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Friend Zach sent this snapshot from Rio, and yorkrules got non-exclusive North American online rights to share it with you. Check out Zach’s blog for the latest on his globe-trotting, zig-zagging journey.

The earliest trees are beginning to turn now. After over thirty years of insipidly eternal So Cal summer, these seasonal transmutations continue to exhilirate.

The Funlands are transitioning, too. Our progress from decade-in-residence Angelenos to cookie-cutter post-academic bohemians in Portlandia shows in the many minor signs that define our lives.

For instance: our forks. Those acquired during our stay in L.A., along with the matching knives and spoons, came from the nearby Century City Crate and Barrel. Sleek, simple Postmodern cutlery, suitable for post-premiere dinner parties and food magazine photo shoots.

We lost one or two over the years, so after moving to Bridgetown, we discovered their replacements at the brew pub down the street (I love this town.) Old Army-issued utensils, designed for S.O.S. and now destined for organic neighborhood potluck bicycling block parties.

We’re changing. Fun.

Happy birthday, MorningStar. For you, my most encouraging commenter, I present my favourite quotes from each of the 11 chapters of I Hate L.A. Click on the images to enlarge them.

You can read the rest here. Cheers!

The Funlands have been in Portland over a year now, and the traditions have begun to establish themselves. For one: the Bridge Pedal, which I recently participated in for the second time. In this annual event, 18,000 or so cyclists take over the freeways and river crossings of Stumptown, riding on roads where only cars typically tread. As I say several times a week, “I love this town.”

Another beer festival this weekend, and a bigger one next. Meanwhile, semi-anonymous email threats from the Bridgetown Old Guard have been received in response to my immigration-inspiring pro-Portland polemic: “Portland rules!”

dude, portland totally rules.  We northwesterners know how much the northwest rules.

But it can’t rule forever if TOO MANY PEOPLE FROM CALIFORNIA MOVE HERE.  SO DON’T TELL PEOPLE ABOUT IT.  =-)

Portland told me that you have passed the probation period with flying colors, and is happy to have you, so you’re all good, but I would be careful about opening the doors for more californians.  You wouldn’t want to fall out of favor.

So let’s just keep it our little secret.

SHhhhhhhh!

=-)

-G

Macleay Park is two blocks southwest of our place. This verdant scene, typical for the park’s main trail, is about a quarter mile further on.

I live near this.

This is the twilight view from the courtyard of our apartment building. Looking west, that ridge of silhouetted pines is Forest Park. It’s one of the largest urban reserves in the Nation. There’s a trailhead two blocks from here, just beyond the steel truss bridge and the sculpture garden.

Four blocks down our street is a brewery. I can smell its sweet scent carried upon the breeze that rolls up the river valley.

Three blocks up there’s a corner bar, a cafe, an art gallery, and a bike shop. Just your typical Portland neighborhood. I love this place.

“You should move to Portland. It’s great.” I said it because I meant it, but there was still that hint of desperation in the words, like when parent-friends say, “You should have kids. It would be great.”

So I’ve tried to stop talking up our 10-month-old hometown to SoCal friends. But I’m finding it hard to stay quiet. Portland rules, and in coming posts, I’ll explain why. First off:

I rode my bike down to the waterfront last night for the fireworks spectacular that kicked off this year’s Rose Festival. Weather: perfect. Downtown: a river. Show: spectacular indeed. I love this town.

During some unrelated Interwebs research I came across this, yet another brilliant idea that wasn’t mine. Dammit!

(via realoregonreality.blogspot.com)

The Julie My Love knitting machine has been stuck in overdrive.  We recently headed down to the wrong side of the tracks to shoot a few recent projects for her Ravelry page. I’m sharing them here so that we can: A.) admire her OCD handicrafts, and B.) stop looking at me whenever we log onto yorkrules (see previous post.)

As I was going from beard to none, I made a few stops along the way.

Portland’s a beard town. I had grown my own for this year’s holiday greeting, so I decided to keep it through the winter, to blend in with my new northwestern neighbors.  It was mid-January when I felt the need — the scratchy, scruffy, unkempt need — to return to the clean-shaven, close-cropped, beach-volleyball-playing style of my old San Diego home.

(click image to enlarge)

Photo credits: amarine88 (George Bush), Adam P Schweigert/WFIU (Barack Obama). Photos are remixed by permission of their Creative Commons licenses.

