Willamette Week, August 19, 2020 - Volume 46, Issue 43 - "Respect"

WWEEK.COM

VOL 46/43 08.19.2020

WILLAMETTE WEEK PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

THE FACEBOOK COAST Mark Zuckerberg is despoiling a tiny coastal village and Oregon’s natural treasures.

The state invited him. 13

RESPECT Now more than ever, we’re grateful to Damian Lillard.

Page 10

New

tar & mor Brick cation: Lo E 2329 NSt. n a Glis

The first best decision is eating a sushirito.

The second best? Ordering from @rollinfreshnw.

With three active food trucks, & one brick & mortar, you have no excuses.

Fresh and flavorful from first bite to last, you can’t skip making the second best decision.

FRIENDS OF WILLAMETTE WEEK

FACTS

ARE THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE Arm Yourself. Support local, independent journalism.

Become a Friend of Willamette Week. wweek.com/support

2

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

FINDINGS ALEX WITTWER

ZUCK’S BEACH, PAGE 13

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 46, ISSUE 41 Portland cannabis shops are being burglarized at a rate of two a night. 8 Dan Ryan’s victory was in part due to a television blitz starring Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty. 9 Democratic Socialists gathered signatures for a preschool funding measure at Portland’s protests.

9

Damian Lillard’s late cousin, Chef B, specialized in pound cake pancakes with 7-Up syrup. 11 Portlanders erected a memorial to a missing mailbox. 12 Joey Harrington sold his oceanfront property at a $100,000 loss. 14

Facebook left 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid under the seabed 500 feet off the Oregon Coast. 18

If the Blazers beat the Lakers, it’ll be the second time Damian Lillard has disrupted a tribute to Kobe Bryant . 21 A late-night milkshake pop-up has a dessert inspired by a Beyoncé song. 22 A famous 19th century painting personifies Iceland as a warrior woman shooting fire out of a crown of ice. 23 Someone finally named a weed delivery service “Pot Mates.” 25

In a Broadway Rose production of The Addams Family, one of the leads peed her pants while singing onstage every night. 26 Cannon Beach stood in as Northern California for a scene in Steven Spielberg’s worst film. 27

Visitors are stealing trail signs from Malheur National Forest. 20

ON THE COVER:

OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK:

Lillard Love, photo by Joseph Blake Jr.

The U.S. Postal Service confirmed it removed mailboxes in Portland and Eugene.

MASTHEAD EDITOR & PUBLISHER

Mark Zusman

EDITORIAL

News Editor Aaron Mesh Arts & Culture Editor Matthew Singer Assistant A&C Editor Andi Prewitt Music & Visual Arts Editor Shannon Gormley Staff Writers Nigel Jaquiss, Latisha Jensen,

WILLAMETTE WEEK IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY CITY OF ROSES MEDIA COMPANY

Rachel Monahan, Tess Riski Copy Editor Matt Buckingham ART DEPARTMENT

Creative Director Joy Bogdan Senior Production Designer Jack Kent Illustration Intern Paola De La Cruz Photography Intern Mick Hangland-Skill

2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210.

Main line phone: (503) 243-2122 fax: (503) 296-2874

ADVERTISING

Director of Sales Anna Zusman Account Executives Michael Donhowe, Justin Eulalio Thomas

TechfestNW Director Shelley Midthun Cultivation Classic Director Steph Barnhart Oregon Beer Awards Director Rachel Coddington

Marketing Coordinator Candace Tillery

Friends of Willamette Week Director Anya Rehon

COMMUNITY OUTREACH

DISTRIBUTION

Give!Guide Director Toni Tringolo

Circulation Director Spencer Winans Entrepreneur in Residence Jack Phan

Willamette Week welcomes freelance submissions.

Send material to either News Editor or Arts Editor.

Manuscripts will be returned if you include a selfaddressed, stamped envelope. To be considered for

OPERATIONS

OUR MISSION

Accounting Manager Kim Engelke Staff Accountant Shawn Wolf Manager of Information Services Brian Panganiban

To provide Portlanders with an independent and irreverent understanding of how their worlds work so they can make a difference.

Though Willamette Week is free, please take just one copy.

Anyone removing papers in bulk from our distribution points will be prosecuted, as they say, to the full extent of the law.

calendar listings, notice of events must be received in writing by noon Wednesday, two weeks before publication.

Questions concerning circulation or subscription inquiries should be directed to Spencer Winans at Willamette Week.

Classifieds phone: (503) 243-2122 fax: (503) 296-2874

Postmaster: Send all address changes to Willamette Week, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210.

Subscription rates: One year $130, six months $70. Back issues $5 for walk-ins, $8 for mailed requests when available.

Association of Alternative Newsmedia.

Willamette Week is mailed at third-class rates.

This newspaper is published on recycled newsprint using soy-based ink.

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

3

SUPPORT

LOCAL

INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM BECOME A FRIEND OF WILLAMETTE WEEK WWEEK.COM/SUPPORT

DIALOGUE On Aug. 14, WW confirmed that the U.S. Postal Service had removed 31 mailboxes from Portland and Eugene. A spokesperson for USPS told WW that boxes were removed due to declining mail volume and only where multiple boxes were located next to one another.

The same day, President Donald Trump told Fox Business he opposed increasing funding for USPS in order to make voting by mail more difficult. In a press conference, U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley said that by removing mailboxes, Trump was trying to sabotage vote by mail, while presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden called the decision “bizarre.”

Here’s what our readers had to say: Tim Willcox via wweek.com: “I live a few blocks from the picture. There was only one box in the entire area. The USPS’s reply is complete BS. You can count at least eight boxes in that picture. We’re being lied to. It’s so blatantly obvious that Trump and his cronies will stop at nothing to rig the election.” @sameritech via Twitter: “It’s not bizarre, Joe, it’s called fucking election fraud. Are you and Democrats going to do anything about it or simply call it what it is?”

Dozer via wweek.com: “Uncertain why this is even a story. According to postal authorities, only doubled-up boxes are being removed. Bad optics at this sensitive time, though. Maybe someone made a ‘budget and efficiency’ decision months ago, and it is now just getting implemented. USPS does have a bit of a poor reputation in terms of budget and efficiency, although I’m generally happy with it. Beyond that…I get my ballot in the mail at my home, and I return it from there. “ Alan Rutherford via wweek.com: “There was only one box at Northeast 70th and Sacramento, so the postal authorities are incorrect. Otherwise,

Dr. Know

I agree, too much is being read into the motives for removing some boxes.”

Erin Holbrook-Kosgei via Facebook: “Did they really need to be removed in August 2020? If they really needed to be moved, they could’ve waited until at least until Dec. 1, 2020.”

Lxmfft via wweek.com: “Seems like it would cost more to remove and store them to leave them where they were. Maybe I’m ignorant of the costs of them being where they were for years.” @cheryl_marlin via Twitter: “Less mail? People are ordering everything to be delivered to their homes right now. That makes no sense.” @Artobot via Twitter: “There are some locations that need to double up. I frequent a couple mailboxes in Hillsboro which are regularly overflowing.”

Cathy Kato via Facebook: “We didn’t have multiple boxes anywhere close to where they removed the one in our neighborhood. And it was a new box just from this year which was actively being used.

Sooooo, yeah.” @is_portland via Twitter: “In Oregon, there are ways to drop off your ballots that don’t involve the post office. Your voter information comes with lists of drop-offs in your community (libraries, election offices). Yes, this #USPSsabotage needs to end, but there are extra options for voting.”

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

You suggest that no Portland mayor has resigned, but your research is lacking this time—Mayor Neil Goldschmidt resigned in 1979. One of the other commissioners was appointed as mayor. —Ken J. In my recent column about who becomes mayor if the current mayor resigns (Dr. Know, WW, Aug. 5, 2020), I suggested that no Portland mayor had ever quit the job. While I did include the weasel words “as far as [I] could determine,” I grant that readers should expect a newspaper columnist to be more aware of major historical events.

In short, mea culpa. That said, try to put my error in perspective—it’s not like some horrible tragedy had befallen President Kennedy.

In any case, Ken, you’re correct. Mayor Goldschmidt resigned his post in 1979, not for the reason that springs to mind today, but to become secretary of transportation (only 14 heartbeats away from the presidency!) in the Jimmy Carter administration.

Under the rules in force at the time, the remaining four members of the Portland City Council could have replaced Goldschmidt with one of their own members—or, if they felt like it, some rando off the street—by a simple majority vote.

