Ten Year Anniversary of Red Hot and Rollin’ and the Stoner Legend of Fast Break

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Ten years ago this month, I released the third installment of what I called the Beaver State Trilogy, Red Hot and Rollim,’ an anthology of essays, memoirs, oral histories, primary source documents, rare photographs and a long lost film documentary commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Portland Trail Blazers 1977 NBA title.

I had some memorable experiences compiling and promoting the book. Three stand out: 1) meeting and interviewing the legendary power forward of that championship team, Maurice Lucas; 2) a walk with old friend along the promenade in Oregon City after a gig; 3) a sort of gig in Monmouth, Oregon.

The 2200-book press run sold out in a couple of years, the fastest-selling Nestucca Spit Press book of all time.

I was thinking about the book and the Blazers last Easter Sunday as I watched them battle the Golden State Warriors in game one of the first round of the playoffs. Ten years ago the team had the first pick in the draft and chose Greg Oden over Kevin Durant, the same Kevin Durant who scored 32 points in a win against the Blazers in game one. If the Blazers had chosen Durant over Oden, the last decade for the franchise would have surely turned out vastly different. So it goes.

As I watched the game, I also thought about the DVD I included in the anthology, Fast Break, a documentary released in 1978 that I discovered entombed in a Gresham warehouse and was surely buried for all time until I resurrected it. As I have written elsewhere and promulgated hundreds of times at public presentations, Fast Break is indisputably the greatest stoner sports film in the history of American cinema. It must be seen to be believed and even then you won’t believe it.

Now that Oregon has become one of the leading states in the pot business, the film takes on fresh historical significance and adds another layer of stoniness. This is particularly true once you realize that the secret weapon the Blazers used to defeat the 76ers was marijuana. I have never written this story for publication but I interviewed the number one participant in the story (it wasn’t a player, but actually a dealer, THE DEALER, and I corroborated his sensational claims). Perhaps one day, I’ll write it up for the record. It’s a helluva of tale.

Fast Break’s movie poster tagline was: “It’s not necessarily a film about basketball.”

That’s for damn sure. Fast Break is prima facie a documentary, but really it’s more of a stoned contemplation of a subject than anything else. That its subject was a professional basketball team led by its counterculture star center, Bill Walton, unselfishly winning an NBA Title in 1977 in Zen Buddhist-style, just makes the film’s treatment of the content all the more incredible and quintessentially Oregon.

A Portland filmmaker named Don Zavin (died in 1998) conceived and directed Fast Break as an independent production. He shot the film in the spring and summer of 1977 and it debuted at the Fox Theater in downtown Portland in September of 1978, showed there in an exclusive engagement for one week, played one more time at the Northwest Film Study Center in October, and then was never shown in public again.

In the spring of 1977 as the Blazers launched their improbable playoff run, Zavin began shooting Fast Break. He followed the team through their victory over the 76ers, the summer, and next fall’s training camp and preseason. How he convinced the Blazer front office, coaching staff, Walton and the other players to cooperate so fully in this intimate and unorthodox project, quite possibly unprecedented in the annals of professional sports, is unknown to me or anyone still alive connected to the film’s production.

It could never happen today.

Fast Break opens with a psychedelic animated dedication to a member of the film crew, (Patrick Stuckey) who drowned in the Warm Springs River while on location in Central Oregon making the movie. From there, Fast Break embarks on one hour and fifty-seven- minute trip, and I mean trip, that cuts back and forth between the playoffs, Walton’s summer vacation, including his bicycle trip down Highway 101 on the North Oregon Coast and his basketball clinic on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.

Space constraints here limit a full review of the sheer far out scenes that comprise Fast Break. Let me tease out a few: Fast Break captures in almost operatic fashion Walton’s legendary jam over Kareem Abdul-Jabber in the playoffs, Walton dousing the Championship Trophy with beer, Maurice Lucas visiting inmates at the Oregon State Penitentiary, an obviously stoned Walton ordering breakfast at an Oceanside diner, and an apparently intoxicated Walton receiving ceremonial chieftain honors from an Indian…around a bonfire!

