I did want to say that it seems like it may be time for someone to do an updated version of this book. There is no mention, outside of Produce Row, of anything the McMenamins brothers have done, which makes me think that this book must have been published before the opening of the Barley Mill Pub. But even the Bagdad Theater and Kennedy School have some great history (before and after it was McMenamins) that could be shared. Afterall, the McMenamin’s fought Oregon legislation and opened Oregon’s first legal brewpub. Also, there’s nothing about Belmont Station, Moon and Sixpence, My Father’s Place, The Basement Pub, Eastburn, the loved/hated Henry’s Tavern and loads of other places. I don’t want to see just a basic overview of what the tavern feels like though, I want a nice history lesson! You know what else I want to know about – The Candlelight on the PSU campus. That place is bumping at night, and not with PSU students…turns out it’s quite the old jazz club and people occasionally show up in zoot suits. So, it sounds to me like a more comprehensive book is in order, although I appreciate this for what it is and when it was made. Maybe there’s one I don’t know about. If someone knows, please tell me.

What are the businesses in question?
Before I go on I must say that there are a few rules that the Triangle, by existing, naturally oblige us to. The first is that in order to be in the Triangle, you must visit all three points in the Triangle. The other rule is simply that you must walk in the Triangle. If you were to visit each point without stopping, you could walk the whole thing in about 10 minutes. So, what are the points of the triangle?

1. Movie Madness – 4320 SE Belmont

The first stop in the Triangle is Movie Madness, where you will rent some sort of sci-fi or horror flick. Movie Madness is home to the Pacific Northwest’s largest collection of Sci-Fi, Horror, and Cult films. The first thing I would do in the Portland Bermuda Triangle is go into this store, go straight to the back and check out the collection. Their horror videos are arranged in further subcategories, so you can browse by “Rampaging Teenagers” or “Nature’s Revenge” or “Ghosts” or a large number of other topics. The sci-fi collection is right next to the horror collection and it promises to have some rare gems that would surprise you. Don’t see the title you’re looking for? Search the computer because there’s a chance it’s located under a director (they file movies by directors too). You can also browse around and find the “Male-Chauvinist Fantasies” section where you can find things like Beach Babes from Mars (I made that up), or you can look through the Red Scare Collection. On your way out, be sure to check out the collection of costumes and props from all sorts of movies including Alien, Blade Runner, and H.G. Well’s Time Machine (You know the little miniature test-version of the time machine…yeah it’s at Movie Madness!!!). It’s really a wild ride. If you aren’t careful, hours will have passed. You can always come back, but tonight you are on a mission to get lost in the Triangle, so you must move on.

2. Horse Brass Pub – 4520 SE Belmont

A block or two away you will find one of Portland’s most important pubs. Now that you’ve got a movie picked out for later you must come in here for a few drinks. I’m going to take a stab and say that Horse Brass has about 60 beers on tap. There are two menu’s – the guest tap list and the mainstay list. I’d say that about 20-25 of their beers are on the guest tap list and so the likeliness of you drinking a beer from that list again next week is pretty slim. Usually the guest beers last no more than 2 days. They serve 20 oz pints and 10 oz glasses. I usually do 10 oz glasses and I’ll order 2-3 for sampling. Horse Brass is a cozy place that is perfect for hanging out with friends and talking, it’s a real pub. There’s also a few dart boards. The servers are very knowledgeable about their beers and even Portland beer history. The selection here is so nice that it will be difficult to make an easy decision, and you may just have to stay till you’ve sampled everything you feel you might otherwise miss out on. This is why Horse Brass is such an integral part of getting lost in Portland’s Bermuda Triangle. (photo credit to Paul Lowry)

3. Belmont Station – 4520 SE Stark

If you finish up your drinking at Horse Brass before 10pm you need to come here. If you are going to take longer at Horse Brass, you should come here first. Don’t miss Belmont Station, your life depends on it. Belmont Station is going to be about a 5 minute walk from the other locations, but it is this short walk that helps form the perfect triangle in the first place. Belmont Station, the biercafé, is currently home to about 1200 different bottled beers. You will have no easy task ahead of you, picking out a few beers to drink with your movie. And you thought Movie Madness took a long time to make a selection! Beers are arranged mostly by geographical location of brewery. What are you feeling tonight? You feeling like something local? Maybe an IPA to go with your schlocky cult film, or a lager to go with your slow-paced sci-fi drama? Maybe a foreign stout to go with your Scottish foreign film? It’s your choice. Can’t figure it out, ask the staff, they are super knowledgeable and helpful. Attached to the store is a small pub with about 15 uncommon beers on tap. These beers are going to be different from the ones you will find 4 blocks away at Horse Brass so stay for a pint.

By the time you’ve finished your time in the Triangle you will be pretty exhausted. Now it’s time to make your way home (don’t drink and drive), pop in the movie from Movie Madness, and pour yourself a pint from the beer you bought at Belmont Station. Portland’s Bermuda Triangle has made it’s way to your living room. It’ll provide some good leisure, don’t miss out!