Unfortunately, they deadlocked, 2-2, and the office devolved to council president Connie McCready, who served as mayor for the remainder of Goldschmidt’s term.

The rules are different today, but the council presidency is still around. It’s not the kind of political office that people try to win, though—it just happens to you, like jury duty.

Every six months, the city rotates its chore wheel and whichever commissioner on the council is next in line has to take his or her turn as council president. (The previous president is now in charge of cleaning the restroom.)

I’m telling you all this because, in the mayor’s absence, the authority to do mayor-type stuff—shutting down the city in a snowstorm, say—passes to the council president. (Currently, that’s Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty.)

The council president does not actually become mayor—it’s not like the vice president of the U.S. being sworn in over the smoldering wreckage of Air Force One—but there is somebody at the wheel in a pinch. If my earlier column gave a different impression, Dr. Know regrets the error.

QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com

4

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

SUMMER

MURMURS WESLEY LAPOINTE

SHOE SALE Continues!

Select Sandals 25% OFF * *On Selected Brands and Styles

Now Open for Walk-In Shopping - Space Permitting 1433 NE Broadway St Portland • 503 493-0070 Tues-Sat 10-5pm APPOINTMENTS ALSO AVAILABLE

DESPERATE MEASURES: House Speaker Tina Kotek presided over two previous special sessions of the Oregon Legislature.

OREGON HOUSE SPEAKER WANTS EXTENSION OF EVICTION BAN: Even as COVID-19 infections and the resulting economic decline continue across Oregon, the state is six weeks away from an end to its moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. That ban ends Sept. 30. It’s not clear how elected state officials will address that. It may require a special session of the Legislature (the third this year) or an executive order by Gov. Kate Brown. House Speaker Tina Kotek is pushing for a six-month extension. “My top priority for September is making sure we can extend the eviction and foreclosure protections for another six months,” says Kotek. “Nothing is getting any easier, and people need to stay housed.” The governor’s office declined to say whether Brown will call a special session. “We’re in conversations with legislative leaders and housing advocates about what the necessary next steps are,” says Brown spokesman Charles Boyle.

CITY COUNCIL WILL WEIGH PEARL HOTEL: A first test of Portland’s 2035 Central City Plan comes before the City Council on Aug. 20. At issue is a proposed Hyatt Place hotel, with 160 rooms and 113 residential units planned for a quarter block on the corner of Northwest 12th Avenue and Flanders Street in the Pearl District.

The project would be taller than previously permitted at 23 stories and 250 feet with no onsite parking, and it abuts the Flanders Street Greenway. The 2035 plan encourages density and a shift away from automobiles. The group opposing the project, Pearl Neighbors for Integrity in Design, says it’s too tall, would generate too much traffic, and is poorly designed. The group also worries about “impacts to cultural and ethnic diversity of the South Pearl area,” which opponents claim would be preserved by retaining the neighborhood’s low-rise buildings. The council will decide Thursday whether to stick with the Design Commission’s approval or order modifications to the project. Patricia Cliff, president of the neighborhood group, wanted to postpone the hearing until Commissioner-elect Dan Ryan could be seated. No dice. “[That’s] most unfortunate,” Cliff says, “since a major land use decision of this type should really be vetted before a full, five-person City Council.”

COMPETITION COMES TO OREGON HEALTH PLAN: A new competitor is coming for the region’s biggest health care providers, including Providence, Legacy, Kaiser and Oregon Health & Science University. These giants partner in the tri-counties’ only provider of Medicaid services, Health Share of Oregon, which serves more than 320,000 Oregon Health Plan members. Health Share is the state’s largest coordinated care organization, and its constituent providers have fought to keep a deep-pocketed competitor, Trillium Community Health Plan, out of the local market. Last year, Trillium, which is owned by Centene Corporation, a massive for-profit firm based in St. Louis, filed suit in U.S. District Court to gain access to the Portland market. On Aug. 18, the Oregon Health Authority, which oversees the state’s Medicaid program, including regulating its providers, announced it had granted Trillium’s application to enter the local market effective Sept. 1.

PRISON HUNGER STRIKE BEGINS: Prisoners in solitary confinement at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton announced Aug. 18 they would go on a hunger strike amid an outbreak of COVID-19. The Eastern Oregon prison has 189 active COVID-19 cases among inmates and 61 active infections among staff. On Aug. 12, a man incarcerated at the facility died from COVID-19. Rose Harriot, a spokesperson for strike organizers, says prison staff has arbitrarily denied inmates phone calls to family members, and that those incarcerated must use baking soda to brush their teeth and make do with one bar of soap a month. Strike organizers say a prisoner named Steven Corbett, who has Crohn’s disease, has suffered seizures that caused him to “fall and hurt himself and for his organs to come out of his body through his colostomy bag,” says Harriot.

They demand his transfer to a medical facility.

Department spokeswoman Jennifer Black told WW that Corbett is assessed daily by medical personnel and that staff have not witnessed him falling or injuring himself. She said inmates in solitary can earn incentive phone calls and they are also provided pencils and paper to send letters to loved ones. “The process of providing phone calls is labor intensive, usually involving two staff escorting the [inmate] to the phone, then placing them back into their unit after the call is over.”

1020 NW 17th Ave., | Portland, OR | 503.943.2780

Where do you read Willamette Week? #READWW Tag us to be featured

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

5

YOU NEED WILLAMETTE WEEK, AND WW NEEDS YOU Tough,independent journalism wouldn’t survive without help from readers like you.

“Thank you for doing what you do!

Democracy dies in darkness.” – Alexis “The spirit of Portland is embodied in this publication, its reporters, photographers, writers, editors, and all of its staff.” – Matthew “Willamette Week has the only investigative journalism team left in Portland. They work hard, dig deep, and bring us the unbiased truth. Willamette Week is not a luxury—it’s a necessity.” – Greg

“Thanks for being out there on the frontlines of the protests.”

– Suzanne

“Thank you for being our daily paper of record. Your quality reporting, photos, charts, reviews, and Daily Primer emails have helped so much.”

– Keith

“Thank you for helping to empower independent journalism in our community.” – Brad

“Trump scares the hell out of me, so we need independent journalism.”

– Valerie

I’ve read WW forever, but in 2020, your reporting is more than critical.” – Jan

“It is crucial that we have access to honest journalism in this next phase of social and environmental justice. The press has the ability to free us from oppressive untruths.”

– Heather

“Willamette Week has broken important stories that no one else did or could.

The only investigative journalism left in Oregon.”

– Bob

“I’ve loved you forever and never want to let you go!” – Shayna

These are unprecedented times. Quality local journalism takes time and talent and resources. We invite you to join Friends of Willamette Week to help fund news reporting in Portland and across Oregon. Your support is essential for us to continue providing tough, independent journalism.

visit wweek.com/support

NEWS

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK

TRENDING

Bud Snatchers A weed robbery spree strikes Portland cannabis shops, even as police are stretched thin.

BY S OPHI E P E E L

who owns Attis Trading Company in the Burlingame neighborhood. On Aug. 9, three of his employees were held at gunpoint and zip-tied as three robbers plundered his

@sophiegreenleaf

A string of burglaries and armed robberies has cannabis shops across Portland fearful—and angry.

WW has spoken with owners or employees of 22 Portland-area dispensaries, each of which confirmed break-ins since late May. Many of the stores were hit multiple times. WW tallied 47 breakins. That’s a rate of one break-in every other night.

Three stores, according to owners, fell prey to armed robberies, including one in which employees were zip-tied and held at gunpoint.

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which oversees recreational cannabis, says the number is even higher: 60 weed stores have reported lost product over the past three months. The agency still hasn’t tallied the full value of the purloined weed, but shops reported $135,000 in stolen product in June alone.

The regularity of the crimes is extraordinary and is almost certainly the largest string of burglaries in decades targeting one type of business.

Industry insiders say the severity and frequency of the break-ins have escalated in the past month.

Dispensaries tell WW multiple shops along the same streets or in the same parts of town have been hit on the same night, leading shops to believe that robbers map out their routes (see map above).

“It’s just rampant,” says Ryon Nicholson, co-owner of a Portland-based cannabis wholesale company. “We’re under siege pretty much.”

It’s not clear what’s fueling the spate of weed thefts, but cannabis shop owners say the response by Portland police has been sluggish.

“We never hold our breath on them catching anyone,” says Johnny Reece, 8

MAPPED

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

store.

