photos COLETTE LEVESQUE

RENNIE’S LANDING
words NOAH DEWITT

By a twist of fate, the first bar of our journey, Rennie’s Landing, happened to be hosting a release party for our rivals, Ethos Magazine, the sore losers of last year’s OV vs. Ethos Dance Off. I decided to wear my dancing shoes just in case things got out of hand. But with an expansive upstairs, two full bars, and ample outdoor seating, there proved to be enough room for both magazines. While the Ethos bunch networked amongst themselves, we Voice Dawgs knocked back draft pints of stout, PBRs, and whiskey gingers in the cozy yellow comfort of the tavern’s upstairs. If you’re looking to unwind after an un-fun day of classes, but aren’t in the mood to get hit on at Taylor’s or Max’s, Rennie’s is a safe bet.

MAX’S
words NOAH PORTER

Fabled to be the real-world inspiration for the Springfield home-away-from-home that is Moe’s Tavern, Max’s serves as the end-of-the-night watering hole for many of the university’s date rapists and popcorn enthusiasts. Pretzel and peanut fans may also find themselves amongst good company here. Really, the snacks are all that this bar has going for it. PBRs are $2.75 (bonus). The closing-time table dancing would be cool if the playlist wasn’t limited to over-exhausted Motown hits and jock jams. But… it’s hard to resist Max’s drunken charm when the whole bar is singing “Piano Man.” Ironically, there usually is an old man sitting next to you making love to his tonic and gin at Max’s. And he will stare at you.

DIABLO’S DOWNTOWN LOUNGE
words PARKER MULLINS

The post-Max’s decision for the crawl’s next boozing station was a wildcard. The upstairs portion presents the opportunity to hang out in perhaps the largest covered back patio in the Eugene circuit. Yeah, bigger than Roma. In general, it’s more desirable as well seeing as you can smoke cigarettes and get heavily intoxicated without having to worry about pastry bakers kicking out your drunk ass. However, the upstairs portion is nothing compared to the seedy dance scene underworld that lies beneath. Diablo’s, in the basement, offered to the Voice a beautiful display of $3.50 LIIT’s, booties in motion, and more heavy-duty beam equipment than a strip-mall Lazer Tag chain. This stop remained my favorite throughout the night, leaving subsequent bars feeling like a slow trek through an MDMA comedown.

HORSEHEAD
words COLETTE LEVESQUE

There are only two ways to attend Horsehead. The first is at the beginning of your night, when a cheap, precious Blue Ribbon or a simple well drink sounds sufficient. This should be relaxing if you’ve beaten the rush. The other way to attend Horsehead – and my personal favorite – is totally wasted at the end of the night, when you have zero cares to give and are in dire need of super dank fries, of either the French or Freedom variety, at a reasonable price. Lost in the Barmuda Triangle and nearing the end of an epic night, the OV staffers and I devoured somewhere between three and 10 baskets. From what I can remember, I took a bite of those savory fries and proceeded to ponder if the feeling in my gut was more comparable to love making or to winning the lottery. I settled on it being just about equivalent to the Immaculate Conception. That said, I would not suggest Horsehead half-way through your night when you are a little tipsy and all you really want to do is dance your heart out while avoiding pool-playing douche bags.

JOHN HENRY’S
words Margaret Appel

John Henry’s began in 1992, and it went strong for several years with an 80’s night that just wouldn’t quit. However, it would seem that that the clientele occupying the bar in 1992 haven’t really moved on, increasing sleaziness levels and therefore decreasing overall desirability. But if you and your gang have the right attitude and not a trace of sobriety (seriously), I would certainly recommend stumbling in on a Thursday ‘80s night, even if only to laugh at the freaks. The checkerboard dance floor is inviting, although the stage appears to be reserved for recent divorcees. For some reason there are fixed-gear bikes hanging above the bar, perhaps a desperate attempt to attract customers who are in good enough shape to even ride a bike, but really they’re just a decorative mystery. Henry’s usually has cheap well drinks and PBR, but perhaps this is because they’re making money off of the $3 cover charge that always seems to be happening. Overall, this bar is just really gross, there’s no denying that — but somewhere in the sea of camel toes and strange powders circulating around John Henry’s, there is a lingering charm that not even the sweatiest creeps can destroy.

RJD2 mini-interview/performance @ Mallard Madness.

What’s better than a big hunk of grapefruit for breakfast? A lot of things. But if you’re in the tart citrus delicious arena, why not go for a pint of blood orange sorbet?

You get the best of so many worlds.

