HinesSight

K. Williams Brown gets Salem's light just right

Salem, Oregon glows in the invisible ultraviolet wavelength, appealing-city wise. That's one of the insights that resonated with me in a column by K. Williams Brown in the Statesman Journal today. 

Check out the "Let's make Salem's light visible, not ultraviolet" post on my Strange Up Salem blog for how Brown's thoughts stimulated my own. 

But it's time (way past time, really) for Salem to evolve out of its ultraviolet phase of development. I'm tired of having friends and relatives visit from out of state and being stumped when my wife and I think, "What to do?" 

Salem sucks when it comes to engaging, vibrant, walkable, creative, artistic, energetic mixed use cityscapes. There's no neighborhood anything like Portland's NW 23rd Street, one of my favorite places to visit. 

I get this "inner beauty" and "secret treasures" stuff. I'm just eager for Salem to blossom with some outward beauty and manifest treasures also.

Break the blah-curse that hangs over Salem, Oregon

Over on my Strange Up Salem blog I've put up a post which conclusively answers the question that plagues residents of our city: why is Salem afflicted with so much blah'ness?

We're cursed. That's got to be it.

Check out "Is Salem, Oregon cursed by a 'blah spell?" The answer is yes; the solution is described. Excerpt:

Thus the curse of Oregon's capital isn't to be infected with evil. Hey, that'd be interesting, cool, something to be proud of. (Las Vegas does just fine with that sort of curse.)

No, Salem's curse is existential.

It's to be doomed with a void at the barely beating heart of our slow-moving metropolis. It's a lack of creative energy, a deficit of imagination, an emptiness that blocks attempts to cure the lethargy that infects Big Ideas and turns them into a shadow of themselves.

#Salemia tweets show need to strange up Salem

Check out another Strange Up Salem post on my blog that's dedicated to weirding up Oregon's excessively blah capital. "Salemia video aims to Strange Up Salem" is the last of my three Salem Weekly columns that made it into the blogosphere rather than print.

Here's some excerpts:

In early February “Salemia” touched off a craze among Salem’s Twittersphere. It all began when filmmaker Mike Perron tweeted, “Salemia. Opening scene: five hipsters fighting over a half smoked cigarette outside Chelsea's place...”

...Keep Portland Weird is a rallying cry for residents who want to preserve their city’s uniqueness. Since I feel an urgent need to Strange Up Salem, my guess was that when other Twitter’ers started sharing their own “Salemia” scene ideas, boring would be a more common theme than bizarre.

I was right. Here’s some of my favorite tweets from the first wave of Salemia sharings.

How stranging up Salem is a job creator

Over on my Strange Up Salem blog I've put up another marvelously persuasive post that uses the example of Trader Joe's to show how strangeness is a key to economic development -- not to mention the secrets of the cosmos.

Check it out. Here's a sample:

Bottom line: A place and the people who live there are intimately intertwined. If we want Salem to be a more interesting and lively place, we have to cultivate those qualities in ourselves.

Free enterprise is adept at filling voids. When there is unfulfilled demand for new and different, a.k.a. strangeness, individuals and businesses will offer up out-of-the-ordinary wares.

Strange Up Salem -- what it's about

Over on my new Strange Up Salem blog I've shared a version of what would have been my first Salem Weekly column (see here for why I'm publishing my paeans to strangeness in cyberspace rather than on newsprint).

Check out "Strange Up Salem! You know you want it."

It isn't only for those of us who want Oregon's capital city to, as I say, become more than a blandburger sandwiched between the spiciness of Portland and Eugene. My grandiosity extends way beyond that.

At one point in my life I worried about being considered strange. Now, I consider it a compliment. The most interesting people I’ve known, the most fascinating places I’ve been to, the most unforgettable experiences I’ve had -- they’ve all been compellingly strange.

This is why I feel qualified to preach a Strange Up Salem gospel: I’m strange, and I adore strange.

So much so, I've come to see strangeness as resting at the heart of many fascinating areas of human understanding that I love to learn about: neuroscience, philosophy, spirituality, land use, politics, physics, cosmology, psychology, artistry.

Strange is the key to everything! I've come to realize this. And now it's my unsacred mission to preach the Gospel of Strange wherever and however the strange spirit strikes me.

You can help out by clicking the Facebook "like" button in the right column. Don't think about it; just do it. Strangeness is spontaneity and freedom. So damn it, I order you to click on that button now!

Why I'm not a Salem Weekly columnist

Oh, man.

I could almost taste my Pulitzer prize -- leaving aside the minor details of (1) whether a Pulitzer is given for alternative newspaper column writing, and (2) the questionable edibility of whatever the Pulitzer folks give out as awards.

