ByGD
When I was younger I thought Seattle was the center of the musical world. But I can’t help noticing that most of the bands I saw at concerts in the years leading up to the pandemic were up from Portland. And as I’m putting together these Music I Like posts, which are based mostly on digital discovery and therefore shouldn’t be geographically centered, it still seems like most of the bands are from Portland. So here’s a post all about the music I like from Portland.
ByGD
In July of 2016 I went on a pilgrimage to Powell’s Books in Portland with my mom and my two kids. We spent two full days in Portland and we did a lot of touristy stuff. But we spent several hours at Powell’s each day, and we bought a lot of books. To this day, it remains one of my favorite trips. And I’m still reading books I bought then.
ByGD
Chapter One. Down the Rabbit Hole. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting and of having nothing to do.
That’s the very familiar beginning to a very new artwork. Because while many of us have been sitting around with nothing to do most of this year, local dancers have been hard at work. Seattle Dance Collective and Pacific Northwest Ballet have both created some of my favorite dances during the pandemic, and last week they added one more: ALICE.
ByGD
One year, I took my mom and my daughters to Victoria for a girls’ weekend getaway. We ended up buying so many books they filled our suitcase and we had to put our clothes in garbage bags on the ferry home.
Two years later, the three of us went to Portland for another weekend. But this was no ordinary girls’ weekend. Portland is home to Powell’s, and this weekend was a pilgrimage.
We spent hours at Powell’s both days we were in town. I spent so much money that the bookseller who rang us up gave us an honorary 10% discount. I spent the entire savings at Powell’s the next day. The receipts from those purchases are more than two feet long and hang above my desk to this day.
But for this trip, I came prepared. I brought a bookcase.
ByGD
I almost didn’t watch Rep 2, Pacific Northwest Ballet’s second program of the 2020-2021 digital season. It wasn’t because I didn’t like Rep 1 – quite the opposite. It’s just that Thursday was one of those days when most of what I tried to do didn’t get accomplished and everything I did accomplish took twice as much time and effort as it should have. Maybe it was the crash following a post-election high, but all I wanted to do was go to bed early after watching a feel-good K-drama with a too-tall pour of rye. But I remembered how good Rep 1 was. So I tuned in to the ballet instead and was reminded once again that art is more uplifting than escapist television – even when it’s on the tv.
