Willamette Week, July 29, 2020 - Volume 46, Issue 40 - "Into the Gas" by Willamette Week Newspaper

“I WANTED THEM TO SEE WHAT THEY'RE SHOOTING AT.” P. 20

WILLAMETTE WEEK PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

INTO THE GAS Night after night, Portlanders confront Trump’s violent police in downtown. It feels like a party, and the end of the world. By Tess Riski Page 11

PLUS

WWEEK.COM

VOL 46.40 07.29.2020

CAUGHT COVID?

Boss Says "Too Bad" PAGE 9

OUTDOORS

Cape Disappointment Does Not Disappoint PAGE 22

IN MEMORIAM

Goodbye, BarFly PAGE 24

FACTS ARE THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE Arm Yourself. Support local, independent journalism. Become a Friend of Willamette Week. wweek.com/support

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JOSEPH BLAKE JR.

FINDINGS

SCENES FROM THE FRONTLINE DRUMLINE, PAGE 18

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 46, ISSUE 40. The Portland Police Association demanded an investigation of Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty. 6

Raffi is a big fan of Portland moms. 20

A coffee shop in Lents would add sidewalk seating if not for all the road dirt . 8

“plays weak.” 21

Providence Health & Services

denied 41 of 44 workers’ compensation claims amid the pandemic. 9

A Portland menstrual equity nonprofit severed all ties with its 22-year-old founder. 10 Portlanders attend protests dressed as Santa Claus and clad in a bear pelt . 12 A man brought a $4.49 decorated cake from Fred Meyer to the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, hoping to throw it at a federal officer. 15 Tear gas reeks of spicy, burnt plastic. 17

Mac Smiff told Ted Wheeler he Cape Disappointment is so named because an English sailor couldn’t find the entrance to the Columbia River. 22

BarFly’s Christmas parties included a drunk Santa who gave out sex toys as gifts. 24 Portland edible company Hapy Kitchen is named after the Egyptian god of the Nile. 25 The hosts of a Portland theater podcast discussed a family who mistook a bear for a dog. 26 NW Film Center is turning Zidell Yards into a giant drive-in theater. 27

2020

CORRECTION: The Portland Girl came in first place for Best Skin Care in the Best of Portland Readers’ Poll. Our published results did not reflect that. We regret the error.

ON THE COVER:

OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK:

The party at the end of the world, photo by Alex Wittwer.

WINNER

Portland Fire & Rescue kicked police officers out of its fire stations.

MASTHEAD EDITOR & PUBLISHER

Mark Zusman

EDITORIAL

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DIALOGUE FEDS AND SCOFFLAWS: GO HOME

I am appalled at the lessons I have been learning regarding the relationship between so many police departments and Black folks since slavery. I believe in and support social justice, the Black lives matter momentum, demilitarizing the police. I support the protesters here and around the world, and also want the feds to GO HOME… wherever that is. It is very scary to see how a president can deploy various agencies to fight violence, yet generate more violence, and essentially hold a city hostage, and remain whether they are wanted or not. Another radical change in how we function as a country? However, I see no valid point [or] purpose in writing graffiti all over buildings, trying to start fires, antagonizing police by shining lasers into their eyes, throwing anything at them. How is that supposed to further the cause of racial equality or anything the majority of protesters are genuinely wanting to accomplish? It seems those bent on this destructive behavior are taking away from the legitimate, essential issues and need for transformation regarding racial inequality, police reform, and holding ourselves accountable for our dark past and making lasting changes in our society. It may be fuel for lawsuits to push a confrontation between the federal agents and the rights of local government, but it all takes away from the transformation people are wanting to see happen. To the graffiti-writers, the violent, those who attack the police physically, and instigate reaction from police I say GO HOME to you as well. Just as I—and many others do not want the feds here—I and many others do not want the instigating, destructive people here either. Good riddance to both. Yolanda Wysocki Wood Village

Dr. Know

PORTLAND POLICE SHOULD PROTECT AND SERVE

Kudos to the Portland City Council for banning collaboration between the Portland police and the out-of-control federal law enforcement agencies. However, shouldn’t the Portland police be protecting the people of Portland against these unlawful abuses of power? Why aren’t the Portland police protecting protesters and defending against the federal officers that are detaining people in unmarked vehicles and indiscriminately spraying tear gas on peaceful Portlanders who are exercising their right to dissent? We should condemn the actions of violent protesters and recognize the need for the U.S. marshals to protect federal property from vandalism. However, in the face of gross overreach by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, Police Chief Chuck Lovell appears to be derelict in his duty to protect and serve the people of Portland. The City Council should pass a resolution directing the Portland police to protect protesters and defend against federal law enforcement agents when they are violating people’s rights to dissent. Why are moms and veterans having to do the police’s work? It’s time for the Portland police to protect and serve their residents and stand up to federal abuse. Ben Wallace Reed College Class of ’93 Albany, Calif. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR must include the author’s street address and phone number for verification. Letters must be 250 or fewer words. Submit to: 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: mzusman@wweek.com

BY MART Y SMITH @martysmithxxx

Oregonians are now required to wear masks in most social situations unless we’re medically unable to do so. But what are these medical conditions that make it so impossible to put a thin piece of fabric on your face? —Lone Ranger Unfortunately for snappy comebacks, Ranger, the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (aka DSM-5) doesn’t include “being an asshole” as a recognized medical condition. Still, you see where I’m headed. I’m not saying there aren’t people with legitimate clinical reasons to skip the mask. I’m just saying that if you’re at Costco waving a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag while you try to Patrick Henry your way out of wearing a mask for the 15 minutes it takes to buy a pallet of mayonnaise, you’re probably not one of them. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are only three reasons not to wear a mask: (1) You’re a baby, (2) you’re unconscious, (3) you already have trouble breathing. Obviously, No. 3 is the category you’re aiming for, but don’t get too excited—they’re talking about people who have trouble breathing because of serious illness, not those who simply find it too cognitively demanding. And anyway, if your respiratory condition really is serious, you’ll already know you’re at elevated risk for COVID -19 and will be only

too happy to avoid exposure to it by accepting alternative accommodations required under the Americans With Disabilities Act. That’s right—not only does getting in a fistfight with a Walmart greeter blow an elephantsized hole in your claim to be so medically fragile you can’t muster the strength to breathe through a Handi-Wipe, thanks to ADA regulations that donnybrook is entirely unnecessary. You can avoid the horror of donning that death-dealing mask by simply calling the establishment ahead of time and requesting a “reasonable modification” to their mask policy. They’ll almost certainly be willing to entertain alternatives like substituting a plastic face shield for the mask, letting you wait in the car for curbside delivery, or even delivering an order to your house. As long as you plan ahead rather than just showing up and making a scene, they will more than likely do this for you even if they know you’re full of shit and your only “disability” is that you’re an asshole. (And, like I said, that one doesn’t count—at least, not until DSM-6 comes out). QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

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MURMURS

MAYOR TED WHEELER BEING INTERVIEWED SHORTLY BEFORE HE WAS TEAR GASSED JULY 22.

HARDESTY AND WHEELER SPEAKING AGAIN: The friction that flared up last week between Mayor Ted Wheeler and his closest City Council ally, Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, appears to be cooling. After Hardesty demanded Wheeler rein in the Portland Police Bureau or turn it over to her, Wheeler stopped speaking to Hardesty and then rebuked her after she falsely levied—and quickly retracted—a claim that Portland police were setting fires at protests. The two began communicating again over the weekend and issued a joint statement July 27 seeking dialogue with federal law enforcement occupiers. Portland Police Association president Daryl Turner proved far less forgiving than Wheeler, the police commissioner. Turner, who wants to scuttle Hardesty’s plan to place a new police oversight agency on the November ballot, issued a scathing demand July 28 for an official investigation of Hardesty’s incendiary claims. “As police officers, we are held to the highest levels of integrity,” Turner wrote. “If we fail to meet those standards, we lose our jobs. Our elected officials should be held to those same standards.” The City Council will consider Hardesty’s proposal for the new agency July 29. JUDGE COULD HAUL WOLF INTO COURT: The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon asked U.S. District Judge Michael Simon on July 28 to find federal agents in contempt of court for violating a July 23 restraining order that prohibited the federal officers from attacking journalists and legal observers covering Portland protests. “Every day it has existed, federal agents have intentionally violated the court’s [order],” the court filing says. The ACLU also asked Simon to order acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli to “personally appear before the court and show cause as to why they should not be sanctioned for contempt,” and for every federal agent who violated the order to identify themselves and appear personally before the court. Ten reporters and legal observers submitted written testimony Tuesday describing federal agents assaulting them or blocking them from reporting on protests after the court issued the July 23 restraining order.” “I saw [the agent] raise his weapon, deliberately point it at me, and fire several rounds,” Oregon Public Broadcasting reporter Jonathan Levinson said in his testimony. “My camera and lens were splattered with paint.”

PORTLAND SCHOOLS CAN’T REOPEN UNLESS HEALTH IMPROVES: Portland Public Schools will hold online classes through at least Nov. 5, the district announced July 28, shortly after it became clear that Portland schools—public and private— are unlikely to open anytime soon. To resume inperson classes, at least for kindergarten through third-grade students, Multnomah County would need to reduce its number of COVID-19 cases by more than 40 percent, and for a full reopening, the cases would need to decline more significantly under state criteria. Oregon does not currently meet the health benchmarks for school reopening set by Gov. Kate Brown. “I have to tell you closing schools in the spring was one of the most difficult decisions I have made during the pandemic,” said Brown, before announcing criteria likely to keep most schools closed for now. “It’s clear that this school year will not look like any other.”

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WHEELER CAMPAIGN WOES CONTINUE: The City Elections Office fined Ted Wheeler’s campaign $2,000 this week: The campaign failed to include required disclosures about contributors in a May 14 email and accepted more than $500 from an individual contributor, developer Dan Petrusich, after new limits went into place in May. Wheeler’s campaign has now been cited six times by the elections office, which Greg McKelvey, campaign manager for Wheeler’s November opponent, Sarah Iannarone, says shows the mayor “believes he is above the law.” Wheeler’s campaign manager, Amy Rathfelder, counters that critics’ scrutiny of Wheeler’s donors is “borderline harassment,” and that the mayor is being held to an unfair standard: “The fact that there is neither a grace period or safe harbor allowed under a new, complex set of rules that requires significant time and expertise is without precedent in our city.” FILL OUT THOSE BALLOTS: Mail-in ballots for the special runoff election to fill the vacancy created by the death of City Commissioner Nick Fish must be returned by 8 pm on Aug. 11. The sole race on the ballot features former Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith and Dan Ryan, onetime executive director of the educational nonprofit All Hands Raised. WW endorses Ryan. Read why at wweek.com.

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Paid Political Advertisement

rown r Kate B Governo ler e ed Wh e Mayor T itz r F sioner Commis d r a esty sioner H Commis udaly sioner E Commis

Facts about the Portland Police Bureau USE OF FORCE (Use of force includes resisting handcuffing) Of 89,015 total Portland police responses (Jan – Mar 2020): 5.46% resulted in custodies (4,856 total) .19% of 89,015 total Portland police responses resulted in use of force POLICE OFFICERS PER CAPITA Portland Population has Grown, Sworn Officers Haven't 1995 Portland Population = 497,600 1995 Portland Police Sworn Officers = 1,001 2020 Portland Population = 653,115 2020 Portland Police Sworn Officers = 1,001 Ratio of police officers to citizens is inadequate. Every day each precinct has at least one shift that falls below the PPB required minimums GUN VIOLENCE July 2020 has already seen 42+ shootings July 2019 at this same time there were 11 380% increase in gun violence compared to July of 2019 50% of Gun Violence Victims are African American POLICE RESPONSE TIMES Prior to riots, emergency priority calls averaged 2-3 minute response time from officers Currently, emergency top priority calls (violent crime IN PROGRESS) have a response time of 8 minutes or more. If your call is not a priority it could be a wait time of over 24 hours or go unanswered. BODY CAMS Portland Police Association President Daryl Turner is IN FAVOR of body cams. Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty is adamantly AGAINST them. 6

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

Governor Kate Brown, Mayor Ted Wheeler and Members of Portland City Council,

The spouses of Portland police are writing to express deep concern over the events in Portland over the past 58+ straight days. For more than seven weeks and with the full knowledge and participation of the city, protestors and rioters have descended on downtown Portland on a nightly basis. The City of Portland has tied the hands of PPB officers, restricting their ability to properly defend themselves and enforce the law. City leadership is subjecting officers to routine verbal, emotional and physical abuse. Occupied police facilities have been barricaded and lit on fire in an attempt to murder the police personnel and civilian employees inside. A federal law enforcement officer was bludgeoned with a 16-inch sledge hammer. High powered lasers have been pointed at officers, which can result in permanent eye damage. At least three federal officers in Portland may not recover their vision, after rioters shined powerful lasers in their eyes to blind them. Officers hold the line while dangerous projectiles are launched at them including, but not limited to, commercial grade explosives, fireworks, rocks, bottles, bricks, batteries, blades, paintballs, bags of urine and feces, ball bearings launched with slingshots (which at high speeds can be deadly). Several dozen officers have sustained injury. Officers are forced to wait until an "adequate" amount of life-threatening actions have been directed at them before they can declare a riot or unlawful assembly and deploy crowd control munitions. Oregon state law allows any citizen to use a reasonable amount of force to protect themselves or a third party from bodily harm. The city has restricted Portland police use of force to the point of having LESS rights to self-defense than the average citizen.Outside the besieged Justice Center, officers are met with messages saying they should die, rioters will “kiss their wives goodnight,” they are bastards, they are killers, they are racists, they are pigs, etc. Officers are berated, cussed at and spit on in the streets. The officers’ repeated and prolonged exposure to traumatic and stressful events under the scope of their employment is taking a major psychological toll and can lead to increased rates of PTSD. The City Council’s anti-police rhetoric, particularly on the part of member Jo Ann Hardesty, vilifies and demonizes PPB officers and contributes to a hostile work environment by its own city leadership. Commissioner Hardesty was quoted in Marie Claire Magazine saying, “I believe Portland Police [Bureau] is lying about the damage—or starting the fires themselves—so that they have justification for attacking community members.” This outlandish statement shows Commissioner Hardesty’s reckless disregard for the truth and is grounds for a defamation lawsuit. Commissioner Hardesty is perpetuating misinformation and untruths about Portland police, which further emboldens the rioters. As a result, Portland Police officers have become the targets of doxing attacks, in which their personal information is being shared on social media in a malicious manner. The complete lack of respect, dehumanization and gross mischaracterization of the men and women behind the badge is disgraceful. These same men and women are members of the most progressive police department in the nation that agencies across the country attempt to emulate. Not only are you failing PPB but you are failing the city as a whole. You’ve allowed the disruption of daily life for tax paying, law-abiding citizens and business owners who’ve had to deal with constant harassment, loss of income, property damage, and an inability to safely enter or exit their homes and businesses. The Portland Business Alliance estimates downtown businesses have lost a staggering $23 million and counting amid the riots. Because you’ve allowed insurrection, lawlessness and anarchy to ensue for weeks, you’ve reduced the ability for officers to respond to emergency calls outside of the nightly rioting. Since the riots began, the entire PPB Detective Division has been pulled away from their investigation caseload to process the revolving door of nightly arrests. Detectives have no time to process their stacks of cases, leaving victims of homicide, assault, rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse and robbery without the justice and police protection they deserve.