Regardless, I came so close to becoming a columnist for Salem Weekly, which actually is published bi-weekly, but alternative publications shouldn't be held to obsessive-compulsive journalistic standards.

That's part of what attracted me to the notion of writing for Salem Weekly when publisher A.P. Walther phoned me early in 2011 and said he wanted us to chat. Soon we had a pleasant get-together at the downtown Beanery coffee house. A.P. had been reading my blogs. He liked my "out of the box" thinking.

Music to my literary ears. I told him that blogging was satisfying, but it'd be interesting to dive into the alternative newspaper waters.

There's something about seeing your words in print, on paper. I've had three books published; it's an exciting moment when the first copy arrives in the mail, much more so than is clicking "publish" on a blog post and sensing electrons fly into cyberspace.

After that first meeting with A.P. I pondered what I'd want to write about during some dog walks, when I often come up with my best ponders. It didn't take long for an idea to pop into my mind.

It was weird. In fact, it was strange. I liked it a lot.

I wanted to Strange Up Salem.

I've lived here for 34 years -- over three freaking decades of listening to people (one of whom was me) bitch and complain about how boring Oregon's capital city is, how there's nothing to do here, how downtown is so yawn-inducing, how we suck compared to Portland and Eugene.

All largely true. But lighting a candle is different from cursing the darkness. I got more and more passionate about a Strange Up Salem campaign, which I came to think of as a happening, that would focus on changing Salem from the inside out.

Channeling Obama's 2008 message, I wanted to proclaim: "We are the strange that we've been waiting for."

And that's what I'm going to do. But not in the pages of Salem Weekly.

A.P. Walther, the publisher, resonated with three sample columns that I wrote along with several memos outlining how Strange Up Salem could bring new energy (and readers) to his publication, help make Salem a better place, and be a satisfyingly fun activity for me.

However, the Salem Weekly editor, who would go nameless if he didn't go by the name of Shawn Estes, wasn't nearly as enamored with my proposal.

After I met with Shawn for the first time, late in the column-planning process, I could tell that we weren't on the same wavelength -- a writer's nightmare, because an editor who isn't attuned to a writer's train of thought is going to de-rail the creative engine.

I suggested further meetings where A.P., Shawn, and I could discuss the Strange Up Salem notion. I wrote out my concerns in detail, hoping that it'd still be possible for both Salem Weekly and me to feel comfortable with each other, an obvious pre-requisite if I was going to write a regular column.

No go.

I realized that the silence I was hearing from Salem Weekly was a response, a conclusion eventually confirmed by A.P.. Not wanting to set aside the work I'd done on Strange Up Salem, I decided to be my own alternative to our city's alternative newspaper. (With the World Wide Web, everybody can be a publisher these days.)

I have no idea how Strange Up Salem will go.

This means I can't fail, because I have few specific expectations of success. I don't even know what "success" means in this context. That's how strange I want Strange Up Salem to be -- unpredictable, uncertain, uncontrollable, undefinable.

You can be a part of whatever the heck this is, no matter where you live.

Visit my Strange Up Salem blog, which functions as a landing place for www.strangeupsalem.com (naturally one of my first thoughts was: "got to reserve a domain name").

Give me a Facebook "like" via the blog. Or head to the Strange Up Salem Facebook page and like strangeness from there.

Follow the Strange Up Salem Twitter feed. Tweets are in short supply at the moment, but I'll get around to tweetifying strangeness before too long.

If you don't understand what Strange Up Salem is all about, join the club. I don't either. Not really. Strange is an idea that sends out tendrils in all directions. Why, I've come to see this concept as a philosophical Theory of Everything. It explains the whole freaking cosmos!

Well, Salem at least.

Friday I'll share the first column that I wrote for Salem Weekly, duly revised for the now-independent nature of Strange Up Salem. With this happening I'm the writer; I'm the editor; I'm the publisher.

More: I'm the goddamn self-appointed Philosopher King of Strange Up Salem.

I wish Courthouse Square was completely torn down and a public park was in its place; then I could get on a soapbox and rant about how strangeness will save Salem from the sins of boredom, lethargy, ordinariness, and lack of creativity.

But who needs a physical soapbox? I've got Facebook, Twitter, and my blogs! Cool.

(I want to end by saying that I like Salem Weekly and admire the dedication A.P. Walther, Shawn Estes, and the other staffers put into this publication. It's a terrific asset for our city. That said, A.P. repeatedly told me "I welcome suggestions for making Salem Weekly better." I'm going to take him up on that offer in a forthcoming blog post, after I get some Strange Up Salem writings percolating in cyberspace.)