Some suspect a correlation between the robberies and fewer police patrolling due to protests downtown.

“It seems like too much of a coincidence to be truly a coincidence,” says Mike Getlin, who owns Old Apple Farm, a cannabis farm in Oregon City. “You know that police departments are straining to keep people in check by the federal courthouse, so robbing a place across town seems like a good opportunity, I guess.”

In a possible sign of how stretched the police are, the bureau told WW it could not comment by press deadlines. Public information officer Melissa Newhard said detectives had not responded to a request for updates. “I am sure they are inundated with follow-up and other requests,” Newhard said.

She added that police had responded to two dispensary break-ins Aug. 17, “one of which resulted in two juvenile suspects identified and detained.”

Cannabis has been one of the few industries spared economic turmoil since the onset of the pandemic. When Gov. Kate Brown shut down bars, restaurants and gyms in March, she allowed cannabis stores to remain open.

OLCC data shows cannabis sales have gone up more than 20% since March.

Joe Russo, who co-owns a cannabis distribution company, says the sales increase makes sense. People are working less and many are getting generous unemployment benefits.

“It makes sense that recreational vices are picking up,” Russo says.

The first break-ins happened on the morning of May 30, in the hours after rioters set fire to the Multnomah County Justice Center. “You could drive down Belmont and Hawthorne, and it was

just broken glass everywhere,” says Rick Vranish, marketing director at Tetra Cannabis on Southeast Belmont Street, who saw widespread damage after his and several other shops were hit June 1.

Widespread looting stopped but the plundering of weed stores continued.

Camille Farrell manages Amberlight Cannabis House in the Richmond neighborhood. Just past 3 am on July 26, the shop’s alarm linked to Farrell’s iPhone started to blare. She didn’t wake up. When she got to her shop at 8:30 that morning, the alarms were still going off, and the police had just responded.

According to security camera footage Farrell watched that captured the burglary, four young men in hoods and masks smashed the glass door with rocks and broke into the safes and fridges holding product. For nearly 25 minutes, they ran in and out of the shop taking loads of goods to a vehicle—about $16,000 worth of oils, extracts and glassware.

“It seems they’re aware that police don’t have quick response times,” Farrell says. “The alarm was going off the entire time.” The same group attempted to hit Amberlight again just two weeks later.

WW spoke with 10 other dispensaries that described young men using rocks to shatter glass windows and doors. They kicked in fridges, smashed display cases, grabbed whatever was handy, then ran out.

Then, in late July, the break-ins started getting more severe. On Aug. 9, three employees at Johnny Reece’s shop in Southwest were zip-tied and held at gunpoint while one of the employees was dragged 20 feet to the back office where she was ordered to open the cash safe.

“I’m just heartbroken. We never want anyone to have to go through that. I was furious,” Reece says. “I wanted to go hunt the guy down by myself.”

The armed robbers stole $30,000 in cash and $5,000 worth of flower—the hardest-hit shop in terms of cash stolen that WW spoke with.

However, five other dispensaries tell WW their total monetary losses—including product stolen and damage done to the store—exceeded $20,000.

Portland Extracts, a dispensary and processing lab in the Division Clinton neighborhood, was broken into Aug. 3, and owner Jordan Jacobsen tells WW nearly $200,000 worth of product was stolen by five young men who smashed a window with a rock to enter.

“It was like a shopping spree,” says Jacobsen. “They brought their own bags.”

More than a dozen shops tell WW they provided security camera footage to police officers from the burglaries.

Reece wants police to make the weed-stealing spree a higher priority.

“We’re not drug dealers,” he says. “We’re a legal business just like Taco Bell across the street.”

How Dan Ryan Won Ryan’s victory over Loretta Smith came down to three key factors.

On Aug. 11, Dan Ryan secured a 51% to 48% victory over Loretta Smith in the City Council special election runoff to replace late Commissioner Nick Fish, who died in January of abdominal cancer. Veteran election watchers say say his victory can be attributed to three factors: 1. Although the electoral map shows a pretty even distribution, Ryan won large victories in what political consultants Liz Kaufman and Mark Wiener long ago dubbed “the Kremlin,” because of its central power in city elections.

These close-in affluent neighborhoods, such as Irvington, Alameda, Laurelhurst and Eastmoreland, and Northwest Portland perpetually draw big voter turnout. Elections data shows Ryan won decisive victories in the three Kremlin precincts with the largest turnout, while Smith’s victories came mostly east of 82nd Avenue, where far fewer people voted. The turnout last week was 39.6%, significantly lower than in the May primary. That made winning the most reliable neighborhoods even more valuable.

“He won every precinct in the Kremlin,” says Kaufman, who wasn’t involved in the race.

“It also helped that he got almost all the newspaper endorsements [except for The Skanner] because in a low-turnout race, you get older, better-informed voters.”

2. Ryan worked the city ’s new Open and Accountable Elections system more effectively than Smith. That’s a bit of a surprise, given that this was Ryan’s first high-profile campaign and Smith had twice won Multnomah County Commission races and previously ran for City Council in 2018. Ryan, whose only previous electoral experience was a 2004 victory in a Portland Public Schools board race, racked up 936 contributions, about one and a half times Smith’s total, which allowed him to leverage more city matching funds.

Pollster John Horvick of DHM Research notes that Ryan has spent his career asking for money for nonprofits. “He’s a professional

NEWS

Who Expects to Live Longer?

COVID-19 exposed the underlying health conditions that kill people of color.

Among the many unforgiving effects of COVID-19 is this: Across Oregon and the U.S., people of color contract the virus at much higher rates than their white counterparts, and when they catch it, they’re more likely to die.

The reasons are layered. But one clue is a phrase that’s become bleakly familiar as we read the death tolls: “underlying conditions.”

The fact is, Black and Indigenous Oregonians were already more likely to die early. COVID just exposed that vulnerability.

These two groups have higher premature mortality rates than any other racial demographic, according to the Oregon Health Authority’s Public Health Division.

In other words, they lose more years of life before age 75: 33% more than white Oregonians.

One reason is the disproportionate number of health issues affecting these communities.

Black people experienced the greatest number of health inequities in a 2014 report card on racial and ethnic disparities compiled by the Multnomah County Health Department. The report card evaluates a person’s health status based on elements that include living and working conditions.

Black and Indigenous people, for instance, had the highest obesity levels among all demographics: 34.8% of Black adults and 36.2% of Indigenous adults were obese. Just 21.5% of non-Latino white people were obese, according to the report card.

Black people over the age of 65 were hospitalized for avoidable reasons at nearly double the rate of white people. White people had 9 avoidable hospital visits per 1,000 population while Black people had 17.3 hospital visits per 1,000 for conditions that could have been treated at a doctor’s office.

Self-reported health status measures how individuals rate their own overall health. Black adults self-reported the highest rate of poor health, 24.5%. White adults had the lowest at 15.6%, the report card said.

These statistics represent a few select ways Black Oregonians suffer from systemic racism: Health conditions that are preventable for most white people adversely affect Black Oregonians’ quality of life as well as their life expectancy. LATISHA JENSEN.

A groundbreaking plan for free preschool is taking an unprecedented path to the ballot.

A groundbreaking measure that would ultimately fund preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old in Multnomah County is following an unusual path to the ballot.

Earlier this month, the county commission referred to voters a Preschool for All measure, which would raise $133 million next year by imposing a 1.5% marginal tax on taxable income above $200,000 for households, as well as an additional 1.5% on households making $400,000 a year.

It’s part of a slate of tax measures appearing on the November ballot, including measures to fund libraries, parks, schools and transportation. But the preschool measure will have taken the most tortuous path to voters.

Here’s what’s different about it: 1. The DSA took charge. The Democratic Socialists of America’s Portland chapter hasn’t ever put a measure on the ballot before, but it helped win the backing of a wide range of groups, including labor, and helped gather enough signatures during the pandemic to put preschool funding before voters.

Campaigns with more money and experience—such as the one behind a statewide redistricting measure—struggled to gather signatures this year. But the DSA-backed effort got more than the 22,000 required—in part by gathering signatures at Portland protests, offering signature-gathering tables at set locations, and just asking registered voters to print the petition themselves with their signature and send it back.

“A lot of people did,” says Suzanne Cohen, a past president of the Portland Association of Teachers and a chief petitioner for the measure. “It surprised me.”

2. A county commissioner forged a compromise.

County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson had been working for years on her own measure to fund preschool.

