The
Utopian Barge Trip Featuring the 20 Foot Man, the Fairyland
Puppet Show Castle and the Gone Orchestra
The
Willamette River
Saturday,
July 31
Free
The
cruise begins at 1 pm at Cathedral Park by the St. Johns Bridge.
After the barge flotilla departs, organizers recommend Waterfront
Park and the Eastside walking path as vantage points. The
trip climaxes at the Hawthorne Bridge at approximately 4 pm.
In the grimy halcyon days of the 19th century, the jack-tars
of the Pacific would hit land, hoping for fun and love, only
to be relieved of their hard-earned cash by the Rose City's
saloon hustlers, sharpie gamblers and working girls. A few
days of carousing? Hell, you'd be lucky if you didn't end
your visit to Portland flat broke and busted, gazing numbly
at the Willamette's deceptively calm waters from the deck
of a slow boat to China.
The plight of the wave-tossed proletariat of yore would
leave even the hardest salt aching for some self-expression--an
impulse modern wage slaves can still feel through the fin
de siècle haze of espresso steam. Couple that
old urge with the trace amounts of untamed seaport energy
still floating in Portland's air, and things start to happen.
Weird things.
For instance: One morning, some people wake up possessed
with the notion that they should build a man. A 20-Foot
Man, fashioned out of corroding rebar and cast-away electronics.
They decide that he should play a giant iron electric guitar.
Eventually, these modern Prometheans feel the primal call
of the water, source of all life. They decide their towering
creation needs to float down the Willamette--and while they're
at it, why not throw in an avant-garde improv jazz orchestra,
a puppet castle and a dramatic finale that combines Don
Quixote, Siddhartha and A Streetcar Named Desire?
Thus, the Utopian Barge Trip. As a strange flotilla carrying
the rusty hulk of the 20-Foot Man proceeds at the Willamette's
molasses pace, the Gone Orchestra, Portland's sonic pranksters,
will provide an improv soundtrack drawing on its repertoire
of organic jazz mayhem and well-wrought standards. The whole
thing culminates with the Quixote-Sid-Desire pile-up
at the Hawthorne Bridge.
John Henault and Josh Mong, keepers and builders of the
20-Foot Man, are the primary instigators of this pleasure
cruise. With the help of certain accomplices, they've transformed
a former schoolhouse in a sedate Southeast 'hood into their
own looniness lab: The place teems with mechanical flotsam,
found objects and homemade musical instruments. The iron-ribbed,
cobwebbed torso of the 20-Foot Man presides over the fertile
wreckage, waiting for the legs that will raise him to his
advertised height when the time comes.
Henault and Mong are casual to the point of being blasé
about this project. They'll happily detail various features
of the 20-Foot Man--his moving arms, the huge guitar that
really works, his flashing electric red eyes. The overarching
question here, though, is why? They seem content
to let people figure that out for themselves. Henault comes
closest to offering a rationale.
"Why? Because you didn't do it," he declares, waving
an accusatory finger at a visitor. "And we needed
to see it."
Indeed, this whole utopian maritime enterprise has a certain
Everest-like, because-it's-there feel to it. You have a
river, you have barges and tugboats, you have freaky artists--put
'em together and see what happens. It certainly seems like
a natural combination to Mong and Henault, who've raised
hell on the Willamette before.
"We went down the river on an 8-by-12-foot barge during
Rose Festival a few years ago," Mong recounts. "The S.S.
Shit. We rode on by the Navy ships--the Navy's 'Just
Say No' flagship was here, and we just floated right under
the edges of it, with no one around. Then, we looked back
and sailors were running all over the place. They were under
the impression that we'd planted something underneath their
boat, although I think they realized that if you were going
to sabotage a ship, our little raft was not the vehicle
to do it in."
In contrast to the S.S. Shit's voyage, the Utopian
Barge Trip's down-river itinerary has been rubber-stamped
by the necessary bureaucrats, with the Coast Guard insisting
on a 12-person-per-barge limit. The 20-Foot Man's guitar-strumming
arms and other moving parts will require the services of
several swabbie-puppeteers, so space is limited. That crunch
weighs on the Gone Orchestra, a free-flowing group that
can have more than a dozen free-thinking improvisers going
at it at once. There's talk of a separate barge just for
keyboards.
Bill Larimer and Mike Mahaffey of the Gone Orchestra don't
seem inconvenienced in the slightest, since taking it as
it comes is the band's prime directive. The builders of
the 20-Foot Man have plainly found high-concept kindred
spirits in the Gone.
"I have an image of what the Gone Orchestra is," Mahaffey
says. "They've got pictures of the sun, and the center is
this bright, burning core. Every once in a while there'll
be a prominence, and the prominence coming out from the
core is the solo. In other jazz bands, the prominence is
what it's all about, the solo is the core. The Gone Orchestra
is the opposite of that."
Grandiose, to be sure, but the vision fits nicely with
the crazed scale of the project. With the Gone Orchestra
seeking the edge of sonic anarchy and the 20-Foot Man flailing
majestically above it all, this three-hour tour of Portland's
aquatic heart just may awaken some stormy ghosts of bygone
craziness. Times have changed, but the madness stays the
same.
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Willamette Week | originally
published July 28, 1999
|
