The hot gossip: Happy 2005!

[January 5th, 2005] Portland songwriter Willy Vlautin, of heroically long-lived alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, has long enjoyed a rep as a particularly vivid, novelistic lyricist, albeit a melancholy one. Well, color the man happy for a change: Legendary British publisher Faber and Faber (which calls itself the "last of the great independent publishing houses in London") announced this week that it will print Vlautin's first novel, The Motel Life. From the sound of it, Vlautin's tale of two brothers on the run will fit right in with his lyrical work. The novel should appear in spring 2006.

If local racists make good on their plans to leaflet Southwest Portland this weekend, they may have company. "They decided to push, we're going to push back," says Brian Budack, a member of a group calling itself Psychos and Punks Against Racism. The "they" Budack is talking about is the Tualatin Valley Skins, a group that says it plans to distribute racist handbills around Gabriel Park ("Dreaming of a White New Year," WW, Dec. 29, 2004). "We know where they're going, and we're going to walk up to them face-to-face and tell them what their hate does to people. We hope for a nonviolent confrontation, but we are willing to defend ourselves if violence is used against us," says Budack.

Pearl District-based vintage-clothing e-tailer MonsterVintage.com recently notched a small victory, persuading a judge to move the company's trademark battle with San Francisco audio-equipment company Monster Cable to an Oregon court. That will be easier on the travel budget of the locally owned concern, which flogs retro T-shirts and the like to the tune of about $200,000 a year but has had to defend itself against the $300 million­a-year giant that sues anything with the name "monster" (see Rogue of the Week, Oct. 27, 2004). A trial date hasn't been set, but you can still get a flavor of the issue at www.stopthemonster.com. "It's just felonious," says MonsterVintage co-owner Cathy West. "People who get a lot of money get weird--just look at Michael Jackson."

Maybe nobody in Oregon (or anywhere else) did much to stop the greatest genocide in recent history, but the critically acclaimed movie Hotel Rwanda (see Screen story, page 45) was co-written by Portlander Keir Pearson, whose résumé also lists a Harvard diploma and a spot on the 1992 U.S. Olympic rowing team. Feeling inferior yet?

TV-addicted Murmurs operatives have spotted Portlanders in weird places recently: Sunday, former Sen. Mark Hatfield was shown in the background of Ronald Reagan's 1981 presidential inauguration in Dynasty: The Making of a Guilty Pleasure. Two nights before, former Portland drag queen Sushi showed up in, of all places, CNN's New Year's Eve broadcast in Key West, Fla. Perhaps best of all, last Thursday WW film critic David Walker was himself caught on camera: He was in the background when KPTV news showed a clip from an Office Depot surveillance camera of two women allegedly committing identity theft. Walker claims he just happened to be there.

In a new development, many Portland cops being trained to use the taser--the stun gun soon to be distributed to every Portland cop--now refuse to be subjected to the weapon they will use on others, according to a Dec. 26 article in the Arizona Republic newspaper. The article, revealing that the weapon has injured numerous cops and poses a spinal-fracture risk to the many adults who have undiagnosed osteoporosis, reported that about 30 percent of newly trained Portland officers are declining to be tasered while being certified with the weapon.