Approximately one month ago, on the evening Friday the 13th of May, I sauntered dressed in my finest chinos and button-down Ralph Lauren to one of my favorite North Portland watering holes: The Saratoga. Being that it was a Friday, I’d been drinking Bud Light Lime since 8:30am and felt a profound fire in my Hanes that only the wettest of barely legal trim could extinguish. To put it quite simply, T-Dobbz was looking to get some stinky on his hang down.
And it is at this point that I must share with you, dear reader, a very personal and very intimate detail about said hang down. There is an odd, recessive gene that seems to consistently make itself manifest in generation after generation of the Dobson clan. Like my father before me and his father before him, my shaft-to-head ratio is incredibly unorthodox. To put it bluntly, my dick looks like a string of waxed dental floss with a can of Campbell’s Chunky Soup hanging on the end of it.
Despite an ostensible handicap, this righteous raconteur has managed to stuff his malicious member into the bleeding hatchet wounds of nameless women an average of four nights per week for the last five years in this city. As I entered the Saratoga that evening, I felt virile and alert, ready to sniff out the next carnal conquest. But something was awry that Friday night – the place smelled of oak and pine; a lumberyard full of wood. Don’t get me wrong, the Saratoga is by no means known for its high number of ladies in attendance on any given night. What struck me as odd though was the fact that from what I could tell, there was not even a single female present. And all of the men appeared strikingly similar, large bellies, exposed carpets of chest and back hair, and the beards… Good Gawd, the beards. Assuming that perhaps the bitches where out back puffing grits and sharing gossip about television or something, I saddled up to the bar and ordered a triple Beam with a milk back.
At about this time, I realized that the aural environment was radically different than on my previous visits. Generally, the bartenders (without a shred of irony) sling alcoholic drinks and play albums by Fugazi on repeat. I guess you could call them “Repeaters,” yes? Anyway, the Chaka Khan greatest hits album pouring from the jukebox gave me pause and I resurveyed the scene from my barstool. On the small stage at the south end of the bar, a fuzzy gentleman with an impressive tummy snagged a microphone and interrupted “Pack My Bags” to make a curious announcement.
“It’s so great to see all of you bitches out here once again at the Saratoga!” he screamed, much to my confusion. I saw no bitches whatsoever.
“I’d like to personally thank the Saratoga for once again hosting the baddest, biggest bear party in town: Bearracuda!”
The crowd erupted in an orgasmic applause and the music kicked back in at twice its original volume. Literally EVERYONE started dancing their asses off in a sweaty, hairy mess and what I witnessed next destroyed every semblance of reality that I thought that I knew. Men, hairy, tattooed, wife beater-wearing men, BEGAN TO FURIOUSLY MAKE OUT WITH ONE ANOTHER! I screamed and momentarily fainted, dropping both my Beam and my glass of milk to the floor. But I was only out for a millisecond, as the sound of the glass shattering on the concrete underneath my barstool snapped me back into what I thought was some kind of obscenely lucid night terror. One of them ran up to me and tousled my hair, giving my nipple a quick tweak for good measure. Like a bolt of straight lightning, I shot through the perspiring mess of flesh, narrowly escaping a laundry list of sodomies of which I’ve never even heard.
I choked down the cool night air outside of the bar, the muffled bass of the music inside still pulsing through the Saratoga’s walls. In a complete daze, I lumbered south on N Interstate Avenue with no particular destination in mind. How much time passed, I cannot be certain. But when I finally jolted out of my post-bear stupor, I was staring at the blazing neon lights of everyone’s favorite North Portland tiki bar and karaoke haunt: The Alibi. If there’s a straighter bar in this city, I’d challenge you to tell me. Many a night, I have found myself here cocked on booze, fingering a hot mess in one of their expansive booths with one hand while I pick at a plate of free buffet sweet ribs with the other. Following the outlandishly sinful hedonism of Bearracuda, what I needed now was a shot at the mic and a something stiff to put in my mouth, like a drink.
Inside of the bar, as I was ordering another triple Beam with a milk back, I heard a honey-laced tenor crooning out a karaoke rendition of “Criminal” by Fiona Apple. The voice sounded strangely familiar, and as I rounded the corner, I recognized none other than former director of the now defunct Car Hole Gallery Sam Korman strutting his stuff on the stage. The song concluded and I began a dramatic slow clap, meandering towards the stage at a leisurely pace. Korman spotted me immediately and waved me over to his table; he was alone, and in need of a friend.