Vega Pederson and the DSA held talks earlier this year to combine forces. Those went nowhere until the DSAbacked Universal Preschool Now measure made the ballot.

Earlier this month, when the county referred its measure to voters, Vega Pederson moved to adopt some of the provisions of the other measure, including increasing salaries for assistant teachers, to win the group’s backing.

3. The competing measures will trigger some sleight-of-hand.

To create a single measure on the ballot, the county commission has to adopt and repeal the DSAbacked measure by Sept. 3, which elections lawyer Dan Meek says is an unheard-of but legal maneuver.

One reason for it: The DSA measure is significantly different in that it would impose a higher tax on high-income households and individuals—a 3.9% tax above $190,000 for households. That higher rate might have more difficulty passing.

At least one county commissioner, Sharon Meieran, says passing and then immediately repealing the other measure is bad policy.

“I believe that this would directly contravene the spirit of our initiative petition system,” Meieran says. “Further, it could set a dangerous precedent—that legislative bodies would be willing to simply dismiss initiative petitions that have been signed onto by thousands of people, leaving them without recourse in our democratic process.”

But Vega Pederson also says there is no legal problem with the approach. “Our county attorney has made clear that there is no legal issue with enacting and amending the initiative for our board,” says Pederson. “With our strong and broad coalition and widespread community enthusiasm for universal preschool, we are confident this will pass in November.” RACHEL MONAHAN.

Years of Potential Life Lost Before Age 75

by Race/Ethnicity

10,000 ts

BLACK AND WHITE IN OREGON

Schooled

100,000 residen

3. Smith focused her spending on direct mail, while Ryan spent more of his money on television. “You couldn’t miss Dan,” says lobbyist and KGW-TV political analyst Len Bergstein. “He was all over TV.” Reed College political science professor Paul Gronke notes the star of those ads—Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who trounced Smith in 2018—may have been particularly helpful to Ryan “given how prominent a voice Hardesty is in today’s political environment.” In a post-election Facebook post, Smith’s campaign manager, Jerome Brooks, agreed Hardesty made a difference, saying she worked to defeat Smith out of spite and because she “wants to be able to continue to say that she’s the only Black Portland city commissioner.” NIGEL JAQUISS.

HOW THINGS WORK

ra te per

fundraiser,” Horvick says. “That had to have been a huge advantage.”

9,541

10,140

9,388

8,000

7,194

6,000 4,000

2,981

3,573

3,235

HISPANIC/ LATINO

MULTIRACIAL

2,000 0 AFRICAN AMERICAN

AMERICAN INDIA N/ NATIVE ALASKAN

ASIAN AMERICAN

PACIFI C ISLANDER

WHITE

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

9

NEWS JOSEPH BLAKE JR.

RESPECT Now more than ever, we’re grateful to Damian Lillard.

ALL LOVE: A mural of Damian Lillard appeared this year next to an upholstery supply shop along Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard.

10

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

COURTESY OF THE PORTLAND TRAILBLAZERS

TOP DOLLA: Lillard obliterated the NBA record for most baskets hit from farther than 30 feet in a season.

BY AARO N M E S H

amesh@wweek.com

breakfast for Lillard and McCollum—pound cake pancakes with 7-Up syrup, McCollum later told reporter Jason Quick of The Athletic. The day of B’s passing, the two players who loved him went to his house. Two of the most famous men in the state stood together and cried.

Lillard recalled his sorrow Aug. 11, after scoring 61 points to defeat the Dallas Mavericks. He credited the last 3 of those points—the shot that bounced so high the camera couldn’t follow, then fell in the basket—to heavenly intervention.

“It dropped in and, you know, I think that was my cousin,” Lillard said. “Rest in peace, Chef B. I think that was him dropping that in for me.”

Forget for a moment whether you think that’s true. Instead, consider Lillard’s example.

Through the death of his friend and the disruption of a career that in the best-case scenario will end when he’s still young, Lillard has soldiered on without excuses, as teammates fell to injury or failed to keep up with the torrid pace he set.

“You see how he holds himself on the court,” Frye says. “Regardless of what sport my kids end up playing, I want them to hold themselves like that.”

None of us can hit a contested 30-foot jump shot, but we all face challenges and frustrations each day. What Lillard’s example shows us: If you get out of bed, no matter how hard it is, keep trying and refuse to quit, good things can happen.

Damian Lillard needed someone to believe in. So did Portland—and he gave us that.

Lillard leads the Blazers into a first round playoff series this week against the Los Angeles Lakers. The games air on NBC Sports Northwest.

DOUG BROWN

It is now, officially, Lillard Time.

Every other day for the past two weeks, much of a bone-weary city has paused to watch the Trail Blazers basketball team fight for a playoff spot in the NBA bubble in Orlando.

The games have been agonizingly close: In four consecutive contests last week, the Blazers fell behind in the third quarter. At times, watching felt like collective scream therapy.

Each day, Damian Lillard has delivered.

The Oakland-born point guard from Weber State University secured a playoff spot with a virtuoso display of desire, composure and grace under an expiring shot clock.

He hasn’t done it alone: He was joined by a roster now beloved by Portlanders, including slithering guard CJ McCollum (playing with a fractured vertebra) and lumbering center Jusuf Nurkic (mourning the death of his grandmother from COVID-19 as he returned from his own broken leg).

But Dame’s play was otherworldly. He manipulated his way past swarming defenders to the basket, threaded passes to open teammates, and slammed his body onto hardwood to pluck loose balls. He hit a shot from the half-court logo, and another that bounced off the back rim and flew straight in the air so high it disappeared from the view of television cameras, before swooshing through the net for 3 points. Lillard scored 154 of those points in three nights—the most anyone has ever scored in the final three games of a season.

“I think it makes him what everyone in Portland knows he is: a superstar,” says Channing Frye, who played for the Blazers from 2007 to 2009 before winning a title with LeBron James in Cleveland. “His play has been nothing short of amazing.”

Lillard ended all debate about who is the greatest player in franchise history and, as the buzzer sounded after the Blazers’ 134-133 win over the Brooklyn Nets on Aug. 13, he snarled: “Put some respect on my fucking name!”

Portland roared back in joy. In 2020, that was an unfamiliar feeling.

Lillard’s performance was a gift to a city that has rarely felt so pummeled and divided.

The COVID-19 pandemic has killed loved ones,

eliminated jobs and paralyzed our daily interactions. An outpouring of anguish over police brutality toward Black people exploded into protests and riots of an intensity and duration surpassing that of most U.S. cities— and President Trump responded to the civil unrest by deploying a brutal federal police force to crush the uprising.

That pain is the backdrop to Lillard’s triumph. It’s hard to quantify how refreshing it felt. You had to watch it.

Sportscasters utter a lot of clichés about the healing power of sports, which change nothing.

Lillard’s athletic feats didn’t make Portland more peaceful or just, and anointing celebrities as saints is a dangerous gamble. Oregon’s doctors, nurses and EMTs have saved lives this year. Citizens have risked their safety to confront governmental abuse in the streets. It’s silly to compare basketball to that.

Damian Lillard isn’t a hero. He’s just one public figure who didn’t let Portland down.

This year has seen a series of leaders outmatched by their circumstances. Gov. Kate Brown often proved indecisive in the face of a pandemic. Mayor Ted Wheeler can’t decide where he stands when police square off with protesters. No champion has risen to guide this city through its grief and fear.

So it matters that Lillard is trying—and triumphing—even in his own small arena. It matters that he identifies with us—that the “O” on his back stands as much for Oregon as it does for Oakland, his birthplace, or Ogden, Utah, where he went to college. We can see ourselves in him, or at least who we’d like to be if we were a little stronger.

And it matters that he is experiencing these events, just as we are.

Lillard also watched the injustices American police forces enact against Black people, and on June 4, the most popular man in Oregon linked arms with protesters and marched across the Morrison Bridge, kneeling in memory of George Floyd. Later, he laid down a hip-hop track called “Blacklist.”

“Ali wasn’t the greatest just ’cause his hands work,” Lillard rapped. “Front line for his people, this was a man’s work… Our culture beautiful, battle-tested and tough, we had enough. So you either come with some change or it’s gon’ be rough. Period.”

On May 1, Lillard’s cousin, Brandon Johnson, who was part of Lillard’s team and cooked for him, died suddenly in May at age 35 of an undisclosed cause.

Johnson, known as “Chef B,” cooked

ARM IN ARM: Lillard marched against police brutality less than a week after Portland’s uprising began. “Cops kill a brother, get released after arraignments,” he wrote in a track this summer.

