Demand cash up front.

I saw Sam the Tram out putting up lawn signs on NE 33rd near Grant High School on Saturday. He was waving to cars as he dashed through the rain. I contemplated an obscene gesture, but decided the better tack would be to act like I didn't recognize him.

The signs are pretty nightmarish. Bright red, as in the city's balance sheet. No "Shake Up City Hall" this time (at least, not that I saw), but "Because Portland Belongs to All of Us." I guess Sho's into excluding people?

And "Moving Portland Forward." I picture the Portlandia statue on a cliff, peering over the edge.

Jon Coney, the Metro clone who's running for state representative, has quite a few up in the same area as well. Haven't seen one from Cyreena Boston yet, but I am sure they'll be exquisite.

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while, but the press of other important topics has kept me from getting to it. Last week, I was watching some sporting event or another -- probably a Blazer game -- when up popped a commercial for Mattress World. No problem -- I'm all ready for the iconic Mattress World owner couple to appear and show us how they're doing with their diets this month. Funniest spots since Tom Peterson.

But lo and behold...

The Mattress World guy is nowhere to be seen! The wife is there, the kids are there, but...

WHERE IS HE? I can't sleep until he tells me, "The mattress is free"!

I hope everything's o.k.

Not so hot.

Hey, this blog has been selected as one of the five best Oregon politics blogs by some guy at The Washington Post. That and $1.75 will get us... well...

Guess who.

Throw away your calendar. Don't dust off the softball mitt just yet. This morning on the ski trails on Mount Hood, we encountered the best snow of the year.

So far.

Even the normally difficult stretches were do-able. A divine gift of a day.

We've now examined two layers of our Bruce Springsteen concert experience of the other night, and it's probably time to put it down for a while. You never know when the edge of another layer's going to appear, but if it does, it will probably take some time.

Meanwhile, a few loose ends:

The E Street Band is still extremely sound. Drummer Max Weinberg was a workhorse, doing yeoman's duty throughout the show. At 57 years of age, and having had some occupational hand troubles over the years, you might expect him to be slowing down, but he clearly wasn't. Maybe his steady TV gig has kept him in shape, but whatever the cause, he's still in the groove.

Nils Lofgren, who fell into the band quite by accident in the '80s, was a strong acquisition whose value becomes more apparent with every tour. His solos have become show-stoppers. He and Little Steven (Van Zandt) play such a mean pair of guitars that Bruce can lay off the strings whenever he wants and still have a phenomenally full rock sound behind him.

Clarence Clemons, the "Big Man," is still blowing fairly strong, but he's moving a little more gently now that he's into his Social Security years. It wouldn't be E Street without him, and when the sax breaks come in the older songs, the energy level in the hall picks up quite a bit.

The other players are Gary W. Tallent on bass, who's been there since the beginning; "Professor" Roy Bittan, whose piano is the melodic anchor of the crew; Soozie Tyrell, who provides background vocals and plays violin when it's called for; and a fellow named Charles Giordano, who has stepped in while original Bruce keyboardist Danny Federici is more or less sidelined with some serious medical issues. Bruce's wife Patty also sings and plays guitar with the band, but she was missing from this part of the tour -- home with the teenagers, who Bruce said would otherwise be taking pot cookies out of the oven right about concert time.

Speaking of concert time, the show began just over an hour after its scheduled 7:30 start time. The Rose Garden ushers, who always seem to have the inside scoop, mentioned something about a late flight, but by 8:30, they assured us that the artist was "in the building." Moments later, the lights went down and the festivities began.

By that time we were fairly fat and sassy. Between giving up on the mosh pit and heading to our seats, we spent a nice hour and change in the "taproom" inside the arena, on the ground level right across from where the old Cucina Cucina used to be. We had to show our tickets to get in there, and they had to be seat tickets, not floor tickets. Of course, we had both in our pockets, and we showed the seat tickets, which by that time we were resigned to use.

The taproom is adjacent to the main concourse, and from our stools we got to see the floor standees hustle along, headed for the magic door through which they would reach the Promised Land. They were all cautioned not to run, but the Mrs. and I, having been through the same drill six years ago, knew that at that point, containing one's self is pretty nigh impossible. You are that close to being that close, and it's "Feet, don't fail me now!"

