One Salem Adventure Writer Turns to Innner Travel

November 6, 2009 by Emily Grosvenor

RollAroundHeaven

One of the most prescient book covers I’ve seen recently graces the dust jacket of Jessica Maxwell’s new spiritual memoir, Roll Around Heaven.

It features an achingly adorable winged swine swathed in the light of some divine clouds.

Well-timed nod to the swine flu?

Probably not — the pig refers to the author’s relationship with a Washington State pig farmer who became a religious guru to her as she embarked on her own spiritual journey about 20 years ago.

Maxwell is reading from her book tonight at the Tea Party Bookshop, the only bookstore in town that holds its own author readings.

Tea Party Joanne Kohler  has said:

“This is one of the few books I feel compelled to read again, and I am encouraging just about everyone who walks in to read it.  In fact, across the country, many people read a copy, then return for multiple copies to give as gifts.”

I found the book a little too inconsistent and out there for my tastes — you can read my review here.

But I might be alone in that regard, for here are some additional reviews, which glow so bright I might expect them to have been written by the author’s friends. Seriously, reading these is like watching a high school chemist burn a strip of magnesium.

I’m inclined to go down to Tea Party and check out the event tonight and meet Ms. Maxwell herself, who is pretty damn lovable in the early chapters of her book. We don’t have too many books coming out by Salem authors, and I firmly believe in the power of showing up.

Posted in Books | Leave a Comment »

Is This Your Bunny We Found Hustling D Street?

November 4, 2009 by Emily Grosvenor

Bunny 001

For months I have walked by a house in my neighborhood where two bunnies, one brown and one white, frolicked on the lawn.

Lawn bunnies.

I assumed they were somebody’s pets — that the homeowners had domesticated their bunnies so well that they let them roam freely in their front yard.

Free-range bunnies.

Until tonight.

Tonight a highschooler from South Salem stopped on our front doorstep, rang the door, and stood there, holding a small, quivering white bunny with red eyes.

She had been knocking on doors up and down the street and happened to land with us. Good thing, too, because we are, I assure you, the nicest people on the block.

We’re calling him Buster.

Bartholomew was another contender.

Anyway, after knocking on quite a few doors ourselves, we learned that there is actually a mythical race of free-range bunnies roaming around our neighborhood. No one is claiming them as pets, and all of the homeowners we talked to insisted that the bunnies are, in fact, wild.

Dear Readers, if you saw this little quivering bunny on D Street, you’d know it wasn’t wild. Someone come pick up your pet at the Willamette Humane Society, because that’s where this buster is going tomorrow.

Come on folks, let’s not lose another bunny to the mean streets of Salem.

Posted in There's something about Salem | 7 Comments »

Zombies Welcome in Salem

November 2, 2009 by Emily Grosvenor

EmilyZombie 003

Were you one of the estimated 1.597 million people in Salem who decided to go to Value Village last Saturday at 2:00 p.m. to see what the second-hand retailer had in stock for Halloween? I was. It was a mistake I won’t make again.

We were actually looking for some furniture, but got distracted by all of the 1960s loungewear and gold facepaint and all of the people walking around dressed like [insert favorite cartoon character here].

My ability to walk straight down an aisle of clothing is inversely proportional to the number of people in said aisle, so it wasn’t long before we threw up our hands in exasperation and screamed “Screw it!” let’s just find something at home.

And that’s how Adam ended up a Devil’s Advocate — easy, all you need is some horns and lawyer’s garb — and I made good on my promise to be a Zombie Emily Dickinson.

You know, a dead poet. They have societies for these things.

Sadly, no one at the Halloween party we attended recognized Ms. Dickinson, perhaps because she so staunchly refused to be a part of the public eye. Seriously, what did her diary read like?

Woke up this morning. Wore white. Wrote some poems.

The party guests did reconize me as that pus-spewing little girl from The Exorcist, though, so I walked around yelling obscenities and trying to make my head spin.

Zombies.

I’m still thinking about them.