Like I said, it must be seen to be believed.

Fast Break suffered the cruel marketing misfortune to debut in Portland at the precise moment when Oregon had come to loathe Bill Walton because of his accusations of medical malpractice against the team and demand for a trade. It was released in 1978 to mediocre Portland reviews and then disappeared until I found it in 2007 and bankrolled its transfer from film to DVD.

They just didn’t get it then. We do now.

Hit your local dispensary, load up, invite friends over, even the ones who don’t care about professional basketball, find the film on YouTube, and get ready to have your mind utterly blown.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Curators and Curating on the Beach

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(This is a One Man’s Beach column for Oregon Coast Today that I wrote a while back, but never ran because the column was dropped after my arrest. I dearly miss writing this column, which ran for eight years and let me explore so many interesting ideas.)

There they were again, on the beach, another young couple, tourists (I can always tell), doing something that always arrests my attention.

He posed her on a driftlog while she faced the ocean. Her back was to him. He took several photographs of her at strange angles with his smartphone.

They switched roles and he took up a new contorted position on the driftlog. She whipped out her phone and took pictures of him. They stepped back from one another, got the phones cooking, caught the signal, and doubtless sent the fresh images to the hashtagged, netherworld of social media. Now everyone they knew or didn’t know could see their…what?

I didn’t have a word to define this curious form of photography until a good friend described it to me as “curating,” as in this couple were curators of their own lives—with obvious intent—to create a specific experience for anyone who might view these images and imagine the lives of the people who produced them.

It wasn’t like the couple was capturing images to document a vacation or first date to the beach. They were not taking pictures for scrapbook because they didn’t own one. One suspects that neither one of them had ever used the self timer app on their phones. Had they done so, they might have captured both of them unevenly in the frame, perhaps even smiling. Vacations and first dates are supposed to be fun!

They also could have asked a stranger for assistance to get the happy picture, but strangers don’t know how to curate. They just say “cheese.”

This curating is such an odd phenomenon to witness at the beach, and I see it more and more these days with young couples. I have never seen someone doing it alone, who is over the apparent age of 30, or with a dog. They typically curate each other, but sometimes they will be together, and curate only themselves.

I’ve seen curating at the beaches where couples employed rented bicycles, kites, apparel, shoes, drink containers and weird flotsam and jetsam to accessorize the experience for the online Museum of Myself. Sometimes they roll in the ocean or a dead crab as a prop. I have never seen them curate with a driftwood fort, which for some unknown perverse reason, I desperately want to see. I have never seen them look directly at the camera or touch one another, let alone kiss. There is no hint of romance in any of it and I do smell the nuance art of highly discerning consumption.

They always look good at looking good. That takes considerable effort on many levels, believe me, because I’ve watched it countless times and often marvel at the precise deliberations that take place, finding the right placement for this or that object (never a can or Rainier), waiting for the light to change.

I think about my times on the beach when I was on social media. Was I curating my life with Sonny the husky there? I took a million photographs of her rambling Oregon’s publicly-owned beaches and sent many to social media. She became famous. I was rarely in these shots because getting the self timer right with a dog on the beach is a tricky thing. Every once in a while, however, I struck gold. I cherish these images (like the one here) because she is gone and they are beautiful reminders of our life together. I printed many of them out and taped or glued them into my journals.

It certainly didn’t feel like I was curating anything with Sonny when I documented our visits. I just loved being with her at the ocean’s edge, wandering our way into incredible stories and indescribable magic, and I wanted to share my spontaneous, unrehearsed joy.

The curating I have observed at the beach seems utterly joyless.

