"Hippies of endless variation"

"We're so thankful for all we've got
And so sorry for everything we're not..."


As the only person in the great State of Orygun who has not yet weighed in on the TV show Portlandia — well. Seeing as how the IFC social satire’s been renewed for a second season, it’s high time I added to the general blogritude to say that I thought the show was.........intermittently amusing. Brilliant when it stuck to lampooning things genuinely Bridgetown, but tepid when it resorted to warmed-over SNL-style sketches.

My favorite episode of Season 1 was the second or third one, where the Mayor (played by the eerily apposite Kyle MacLachlan) commissioned a pair of local roustabouts to write a theme song for the City of Roses. Their ham-fisted attempts to hack out something suitably anthematic served as an ongoing motifs for that episode, with each songwriting attempt worse than the one before, of course.

The punch line for the storyline didn’t come till the credits, when you were treated what the two songwriters actually turned in to the Mayor. And the wonderful epiphany was that it was good — dippy and DIY and beguiling at all once, the combination of which is, after all, very much a Stumptown specialty.

I wish it really were the city’s theme song. Here it is, see you what think.

Slouching toward spring in Portlandia

Just 28 hours to go till the equinox, at this writing — but hey, who’s counting. It's been spring here for weeks, as evidenced by the number of trees in my neighborhood that are now completely swathed in neon green moss.

By way of celebrating the changing tides of the seasons, here is a poem by Portland icon Susan Denning — she of the tremendously useful resource for writers called Paper Fort, as well as the online literary magazine, Caffeine Destiny.

For more of Susan’s work, visit her page at Inknode. And celebrate the return of light with us.



NO ONE KNOWS HER

Tell her wait, little interrupter. Why bother
she is slow. She is field hungry, moving
to the edge of the garden, where she wants
to stay and stay. Spring on its way, why listen.
She is solidly hers. Ducks overhead and the sky
a speckled target. A suggestion of owls in the trees.
The trees repeat her name. How the trees insist.
The birdbath unfreezes, the ground sprouts
and shifts. Tell her back to the house with its curtains
and floors. Tell her dress the paper dolls in leaves,
give them paper knives and forks. Stand them on the counter.
Tell her lovely, little negotiator. She would rather gather
mice. She has had it with the roses. How the bugs persist.
Tell her she can wish for goats eating up the weeds—
she can hope for rabbits. Deer lingering by the fence.
She wants her animals near. She wants the only sound
to be their movements. Call her steady. Tell her resist.

Breaking news: it's raining in Oregon

Clearly it’s a 40 days/40 nights plus scenario here in tropical Portland OR, and people are freaking out. Though it’s traditional for the heavens to pour down on the annual Starlight Parade, for once the rain actually gave us a brief intermission, especially for the occasion, apparently, before returning to business as usual overnight.



It’s been raining now for months, and while everyone else gripes about it, I exult. My garden is growing itself! The entire city is shades of emerald, viridian -- it’s viridifloral, how about that -- and I’m not just referring to the moss. Okay, so my basil plants are drowning and the tomatoes are outraged. Everything else says THANK YOU.

“Rain-grey town….known for its sound…” Though the song wasn’t talking about San Francisco at the time, it fits Portland in both its sentiments and its scene-painting. This wuthering, brooding, tempest-toss’d mess is what I moved here for eight years ago, eschewing the unvarying desert of L.A. for good. So I’m astonished every single year when real-live Portlanders say: OMG, the rain! As Ken Kesey wrote in Sometimes a Great Notion, “It ain’t no secret it’s gonna rain in Oregon.”

But-but-but, you point out, he was talking about the winter. Whereas we’re supposed to be well into summer by now here. Well, console yourself with the study of historical climatology, which posits that the endless warm, wet summers of the Elizabethan era may have contributed to a creative “climate” producing the likes o’Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dowland and Inigo Jones. Not to mention Queen Bess herself.

Yes, one wet summer is not an historical epoch. Just saying. Gather ye mushrooms while ye may.

OPEN CITY

PlayGroup presents

OPEN CITY

by Althea Hukari, Shelly Lipkin, Ellen Margolis, Steve Patterson, Andrea Stolowitz, Patrick Wohlmut, Nick Zagone + Matthew B. Zrebski

directed by Matthew B. Zrebski

with the talents of Deirdre Atkinson, Ben Buckley, Timothy M. Hill and Lara Kobrin

8 playwrights. Each with a Portland location assigned by chance operation. The result: 8 short plays adding up to a kaliedoscopic portrait of Stumptown, Bridge City, The City of Roses, the City That Works, Greenlandia. The City of ..........

When: this coming Monday, February 2, 2009 @ 7:30pm

Where: The Gerding Theater, Portland Center Stage @ The Armory

Wny: The Fertile Ground Festival


Special tip for the hip: Open City leads directly to the fabulous Fertile Ground Festival closing night fete. Come for the art, stay for the hooch!

At left: the famed Fremont Bridge Troll. Which is actually in Seattle, not Portland, but who's counting.

Built for fun

TBA:08 is getting off to a great start this year with a number of events that simultaneously critique and celebrate Portland as a unique social experiment. I got a jump on the action tonight by catching the preview performance of Sojourn Theatre’s ingenious and fun new piece, Built.

The setting for the play is in South Waterfront, Portland’s glossy new development that reclaimed a blighted marshland -- long assumed uninhabitable thanks to decades of industrial waste dumped there -- and constructed a space age village of riverfront high-rises (many facing Mt Hood) built according to rigorous Green standards.

Built interweaves performed sections with game-playing activities that capture audience statements and use them in the evening’s narrative. Some of these activities are individual; I opened a kitchen drawer, for instance, to find a grid, a box of figurines, and an instruction to place a figurine in whichever quadrant represented my experience (raised in a city, in a rural environment, a small town, etc.). Later I wound up in a group of spectators where we were asked to choose which city services we wanted closer to our residences, and to arrive at a loose consensus with the others in the group.

One of the most breathtaking performances involved a couple literally walking a tightrope (actually two parallel cables) who gradually grow into disaffection as their attempt to buy a home reveals prejudices and fears that had never come to light before. Here, as elsewhere, the inventive choreography kept your eyes engaged and left your ears free to consider a series of overlapping dialogues. I especially remember one person saying a community should develop, not be developed, and then a counterpoint argument challenging that notion as a reactionary bias.

The whole event echoed a civic dialogue that’s been brewing here for years. We’re often reminded that the popular image of Portland, which is ballyhooed these days in everything from The New York Times to Bon Appetit, is the result of meticulous planning that was begun 30 years ago. How is that discussion proceeding today? Who is safeguarding what we’ve gained, and who is making sure it continues to evolve along with its citizenry?

Built is a heady and entertaining launch into these issues, and I hope you can see it. Performances are free, but only 40 can participate at one time, so reserve your space tonight.