We considered for a minute trying to use the floor tickets in my pocket to cheat our way into the pit. It looked as though it might have been possible -- there was an usher blocking the passageway between the taproom and the concourse, but she did let a couple of wristband people through. Could we finagle our way past her? She was probably the last line of defense between us and the stage!

Nah. We decided that we had already had sufficient ticket drama for one day. It was enough to get a vicarious thrill from watching the people trying to walk as quickly as they could without running.

We then settled in for some of the $8 microbrews that the Rose Garden is so well known for. But we were blessed with an incredible young waitperson who worked feverishly to make sure that everyone at her tables were being served well and not having to fret about the clock. Along with the second round of excellent beer, we decided to order some finger food, which was also fast and good (though not cheap). At one point, one of the gals we were sharing a table with spilled an expensive mixed drink, and our waiter had another one in her hand, on the house, within a couple of minutes. You really could not have asked for a better pre-concert venue.

Across from us in the taproom were two young women who were wearing identical T-shirts that said "Lesbians [Heart] Bruce." We smiled at that sentiment, but pretty much shrugged it off. Of course they do! Everybody in the place did.

It turned out, those two were part of a larger group of young women -- maybe 10 or so -- who were all wearing the matching shirts. During the second half of the show, we saw that the group of them had made their way into the mosh pit and were standing stage left, where the barrier stood between the pit and the rest of the standing room. As he wandered over that way during the instrumental segment of a song, Bruce noticed the shirts and gave a big grin. During his last number, "American Land," in which various nationalities of immigrants are recited, he threw in a reference to "lesbians" in where "Germans" would normally go. The guy doesn't miss a beat.

Now, there once was a time when I probably would have griped about the t-shirt crew wangling their way into the pit. They couldn't all have had winning wristband numbers, could they? But it was the end of another wonderful Bruce show, and somehow the concept of ticket line justice seemed pretty far away. God bless the lesbians, and the guy they were showing love to.

We also got quite a kick out of watching our friend Charles and his date literally right up against the stage next to Bruce's microphone throughout the concert. They appeared on the big overhead screens more than once, and we could see that they got in plenty of touches on the star and his guitar. A big night for them, even when Bruce was singing songs older than they were.

The only thing we would have enjoyed more was standing next to them. But hey, at least it was somebody we knew.

Get up every morning at the sound of the bell
Get to work late and boss man's givin' you hell
'Til you're out on a midnight run
Losin' your heart to a beautiful one
And it feels right
As you lock up the house
Turn out the lights
And step out into the night

Both Bruce and his audience, including myself, are a little different now. I was 22 years old at that time; he was 27. Back then, we had unlimited adrenaline, and we were showing off how it worked. Since then, we've turned a corner, and now the point of the show is to tap into the reserves of that kid stuff, pushing it until it comes blasting out through the thick pile of reality that's accumulated in the decades since.

Bruce is a little wider, and balder, than he was even six years ago when he last visited Portland with his band. Our kids are growing up -- in his case, almost to the age at which he started writing and singing his own songs about rebellion, and the shortcomings of the old folks' world. "How does it feel to see Bruce get older?" the Mrs. asked me early in the show. "About the same as looking in the mirror," I said. "You gotta go with it."

Springsteen is going with it quite well. He has had complete control of his career for decades, and today he has the luxury of tremendous artistic freedom. He can channel Woody Guthrie if he likes, knock out airy pop songs, mount a huge Pete Seeger tribute effort, or put out an album of Irish jigs. Money, which was never the point, now is not even close to being an issue. But staying on top of the music world and in front of adoring crowds will always be there. As Bruce himself has noted (and sang last night), "Poor man wanna be rich/Rich man wanna be king/And a king ain't satisfied 'til he rules everything."

It's ironic how the music industry, whose unwritten rules were once hostile to a guy like Bruce, is now in the palm of his hand. In the old days, a performer made money by selling records; concert tours barely broke even, existing only to support record sales. Now it's more or less the other way around. Sales of CDs are dead forever, and even single-song downloads are nothing to bank on over the long term. The way you make money as a band these days is on the road.

Which, of course, is the Springsteen specialty. He can sell at least 10,000 seats in any major city -- and often multiples of that -- with no promoter weasels and absolutely no advertising. He basically puts on the show himself, and the fans figure it all out by word of mouth. On the back of an envelope, I'd bet he makes between a half-million and a million a night, after all expenses but before taxes. The band members get paid a low five figures a week, which when you think about it is a nice living over a year. A hundred nights on the road for Bruce is $100 million.