The taste is one of those tastes where you’re forced to close your eyes for a second and sigh. You can’t eat it too quickly, because your throat somehow detects the scrumptuosity and luxuriates in the time it takes for the spoonfuls to glide down to your stomach. The sorbet sits on the perilous edge between too sweet or too bitter, but balances perfectly between the two. It’s perfect for waking you up and stimulating the juices in your body that inevitably need stimulating in the morning.

You can pretend that you’re a vampire. The rich color of blood in your cereal bowl is bound to do more good for your ego than plain old cheerios. The redness of the blood oranges is as intense as one of those sunsets that you have to go west from Eugene to see (try Santa Fe). The color almost violently springs into your mouth.

It’s ice cream for breakfast. That always seems like a no-brainer, until the rebellion of the stomach a few hours later. But this is different. You feel like you ate a boring old piece of super-powered fruit, when you really had the indulgence any short-lived human morning should have. Glorious.

The only drawback I’ve encountered is that only one company makes blood orange gelato, and their price tag makes me want to cry a little bit every time I see it ($6.99 at the worst). The company is called Ciao Bella Gelato, and they have hoards of intriguing flavors (Chocolate Jalapeno, Maple Ginger Snap, Blackberry Cabernet, Prickly Pear).

So until the day comes that I grow my own blood oranges and have my own ice cream maker, I’m stuck with blood orange sorbet as being a sometimes breakfast. It would probably be good for lunch, too.

It’s 5:30 and I don’t want to drink any more bad coffee. I can’t stop thinking about how bad this badness is in front of me. Dux Bistro, I’m sorry, but you just can’t fulfill my needs. Your joe is like liquid dust reheated in a microwave several times over. I’m not one to pour anything out, but this blackness might as well be bile.

I think I’m allowed to be a little bit of a coffee prude. I grew up making espresso drinks in my dad’s coffee shop. The smell of a good grind is enough to start me springing around on my toes, like a stray puppy at a new home. My mood is significantly lowered when I am sustained by the soulless airpots from the residence halls.

My problem is a fairly easy one to solve, as long as I’m capable of getting my butt out of it’s accustomed radius on campus. After going to Morning Glory Café, my tusch is far more motivated to shimmy out of its comfort zone. I ordered an Americano, the “European” equivalent to a cup of American coffee. After the first sip, my senses numbed and the world melted in elation in front of me.

They operate their espresso machine in plain sight. This means that they’re confident about their espresso shot-making skills, a good sign in a coffee shop. The machine is also completely manual, meaning that the employees actually have to know some technique to produce drinks in a consistent manner (as opposed to Starbucks, where automation is preferred). The shots of espresso come out in about 25 seconds. I was trained that this is the correct time, and my taste buds concur.

Coffee shouldn’t taste like dirt. It should taste like molten sunrises sprinkled with sweet hints of fresh roasted nuts. You shouldn’t have to hide it beneath sweeteners and cream to make your mouth appreciate what’s going through it. If you’ve never had the experience of enjoying the unembellished taste of coffee, I recommend a trip to Morning Glory.

Apart from the glorious coffee, Morning Glory also serves breakfast and lunch, and they bake pastries. I should mention that they are vegan. It doesn’t subtract anything from their coffee or their pastries, and soon I will likely be able to say the same for their breakfast and lunch.

I only wish that their hours were longer. Then I could stop this dreaming and exchange it for the real satisfaction they have consistently supplied me.

Location:

450 Willamette Street
Eugene, OR 97401
(541) 687-0709

Hours:

Open 7 days a week
7:30am – 3:30pm

http://www.morninggloryeugene.com/

• The theme of this airplane adventure: I wonder what my pupils look like.

• [My roommate] Shining Grass drove me to the airport. After passing her my lighter, and momentarily grabbing the wheel so she didn’t have to steer, that stat that everyone thinks about being more likely to get into a car crash on the way to the airport than getting into an airplane crash inevitable crosses my mind … and makes a lot more sense.

• I took about seven times longer cooking for my flight than it took me to pack. Jasmine rice, red lentil dahl (what up Noah), curried garbanzo beans, two peanut butter and honey tortilla sandwiches, and Mary’s Gone Crackers Brand pretzel sticks. I don’t fuck around with this shit.

• I’m in the Eugene airport and everyone has a British accent. Something’s not right.

• I just read they’re about to replace the flying people art at the Eugene airport. Bummer. I think I know why. These cats is hipsters! Check out that flickr account. Every last one of them.

• Damn. This duffel bag is pretty fucking legit. ergonomic design, tough canvas. Sir Francis Drake High School will be forever classy in my mind. That’s marketing.

• Damn. Sir Francis Drake didn’t make their duffels x-ray proof. My bag got “subject to further search-ed.” Future does not look bright for red lentil dahl.