Shootings so far in July have increased by 380% compared to this time last year, yet Portland City Council voted to dissolve the 34-member Gun Violence Reduction Team. Instead of acting to address the severe understaffing of your police department, Portland City Council has voted to defund $15 million from the police budget as an appeasement to the mob. Various proposals by the city to further debilitate police officers are being advanced, proving city leadership is too anti-police to effectively govern. Portland Fire Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty mandated that Portland police may no longer use fire stations for staging during tactical operations. The locations of fire stations strategically placed throughout the city allowed police to respond quickly when criminal activity is occurring. Without this option, it will take longer for police to arrive on-scene which will negatively affect public safety. Portland Police have been ordered to stand down and not prevent any vandalism, looting or arson throughout the city. On the night of July 18, 2020 a mob of rioters were marching toward the Portland Police Association building in North Portland. Instead of standing outside the building to protect it, the Portland Police Rapid Response Team was ordered to wait blocks down the street and watch the mob set the building on fire. At which point, they had to give ample warning for the crowd to disperse before they could move in and put the fire out. In other words, Portland police must now sit back, watch and respond after the fact. Local leaders are aiding and abetting politically-approved lawlessness in the streets. Multnomah County’s policies of no bail/low bail releases are permitting rioters to return to engage in unlawful conduct again and again. Charges have been dropped and cases dismissed for those who have committed serious felony crimes including riot, arson and theft in the first degree. State officials and Portland City Council need to advocate for the prosecution to the fullest extent of the law of those responsible for these acts of violence. The President of the United States has the responsibility to protect America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The spouses of Portland police are supportive of federal police acting within their constitutional rights to protect federal property against domestic terrorists. 40 U.S. Code 1315 gives DHS the ability to deputize officers in connection with the protection of property owned or occupied by the federal government and persons on that property. State and city leadership is responsible for malfeasance and grave dereliction of duty. You’re complicit in the violence that has consumed the city in the name of social justice. You continually allow criminals in the street to dictate public safety policy, you’ve caved to domestic terrorists and allowed your political agenda to supersede law. Your bias and prejudice against the police has allowed you to commit egregious injustices to officers and their families, to citizens and business owners. Governor Kate Brown, Mayor Ted Wheeler and Members of Portland City Council, we have had ENOUGH. The spouses of Portland police are calling on state and city leadership to allow PPB to restore order to the city, condemn the nightly violence and the continued abuse and extensive harm against Portland and federal police officers.

Paid for by Stacey Smith of Portland Oregon And the spouses of Portland Police Officers

BRIAN BURK

NEWS

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK

Future Tense

Metro is sending voters a transportation tax, even as tomorrow’s commute looks foggy.

CAN’T HARDLY WAIT: Metro’s transportation measure is arriving faster than some business leaders would prefer. BY R AC H E L M O N A H A N

rmonahan@wweek.com

This month, regional government Metro referred to the November ballot the largest tax measure in Portland history: $5 billion for transportation, including a light rail line to Tualatin. Metro is plowing forward in the middle of a pandemic, against the outcry of business owners, because it says the need is urgent. “The time to act is now,” Metro Council President Lynn Peterson told WW before the referral of the measure. “If we delay, we will not be able to create tens of thousands of jobs when we need them most, and our region could miss opportunities to leverage federal, private and philanthropic funds.” But Metro is taking a big gamble at a moment of rapid change. That unpredictability extends to transportation. The fallout from COVID -19, social distancing and the economic downturn are changing American traffic patterns and may result in other, more drastic changes in how people commute. Already, some in the car industry predict a decrease in driving. Will that chilling effect extend to MAX? WW spoke to a half-dozen longtime observers of transportation patterns. Some say there’s no way to predict what the pandemic will mean for roads and rail. “We should at least hold off making big investments until we see how this shakes out,” says economist Joe Cortright. “There’s no need to spend billions on the Metro package, or on the Rose Quarter or the Columbia River Crossing, if commuting is going to go down. These are mostly 50-to-100-year investments, and it’s worth waiting one to two years to see whether this prediction comes true.” Peterson says while it’s necessary to start the work now, some of the projects she’s sending to voters in a package called Get Moving PDX are a long-term effort that can be adjusted to match demand. “Our planning and research teams are closely monitoring and studying COVID -related trends in transportation around the world, as well as what we can learn from other disruptive events in the past,” says Peterson. “Get Moving is a long-term effort. If voters approve the measure, some projects will get underway as

soon as next year. Others will begin later in the decade.” But the pandemic presents three central questions about how people will travel for the foreseeable future. Metro will have to confront all three between now and November. More people are telecommuting. How much of that will last? Portland may continue to see a wide swath of the population work from home and shop online. “There’s a huge amount of uncertainty,” says Cortright. “There’s been a shift in the adoption of things like work at home and e-commerce. Work trips and shopping trips account for half of transportation in the U.S. If people change their behavior to take fewer trips, you’ve reduced the pressure on the transportation system.” And it could impact voters’ support, given that homelessness, policing, protests, the coronavirus and the economy all ranked as higher priorities, according to survey results released by opponents of the measure. Fewer people are commuting by public transit. Will that last? The first months of the pandemic saw TriMet actually encourage its riders to stay off trains and buses unless they were commuting to essential jobs. The regional transit agency is slowly ramping up capacity—but will public confidence follow? “Concerns about the coronavirus, and a commitment to physical distancing, has led to a plunge in TriMet ridership, says Andrew Hoan, who is president and CEO of Portland Business Alliance, a leading opponent of the measure. “Billions of dollars are at stake and there has been zero re-evaluation of this measure since we entered the post-pandemic reality.” A study of COVID-19 infections on the Tokyo subway found low virus transmission on trains. If Oregonians adopt mask wearing and otherwise feel secure, that could add to ridership. Proponents of the measure say those who need public transportation most have continued to ride and will do so into the future. Even without a return to public

transportation, the investments are necessary for people who will ride regardless. “We cannot ignore the fact that people are starting to go back to work [and] that some folks’ work has involved commuting by bus this entire time,” says Richa Poudyal, advocacy director of the Street Trust. “People, especially low-income and communities of color, are going to continue to rely on public transit to get to where they need to go.” Will the business district downtown bounce back? Even if Portlanders commute to work and shop, will their destination still be downtown? The downtown business community has taken a significant economic hit. It’s clear some small businesses won’t be back. And downtown office workers may opt to telecommute. That could affect who uses the biggest investment of the Metro measure — a near-billion-dollar investment in a new MAX line through Southwest Portland and the ’burbs. Supporters of the measure say it’s still necessary. “I believe a combination of creating a culture of mask wearing, better sanitation measures, and vaccines will let people feel comfortable about transit within that 12-to-24-month period,” says Chris Smith, a candidate for the Metro Council. “As far as the Southwest Corridor goes, I think of our high-capacity transit investments in a 50-to-100-year frame, and it’s important to keep developing the backbone network.” Peterson argues the Southwest Corridor is not simply about downtown. “Downtown Portland is still the economic engine of our region,” says Peterson. “But the Southwest Corridor is a project to serve the region. Workers at Bridgeport Village, nurses and doctors at [Oregon Health & Science University], and students at Portland Community College and OHSU are all key, planned riders. And the corridor plan includes millions of dollars of investments in streets and sidewalks in the vicinity of the project, along with community stabilization efforts to limit displacement and support small businesses.” Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

NEWS BRIAN BURK

MAPPED

Out of Bounds

A new city program to boost outdoor dining isn’t helping east of 82nd Avenue. 700

A new city of Portland initiative aims to help restaurants and bars move service onto streets and sidewalks across the city. But WW’s analysis of permits issued for the program shows the benefits are anything but equal. The Portland Bureau of Transportation launched its Healthy Businesses program on May 28. PBOT’s goal was to help establishments pounded by the pandemic expand onto Portland’s sidewalks, parking spaces and even entire roadways. In normal times, the city charges hundreds of dollars for sidewalk cafe permits, but the Healthy Businesses permits for expansion are free. Still, of the more than 700 businesses that have applied to participate, less than a dozen are east of 82nd Avenue. COVID-19 has hit East Portland hard. State figures show neighborhoods east of 82nd have some of the city’s highest rates of infection. As bars and restaurants struggle to stay afloat amid social distancing restrictions and high unemployment, outer eastside establishments are also lagging in their ability to offer customers seating outside. ParkStone Wood Kitchen + Taps at 9921 NE Cascades Parkway is one of the few outer eastside businesses that applied. ParkStone says expanded outdoor seating has been good for business. PBOT data shows only seven applicants for the new program—including ParkStone—are east of 82nd. Permits are heavily concentrated in downtown Portland, along nightlife destination streets such as Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard and North Mississippi Avenue. PBOT spokesman Dylan Rivera cites a few reasons for the unequal distribution of the outdoor permits: the expense of building an outdoor seating area, and the wide busy streets and lack of sidewalks east of 82nd. Rivera adds that PBOT is seeking to market the program to businesses run by people of color and has arranged discounted goods and services for them. WW asked more than a dozen East Portland businesses about the new program and got mixed responses. Some said they have enough outdoor seating already. For others, expansion just doesn’t make sense. Refuge Coffee House in Lents is located near an entrance to Interstate 205 where owner Kimberley Richardson says 20,000 cars zoom past each day. Refuge has a few outdoor tables, but the traffic prevents adding more. “With the amount of road dirt, we’d have to wipe tables down often,” Richardson says. “We’d definitely like it if was possible. We would probably get more business.” Bella’s Italian Bakery and Market at 9119 SE Woodstock Blvd. faces similar limitations. Owner Michelle Vernier says due to Bella’s location on a busy corner at 91st Avenue, it’s not possible to add more seating beyond her existing two tables. “Business is down,” Vernier says. “If I could block off any of the street for more tables outside, I’d absolutely do it.” LATISHA JENSEN.

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

PARK PLACE: Restauants and bars, like this one in the Pearl District, have installed street seating.

BLACK AND WHITE IN OREGON

How Do Students Perform in Portland Public Schools? A 2019 audit found deep racial disparities in student achievement. Lif e in Portland f or Black and white people is overwhelmingly different. In the coming weeks, WW will explore these contrasting realities—the inequities that have molded the Black experience in this city and state. This week, we look at education. An Oregon Department of Education audit reveals deep disparities in public school performance rates in Portland, with white children greatly outperforming their peers in school subjects. Achievement gaps are prominent throughout Oregon but far worse in Portland. The biggest gap is between white and Black students. A 2019 state audit of Portland Public Schools found a 53 percentage point achievement gap, for example, between the district’s white and Black students in language arts. The report shows only 21% of Black students met or exceeded grade-level standards on the 2017-18 English Language Arts achievement test compared to 74% of white students. The achievement level differences for math are even steeper. Only 11% of Black students met the standards for math compared to 60% of white students. The lack of teacher representation and discriminatory policies are partly to blame, states a 2010 report by the Multnomah County Coalition of Communities of Color. Students have demanded change over and over, but too often their social status determines the quality of their education and their access to resources. “Substantial gaps also remain based on economic status, language fluency, race, and disability status,” the audit report states. As WW previously reported in this series, poverty rates are the highest for Black Portlanders compared to other demographics. When children live in poverty, daily worries become more focused on survival, and education may not be their primary concern. This is one of the ways they get pushed steps behind their more affluent peers. LATISHA JENSEN.

MEGAN HARRING

NEWS

Virus Proof Frontline workers who contract COVID-19 want automatic workers’ compensation benefits. Employers say not so fast.

ON THE MEND: For weeks, Megan Harring was too sick to work or care for her family. BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS

njaquiss@wweek.com

In the middle of March, Megan Harring began to feel sick. It was early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when personal protective equipment was in short supply and few in Oregon could get tested for the virus. Harring, 33, is a registered labor and delivery nurse at Providence’s Hood River Hospital. After she developed a fever, nausea, a splitting headache and shortness of breath, her doctor suggested going to Seattle for a drivethru coronavirus test. That was impractical for the mother of two young children. Harring was so sick she missed a month of work. In mid-April, she finally got a test—it was positive. On her doctor’s advice, she filed a workers’ compensation claim. Workers’ compensation insurance is a state-regulated system designed to reimburse workers who have gotten ill or injured at their workplace, paying for their medical expenses and lost pay. All employers in Oregon must, by law, purchase insurance for their employees, or selfinsure. Providence Health & Services—the health care giant with more than $20 billion in annual revenues, 51 hospitals, more than 1,000 clinics, and 120,000 employees across five Western states—is a self-insurer. Therefore, Providence can decide whether to approve workers’ comp claims or deny them. In the case of Harring, the nonprofit denied her claim, telling her in a May 1 letter she’d failed to produce sufficient evidence she’d gotten sick at work. “They said, ‘Do you have proof of contact?’” Harring recalls. “How could I? Nobody was being tested.” Harring is not alone. In Oregon, Providence has denied far more workers’ comp claims since COVID erupted than any other employer or insurer, including SAIF, the stateowned insurer that dominates the market. Indeed, state data shows that most workers’ compensation claims filed for COVID-19 are approved. As of July 10, workers’ comp insurers had approved 74% of the 557 claims filed. Providence was the outlier, according to the state statistics, rejecting 41 of 44 claims at that time. A state panel grilled Rich Reynolds, Providence’s senior manager of workers’ compensation, at a July 15 hearing. Reynolds told the committee that Providence investigated all workers’ comp claims thoroughly but fairly and paid for testing and quarantine time even when it denied claims. Pressed why Providence’s denial rate was so much higher than other insurers’, Reynolds said, “It might be too soon to draw any conclusions.” For the past month, at Gov. Kate Brown’s request, a state panel called the Oregon Management-Labor Advi-