That said, at this stage in a long and storied career, there are some challenges. One such has dogged Bruce for 20 years now, and that's how to deal with the hype. Since he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek the same week in 1975, he's always had to live up to a larger-than-life image. When the machinery of stardom has made you such an icon, it brings out extreme reactions in people. If somebody doesn't like Bruce, usually they really don't like him. He has admitted that he himself became "Bruced out" after the monster promotion of the album "Born in the U.S.A." in the '80s. Sure, it was a fine record, but it didn't stop the earth on its axis, the way Columbia Records kept telling you that it did.

New material always rolls out of an aging star under a cloud of suspicion. Sinatra, Dylan, Stevie Wonder -- most of the greats have gone through it. When one's early work is studded with classic gems, it's hard for anything that's just plain very good to stand up next to it. The smash hits are accordingly few in the later years, although years down the road, some of the later stuff may hold up quite well. As Joni Mitchell once observed from a stage, "Nobody ever told Van Gogh, 'Paint A Starry Night again, man!'"

Another quandary after 40 years of performing is picking a concert set list out of what has become a huge catalog of songs. When I first caught up to Bruce in the mid-'70s, he wanted to play three-hour concerts, but he had only around two hours of original material. So he'd cover "Quarter to Three," "Raise Your Hand," or "Devil with a Blue Dress On" -- taking them all to a higher level. Nowadays he's got a big enough body of work that he could do a dozen shows, with all original material, and never repeat a song. And so he faces Bob Seger's problem: "What to leave in? What to leave out?"

Last night's selections were an interesting lot. As expected, the band played almost all of the current album, "Magic," and those numbers were mostly new to me. (Sacrilegiously, I hadn't even listened to the whole album before the show, although I have a copy in my hand at this writing.) The melodies were nothing new, but the lyrics were as thought-provoking, or fun, or both, as ever. Lots of folks in the crowd were quite familiar with the new songs, singing along both with and without prompting from the stage.

The choices from among the older stuff were particularly good. There were four from "Born to Run," a surprising four from "Darkness on the Edge of Town," two from "The Rising," and only one from "Born in the U.S.A." There was also a souped-up shuffle version of "Reason to Believe," from the haunting downer folk album "Nebraska."

But for long-time Bruce aficionados, the highlight of the night was a pair of songs from the very first Bruce album ever, "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J." These were "For You" and "Lost in the Flood." Wordy, Dylanesque Bruce at his best, before anybody knew who he was, before Max Weinberg and Steve Van Zandt even, a kid with a head full of ideas and two hands full of Fender guitar.

And now the whiz-bang gang from uptown, they're shootin' up the street
That cat from the Bronx starts lettin' loose
But he gets blown right off his feet
And some kid comes blastin' round the corner
But a cop puts him right away
He lays on the street holding his leg screaming something in Spanish
Still breathing when I walked away

When "Lost in the Flood" finished, I told the Mrs.: "We can go home now. Bruce played 'Lost in the Flood.'" Certainly we had received our money's worth at that point, but of course we stayed until the show was over.

It never fails. You leave a Bruce concert exhausted but energized at the same time. The next day, you walk around on a different plane. You're on to something that most other people aren't. You feel as though you've been privy to matters beyond the petty details of everyday life. And there's a guy walking around just behind you through that life, reminding you to try to live out the ideals and dreams.

So what if now it's an older guy's voice you're hearing, in your good ear? You gotta go with it.

UPDATE, 3/30, 9:02 p.m.: Readers point out that Springsteen in fact does have a concert promoter these days -- a national, publicly traded pack of weasels called Live Nation. I'm not saying "Bruuuuuuce" -- I'm booing.

I still think he makes half a mil to a mil per show.

I've written a lot about my experiences as a Bruce Springsteen fan over the years. When I was in law school something like 30 years ago, I was determined to write the definitive piece about how the Nijinsky of Asbury Park fit into my world view. I wrote and wrote and wrote, on a portable typewriter that I dragged around with me in those days. What emerged was a jumbled mess of an article that the editor of the law school newspaper couldn't understand, much less publish. It made sense to me, but no one else would get it. I was happy to get what I felt out of my system for a while, but what I wrote never saw the light of day.

I didn't get the manuscript back from that guy. It would make interesting reading now.