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

11

NEWS TREVOR GAGNIER

EX-BOX: Residents of Portland’s Roseway neighborhood erected a memorial for a missing blue mailbox.

Mail Tampering Trump is messing with the U.S. Post Office. Experts say that challenges Oregon democracy.

BY TE SS R I S K I

tess@wweek.com

Portlanders worry President Donald Trump may be undermining one of the state’s proudest innovations— vote by mail.

On Aug. 15, Eileen Dolan, a 67-year-old retiree, hopped on her bike to run a weekly errand for the Democratic Party: mailing bundles of postcards reminding Oregonians to vote by mail. In Northeast Portland, she pedaled past an arrangement of baby blue balloons, flowers and a headstone-shaped cardboard sign that read “R.I.P. Democracy.”

Dolan first thought it might be a memorial for a cyclist killed in traffic. Then she realized: The blue mailbox on the corner of Northeast 70th Avenue and Sacramento Street had disappeared.

“It was just ironic to be mailing those [postcards] from that box and for the box to be gone,” Dolan says. “It struck a chord.”

The missing mailbox was one of four boxes in Portland and 27 in Eugene removed last week by the U.S. Postal Service, as first reported on wweek.com. Officials cited declining mail volume during the pandemic as the reason for removing the 31 boxes. The agency told WW boxes would only be removed where at least two were stationed.

Dolan is skeptical, given that the sole mailbox stationed at the intersection was gone.

Removing four mailboxes in a city of 627,000 would be a pitiful attempt at voter suppression. But six local letter carriers who spoke to WW say it’s just a symptom of measures seemingly aimed at reducing mail flow under the guidance of Postmaster Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee and megadonor.

12

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

In recent weeks, some Portlanders have noticed a slowing of their mail delivery—a result, the letter carriers and USPS affiliates say, of new policies and dismantled machinery.

Beyond the removal of blue boxes, Joe Cogan, president of the Portland-area local of the American Postal Workers Union, says USPS has removed or is preparing to remove more than a quarter of its letter-sorting machines—15 of 50 machines—from the Processing and Distribution Center near Portland International Airport. Nine are already gone.

Larry Guarnero, a steward with the union, tells WW he recently witnessed stacks of letters destined for three local ZIP codes held behind at the facility because they weren’t properly processed through the sorting machine in time.

The Postal Service has battled obsolescence for years.

Buffeted by the internet and private competitors, the agency has seen first-class mail, its primary source of income, drop 44% since 2006, according to the nonpartisan General Accounting Office.

Trump has said he intends to withhold funding to the USPS ahead of the November general election—one that will rely more heavily than ever on vote by mail as the country surpasses 5 million COVID-19 cases. The president contends, without evidence, that mailed ballots are susceptible to election fraud. Democrats argue he fears vote by mail because it increases voter turnout and most Americans don’t want him in office.

On Aug. 18, after receiving national backlash, Postmaster DeJoy announced he was walking back many of the

changes he initiated, including removing blue mailboxes from neighborhoods. Hours after DeJoy’s announcement, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum announced her office was suing the Trump administration to block its attempts to limit vote by mail. (Disclosure: Rosenblum is married to the co-owner of WW’s parent company.)

Guarnero feels it’s too little too late. “I fear the damage has already been done,” he says. “At the plant, the machines are already torn up and not functional. They’ve already reduced the number of machines and post offices available prior to the election.”

Jamie Partridge, a retired letter carrier in Portland for 28 years and an organizer with Communities and Postal Workers United, says DeJoy “has walked back a few changes and left in place the most important change, which will delay the mail.”

That change is the recent rule that mail trucks are prohibited from leaving even one minute late from the processing plant. This leads to bundles of mail getting left behind and delayed until the next day, Partridge says.

The Multnomah County Elections Division, which has historically assured voters they can safely mail their ballots up to the Thursday before Election Day, is now reevaluating the cutoff date. “[We are] working closely with the USPS on changes that might impact delivery of mail ballots,” elections spokesman Eric Sample said in an email. “Multnomah County Elections will make a decision at a later date as to what the last date to safely mail the ballot back is.”

Some election experts no longer trust the USPS to safely handle their ballots.

“I will be using a dropbox for this election until we have a new administration that doesn’t mess with the Postal Service,” says Bill Bradbury, who served as the state’s top elections officer as secretary of state from 1999 to 2009. “It almost makes me want to cry.”

In the long term, Bradbury says, Oregon’s vote-by-mail system—considered by many the gold standard nationwide—will survive. But for now, he advises voters to drop their ballots in a ballot dropbox that doesn’t involve the post office.

Following DeJoy’s Aug. 18 announcement, Bradbury says he remains skeptical. “I’m moved that he’s saying he’s going to something different. Let’s see if he does,” Bradbury says. “I will wait to see.”

Oregon voters already receive ballots about three weeks before Election Day. But Bradbury and others recommend taking steps to ensure Trump cannot alter Oregon’s elections.

“I think [vote by mail] has worked too well and been too popular for it to be easily undermined this way,” says former Secretary of State Jeanne Atkins, who served from 2015 to 2017. “I think how the politics work out in the next two days will probably be really telling on whether we can continue to count on the post office as a partner.”

Atkins says more than half of Oregon voters already use dropboxes. For those who do want to mail their ballots, she says, they should do so 10 to 12 days before the election.

“From a voter’s standpoint,” Atkins says, “if you have easy access to a dropbox, go that direction. You’ve increased your odds, for sure, that the post office can’t mismanage that ballot.”

In Multnomah County, officials feel confident Oregon’s 20-year-old vote-by-mail system will go on.

“We have been assured by our local USPS liaison that elections officials and voters should expect the same reliable service we experience each and every election,” Sample said. “Multnomah County Elections wants to stress that voters will have the option to safely and securely cast their ballot either by mail or at any official 24-hour ballot drop site.”

Eileen Dolan, the Portlander who regularly sends out vote-by-mail postcards every week, still plans to do so. But from now on, she’ll drop them off in the blue box closer to her home.

“I’ll just go back to the Northeast Stanton box,” Dolan says, “while it’s still there.”

THE FACEBOOK COAST Mark Zuckerberg is despoiling a tiny coastal village and Oregon’s natural treasures.

The state invited him.

VIEW LOT: Facebook built a security fence around its drill site, with extra high bracing to hold noise curtains.

BY N IGE L JAQ UI SS

njaquiss@wweek.com

Tierra del Mar, two hours from Portland, is a funny kind of beach town. You can’t buy a cup of coffee, a beer or even a kid’s bucket and shovel there.

There are no stoplights, no cops and no city government.

That’s the way Marie Cook and the unincorporated Tillamook County village’s 220 other homeowners like it.

Cook and her late husband bought their house in Tierra del Mar in 1971.

Sandwiched between the soaring cliffs of Cape Lookout to the north and the blocky basalt monolith of Haystack Rock rising 327 feet above sea level to the south, Tierra del Mar—a collection of run-down shacks, trailers and elegant beach homes—is cut off from the world, on one of the state’s longest stretches of beach not directly adjacent to Highway 101.

A no-nonsense retired nurse with a nimbus of white hair, Cook says Tierra del Mar has changed little in 50 years—until she dis-

covered by chance in late 2018 that Facebook was going to be her new neighbor.

As in directly next door to her tidy Cape Cod-style beachfront home.

Looking out the back window of her home one day, Clark spied strange men tromping between her deck and the Pacific dunes.

“These surveyors were walking in my yard. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’” Cook recalls. “They said they were working on a cable project. I didn’t know what they were talking about.”

CONT. on page 14 Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

13

UNHAPPY NEIGHBOR: Marie Cook (below) now looks at Facebook’s fence, which is adjacent to her backyard.

POP-UP ADS: AntiFacebook signs along Sandlake Road express Tierra del Mar’s feelings.

They were laying the groundwork for a connection between Asia and Facebook’s vast server farms in Hillsboro and Prineville.

Cook and her neighbors have since become experts on the fiber-optic cable that crosses the Pacific seabed like high-tech Silly String.

In the past two years, over the opposition of Tierra del Mar residents, a Facebook subsidiary, Edge Cable Holdings, bought an oceanfront lot from former NFL and Oregon Ducks quarterback Joey Harrington and have converted the lot into a vibrating, cacophonous industrial site, clouded with diesel fumes, the roar of a drilling rig and the rumble of heavy trucks. A forbidding security fence topped with noise curtains replaced the scrub pine and thick vegetation on the lot.