sory Committee, or MLAC, has grappled with an impor- ately affected by COVID-19. tant question for frontline workers like Harring: Should Politicians and employers routinely tout the heroism of people who work in jobs with a high risk of coronavirus these frontline workers. But many of those heroes, Hagins infection and then test positive for the virus be presumed says, have poor or no health insurance, cannot afford to to have gotten infected on the job? take time off if they get sick, and may not know they are If so, frontline workers who contracted the virus eligible for workers’ compensation. couldn’t be denied coverage by their employer, and would “It’s important for the Legislature to live up to our have their medical bills paid and lost wages compensated. obligation to these workers,” Hagins says. “When you look If not, they could have to pay their own medical bills and at the numbers of all workers who are getting COVID as use sick leave and vacation to recover. a function of keeping our economy going, that says to me It’s a question Brown’s panel has not resolved. that presumptive coverage is necessary.” Many business owners say the current rules, in which Kevin Mealy, a spokesman for the Oregon Nurses Assoemployees must prove their injury or illness originated in ciation, points to the example of Providence, Harring’s the workplace, are highly effective. They say “presump- employer, as evidence the system isn’t working. tive coverage” is too broad and would place a financial “More than 10% of Oregon’s COVID-19 cases are health burden on employers. care workers,” Mealy says. “We’re asking Providence to do “We’ve got a workers’ compensation system that the right thing and protect people, not profits. Presumpworks very well,” says Sandra McDonough, president and tion must be the standard for the nurses and other frontCEO of Oregon Business & Industry. “If somebody got line workers we rely on.” COVID-19 in the workplace, it should already As for Harring, she’s returned to be covered.” work and the gym, but nearly four Prior Presumption “The presumption that working Oregomonths after she first fell ill, she The concept of presumptive nians who have COVID-19 could only have still feels short of breath during insurance coverage is not been exposed at work risks the stability and what used to be a routine workunique to COVID-19. Firebalance of the workers’ compensation sysout. She’s appealing the denial fighters, in particular, have tem,” Portland Business Alliance CEO of her workers’ comp claim. But successfully made the case Andrew Hoan told MLAC in a July 15 letter. whatever happens, with COVIDin the Oregon Legislature “The data we have heard supports that the 19 increasing its grip on Oregon, that they should get presystem is working as intended. A presumpshe’d like to see more protection sumptive compensation for tion of compensability for COVID-19 is not for her colleagues on the front respiratory diseases. Other needed.” lines. first responders, like police But organized labor points to denials of “ We put ourselves out there officers and paramedics, get claims like Harring’s as proof COVID-19 is every day, no matter what,” Harpresumptive coverage for different. There are still too many uncertainring says. “And we’re just at a post-traumatic stress. ties, including asymptomatic spread, and too higher risk of getting infected.” So far, 17 states have few tests available for employees to provide enacted some version of the kind of proof some insurance claim C OV I D - 1 9 p r e s u m p t i o n adjusters require. And, as the state’s case since the pandemic began, count has risen, contact tracing has proven according to the National less effective. That makes it even harder to Conference of State Legisdetermine how someone got the virus. latures. Some states, such Advocates say Oregon should offer preas New Hampshire, have sumptive coverage for certain high-risk prodrawn their laws narrowly, fessions—such as health care workers, first benefiting just first respondresponders, custodians, and food industry ers. Other states, such as workers. Felisa Hagins, a lobbyist for Service Colorado and Illinois, have Employees International Union Local 49, p rov i d e d wo r ker s’ co mnotes that data shows low-income people pensation protection to “all of color who work as custodians, security essential workers.” NJ. guards, retail clerks and laundry staff, and in the agricultural industry are disproportionWillamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

startup as a nonprofit. Instead, the contract deemed her organization a chapter of Period. Weeks later, after Okamoto mentioned Jaiyoba’s organization in an interview and claimed it as a Period affiliate, Jaiyeoba asked her to stop. Okamoto sent her a November 2016 message, which Jaiyeoba shared with WW, that read, “We’re just noticing your model is essentially the exact replica and it developed once we provided our toolkit to you.” The educational toolkits are given exclusively to Period chapters through a password-protected portal. Jaiyeoba says the chapter model is a way for Period to subsume other activists so it doesn’t have to compete with them for resources. Manju Bangalore runs the Eugene-based menstrual nonprofit Operation Period. She says, for a brief time in 2018, Period gave products to Operation Period but counted those metrics as their own: “It was like we were just distributors for them,” Bangalore said. Period later refused to routinely provide product for Bangalore’s nonprofit if it didn’t become a chapter. That type of competitive behavior, says Jennifer WeissWolf, a New York author and lawyer who’s helped elimiILERI JAIYEOBA NADYA OKAMOTO nate sales taxes on menstrual products in 10 states, is an anomaly. “Try to picture another movement where somebody has named themselves the movement, threw their face all over everything and said, ‘I am the sole storyteller,’” says Wolf-Weiss. “People have this feeling of being gaslit or ignored in pursuit of the next award, the next magazine picture.” Baedard says Period is conducting a full internal audit, including of its chapters and partnerships. “Period is revisiting all our programs to ensure we are working collaboratively, closely and in true support of young activists, BY S OPH I E P E E L speel@wweek.com résumé by exaggerating her own housing insecurity. whether they are a Period chapter or another organizaOkamoto did not respond to requests for comment. In tions,” she says. “We have much work to do.” Nadya Okamoto’s bio at age 22 is the stuff of lofty child- a long public apology she posted June 25 after Jaiyeoba’s In a 2019 talk show appearance, Okamoto told the hood daydreams. A once-homeless teen in Portland, criticism, she admitted she had “caused harm” and said hosts she felt as if “we needed a book to claim that this she founded an internationally known nonprofit at 16, she “deeply apologizes to those I have silenced or invali- movement is real. It’s not just me and some friends getting authored a highly regarded book, and will soon graduate dated over the years.” together on the weekend putting together period packs from Harvard. After the backlash, Period severed ties with its founder. anymore, but we’re a real national movement.” She’s been the face of an Adidas shoe campaign for “In order to rebuild Period, we have terminated our But activists say it was a real movement long before women’s empowerment, was named an influential figure contract with Nadya and called for an independent Okamoto arrived. “They took all of the ideas that so many by such magazines as Forbes and Bloomberg Businessweek, review,” read a July 2 statement from Period’s board. people have spent many years evolving and refining…and ran for city council in Cambridge, Mass., during college— Period’s executive director, Michela Bedard, tells WW they slapped it in their own manifesto,” says Weiss-Wolf. Okamoto was everywhere, doing everything. it has no contractual or financial ties remaining with During interviews, Nadya would use the term “legally Okamoto found the inspiration for her Portland-based Okamoto and that it’s been “a difficult and embarrassing homeless” to describe her experience. After her and Okanonprofit, Period, during long bus routes through Old time.” She says the backlash has affected the amount of moto’s fallout, Jaiyeoba says she learned that Okamoto’s Town to private Catlin Gabel School in 2014, when she menstrual products donated by corporate partners. definition of homelessness was living with family friends spoke with houseless women struggling to find menstrual Despite pushing Okamoto out, Period finds itself on for several months. That’s also the federal definition of products. shaky ground as activists and chapters continue to voice homelessness. But critics still say she was being disinShe writes in her book, Period Power: A Manifesto for concerns about the organization and Okamoto. More than genuous. the Menstrual Movement, that the women’s stories “stirred 50 of Period’s purported 750 chapters have decided to “The kind of homeless-to-girl-boss thing is so toxic something in me.” She adds, “I felt a sense of duty to these split with the organization, Bedard says. in a way, you make people believe you pulled yourself up women.” “Period should not be any single face or story and is from your bootstraps,” says Jaiyeoba. “So when you put Okamoto then launched a one-woman quest, visiting committed to structural changes that will better collabo- on a façade just to make yourself sound better, to market homeless shelters and pushing them to provide menstrual rate with and amplify the incredible work done by fellow yourself, it’s messed up.” products. activists,” says Bedard. Last month, Okamoto apologized for “inaccurately “From what I could tell at the time, no one else was But critics say that isn’t enough, and want the non- [characterizing] my situation as anything more than it talking about the need for period products,” Okamoto profit to dissolve. was.” But, she added, “it was indeed traumatizing for me as writes in her book. “I felt like I had something new to offer “When the inside of your organization has been this a young woman.” the world and a duty to speak up. I felt empowered.” toxic space, how much of that is actually good?” says Two local chapter leaders worry backlash against OkaPeriod, which provides menstrual products to home- Jaiyeoba. “Does it matter the good you’ve done when it’s moto is detracting from the core of the movement. less women and educates about period equity through a come at a cost?” “We don’t want passion to die for this cause because system of chapters, grew quickly. As of 2018, it had annual of these allegations,” says Aishwarya Marathe, a former revenues of $420,000. Jaiyeoba first met Okamoto at a conference when they chapter leader at Arts & Communications Magnet AcadBut Okamoto’s ascent ended this summer in an Inter- were both 16. Okamoto had recently founded her non- emy in Beaverton. net firestorm. profit, and Jaiyeoba planned to create a period equity “When you’re fighting for something like menstrual Last month, Ileri Jaiyeoba, a New York City period organization, too. She looked up to Okamoto, because her rights, you want to get as big as possible in order to serve activist, wrote an article on Medium accusing Okamoto of personal narrative had strong parallels to Jaiyeoba’s. your mission,” says Lincoln High School chapter leader “misleading and coercing” her. “Nadya is a very enchanting person, a lot of people are Avery Hellberg. A swell of activist voices joined Jaiyeoba’s, alleging drawn to her because of her story,” says Jaiyeoba, who In her book, Okamoto says she’s not in period equity Okamoto routinely muscled out Black and brown activists, graduated from New York University this year. “She’s “for the money or the recognition.” She dismissed the monopolized resources, and took credit for other people’s inspiring, it’s easy to be drawn her.” prospect of competition posed by similar nonprofits. work. Over the next year, Jaiyeoba tells WW, she showed “I don’t think that there should be any sort of competi“Have they exploited people? Yes,” Jaiyeoba tells WW. interest in partnering with Period but was later caught off tion between different mobilized groups working toward “Have they erased other activists? Yeah.” guard when Okamoto insisted that Jaiyeoba had signed a the same goal,” she wrote. “I mean, aren’t we all on the Many critics also accused Okamoto of inflating her contract that wouldn’t allow Jaiyeoba to register her own same team?” MONIQUE MUSE

M T V. C O M

NEWS

Success Story

A Portland student became the face of the menstrual equity movement. Others say she silenced them to become famous.

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

ALEX WITTWER

LIFESAVERS: A medic waits in the back of the Breonna Taylor Memorial Medical Utility Vehicle.

INTO THE GAS Night after night, Portlanders confront Trump’s violent police in downtown. It feels like a party, and the end of the world.

BY TE SS R I SK I

tess@wweek.com

On Saturday night at 10 pm, a woman in her 20s, dressed head to toe in black, sat on the tailgate of a white truck parked at the corner of Southwest Main Street and 4th Avenue. She was waiting for tear gas. The “Breonna Taylor Memorial Medical Utility Vehicle”—named for a Black emergency medical technician killed by Louisville, Ky., police earlier this year—is a do-it-yourself M*A*S*H unit on wheels, built in the back of a used truck by a collective of Portland nurses and EMTs, and equipped with a gurney, a defibrillator, helmets and bottles of saline solution. The young woman sitting on the tailgate went by the name “K.” A nurse at a Portland hospital, she started going to the protests recently to aid the injured. She says she watched federal officers use tear gas and rubber bullets on demonstrators in downtown Portland for several nights and feared that if someone were severely wounded, an ambulance couldn’t reach the scene in time. K and her colleagues decided to start a mobile clinic that could park at the edge of protests so they could render aid to those injured within minutes and, if necessary, drive them quickly to a nearby hospital or ambulance. So she sat in the parked truck on the northwest corner of Southwest 4th Avenue and Main Street and waited.

She said the feds would fire the first round of tear gas like clockwork: 11 pm on the weekends, followed by a second round at 1 am. That night, the call for help was right on schedule—10:58 pm. “We need an ambulance!” said a street medic sprinting out of the crowd and yelling toward the collective of volunteers. “A mom got shot. It’s more than we can handle.” The mom—one from the “ Wall of Moms,” who assemble at dusk—bled from a puncture in her face. That’s where she’d been shot with a munition, the medics later said. A handful of them hopped into a dark blue van and drove south to find her. Minutes later, 15 protesters staggered toward K and the MUV, tears streaming out of their puffy, red eyes. They had arrived from the front lines of a protest along the fence of the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse two blocks from where K was parked when they were blasted with a cloud of CS gas. The medics, identifiable by a cross of red duct tape on their backs, held Arrowhead water bottles with squirttop lids high above their helmeted heads and squirted water directly into each protester’s eyes. (The full force of the pressure is necessary to flush out CS gas, K said.) After being doused, the protesters thanked the medics,

water streaming down their faces as if they had just been baptized. “They didn’t teach us about being in combat zones,” K said of nursing school. K is just one of thousands of people who return at nightfall to three square blocks in downtown Portland. For the past 60 days, protesters gathered along 3rd Avenue to demonstrate against systemic racism in the criminal justice system. By late June, those protests dwindled to a few hundred demonstrators each night. Then, in early July, President Trump sent his police force to Portland. That deployment reawakened Portland’s protests in a way no other city in the nation has experienced. On July 11, a federal officer sent a protester to the hospital with a fractured skull, and four days later video surfaced of agents snatching two people off the streets into unmarked rental vans. Today, thousands gather each night along the west face of the federal courthouse—chanting, singing and launching fireworks at the building. Portland is now a national symbol. Depending on which media you consult, it’s an example of liberal defiance, a laboratory of authoritarianism or a carnival of anarchists allowed to run amok. CONT. on page 12 Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

ALEX WITTWER

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

ALEX WITTWER

WE DO THIS EVERY NIGHT: Protesters gather each evening in parks opposite the downtown courthouses. They bring hockey sticks and tennis rackets to swat tear gas canisters back over the fence. There’s a marching band and a lone trumpet player. On one street corner, an artist sets up an easel each night and works on an oil painting of the crowd trying to tear down the courthouse fence.

And there’s plenty of media: Camera crews from CNN arrived last week, and nearly every freelance photographer in this city is now contracted to a national outlet to document the chaos. A new street celebrity emerges nightly: a naked woman doing yoga poses along police lines, a Navy veteran walloped with batons, potbellied grandfathers toting leaf blowers to blast tear gas clouds back at the officers. The mayor was tear gassed last Wednesday. The irony was not lost on protesters, who’ve nicknamed him “Tear Gas Teddy” as the commissioner who oversees the city’s own gas-happy Police Bureau. By July 25, protests erupted nationwide, from Seattle to Texas, as demonstrators expressed solidarity with the people of Portland. But what’s happening in Portland is not merely a spectacle. It is also a place. “It’s a society being built,” says Mac Smiff, a Portlandbased activist and writer who has attended the protests since late May. “We’re not holding our city hostage. We’re saying we are the city.” To understand what’s really happening in Portland, we

entered a world that recurs each night in Chapman and Lownsdale squares. In this world, people come dressed as Santa Claus or a medieval knight. One woman arrives topless, another wears the pelt of a bear. Dissenting lawyers arrive wearing suits; nurses show up in hospital scrubs. People make shields out of whatever they have at home: the lids of storage bins, plastic barrels cut in half, a framed poster of the United States Constitution. It’s a world where CS gas is so thick that, amid its hazy fog, it can be impossible to distinguish silhouetted riot cops from protesters clad in helmets. In this world, food is free and so is medical care. Protesters call each other “comrade” and “friend” and forget new people’s names easily because it’s hard to remember anyone when everyone’s faces are covered with masks and goggles. In our four nights here, we found few people willing to speak on the record. Most of them fear retaliation from the feds. It proved hard to get somebody to describe how they sawed a hole in the fence or tossed a bottle at a riot cop, even if they consider such acts to be civil disobedience. But there is a discernible rhythm here, even a ritual.