There was — some will say unsurprisingly — an autohomoerotic period in my art, in my younger, fitter years. But it was brief, including only this self-adoring self-portrait and that bebe thing, which I did for the money. I feature it here not only to exercise my electronic exhibitionism but because this happens to be the 300^th post of this incarnation of yorkrules (known here at the YR command center as yorkrules3,) so it seemed appropriate. This is also the final post of this iteration before the next from-scratch redesign (yorkrules4.) I feel a retrospective coming on…

Yorkrules1, which launched in August of 2004, was a static portfolio of my art. A year later, yorkrules2 introduced a whole new design along with a blog. Yorkrules3 — where we are now — debuted the year after that, and it ditched the portfolio entirely as the blog became my art. The first post of the revamped site went up over a year and a half ago, and from then until June of this year, three new posts appeared here almost every week.

My myriad musings broke down into a murder of categories: recipes, essays, interviews, audio recordings, movie clips and more. There were eventually so many — thirty-four at last count — that I decided it was time to simplify: thus the jump to yorkrules4. Before we tear down this web house, however, why don’t we take one last stroll around?

Learn

Learn is the first of the six primary categories. Contrary to the bold title, it was really just the playground of the yorkrules cookoo test kitchen.  I never expected anyone to make a Spaghedilla!, Zonkey Bomb, or Sakecranitangerini, but the The Royal York, like its namesake creator, is wicked easy — just two jiggers of bourbon and a pony of maple syrup — so give it a try, ay!

Look

Primarily a visual artist, much of my creativity found expression in Look.

Desktop Downloads were evenly split between fine art photos and cat pictures. And then there was this one, floating in the aether between.

The original yorkrules website was all about one thing: L.A. Rock Fan. Four years later, it’s stuck around like alligators through evolution. It’s just a little harder to find nowadays, in amongst all the digital bric-a-brac.

I love snapshots. I think that’s partly the instant creative potential and partly that they’re a reasonable and entertaining facsimile of the memory I don’t have.

Excellent point-and-shoot case-in-point: The Ugly Americans.

York Was Here put me in all sorts of spots, usually through the magic of Photoshop or friends.

On an even cartoonier tip, the hand-drawn Unfunnies became Yorkies when I discovered that someone had my titular inspiration long before.

These Far Side-esque drawings then somehow evolved backwards into York Was Here-like Photoshop jobs, culminating with my rebuttal to an e-mail that warned of the imminent Islamic threat posed by Barack Obama — Subject: WAKE UP AMERICA…!!!

Play

Here’s where I lay limited claim to multimedia cred. All the original audio and video content on yorkrules is collected in Play.

The Anthony Project is available here, if you have an hour to get perspective.

Twenty-two bold individuals participated in the Minute by Minute mutual interview audio series. If The Anthony Project doesn’t put you over the top, try this.

(See the tattoo here.)

York TV was the repository for all my motion picture productions. I’m particularly fond of Skywalker: Undercover II, Mosquito Christmas, and The Falcon & the Charlieman, but one thing I’ve learned in my years as a content producer: people love cat videos.

Read

I hate writing. I find all creativity a sort of necessary evil, but writing, and my doing it, is proof enough for me that I’m a masochist. I included Read for just that reason: to compel me to put words on the screen like a shiv in the ribs.

How Not to Start a Cover Letter was an opportunity for me to share some examples from my own archive of ways not to get a job, like my haiku cover letter.

Ideal candidate
More creative than the rest
See my résumé

The best part of our Gay Suicide Death Pact was the comment it got from an appreciative stranger.

This gay suicide death pact sounds like just what I’ve been looking for. You wouldn’t believe how many people are out there talking about how one day they are going to get off their ass and finally start that suicide death pact they’ve been thinking about for all these years and never actually DOING it. Well, you guys have actually done it and I’m very proud of you. The longest journey begins with a single step. Even when the final step in the journey is jumping hand-in-hand off a cliff with your gay friend. So – is there an application process or what? Do I need to submit samples? Of something? Because I’m all over that. Please let me know.

-josh
Not Gay Either but Equally Ambivalent

Share

Oxymoronically enough, yorkrules isn’t all about me. I’m almost as fascinated by others as I am with myself, and Share is where I indulge such interests.

My Required Listening list featured the music I was discovering and the musicians who made it. My favourite featured track?

Artist: Beat the Devil
Track: Shine In Exile
This track is available on

My favourite interview? Probably gotta be The Bird and the Bee.

Show Us Yours presented the work and words of a wide range of visual artists. One question I always asked: Why do you create? Here are a few of the artists and their answers.

We like the process and we like the results. It’s as simple as that. Once we started to figure out that there is more light in the dark than we thought, we wanted to see more of it. So we continued to take pictures at night.

Is the world becoming a better place through culture and fine arts? Yes, we believe so very strongly. But we can’t claim honestly that that’s why we do what we do.

— Cenci Goepel & Jens Warnecke

I create to keep myself entertained, otherwise I may melt into a puddle.

— Tao Nyeu

I’ve always liked to do stuff with my hands. If I wasn’t painting I’d be sewing, or building, or cooking, or fixing something.

