In accordance with Christian's "the weather forecast in Portland"


The rain dripped onto the concrete outside the small cafe, where gentle harp music complimented the fragrant beans, ground and extracted with precision. The forecast in Portland: rain. It was a grey Saturday morning in mid-November, and I began to ponder the wetlands of Oregon, and my place within this grey-green landscape. The preceding day, we took a field trip to the wine country to have a seasonal lunch at an artisinal diner. Afterwards, we explored the bead store, where an aging proprietor constructed another colorful necklace, and then to an all-weather outfitters where my travel companions attempted to persuade me into purchasing a sort of boot that has hitherto not suited my typical aesthetic. But, given the paced & tortoiselike nature of the afternoon, I gave it some brief consideration. To wear a boot with a swaying, chiseled sole wrapped with a matte brown water repellent material would have certain benefits in the perennially wet Pacific Northwest. To drape my body in gortex and mesh would ease certain anxieties and likely add warmth to a day, but what then of elegance, independence, and personal identity? Northward, toward Dundee, a marketplace was recommended to us, and we, though satiated with various stews and crusty breads, felt obliged to view the local salumis of the town. And upon arrival, we were greeted with three olive oil samples, the sight and warmth of a wood burning pizza oven, and a bounty of niche-market cured meats and cheeses. One of my companions graciously bought me a small cocoa in exchange for my driving duties, and I purchased a calabrese from a pleasantly plain attendant. I made a note in my mind, we must return one day and try the pizzas. Back towards the city, amidst conversation of an industrial flavoring process utilizing the rectal fluids of beavers for raspberry and vanilla, we used our navigational equipment to direct us toward a suburban donut hamlet whereupon I made the foolhardy blunder to purchase a dessert filled with the selfsame sort of filling which my companion vilely asserted was created from castorium, which was wasted after my realization and jovial self-deprecation. Whoa is me, and this world which performs many acts bizarre to create desire, revelry, satiation, and comfort.

-Gregory C

In accordance with Christian Filardo's prompt, "i found it in a ziploc bag"

Today, I listened to Duncan Trussell speak about the Buddhist teachings of Tilopa, who sent his student, Naropa, to do foolish things and be beaten, and in response, Tilopa then beat Naropa further. Christian's prompt makes no sense to me. I don't use ziploc bags. How would I find something there? It is not there. Vincent Gallo was beaten extensively by his father. How hard it is to overcome the effects of multi-generational family trauma, and even then, we are often doomed to have sex with our mothers and slay our fathers, men who were mercilessly whipped with broomsticks and made to deliver groceries in the rain all winter while their peers played stickball and gave each other hand jobs. This is what I find in the "ziplock bag" of my mind this morning, forced to attempt to synthesize them into a meaningful narrative thread, or else abandon narrative altogether. 

Last night, I had the great privilege to see Meredith Monk perform at Reed College. Her independence and whimsy were inspirational. She seems like the sort of person who would refuse to accept daily beatings. She performed a piece titled "The Tale" towards the end of the program, about a woman bargaining with death. Here is a video of her performing this piece in in 70s: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM-I53yUoTU

-Greg

In accordance with Gregory's prompt, "a quick jaunt out of Baltimore"

From Baltimore you can basically go anywhere on the east coast with relative ease. Virginia is probably the most interesting place I have been too since I began my time here on the east coast. While I have been to New York, Washington DC, and a few other places Virginia has been my favorite and probably the oddest. For starters, it’s a small relatively conservative state, and from what I understand a lot of Virginia’s residents commute into DC for work. I was heading out there to play a show in a small town called Fredericksburg, which is forty-five minutes from Richmond, which is a big town or small city, I don’t know. We started our trip off by hitting up Caroline’s brother’s wine store in a posh Virginia suburb called Vienna, to get there we had to drive through part of Northern Virginia. Northern Virginia looks how the moon would look if humans were to put a giant bubble on its surface and start trying to colonize it. The sky was grey and there were huge slabs of concrete destined to become highways. There is this pretty strange looking shopping mall called Tyson’s corner out there too, it seems like it is in the middle of nowhere and that there aren’t people around for miles. Virginia is also remarkably green. It’s green to the point where you get the feeling that there are people living in the woods completely off the grid. Having grown up overseas and in a place relatively west of middle America I haven’t had much experience with places were the Civil War was a super huge deal. In Virginia there are some people still living in Civil War times and it is pretty apparent. When we pulled into Fredericksburg’s downtown we got out to walk around. The area seemed to be doing well economically, there were tons of young families around and people seemed to be hitting up local businesses. We ended up walking to this place called “Soup & Taco” which turned out to be the best Mexican Food I have had since leaving Arizona. Downtown Fredericksburg is pretty strange because there are restaurants, shops, and businesses but scattered amongst them are all these closed civil war museums. Some of them were just empty storefronts and you can see the occasional confederate flag here and there. I guess that is relatively normal for the area though. Another weird thing is that I was in Fredericksburg to play an experimental noise show and there were about 10 other projects on the bill. I couldn’t list ten experimental projects that play frequently where I used to live so I thought that was pretty gnarly. We even got paid! We drove back to Silver Spring to crash at Caroline’s parent’s place and it was so rainy that we almost got run off of the road a few times. Drivers out here are just as wild as drivers in Los Angeles.