I had a plan to write November’s Desperately Seeking Salem column about something kind of altruistic and Thanksgiving-y that I’ve been doing here in Salem, but I couldn’t help myself. Zombies are an image that fits well with what I see as the hunger for cultural products in Salem.

And I’ve been pretty excited to see what Salem’s Culture Shock Community Project has cooked up with zombies over the past month. Those guys deserve some recognition.

Their brains taste good.

Posted in Shopping, You are what you read | 8 Comments »

Happy Halloween!

October 31, 2009 by Emily Grosvenor

MonaLisa

5:59 p.m.

Emily: “I bet we don’t even get any Halloweeners. Seriously, if we don’t get any Halloweeners I’m going to feel like a Halloweenie.”

Adam: “I’m sure we’ll get a few.”

Emily: “If we don’t get any I’m going to be devastated. And then I’m going to eat all of this candy myself.”

6:02 p.m.

Emily: “Did you see that little fat, kid, he took like three at a time! Next year, I’m handing out dried apricots. I had better go get some more Skittles.”

And so it went for about an hour, in which we treated:

1 wolf man
1 Michael Myers
1 bloody surgeon (he looked like he was from the band Clinic)
1 Superman
1 Supergirl
2 Dark Knights
2 skeletons
1 Iron Man (kid probably got last year’s hand-me-down)
1 puppy
1 Ninja turtle,  Michelangelo (orange headband)
2 samurais
1 zombie bride (an 8-yr-old girl in the best costume of the evening)
3 princesses (yawn)
3 high school theatre nerds who said they were getting a lot of nasty door openers
7 ambiguously dressed kids who parents don’t know how to put together  a costume or who forgot what night it was

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »

Domo Arigoto! Salem’s Japanese Invasion

October 27, 2009 by Emily Grosvenor

JapaneseSalem

Of all the massive failures in my life, my attempt to learn Japanese is probably the most egregious.

I had this idea in the summer of 2002 that I needed to learn another foreign language and I was intent on acquiring one that had a different alphabet. I was drawn to the graphic look of the Japanese kanji and imagined that I would pick it up in no time.

Within two weeks, I had dropped out of my Japanese course. For one, I was living in Germany at the time and trying to learn a foreign language through a foreign language: Just plain impossible.

Also, it struck me that in choosing Japanese, I had unintentionally aligned myself with the Axis Powers — I already spoke German fluently and had reached intermediate Italian.

But the final sign that Japanese and I were on the outs was this: What I really had a fetish for was Japanese food.

Salem has its share of acceptable sushi joints. I’m kind of partial to Fuji Ricetime.

But to find the real Japanese in Salem, you need to head to Willamette’s Tokyo University location on the east side of campus. There it is possible to feel like Scarlett Johansson wandering thoughtfully around Tokyo in the university’s cafeteria, in its Kaneko Commons.

Like that other Willamette University cafeteria, Goudy Commons, which is open to the public and which attracts a more varied crowd of state workers and local people in addition to students, Kaneko Commons is something of an insider’s secret. It’s got a fresh salad bar to rival your favorite Roth’s, and serves traditional Japanese noodle dishes that are both cheap, delicious and authentic.

My hungry man husband and I both got the special, a bean noodle dish smothered in green curry peanut sauce yesterday ($5.50) — and we should have shared it because it was too mammoth a portion for even this mighty eater and a mom-to-be.

We parked ourselves in the corner and spent lunch watching all of the Japanese exchange students hang out in the commons.

Lucky for me, you don’t need kanji to eat noodles. Though chopsticks can help.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Salem’s Thriller Re-enactment Stirs the Dead

October 24, 2009 by Emily Grosvenor

Thriller1

Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Salem crawls in search of blood
To terrorize y’alls neighborhood.

The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom.

And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere Salemite can resist
The evil of the thriller.

Ignore the obvious — that there was more life out there on the streets of Salem tonight than usual, and it was the life of the walking dead — and you have Salem’s contribution to the Thriller cultural behemoth.