And each night unfolds in nearly the same way, with three acts so precise in their timing you could practically set your watch by them. Between the tear gas and rubber bullets, there are often moments of joy and compassion, when strangers lend each other masks and goggles. Those who talk about what they’re feeling describe a sense of purpose, even peace. “[It’s] a place I can be my most authentic self,” said a protester named Joey, who declined to share his last name. Sporting a blue L.A. Dodgers cap, Joey sat on a park bench in Lownsdale Square on the evening of July 24. It was his second night at protests. He had recently arrived in Portland from Arizona. “I just moved here from a place that is definitely not as liberal and is harsher [toward me] as a Black man,” Joey said. “When you get to the energy out here, the things they’re chanting, it makes me emotional, it makes me feel wanted and appreciated and respected. It makes me feel like, for the first time in my life, I matter more than just physically.” Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

ACT 1 You know you’re close to the protest when you smell the spray paint. You hear the hissing sound emanating from the can, followed by the metallic rattle of the ball shaking inside of it as someone tags “FTP” (fuck the police) on the wall of a nearby shuttered business. Continue through downtown and you’ll see vendors selling $15 T-shirts that bear the slogan “Black Lives Matter” or an artist’s rendering of George Floyd. You inhale the earthy scent of a sage smudge stick burning and feel the percussion from a nearby drum circle, where some of the drums are decorated with the phrase “This machine kills fascists.” You taste smoke: A dozen propane grills sear burgers at the all-you-can-eat, pay-what-you-can street barbecue, Riot Ribs. This zone, where nearly all the action occurs, covers three square blocks: between Southwest Taylor and Madison streets and 3rd and 4th avenues. In the early evening hours, these blocks don’t feel like a protest. They feel like a street fair, or a low-budget Bumbershoot. As the summer temperature reaches its highest point, near 6 pm most nights, dozens gather on the grassy lawns of Chapman and Lownsdale squares, where white people with dreadlocks lie outside tents they erected and smoke weed—a display of hippiedom so on the nose it almost looks like a parody of itself. People offer each other joints, beer, sandwiches and fresh-cut roses in shades of pink and red. Music from surrounding speakers clashes with other boomboxes. Some people dance as the orange evening sun reflects off the 16-story, ivory façade of the federal courthouse looming over the park like a watchtower. “Occupy Portland was exactly like this,” says Andrew Simmons, a protester who says he’s demonstrated in 14

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

COMMUNITY AID: The parks have become a world that, to some of the people in it, feels better than the one that existed before. One man described it as a “sanctuary.”

Portland since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The Occupy protests set up camp in the same parks in 2011, protesting economic inequality for 39 days. The main difference: “It feels like people are more fed up,” Simmons says. “There’s a lot more people from the suburbs coming and parents coming.” His mom showed up. “She took four [rounds of tear gas],” Simmons says. “Ted Wheeler took one. I was like, all right, if my 60-year-old mom can take three or four, you can take one.” On July 24, along 4th Avenue, a man named Pablo stood next to a van so completely covered with Black Lives Matter art and slogans that a KATU-TV reporter erroneously tweeted that the vehicle had been tagged by vandals. With green hair and a smile that invites strangers to strike up a conversation with him, Pablo is one of the volunteers with the Black Lives Matter snack van, which has shelves on its side filled with Clif Bars, water bottles and apples—all donated—for protesters to take free of charge. “It’s impossible to be upset while you’re eating food,” he says. “It’s unity amongst us.” Pablo is part of an ecosystem of support that has emerged at the Portland protests. It’s a fragile infrastructure. (On July 27, Riot Ribs dissolved, amid a bitter dispute over donations.) Pablo says he’s witnessed police target the protesters’ food supplies with tear gas. “It’s been very upsetting how some nights we’ve been doing nothing and they still call it an unlawful assembly,” Pablo says. “Yes, I understand there are people here causing [the police] to be stressed out and be upset. But it’s like hey, what about if your son or daughter were here? What about if you were on the opposite side and people

were doing that to you? Especially with the CS gas. That stuff is no joke.” As the sun sets, the mood changes. Yellow-clad moms arrive, arms linked. Black Lives Matter organizers give speeches about Ted Wheeler’s hypocrisy and Donald Trump’s tyranny. The speakers outline specific demands: Defund the Portland Police Bureau by 50%, free all protesters from jail and drop all charges, oust the feds from Portland, and have Wheeler resign. Parents shepherd children younger than 12 into the crowd to listen to speeches. “We’re only staying for 10 minutes,” one mother remarks to her two young daughters. Those children head home, and they are replaced by protesters wearing all black and carrying gas masks. Some walk to the 7-Eleven at 4th and Taylor on the north perimeter of the protest area. It’s one of the only businesses still operating in the zone. Under the fluorescent lighting, protesters clad in helmets, goggles and military-grade gas masks buy Truly Hard Seltzer and Snickers bars—fuel for the night. One person asks the clerk if the store sells Tide to Go stain remover pens. Outside the 7-Eleven, dozens gather. It’s unclear who’s a part of the protest and who’s outside simply to socialize on a weekend night. A man on a pedicab carrying a speaker blasts N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police.” Commercial-grade fireworks from two blocks away can be heard exploding and reverberating off the federal courthouse. People outside the 7-Eleven cheer. Someone begins playing “Fuck Donald Trump” by YG and Nipsey Hussle on a stereo. “You look like you’re ready for war,” one protester says jokingly to another as they leave the store.

ACT 2 At about 10 pm every night, the standoff begins. The protest venue shifts a block north—from the county courthouse to the federal one. Protesters gather around the $200,000, 8-foot black metal fence erected July 22 around the building. Swaths of people chant, “Feds go home!” as they sway the fence back and forth in an attempt to push it down. A nearby drum circle intensifies its pace. On varying nights, some protesters manage to climb over the fence and unlock it from the inside, while others attempt to use power tools to open it from the outside. People along the fence throw water bottles, apples and glass toward the building’s covered portico. People unleash a stream of commercial-grade fireworks against the building, where multiple windows appear fractured but still intact from the explosions. (Federal agents say in court records that the damage totals nearly $50,000, a relatively paltry sum given how many fireworks are launched.) The protesters surrounding the fence can be difficult to identify, mainly because they are covered in helmets, balaclavas, respirators or fullon gas masks reminiscent of those worn to ward off mustard gas during World War I. On the night of July 22, one white man arrived carrying a round cake with yellow frosting, still in its plastic packaging from Fred Meyer, including its price tag: $4.49. He said his goal was to throw it at one of the federal agents. Twenty minutes later, he told WW that the attempt was a flop: He lobbed the cake, but it barely made it over the fence before splattering on the concrete. But not all was lost: His friend had successfully launched a raw egg at one of the federal agents. “I got the SWAT guy with an egg, though,” the friend said, excited. The difference in firepower is significant, even ridiculous: One side brings pool noodles and umbrellas to use as shields, while the other has tear gas, rubber bullets and the legal authority to make arrests. Federal agents have inflicted traumatic head wounds to multiple protesters. But it is also true that some of the people who gather at the fence want to damage this property— both as a symbol of a criminal justice system they believe is corrupt beyond repair, and as a home base for the police who have injured their friends. Every night is an attack run on Trump’s police state. Other protesters, even those who don’t come to deface federal property, say they don’t mind the vandalism. “I don’t really believe in the concept of peaceful protests for justice. When you’re fighting for justice, you’re fighting for peace,” Smiff says. “If someone shoots a firework at the Justice Center, it’s not going to set the Justice Center on fire. It’s a concrete building. It’s graffiti and burn marks on the sides of buildings. That’s not violence. It should not warrant the response of physical violence.” But it will.

ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER: Each night, protesters try to tear down a metal fence around the federal courthouse. Each night, police flood them with tear gas.

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

ACT 3

REVOLUTION: A firework explodes against the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse as protesters anticipate federal force.

Each night builds toward the same cinematic climax: tear gas. Provoking the feds until they deploy gas has become a ritual. (The officers have also deployed it without warning or any apparent provocation.) In some ways, gas proves the protesters’ point, which is that the federal agents can’t maintain control over a crowd without escalating to violence and injuring people. And, in truth: The anticipation of tear gas is equal parts terrifying and exhilarating. It’s the single image that the nation is watching, and you’re in the center of it. “There’s definitely a strange phenomenon of, ‘I got to get down there before they start gassing,’” Smiff says. “People want to say, ‘I was there. I was on the right side of history. I ate tear gas for freedom.’ [The cops] beat us half to death, and then they get confused because we get nostalgic over our war wounds.… This is American energy.” Each night, events lead up to a moment of release—the cloud of gas. Tensions rise and fall as protesters throw fireworks, light small bonfires and shine lasers at the courthouse. A massive firework—the commercialgrade kind purchased in Washington state—will explode in front of the building. Then everyone waits. “Can we not with the fireworks? Holy shit,” a medic says after a particularly loud firework detonates. “It’s gonna happen soon.” M i n u t e s l a t e r, i t h a p p e n s. Federal agents throw smoke bombs over the fence. (Sometimes the feds deploy munitions from inside the doors of the courthouse; other times they walk completely outside.) Many protesters walk backward slowly. Then it’s a flurry of action: Feds deploy munitions and protesters fling them back over the fence. An officer shoots pepper spray through the fence directly at a protester’s face, a stream so thick it looks like Silly String. Protesters then continue to set off fireworks, which explode feet away from federal agents. At around 1 am on July 26, the feds decided they were done with the back-and-forth. It takes a split second to realize you’ve inhaled CS gas. It reeks of burnt, spicy plastic. It infiltrates your respiratory system immediately and so completely that eyes, nose, throat and skin all burn. The searing pain—worse than eating a spoonful of wasabi—induces panic, making you gulp for air. But the air you gulp is also saturated with gas, producing more panic.

You are also probably running away from police and out of the gas cloud, making breathing nearly impossible. All the while, you can barely see anything. CS gas isn’t just painful. It’s completely disorienting and panic-inducing. It makes people choke for simply breathing, and choke harder when they try to catch their breath. At times it feels as if there’s no escape. “If someone has asthma or is immunocompromised and they get tear gassed, there’s precious little we can do,” says Raviv Hileman, a medic from Seattle who tended to protesters in Portland on July 25. “All we can do is get them the hell out of here and get them to a hospital as fast as possible and hope it’s fast enough.” Early Sunday morning, Hileman and other medics slowly drove their vans along with the people fleeing police. Federal officers exited their pen in front of the courthouse and began marshaling protesters west. The Breonna Taylor Memorial MUV, operated by K and other medics, crept slowly up the hill alongside the crowd. A medic inside the vehicle stood on the edge of the truck and squirted water into a protester’s eyes. Tear gas hung heavy in the air, and the red and blue lights from police vehicles reflected in the thick fog as people coughed heavily. Organizers tried to keep people from panicking: “Walk, don’t run,” they chanted. At the same time, people caught in the back of the crowd yelled for everyone to hurry up so they wouldn’t get trampled by police. One medic turned and yelled at the Breonna Taylor Memorial Medical Utility Vehicle, because an injured protester needed medical attention immediately: “MUV, slow down!” The medic was helping a protester who had been shot by a munition between her eyes. There was blood all over her face, one medic told another. They eventually got her into the back of the truck. They shut the doors and drove her away. The group of medics who aided the injured woman gathered in a circle on the sidewalk. They were silent. The din of the police loudspeaker faded in the distance, along with the footsteps of retreating protesters. “Are you OK?” one medic asked another, who was visibly upset. “I’m fine,” she responded. “Just a little shaken up.”

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

STREET

FRONTLINE DRUMLINE Photos by Joseph Blake Jr. On Instagram: @pdxwulf_

From organizer Christian Burke, aka Creme Brulee: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Frontline Drumline was the ultimate example of the kind of energy we need to sustain this revolution. For us on the front lines of the movement, day in and day out, a moment like this for celebration and reprieve is life-giving.â&#x20AC;?

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

A Benefit Concert for Don’t Shoot PDX

STARTERS

T HE MOST IMP O RTA N T T HI NGS THAT H A P P E N E D I N P O R T L A N D C U LT U R E T HIS W EEK , FRO M B EST TO WOR ST. THOMAS TEAL

An Injury to One = An Injury to All Sunday, August 2nd | 7PM

Fyndi Jermany,

vice president DSP

Darlene SolomonRogers, voice

Stephanie Cooke, voice + piano

LaRhonda Steele, voice

Join the online watch party! More details at:

dontshootpdx.org/about-us Andrew Endres, voice + guitar

Justin Copeland, trumpet

Videography: Karney Hatch Sound, Mix/Master: Andrew Endres

Please consider donating via our GoFundMe page: gofundme.com/f/DSP-Benefit-2020

Founded in 2016 by community organizer Teressa Raiford, DSP has continued to demand police accountability and legislative change through their on-the-ground work, impacting youth and inspiring them to lead along the way. Don’t Shoot Portland does a number of art projects, printmaking events, archival based workshops, and legal referral clinics as well. In the midst of the global rising for Black Lives and COVID-19, Don’t Shoot is focused heavily on providing mutual aid resources to BIPOC communities.

@DontShootPDX

@dontshootpdx

LOCAL REPORTING THAT DRIVES

CHANGE After WW reported both outbreaks at Townsend Farms, Gov. Kate Brown and OHA announced a reversal in policy.

After WW revealed the outbreak, the Oregon Health Authority pledged to report clusters of cases at child care centers in its weekly reports.

Five members of Oregon’s congressional delegation are calling on the U.S. Marshals Service to disclose information following a June 15 report from WW.

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Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

RAFFI AT ALADDIN THEATER IN 2015

RAFFI <3 MOMS The last time an artist who lives in Canada wrote a song about our city, it featured the line, “Out in Portland/Trying to get in her organs.” This latest one is…a bit different. On Saturday, beloved children’s singer Raffi dropped a new track on Twitter celebrating Portland’s now-famous Wall of Moms. The “Baby Beluga” singer and longtime activist tweeted that the idea for the song, called “Portland Moms,” hit him at 3 am, and it was recorded quickly with an assist from singer Lindsay Munroe and dobro player Ivan Rosenberg. It’s a short, simple folk jam, based on the standard “Buffalo Gals,” shouting out Black Lives Matter and the Wall of Vets in addition to the song’s namesake. Here’s hoping this soon becomes an actual protest anthem, perhaps sung at federal agents as an eerie lullaby. THE NAKED TRUTH We now know a bit more about “Naked Athena,” the anonymous protester who gripped the national imagination after being photographed facing down officers while wearing only a beanie and a face mask. In a two-hour conversation with the Portland-based podcast Unrefined Sophisticates, the protester, who identifies herself as “Jen,” divulges only a few pertinent biographical details. She is a sex worker. She’s in her 30s. And contrary to assumptions, she is not white but a nonBlack person of color. She describes the moments leading up to the altercation and what happened during the standoff, revealing that her “yoga poses” were in part the result of being shot in the foot by a crowd control munition. She also discusses the aftermath, including the criticisms, the media attention, and the surrealness of being talked about by the likes of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert. Describing her motivations, she says, “I just wanted them to see what they’re shooting at.” Hear the episode at soundcloud.com/unrefinedsophisticatespod. THE RENTAL IS TOO DAMN HIGH For the second time since quarantine, an Oregon-made production is the No. 1 movie in the country. The Rental—Dave Franco’s directorial debut about an Oregon Coast vacation gone wrong—topped box offices last weekend with $421,000, Deadline reported. The horror flick, starring GLOW’s Alison Brie and Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, was filmed in Bandon, Ore. To be sure, The Rental’s place at the top of the box office has a lot to do with the lack of big releases during the pandemic—its closest competitors are catalog titles like The Karate Kid and reigning Oregon coast classic The Goonies. But it follows the even more surprising success of Phoenix, Oregon—a small, Klamath Falls-filmed production about two men restoring an old bowling alley—which topped the box office in April. SAFETY FIRST After 10 rescue requests in just the past few months, including last weekend, the Linn County Sheriff ’s Office is asking recreationalists to take precautions when visiting Tamolitch Falls, a remote attraction more than 50 miles east of Sweet Home, Ore. It isn’t the only place that has seen a flurry of rescues recently. Earlier this month, 19-year-old Todd Adelman, from Aumsville, died after falling on the mountain known as Three Fingered Jack. As temperatures rise, sheriff ’s offices, medics and mountain rescue teams urge people to be prepared for emergency situations when hiking, swimming and climbing, particularly in hard-to-access areas with no cellphone service.

