Sometimes I pick out a topic and fiddle with it for days and other times, the topic more or less spears me with a frog gigger and there I am. From the photo you can guess what got me this time. (There’s usually a little cluster of Japanese tourists within trident range. You can tell they’re Japanese by the cameras.)
According to NPR (wouldn't you know?), a new program on TV is about Portland, Oregon, where I was born and which I have escaped. (At least I haven’t been back since 1999 when I drove an 18-foot UHaul out of town at 3AM when there was only light traffic on the Banfield.) It is a comic “sketch” program, little bits of friendly mockery of a small community of persons of a certain age. Not my community and not my age. There have been other movies and series made in Portland because cast and crew of a certain kind and age want to live there. They are from other places.
Recently I sent an article about Cinematheque/The Studio to the editors of an eJournal that shall remain nameless but that purported to believe in very high-minded social theory supporting social action to defend the vulnerable and atypical people of the world. In eConversation one editor confided that she lived across the river in Washington state and commuted at great inconvenience because she was afraid to live in NE Portland, the only part of the city where she could afford the rent. That’s where I grew up. You don’t have to tell me NE is dangerous. It’s also black. Henry Kaiser imported a lot of people from the south to build ships during WWII (when I was born) and housed them by the river which later broke the unmaintained levees and destroyed the housing and cars but luckily not the people who walked to NE Portland with all their possessions in their arms, looking for low rents.
One of the anchors of reality is history. These slacker immigrants are not big on history. They haunt bookstores but spend their money at the coffee shops next door. The coffee shops do not hire blacks: they prefer Easterners with piercing, maybe some tasteful tattoos. The levees are still not properly maintained but political interference has allowed housing to be built in that flood plain. They are nicer houses than Henry Kaiser’s.
The black gangs and the hispanic drug trade (my homeward bus was caught in a cocaine drug bust once -- very tiresome) are not the only danger. Through the Nineties when I was working in the Portlandia building as a clerical specialist (secretary) we had training for how to survive an earthquake. Get under your steel desk -- but then they took the steel desks away. For a while we all kept water and crackers under there, but gradually -- when no earthquake came -- they were consumed. They said there was not much prospect of survival anyway -- the building was constructed like the World Trade Towers, which meant that under stress it would “pancake.”
In the end the idealistic journal decided not to publish our article. They wanted to know more about the Blackfeet. Would I introduce them to a real true old-time medicine man? Oh, the shivery romance of it all.
This Portlandia building presents a lovely facade with Portlandia herself brandishing her frog gig. The sculptor is Raymond Kaskey, who insisted that the building had to include a mezzanine gallery about him and the statue. He forbids any photos, but he was not there at the time I took these.
The building itself is by Michael Graves who complained that he was given a very limited budget but Portland wanted a remarkable showcase -- and on an expensively slanting piece of land. His solution was that of the wedding cake: a standard warehouse/office building with a lot of festoons and decorations. The windows are small, few, and sealed. The ventilation was adequate only for a few months until the inhabitants began to increase, to partition, to add machinery. The head of the Inspection Section of the Bureau of Buildings became so allergic to the air (fungus, bacteria, strange substances) that he had to work in an enclosed office with an air purifier. Finally the Bureau of Buildings raised enough uproar that it was moved to a different building. The rule for successful bureaucracies is never to get rid of the cause of the complaint -- too expensive -- just get rid of the complainer.
Every place is a lot of small places pushed close together, overlapping, layered, some only perceptible to specific people. What all these people who “love” Portland know is where they go. When I was an animal control officer there in the Seventies, I went everywhere -- places I had had no idea existed. The Hmung enclave, the “trannie” community, homes of the rich and famous, drug crash pads and motorcycle gang hangouts. A uniform and badge were a big help in some places, a hazard in others. A few years ago a woman on an enviro listserv boasted about helping to create pocket parks in NE Portland, sweet little bowers where one could sit on a bench along with one’s choice of companion. Because there was lots of cover and a little separation from the houses, they became fav places for rapists and muggers to drag their victims.
The “nice” people often translate to the “naive” people and those are the people who often dominate the bureaucracies. But they get very indignant and accusing when one says they are out of it. This is a sign that they are secretly terrified.
“Portlandia” is not addressing the real city of Portland, originally called “Stumptown” for its raw, mud-embedded reality. This comedy sketch show is after the festoons: the gay mayor, Starbucks, the Hawthorne district with its leftwing super-liberal preoccupations and quaint little import shops, its hippies and extinct volcano -- or NW 23rd with its more upscale version of the same thing. I used to be the theatre reviewer for The Portland Scribe, an alernative co-op weekly paper produced by people who walked in off the streets. It was on Hawthorne. In the Fifties on NW 23rd I took ballet lessons from Mr Oumansky not far from where Gus Van Sant’s office is now and not far from the abortion clinic where I took my granddaughter because no one else would.
Some of the people who live in “Portlandia” (not Portland) think Missoula is a suburb and move there to join the Montana lit coterie. The more dangerous naive "nice" ones move to Valier and play Sim City. Let’s hope this nice little comedy sketch show entices them into reversing the flow. We happen to be real in Valier. A different genre.
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