Before this serendipitous meeting, we’d been emailing back and forth for a few weeks attempting to arrange a time for an interview. I was interested in his work at the gallery (read: his garage) and wanted to talk to him about a new magazine he was pushing called YA5. Without even needing to explain what was about to happen, I produced my Zoom H2 Digital Recorder from my back pocket and placed it on the table. Korman raised an eyebrow knowingly, and it was on.
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TD: Let’s get down to business. What the fuck happened with Car Hole? Did your financers back out or some shit? Be honest, don’t put my dick in a kangaroo pouch, Korman.
SK: I closed it. After about ten months of doing Car Hole, I realized I had gotten everything I wanted out of it and I didn’t want to start to repeat myself, which is something I saw starting to happen. It was not meant to last. You came, you saw how the walls crumbled. And there was never any financial backing. I stole the photocopies from PSU for the catalogs and there’s only so many times you can ask artists to make work on their own dime. I thought about it like a first album or some kind of editing. I released the book and left it at that, I didn’t want to beat the project into the ground and I didn’t want to have some shitty, overproduced sophomore release. There was only so much to be done in that space. And, kind of like any live show, people started to find out about it and that’s when you need to leave them wanting — I had already played for my friends, that’s why I did Car Hole in the first place. But I still live there, all the lights are still up. My roommate parked his truck in there for a few months after it closed. I thought that was appropriate.
TD: That sounds like a respectable decision. You wouldn’t want to treat it like Two and a Half Men and go on for nine fucking seasons, right? Plus, it’s still got that killer Portland Trailblazers painting on the door that says, “The Rain.” I like that because I like sports because I am a male. I hope that you also identify with sports as a male, despite your handicap of being an artist. What was your favorite moment over the course of Car Hole’s run? Did Alex Felton ever punch a woman or anything like that?
SK: Alex never punched anyone, but I think my favorite night at Car Hole was a night Alex held his first chicken. Her name was Penelope. You were there that night, when you roasted Derek Franklin. My crazy neighbor came over with a little fence and asked if her chickens could graze on a little patch of grass. Alex said he would help and then all of the sudden, my neighbor starts walking around the gallery showing her chickens all the art on the walls. Not long after that, this weirdo on a Huffy mountain bike comes screeching through everyone, making bird calls. He stops at the end of the block and walks back and takes out a pizza shaped Tupperware container and asks if anyone likes vegetarian pizza, and he opens the thing to show that it’s full of scraggly homegrown weed. He asks if he can roll a joint, which he does and starts handing out nugs of weed while he tells everyone about how he works for his parents and keeps getting fired because he leaves his weed in the apartments he’s supposed to clean or gets high and leaves the water on in the tub while he takes a nap and it destroys the floor — bear in mind that he’s easily 50.
TD: Please don’t talk about bears.
SK: What?
TD: Nothing. Never mind. Go on.
SK: OK… he grabs a beer, makes a loud bird call, gets back on his bike and leaves. After that there were the weird people in the car that chewed gum loudly and asked what we were all laughing at and then they singled out Arnold (Kemp) and it got weird. That was my favorite opening and I think a perfect send off for Derek.
TD: It sounds like Car Hole was giving Worksound Gallery a run for its money. It’ll be up for the readers to decide if they like partying in miniature garages or gigantic warehouses better. I personally enjoy the intimacy of the garage. So, Car Hole is dead (Love live Car Hole), but you’ve been busy. I think that you made a newspaper or something? Didn’t Larry Rinder write for it? How the fuck did you pull that off?
SK: I started YA5 with Gary (Robbins) at Container Corps. I kind of freaked out after I closed Car Hole and didn’t really know what I was going to do or how to keep up some of the momentum I thought I had built up, so I had an idea and immediately sent Gary an email. The title was going to be a bit longer, but once David Knowles came on board, we abbreviated it to YAS and then YA5, which is a design-y thing to indicate that there will be five issues per year–I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out what the letters stand for.
YA5 combines two of the things from Car Hole that became really important to me: writing and facilitating other people’s work. We solicit everything for the journal, though that has largely meant that we rely on friends, vague acquaintances and cold calling — which has worked, actually. We haven’t received any unsolicited submissions yet, but I guess that could happen. I don’t know.
