Orlo

Archive for the ‘story’ Category - 2

Bowing Down to Mystery: An Interview with Spalding Gray (1994)

Portland, Oregon; Issue #3

Interview conducted by Philip Krohn and Tom Webb
Note: This interview is reprinted from The Bear Deluxe Magazine #3 (1994). Magazine co-founders Krohn and Webb met with Gray before his evening performance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon. Gray arrived over two hours late for the interview but eventually shared lunch on Tom McCall Waterfront Park, talking on tape for another two hours. For background on Spalding Gray, visit

Spalding Gray is the internationally acclaimed performing artist and writer responsible for such gems as “Swimming to Cambodia” and “Monster in a Box.” A story collector and wayfarer, he is propelled by an insatiable curiosity and pursued by the bizarre. In addition to being brutally honest and side-splittingly funny, he may also be one of America’s most complicated thinkers. Orlo is grateful to have had the opportunity to spend some time with Spalding Gray during his recent stay in Portland, OR.

Orlo  A couple of years ago you interviewed the Dalai Lama. What is the extent of your interest in Buddhism?
Spalding Gray  I’m not so interested in being a Buddhist, I’m interested in being an individual. I’m a New Englandian, I’m a Thoreauzian. You know, I’m for bowing down to the mystery.
Orlo  You started your interview with the Dalai Lama talking about being on the road all the time, both of you. And trying to get comfortable. It made me think of someone else who is interested in Buddhism, Gary Snyder. And he’s very interested in the discussion of homelessness in a broad sense and trying to find a sense of place, because to him that hasn’t happened in America.
Spalding Gray  Gary’s different than I in the sense that Gary has found a place. I like Gary Snyder, but I think that he’s coming from a preachy place. I can’t quote him, but his attitude is this: “Look at me, I was able to integrate myself with the environment. I now go and argue with Congress about the spotted owl. I’m an environmentalist, I’m Gary Snyder, I found a place. The rest of you are wandering idiots.” We did a Buddhist Conference some years back, and Gary said, “I can’t tolerate it any more, that these people on the road don’t know how to roll their rucksacks.” And I go, “Oh my God.” That’s why he couldn’t hang out with Jack Kerouac after a while. He was a little anal retentive for me.  Read more »

Toward Xenon

Madison, South Dakota; Issue #34

by Justin Blessinger

for my father

Clayton strikes the rod to steel;
a blinding arc of buzzing, wicked blue
lights the workshop,
fusing bolt to chalybeous plate to looping rod puddle.
His black glass face reflects the plasma bolt,
his hammer near to hand
shattering flux.

A Ford bidirectional tractor hunkers behind him,
its bucket bowed in submission
waiting for Clayton’s next endowment
never adornment;
its cerulean paint has washed.

Insulation, silver-backed, keeps Montana’s winter out,
the blue is much softer out there, on the drifts,
absorbing the cold moon
and colder stars
Someone’s old engine oil burns above him
in a red furnace he pulled from the county junkyard
and made it breathe again.

That cobalt night,
bounding in ruts of the dirt road,
a cottontail ignites
in the twinkle of his eye
and his Chevy pickup’s noble headlamps
when he turns toward the house
and thick sleep.

Declining Cities: Urban planning looks to flexibility, not growth

Fresno, California & Portland, Oregon; Winter-Spring 2012-13

by Molly Cooney-Mesker

In Fresno, California, a neighborhood of new stucco-walled houses is fenced off from an abandoned, run-down “parts” shop sitting in the middle of a dry grassy field. With worn board planks and unhinged doors, it looks like a prop on a Western ghost-town set. On the other side of the fence are shiny power-line towers leading to ghostly footprints of would-have-been stucco homes.

This scene in Fresno could just as easily describe any number of suburbs across the Sun Belt.

