And that’s really all I have to say about this movie. It’s pleasant enough, and there are certainly worse movies to spend your money on – there always are – but you’d get more out of seeing, say, American Splendor for a second time than seeing The Station Agent once.
I’m tired because I just got back from a trip to Portland. (I connected through Seattle and got a spectacular view coming into Sea-Tac of the Cascades, stretching from Mt. Rainier, to Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, and, faintly in the midmorning sun, Mt. Hood. In the little prop plane from Seattle to Portland, we flew almost directly over Mt. St. Helens; I could see halfway into the crater.) I was there for a conference for work and, as usual, tacked on a couple extra days for myself (it’s the only way I can afford to take a vacation these days). The conference was long and exhausting, and I had to make conversation with people like the Texan who was a dead ringer for Maurice from “Northern Exposure,” who opined that we never used to have so many forest fires until those environmentalists stopped all the logging. The weather was fantastic the first few days, most of which I unfortunately had to spend inside the convention center. By the time I had my two free days to pack in all the sights I wanted to see, the temperature had dropped 30 degrees or so.
I’ll do a little travelogue on Portland when my photos come back, but I have to say that 1) I have never had so many people ask me for money on the street – certainly not so many who looked like suburban kids slumming in the city; 2) I love that all public transit in the downtown area is free; and 3) half the stuff I wanted to see wasn’t there anymore or was unfindable. My main sources for locating oddities were RoadsideAmerica.com (whose tipsters have a distressing tendency to write directions like, “Somewhere just off the main street”) and Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk’s guidebook to Portland, Fugitives and Refugees (his contribution to a clever series from Crown Books of selectively famous [not to say cultish] authors giving tours of their hometowns – a concept that works well with Palahniuk [although a lot of the “sights” he describes tend to (a) places where he got drunk, (b) places where he got beaten up, (c) places where he shot up, (d) places you can get into only if you know the owner, or (e) places that aren’t there anymore] but is executed horribly by Christopher Buckley in his snide guide to Washington, DC, which never leaves the “monumental core” and tells you little you couldn’t find out from a regular guidebook – except for gossipy but ultimately dull stories about Reagan and Bush Administration figures, whose names Buckley drops like bread crumbs to mark his walking trail, made more nauseating by his transparently false insistence that he doesn’t care about fame and power. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s probably the perfect insider guidebook to Washington). Anyway, I spent a little time in the city, but mostly I was driving: to Mt. Hood, the Columbia Gorge, and the Pacific coast – all in one day (that was kind of a dumb thing to do, in retrospect, because it was a hell of a long day, and I didn’t get to spend enough time at the stunning waterfalls or the rocky beaches).
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