Anyway, there are always a lot of layers to Bruce stories. There's the music, the star, the performances, the crowd, the scene, the politics, and probably most importantly, how all of the above tie into the real world that happens before the music starts and after it stops. Having just come off last night's show at the Rose Garden in Portland, I think I'll try something that I wasn't smart enough to go for back in law school: I'll take the layers one at a time.

The last time Bruce and his band were here, playing the album "The Rising," the Mrs. and I got to the arena early enough to camp out in a line all afternoon and stand in the mosh pit right in front of the stage. There were no seats on the main floor of the arena, and no reserved spots on which to stand, but 350 lucky fans got to stand in the pit. Being that close to the E Street Band is a wonderful experience, and of course we wanted to do it again, and so for the present tour we again bought a pair of general admission, standing room spots.

This time around, the Bruce people eliminated the need for us to stand around all afternoon waiting for the show. Instead, from 2 to 5 they issued wristbands to all floor ticketholders who requested one, each with a number, issued in ascending numerical order. At 5:15 they would pick a number, and that number would be first in line to get in. Everyone after that number would line up behind him or her, in order. Once they reached the last number that had been issued, the patron with number 1 would get to go in, then 2, etc.

We popped over to the Rose Garden with the kids in tow a little before 3 and got our orange wristbands -- numbers 297 and 298. "Left wrist, please," the Springsteen man said. Nice silver-haired Jersey guy, around my age.

At the number assignment session, we saw some folks we know, right off the bat. Bean was there, along with Jim the Musician Lawyer, and our numbers were right next to theirs. We mused briefly about where we would stand in the pit if we got in. Then we went home for a cup of coffee before coming back for the 5:15 Moment of Truth.

When we arrived back at the arena at the appointed time, there were about a thousand people milling around outside. Everybody was lining up, as instructed, in number order. There was a KGON truck parked there, playing a 30-second commercial on a large screen over and over. The "We Will Rock You" one. I was able to tune it out, but it drove some people crazy. Eventually one of the fans climbed into the KGON truck and pulled the plug on the music. The crowd let out a big cheer.

There were some other folks in the crowd that we recognized. Craig the Guy I Work With and his daughter were there, and a young fellow I know, Charles. They were back in the 600's somewhere. In the line, we had some time for some nice conversation with the people behind us, whom we were meeting for the first time. Bruce concertgoers are always good company.

It had been a crazy weather day, with sun, then driving hail; temperatures were unseasonably cool, but the skies were sunny and blue. When the Springsteen guy came out and shook up the big bowl with the numbers in it, everybody stood up. A guy behind me said that the last number they had issued was 796. Bean and I deduced that if they drew a number lower than ours or higher than 750, we were in the pit. We all silently applied our powers of persuasion on the gods of fortune.

A fan out of the crowd picked the number and handed it to the tour guy. Then a young fellow with a bullhorn made the announcement: "670."

And so everybody from 670 to the end, and from the start of the line to number 230, would get to hang in the pit. For the rest of us, and for hundreds more who would be showing up in the next couple of hours, we'd have the back two-thirds of the arena floor to stand on.

We stood there pondering our fate. We had had about a 40 percent chance of making it to heaven, and we didn't quite get there.

Now, when you get as old as I am, you tend to have a Plan B for just about everything. In our case, we had heard through the grapevine earlier in the week that some nice lower-level seats had suddenly gone on sale, and we had also purchased two of them. And so I had four tickets in my pocket -- two floors, two decent seats. Knowing we would have an extra pair of tickets, and taking advantage of this era of bar-coded electronic tickets, we had parked an extra copy of both pairs with a friend. We told her we would call her after the drawing and tell her which pair she should use. After the Magic Number had been announced, we punched her digits into the cell and told her she'd be using the floor tickets. We would be sitting in the seats.

After I hung up, we stuck around in the line for a while. With Bruce's organization, there are sometimes pleasant surprises. Maybe, we thought, they'd let some extra folks into the pit. But the drawing had been so well organized, and the counting so exact, we eventually reached the conclusion that no, there would be no reprieve.

Given that they had numbers right around ours, Bean and Jim were also out of luck. Craig had a number in the low 600's, and so he missed the cut, too. Only Charles made it, and he scored big time, in the first 20 or so. "I hate you," I told him with a big smile. He and his lady friend were in for the big ride.