• The fate of my mid-flight meal is in the hands of a man name ‘Ned.’

• (I wonder what my pupils look like?) “ … Oh that? I thought that was a solid. It’s not, well… what if I poured some out and left only 4 ounces in my container. Would that be cool?”

• (Still wondering what my pupils look like.)

• Ned answered no. But the dude wasn’t a dick about it. The next 2-7 minutes (measuring time is hard right now) Ned’s compassion was on display. He explained: I could mail my dhal; I could check my bag; I could go outside and eat it; I could give it to a friend. It was like it was my family dog was in question, not my red-lentil dhal.

• With time very much not on my side, I had no choice. “For the homies” I told him. Ned didn’t know what that meant.

• (I wonder what my pupils look like?)

• Even though dude’s like Ned are the most 1984 aspect of my life, it was kind of a beautiful interaction. Big Brother doesn’t seem so bad right now.

• Sitting at the gate now. Watching planes take off, with a rainbow and cumulus clouds providing a backdrop. What’s this? Chums …. BluBlockers! FUCK YES. BluBlockers! Am I Dreaming?

• I’m on an airplane. Cool.

• Oregon Voice. Meet San Francisco International Airport. If all goes to plan, the Oregon Voice distribution network will soon expand globally.

The little perturbations bananas send through me are apparently not applicable to most of the country. Americans ate 7.6 billion pounds of bananas last year. Apples and oranges, even when combined, didn’t achieve this poundage. Ground beef consumption is about 4 times that of bananas, but one banana to four hamburgers? It’s a step in the right direction.

We may have to go back to 5 burgers and no bananas soon, though. Tropical Race Four has arrived on planet earth, and it’s out to get our bananas. We’ll soon be singing  Yes, We Have No Bananas.

Tropical Race Four is a fungus that makes the leaves of a banana tree turn yellow, and the entire plant begin to rot from the inside out. Since there is only one species of banana that is mass marketed in the US, it’s an epidemic that is not easily cured.

I thought I might be thrilled when I first heard this news. Since bananas are my personal least favorite fruit, I thought I wouldn’t be hit very hard. But then I started thinking harder.

No peanut butter banana sandwiches.

No banana cream pie.

No banana bread.

One less Gwen Stefani hit..

No bananas in pajamas coming down the stairs!!

No bananas to freshen up boring cheerios.

Don Hertzfeldt’s brilliant cartoon would never have come to exist…

And then I started researching. Bananas are basically magic. They contain Vitamin C (helps heal wounds), Vitamin B6 (supports the immune system), potassium (reduces risk for high blood pressure and strokes, and helps you build muscle), and fiber. They have no fat, but are laden with carbohydrates that give you sustained energy. Eating them can also help your digestive tract out when it’s having a hold up. Bananas might even enhance your mood, since they contain an amino acid that helps your body produce serotonin.

Other (slightly dubious) medical uses of the banana include a hangover cure, wart killing, and PMSing. For the hangover cure, if you blend bananas with milk, honey, and ice, your stomach will be calmed and your depleted blood sugar levels will be refilled by the all-powerful fruit. To kill a wart, put a piece of banana skin on top of it and hold it in place with surgical tape. For PMSing (the mood-swing aspect), all you have to do is eat a banana. There seems to be little bananas can’t do.

So far, the superfruit has been unable to ward off Tropical Race Four. The bananas we eat don’t have seeds and don’t reproduce sexually. Each plant grows a new stalk of identical bananas every year. This method of reproduction makes it easy for a fungus like Tropical Race Four to attack.

The solutions proposed are to either genetically engineer a new banana, or somehow stop the spread of the fungus. Neither has had much success.

So for now, go bananas while you can.

Sources:

http://www.whfoods.com

www.banana.com

www.chiquitabananas.com

New Yorker: Mike Peed “We Have No Bananas”

Pie is more than a three-letter word. It is a divine creation, not to be taken lightly. Pie is flexible enough to come in varieties to please every palate, but stable enough so that whenever you hear the word “pie,” your taste buds spurt out bursts of expectant saliva. Pie beats cupcakes on so many levels, it’s easy to see why cupcakes preceded pie in the evolutionary cycle. Cupcakes are cute, but pie is perfection. It takes major skill and special gumption to produce quality pie. Cupcakes are easy; you can’t not like them because they’re too cute.

Let’s take apple pie. When you bite into a firm, flaky crust, your mouth is tantalized by a simple hint of sweetness. Then a burst of juicy, ambrosial apple caresses your tongue. For a moment all the flavors blend together as your teeth lovingly gnash, and your mind should empty of all trouble and dissatisfaction. The apples are not mushy, they hold their bodies slightly stiff against the crust. The cinnamon and brown sugar play nice with the tartness of the apples. Nobody is being a bully, and all the members in the chorus of the pie sing in harmony.

