And just to the left of that:

Earlier that morning we went to visit the Mission Dolores in the city.  It’s hard to imagine that time, when the mission was the most substantial structure around.  Now of course it’s all urban, and right nearby I came across by a chance a bar immortalized in one of my favorite songs, by Steel  Pole Bath Tub, in which the singer lists a series of misadventures that befell him the night before, but he can’t remember any of them:

I don’t remember being on the floor
I don’t remember how it smelled
I don’t remember how they’ve been there before
I don’t remember when I fell

…

I don’t remember why I woke up alone
With no more memory of you
I don’t remember

that we were in love
That’s only one thing that I recall
I was singing at the 500 Club
I don’t remember her at all

Lo, the 500 Club:

About a Boy Nick Hornby

The Road Cormac McCarthy

Why Sinatra Matters Pete Hammil

Augustine: A Very Short Introduction Henry Chadwick

Dead Reign T.A. Pratt

The Civilization of the Middle Ages Norman F. Cantor

The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradition Howard J. Wiarda

Modern European History, 1871-2000 David Welch

The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money John Dos Passos

Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar Chris Onstad

The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found Mary Beard

Anansi Boys Neil Gaiman

American Colonies: The Settling of North America Alan Taylor

Empires at War: The French and Indian War and the Struggle for North America, 1754-1763 William M. Fowler, Jr.

Africans: The History of a Continent John Iliffe

History of Africa Kevin Shillington

Reminds me of one of my favorite poems in the Poetry in Motion series on TriMet.

The protest left some damage in its wake, police said, with windows broken at the Bank of America building on Southwest Fifth Avenue.

I was at Fifth and Salmon; maybe the windows were further up Fifth, but I didn’t hear glass breaking.  I will go and check it out.

If I’d had the presence of mind, I would have taken a picture of the moment when the anarchists tried to break away from their police escort, but as they swirled around me and the others at the bus stop, they were stopped in their tracks by the wall of mounted police on Salmon St.  It was quite a tableau, with the black flags on one side, mounted cops on the other, cops on foot blocking off the street to the north.  That’s when I moved into the bus shelter, in case there was a charge by either side.  The situation was fluid, in respect both to how quickly the scene changed and the manner in which the crowd changed direction and flowed east, channeled in that direction by the pressure of the cops.  Then I stood for awhile, waiting for my bus home, but the cops still had Salmon blocked off to the west.  I used my PDXBus app to figure out where they had re-routed it to and set off to meet it.  I saw no more, heard no more, of the protest.

If you read his book, you find that his solution to the problem of economic co-ordination in the absence of a price mechanism is “the allocation of resources [that] is largely the outcome of discussion between producers, consumers and other affected groups, but within the framework of overall decisions about economic priorities made democratically at the national and international level” (p.140).

That’s one interminable public meeting.

Then I came across this:

The four obtained secrets regarding steelmakers’ output and meetings of the China Iron & Steel Association from companies including Shougang Corp. and Laiwu Group, he said. That led to the failure of iron ore price talks last year, the judge said.

And what are “iron ore price talks”?  Annual meetings between iron producers and steel companies to set prices.  Quite possibly outside of the framework of overall priorities about the advantage of the spot market in reducing the risk of bribery in obtaining pricing information.

Right down to the mailbox:

Bels fut li vespres, e li soleilz fut cler

Then I turned into a street upon which the morning sun had not yet shone and up which a cold, biting wind was blowing.  I like to have died.  It is still winter.