It was only 6:00, and the show wasn't scheduled to start for another hour and a half, and so the Mrs. and I decided to find a drink somewhere. We bid farewell to our erstwhile standing-room buddies, stepped over the yellow crime scene tape that was marking the lineup area, and walked off.

This one's so sad, it's almost funny: The Portland police union says that the city's police officers don't engage in racial profiling, and here's proof:

[D]uring daytime hours black drivers constitute 9.1 percent of all stops, while at night that figure grows to 17.3 percent of all stops.... [The union's expert] cited data showing that black drivers make up twice the share of drivers pulled over at night as they do during daylight hours, when officers are more able to determine ethnicity — as evidence that racial profiling does not go on.

Glad that's settled.

You wonder why the average guy or gal ignores state politics? Check this out. It's just about the blandest coverage of a hot race that you could imagine. To write a less interesting piece on that contest would be difficult.

Multnomah County Chair Ted Wheeler may just get his butt run out of office for some of the crazy stunts he's pulling now. Get a load of this:

The county was blessed with higher-than-expected property and business income taxes this year, before the economy slowed. That, plus unspent reserves, is expected to provide $35 million in "one-time" money for 2008-09.

"We’ll take a majority of the one-time money and use it to pay down our debt," Wheeler said. That would reduce the county’s ongoing funding shortfall, he reasoned.

Pay down debt? With all the neighborhoods still served by neither streetcars nor condo towers, and a wonderful convention center languishing without a headquarters hotel? Buildings all over town without eco-roofs? Executives at Hoffman Construction taking home a mere high six figures?

Pay down debt? What about that new David Douglas school? And for the love of God, Ted, what about the doulas?

Come to your senses, man! Or you'll be back working a real job in the private sector faster than you can say "Measure 50 compression."

Sure, they're going to put in a day labor pickup station over by the Oregon Convention Center. But with the economy going the way it's been going, we may need another one downtown:

Why are we watching a blowout when there's another close game in progress? Plus, Dick Enberg -- please, guys, take him up to the Hollywood sign and push him off!

UPDATE, 6:27 p.m.: Actually, I see you can pick which game you want to see here.

UPDATE, 10:29 p.m.: On a better computer the player worked fine. Now if we could just get announcers who weren't in love with the top seeds...

We just got back from a rare trip to a movie theater. There we partook of an amazing film -- wildly entertaining, smart, funny, and with serious political and religious implications.

The flick fell short in only one respect: It was able to portray only the second most ridiculous city council anywhere.

Some startling news on the wire this afternoon about Blazer center Greg Oden. (Scroll down a little for the story.)

Says today's e-mail:

"We were impressed with his experience in the Marine Corps, his experience as a federal prosecutor and his experience as an academic," said PPA President Robert King. "John's public service record is an all-star combination of law enforcement and public policy that we want to see in our next Attorney General."

And with the Portland-Vancouver area poised to take on 1 million new residents by 2030, the landlocked city of Portland views the streetcar as a tool to help absorb those new residents without the burdens of yet more vehicles and parking needs.

At the risk of interrupting this ritual chant, a fact: The population of the City of Portland, where the shiny new condo-selling streetcars would run, is growing by approximately 1.1 percent a year -- and that estimate is arguably on the high side. At that rate, only 156,000 new residents will be arriving in the city by 2030. If another 844,000 come to the area, it will be to the suburbs, which will not be served by the streetcars.

Sam the Tram loves to throw the million-newcomer number around, as he did a few weeks back on the Lars Larson radio show (the one on which he said the city shouldn't use contractors who employ illegal aliens). The problem is, he's not running for Metro, which would be a much better job for him. As mayor, he'll do everything but what he is supposed to do -- insure provision of essential services to people within the city limits.

Portland's vegan strip club is drawing national attention.

I guess that's the point of this. Or maybe not. As usual, I can't make heads or tails of what she's trying to say.

A while back I blogged a little about this person. If you've got 20 minutes, her recent talk was pretty interesting:

[Via Chantel.]

Here's a workplace innovation that some city workers in New York aren't too keen on.

These hysterical bloggers may be too much for you to handle.

This man ought to be showing up in town over the next day or so:

Oh, and there's that other guy in the band, too.

The state says the place is too out of control.

Looks like Portland City Council Jim "Sten" Middaugh is spending his