Beulah Land

The Field-Yesterday and Today *Link Updated*

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Mount Eerie-White Stag


"From March 30th to April 4th 2009, at the invitation of Matthew Stadler, I lived in a small room on the fifth floor of the so-called "White Stag Building" in the middle of Portland. The building belonged to the University of Oregon and had a long history of various occupants, from Asian immigrant garment manufacturers to students of architecture. I wandered the building at night with recording equipment after students had left, and ruminated on the site, specifically on what the spot must have been like before the building was even there. I heard that the native people in the area didn't consider the spot suitable for settling and that it was mostly a swampy stopping-over place for travelers headed upriver at dusk. Focussing on the rumor, hanging out mostly in the underground basement, I wrote songs from the idea that a mythical white deer had died in the swamp where the city of Portland would later grow, haunting the site forever. I read that the white stag exists in the mythology of many cultures as a perpetually pursued rare creature, never caught, like humankind's quest for happiness and spiritual fulfillment. The muddy brutal history of early Portland (and everywhere else in the region in the late 19th century) seemed like an appropriate punishment from an imagined animal god that had died in the mud among the stumps and cursed the place. Now in 2009 a sign of a giant white deer in neon looms above the site like a gravestone over the cars and homeless people on the bridge."