The mass MJ meetup took place on Liberty and Chemeketa tonight at 5:30 prompt and lasted just about 11 minutes. I’m going to go ahead an nominate this one for best Salem family event of the year.

If you look closely, you might have even seen the spirit of MJ himself giving cred to the event.

LittleMJ

Posted in Music to my ears, Nightlife | 4 Comments »

Take Your Husband to Work Day

October 24, 2009 by Emily Grosvenor

superman-no1I have this theory that one of the best ways to build mutual admiration for the day-to-day slog within a marriage is to enact a Take Your Spouse to Work Day.

For my own husband, I have always feared that this might be a boring prospect indeed. Who wants to sit at home looking over his wife’s shoulder as she hammers on her keyboard and bangs her head against the wall until it bleeds?

There really is no glamor to the writing life.

But now that I’m heading down to Eugene twice a week to teach magazine writing at the UO, I’ve got much more to offer: a nice drive through the Willamette Valley, a 1.5 hour class, and an afternoon of exploring Eugene.

Adam had a random day off of work recently, so I dragged him along.

Rule #1: Follow through. I felt such guilt at making my husband sit through my own class — all we were doing was watching student presentations on magazine markets — that I gave him a bye and let him sit outside reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. Massive fail on my part, since I might have been able to impress him with my ability to wrangle a classroom discussion and mold young minds.

Rule #2: Create conflict. Every single person we encountered in the journalism department seemed there to help me the day I took my husband to work. They were like these bright, shiny, smiling diamond people dropped from heaven. Come to think of it, they usually are…

Rule #3: Make it a normal day. If your goal is to show your spouse how difficult your job is, by all means do not set up a day of fun in Eugene for TYHTWD. We spent the afternoon poking around the new special exhibition Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of the Superhero, currently on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. For nerdy comic book collectors and fan boys, it might be a disappointment — it’s more of an intro to the art of the comic than an exploration of the form — but it does feature a few prize pieces, including the first-ever serialized American comic book and Superman No. 1.  One section of the exhibition is given over to a few very telling and very famous panels of the Batman strip, in which the Dark Knight, in a confrontation with the Joker, realizes how similar they actually are.

Take Your Husband to Work DayVerdict: I got pwned. Or, I pwned myself. We had too much fun to make it seem like work. If he were a little 8-year-old rug rat, and I was trying to instill the values of playful work in his young mind so that he would gain some insight into mom’s life while also internalizing that Protestant work ethic, I might have given myself a gold star.

As it is, I’m pretty sure my husband thinks I just goof off all day at the computer and do stand-up for undergrads.  And that I’m no Wonder Woman…

Posted in Travel | 3 Comments »

Desperately Seeking: Pick-your-own Pinot

October 19, 2009 by Emily Grosvenor

PinotFirst

There is a carboy of magenta mash fermenting in a corner of my living room. I can feel it with the eyes in the back of my head, changing ever-so-slowly, day by day, into what will become our first ever batch of homemade pinot noir wine.

Just thinking about our stash over there, working in its corner while I work in mine, makes me feel inordinately lucky. Lucky to live in Oregon, lucky to be able to get my hands on some grapes for a household experiment, lucky to have found a pick-your-own grape hookup that I plan to cultivate in the years to come.

I’ve heard that pick-your-own pinot is rare indeed in the Willamette Valley. Ask any real winemaker if you can come and “help with the harvest,” and chances are good that you’ll get one of those incredulous, are-you-kidding-ma’am, you-really-don’t-have-a-clue looks in return. There’s a reason why vineyards hire migrant workers to accomplish the chaotic and frenzied harvest of grapes. It is hard work — and it is work. Some of us might get all googly-eyed at the very idea of spending a morning plucking plump pinot from the vine, but real winemakers need the deed done fast and hard.

Well, I still want to wake up to one of those oogly googly pinot morning. And a I did a few weeks ago when our neighbor invited us to come pick our own grapes at a vineyard south of Salem.