GET...OUTSIDE?

WHAT TO DO—AND WHAT OTHERS ARE DOING—AS PORTLAND REOPENS.

JULY 29AUG. 4 B

SPORTS? SPORTS!

Blazers in the Bubble

O RT

ND TR

PESSIMISTIC THOUGHT: They sucked a lot most of the year. Unfortunately, Hassan Whiteside started for much of the season, so they really ate it, amassing a 16-21 record before everything shut down. They have to win a lot to leapfrog the Grizzlies, the Kings and the Pelicans, who have the same record and now have walking cannonball Zion Williamson back. OPTIMISTIC THOUGHT: The Blazers are probably the best team in the qualifying rungs! The bones of this team made the conference finals last year. Damian Lillard is still one of the premier guards

WESLEY LAPOINTE

Q(UARANTINE)&A

PESSIMISTIC THOUGHT: But they’re missing some pretty big bones. Rodney Hood is injured, Nassir Little is unseasoned, Mario Hezonja lulls somewhere south of “legit NBA player,” and Trevor Ariza, bless his soul, has opted out of the bubble so he can spend time with his children. OPTIMISTIC THOUGHT: Zach Collins! One of the big hits the Blazers took this year was losing Collins, who looked pretty good last year—and also called Klay Thompson a “hoe” in the middle of a game. Maybe he can snap the roster into order and give them what they’ve been missing all year. PESSIMISTIC THOUGHT: Anfernee Simons? The team also hoped 21-year-old Simons would be good, but he’s had a rather poor sophomore season, shortening the useful guard rotation and leaving the team in a strange netherworld, backup point guard-wise.

BLAZERS

OPTIMISTIC THOUGHT: The Blazers will suck less! After jettisoning defensive forward Al-Farouq Aminu in the offseason, the team was depending on production from Zach Collins, but he got injured at the beginning of the year. But thanks to the pandemic, Collins isn’t injured anymore, and neither is Jusuf Nurkic.

in the league, CJ McCollum is also excellent, and had they done literally anything but trade for Whiteside, they might have seemed a fringe contender this year.

AIL

Professional basketball: It’s back! After a four-month layover to figure out how to finish the season in light of this whole coronavirus nuisance, the NBA has decided that, instead of playing in a packed home arena, most teams will retreat to the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando, Fla.—home of the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex—where they will live in hotels and play in gyms in front of television crews and no one else. Is it a good idea? We’ll leave that for another article. Because for our purposes, here’s what matters: The Portland Trail Blazers are still in this thing! When we last left our local squad, they sucked but not so bad that they didn’t seem like they could scrounge together a good run and take a shot at qualifying for the playoffs. Also, Carmelo Anthony was on the team. You might have seen him at Canard. Can they do it? We have reasons to feel optimistic— but also reasons to feel the opposite.

OPTIMISTIC THOUGHT: They could win the title! So much would have to go right, but this is a high-seed playoff squad in a world where they play a whole year! Good defense, high-level guard play, Melo providing a spark on the wing—pull it all together and become legends. Why not? PESSIMISTIC THOUGHT: Who wants to be the Coronavirus Champions? If the Blazers manage to overwhelm their way into the playoffs, beat LeBron James and the L.A. Lakers in the first round, keep pounding away, and become the firstever eight seed to win the NBA title, they will have done it entirely because a massive pandemic broke out, killed a truly obscene number of people, and sidelined sports for several months, giving them time for their injured front line to come back and dominate. If that happened, are you sure you could truly celebrate, knowing the monkey’s paw series of events that transpired to make it happen? CORBIN SMITH. The Portland Trail Blazers play the Memphis Grizzlies at 1 pm on Friday, July 31. The game airs on NBATV and NBC Sports Northwest.

Mac Smiff, Hip-Hop Journalist and Promoter You were downtown at the protests last Wednesday night and ended up having a lengthy conversation with Ted Wheeler. What did you talk to him about? What I really talked to him about, first and foremost, is you keep saying there are no demands in this protest. It’s known what we want: We want to defund the police. This is not a complicated thing. Defunding the police is a political ask, and I’m not sure why they act like it’s not. I told Ted, we spend a billion dollars every four years on the cops. That’s insane. He did the Ted thing where he blames other people, and I told him a big thing he does is he plays weak. When the people want something, he says he can’t do it because the police told them he can’t, and when the police want something he says he can’t do it because the people don’t want it. Politicians, especially Northwest politicians, have been trained in the words of equity and Black Lives Matter. They know all the phrases, they say all the right things. They just don’t do it.

Did you get the sense he heard you at all? Ted is really good at acknowledging and listening and repeating back what you said. He’s very good at that. But recitation does not equal wisdom. It’s just practicing the words. He says, “Yes, you’re right. We do have to fix this.” In his mind, he wants to transition back to reform again, and it’s like, you understand that boat has sailed. There are 5,000 people out here telling you the same thing, and you’re asking what we want. Justice, and getting rid of the police—what is it that you’re confused about? What did you make of him getting tear gassed? It was definitely a photo op. Think about it: When has an American mayor ever been tear gassed by the federal government in his own city? People were shouting out, “He’s looking for his Pulitzer Prize photo.” I respect him for standing in the smoke and tear gas that long, I’ll give him that. But I wish he used that strength in office. See the full video interview at wweek.com/distant-voices.

MEET THE MAYOR: Ted Wheeler at the protests. Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

GET...OUTSIDE? JAMES A. TWEEDIE

TAKE A HIKE

Cape Disappointment Distance: About 2.5 miles Difficulty: Parks scare me. Drive time from Portland: 2 hours, 15 minutes Directions: From Astoria, cross the Astoria-Megler Bridge and turn left at the end to take Highway 101 north, toward Ilwaco/Long Beach. After about 2 miles into Ilwaco, turn left onto 2nd Avenue Southwest, which becomes Robert Gray Drive. Follow that for about 2 miles. Turn right onto Fort Canby Road, which then veers slightly right and becomes Jetty Road. Continue straight through the pay station and you’ll spot the parking lot.

No Regrets Don’t be fooled: Cape Disappointment is no letdown.

aprewitt@wweek.com

The name certainly doesn’t inspire much confidence. If you’ve never driven across the lengthy AstoriaMegler Bridge—which peaks at almost 200 feet above the Columbia to provide enough clearance for massive freighters before skimming the water the final few miles into Washington—you probably haven’t seen Cape Disappointment. And with such a discouraging moniker, you may question whether it’s worth a visit. But the “disappointment” here has nothing to do with the jagged promontory’s views. In fact, a good rule of thumb for destinations along the Oregon Coast is the more dubious the name, the more breathtaking the view—see Devils Punchbowl or Cape Foulweather. Often, the boiling bay or precarious peak in question earned that distinction because the seascape is so stunning it presents a hazard to mariners. And Cape Disappointment is no different. The headland where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean is one of the most treacherous bar crossings in the world. It was slapped with its label by an English captain who basically missed his turn. John Mears, who sailed near the cape in 1788, couldn’t find the river’s entrance, assumed it was a bay and called the whole mission a bust. Whatever sort of deterrence the name had for early explorers, visitors today aren’t fooled. Campsites and picnic tables tend to fill quickly on summer week-

HEAR THIS

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

ends. But even though every grassy lot was blooming with pitched tents on a visit in early July, few of those occupants opted to take the more challenging route to get to the state park’s Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. Hiking the trail rather than driving the road to the viewpoint may take a bit longer but rewards with the kind of scenic variety that can only be found on the Pacific Northwest coastline: towering old-growth forest, lapping waves and even a military battery carpeted in moss. From the Waikiki Beach Trailhead parking lot, begin with a short detour down to its namesake. It looks nothing like the better-known strip of golden sand and glitzy skyscrapers in Oahu, but this place boasts its own beauty, and with fewer crowds. The small cove is sheltered on either side by a jetty and a giant cliff face. And while the shore may be several shades of gray, depending on the sunlight, it’s covered in a tumble of driftwood, inviting fort builders of all skill levels to start drawing up plans. After assessing where you’d like to set up your temporary beach shelter, post-hike, walk back toward the fee booth where you entered (Discovery Pass, $10) until you reach a sign for the Cape Disappointment Trail to the right. From there, push up a fern-lined hill that spills out onto a small bluff above Waikiki Beach, revealing an even bigger supply of scattered lumber. It’s not long before you duck back into the forest,

COURTESY OF BRIAN STRAUSS

BY ANDI PREWITT

PDX Couch Tour Brian Strauss always dreamed of running a virtual local music showcase. He just never imagined that such a thing would be necessary. Strauss came up with the idea in the ’90s while studying video production in college. But it never really came to fruition until venues shut down in March due to the coronavirus pandemic. Shortly thereafter, Strauss launched PDX Couch Tour, which livestreams sets five days a week from bands you’d normally find at neighborhood watering holes around the city. The upcoming calendar ranges from Laurelthirst

passing under alder and spruce trees cloaked in lichen that dangles like cobwebs. About a half-mile in, you’ll spot signs of humanmade structures that have long been obsolete. These are the remains of Fort Canby, established in the mid1800s as a harbor defense for the Columbia and maintained until the end of World War II. Scamper up a cement staircase that nature is trying to reclaim for a peek at boat traffic and the long arm of the North Jetty reaching across the water. In another half-mile, you’ll stumble upon a gun battery with a roof sprouting a wild mane of spiky ferns. You’re free to use the old cannon fortress as an archeological playground, but do so with caution—the dark corner rooms and pointy, rusted, doorless hinges can trip you up if you’re not paying attention. If there is any sort of actual letdown on this hike along Cape Disappointment, it’s that the Coast Guard cut off trail access in June to the lighthouse, which was completed in 1856 and is the oldest operating in the Pacific Northwest. But you still get a stunning perch at the interpretive center from which to view the weathered structure. Now you’re just shy of the southernmost point on Washington’s coastline, and on the edge of a continent that feels like the end of the world. The swirling river below won’t let you soon forget that last part.

Pub co-owner Lewi Longmire and his band the Left Coast Roasters to six-piece soul-jazz mainstays Donna Jones and the Delegation. Funded entirely by voluntary audience tips, the series is a scrappy effort that looks and sounds entirely professional. The virtual audience can tune in via YouTube, Facebook Twitch or Zoom, and the chat windows and Zoom “audience wall” are displayed for the band on screens around the stage. The series, however, has been dealing with a problem that’s plagued local artists since pre-COVID times: finding a venue. PDX Couch Tour started in March at the Woodstock location of the high-end furniture store the Joinery. When the store was sold, it moved out to

Catfish Lou’s in Beaverton for two weeks, until the venue reopened for patrons. Now, the showcase will have to move out of its current venue, 24 Fremont, which is going up for lease. Nonetheless, Strauss says all the moving is worth it. “The musicians, they’re so elated,” he says. “A lot of the bands haven’t played together, let alone for other people, in a few months. To see them come off the stage after playing together, the energy between the band members is always electric.” SHANNON GORMLEY. Find out more about PDX Couch Tour at pdxcouchtour. com.

WESLEY LAPOINTE

FOOD & DRINK REVIEW

Sun’s Out,Wing’s Out Sunshine Noodles brings Cambodian street food to Mississippi Street. BY JO R DA N M I C H E L M A N

@suitcasewine

Take a walk down Mississippi Avenue one warm afternoon, and these can almost be mistaken for normal times. Here in 2020, a sunny day can be deceptive. The neighborhood is out and about. People are drinking on patios, waiting for takeout on the sidewalk, or circling the block looking for parking. But look again, and you’ll notice the entire block has transitioned into a street scene—an elaborate patchwork of parklets and sidewalk seating mushroomed up seemingly overnight. Creeping fascistic dread and pandemic realities aside, it’s almost kind of lovely. We should all be sitting outside on nice days like today. What’s not to like? In the middle of it all is Sunshine Noodles, an avowedly irreverent, none too serious take on contemporary Cambodian food by chef and founder Diane Lam. Here, she’s transposing street food favorites and the cuisine of her grandparents— Khmer street corn, fragrant with fish sauce and coconut; daily charred fresh farm greens in subtly spicy oil; and corn pudding balanced just so delicately between sweet and savory—into a new outdoor and takeout concept that immediately feels like part of the neighborhood. “Cambodian food doesn’t really have the spotlight,” Lam says, “and so it’s nice to represent a style of food that isn’t always appreciated in the current day.” A native of Alhambra, Calif., Lam has cooked for State Bird Provisions in San Francisco and Joule in Seattle, both of which have received multiple notices from the James Beard Foundation. In Portland, she was the chef de cuisine at the recently shuttered Revelry, which was Joule founder Rachel Yang’s first foray into the city’s dining scene. Housed on the grounds of supernatural-themed Psychic Bar, Sunshine Noodles is Lam’s next step— though it may be only temporary. She and her team, including co-founder David Sigal, are currently working on terms through January 2021. After that, who knows? “We’re taking it a month at a time and embracing what it is now,” Lam says. “Right now, it’s an incubator for a lot of talent—the people who work here are my peers. It feels like a summer camp. Everyone is putting in their energy and time, which is a nice break from everything else we’re all going through. It’s a nice little echo chamber of good stuff.” And good food. Order the corn pudding: Lam and pastry chef Ally Fortin have made perhaps the best new dessert in Portland this year. Also, get one of the noodle dishes, and the corn if it’s available. But the lime pepper wings at Sunshine Noodle are poised to become the breakout hit. Lam’s are inspired by a dish she grew up eating with her grandmother. “She would serve these barely dredged wings, tossed in flour, with a dipping sauce,” Lam says. “But nobody wants a communal dipping sauce right now.” In Lam’s modern interpretation, these spicy, wonderfully complex wings come perfectly ready to eat, and want for nothing except a beer—and perhaps a napkin. I’ve got designs on ordering, let’s say, two rounds some future sunny Saturday, posting myself streetside, and daydreaming of better days.

SUNSHINE NOODLES’ LIME PEPPER WINGS THE CHICKEN

Lam and company start with Mary’s Chicken wings. “If the item is meatforward, it has to start with good product,” Lam says. These wings aren’t huge, nor are they scrawny, with just the right amount of heft and juiciness.

THE MARINADE

Sunshine does a two-step prep before the wings are cooked. First, “a quick-dry brine,” as Lam calls it, using buttermilk powder, garlic powder, sugar, salt and Old Bay seasoning, left to cure for about an hour. Then a wet marinade overnight in buttermilk, fish sauce, and oyster sauce.

Khmer Street Corn

THE DREDGE

Each wing is bathed in a gluten-free dredge made from ground coconut, turmeric, rice flour and tapioca flour before frying. When she pulls the chicken, a bit of excess oil from the fryer is grabbed on purpose, and the chicken and oil are quickly tossed with the juice of makrut limes.

Coffee Slushie

THE SAUCE

Lam’s wing sauce, pre-tossed for your enjoyment, is impressively complex. She uses a blend of Kampot pepper, long pepper, pink peppercorns, and Tellicherry peppers alongside sugar and salt to make a warm, piquant paste. Lam describes it as “a salt-and-pepper mud,” and when combined with the fresh, hot chicken and lime juice, the end result is wonderfully complex and textural, with no two bites the same: intricately peppery, slightly bitter, slightly sweet, warm, pink, green and fresh, with spices and citrus in every bite.

