Entering Portland
Jun. 13th, 2013 03:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ateolfBefore I continue, I should point out the awesome work Mary Beth did in doing ALL of the planning for this trip. Well, I looked up a record store in Seattle and a synth store in Portland but that's it. She did an awesome job and we had a great vacation because of it.
Okay, now back to White Eagle, the hotel we stayed in. First and foremost, it's a bar. A bar that has bands play most nights. Thus, they bill themselves as the "rock'n'roll hotel" (because of the loud music at night). They mostly have blues-rock type stuff (such that it seems like something that could be in Memphis). Anyway, the plan's not to stay much in the hotel anyway. It was cheap and ended up being pretty sweet. Shared toilets and showers, but it was never an issue and I never had to wait for either. So, we're ready to hit the town. We got in in time for the art walk in the pearl district downtown. Trying to park: jesus christ! I was thinking Portland had the worst parking situation of any city I had ever been in ever! We kept driving around and driving around and eventually had to park way the fuck away from everything. Turns out this was just what happens on art walk day and the rest of the trip parking seldom posed anything close to a problem. We got to this gallery that was free on this day. I really like the sound design stuff. We had apparently just missed a musical performance. A dude was packing up his eurorack modular. Too bad I didn't get to see that! (Oh, I'm forgetting, before we went downtown, we had dinner at Lardo which was good and porky and lardy.) We went over to this bar where Mary Beth was going to meet some folks from Metafilter along with live band karaoke. We got there early and hung out at the bar with the rude bartender. They were playing It's Always Sunner in Philadelphia on their dvd player. After a while a little group showed up. It was fun 'cuz one guy ended up being into synthesizers so we talked about that in short burts of semi-quiet between loud music. They had a pretty decent selection. I sang "Uncontrollable Urge." (I had put in for "I Wanna Be Your Dog" for my second song, but they never got to it.) One of the girls we were with did a pretty amazing rendition of "Mother." She was belting it the fuck out. After that we found Ground Kontrol: the old school arcade/bar that perfectly caters to nerds of my generation. It was the wet dream of what awesome would be from our young 80s vantage. The tables glowed white. The bathroom was tiled into Pac-Man mosaics. The sink glowed different colors like the ghost regeneration station or whatever it's called. I mostly played really old games and did horribly. I started off with The Simpsons arcade game, that's the one with the biggest nostalgic kick to the gut. I went for five dollars worth of quarters and played them all! I bought a t-shirt too and a can cozy and a set of pins. It was quite a bit of nerd fun for me. After that we had the fun task of walking many blocks to a remote corner of a dark and creepy downtown.
Friday was our big shopping day. In the morning we had breakfast at Tasty n Sons. It had a Moroccan or African kind of thing going on. It was tasty. Then we went just a few blocks over. Mary Beth checked out some store she wanted to go to and I went to...Control Voltage! Portland's one of the few cities in the country with a bona-fide mother fuckin' synthesizer store. I played around with their display eurorack modular shit. I played with an MS-20 mini. I played with a Sub Phatty. It was a lot of fun and then I took the plunge and made my own eurorack setup a lot less small! I got a couple used modules: Doepfer A183-3 Amplifier and Pittsburgh Outs (converts tiny eurorack jacks to big jacks plus stereo capabilities and amplification or attenuation). I was going to get a Maths (which I had played around with a good bit) but was informed they didn't have any stock aside from their display module. The guy recommended something similar to me: 4MS Pingable Envelope Generator (PEG). It does a lot of similar stuff as the Maths (though not everything the other can do). It does have the advantage of NOT having Maths's horrible, unreadable layout. I played around with one and loved it too and got it. So now my eurorack system is...more than one module! I also picked up some patch cables and a t-shirt. Obviously, that was a motherfucker of an awesome time. Now my posting is gonna break off again.
Okay, now back to White Eagle, the hotel we stayed in. First and foremost, it's a bar. A bar that has bands play most nights. Thus, they bill themselves as the "rock'n'roll hotel" (because of the loud music at night). They mostly have blues-rock type stuff (such that it seems like something that could be in Memphis). Anyway, the plan's not to stay much in the hotel anyway. It was cheap and ended up being pretty sweet. Shared toilets and showers, but it was never an issue and I never had to wait for either. So, we're ready to hit the town. We got in in time for the art walk in the pearl district downtown. Trying to park: jesus christ! I was thinking Portland had the worst parking situation of any city I had ever been in ever! We kept driving around and driving around and eventually had to park way the fuck away from everything. Turns out this was just what happens on art walk day and the rest of the trip parking seldom posed anything close to a problem. We got to this gallery that was free on this day. I really like the sound design stuff. We had apparently just missed a musical performance. A dude was packing up his eurorack modular. Too bad I didn't get to see that! (Oh, I'm forgetting, before we went downtown, we had dinner at Lardo which was good and porky and lardy.) We went over to this bar where Mary Beth was going to meet some folks from Metafilter along with live band karaoke. We got there early and hung out at the bar with the rude bartender. They were playing It's Always Sunner in Philadelphia on their dvd player. After a while a little group showed up. It was fun 'cuz one guy ended up being into synthesizers so we talked about that in short burts of semi-quiet between loud music. They had a pretty decent selection. I sang "Uncontrollable Urge." (I had put in for "I Wanna Be Your Dog" for my second song, but they never got to it.) One of the girls we were with did a pretty amazing rendition of "Mother." She was belting it the fuck out. After that we found Ground Kontrol: the old school arcade/bar that perfectly caters to nerds of my generation. It was the wet dream of what awesome would be from our young 80s vantage. The tables glowed white. The bathroom was tiled into Pac-Man mosaics. The sink glowed different colors like the ghost regeneration station or whatever it's called. I mostly played really old games and did horribly. I started off with The Simpsons arcade game, that's the one with the biggest nostalgic kick to the gut. I went for five dollars worth of quarters and played them all! I bought a t-shirt too and a can cozy and a set of pins. It was quite a bit of nerd fun for me. After that we had the fun task of walking many blocks to a remote corner of a dark and creepy downtown.
Friday was our big shopping day. In the morning we had breakfast at Tasty n Sons. It had a Moroccan or African kind of thing going on. It was tasty. Then we went just a few blocks over. Mary Beth checked out some store she wanted to go to and I went to...Control Voltage! Portland's one of the few cities in the country with a bona-fide mother fuckin' synthesizer store. I played around with their display eurorack modular shit. I played with an MS-20 mini. I played with a Sub Phatty. It was a lot of fun and then I took the plunge and made my own eurorack setup a lot less small! I got a couple used modules: Doepfer A183-3 Amplifier and Pittsburgh Outs (converts tiny eurorack jacks to big jacks plus stereo capabilities and amplification or attenuation). I was going to get a Maths (which I had played around with a good bit) but was informed they didn't have any stock aside from their display module. The guy recommended something similar to me: 4MS Pingable Envelope Generator (PEG). It does a lot of similar stuff as the Maths (though not everything the other can do). It does have the advantage of NOT having Maths's horrible, unreadable layout. I played around with one and loved it too and got it. So now my eurorack system is...more than one module! I also picked up some patch cables and a t-shirt. Obviously, that was a motherfucker of an awesome time. Now my posting is gonna break off again.
