dkSez : : : : : : Don Kahle’s blog

… Enjoying The Blind Boys of Alabama on the New Haven Green. Hundreds jiving to their gospel music. But is the standing ovation wasted?

See? RT @errolmorris: Is it possible to write an essay on stupidity w/o looking stupid? (I doubt it. Am I too stupid to realize that fact?)

… Watching an Errol Morris film in New Haven, where he was scheduled to speak. I’m also reading his tweets about his Monday NYTs essay.

Eugene has always looked to Portland for ideas and inspiration, but the blade cuts too often the wrong way. Eugene suffers from brain drain, as its best are drawn northward where opportunities abound for cutting-edge thinkers. Call it “bright flight.”

I think I’ve located the problem. That Portland’s ocean is on the wrong side. America is bookended with Portlands, but don’t call the smaller Portland the “other Portland.” Oregon’s Portland followed Maine’s.

Portland, Maine is a city with half Eugene’s population and double its pride. Forbes Magazine in 2009 rated it America’s Most Livable City. Note that nobody complained about the last word in that title. As a city, it’s comfortable in its own skin.

Comfort comes with age. Portland’s Euro-American history started with a land grant of 6,000 acres from King Charles I in 1623. Eugene’s transportation engineers could visit this smaller Portland for an ingenious traffic-calming strategy called cobblestone. Shopkeepers love it. These original rough-hewn roads seem to shake the money directly out of visitors’ pockets.

The abundance of quaint buildings and a charmingly hurly burly road design point to a city that managed its growth a long time ago. Portland, Maine stopped growing during the Great Depression. The advent of a national railroad network supplanted waterways as the most efficient mode for moving goods, so their ice-free harbor lost commerce.

Hope for Eugene is embedded in this Portland’s history. At the turn of the previous century, Portland realized too late they had backed the wrong (iron) horse. The city fathers were laying railroad track as fast as they could, but they chose narrow-gauge track for its versatility and economy. It wasn’t until well into the 1900s that narrow-gauge railroads became that era’s Betamax — a smarter solution that lost in the market.

America’s largest museum for narrow-gauge railroading is in Portland, so they didn’t come away completely empty.

They bet and they lost. And then they waited. Things eventually come back around. As water lost its utility as a transportation corridor, it gained romance as a respite from all that. Eugene’s waterways have a more angry history, unless you count warships and oil tankers, which you probably should.

We’ve been slower to embrace our water as a magnet for human activity. But the water will wait for us, and we’ll know where to find it when we’re ready.

Most of Portland burned to the ground when a city celebration on July 4, 1866 went awry. No wonder its alternative weekly newspaper is called The Phoenix. Fires dot Portland’s history how floods dot our own.

Portland has a vibrant downtown — more than one. Its original main street (the one with cobblestone) is lined with small shops. Portland boasts the highest per capita of independent businesses in America. Inc. Magazine included Portland in its 2006 list of “Hottest Cities for Entrepreneurs.” Portland’s Buy Local campaign has connected more than 300 independent businesses with the local pride of its residents.

The wharfs along the waterfront have risen from a gritty past to become another enterprising zone for restaurants, tour boats and condominiums. I stopped in at the Lobster Pound, but they wouldn’t allow me to adopt one. I guess I shouldn’t have worn the bib.

The arts district has become a third hub around downtown, built with tax increment financing, and anchored by one of the city’s five colleges’ downtown campus. Creative Portland Corporation has been formed to reinvest the tax increment gains to entice, support and celebrate artists living and making a living in Portland.

“I moved to Portland because of the school’s location,” admits Adriane Herman, who teaches printmaking at the Maine College of Art. “My students can step outside the school’s door and find an instant audience. That matters to me as a teacher.”

The city created an arts district to catalyze the school’s investment. The school opened its downtown doors in 1997. Art galleries followed. Then came an L.L. Bean outlet. Performance halls filled in some of the larger spaces, and now the area is alive again. Their First Friday gallery walk this month had 77 stops.

Portland, Maine has bet its next future on what urbanists call the creative economy. If it fails, they’ll build another museum.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a weekly column for The Register-Guard and blogs. Learn more about Portland, Maine’s creative economy initiatives at www.liveworkportland.com.

… I stopped in at the Portland Lobster Pound, but they wouldn’t let me adopt one. Maybe It was my bib. http://tweetphoto.com/27382806

Each Wednesday morning, I sit at my laptop and survey my little corner of the world, looking for a story to tell. I ask myself a simple question. “How much has to happen to you before something occurs to you?”

I favor topics that have local impact, something that may have happened to you but hasn’t yet quite occurred to you. If I can prompt an “Ah Ha!” moment, that’s good. “Ah Ha Ha!” moments are even better. Fun matters. It makes life worth all the trouble.

Occasionally there are disasters that did or will lap into every corner, destined to become local, sooner or later, with nothing fun attached. The BP Oil Spill fits that cataclysm profile. Like it or not, we’re an oil-sopped nation and our pact with industry that oil will remain invisible has been broken.