The Patio at Sunshine Noodles

EAT: Sunshine Noodles, 3560 N Mississippi Ave., 971-220-1997, sunshinenoodles.com. 11 am-3 pm Thursday-Saturday. Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

FOOD & DRINK

COURTESY OF CHRISTINE HEELEY

A Requiem for BarFly

An ode to crazy parties, weird award shows and booze—lots and lots of booze.

SANTA BABY: Christine Heeley at a BarFly Christmas party.

BY C H RIST I N E H E E L E Y

When I was recruited onto Team BarFly, I didn’t quite know what I was getting into. At its most basic, BarFly was a guide to Portland bars. It started as a simple idea formed around founder Jen Lane’s kitchen table in 1997—a zine (and later website) that would tell you which bars were most worth visiting, when the happy hours were and, most importantly, what the vibe was like at each place. As a former bartender, Jen was passionate about supporting local businesses, especially the small and obscure ones. She was the Atlas of the bar scene: When Anthony Bourdain visited Portland, his itinerary included stopping at Voodoo Doughnut, eating at Apizza Scholls, and partying with Jen. And over time, she grew BarFly into something much bigger than a bar guide. First came the party buses. For a small fee, customers would be escorted to an assortment of Portland’s premier dives and strip clubs. You would see it all on those buses: nudity fights, engagements, weddings, Alf costumes. Almost nothing was off limits—except vomiting. That was a hard no. And if you were a host, that meant keeping 50-plus very drunk people entertained as you traveled between locations. My signature trick was “the baby bird shot.” That’s where you shoot a drink and spit it right back into a person’s open mouth. It was surprisingly popular. We had epic employee parties. If you could dream it, you would see it. Stripper petting zoos. Kiddie pools with staff TOP 5

HOT PLATES Where to eat this week.

1. Lazy Susan 7937 SE Stark St., 971-420-8913, lazysusanpdx.com. 4-9 pm Friday-Sunday. At Lazy Susan, the dust—proverbial and literal—hadn’t yet settled when Hat Yai owner Earl Ninsom and chef Andrew Mace realized things might not go as planned. The duo took over the former Country Cat space, hoping to convert it into a familystyle restaurant that would become a culinary anchor for the neighborhood. COVID-19 threw those plans off course, but the eatery is finally open for outdoor dining, serving flaky dinner rolls, farm-fresh veggies and charcoal-grilled proteins.

2. Street Disco 1305 SE 8th Ave., street-disco.com. 3-9 pm daily.

Summarized simply, Disco Snacks is a multifaceted snack bar concept at White Owl Social Club comprising a series of distinct ideas. That includes Taco Tuesdays, a public school cafeteria homage to tacos of the hard-shell variety, and pizza inspired by the suburban food court experience, currently available for pre-order on Fridays and Saturdays. The stunner is the cheeseburger pie, a heavyweight concoction made of pickles, ketchup, onions and American cheese. There is nothing else quite like it in Portland.

3. Piggins Outdoor Bistro 1239 SW Broadway, 503-222-9070, higginspiggins.com. 11:30 am-8 pm daily. 24

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

wearing thongs. Bands playing naked. The Christmas parties were our favorite. We all worked a lot, and didn’t get to see each other that often. It was like our family gathering. At the end of the night, we would all line up to sit on Santa’s lap, and he would dole out presents donated by Fantasy Adult Video. The greatest honor was to be nominated for an annual BarFly Award. Categories included Smartest Stripper and Hottest Item Not on the Menu. We would dress up fancy, receive a sash, and peacock around. It sounds silly, but it was the only recognition many of us in the service industry ever got. BarFly is dead now, thanks to COVID-19. But for those of us who were Team BarFly, it’ll be impossible to forget. I mean, I still have one of my co-workers’ teeth that he gave me as a present. How can you forget something like that? It was the only club I ever belonged to, and I was lucky enough to be part of one of the things that once made this town The pandemic has pushed one of Portland’s oldest restaurants into the food cart game. Piggins is effectively an extension of Higgins’ storied downtown farm-to-table kitchen, serving 16 tables spaced 8 feet apart in the plaza of the Oregon Historical Society. The grass-fed burger and beer list are both legendary, and you can access both here, along with dozens of other sandwiches and seasonal specials that earned namesake chef Greg Higgins a James Beard Award.

4. Portland Pizza Peddler Orders placed through direct messages at instagram. com/portlandpizzapeddler. Pickup only.

Chicago native Jerry Benedetto started quarantine-learning how to cook the thin-crust, square-cut pizza of his youth in the oven of his Southeast Portland townhouse. After Benedetto posted a few pictures on Instagram, people wanted to place orders. He’s filled about 300 so far, taking donations, deducting the cost of ingredients and sending the rest to nonprofits. His most popular pie? The “Jerry Special” with bulk sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and a side of hot giardiniera.

5. Kachka Alfresca 960 SE 11th Ave., 503-235 0059, kachkapdx.com/alfresca. 3-10 pm daily.

A pop-up in the truest sense of the term, Kachka’s outdoor spinoff is so utterly of its time and place in this shared moment that it feels like a vital addition to the food landscape. It has allowed owner Bonnie Morales to dive into the nostalgia of her childhood spent watching her Soviet émigré parents run a 1990s bistro in the Chicago suburbs. It doesn’t all necessarily make sense—it’s like a trans-Siberian TGI Friday’s—but it is damn fun.

BUZZ LIST Where to drink this week.

TopWire Hop Project 8648 Crosby Road NE, Woodburn, 503-982-5166, crosbyhops.com. Call to confirm hours.

Anyone who requires a little more distance from other people can soon sip beer far from the city, in the middle of a Willamette Valley hop yard. Crosby Hop Farm in Woodburn has carved out space among its towering rows of hop bines for a picturesque beer garden that places drinkers right at the source of one of the key ingredients. Grand-opening beverages include a double IPA created by Dallas’ Celestial Beerworks and a cider with Cascade hops from Reverend Nat’s in Portland.

Loyal Legion 710 SE 6th Ave., 503-235-8272, loyallegionpdx.com. 5-10 pm Tuesday-Sunday.

This sprawling beer hall boasts almost 100 Oregon beers and ciders on tap daily, with draft lines and kegs meticulously cared for and maintained. But whiskey fans won’t be disappointed either. Neither will cocktail drinkers or more economical patrons, as the bar also boasts some of the best boilermaker pairings in town. The bar is utilizing plexiglass for ordering and is keeping service to outdoor seating.

Wayfinder Beer 304 SE 2nd Ave., 503-718-2337, wayfinder.beer. 3-9 pm daily.

If ever there were a beer that could transport you to the brauhauses of Munich, it would be Wayfinder Hell, a crisp and snappy lager with a gasp of citrus that comes in a fat mug. Enjoy it on the expansive patio.

Prost! 4237 N Mississippi Ave., 503-954-2674, prostportland.com.

In a city filled with amazing beer bars, Prost stands out for its steadfast dedication to German food and beer—not to mention its back patio is now home to maybe the city’s best food cart pod. All beers here are imported from Germany and served in the style of glass called for by German tradition. The staff is knowledgeable and happy to guide your order from the unique and delicious menu.

Botanist 1300 NW Lovejoy St., 971-533-8064, botanisthouse.com.

At this sleek subterranean gin bar—which opened its rooftop patio during Phase 1— veteran mixologist Robbie Wilson spreads the joys of juniper berries to bargoers west of the Willamette. For those who know little of the details that distinguish one type of gin from another, the list of about a dozen $13 cocktails serves as a safe point of entry. As basic as it is, the Botanist G&T should be the go-to for anyone who’s familiar with the timeless pleasure of a simple gin drink.

POTLANDER REVIEW

Hapy Days Portland’s Hapy Kitchen takes craft edibles up a notch. BY BRIA N N A W H E E L E R

Tucked behind a nondescript corner lot in Northeast Portland, on a formerly redlined block that’s equal parts residential and commercial, sits a small chocolate factory named for the Egyptian god of the Nile, founded on the Hippocratic oath, and developed with ambitions to repair and replace both a fractured pharmaceutical system and an inequitable cannabis industry. “The craziest thing about the cannabis industry is that there are still people in jail for minor charges while people such as myself are able to make a profit from it without being labeled a criminal,” says Cory Cooper, founder of Hapy Kitchen. “Right now, the industry as a whole is not doing enough to address that injustice, but it has been a point of conversation on how we move toward meaningful action.” Working toward a more equitable industry is not the only action item on Hapy Kitchen’s to-do list. While Cooper and his team develop their next steps in support of restorative justice and cannabinoid research, head chef Carla Burns keeps her fingers in as many figurative and literal pies as the edible industry has room for. The brand currently boasts six different chocolate bar varieties, four gummy flavors, four hard-candy flavors, two distinctly

different caramel offerings, an assortment of tinctures, a chocolate chip cookie and a really good brownie. WW met with Cooper and his team to discuss keeping things local and reinventing the compound pharmacy, and, of course, to jam several of their award-winning craft chocolates, caramels and fruit candies directly into our mouths. WW: Can you tell me a bit about the local brands, farms and ingredients Hapy Kitchen works with? Cory Cooper: A few local companies we support are Self Made Cannabis, a company with great, quality sungrown cannabis and great oil. We also like working with the local CO2 company Engineered Extracts. For some of our edible ingredients, we proudly use True Terpenes, Trailhead Coffee, and some other companies our head chef likes to keep secret. How does the company address or intend to address the radical inequalities that shadow the industry? Right now, the industry as a whole—and Hapy Kitchen itself—is not doing enough to address that injustice, so we took pause to make sure our next steps were meaningful and long term and started to organize fundraisers for groups like Cage-Free Cannabis, who help the cannabis industry and its consumers repair harms of the War on Drugs. We also participate in and support expungement events. I would like to focus on the prison industrial complex. There are companies that are profiting off modern-day slave labor. Disbanding the police doesn’t go far enough without disbanding and defunding the power structure keeping that in place.

What’s next? We are just scratching the surface in starting to understand the science behind the endocannabinoid system. In fact, a new cannabinoid was just discovered that is more potent than THC. As more science is applied to understanding the 400-plus compounds that this plant produces, and as equipment to isolate and refine cannabinoids improves, we want to be advancing. For a plant that’s been around for thousands of years, we have just 15 years of research available. We ultimately want to be aligned similarly to a holistic compounding pharmacy. Medical cannabis got us here and we have temporarily forgotten it, but the greatest potential of cannabis lies in its ability to better the lives of people.

THE PRODUCT

Hapy Kitchen Chocolate Bars Varieties include four dark chocolate bars, dressed in either roasted coffee, candied orange, tart raspberry or, if you’re into minimalism, the nude. A classic milk chocolate selection and a s’mores bar with cartoonishly tiny cereal marshmallows round out the selection. Each bar has its own singular personality, but the effects more or less hover in the same category. Only the coffee (sativa) and raspberry (indica) flavors are infused with strain-specific terpenes. As a 5 mg microdose, the bars serve a gentle flutter of tranquility that leaves a rosy shimmer after it evaporates. Full bars are varsity-only, but half a bar works for the moderately experienced user, with a balance of calm euphoria and simmering body high.

Hapy Kitchen Brownies Baked in their own adorably miniature personal tins, these brownies are big on visual charm—but the charm wears off once you realize pulling the brownie from the tin will result in both a mashed treat and sticky fingers. Compromised integrity aside, this is a sumptuous, fudgy mouthful of medicated confection. The 25 mg high was syrupy in the body and meditative in the head, saddling me with a deeply pacifying high that soothed me without clouding my cognition so much that I couldn’t focus on my video games.

Happy Kitchen Caramels In 2019, Hapy Kitchen’s 1:1 Coffeelicious Caramel won a Cannabis Cup medal for CBD ingestibles. Since both the caramel varieties the company produces—Coffeelicious Sativa and Sea Salt Indica—are available in 1-to-1 and THC formulations, users of all tolerances can partake. The highs arrive in slow, gradual waves rather than epic swoons, and hum like sustained harmonies. The actual caramels ain’t no afterthought, either. Each is boulangerie-flawless, delicate and rich in equal measure, melting between my teeth without cementing itself in the gaps.

Hapy Kitchen Hard Candies and Fruit Smackers Hapy Kitchen’s hard candies and gummy fruit smackers are divided into two categories: “Uplift” and “Relax.” Meanwhile, the semi-firm, sugar-dusted gummies celebrate the Northwest with flavors like Mt. Adams Apple and Rogue Raspberry. The glossy hard candies all taste of simple, uncomplicated fruit, albeit with a bottom note of straight-up skunk, which I personally appreciate, but tastes may vary. On the Uplift end of the spectrum, the high is a technicolor euphoria on the edge of frenetic. On the Relax end, the high is a tightrope walk between tranquil and tranquilizing. FIND: Hapy Kitchen, 420 NE Failing St., 503-506-0945, hapykitchen.com.

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

PERFORMANCE

Editor: Andi Prewitt / Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com

BOOKS

Written by: Scout Brobst / Contact: sbrobst@wweek.com

FIVE BOOKS ABOUT PROTESTS YOU SHOULD BE READING RIGHT NOW.

The Fire This Time, Jesmyn Ward

SHOUT: A CoHo Productions podcast tackles topics big and small during the pandemic.

The Listeners

In turbulent times, the hosts of a Portland theater podcast are all ears. BY BE N N E T T C A M P B E L L FE RGUS O N

When Phil Johnson was in high school, he saw Clifton Holznagel in Lee Falk’s Eris, a play about strangers meeting on a bridge over the Hudson River, and never really forgot that experience. “I remember watching the play and afterwards thinking, ‘Wow, that man’s a really good actor,’” Johnson says. “And then I went along with the rest of my day.” Little did Johnson know that two years later, he and Holznagel would meet at Ohio University and forge a friendship that would reshape their lives. Today, in addition to acting, they run Radical Listening, a podcast about Portland theater that has become a voice for an artistic community in flux due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Radical Listening is my attempt to document what I call a theater renaissance that’s happening in Portland,” says Johnson, who is a company member and technical director at Confrontation Theatre. “Unfortunately, things have changed because of the virus, but I would say for the last five to 10 years, the Portland theater community has had a high output of theater. You’ve got the small fringe shows, you’ve got the stuff in the park. I’ve seen a play where you had to ride your bike from scene to scene. That was my whole goal—to document that this stuff is happening.” Radical Listening is produced by CoHo Productions and Johnson’s Virtual Sonic Reality studio. When the podcast started in 2019, Holznagel became Johnson’s co-host, even though he was uneasy about Radical Listening being their follow-up to Moontalk, a podcast about cryptocurrency. “The stakes are higher,” Holznagel says. “No one I knew was listening to my cryptocurrency podcast.” With high stakes came high-profile guests. Johnson and Holznagel have turned on the mic for some of Portland’s most commanding performers, including Samson Syharath—who joined them to discuss the soulful scareathon The Brothers Paranormal—and La’ Tevin Alexander, who spoke to them about playing a private school student accused of assaulting a teacher earlier this year in Portland Playhouse’s production of Pipeline. Rather than intimidate interviewees with a hulking, 26

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

Howard Stern-style desk, Johnson and Holznagel typically record around a tiny table at CoHo. “Ultimately, we want it to feel like a free-flowing dinner conversation, where maybe it can get wild,” Johnson says. That spirit pervades the “headlines” section of the podcast, which has a history of loosening up guests by asking them to respond to quirky news stories, like a family in China mistaking a bear for a dog. They’ve kept it up, even though the pandemic has forced Johnson and Holznagel to start recording from their homes. “I think it’ll be most interesting to keep talking to the same type of people we would have talked to anyways, and talk to them about what they’re up to now,” says Holznagel, “because everyone’s had to adjust and that’s relatable.” Radical Listening has also responded to the killing of George Floyd and the protests against police brutality that followed—the podcast’s 15th episode, an interview with Fuse Theatre Ensemble member James Dixon and activist Darion Jones, focused on Black Lives Matter and allyship. Yet while the podcast merges art and activism, Johnson doesn’t want it to be held solely responsible for promoting equity in Portland theater. “Here’s the other thing about being Black, I guess: People are constantly calling on you to be the one,” Johnson says. “Black people are always getting called upon to use their equity or their assets to enact this change, and what I’m asking is for white people to do that. I want Radical Listening to be radical listening, and I want white theater companies to do this work.” It’s impossible to say exactly what the Portland theater scene will look like a year, or even a month, from now. Whatever happens, Johnson and Holznagel plan to keep listening and collaborating. “He’s really made me value my skills higher than I think I used to, for better or worse,” Holznagel says of Johnson. “I hope the same is true for him, but I know it’s true for me. He’s an inspiring dude to be around, through and through.” LISTEN: Radical Listening streams at cohoproductions.org.