“It was just awful,” Cook says.

After interviews with residents and public officials and a review of a vast sheaf of public records, a picture emerges of a huge and powerful company that snuck onto the Oregon Coast, bullied neighbors, abused the state’s iconic coastline, and covered up its sins, all in the service of expanding its wildly profitable quasi-monopoly on social media.

“There are 365 miles of coastline in Oregon,” Cook says.

“And yet they come here and put this thing that has no benefit for our community right in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It’s unethical.”

14

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

Cameron La Follette, director of the Oregon Coast Alliance, an environmental advocacy group, says it’s anything but a NIMBY dispute. She says what’s happening in Tierra del Mar affects every inch of Oregon’s coastline and beyond. In her view, the industrialization of Oregon’s ocean is proceeding without much thought about what could go wrong.

And it’s a betrayal of the legacy of former Gov. Tom McCall, who safeguarded Oregon’s beaches as a public trust (see “Stinking Smokestacks,” page 16).

Now the state is selling its coast—cheaply.

“In Oregon, we’ve been very lax in what we allow corporations to do and have not put enough emphasis on the public interest,” La Follette says.

“The result of that gap is, we have an ugly mess on our hands.”

The specific mess in Tierra del Mar, as first reported last week by the Tillamook Headlight-Herald: 1,110 feet of drilling pipe, a broken drill bit, and 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid that Facebook’s contractor abandoned under the seabed—and about which it only belatedly told state officials.

Facebook is as big as Tierra del Mar is small. At its current share price of about $260, Facebook is worth $750 billion, making it the nation’s fifth-largest company. CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns shares worth nearly $100 billion, thanks to his ability to monetize the more than 2.5 billion people who use Facebook each month.

In Tierra del Mar, the locals don’t even have cellphone service. They’re not interested in terabytes. They just want to be left alone. But for the past two years, they and their attorneys have battled Facebook in a series of forums as the company sought permits at the local, state and federal level.

In October 2018, the Facebook subsidiary Edge purchased the vacant lot next to Cook’s from Harrington for $495,000. (He bought the lot in 2008 for $600,000.)

The plan was to lay 5,000 miles of cable between Oregon and Japan and to use Harrington’s lot as a staging ground.

The company would excavate an underground vault on the property and drill under the beach and ocean floor to a point about a half-mile offshore. There, the cable would come up through a hole in the seafloor and connect to the trans-Pacific cable.

Undersea cables form the spinal cord of the internet. The slender fiber-optic strands blast terabytes of data from continent to continent. Facebook told regulators in permit applications it plans to build “an ultra-high-speed fiber-optic cable system” to meet the increasing demand for internet services worldwide.

At least seven other trans-Pacific cables come ashore in Oregon but none at a location comparable to Tierra del Mar, so previous installations have not generated similar opposition.

Facebook made one friend when it came to town: the Oregon Fishermen’s Cable Committee, which helped the tech giant chart a path that would avoid snags with nets that commercial fishing boats drag across the ocean bottom. OFCC members also do “patrol duty” when companies lay cable in Oregon waters. The work can be lucrative—up to $5,000 a day for large boats—and earned the Oregon Fishermen’s Cable Committee nearly $154,000 in 2017.

But residents of Tierra del Mar viewed Facebook as an occupying army. “If they had come and asked for a meeting with the community, maybe it wouldn’t have turned into such a negative situation,” Cook says.

Facebook declined to answer specific questions for this story, instead responding with general statements.

“Over the last 12 months, through multiple town hall meetings and public communications, Facebook has engaged with the Tierra del Mar community and leadership to ensure that all of the questions concerning noise, environmental impact and road closures have been addressed,” a company spokeswoman said.

Most people in Tierra del Mar learned of Facebook’s arrival when they received public notices in late 2018 and early 2019 that the company’s subsidiary was filing for a batch of local, state and federal permits on Harrington’s lot.

They were flummoxed: How could Facebook put an industrial facility in a sleepy At the June 2019 land board neighborhood that was zoned entirely resimeeting, Read said the board dential? should grant Facebook’s perTwo of those neighbors, Lynnae and Ed mit, provided it got all other Ruttledge, had spent decades immersed in permits as well. the process and procedures of government.

Read acknowledged neighFacebook’s arrival in Tierra del Mar, bors’ concerns and urged where the Ruttledges have owned a home Facebook to be a good corposince 1992, interrupted a peaceful retirement. rate citizen.

But soon, fighting Facebook would become “I’m comfortable making nearly a full-time job for them both. t h e m ot i o n ,” R e a d sa i d .

RESEARCH TEAM: Lynnae and Ed Ruttledge.

Spritelike at 5-foot-1, Lynnae Ruttledge, “Going forward, I’m hopeful a former high-ranking official in vocational Facebook and Edge will take rehab in Oregon, Washington and Washingresponsibilities to communicate with neighbors seriously.” ton, D.C., is a tenacious researcher. Her husband, 74, negotiated Brown seconded his motion. Neither mentioned they’d received labor contracts for Portland-area governments. In retirement, Ed substantial campaign contributions from Facebook and its chief Ruttledge has used his skills as a photographer and drone pilot to operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg: Read had received $38,900 since bring attention to the battle in Tierra del Mar. 2008, and Brown got $12,500 since 2016.

“I’ve been doing public policy my entire career,” Lynne RutAlthough State Land Board members are not required disclose tledge says. “I requested their permit applications and read them. such information, La Follette of the Coastal Alliance wishes thay What they said they were going to do was so contrary to what a resi- had. “They should absolutely have disclosed those contributions,” dential community is, I became very concerned.” she says. “The very least the public should expect is transparency.”

To move forward, Facebook needed numerous permits—but two Read’s spokeswoman Amy Bates says the contributions had no were key. The first permit would have to come from the State Land effect on his vote. In fact, she says, he wanted to delay approval for Board, whose only members are Gov. Kate Brown, State Treasurer more consultation with neighbors. “Unfortunately, there was little Tobias Read, and Secretary of State Bev Clarno. appetite from others to slow the permitting process down,” Bates The company needed the state’s permission to drill under the says. seabed and punch a hole in the seafloor where the cable could exit.

Brown’s spokesman Charles Boyle says any notions Facebook’s In a February 2019 meeting with state officials, Tierra del Mar contributions influenced Brown’s vote is “absurd.” residents expressed their objections to the project.

“Gov. Brown has a long track record of standing up for the enviBut nothing in Oregon law specifically prohibited what Face- ronment, from climate policy to forest management to protection book wanted to do; the company just had to demonstrate it could of Oregon’s coast,” Boyle says. conduct its drilling safely and without harm to the environment.

Facebook is no stranger to Oregon. The company opened its first Moreover, Gov. Brown had explicitly pitched her state as a land- data center in the state in 2011 near Prineville. It now has nine data ing ground for marine cables in a 2016 letter to the Pacific Telecom- centers there, an investment totaling about $2 billion. munications Conference.

That’s in part because, in addition to cheap electricity, Oregon “As chair of the State Land Board, which approves easements offers the company and its competitors massive tax breaks, which for cable landings on the Oregon coast, I can assure you that we the trade website Data Center Frontier has reported are the secwill welcome and give full and timely consideration to all landing ond-most generous in the country. requests,” Brown wrote.

That business-friendly attitude prevailed when it came time to vote.

FACEBOOK’S LONG SHADOW: The lot the social media giant bought is centrally located and looms large in Tierra del Mar.

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

15

STINKING SMOKESTACKS Oregon’s iconic 1967 Beach Bill aimed to prevent the private commercial exploitation of the state’s coastline.

The bill is a legacy of Gov. Tom McCall, who spearheaded the legislation guaranteeing Oregonians a right unique on the West Coast—“free and uninterrupted use of the beaches.”

But in recent decades, Cameron La Follette says, Oregon leaders have lost sight of McCall’s vision.

The economic colonization of Oregon has seen high-tech server farms hook up tp the Columbia River’s cheap hydropower, Wall Street-backed timber management firms mow down our forests like cornfields, oil trains roll unregulated along our rails, and fossil fuel companies vie to string pipelines to our deep-water harbors.

La Follette and others blame Gov. Kate Brown and other officials for making it easy for companies that want to plunder Oregon’s natural resources.

“Do we want to sell out to every industry that comes to the coast?” La Follette asks.

