John Darling: “The ‘it’ I am looking for is that elusive, usually sentimentalized, grossly exploited thing called Christmas Spirit — which is supposed to be a giddy, blessed, childlike abandonment of the normal hurried, self-centered, worried, grabby, type-A personality we have the rest of the year.”
John Darling: “I don’t want to go to France. I want to be here. I want to drive through the leafy streets of Ashland, where I’ve gotten used to the slow pace of traffic.”
John Darling: “Fall has no illusions. Three-fourths of the way through the year, like three-fourths of the way through life, you know what is possible.”
John Darling: “Even though it’s trying to become a hyper-spender geezerville, that’s not gonna happen. It’s a city now, not a town, and that means it’s a mix and the people who happen to be young and poor and have kids will always find ways to live here and bring in those new streams of energy.”
John Darling: “As Helman built his mills around Ashland’s Plaza (essentially creating Ashland), the locals fought for the homes they held for 12,000 years. The settlers occasionally had to hole up at a fort built on Wagner Creek. Within five years from the first claim here, the Shastas and Takelmas were gone, decimated by our diseases or removed to remote reservations ….”
John Darling: “Remember, continental drift, evolution and destruction of dinosaurs by an asteroid (not to mention racial harmony and environmental sustainability) all once were considered the province of unstable, dangerous, barking-mad thought criminals – and we wouldn’t get anywhere if we didn’t keep pushing our way outside that box called normal.”
John Darling: “Almost always in these interviews, there comes a moment when they pull back the curtain and say something about themselves, about how they understand life, about what it all might mean.”
John Darling: “Oregon, he explained, was kind of laid out in four bands. Left to right, you have the coast, then the western valleys along I-5, which is what most people think of as Oregon (lots of firs and hills), then the mountains, then the two-thirds of Oregon which is desert, a fact which almost no one outside Oregon knows.”
“You’ll notice the very energy of the vortex makes that system of yours evolve and change and soon it’s not working that great for you. The vortex makes you let go of it. What’s next? I don’t know. You walk, you hike the trails, you talk with your widening circle of friends. Soon it starts becoming more clear, the next arm of the spiral dance.”
“We in Ashland often delude ourselves that we’ve created the most perfect of worlds and must hold it close to our breasts, that this blessing is portable, is not outside us and is ever present in our genes and cells and souls, ready to flow like heat lightning on a summer night.”
The Say Their Names T-shirt memorial at Railroad Park in Ashland was vandalized again this week, but a group of community members long invested with maintaining the shirts have organized an event for Sunday, April 2, to rebuild the memorial.
Obituary: Jefferson Straub, 78, passed away Feb.25, 2023, in the arms of his wife, Kelly Nash Straub. A celebration of Jeff’s life will be held at the Ashland Congregational Church at 2 p.m. Saturday, May 6.
Herbert Rothschild: “When they covered the 20th anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, our mainstream media were as craven as they were during the run-up to the invasion itself.”
Productions of all kinds and sizes abound at the Oregon Fringe Festival, which will begin its five-day run of unfiltered creative outpourings in Ashland on April 26. Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the festival is produced by the Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University.
Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument officials are accepting applications for the annual Artist-In-Residence program through April 17. Selected artists receive a residency at the monument during the early summer months, where they will spend time creating art while surrounded by the monument’s natural beauty.
Ashland Rotary will host its annual Easter egg hunt event at 1 p.m. Sunday, April 9, at Lithia Park near the pickleball courts, according to a news release.
(It’s free)