District 9, is undeniably a creative movie with a story that has not been overplayed and that links its conceptual framework to humanities inability to treat everyone as human. I think many people have forgotten the movie and television series Alien Nation, which starts with a large alien ship not to dissimilar from the D9 ship, finding free parking in the desert, being granted permission to stay by humanity, and then the aliens try to integrate themselves into society. In Alien Nation, they look enough like humans, but they are not easily accepted, and are often blamed for bad neighborhoods and violence. D9 doesn’t sound too different does it? But after the first 30 minutes D9 turns away from dealing with the societal issues arising with the new aliens and turns instead to a story that seems more of a chase/thriller than a didactic and worldview-changing film.

What made the first bit of the movie so interesting is sacrificed for hollow special effects. The main character is working for the government to capitalize off the alien race and while doing his job is infected with an alien virus that slowly turns him into an alien. In this moment we are supposed to feel attached to him as a human, and be appalled by the inhumanity of those that once employed him, and maybe even feel compassion for the alien race that adopts him. The problem is that the aliens are so slickly animated that they lose any sort of real credibility; they don’t feel real the way Gollum felt real. And I am never saddened by his transformation the way I was saddened by Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. What was needed in this movie was a moment where you realize that even in his transformation, things would be okay, the aliens are not as bad as you thought they were, that it’s not a big deal – but this moment never came because they were never believable in the first place. I would recommend my readers watch Creation of the Humanoids, a movie from 1962 that quite nicely addresses these same issues of inhumane treatment of humans. Lastly I wanted to say that I’ve never seen anything else that Niel Blomkamp has made, but it seems that some of his shorter movies were direct inspirations for D9, and were maybe even incorporated into the movie (can anyone verify this?). These are the parts at the beginning that show people on television reports saying that they want the aliens to leave. These, along with the next 15 minutes of the movie, were the best parts of the movie – they seemed the most thought through and the rest of it felt rushed and thin, relying on the visual effects more than it should. I’m wondering if when Peter Jackson got behind the movie it was pushed in directions Blomkamp would not have chosen. I’m not sure what happened, but I’d be interested in finding out. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie, I thought it had a lot going for it, but I’m trying to say a few things that I don’t hear too many other people saying about it.

Surrogates never promised to be anything but a slick movie, I mean it’s got Bruce Willis in it for crying out loud. You have to take it for what it is. For me, it might sit well with movies like Soylent Green and Logan’s Run which were slick for their day, relying on celebrity, adding cliché and cheesiness. When you are able to agree to that, Surrogates is much more pleasant than if you were to have the typical “Hollywood Bashing” attitude. A lot of movies over the past few years have suggested that we are just robots feeding the system, and that we need to break free and rediscover our humanity. I’m thinking of Wall-E, The Matrix, there’s a few zombie flicks you can throw in there too. Stepford Wives is another movie where people are replaced by an other-robot for the pleasure of whoever’s paying for that bill. I very much appreciated that Surrogates used it’s slickness to its advantage the way that a Spielberg film would do the same – like Minority Report. It did not, however, rely on the boring farcical treatment that most people mistake as humor in movies such as Idiocracy or the 2004 Stepford Wives. Mostly though I think that Surrogates has more relevance than people give it credit for. How often do we hide behind our internet identities, how often do we try to live vicariously through other people, how often do we allow our dreams to fade away while we sit by and let our employers feed off of us, how often do we not go do anything with anyone because we become tired or afraid of meeting new people, how often do we let ourselves live in the past. Maybe I’m just partial to these questions and that’s why I liked Surrogates more. I do think though, that Surrogates had a didactic element that it maintained for the whole movie, much like the original The Day The Earth Stood Still. This element did not get lost in the story, or with the slick effects.

Mads Lynnerup is an artist that is addressing the same issues of labor, leisure, and productivity. In his newest art project he asked a number of people in the town of Troy, NY to “take a day for yourself.” People who have jobs and live out their daily life with a normal routine will now get to break that routine for the sake of art. They are each documenting their day in some form and I imagine we will see that maybe people are most productive when given time for themselves – to catch up on rest, to continue building relationships with their family and friends, to do something that is actually interesting to them, to give them the mental space to think for themselves. In these situations, all acts are creative. I value the utilitarian aspects of art projects such as this and the challenge they present to us to rethink how our lives will be played out. Thank you Mads Lynnerup

Here are a few links to websites that I enjoy that also address issues of productivity, busyness and seeing daily acts as a form of creativity. They take two very different approaches: Unconventional Ideas and Why Work?

Hopworks will unveil this bike at their Biketobeer Fest which is on Sept. 19, 2009, the same day as Art & Beer – the event I’m putting on at the Portland Art Museum. Now you must choose between this or that or both.

And here’s another video that I’ve shown before of that giant plastic soup area in the Pacific Ocean:

They’ve teamed OMSI for the Science Pub, and they will be discussing the science of making beer:
“Do you know the difference between ale and lager? Or why traditional German brewers had to boil some of the malt during the brewing process when English brewers did not? Although many microbrewers today approach brewing as an art form, understanding the science behind the process is essential for making consistently good beer.”