I have yet to taste such a pie at a restaurant. The perfect pie for my mouth, in my 19 years of experience in the pie area, has always come from my hands. The apples are too often mushy or too artificially sweet. The crust is either too doughy or too plain or too sweet or just not right.
Since pie is apparently the new trend in the foodie universe, I figure it’s time to share some of my brilliance in pie creation. What follows is a meditation on my pie making method.

Though frozen store-bough pie crusts are handy, they take away from the sensual experience that pie-eating can be. I start with two cold sticks of butter, and cube them delicately and swiftly, as I feel the butter’s eagerness to meet flour and mingle with sugar (only a few tablespoons) and salt (a little more than you’d think is necessary). I dump the cubes into the flour waiting with bated breath, and immediately begin to massage the butter into the flour. Though literally I pinch (with my hands, duh) the cubes of butter to distribute them amongst the dry mixture, it is with the mindset needed to give a good massage. The dangers of gluten build-up that can produce a horrid chewy crust force are very sly, and to avoid them I must become one with the forming dough.

When the butter is spread in pea sized pieces, I force myself to break away from my creation and let it rest in a ball in a frigid setting. The separation is unnerving, but the time apart is a perfect time to prepare the apples.
A lot of the apple component to apple pie is left up to the apples. Tarter varieties are better, because they hold their own against the dense sugar and the oppressive oven. Apart from mixing what seems like a good amount of brown and white sugars, vanilla extract and cinnamon to complement the peeled and sliced fresh tart apples, you are at the mercy of your fruit source. Granny Smiths all the way.

Back to crust land. After a meaningful separation where longing has strengthened the yearning in my heart for quality pie, I tenderly separate the dough ball into two balls on a floured, cold surface. I roll the balls carefully out into roundish circles. The first roll is always a failure. The second must always suffice, because otherwise the horrid chewy crust infection will plague the pie.

From here on out, everything has to be done with attention and sympathetic hands. Throwing a pie together is impossible. It must be assembled wish consideration for the composition of the different elements. Before the top layer of crust is allowed to snuggle up with the pyramid of apples and the bottom crust, a few little pieces of butter strewn around at random, and a sprinkling of corn starch over all the apples are the last touches needed for a shot at the perfect pie.

Pie is so much more welcoming and comforting than a cupcake. Apart from skinny women, and small children, who looks good eating a cupcake? No one. There’s always the awkward decision of how to deal with the icing. You inevitably stick your neck out like a chicken and peck, dangerously biting in close proximity to your hand.

Who looks good eating pie? Everyone. There’s no confusion about how to start. It’s not hiding behind any cutesy details. A good pie is pure, wholesome, organic love. The pie trend should trend on to eternity, so the less exceptional pies out there (of which there are many) will be forced to upgrade themselves. It’s all about the pie mindset of consideration for all components and simple rustic goodness.

Where: 1054 W 8th Avenue

When: Thursday February 17, 9:00 p.m.

Definitely roll.

Music was scheduled for 8, but attendance was clearly an issue. By 8:30, as Medium Troy took the stage, the crowd had multiplied to roughly 75 heads.
Possibly shocked by the illusion of emptiness in the dancehall the band seemed a little shaky at first. A minor mishap occurred during performance of the song ‘Space Tree’, which resulted in an en medias res, onstage apology from the band. Though the incident was distressing, don’t even worry, the show went on. In fact, the show got better and better as time went on.

I was impressed by the band’s composition, lively tempos, and overall irie charisma. Granted I am not too familiar with their shit, I can willingly admit that I was loving it.
The dirt low baseline kept the undertone super grimmy, but at the same time, the saxophone/keyboard combo got me feeling hella lifted. Twas simply the best of two worlds, so heavy yet so fluid.
I feel like with a tid bit of hype and a little bit of heart, this band has the potential to blow up in the near future. I would recommend checking them out.

Next on the spot was the uplifting, enchanting, and vivacious headliner, Anthony B. Not knowing much about the musician before hand, I left my expectations at the door and hoped for the best. A group of skilled musicians charged up the stage with some heavy reggae beats and then suddenly Anthony came bouncing out of the back, fired up, spitting out some straight fyah. The energy in the venue immediately evolved into a jolly d party. The music was authentic and engaging, which kept dancers gyrating madly all night. Anthony sang, jumped, promoted the spirit of Reggae Love, skanked his way around stage, and brought smiles to the face of the crowd. It was a very happy scene, to say the least. Anthony B has left the Eug but he left us a few short and suggestive words of wisdom, “Love yourself!”.
I dig it.