I pass no significant judgment here. At least these couples were on the beach. Perhaps this is a different generation’s way of uniquely defining themselves though a highly articulated sense of mood and aesthetic. Perhaps it actually slows them down and allows for much-needed concentration. I don’t know. I was merely thinking aloud here. Being on the beach always does that to me. That’s really why I go. And I miss conveying those thought to my readers in the column.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

 

Lost and Found 6 / Back and Forth

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A vicissitude is defined as, “a change or variation occurring in the course of something.” Its connotation is typically negative, meaning you probably didn’t see a variation coming with such extreme velocity and whatever it was, it terrified you almost into madness or despair. Apocalypse Now!

Other definitions include: “a reversal of fortune, downturn, twist, shift, ups and downs.”

I was always pretty good at avoiding vicissitudes. I flattened the mountains or skipped over valleys. I ignored the smiling ones staring me straight in the face. I put my head in a book or hit the road and they disappeared.

Right now I am living through the largest, most terrible vicissitude of my life, a Mt. Everest and Crater Lake happening day in, day out, often within the space of an hour. It is the ultimate unknown Territory of Lost and Found.

I think, though, during all of this wandering, I may have learned something useful about navigating (or riding out) vicissitudes—the other part of them not defined in the dictionary. That other part is when the reversal reverses, when the up comes down. I guess you could call it a “back and forth,” a quasi-Newtonian law of metaphysics, a letter-less law with only one constant: the “back and forth” almost never reciprocate each other in real time. One direction backward could be a tank; one direction forward could be a keyhole limpet. Perhaps years later, however, through time, the long run, a person might notice a reapportioning of that particular back and forth, and the keyhole limpet becomes much greater in force than the tank.

These “back and forth” moments are legion to me these days. I lose something, I find something. I find something, I lose something. I suspect others have already experienced this so-called inevitable, inequitable “back and forth” phenomenon in their own vicissitudes, but I never perceived anything remotely like it until I found myself lost in the criminal justice system and seeking a way to survive, and maybe even transcend a dramatic reversal of my fortune.

Recently, I started listing the back and forth moments of my current situation. As I said early, they were almost never reciprocal, at least as of this writing. In fact, some were wildly unequal but I won’t provide the percentages here because I don’t know them—yet.

  • I lost entrance to a thousand familiar doors of creative opportunity but found several unfamiliar ones open slightly to me.
  • I found a job as a custodian and then lost it before it began, then found it again, then knew I had to lose it.
  • I lost my husky but keep finding her in my dreams.
  • I found hope I could get a job to save my house and then lost it.
  • I lost my teaching career but have found another way to teach.
  • I lost being an island and found strength on my family’s shore.
  • I lost my greatest collaborator but know I can find another one out there, perhaps even the great collaborator herself, repurposed, reanimated, remade, the two of us perhaps born anew with new unpredictable energy to create.
  • I found a promising new business client and then lost him for no reason that I ever discovered.
  • I lost faith in the old sound of the ocean but found faith watching a deer eat an apple in my back yard.
  • I lost a belief in facts but found the truth in novels.
  • I found an exciting fresh idea out of nowhere and then it lost it practically just as fast.
  • I lost my conviction for rain then found it after a little help from a library and someone who still believes in me.
  • I found incredible new friends while I lost incredible old ones.
  • I found my hometown of Oregon City as an incredible river of story inspiration and lost the absurd idea that what happened to me there in my youth was like everywhere else in the 1970s and 80s.
  • I found a throwback sports metaphor on how to rally and haven’t lost it yet. (Hint: tennis with a wooden racket on a clay court. Thank you Oregon City High School tennis team.)
  • I lost all judgment of others and found a new ability to walk in another person’s shoes.
  • I lost all interest in self-aggrandizement and found joy in silent, good work.
  • I lost everything and found there was more.

