Portland musician Rachel Taylor Brown interview before CD release at ...
There's an ice cream truck driving by Rachel Taylor Brown's apartment, and it's creeping her out something fierce."Can you hear that?" she asks as warbling strains of "The Entertainer" chime in the background. "Ugh, It's so creepy." Then, she gets out her tape recorder.
For Brown, the ugly and the beautiful are often so closely entwined that what sounds wrong in the moment might be put to a useful purpose later, and vice versa. For her most recent album, "World So Sweet," she recorded the voices of people she met on the street for a song called "How to Make a World Class Gymnast."
Read one line at a time, the lyrics don't seem so bad. When you put them all together, the effect is a bunch of folks with good intentions making a really spooky statement. Listening to the rest of the album, it's easy to see that as a metaphor for life as Brown sees it.
She seems to find hope in sticking it to humanity, and "World So Sweet" is filled with portraits of characters that range from the sympathetic to the downright skewering. That they're communicated through Brown's clear, sweet voice and atmospheric arrangements layers on the meaning and emotional nuance.
As she prepared herself for an upcoming show at Mississippi Studios, we tried to sort it all out.
Q: World So Sweet has a song called "How to Make a World Class Gymnast." What inspired you to record all those different people speaking the lyrics, and what do you think it added to the album?
A: My hope was that it would create an effect that would give the listener a general sensory hit, all at once. I wanted it to create the kind of confusion I see involved in molding young lives and raising kids up -- the good and the bad sides of that. Kids are so vulnerable and at the mercy of grownups, especially within their families. As a culture, we idealize families but don't pay a lot of attention to what happens when dangerous or even just poorly coping folks -- most of us! -- get their less-than-healthy hands on these little sensitive lives. The lyric repeats "You get them when they're young and you bend them," then "First an arm. Then a leg. Then the heart. Then the head." I had the nice folks of the Woodstock neighborhood read the lines from a book in which I'd written one line per page, flipping pages so they couldn't read ahead. I wanted the menace in the lyric to be softened or reinforced by the individual sound of these voices.
Spiders In Oregon - News
But we probably should worry more about spiders. Black widows, hobos (often mistaken for brown recluses) and yellow sacs are the spiders of the highest medical concern in this state, according to the Oregon Department of Agriculture.
I've always loved animals, and rescue bees and spiders and snakes, etc. My neighbor had a stuffed possum when I was little -- too young to know it was a cruel joke. I loooooved that possum and would carryit around and snuggle it and they'd laugh at me.
Snakes, spiders, lizards, frogs, turtles and other captive-bred creatures will be featured from 10 am to 4 pm at the 12th Portland Metro Reptile Expo. Courtesy of Northwest Reptiles ExpoKids will get a chance to pet lizards and other critters at the
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Spider Bug! 15 Spooky VW Beetle Car Art Sculptures | WebUrbanist
Travelers gazing out the car window towards the the north side of the Trans-Canada Highway a mile or two east of Kenora, Ontario, might feel a sudden urge to put the pedal to the metal, just in case the giant Spider Bug just off the tarmac happens to see them first. Then again, with its jaunty top hat and bold black & yellow paint job, the automotive arachnid bears more than a passing resemblance to Mister Peanut.
Reno/Sparks, NV Spider BugThis David Fambrough masterpiece was originally located in downtown Reno, NV, on the roof of an old fire station that was upcycled as a homeless shelter. Oddly enough (or maybe not, if you’re from Reno), the sculpture was the city’s first piece of public art. In 2008, however, with the building sold and the new owners unwilling to maintain the rusting Spider Bug, the Reno Arts & Culture Commission voted to return the sculpture to Fambrough while recommending he offer it to Scudders VW Performance Specialists in nearby Sparks.
When reports first came in about giant spiders invading rock concerts and car shows in Holland, it was chalked up to the locals spending too much time in those infamous Amsterdam coffee houses. In fact, the Dutch Spider Bug does indeed exist, and was caught on film at the 1999 Dynamo Open Air music festival held near Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
Swetsville Zoo, CO Spider BugMost homeowners know that if you see a spider in hour house, it probably got in through a hole in the wall. Such is the case with giant spiders as well, at least it is with this spiky Spider Bug spied in front of the “ Hole In The Wall Welding “, a former VW repair shop in North Palm Springs, California. Visitors are advised to be on the lookout for giant mice.
Spiders In Oregon - Bookshelf
Mygalomorph spiders from soutwestern Oregon, USA, with descriptions of four new species
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In eastern Oregon, earthworms (Oligochaeta) and spiders contributed most to the diet of 5. vagrans in an ungrazed mountain meadow, but caterpillars, ...Bulletin of the U.S. Department of Agriculture
This mite is an important enemy of the red spider. Rhynchoi.ophidae. ... numbers of this mite upon violets, heavily infested with red spiders, in Oregon. ...Helpful Guide Directory
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Poisonous spiders, ticks and other biting mites in Oregon. Some documents on this site require that you have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed (3.x or above) ...