A half-century after the publication of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, n ove l i st J e s my n Wa rd released a critical anthology of her own, pulling together a collection of writers and thinkers to discuss the state of race and racism in America today. As Baldwin suggested, if we do not reckon with the demons of our past, they will follow us wherever we go. Ward’s collection includes essays by Jericho Brown, Carol Anderson and Portland’s own Mitchell S. Jackson, writers who pay homage to Baldwin’s legacy and consider the progress we have made while thinking carefully about the work that is still to be done.

Blueprint for Revolution, Srdja Popovic In the late 1990s, Srdja Popovic formed the nonviolent activist group Otpor!, a name that loosely translates to resistance. The goal was to work against the brutalism of the Milosevic regime, casting oppression as the trick mirror that it is and branding political upheaval in a way that catered to the masses. By 2000, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was effectively overthrown. Popovic’s handbook for revolutionaries isn’t always prescriptive, or even relevant, for the American landscape, but it is intensely readable and offers a crosscultural look at what moves us toward lasting change.

They Can’t Kill Us All, Wesley Lowery In They Can’t Kill Us All, Wesley Lowery writes the birth story of the Black Lives Matter movement, a story he became uniquely equipped to tell in his years as a Washington Post reporter covering the police shootings of unarmed Black men. The book moves from 2014 onward, bringing Lowery to Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and St. Anthony, Minn., introducing readers to the activists he meets and searching for patterns in police brutality. “The story of Ferguson remains the story of America,” Lowery writes.

A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde In the earliest pages of A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde writes of the tyranny of feelings: “You don’t feel a tank or a war, you feel hate or love. Feelings are not wrong, but you are accountable for the behavior you use to satisfy those feelings.” With grace and precision, Lorde draws the nebulous concept of “social justice” to a fine point, expanding on the politics of identity and deconstructing the forces that work against freedom. That freedom, to Lorde, is a pipe dream without the inclusion of each group that has been left behind, a sentiment worth remembering in times of conflict.

Human Acts, Han Kang Set against South Korea’s 1980 Gwangju Uprising, Han Kang’s Human Acts is almost impossibly human in its reflection on life under military dictatorship. The novel, separated into seven chapters with seven different narrators, works through the death of one 15-year-old boy killed during protest—we read from the perspective of his neighbor, mother and others who lived in his orbit as they confront the gruesome realities of state violence. Kang’s tact as a storyteller breaks through the tragedy, reminding us that some stories are difficult and we should still read them.

MOVIES GET YOUR REP S IN

Editor: Andi Prewitt / Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com Have a movie screening you’d like to submit to our Get Busy calendar? Go to wweek.com/submitevents for instructions.

SCREENER

While local rep theaters are out of commission, we’ll be putting together weekly watchlists of films readily available to stream. This week, we highlight a couple of the best films coming and going to various platforms as we transition from July to August. Time may not feel real these days, but that sure doesn’t matter when it comes to movie licensing contracts.

My Own Private Idaho (1991) An Oregon staple from Gus Van Sant, this loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry plays follows two gay street hustlers (Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix) as they turn tricks in Portland. The result is a simultaneously gritty and tender exploration of friendship, identity and unrequited love. Criterion Channel until July 31.

PHONE HOME: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial will be one of many movies shown at the new Zidell Yards drive-in.

Drive-Ins, 3-D Programming and Fundraising Drives NW Film Center is offering audiences unique ways to experience cinema during the pandemic.

The Edge of Seventeen (2016) Another Oregon-set coming-of-age film (though sadly not shot on location), this one by Kelly Fremon Craig in her remarkable directorial debut. Angsty teenager Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) feels her life is upended when her best friend (Haley Lu Richardson) starts dating Nadine’s older brother. Woody Harrelson co-stars as her supportive yet pithy teacher. Netflix until July 31.

When Harry Met Sally (1989) In one of the most influential romcoms of all time, Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal play two New Yorkers who, over the course of their 12-year friendship, refuse to ruin their deep connection by having sex. Can a woman and man truly be just friends? In real life, yes, obviously, but in Nora Ephron’s world…hotly debatable! HBO Max until July 31.

Ocean’s Twelve (2004) The wildly misunderstood and underappreciated sequel to Ocean’s Eleven (2001) finds our beloved charlatans (George Clooney, Brad Pitt, et al.) in need of a high-stakes heist to pay off a multimillion-dollar debt— all while being tailed by a savvy Interpol agent (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) also streams on Netflix starting Aug. 1.

Before Sunrise (1995) The first in Richard Linklater’s emotionally devastating Before trilogy follows Jesse and Céline (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), two strangers who meet on a train to Vienna. The subsequent night is spent walking, talking and falling in love, bolstered by the leads’ magnetic chemistry and the screenplay’s deeply authentic dialogue. Before Sunset (2004) is also on HBO Max starting Aug. 1.

BY C H ANC E SOLEM-PFEIFER

@chance_s_p

Reflecting on the final nights of March’s Portland International Film Festival cut short by COVID-19, NW Film Center director Amy Dotson says guests have since described it “like the last night on earth.” A glance four months backward is bittersweet for Dotson, who was leading her first PIFF in the directorial role. Her goals for opening the festival’s “doors a little wider” to audiences and marking “a new day” were on track: Dotson says attendance by first-time guests was up 40 percent, and PIFF was on its way to fiscal positivity for the first time in “many years.” Then, the coronavirus leveled the festival, the entire film exhibition world, and several local filmmakers’ world premieres. In pursuit of any silver lining, it also leveled the industry playing field. “The [film] world is a lot more unbound four months later,” Dotson observes. “A lot of silos and hierarchies and ‘Well, you’re this cool festival that’s been around forever’ and ‘You’re just this small festival,’ all that just exploded in the first month of trying to figure out what was going to happen.” Dotson describes video meetings— sometimes more like “group therapy sessions”—from the spring in which NWFC staff, local artists and industry leaders from New York and Los Angeles discussed shared challenges and collaborating in unprecedented ways. Now, Dotson asserts, the Film Center has been “able to pivot” in ways more entrenched organizations haven’t.

The results this summer are threefold: • The Cinema Unbound Drive-In Theater Aug. 6-Sept. 27 at Zidell Yards. • The Portland Art Museum debut of the Venice Biennale’s virtual reality programming Sept. 2-10. • A three-pronged fund (one taking applications now) supporting Northwest filmmakers and new media artists through COVID-19 and beyond. Given the vague to nonexistent timetable for reopening theaters nationwide, the Cinema Unbound Drive-In looks to capitalize on perhaps the only safe way to watch movies in public: from cars. Zidell Yards will host up to 250 moviegoers, by state ordinance, every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night through September. Slated titles range from Labyrinth to John Lewis: Good Trouble to The Birds. Performances or short programs by Northwest artists will precede every screening, and tickets are on sale now. “We want that unexpectedness [in the curation],” Dotson says. “Everyone who comes to Do the Right Thing may not come to Creature From the Black Lagoon, and that’s OK.” If the drive-in cuts toward the retro, September’s virtual reality partnership with the Venice Biennale pushes toward the sharpest edge of NWFC’s new media goals. Since 2017, the Venice Biennale—the world-renowned arts organization under which the Venice Film Festival operates— has funded and premiered VR projects. In light of the pandemic, this year marks the first time the Biennale will export its exclusive VR work to “delegates” around the world, with the Portland Art Museum of acting as its only American outlet. From

Sept. 2 to 10, Dotson says Portlanders can come to the museum, safely don VR headsets and be transported. “At this moment, to be able to quite literally walk in someone else’s shoes or take up space in a place that might be imaginary or might be deeply lived,” she says, “we’re psyched.” F i n a l l y, t h e N W FC d e b u t e d t h e Re:Imagine Artist Fund this month with three branches of grants to support Oregon, and Clark County, Wash., cinema and new media artists. The fund comprises $2,000 relief grants (currently in review), $5,000 grants for artists reimagining their practices post-COVID, and a longer-term third phase of stipends for “artists who are currently less represented—specifically Black artists and filmmakers, those who identify as women and LGBTQIA+.” “People [in Portland], more than other places I’ve had the pleasure of living and working, are artists of multidisciplines,” Dotson says. “They see themselves as artists first. Even still, there are very few funds melding fine arts and cinematic storytelling.” Though it could be years before we see the projects born of this funding, long-term ambition and short-term improvisation have become mandatory in Dotson’s still nascent tenure. As a result, the NW Film Center is in a flurry of motion at a time when so many organizations are forced into holding patterns. “It’s all a grand experiment,” Dotson says. “Today is another grand experiment.” SEE IT: For more information about Cinema Unbound Drive-In Theater, the Venice Biennale’s virtual reality programming, and the Re:Imagine Artist Fund, visit nwfilm.org. Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

July 29-Aug. 4 IMDB

MOVIES OUR KEY

: T H I S M O V I E I S E XC E L L E N T, O N E O F T H E B E S T O F T H E Y E A R. : T H I S M O V I E I S G O O D. W E R E C O M M E N D YO U WATC H I T. : T H I S M O V I E I S E N T E R TA I N I N G B U T F L AW E D. : T H I S M O V I E I S A P I E C E O F S H I T.

TOP PICK OF THE WEEK

A Girl Missing With the revenge preoccupations of Park Chan-wook but the no-frills living-room style of Ken Loach, Japanese writer-director Koji Fukada makes movies about the echoes of guilt. The successor to his 2016 high-water mark Harmonium, A Girl Missing witnesses the unraveling and transformation of a devoted nurse named Ichiko (played by Fukada favorite Mariko Tsutsui) into a lonely woman about town. Her character shift is brought on by Ichiko’s nephew dispassionately abducting the granddaughter of a patient, but this kidnapping mystery is only the initial thread in one of 2020’s knottiest films. As with Harmonium, Fukada entrenches audiences in the darkest possible subject matter but omits violence or action that could rack up points for shock, style or catharsis. His tastes are unflappably drab. Meanwhile, Mariko is outstanding as a trusting woman realizing too late that accusations about the kidnapping are rippling her way. For the most part, A Girl Missing is a writing achievement. At only 40, Fukada seems a whisker away from resounding international acclaim, but he keeps stiff-arming audiences back from any version of narrative or experiential gratification. Still, if you dig a fathoms-deep script about guilt coming home to roost, consider this a loud but conflicted endorsement. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Virtual Cinema.

ALSO PLAYING

THIS IS A PHOTO CREDIT

Welcome to Chechnya In 2017, the Chechen Republic targeted all gays and lesbians in a countrywide “hunt.” Its tactics and atrocities are noted with precision in the poignant documentary Welcome to Chechnya. The film follows a network of activists who smuggle LGBTQ individuals out of Russia, focusing on two rescuers and two rescuees as they navigate their way to safety. With its rough and raw camerawork, the documentary exposes a human rights tragedy that, for one reason or another, has been purged from headlines. Here, crisis coordinator David Isteev is doing all he can to change that, not just by detailing the tragedy on film, but by spiriting at-risk gays and lesbians out of Russia to nearby countries. The film does all it can to keep its subjects safe, too. Director David France uses “deep fake” technology to overlap their faces with that of a volunteer, allowing France to capture daily routines. In the tradition of guerrilla filmmaking, France zeroes in on hang-out scenes, where men and women chat, joke and make love while hiding from authorities. There are nail-biting moments, too—checkpoints, blown covers—but France treats the banal and the pivotal equally to speak to his greater point: The queer people of Chechnya live in fear day and night, at home and in public. Chechnya the movie blends this terrifying message with glimmers of hope and resistance. NR. ASHER LUBERTO. Amazon Prime, HBO Go, HBO Now.

All I Can Say Profound intimacy runs throughout Shannon Hoon’s home video archive-turned-documentary, but it’s not due to footage of the late Blind Melon singer’s newborn baby, or laying down the “No Rain” vocal track or spying on Neil Young through an air vent. It’s democratized time that creates the closeness. Hoon playfully but obsessively recorded his life between 1990 and 1995—a span in which he evolved from an Indiana ne’er-do-well to alt-rock icon to Icarian tragedy. The catalog unfurls into a timeline of elation, failure and boredom that most Hollywood editors would dice into a 45-second touring montage. Even more meaningful, the audience can feel how time sped up for Hoon himself. Through Rolling Stone covers and rehab stints, he recorded his life almost daily with the intention of watching the tapes later for clarity. While this doc will obviously carry deeper meaning for Blind Melon fans, any viewers will appreciate the

snapshot of the era, which doubles as a glimpse of how the diary method changes the diary. Any approximation of All I Can Say in 2020 would directly or indirectly nod to the fans. In a trip back to 1992, though, we can experience the thrilling and ugly disembodiment of being truly uninvited. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. allicansay. oscilloscope.net.

Days of the Whale Both by recent American standards and the (perhaps outdated) reputation of the city itself, the streets of Medellín, Colombia, appear almost tranquil in Days of the Whale. We follow university student Cris (firsttime actor Laura Tobón Ochoa) biking to a cafe, adopting a stray dog with her flame Simon (another newcomer, David Escallón Orrego) and dancing in a commune of fellow graffiti artists. Where injustice does exist—cartel flunkies shake down the neighborhood for “protection”—it’s absorbed into a civic mural. Their threat is almost atmospheric in Medellín, so Cris and Simon must decide how seriously to take it and whether to quit painting their zoological street art over top of gang tags. Though her debut feature is slight and its script more like a sketch at times, Catalina Arroyave Restrepo brings her home city to life with marvelous assuredness and ease. This is a movie chiefly about place, and instead of explaining Medellín in a post-Escobar world, she reveals it, earning audience trust with docurealistic visuals still fluid enough to demonstrate the craft of fiction. The painting scenes are probably the film’s most euphoric, and in this way, Days of the Whale is an artist’s manifesto: It believes in the transformative value of creation. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Virtual Cinema.