I don’t know if recognizing the “back and forth” in my vicissitudes will continue to register with me. I don’t know if these musings will prove beneficial to anyone reading this. I certainly don’t offer them as a prescription for handling a major reversal in your life. To me, at this point, it’s a working theory, but I like where the work is going and believing in some reapportionment later.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

The Secret Oregon Coast: Part 2…My Favorite 101 Secret Spots on the Oregon Coast

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Astoria to Neskowin

 

Godfather’s Books (Astoria)

McCure Park (Astoria)

Coffee Girl (Astoria)

Olney Saloon (Olney)

Gillnet Fleet Dock (Astoria)

Triangle Tavern (Astoria)

Shively Park (Astoria)

Portway Tavern  (Astoria)

Jeffers Gardens Inn (Astoria)

Skipanon Cannery (Warrenton)

Conde McCullough Exhibit (Warrenton)

Penny-wise Thrift Store (Warrenton)

South Jetty Columbia River/Fort Stevens State Park (Hammond)

North Coast Land Conservancy Reuben Snake Memorial (Gearhart)

Bridge Tender/Beach Club Tavern (Seaside)

Seaside Bumper Cars

Beach Books/Seaside Coffee House (Seaside)

Highway 420/Buoy’s Best (Seaside)

Jupiter’s Books (Cannon Beach)

Screw & Brew (Cannon Beach)

Hug Point Highway

Falcon Cove

Matt Kramer Memorial (Oswald West State Park)

Oswald West Memorial

Cloud & Leaf Bookstore (Manzanita)

South Jetty Nehalem Bay

Oregon Du Drops (Rockaway)

Port of Garibaldi (Garibaldi)

Kilchis Point

Taco Trucks (Tillamook)

2nd Street Coffeehouse (Tillamook)

Lucky Bear Soap (Tillamook)

Bayocean Spit

The Schooner Lounge (Netarts)

Whalen Island

Mt. Hebo (Hebo)

Sportsman’s Tavern (Pacific City)

Nestucca Spit (Bob Straub State Park/Pacific City)

Nestucca Bay Wildlife Refuge

Slab Creek Road/Cascade Head Experimental Forest (Neskowin)

Hart’s Cove (Cascade Head)

 

Lincoln City to Florence

 

Robert’s Bookshop (Lincoln City)

Red Cock (Lincoln City)

Old Oregon Tavern (Lincoln City)

Renee’s Herb Store (Lincoln City)

Connie Hansen Garden (Lincoln City)

Anchor Inn (Lincoln City)

Stamper House (Highway 229)

Drift Creek Falls

Salishak Tavern (Gleneden Beach)

Depoe Bay Drive-in

Depoe Bay (Rope beach access)

Mad Dog Country Tavern (Newport)

Bay Haven Inn(Newport)

Bayfront (Newport)

JC Market Thriftway (Newport)

Pick of the Litter Thrift Store (Newport)

Nye Beach Bookshouse (Newport)

Nye Beach Turnaround (Newport)

Sandbar Lounge (Newport)

Fishermen’s Memorial /Yaquina Bay State Park (Newport)

Obelisks, Yaquina Bay Bridge (Newport)

Hatfield Marine Science Center Guin Library (South Beach)

Crab Shack (South Beach)

Hoover’s Pub (South Beach)

Mike Miller Educational Park (South Beach)

Ona Beach (Brian Booth State Park)

Beaver Creek State Natural Area / Snaggy Point

Seal Rock State Park (Seal Rock)

Waldport Heritage Museum (Waldport)

Salty Dawg Bar (Waldport)

Governor Patterson Memorial State Park (Waldport)

Yachats Farm Store (Yachats)

Mari’s Books (Yachats)

Cape Perpetua Rock Haus

Muriel Ponser Wayside

St. Vincent DePaul Thrift Store (Florence)

 

Reedsport to Brookings

 

Oregon Dune Trailhead (south of Florence)

Tides Inn Bar (Reedsport)

Defeat River Brewery (Reedsport)

7 Devils’ Brewery (Coos Bay)

Steve Prefontaine Memorial Gallery/ Coos Art Museum (Coos Bay)

Arcade Tavern (Bandon)

Nagomatt Memorial (Bandon)

James F. Fleck Picnic Shelter (Bandon)

New River Nature Center

Langlois Market and Deli (Langlois)

Sixes Grange and Marketplace (Sixes)

