This week I’m writing from New Mexico! My cousin got married this past Saturday, June 15, in a beautiful ceremony at the New Mexico Museum of Art, with the reception in the inner courtyard. The DJ could work on his transitions, but he played plenty of bangers and had everyone boogying down until we had to leave the venue. So congrats to Michael and Emma! I’m staying with family in Los Alamos for most of the week to ride bikes, hike, eat good food, and catch up. It’s hot but beautiful, and I’m glad to soak up the culture.
And speaking of culture…
In my early 20s, my friends and I went to lots of concerts. Sometimes a couple a week, but at least a show every other week. At the time, it just felt normal. We all loved music and it only made sense to see live music as much as we could afford.
Looking back, it was miraculous we went to that many shows! In large part because we had to drive an hour and a half to Asheville, NC, for most of them, as Greenville, SC, (where we all lived) had an absolute shit music scene. Sometimes it existed and we took advantage if there were good shows, but those amounted to a few per year, often thanks to Furman University’s jazz department, which was phenomenal. So yeah, the scene was bad.
But our trips to Asheville or Atlanta or wherever the cool bands were playing were magic. I only saw one show by myself, and more often had 3-8 other friends to go with. We saw the likes of Sigur Ros, Local Natives, The Weeknd (before he got super famous), Shovels and Rope, Dr. Dog, The Tallest Man on Earth, The Black Angels, The Allah Las, Lucius, Laura Marling, The National, Angel Olsen, Floating Action, Neutral Milk Hotel, Circa Survive, to name a handful.
We didn’t really have money but we didn’t care. We made it work because it often felt like all that mattered.
I live in Bend, OR, now, and I mostly like it here. The access to outdoor sports and activities is wonderful. From almost anywhere in town, it takes 30-40 minutes to ski or board at Mt. Bachelor — but there’s often long lines of traffic. I can ride my bike for five minutes on a bike path to hit a large network of singletrack — mostly because I’m lucky with where in town I live. The Deschutes River runs through town and has several delightful sections to float — but it’s wildly crowded for most of summer. The busyness of Bend is tolerable most of the time, although summer weekends make me want to never leave the house.
But there are two main things about Bend that make me want to leave: the dominance of a monoculture, which thrives on a lack of diversity; and the music scene.
The first issue leads into the second, so we’ll go in order.
Bend is one big cesspool of white people who LOVE the outdoors and LOVE beer. If you don’t like the outdoors or beer enough, Bend really isn’t the place for you.
The access to outdoor playgrounds is fantastic. Damn near any activity one might want to do outside, the surrounding areas of Bend (i.e. Central Oregon) has a lot of it. Snow sports, mountain biking, rock climbing, white water, hiking, backpacking, gravel riding, road riding, bikepacking, fly fishing, horse riding, hunting. Those are just the easiest ones to think of.
Sure, the beer is good, too, and Bend has loads of it. In 2019, Food & Wine ranked Bend third in most breweries per capita in the U.S. I used to like beer, but I’ve stopped drinking and feel great about it. But having a casual hang with friends is a little tougher now, as I can only drink so much kombucha or seltzer.
Some art and music exist, yes. But the vast majority of the art caters to the population of wealthy but tasteless older folks in town. And the music scene that exists serves either the outdoorsy folk who are into country, bluegrass, white reggae and cliche folk music or that wealthy and tacky group who want to see legacy acts at their worst. As a few easy examples, at the Tower Theater, which sits in the heart of downtown, three acts for June and July are Don McLean, So Good: The Neil Diamond Experience, and Todd Rundgren. Their average age is 78.6 and are all undoubtedly well past their primes. At Hayden Homes Amphitheater, Oregon’s largest outdoor venue, the summer concert lineup is only marginally better. A few shows are guaranteed to be, or were, great — LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Weekend, St. Vincent, to name a few — but far more are shows I’ll want to leave town for so I don’t have to potentially hear the sounds that carry towards where I live. Jordan Davis, Sam Hunt, Walker Hayes, and Jason Aldean are some of the country stars; Slightly Stoopid, Michael Franti, and Stick Figure are reggae or adjacent; The Beach Boys, Slash, Gipsy Kings, Foreigner, and Styx are all older acts that certainly put on weak shows.
Places like Midtown Ballroom/Domino Room, The Capitol, and the Volcanic Theater Pub host much more interesting acts. But these are exceptions, and still have a large number of acts that attract an outdoorsy (read as, at least in this context, lame) crowd.
Among other things to do, these two hobbies are fairly innocuous. But taken together as the dominant parts of culture in Bend, they become problematic because the people who live in Bend just want more of it, never new things.
This monoculture does not attract many, if any, folks outside of the majority that has existed since Bend was founded. In other words, white people and only white people. (Which was one of the founding principles of Oregon.)
What’s missed in monoculture? What does diversity actually give us?
The answer to both is simple: everything.
We miss the perspectives that make everything in America great.
Here’s an easy, recent example. Politically, Bend appears to be a liberal bubble surrounded by red. But most self-identifying liberals in Bend are fakes, as many liberals are. In the May primaries, a measure to further fund schools in the district failed spectacularly, but why? Because it would levy taxes to fill large budget gaps, maintain current class sizes, and develop further programs. Property owners are disconnected and don’t care about the future generations, so why pay more taxes for something their own children wouldn’t benefit from?
Folks who profess to be tolerant turn into NIMBYs as soon as anything might affect their way of life. Multi-family housing in a neighborhood? No way! A bike trail near their house? Put it anywhere else!
Many folks in Bend are disconnected from the reality we actually live in, preferring to further nestle into the bubble here.
There’s virtually no tolerance for things outside what’s already in Bend. The metal or rap shows at The Capitol or The Domino Room are looked at as weird, freak occurrences, but are loyally attended by a tiny, mostly hidden subculture. There are some rad artists in town, but mostly show at the small art supply store downtown. This lack deters other creatives from moving to Bend, even if they like other qualities of the area. Creatives from Portland seem to make the three hour trek to Bend for inspiration or vacation, but rarely move down.
To disrupt Bend’s cultural landscape would be a massive undertaking, and would be predicated on people with money investing in people and buildings and scenes that don’t guarantee huge monetary returns. But the potential returns are worth more than money.
A community in which people care about all of the population, vote for inclusion, patronize artists who are pushing boundaries and understandings, and welcome outsiders with enthusiasm is a community worth more than any monetary investment. There is no price too high for creating the best society we can for as many people as possible and truly acting upon the ideals we claim to uphold.
By nature of our humanity, we all have immense value and dignity worth upholding. The diversity of ideas and opinions are worth hearing and considering, and an amalgamation of all of our values and ideas can create the respect and understanding that is sorely needed.
We need to start taking back all the power from people with the most money. How we do that, though, is a discussion for another time.
No reading recommendations or playlists this week, as I was driving too much to get any reading in. Just give a listen to the new NxWorries album, Why Lawd?