The King of Staten Island Scott (Pete Davidson) needs help. When we first meet him, he’s driving on a freeway with his eyes closed. The King of Staten Island, directed and co-written by Judd Apatow, is the story of Scott opening his eyes to reality—a big step for the mouthy, insecure, mentally unstable 24-year-old living with his mom (Marisa Tomei) in her Staten Island basement. He dreams of opening a tattoo restaurant (“Ruby Tat-Tuesdays!”), an idea so bone-headed even his stoner friends turn it down. Part of Scott’s arrested development is linked to the death of his firefighter father 17 years earlier. Though his life is a slog, both Davidson’s performance and Apatow’s management of his talent make Scott easy to root for: Davidson, like Scott, lives with his mother and lost his

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

A GIRL MISSING father, also a firefighter, in the World Trade Center attack in 2001. The most touching moments pull from that reality, and Apatow’s improvisational style of directing, although meandering in some past films (Trainwreck, Funny People), does well to reflect Davidson’s loose-jointed way of being. A couple scenes stick out. A low-key argument with a group of firefighters at a Yankees game, his mom’s new boyfriend (Bill Burr) among them, feels painfully honest, while a party montage sees Scott finally letting loose. Mostly, the movie is memorable because of Davidson, who with his boyish smile, buggy eyes and comic timing brings an honesty to a role that stuck with me like a permanent tattoo. He’s a star—and man—in the making. R. ASHER LUBERTO. Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Fandango Now, Google Play, Vudu, Xfinity, YouTube.

Manchild: The Schea Cotton Story In 1995, Schea Cotton was the country’s top-ranked high school basketball player. The hoop dreams were high and his vertical was higher. Cotton, whose publicity matched that of later stars, like LeBron James and Jason Kidd, was such an explosive athlete you couldn’t help but wonder if he ate gunpowder before each game. At 15 and 16, he was packing arenas, signing autographs and appearing in Sports Illustrated features. Then the moment was gone. The NBA draft passed him by in 2000, as did his competitors, like Baron Davis, Paul Pierce and Tyson Chandler. How could a top prospect in his sport drop off the map so quickly? That’s the cautionary tale spun by Manchild: The Schea Cotton Story, a brisk, troubling documentary that doesn’t over-dribble. In less than 90 minutes, Manchild tells Cotton’s story through interviews and archival footage of the 6-foot-6 player dominating the court. “He was LeBron James before LeBron James,” says former Celtic Paul Pierce. The only way to stop him was off the court. The documentary doesn’t shy away from detailing the media’s perverse role in hyping kids at an early age and the NCAA’s corruption, which derailed Cotton from playing Division I basketball. But Eric Herbert’s directorial debut, which premiered at the

L.A. Film Festival in 2016, and released on streaming services this summer, is more than a “what could have been” narrative. It’s a rewarding reminder of how athletes who are considered “failures” can still rebound off the court. NR. ASHER LUBERTO. Amazon Prime, Google Play.

Carmilla A carriage crashes and out climbs Carmilla, a mysterious young lady ready to spark the 19th century English gentry in their own version of The Witch meets Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Taken in by a local family to recover, Carmilla instantly earns the affection of their teenage daughter, Lara (Hannah Rae), and the distrust of Lara’s stern governess (Jessica Raine) and the attending physician following the crash (Tobias Menzies). Based on one of the earliest known works of vampire fiction, dated 1871, Carmilla seeks to explore how oppressive social expectations of women catalyze a fairly innocent rebellion that can look devilish in the right (or wrong) light. But that kind of social commentary requires an insightful dramatic core, and Carmilla too often shoehorns in horror elements for convenience. Director Emily Harris’ script constantly fills gaps where character detail should go with demonic illustrations, dream sequences and time-lapse footage of decaying wildlife. Even if it is pinned between the stately drama and the scrappy genre play, Carmilla arrives lovingly crafted and noticeably well lit, creating constricting circles of visibility around its characters with encroaching darkness. It just doesn’t matter how well we can see them; we don’t know them. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. filmmovement.com/carmilla.

Greyhound The ocean has always beckoned Tom Hanks. From mermaid romances (Splash) to Gulf shore shrimping (Forrest Gump) to tragically losing Wilsooooon (Cast Away), Hollywood’s favorite Everyman has often been put in his place by the briny abyss. In Greyhound, it’s more like Hanks, who also wrote the screenplay, premeditated the humble place. Stoic and dutiful as the skipper of a U.S. destroyer shielding a convoy from Nazi U-boats, Hanks undercooks his own passion project in this ominous Apple TV+ war movie, which Sony sold off

to streaming when the pandemic hit this spring. Largely free of backstory or B plots, Greyhound (or Coordinates: The Movie, as it could’ve been called) steams forward as a historical military exercise. Hard right rudder now, to avoid yet another unidentifiable ripple in the black waves. On the one hand, there’s value in fixating a war movie so fully on process that the glory is sapped out of violence. But Greyhound veers too sternly toward lifelessness. Of all the nautical Hanks movies to imitate, this one apes Captain Phillips, obsessed with the realism and alienating qualities of military might. It’s too bad Hanks has narrowed the definition of Everyman to “glum avatar for bravery.” PG-13. CHANCE SOLEMPFEIFER. Apple TV+.

John Lewis: Good Trouble Congressman John Lewis was an undeniably important civil rights leader: Over his 60-year career, he was arrested 45 times, and his steadfast activism paved the way for the end of segregation and the advancement of voting rights. His tenacious approach to these issues also “highlighted the inactivity of the federal government,” according to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is interviewed in the film along with a host of other leaders, ranging from newwave progressives like Rep. Ilhan Omar to outdated centrists like the Clintons and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It’s difficult to make a documentary about a living subject that doesn’t feel self-serving—Lewis died of pancreatic cancer July 17 just a few weeks after the film debuted—especially if the subject is a politician, of whom there are no perfect ones. At times, Good Trouble sidesteps this trap by featuring archival footage of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches, but its present-day content is cursory, verging on cloying and pandering. Did we really need a segment dedicated to Lewis’ fondness for dancing to Pharrell Williams’ “Happy”? Good Trouble may be emblematic of our tendency to lionize public servants— though Lewis’ impeccable voting record demonstrates he practiced what he preached—but it also serves as a welcome and timely reminder that causing a stir is exactly what creates societal and political change. PG. MIA VICINO. Amazon Prime, Google Play.

FLASHBACK

THIS WEEK IN 1993

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

SPOTLIGHT

CHRIS KNOX

LOST LAKE EDITION!

by JACK KENT

Chris Knox is currently a comic book artist/illustrator. He owns and operates Moose and Mouse Gallery with his wife. He has been a practicing artist for over 25 years and has shown work from Maine to Oregon. He attended; The Maine College of Art, The Art Institute of Portland, and PNCA. He works primarily in ink and gouache. He’s currently writing two comics: Sundries - An epic, hyper-color surreal trek through the dreamy subconscious of Al, a man whose forgotten how to imagine. Honored Citizen - A black and white “daily” dealing with the hypocrisy of employment, the love of family, and the obligation we all have to break the law. It can be found on Instagram @honoredcitizencomic Chris lives in Northeast Portland with his wife, Katie and two kids, Story and Marin.

Jack draws exactly what he sees n’ hears from the streets. Buy an original Sketchy People drawing and help keep Portland weird, and fed! Jack is donating all proceeds to Meals on Wheels! E-mail or DM Jack to help fight hunger.

Be a Willamette Week featured artist! Contact us at art@wweek.com.

Willamette Week JULY 29, 2020 wweek.com

IG @sketchypeoplepdx | kentcomics.com

JONESIN’

Week of August 6

by Matt Jones

"Censor-y Overload"--just can't say what's happening.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)

In her book *Sticks, Stones, Roots & Bones*, Stephanie Rose Bird reports that among early African Americans, there were specialists who spoke the language of trees. These patient magicians developed intimate relationships with individual trees, learning their moods and rhythms, and even exchanging non-verbal information with them. Trees imparted wisdom about herbal cures, weather patterns, and ecologically sound strategies. Until recently, many scientists might have dismissed this lore as delusion. But in his 2016 book *The Hidden Life of Trees*, forester Peter Wohlleben offers evidence that trees have social lives and do indeed have the power to converse. I've always said that you Aries folks have great potential to conduct meaningful dialogs with animals and trees. And now happens to be a perfect time for you to seek such invigorating pleasures.

Have you been saving any of your tricks for later? If so, later has arrived. Have you been postponing flourishes and climaxes until the time was right? If so, the coming days will be as right a time as there can be. Have you been waiting and waiting for the perfect moment before making use of favors that life owes you and promises that were made to you? If so, the perfect moment has arrived. Have you been wondering when you would get a ripe opportunity to express and highlight the most interesting truths about yourself? If so, that opportunity is available.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20) Author Joanne Harris writes, "The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. The magic of everyday things." I think that's an apt oracle for you to embrace during the coming weeks. In my opinion, life will be conspiring to make you feel at home in the world. You will have an excellent opportunity to get your personal rhythm into close alignment with the rhythm of creation. And so you may achieve a version of what mythologist Joseph Campbell called "the goal of life": "to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature."

GEMINI (May 21-June20)

ACROSS 1 "Groovy" relative 4 Bitter-tasting 9 With celerity

55 Clearly inflamed, but censored? 60 Toe the line 61 Soap that's evidently 0.56% impure

30 Long ride to the dance 31 Laundry piles 33 Kindling-making tools 34 Paris's Rue de la _ _ _

44 Lined up

69 Brit. reference work

45 British singer-songwriter Chris

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)

DOWN

47 Defensive specialist in volleyball

35 Barber's cut

14 "Awesomesauce" 15 Set of principles

64 Receive at the door

38 Villainous sort

17 Censored hearty meat entree?

65 Boxer Fury

39 Name of anonymity

66 Pastrami sandwich bread

40 Melville sailor Billy

19 Clue options

67 Filmdom's suave bloodsucker, for short

41 Litter

20 Heavy metal's Motley _ _ _ 21 Censored mugful for Harry Potter?

68 Introduce yourself

23 Prepare for a sale, maybe 25 Domain of a bunch of Ottos, for short 26 Tango requirement? 27 Hundreds of wks. 28 Brief calm 32 Biblical peak 34 Outdoor eating areas

1 Pale imitation 2 Passionate fan 3 Fine specimens 4 Teensy invader 5 Salad with bacon and egg

36 They precede Xennials

6 Waltz violinist Andre with PBS specials

37 Poker player's censored post-hand challenge?

7 "Colors" rapper

41 Protagonist of Netflix's "Never Have I Ever" (or a Hindu goddess)

8 Profoundness 9 Oscar winner for playing Cyrano de Bergerac in 1950

42 Detestable

10 Basic travel path

43 Medicine show bottleful

11 Closet-organizing device

46 Went 9-Across

12 Dance in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"

47 Start of many California city names

CANCER (June 21-July 22) "Pleasure is one of the most important things in life, as important as food or drink," wrote Cancerian author Irving Stone. I would love for you to heed that counsel, my fellow Crabs. What he says is always true, but it will be extraordinarily meaningful for you to take to heart during the coming weeks. Here's how you could begin: Make a list of seven experiences that bring you joy, bliss, delight, fun, amusement, and gratification. Then make a vow—even write an oath on a piece of paper—to increase the frequency and intensity of those experiences.

62 Unable to escape censorship?

13 Citrus beverage suffix

Author Gloria Anzaldúa writes, "I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining." She adds that in this process, she has become "a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings." I would love for you to engage in similar work right now, Gemini. Life will be on your side— bringing you lucky breaks and stellar insights—if you undertake the heroic work of reformulating the meanings of "light" and "dark"—and then reshaping the way you embody those primal forces.

16 $100 bills, slangily

50 "The Family Circus" cartoonist Keane

18 It has a bed and a floor

51 Classical opening

24 Garbage bag brand

53 Potable, so to speak

29 Pac-12 athlete

37 No longer worried

48 Cyclops feature 49 Did some videoconferencing, maybe 52 Passing remarks? 54 Hold up 56 Operatic solo 57 "Shepherd Moons" Grammy winner 58 Online crafts marketplace 59 Christopher Robin's "silly old bear" 63 Ending for pepper

last week’s answers

At times in our lives, it's impractical to be innocent and curious and blank and receptive. So many tasks require us to be knowledgeable and self-assured and forceful and in control. But according to my astrological analysis, the coming weeks will be a time when you will benefit from the former state of mind: cultivating what Zen Buddhists call "beginner's mind." The Chinese refer to it as *chūxīn*, or the mind of a novice. The Koreans call it the *eee mok oh?* approach, translated as "What is this?" Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield defines it as the "don't-know mind." During this upcoming phase, I invite you to enjoy the feeling of being at peace with all that's mysterious and beyond your understanding.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you." Author Anne Lamott wrote that, and now I'm conveying it to you—just in time for the Unplug-Yourself Phase of your astrological cycle. Any glitches or snafus you may be dealing with right now aren't as serious as you might imagine. The biggest problem seems to be the messy congestion that has accumulated over time in your links to sources that usually serve you pretty well. So if you'll simply disconnect for a while, I'm betting that clarity and grace will be restored when you reconnect.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) "I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes," writes Scorpio author Maxine Hong Kingston. That would be an excellent task for you to work on in the coming weeks. Here are your formulas for success: 1. The more you expand your imagination, the better you'll understand the big picture of your present situation— and the more progress you will make toward creating the most interesting possible future. 2. The more comfortable you are about dwelling in the midst of paradoxes, the more likely it is that you will generate vigorous decisions that serve both your own needs and the needs of your allies.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) "Some people will never like you because your spirit irritates their demons," says actor and director Denzel Washington. "When you shine bright, some won't enjoy the shadow you cast," says rapper and activist Talib Kweli. You may have to deal with reactions like those in the coming weeks, Sagittarius. If you do, I suggest that you don't take it personally. Your job is to be your radiant, generous self—and not worry about whether anyone has the personal power necessary to handle your radiant, generous self. The good news is that I suspect you will stimulate plenty of positive responses that will more than counterbalance the challenging ones.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) Capricorn occultist Peter J. Carroll tells us, "Some have sought to avoid suffering by avoiding desire. Thus they have only small desires and small sufferings." In all of the zodiac, you Capricorns are among the least likely to be like that. One of your potential strengths is the inclination to cultivate robust desires that are rooted in a quest for rich experience. Yes, that sometimes means you must deal with more strenuous ordeals than other people. But I think it's a wise trade-off. In any case, my dear, you're now in a phase of your cycle when you should take inventory of your yearnings. If you find there are some that are too timid or meager, I invite you to either drop them or pump them up.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) The people who live in the town of Bazoule, Burkina Faso regard the local crocodiles as sacred. They live and work amidst the 100+ creatures, co-existing peacefully. Kids play within a few feet of them, never worrying about safety. I'd love to see you come to similar arrangements with untamed influences and strong characters in your own life, Aquarius. You don't necessarily have to treat them as sacred, but I do encourage you to increase your empathy and respect for them.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) Your body naturally produces at least one quart of mucus every day. You might not be aware of it, because much of it glides down your throat. Although you may regard this snot as gross, it's quite healthy. It contains antibodies and enzymes that kill harmful bacteria and viruses. I propose we regard mucus as your prime metaphor in the coming weeks. Be on the alert for influences and ideas that might empower you even if they're less than beautiful and pleasing. Make connections with helpful influences even if they're not sublimely attractive.

HOMEWORK: What helpful tip might one of your wise ancestors offer you about how to thrive in the coming months? FreeWillAstrology.com

22 Period of importance

©2020 Jonesin’ Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com) For answers to this puzzle, call: 1-900-226-2800, 99 cents per minute. Must be 18+. Or to bill to your credit card, call: 1-800-655-6548. Reference puzzle #JNZ990.

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