Sisters State Park

Nesika Beach RV Park and Campground  (Ophir)

Otter Point Recreation Site/Bailey Beach North (Ophir)

Turkey’s (Gold Beach)

Rogue River Bridge/River Trail (Gold Beach)

Port of Gold Beach Memorial/South Jetty Rogue River

The Crow’s Nest Bar (Gold Beach)

Gold Beach Books/Rachel’s Coffeehouse

Hunter Creek Tavern/Arch Rock Brewery (Gold Beach)

Pistol River State Park (South entrance)

Secret Beach/Samuel Boardman Memorial/House Rock

The Vista Pub (Brookings)

Chetco Point Park (Brookings)

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

 

The Secret Oregon Coast Part 1

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(Last fall I wrote a proposal for a book I call The Secret Oregon Coast: My 101 Favorite Secret Spots. I sent out the proposal and it was unsuccessful. In the old days, I would have published this book myself, but I no longer have the financial wherewithal to do that sort of thing. I can envision bringing it out as a newsprint magazine and distributing it for free everywhere on the Oregon Coast, if I could find a sponsor. (Please contact me if interested.) The book was a list (with individual summary) of my favorite 101 spots and collection of 13 essays about the Oregon Coast on the following topics:

Great Birthright 1 (part one of Oregon’s unique legacy of publicly-owned beaches)

Great Birthright 2 (part two of Oregon’s unique legacy of publicly-owned beaches)

Crooked Inviting Fingers (about mysteries of visiting the beach)

Beer (about craft breweries)

Coastal Bookstores (on the joys of patronizing them)

Bridges (about the Coast’s unique Art Deco-style bridges)

Dive Bars (on the joys of investigating them)

Driftwood Forts (an explanation and guide to how to build)

Gas (on the joys of not being able to pump our gas in Oregon)

Pot (on the incredible proliferation of pot shops on the Oregon Coast)

Radio (about the independent classic rock stations)

Winter Rain (on the delights of experiencing rain)

Rule of Three (about how to make a transition to living at the Oregon Coast full time)

 

What follows is the introduction to the book. In another installment of the blog, I will reveal my 101 favorite secret spots.

 The Secret Oregon Coast: Part 1 / Introduction

The genesis of The Secret Oregon Coast began a few years ago when a striking couple resembling Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch’s characters in Drugstore Cowboy entered the Sandbar in Newport on the Central Oregon Coast. They sat down. Kelly and Matt expected table service but none was forthcoming and never would be. Finally, Kelly stood up and went to the bar.

“What have you got in martinis?” she said to Lindsay, the veteran bartender.

“Well, you know martinis are martinis,” said Lindsay.

Lindsay then mixed two house martinis, and set them on the bar. Kelly carried them warily to her table.

She returned to the bar a few seconds later.

“Can I get you to try this again?” said Kelly.

“What?” said Lindsay, bewildered.

“Is that like your well vodka?”

“What?” said Lindsay.

“Can I get you to try this again,” said Kelly, extending the martinis to Lindsay, whose hands never moved.

“No. Martinis are martinis,” said Lindsay. “We have real problems here.”

I just laughed. The couple didn’t get it. They should have relished their terrible martinis, thrown them back, ordered two more, tipped huge, and begged off Yelp. I would suggest that drinking the worst martini in the world in a dive bar is the type of unexpected preposterous experience one should cultivate while touring the Oregon Coast. If you desire an artisan martini concocted with hazelnut vodka or raspberry gin crafted by a gorgeous bartender, don’t bother leaving the big cities.

Kelly and Matt were participants in what I call the Oregon Coast Cliché Festival. Twenty-five-million people visited the Oregon Coast in 2015, making it the most popular outdoor tourist destination in the Pacific Northwest. Most of these visitors attended the Festival and drove unwittingly past or failed to appreciate the secret spots that offer idiosyncratic charm and overlooked history.