Brown’s spokesman, Charles Boyle, disputes the notion that Oregon goes too easy on industry generally or Facebook specifically.

“The actions of Facebook and its subsidiaries in this case are unacceptable, and we expect state agencies will hold them accountable to the fullest extent allowed by Oregon law,” Boyle says. “Oregon’s coasts and seafloor are not Mark Zuckerberg’s dumping ground.”

Boyle adds Brown is considering a review of cable siting policies.

State Treasurer Tobias Read says that must happen. “[He] believes that our permitting system is flawed and in need of reform to reflect the evolving nature of infrastructure projects like Facebook’s,” says his spokeswoman Amy Myers. “It’s on us to prevent it from happening again.”

One means of doing that: Make doing business on the Oregon Coast more expensive.

Oregon law prohibits the Department of State Lands from charging companies for permits. That means, once it obtained state approval, Facebook could have drilled out under the state’s beach and punched a hole in the bottom of the ocean for free.

Recognizing that the policy made no sense, Facebook negotiated a payment of $300,000 for 20 years of protection from any future law change. The fee Tillamook County charged Facebook for its permit didn’t add much more expense—about $1,700.

In California, the business climate is less friendly. Facebook acknowledged that in one permit application, saying, “permitting in Northern California would also be complicated due to the marine sanctuary off the northern California Coast.” Permitting costs in Hermosa Beach, where the main trunk of the Jupiter cable will land, are far higher than in Oregon.

Long after he signed the Beach Bill, McCall cautioned Oregon about selling itself too cheaply.

“Oregon is demure and lovely, and it ought to play a little hard to get,” McCall said in 1982. “And I think you’ll be just as sick as I am if you find it is nothing but a hungry hussy, throwing herself at every stinking smokestack that’s offered.”

McCall’s Beach Bill built on the work of an earlier Oregon governor, Oswald West. Mary Voberil, who bought property four doors from the drilling site in 1989, says both men would be dismayed to see what has happened in Tierra del Mar. “How does such cavalier, even arrogant disregard for public property square with the legacy of Tom McCall and Os West?” Voberil asks. “It mocks their efforts, which were pretty hard-won.”

NIGEL JAQUISS.

16

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

COAST IDYLL: Tillamook County (pop. 27,036), where Tierra del Mar is located, calls itself “the land of cheese, trees and ocean breeze.”

The Tierra del Mar cable project is a direct result of Facebook having built all that infrastructure in Oregon—it will connect all those servers to Asia.

Records show Facebook has spent $294,000 lobbying public officials in Oregon since 2016, more than Apple or Microsoft but less than Amazon.

Clarno, the secretary of state, who lives near Facebook’s Central Oregon server farms, voted last on the company’s state permit.

“I hope it’s of some comfort that Facebook in Central Oregon has been a wonderful partner in Prineville,” she said before casting her “yes” vote. “They provided local schools equipment and made sure we are happy.”

The residents of Tierra del Mar were not so easily swayed.

After the land board approval, Facebook sought to pacify its critics before meeting them in the most crucial forum, the Tillamook County Commission, in late 2019.

State Rep. David Gomberg (D-Otis), whose district includes Tierra del Mar, was initially supportive of Facebook’s efforts. He tried to broker a truce and pointed out to Tierra del Mar residents they had leverage.

“I got Facebook to come down and meet with the neighbors,” Gomberg recalls. “I’d said, ‘You are in a great place to ask for things: What do you want? Paved roads?

A park? What?’”

In the fall of 2019, Facebook’s representatives made their case to residents at two meetings.

It didn’t go well. At one of the meetings, Ed Ruttledge recalls, Facebook representatives brought in cake from a popular Pacific City bakery, Grateful Bread.

“They tried to serve us cake,” Ruttledge recalls, “but nobody would take the cake.”

Marie Cook, the Ruttledges, and other neighbors lawyered up.

Facebook, through its Portland attorney, Phil Grillo of Davis Wright Tremaine, argued the Facebook subsidiary was in effect a utility, just like a provider of water or electricity. Therefore, the project should be permitted.

Claiming utility status was an interesting position to take for a company that has battled calls for regulation in Washington, D.C., and in Europe for years.

Regulated utilities are subject to heavy oversight— and their profits are capped at a small fraction of the profit margins Facebook earns.

In 2018, shortly before Facebook began work in Oregon, Zuckerberg defined his company in congressional testimony. “I consider us to be a technology company,” he said. “The primary thing we do is have engineers that write code and build services for other people.”

Duke University professor Philip Napoli, who has written extensively about Facebook, says that given the company’s aversion to regulation, he’s surprised it would claim to be a utility in Oregon.

“It sets a precedent and opens the prospect of more and different regulations than I think Facebook would want to be subject to,” Napoli says.

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

17

In January of this y e a r, T i l l a m o o k C o u n t y ’s b o a r d of commissioners, by a 2-1 vote, determined that Facebook, in this instance, qualified as a public utility and therefore deserved approval.

Doug Olson, a longtime Tillamook County business leader and member of the Tillamook HIGH ROCKS: Cape Lookout guards Tierra People’s Utility Disdel Mar to the north. trict board, says he’s not convinced.

“I do not see that they would qualify as a public utility,” Olson says. “In Oregon, virtually every utility enjoys a monopoly and either answers to the Public Utility Commission or an elected board—Facebook doesn’t do any of that.”

In February, Facebook made what its attorney called a “peace proposal.” Facebook would pay $15,000 each to four adjacent landowners, and $15,000 to the Tierra del Mar Community Association—but only if nobody appealed the county’s decision.

The opponents said no. And Facebook moved ahead.

BEACH SHACK: Unlike some oceanfront towns, Tierra del Mar has a wide spectrum of homes.

LIMITED RETAIL: There are two stores in Tierra del Mar. One sells antiques while the Pier Avenue Rock Shop (above) specializes in Oregon sunstones.

18

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

On March 9, after erecting security fences and noise barriers, the company’s contractor started drilling. The hole would first go down and then horizontally under the beach and out under the seafloor.

As the drill bit progressed, it displaced sand, dirt and rock that was forced back out of the pipe on land and hauled away. (Facebook expected to displace 77,000 cubic yards of material, enough to fill 23 Olympic-sized swimming pools.)

Vibration from the drilling rig broke the water main to Marie Cook’s house—Facebook had it repaired—and disturbed other neighbors.

“You could hear it and you could feel it,” says Candace Churchley, who lives a block away from the drilling site.

“And the diesel fumes were intense.”

Then, disaster.

On April 28, two days before the project’s state permit was to expire for the year, the drill bit was biting through the earth about 500 feet offshore when it smashed into rock, breaking the drill bit and snapping the pipe.

The mishap left drilling machinery, 1,110 feet of broken pipe, and 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid—a mixture of water, chemicals and bentonite, a lubricating mineral—40 to 50 feet under the seabed.

Churchley, 72, who bought her house in Tierra del Mar in 1982, and moved to the town full time in 2003, says she walks the beach with her husband three hours every day.

A volunteer at the Wildlife Center of the North Coast, Churchley worries the debris and drilling fluid might emerge from the seafloor in an earthquake and about the long-term effects of drilling on the seafloor. “I don’t think man

has yet created anything that won’t decompose in saltwater,” she says.

The company notified the county of the drilling accident May 5 but did not inform state authorities it had left drilling equipment under the sea until June 17.

Residents in Tierra del Mar are livid. “Facebook could care less what happens here,” Churchley says.

But like many of her neighbors, Churchley is most upset with state and local officials.

“They haven’t really listened to the residents or considered the environmental impact of what they’ve allowed,” Churchley says. “I thought they were there to help us and protect us. But that’s not true.”

On Aug. 13, the Department of State Lands told Facebook it would have to pay damages for leaving the drilling materials under the sea and that it had six months to come up with a plan to remedy the situation.

La Follette isn’t impressed. “Part of the problem in this case is, Oregon doesn’t have any standards at the state or local level for undersea cables,” she says. “There’s been absolutely zero public debate over whether landing cables is a good thing or not. Most of these projects don’t benefit Oregonians.”

She thinks companies are increasingly attracted to Oregon because it’s cheaper and easier to do business here than in neighboring coastal states.

Immediately after rejecting Facebook’s peace offering, opponents filed an appeal with the Land Use Board of Appeals, an agency that provides a statewide forum for local land use disputes and has the authority to overrule decisions made locally.