Pinot1
This particular vineyard is owned by a former doctor who spent many years growing a range of pinots on his property, harvesting them, making juice and bottling it for commercial sale. After an illness interrupted this cycle, he began inviting the public to pick grapes on his property. Yes, he so loved his grapes that he gave his only begotten vines to the world.

Pinot2
I cannot tell you how much we paid for these grapes, since it involves deciphering a strange rubric concocted by our neighbor and the winemaker, and which we were only privy to through our relationship with the former.

I will not tell you how much we paid for these grapes because the price was ridiculously low, and I still feel kind of guilty for having achieved such an “in.”

But I will say that we picked about 200 pounds worth of pinot noir grapes from 3 choice rows at Salem Hills Vineyard and Winery and paid less than one would pay for a really nice two-person dinner at Morton’s Bistro.

Pinot3
The mash is fermenting and we are waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

We are, both of us, the carboy and I, fermenting in our respective corners. I’ll give that mash a year or more and then it had better watch out.

Posted in Wine | 4 Comments »

Traveling the Globe in Salem

October 17, 2009 by Emily Grosvenor

ItalyI love a good self-mythologizer. Heck, if you read this blog, you might argue that I am one.

But when the impulse to craft one’s own story starts sounding like a none-too-stealthy marketing campaign — and a slightly ridiculous one at that –  I can’t help but call shenanigans.

Today I’m calling out Christo’s, Salem’s generally awesome, family-owned pizza restaurant, which opened at a new location on Broadway earlier this year.

Now, Christo’s pizza is arguably Salem’s best. The hand-thrown crust is crisp, the sauce rocks, and I’m pretty sure I saw a couple at a table next to us last night eating a pizza that could have been baked in a joint on the trash-strewn streets of Naples.

Also, the place employs a completely brilliant performer and voice coach who moonlights as a server there and who is inclined to break out into Verdi’s  “La Donna è mobile,” filling the place with song and shaking everyone out of their rainy-night duldrums. (Watch that video and then try not to think of Stella d’Oro bread sticks…).

But flip over the menu and you might find something curious. A map of sorts. A message indeed. A little graphic that shows an Italian boot placed smack over Salem’s newest revitalized neighborhood and calling that ‘hood “Salem’s Little Italy.”

Now, we’ve all wondered about the name of this new neighborhood before. And I’ve tipped my hat towards something more original than the “Broadway District,” or anything else that borrows mythologies from other cities.

But “Little Italy” poses an exceptional problem, not least because Christo’s isn’t really a neighborhood filled will Italian immigrants. Does one restaurant a diminutive country make?

If that’s acceptable, than may I also propose the following.

Salem’s Chinatown: The block occupied by Kwan’s.

Salem’s Russian Village: That store tucked into the Northeast Lancaster Drive strip mall that claims to be a European gift store but whose pickles and tea suggest an audience of Russian immigrants.

Salem’s Japantown: That cafeteria at Willamette where Japanese students from the Tokyo University hang out.

Salem’s Czech Village: the Kafkaesque corridors of the City Police station.

The French Quarter: The span of road between La Capitale and Napoleon’s. Alternately: The parking lot housing the French Press and Bakery L’Amour.

What others are there?

I have this idea that for a city to achieve greatness in character it has to create its own stories, not borrow them.

Posted in Food, Music to my ears, There's something about Salem | 12 Comments »

The Best of Wordstock: James Ellroy

October 12, 2009 by Emily Grosvenor

JamesEllroy

Wordstock 2009. Enter onto the Powell’s stage James Ellroy, the demon dog of American literature, the White Knight of the Far Right. After reading three excerpts from his new book Blood’s a Rover, he stops to take questions.

James Ellroy: So now I am ready to answer your most intimate questions into my person.

First Fan: So, um, Mr. Ellroy? I love your books, but I’ve felt kind of personally insulted since watching a documentary on you several years ago which talked about your right wing conservative views. I was wondering how you rectify having so many liberal readers when your views are so right-wing?

James Ellroy (pointing): You can take that question and shove it up your ass! That question is rude and insulting. I am not here to justify my political views to anybody! (shaking his fist).

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

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