In 1997, I immigrated to the Oregon Coast from Portland, intending to stay one year as a cultural experiment. I never left. In my 20 years of residency, I’ve explored practically every inch from Astoria to Brookings. I’ve met and observed many tourists, documenting their proclivities and preferences. I’ve written hundreds of features and columns extolling the virtues of living and visiting here. I became the state’s greatest advocate for Oregon’s unique legacy of publicly-owned beaches. I also discovered incredible places that were totally unknown to most visitors and many locals. I called them my secret spots and began compiling a list.

When the list reached 101, I decided to share. Readers may wonder about this apparent contradiction: why would he give away his secret spots? The answer: I want visitors to experience the Oregon Coast I have come to know and love; a different, richer, weirder, wilder, lustier, grittier place than what routinely plays out in the guides, blogs, apps, reviews or magazines.

To me, the best way to explore a place is to reconnoiter, get the lay of the land, talk to the locals, run into dead ends or fall through rabbit holes. That’s exactly what I started doing when I moved here and the habit remains. In these discursive explorations, I’ve walked into some of the most memorable stories and scenarios of my life and wasn’t even looking for them.

That very well could happen to you if you follow a similar strategy when visiting the Oregon Coast and use this book for information or inspiration. Consider this: Don’t you long to discover the unpretentious, unexpected, unprecedented, secluded, untrammeled, analog, languid, profane, preposterous, timeless and bizarre nature of a place? I sure do.

In no way does The Secret Oregon Coast attempt comprehensive coverage of all coastal cities, hinterlands or attractions. It isn’t suitable for families with small kids. This book offers the potential for readers to experience something incomparable. Follow the recommendations of conventional travel media and you will never relish that worst martini or find a remote beach that might change your life.

Of course I missed a lot. I don’t know everything there is to know about the Oregon Coast. I hope I never do. But I do live and work here fulltime and believe that gives me extra credibility to offer personal recommendations.

Find your own secret spots. They are out there, lurking, obscured, awaiting discovery by the curious, the wanderers, the devotees of anachronisms, the paper map readers.

One last thing: back in 1973, the late, great Oregon Governor Tom McCall said something to a CBS News reporter on national television: “We want you to visit our State of Excitement often. Come again and again. But for heaven’s sake, don’t move here to live.”

Tom McCall was a very wise man.

Dear Anonymous Letter Writer

NSP Meditations , , ,

Dear Anonymous Letter Writer:

I received your anonymous letter in the mail yesterday afternoon and read it immediately in my Beaverwood Writing Studio while drinking mint tea. At the time your letter arrived, I was working on a long, strange essay about my youth in Oregon City that I am writing for no discernible reason except that I can’t seem to stop. Perhaps I am onto something important. It feels that way.

Actually, I read your letter three times because it was extraordinary. Your wise and uplifting words found me at precisely the right time I needed to read them. I can hardly believe that is a coincidence. I can hardy believe you discovered the new blog, let alone that mentioned taking a recommendation from the site and are enjoying Jim Harrison’s Dalva. This reminds me yet again how cosmic this novel is in my life and charts a path where I want to return in my life.

Thank you for the time and palpable care you expended on my behalf. You made me think about where I am going these days and almost brought me to tears when you wrote, “Thank you for being a teacher even now.” Reading that sentence instantly brought to mind this electric idea: perhaps I am engaged in the greatest teaching gig of my life and didn’t even realize. But what am I teaching? Who am I teaching (besides myself)? These are questions rich in possibilities for me to answer.

I would like to correspond with you in the old-fashioned manner you shrewdly employed to reach out to me. Would that be okay? I need an address and a name would nice as well. You can also reach me through the web site to move things along quicker, but sometimes slow is better.

Thank you again. It truly was incredible to realize that receiving a letter from a total stranger could produce such keen insights and warm feelings within me. I sincerely hope I get to read more of your words to me.

Matt Love

PS: I have another book recommendation for you. Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, about his Zen-infused trek to the Himalayans to spot an elusive creature. I am rereading this book for the fifth time right now and it has taken all new meaning. It’s providing the clarity I need.

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