TD: What about Larry?
SK: Oh, and with Larry. He rules. He’s incredibly generous and friendly — we met when he and his boyfriend, Colter hosted us for a Publication Studio release in San Francisco.
TD: Boyfriend? Oh, man…
SK: Did something happen to you earlier?
TD: No. Continue.
SK: Israel Lund and I made a book about Thrasher and Larry had written a new story, illustrated by Colter’s photographs. All I did was email Larry once we started seeking contributors for YA5 and he said yes. Colter is doing something very similar to Larry’s article for the music issue — kind of a regular column. In the end, though, I feel a bit bad about never returning the keys to his house when I stayed there in January. They’re in my desk drawer and I always cringe when I see them.
TD: I’m glad to see that somebody else in town is still interested in writing. I seriously can’t think of one other person in the entire city besides myself who writes. Wait, Lisa Radon does. And so does Patrick Collier. But literally no one else. No one. So, you made a book about Thrasher with Israel Lund. Was it a real book or a zine?
SK: It was a tribute book… Just photos of skaters we liked that had appeared in Thrasher over the years. I gave a “reading” of the book in SF, where I described the images and tricks and spots by their skate names, like “Stevie Williams switch-flip back tail at the bump to yellow bar in LA.” I think Israel was the only person in the audience that knew what I was talking about. And a copy was just sent to the magazine, because they have a section where they review zines and printed ephemera that people send them. The stuff that gets reviewed is mostly original content and I like to see the covers they print in the mag. Really weird names, too. Or just stupid ones. If it makes it into Thrasher, that would really complete the book for me.
TD: So it was a zine. Let’s get serious for a minute here: would you fight Brad Adkins?
SK: I am not an authority on Brad Adkins, but I think I could take him. After I beat him up, you’d call him Brad Ass-kicked-in. Unless he knows how to rip out throats. He is from Montana, after all.
TD: Everybody and their fucking mother is from Montana in Portland. Where are you from? Wait, let me guess – Palestine?
SK: You mean Israel?
TD: Israel Lund?
SK: Jesus. No, I am from Buffalo, NY. Nobody in Portland is from Buffalo –except for two winos I met on the street. One time, a guy dressed as a pirate asked to have his picture taken with me, because I was wearing a Buffalo Bills sweatshirt and he was a huge fan. To reiterate: a 45 year old man dressed as a pirate wanted to have his picture taken with me, because of what I was wearing.
TD: I’m so glad that this whole pirates-as-a-metaphor-for-how-I-live-by-my-own-rules thing is fucking over. Besides that gentleman, who are some of your favorite white male artists in Portland?
SK: I’ve been into what Alex Mackin Dolan is doing lately. We talked about Real TV where people send in tapes of skate slams or plane crashes at air shows. It was rad. Gary Robbins’ show at Valentine’s and Appendix were both amazing. And, Ashby Lee Collinson. And Krystal South. Not dudes, but between Experimental Half Hour and the Internet, these two are doing super smart things.
TD: So a new edition of YA5 is coming out soon. What should we expect?
SK: Rodney Graham interview about his record collection. Karaoke. R Kelly. Ambient music. And teenagers on pot. The release is at a karaoke bar, too.
TD: You know my opinions on people illegally tripping on pot, Korman. But regardless, I wish you luck at the launch. Any final thoughts or words of wisdom for my obscenely large readership?
SK: Nope. Free Lund.
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You can join the party and pick up a FREE copy of the brand spanking new YA5 this Friday here in Portland. Oh, and you can sing some karaoke. Make sure to ask Korman to do some Fiona Apple. He fucking loves that shit.
YA5 Issue #2 Release Party
Friday, June 17th / 7:00pm @ Galaxy Restaurant & Lounge / PDX
David Knowles interviews Hiwa K
Sam Korman on Karaoke
Hua Hsu on Weed on Mobb Deep
Kari Rittenbach on Distributed Mixes
Sofia Dona on “Twinning Towns”
Alastair Hunt on Nothing
Colter Jacobsen on The Best 24 Hour Music Festival imaginable
Jen Delos Reyes on Mike Love
Matthew Pappich Scores the Future
The Music Appreciation Society interviews Rodney Graham
Alison Halter on R. Kelly