-Christian

In accordance with Christian Filardo's forced prompt, "bottled coke at the brooklyn deli."

The lovely, young, and inspiring Christian’s first forced writing prompt for our new blog, Forced Meditations, was “bottled coke at the brooklyn deli.” Since I currently live in Portland, Oregon, and not Brooklyn, NY, or even Manhattan, New York, NY, I was “forced” to improvise. There is a neighborhood in south Portland called Brooklyn, so I went on Yelp to see if I could find a deli with some bottled coke to write about. The closest thing is a cafe, True Brew Coffeehouse, or more specifically, True Brew: Coffee, Tea & Espresso, Milkshakes, Smoothies, Panini. So, after my bi-monthly therapy appointment, I skipped my group supervision class for my mental health counseling master’s program, and drove the 20 minutes to Brooklyn. It was a grey, drizzly November day, and the weekday traffic was moderate. As Portland’s population slowly explodes, even off-peak driving tends to take a little bit of extra time. I listened to John Maus on my i-Pod, and pondered driving down Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd until it morphed into US-99, out of Portland, and into the scenic wine country, a fantasy I often have, of leaving the small city and my occasionally stressful counseling internship, to be adopted by an old vineyard family, waking up early to work the farm, and taking long rides on a touring bike through majestic, rolling-hilled landscapes, with a Chihuahua in my basket. However, on this day, I just drove to True Brew, a cafe I keep wanting to call “True Blue,” which is the way Gene Hackman’s character describes his ex-wife, played by Anjelica Huston, in The Royal Tenenbaums. He has a lot of respect for her, but not enough to modify his deeply ingrained selfish motivations.

This is a bit how I feel about the True Brew Cafe. First of all, there’s no bottled coke. I order a sausage, egg, and cheese on an everything bagel, which has little to no flavor. Am I fulfilling this assignment? I gaze across the street towards the empty Brooklyn Park, with its muddied baseball field and tattered basketball hoops while pondering my boyhood enthusiasm for sports. A depressed-seeming twenty-something blonde pulls up in a Toyota Tercel and comes into the cafe. She’s cute. Will she sit close to my booth? No. She sits what feels like 30 yards away. The cafe is huge, with scuffed white floors and wooden booths lining the perimeter. It feels like a mix of high-school cafetorium and a thrift furniture store, but with nice light fixtures, bad art, and a large fake Victorian style painting frame with nothing in it. I can’t stay here much longer.

This is Gregory Campanile, reporting from the True Brew Cafe for Forced Meditations. Best regards, and take care!


In accordance with Gregory Campanile's forced prompt, "an unexpected suburban purchase."



One summer day, I found myself clutching a fairly large foot tall Greedo action figure beneath a carport on 14th and College, in Tempe, Arizona, a suburban college town. Greedo is largely known for getting killed. Han killed him in the bar where bulbous headed aliens play what appears to be space clarinets on the planet Tatooine. Either way, my fascination with Greedo began at an early age, and progressed when I started dating my current girlfriend Caroline. Oddly enough, Caroline is also a Greedo fan. For her birthday, I actually commissioned a painting of Greedo to be done for her. So, I ended up buying the doll for a buck and added it to our growing Greedo collection. 

A few years later Caroline and I moved out of Arizona. We ended up in Baltimore, Maryland, which is home to the first ever suburban-community in America. The neighborhood is called Roland Park, and it is sort of an upscale mansion filled zone these days. However, Caroline’s parents live in a suburb of D.C. called Silver Spring, and in the basement of their house is a replica of the exact Greedo doll I purchased for Caroline in Arizona. Pretty weird.


Today I watched this video at work on a blog. In the video, Jar Jar Binks actually dies. He is the pink guy in the newer Star Wars episodes. He says “Misa” a lot. For some reason, I feel like Greedo is the quieter, cooler version of Jar Jar Binks. Greedo is good, and every night before I fall asleep in my new apartment that I share with Caroline, his portrait is illuminated by the streetlights pouring in through our bedroom window.


-Christian Filardo, for Forced Meditations