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Deer in Headlights: Whitetail Populations Soar Across the Midwest

Missouri and Midwest; Winter-Spring 2012-13

by Jason Tobin

Town and Country, Missouri, is the quintessential setting for wealthy suburban living. Situated about 12 miles west of St. Louis, the exclusive enclave has long been considered one of the premier locales for the upper class of St. Louis County. Strict residential zoning and few commercial zones have made intensive development impossible, which has led to Town and Country maintaining much of its pastoral vibe. Not to mention its elite status. According to the City Data website, as of 2009, the average home was worth $840,811 and 56.5 percent of Town and Country students attended private school.

Town and Country was first incorporated as a village in 1950 and was initially a farming community before transitioning to a high-end, low-density suburb. The farms have disappeared and been replaced with white picket fences, but over time the topographic make-up has remained unchanged. An abundance of open space still exists. All this room has created ideal grazing lands for whitetailed deer. Considering humans are the only natural predator left in the area, the deer population began to skyrocket in the 1980s.

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Cultural Memory: An Interview with Carolyn Finney

Berkeley, California; Spring-Summer, 2012

by Casey Bush and Tom Webb

Carolyn Finney is a geographer who has discarded maps in favor of storytelling. The UC Berkeley assistant professor has abandoned cartography for cultural narrative. She looks to expand our green horizons with a populated landscape including people like former slave Israel Parson Jones, whose family lived for generations in the lowland that is now Biscayne National Park, and who died as one of the first African-American millionaires. Finney’s forthcoming book, Black Faces, White Places: African-Americans in the Great Outdoors (University of Georgia Press), expands the color palate that is the history and the face of modern environmentalism.

Finney’s unusual career route included 12 years pursuing acting in New York before trekking in Africa and Asia led her to re-enter academia and attempt to redefine the “white wilderness” that has led to a racialization of envi­ronmental concerns. As part of that work, she counted the faces of color in 10 years of Outside magazine, finding only 100 out of 4,000 that were not white. But Carolyn Finney is not an outsider herself and instead is working to change the place of African-Americans in the green movement as a member of the National Park Advisory Board and the Second Century National Parks Commission, among other appointments and awards. Finney earned her undergraduate degree from Western Washington University and her Ph.D. in geography from Clark University.

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CSI: Special Forest Unit — Backroading artist documents clear-cuts with creative flare

By Tom Webb

Ryan Burns is not an everyday ambulance driver. He doesn’t scream down busy city streets, pick up accident victims and rush them away to the nearest hospital. He has no need for a siren, since his patients are, without exception, dead on arrival. He’s part Quincy, the county coroner, and part public provocateur, documenting the death of biodiversity in the backcountry of America’s national forests. You can call him a stump-rubber, or tree-impressionist, but you’d never be correct in describing him as an average landscape artist. Forest rangers can attest to that.

“They get real confused,” Burns says of the rangers who encounter him and his 1989 Ford ambulance as they travel the logging roads of the Pacific Northwest. “’Whatya’ doing? Did someone get hurt out here?’ they ask. And I’m like ‘No, I’m just looking for some clear-cuts.’”

A fresh cut mapped and found, Burns pulls out his materials—swaths of paper, a glue stick and a thick rubbing crayon—and gets to work on his latest patient. He finds the largest, freshest stump available. The papers are layered across the ringed behemoth and glued together to form a parent sheet. Sometimes he’ll have to saw off an errant snag so as to create a relatively clean, flat surface. Only then does the rubbing begin. As the pine pitch, bone-black pigment and of his crayon scurries across the stump, a new image is born from the recently department Douglas fir, Sitka spruce or Ponderosa pine. It’s like dusting for clues, and Burns knows that every stump has its own unique set of rings, its own fingerprint.

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Stories coming soon!

Portland, Oregon

More to come!
Our site has launched! Come back soon to see stories from the previously print-only Bear Deluxe magazine, now free to roam the web. We’ll be populating these pages with selected back issue articles and art, news, and web exclusives in the upcoming days.

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