Television and YouTube help us envision the unimaginable, steadily gushing us new video. We can’t take our eyes off it. It’s a parade of pelicans, politicians and plumes. It’s not local. Yet.

And then there’s the story about the nice lady from Hasbro who stopped by Chris Pender’s Saturday Market booth last week to introduce herself. Pender wondered whether she was sent to see whether his homemade board game “The Game of Real Life” was an infringement of their copyrighted “The Game of Life.” Hasbro bought out Milton Bradley in 1984 because every industry titan wants to become Too Big To Fail, even if that industry makes games and toys for little ones.

“I offered to let them buy me out,” Pender joked, “but she seemed totally not interested.” Pender makes the board game in his home and sells them on the weekends. He’s taking this year off from the Portland Saturday Market because it was draining him. “I’m gardening again,” he exults. “I haven’t seen springtime for a decade!”

Pender drove to Portland every weekend for ten years. It would be a long walk, especially carrying a load of board games. There’s no getting around it — we’re as sticky with oil as those Gulf state pelicans. We won’t be able to clean ourselves easily or soon. And until we do, real progress is out of the question.

We all scold BP for skipping steps. They overlooked important safety measures. But everyday life has gotten impossibly complicated. I googled “BP Oil Spill” and got 27 million hits. That’s a lot of background material to read. Then it occurred to me that I was using Google’s search engine as thoughtlessly as we use our gasoline engines.

I googled “Google’s Terms of Service” and got 174 million hits. I found the agreement I had carelessly made with Google to use their search engine. 6,401 words (some in ALL CAPS, for emphasis) later, I did not understand what I had agreed to.

But I pound away on my keyboard, not thinking about the Terms of Service I must abide by for using this software (10,440 words) or this hardware (25,250 words) or this wireless network (9,546 words).

My mother taught me always to read the fine print before agreeing. I’m sure BP’s mothers warned them to test blowout preventers at full pressure and to keep a containment dome on site, just in case. But the world is different than when our mothers grew up. We never agreed to anything for the right to mail a letter or read a magazine or listen to the radio or watch television.

If we really stop and think about each step of modern life, that makes for a life that stops more than it goes. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But examining every aspect of modern life leaves no time to live it.

Reading every Terms of Service might be a hobby for some poor soul, but it can’t compete with gardening. How we invest our time is what shapes our life. BP notwithstanding, some steps are better skipped.

Meanwhile, Chris Pender has gotten two or three board games assembled, which he will sell next Saturday. Each will have been enjoyed by Eugene residents or visitors by this time next week. So who’s really winning this game of real life?

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a weekly column for The Register-Guard and blogs.

Angels recently visited downtown Eugene.

They didn’t leave fairy dust to fill the pits. That was drywall dust and other rubble being torn out of the Centre Court Building’s interior. But the angels did bring money. Fairy dust stopped being the currency of choice centuries ago. Gold dustings are much to be preferred. The coin of the realm is now coin.

John Sechrest founded the Willamette Angel Conference last year. He wanted to connect what he calls our innovation economy with local investors and business mavens. In his own words:

“We have close to a million people in the fifty miles around Corvallis. If the Willamette region can come together around the local economy, we can create stability and prosperity that would be significant.

With our two universities, we have a lot of energy that is focused on innovation. However, we have not built the entrepreneurial culture that will allow us to grow the skills and resources to make it possible to effectively commercialize that innovation.

The end result is that the good ideas get sucked out of our local region and commercialized  elsewhere. That is like spending a lot of work to plow the fields, plant the wheat, but we don’t have a combine, so we let others harvest the crop. As a result , we export our economic resources out of the region.”

“Buy local” is only a slogan if the products being sold came from elsewhere. The angels came to fix that.

They heard pitches from entrepreneurs from across the Willamette Valley. One left with a stockingful of money.

Angel investors are flying all the time, looking for a concept or a product that’s about to take off. They provide some of what the originator still lacks. Sometimes it’s new money that isn’t already spoken for. Other times it’s the wisdom that comes only with experience. Always significant is the networking with other entrepreneurs.

If the angels can add just the right mix of these, then a promising business that is toiling in the trenches can find itself soon aloft. And once that happens, the sky’s the limit.

I’ve written recently that Eugene needs a more explicit strategy for fostering start-ups. But a city filled with entrepreneurs, as fun as that sounds, will not necessarily produce robust economic development. Not everyone wants to start their own business. Some would prefer a paycheck — a job.

Cue the angels.

Angels help entrepreneurs build their ideas into full-fledged companies. It’s one thing to start a business. It’s another to run a company. The former can surely keep you busy. But the latter requires others to accompany the owner in his or her busy-ness. That accompaniment is what what we call jobs.

Eugene has a local resource for growing to that next step, but the business development people can be forgiven for overlooking them. They operate in a different field entirely, though the skill sets required are remarkably similar.