— John Lytle White

Because if someone else was doing it i couldn’t sue them for plagiarism.

— Travis Millard

I think I’ve got something to say. Of course, I might be wrong.

— Scott Listfield

it’s my way of talking.

— Jen Corace

I’m a geek. It’s what I do instead of going to bars.

— Wednesday Kirwan

You might as well ask: Why do you breathe? The answer would be pretty much the same. I tried to give up art once. I didn’t work.

— Heiko Müller

I create because my heroes are creators, and i want to be a part of a long thread of creativity. I tend to create works in series, and to create works about things i want to explore and articulate. If i do a good job, i am a gateway drug, opening people up to new ideas, and compelling them to look further than my own work. That way, people might be compelled to create work that i enjoy, that drives me to discover something.

— Andrew Brandou

Every one starts out in the world drawing & creating as kids.
It’s an essential way of working and acting out our imaginations.
But, many people just stop doing those things as they grow up.
As you get a little older…i think it’s harder to relax and feel confident through
personal expression because we grow overly self-conscience. Or, people don’t see the purpose
in it as the “real world” starts to infiltrate our lives. I think that challenge is one reason why i kept drawing,
and also the challenge of continually starting with a blank piece of paper over and over again.

— Mel Kadel

I think it is human nature to find a purpose… someplace we’re comfortable within ourselves. I feel incredibly lucky that art found me and ceased my search at a young age. I can’t remember the first time I drew a picture. It seems like it is something I have always done.

— Evan B Harris

I create because I like doing it. I believe we are here to do things we like.

— Eric Joyner

Your Voice Here offered everyone the opportunity to share their own creativity. Most recently, I enjoyed A Very Charlie Christmas.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, except for Charlie’s mouse,

His keyboard went “click”, his hands in his hair,
The thought of a year-end letter drove him to a scare,

“What should I write, what should I say,
Should I come out of the closet? Should I tell them I’m gay?”

Shop

In theory, you really can make a living through blogging. In reality, if you’re not covering celebrities, technology, or how to make money blogging, don’t quit your day job (if you’re unfortunate enough to need one.)

Of course, such an assessment is based on my own online economic experience, which, like most of the merchandise I made, had almost no purchasable appeal.

But the Adult Video Jesus Christmas card? I should’ve been a Hallmarkian millionaire by now!

Moving Forward

Yorkrules3 covered a great deal of ground in less than two years. Now it’s time for an update. What will yorkrules4 be? When will it go live? Such answers don’t yet exist, but if you’d like to subscribe to the yorkrules RSS feed, you’ll be notified by your newsreader or email application as soon as it goes live.

My thanks to all those artists, musicians, writers, and readers who have been a part of yorkrules (any or all versions of it.) The adventure now continues!

Cheers,

York

Julie My Love and I were both frightened of the future earlier this year. We were escaping from L.A. after a decade in Entertainment Industry residence, so Julie was of course afraid of leaving friends made close by ten years of shared experiences. I, meanwhile, was completing work on my first book, tellingly entitled I Hate L.A., and feared internally, What if I hate my next hometown?

After weekend visits to a few top contenders, Portland, Oregon, was selected by surprisingly wide margins to audition as our new answer for “Where ya from?”

We’ve been here three weeks now, and I’m grateful to report that I’m not just a chronically pessimistic complainer. Los Angeles really is a horrible, terrible town. Portland, by apples & oranges comparison, dances with ideal.

Case in point: a three minute bike ride north of our place is MacTarnahan’s Brewing Company. This brewery has a taproom out front that serves all the company’s brews (and then some) along with bar food that’s archetypal in its excellence.

Twice now we’ve rolled in for the day’s first Happy Hour. We sit out on the sun-dappled veranda, shaded by leafy trees and surrounded with effusive flowers. Julie enjoys a Mimosa while I rotate onto the next 20 ounce beer on my MacTarnahan’s to do list. We also split the taproom’s eponymous burger (a “1/2 pound of Fulton ground chuck on an onion bun, fully dressed with crispy fried onion strings… served with savory garlic rosemary fries.”) The cost of all this afternoon happiness? Less than ten bucks, which still feels nearly free by our old Angeleno standards.

This is just one of the many exciting discoveries we’ve made since our recent arrival in PDX, and we see no end of fascinations ahead. Our nascent list grows daily longer.

Will the approaching seasons’ interminably gray skies rain on our little civic honeymoon’s parade? Well, back at MacTarnahan’s taproom, there’s also a covered and heated outdoor patio, so I’m not forecasting any imminent sequels in my city-slamming bibliography.

(But check back with me near the close of this next winter, as I may have ranting new plans.)

Postscript — Thanks for your thoughts, Z & Morningstar.

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