The speaker will be Tom Shellhammer, Professor of Fermentation Science and Associate Professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology at OSU where he leads the brewing science education and research programs.

Science Pub – Bagdad Theater and Pub
Monday, Sept. 14
7-9pm (it says come early for seats, food, and beer)
For more info, go here.

DESCRIPTION:
Art & Beer (At the Museum) is an event that combines drinking beer and experiencing art. For one night only, you can sample three new beers from Laurelwood, Lompoc, and Lucky Lab at the Portland Art Museum. A brewer from each of the three Portland microbreweries received a tour of the museum’s collection, selected an artwork, and made a beer that will complement that artwork. This beer sampling is part of a one night event called Shine A Light: A Night at the Museum, an event that will host a number of performances, time-based art actions, music, and more. The entry fee for the event is $12 and will give you access to all the art and performances, the museums galleries, and unlimited sampling of the three new beers.

DETAILS:
Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park, Portland, OR 97205

Sept. 19th / 6pm – Midnight
$12 entry includes access to all the nights events, the art collections and unlimited beer samples

To see a full schedule of events for Shine A Light, click here.

Art & Beer (At the Museum) is presented by Portland-based artist Eric Steen.

I honestly thought Yellowstone would be a place where I would park the car, grab my gear and enter the wilderness to set up camp and I would probably run into a couple people along one of my hikes. This is not at all what it is!!! It’s a giant tourist attraction, much like Disneyland. People wait in lines and follow specially built pathways to experience nature. Actually most people don’t experience nature there, they just take a picture of it and move on. You can buy some ice cream right next to Old Faithful geyser as you wait for it to blow. Ever major stop on the route has a nice sized gift shop. My least favorite of all was everyone’s desire to “hunt for animals”… One person drives while the other people in the car will be on the lookout. “Oooh, there’s a deer, or is than an elk, or a moose? Quick stop the car!!!” The family pours out of their car, stand in the middle of the road and shoot pictures for a couple minutes before they hop back in and look for bison and bear. It’s a real wilderness experience, that’s for sure! After my initial bit of tourist shock I was able to allow myself to enjoy the park for what it was – an amazing display of nature. But here are the movies I recommend based off the tourist industry:

Jurassic Park (1993) and Grand Tour: Disaster In Time (1992)

I’ll start the recommendation with Jurassic Park because, chances are, you’ve already seen it so why make it the last movie you watch? But, it’s probably been a while. Grab a nice summery wheat beer that you’d take with you camping and get ready to enjoy the ride! This is the best account of the tourist industry gone wrong and reminds me very much of Yellowstone. The people in the movie are dying to see dinosaurs the way Yellowstoners are dying to see a grizzly bear. But with a little bit of luck, a little bit of chaos, a little bit of survival of the fittest, and a little bit of scheming, you’re tourists won’t know what hit em.

Grand Tour: Disaster in Time is much less known but is still a wonderful flick. For this movie you should grab yourself some trail mix for your journey. Get the healthy kind though please. So, in this movie beautiful people from the future travel back in time to watch horrible natural disasters because in the future everything is perfect and they love watching things go wrong. But you can’t watch something, even if from a distance, without changing it slightly right? Tourists from the future!!! How genius is that? It’s genius.

Down in his basement is a complete brewery and bar and it’s available to anyone who wants to come have a drink with Dean and his pals. He offers about four of his own homebrews on tap. You walk in, get yourself a glass and self-serve your beer. He’s constantly brewing new batches and he has a rule that he’ll never brew the same beer twice. He’s made friends with a lot of the brewers in town and he’s obviously a big collector of beer paraphenilia. It’s quite an exciting place to visit. He’s got a bunch of youtube videos where he’s brewing beer and talking politics with his friends here. Here’s a nice image of the brewery with the bar in the background: Here’s the cabinet with all the beer glasses:

It’s a real microbrewery. Sometimes he’ll open up any number of bottles of beer from around the world for you to taste with him. He’s built his own walk in fridge and he’s aging a lot of beer there. One time he opened up a 3 year old bottle of Stone Brewery’s Epic Ale (2006). That was tasty. Another time he opened up a Heater Allan Hefeweisen, a beer I had never seen before. Yesterday I walked in and he had just finished giving tastes of about 7 different beers that I had never had before. Just missed it!

It’s the only bar in Portland you can smoke at. Really though, it’s not licensed, it’s just Dean opening his house to anyone who loves beer. I always give him a little cash to be nice.
UPDATE ***
I am removing the location of Dean’s Scene because there is concern that some people might hear about it and show up not respecting Dean and his place. The general rule as has been pointed out by a commenter below is that you should introduce new friends by bringing them with you, this way it will continue to remain less known and a respectable place.

For now, I leave with an image of me at Laurelwood Brewery.

Sunday May 31st, 7:00pm
At the Pancake Clubhouse
906A NE 24th, PDX, OR 97232

Needless to say they are beautiful images as well.