John Sechrest, meet Minalee Saks.

Saks is a social entrepreneur. She started the nonprofit organization Birth To Three in Eugene decades ago. Birth To Three is now an international concern, still headquartered in Eugene. In her own words:

“We started BT3 because you prepare for months to have a baby, go to doctor visits, childbirth preparation classes, learn all about labor and delivery, and it’s over in about a day.

And then comes the part —parenting — that lasts the rest of your life. Nobody is born knowing how to be a parent. Yet it’s probably the most important role any of us will ever have. Parenting used to be learned from extended family, when people usually stayed in the same communities they grew up. They had grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters around to help.  It’s a whole different story now — isolation, with powerful stressors, like the economy and needing to work, and very little support.  And now we know that the earliest years are the time the brain develops the fastest, and parents have the biggest influence on how well the child will do in life.”

Birth to Three facilitates peer-to-peer learning. Once parents learn they aren’t the only one facing certain fears, then coping and learning become more possible. Supporting others helps parents strengthen themselves.

The same goes for entrepreneurs.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a weekly column for The Register-Guard. He started two businesses in Eugene. He blogs at www.dksez.com.

… that downpour minutes ago was spectacular. I went out and looked at the horizon. Blue in every direction! Rain falls straighter here.

Why is every news outlet so obsessed with the trade jargon for BP’s next solution to plug its leak? Why should we care what they call it?

I admire Mary Spilde’s pluck. The president of Lane Community College has pursued an aggressive vision for burnishing her school’s presence in downtown Eugene, beginning with a successful bond measure campaign in 2008. She and the LCC Board of Directors have faced many choices between “make do” and “make good.” At each juncture, she and they chose the bigger, longer-term vision.

Refurbish the old Montgomery Ward building or seek additional funding to build new? Build a functional structure for present needs or design a signature building for the future? Economize on the construction or seek L.E.E.D. certification for sustainable design? Use only half a city block or add 200 housing units to fill the block and downtown’s biggest need? In each case, the latter (more expensive) choice has carried the day.

This week, Spilde explained her funding strategy simply. “We have $30 million in hand or promised — enough to build a remarkable 80,000 square foot facility downtown. I’ve asked the board to give me a couple more months to raise $4.5 million more to get us to our goal of 90,000 square feet.” She then rattled off five or six funding avenues she’s still exploring, as if she can list them in her sleep. She probably does — if she sleeps.

By the fall of 2011 or 2012, the deed will be done. The Sears pit will be filled, our downtown library will have a suitable companion across 10th Avenue, and the community will see that sometimes it’s better to stretch for that second bird in the bush.

An LCC board member was audibly corrected this week when he referred to the project as the school’s “downtown center.” “Downtown campus” came the instant rebuke from three different voices. You can insert a “center” into the shell of a tired retail store, but a “campus” will not fit. A campus has housing and open space, classrooms and rec rooms, a face to the street and a life after hours. LCC is planning a campus, not a center.

The city should follow Spilde’s lead, get a little pluck of its own, and plan a new civic square at 10th and Olive. Where right now we have a downtown hole, we can begin to make downtown whole. Follow me.

The preliminary designs for LCC’s downtown campus includes a prominent “front door” and plaza, facing south to form a couplet with the library. These two buildings will have similar shape and mass. Their uses are complementary. Both buildings will spill their inhabitants into the plaza to make a vibrant people place. The plaza will be designed so it can be closed to traffic during street fairs.

But the couplet has a third partner already in place — Lane Transit District’s downtown station. Again, the function complements the other two corners’ uses. Its open space could play well with the plaza envisioned, if only the fourth corner could be secured for public use. Four corners makes a square, but three corners doesn’t make anything at all.

We must reclaim The Atrium as public space.

The building already belongs to the city of Eugene. It currently houses the planning and development department, along with a couple of related private businesses.

Old-timers will remember Cinema 7, Oregon Repertory Theatre, the Willamette Valley Observer, DeFrisco’s Pub, and Mr. Moto’s Coffee. Although it never stopped being a public space, the public no longer has reason to go there.

“Well, it was certainly more interesting back then,” recalls “Stone Soup” cartoonist Jan Eliot. “I began my love affair with newspapers there. I worked in the production department at Willamette Valley Observer.” Many good things began at The Atrium.

Repopulating The Atrium with small-space retail, handcrafters, entertainment, and start-ups will extend the mission of LCC’s downtown campus, square the corners for continuous learning, and confirm a college town’s commitment to “pluck, not luck.”

Only with all four corners can each “two-bird stretch” feed from the other three. Add a little foresight and we’ll have more than four sites. A public square at 10th and Olive will mirror and modernize the heritage of our Park Blocks.

Taken together, people will mistakenly believe we planned it that way all along. If we move quickly, we needn’t correct them.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) is executive director for the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, but these ideas are his own. Kahle writes a weekly column for The Register-Guard and blogs.