Say, Ruth, what else have you been up to?
Posted by Ruth on July 26th, 2010Oh, I’m glad you asked.
I interviewed a local musician called Brian Mumford, who plays under the moniker Dragging an Ox Through Water. He mixes country with electronica and does crazy things with these effects pedals he makes himself. I caught the bus out to his granny flat and we chatted about investigative journalism and DIY electronics over good stovetop espresso. He told me a great story about touring around Germany in a crappy car with Jackie O Motherfucker and getting pulled over by the police and searched by customs for hours, because they looked like drug-smuggling Romanian gypsies. Sadly, I couldn’t work it into the story itself, but it was a good yarn.
I interviewed another local musician called Dustin Hamman, who plays kind of bluesy/jazzy indie-folk under the moniker Run on Sentence. He has a spectacular voice and an even more spectacular beard. He told me all about growing up in Omaha, where his idol was local folk singer Simon Joyner. Last week, Simon Joyner came to Portland and played a show in Dustin’s livingroom. I love stories like that.
I went to an all-female arm-wrestling competition at a bar. Initially I thought it would be just fun to enter and to write about getting my arm ripped off by a bunch of much tougher chicks, but then about five minutes into the contest, one of the competitors’ arms was broken in the heat of battle, and I figured it would work better as a straight report. Also, my tilt at the competition was fairly short-lived: I was knocked out in the first heat by a 57-year-old.
Anyway, as you can see from the article, it ended up being awesome fun, and is my absolute new favourite spectator sport. B-side is also just a cool bar to hang out in and I’ve been back quite bit since. Nice and scungy with good jukebox, decent pinball and beers for a buck during “unhappy hour”.
I introduced my workmates to the Commonwealthian (shut up, it’s a word) delight of the deep fried Mars bar. Until last week, there was a Scottish guy running a British fish and chip food cart right near the office (he just moved it downtown): proper chippy chips, curry sauce, battered savs, IRN-BRU and all. He announced on Twitter that he had some Mars bars in and was going to be deep frying them, and the ‘tubes went a bit nuts. Turns out that they don’t have Mars bars here, and although they deep fry just about everything else, this was a new way to clog their arteries. Plus, fish and chip batter is special — that slightly salty, doughy flavour that takes you back to soggy Summer evenings on the beach with squeezy sauce packets and pickled onions — it’s not the same muck they make corn dogs out of. Plus, to be honest, I’d never actually eaten one sober. So I went down to the cart in 35 degree heat and bought a couple.
Everyone was thoroughly repulsed — they do look like crusty blobs of poo — but once I broke them open, no one could resist the smell of melting chocolate and nougat and deep-fried dough and there was a lot of, “Oh my GOD, that’s amazing”s as I passed around little bites of heart attack on a plate.
Just wait until they try potato cakes, dim sims and chiko rolls…
Speaking of deep fried food, last weekend I reported on a deep fried pie eating competition. Whiffies Fried Pies is a food cart over on the south-east side of town that makes “pies” (more like a pastie or empanada than what we would call a “pie” though) filled with all sorts of sweet and savoury fillings — pulled pork, tofu, chilli beans, peanut butter, berries — then deep fries them. It sounds gross, but is, in fact, entirely delicious. They’re also super filling, make the perfect drunk food and the cart is open until 3am — which naturally means a competition around who can eat the most pies has arisen.
I was not too far away, reviewing this production of Gulliver’s Travels (which was awesome: voice actors, orchestra, choir and foley artists live-dubbing the 1939 animated film of Gulliver’s Travels in this great old movie house) and saw on the Twitter that the guy who owns a New York-style deli near my house and wrote this ridiculously thorough piece on the best burgers in Portland (he personally tasted 72 different bistro burgers) was headed to Whiffies to break the record, so I jumped on my bike and cycled down to do my journalistic duty. It was actually a really fun afternoon sitting in the sun chatting with him, his teenage brothers and the guys from the cart, and quite impressive to see him down 10 pies in 30 minutes.
I learnt all about how prosthetic limbs are made, which turned out to be really fascinating. It’s always lovely interviewing people who are really passionate about what they do, and to be honest, I much prefer hearing ordinary people talk about the things they love than famous people talk about themselves. I guess I presumed prosthetic limb makers just… made prosthetic limbs. But actually, the same people who construct them go down to the hospital to meet with new amputees, design and redesign a custom prosthesis for them, teach them how to use it, then continue to make changes and work with them their entire lives. One of their clients had been with them since the 1940s.
I’ve also been listening to and seeing heaps and heaps of local bands (well, some are from Washington state, which I get the impression is a bit like New Zealand: when there’s something good, they’re “local”, when there’s something shit, they’re a bunch of freaks over the border). Here’s a few worth listening to:
The Pharmacy – Lo-fi Zombies-esque summer psych-pop
Sons of Huns – Grungy indie stuff
Dutchess and the Duke – Bittersweet alt-blues-folk guy-girl duo
Monarques – ’50s Happy Days rock ‘n roll played by a bunch of hipsters. Awesome live
Laura Viers – Indie-folk singer/songwriter. Be-ewdiful voice
Arctic Flowers – Female-fronted post-punk. Killer guitarist
Guantanamo Baywatch – Trashy Cramps-style surf rock. Best band name ever
Lefty, the one-armed guitarist who busks at the Saturday Market
I’ve also been doing a bunch of restaurant reviews, but I can’t really write anything about those until they’re published. I have been eating loads and loads of new things, though. Apart from PB&Js and Marionberries, here are a few other new foods I’m enjoying:
Beaver mustard
Fresh pico de gallo
Cups of chilli
Ice-cream sandwiches
KA-POW! coffee bars
Egg creams
Hot sauce
Crazy flavoured hummus
Oregonzola
Oh, and good old-fashioned American BBQ, but I’m-a-gunna dedicate a whole post to that. Set your arteries to “harden”, my friends.