LUBA has twice postponed a decision whether the Tillamook County Commission should have allowed Facebook to engage in industrial activity in a residential zone. It says it hopes to issue a ruling Aug. 21.

Gomberg, the state representative, vows to bring the issue to Salem in 2021. Once a supporter of the Tierra del Mar project, he’s changed his view. “Facebook has proven to be a poor neighbor,” he says. “And more broadly, a poor citizen.”

Along Tierra del Mar’s main drag, Sandlake Road, signs sway gently in the coastal breeze. They say, “Keep Facebook Off Our Beach.”

Marie Cook doesn’t regret challenging the corporate colossus. And although she stays in touch with her grandchildren via Facebook, she’s probably going to stop using it.

“To fight Facebook is pretty silly considering how big they are, but it seemed like the right thing to do,” Cook says. “They left all this garbage out under the ocean.”

STREET

RIP CITY READY Photos by Annie Schutz On Instagram: @annieschutz

Whether balling at Irving Park or marching for justice, Portland runs on Dame Time.

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

19

STARTERS

T H E MOST I MP ORTANT T H I N G S TH AT H A PPE N E D I N P ORT L AND C U LT U RE T H I S WE E K , FR O M B E ST TO WO R ST .

THROWING SHADES

Presents:

Saturday Aug. 29th

Special Store Hours: 8 am- 10 pm BE KIND, UNWIND

Over 165 Special

Limited Vinyl Releases!

Titles from: David Bowie, The Cure, Black Keys, John Prine, Billie Eilish, U 2 , Pink Floyd, KD Lang, Pete Krebs, Gorillaz, Brittany Howard, The Wipers Drive by Truckers AND MANY MORE!

Music Millennium

RECOMMENDS Naked Giants

Next month, three Deschutes County families get to make it a Blockbuster night—literally. The only surviving remnant of the once-mighty video store chain in Bend, Ore., went up on Airbnb last week, offering three one-night bookings in September. Guests will have free rein of the store, including the rental inventory and concession stand, and employees have even set up a mock living room that looks like a sitcom set from the ’90s. To make things even more surreal, bookings are only $4 a night. Need more room for your socially distant staycation? Boutique downtown Portland hotel the Hoxton is now making a whole floor available for rent.

The price is substantially more: It’ll run your quarantine pod $2,020 a night.

Well, now we know why Drake was in town last week: He was shooting a video for the first single off his new album, Certified Lover Boy. (Oh, Aubrey.) The video for “Laugh Now Cry Later” was shot entirely on the Nike campus in Beaverton and features cameos by Kevin Durant, Odell Beckham Jr. and, in the video’s runaway highlight, Marshawn Lynch. Drake also takes draft night-style photographs with rapper Lil Durk and rips around the campus’s artificial lake on a jet ski. A release date for Certified Lover Boy (LOL) hasn’t yet been confirmed.

The Portland Timbers are champions, sort of! No, they didn’t win Major League Soccer’s ultimate prize, but they did prevail in the MLS Is Back Tournament, a competition many analysts gave them little chance of winning. The team beat Orlando City FC 2-1 in the final match of the tournament, which, like the NBA playoffs, took place in a bubble on the campus of the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. And now they’re coming back home: MLS recently announced plans for a restarted season, and the Timbers are scheduled to open against Seattle at Providence Park on Aug. 23, most likely without fans in attendance.

SHUT DOWN ’CAUSE OF SICKNESS

County health officials have forced a downtown food cart to close after tracing the outbreak of an infectious disease to the business. Several cases of the food-borne illness shingellosis have been linked to the Small Pharaoh cart at Southwest Stark Street and 5th Avenue. Officials ordered the restaurant to shut down immediately, a move the agency classified in a press release as “unusual.” But the cart has been in the news before. Owner Islam El Masry has twice been accused of using racial slurs against Black customers. In 2018, he was arrested after an eyewitness filmed him throwing a bottle of Gatorade at a Black woman and allegedly spraying her with chile sauce. The case was later settled out of court. Health officials say they are working with El Masry to safely reopen the cart.

BAD CAMPERS

EACH SONG ON THE SHADOW EXAMINES AN ASPECT OF THIS GROWTH THROUGH A DIFFERENT MUSICAL LENS, ADDING UP TO A SERIES OF ROCK- AND- ROLL VIGNETTES OF LIGHT, SHADOW, ANXIETY AND RESPONSIBILITY. CD SALE $9.99 LP SALE $17.99

GRAFFITI IN MALHEUR NATIONAL FOREST Image courtesy of Malheur National Forest Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

WHEN’S THE PARADE?

CERTIFIABLE

The Shadow Out 8/21

20

Thomas O’Hanlon came to St. Helens to chew bubblegum and put up a billboard—and he’s all out of bubblegum. The founder of the Progressive Alliance of Columbia County has successfully raised the funds to put up a satirical anti-Trump billboard along Highway 30 inspired

by John Carpenter’s They Live. The image depicts President Donald Trump as one of the skull-faced aliens from the 1988 sci-fi classic—which stars late Portland wrestling legend “Rowdy” Roddy Piper—along with the words “Vote, Obey.” It’ll be on display from Sept. 17 through Nov. 11, to coincide with both Halloween and the election. “I do anticipate some pushback due to the nature of the billboard and living in a more conservative rural community,” O’Hanlon tells WW. “But overall, the billboard has received an overwhelming amount of support.”

After months of living in lockdown, quarantine-weary Oregonians have been eager to hike, camp and swim this summer. But many of the visitors getting back to nature this season are leaving it trashed. The Malheur National Forest is the latest agency to report increased vandalism and theft, including graffiti on natural features and fire rings ripped from the ground. Maps and trailhead sign boards, which provide much-needed directions and alerts, have also gone missing. That means Forest Service workers, already stretched thin following the loss of user fees from COVID-related spring closures, are now busy replacing, fixing and cleaning facilities, diverting their attention from critical responsibilities like trail and campground maintenance.

A LY N I C K L A S

GET...OUTSIDE?

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

Oregon with her friend Dej’uanae Toliver and professional mountain biker Brooklyn Bell.

Cleopatra co-directed and helped lens the journey, which sometimes meant riding stretches of the trail more than once to get a good take. There were moments of doubt and anxiety, as well as a few gnarly-looking crashes. SHANNON GORMLEY.

Play Room

OVER THE BRIDGE: Analise Cleopatra in Pedal Through.

Crash and Learn

In her bikepacking documentary Pedal Through, Portlander Analise Cleopatra did it all—much of it for the first time.

Going on your first bikepacking trip is a feat. So is directing your first film. Analise Cleopatra did both at the same time.

Released by REI and funded in part by Travel Oregon, the short documentary Pedal Through is Cleopatra’s directorial debut. It follows her on a weeklong mountain biking trip last summer through Central

How did you persuade Dej’uanae to join you?

She just came to support me. It can be really intimidating when you’re with people who are so much more comfortable in the outdoors. You say you’re scared of wolves and they kind of laugh it off, and it’s like, that’s not making me feel better.

What were the hardest parts of the ride?

The scariest was going up that big hill—I knew I was going to be able to get there eventually, but the fact I was panting while riding and not able to chop it up during the ride made me feel really weak.

Falling is one of the scariest parts of bikepacking.

I had a pretty bad fall on a training ride before. In comparison, the fall you saw looked so funny. It was so ridiculous because that was a retake. I had just ridden it fine. So that’s probably what happened: I was too confident. You’ve just to accept you’re going to fall sometimes.

See a full interview at wweek.com/distant-voices.

B R U C E E LY/ P O R T L A N D T R A I L B L A Z E R S

Battle in the Bubble It’s been 20 years since the Blazers and Lakers met in the playoffs. Here’s what’s happened in between.

Once again, we can say it’s on. The Blazers are back in the playoffs, and who should be waiting for them but their archenemies, the Los Angeles Lakers. It’s been exactly two decades since the two teams last faced each other in the postseason, but the rivalry has hardly abated. Here are five of the most significant moments to happen in the interim.

Date: April 20, 2005 What happened: A very bad Blazers team beat the Lakers in Portland.

The aftermath: The Blazers kept on beating the Lakers at home, for nine straight games, earning the Rose Garden—and then Moda Center—a reputation as a house of horrors for L.A. Date: March 9, 2009 What happened: Trevor Ariza, then of the Lakers, knocked Rudy Fernandez out of the sky on a fast break, sending the Spaniard crashing to the floor.

The aftermath: Fernandez went out on a stretcher and missed a few games with a bruised hip. Eleven years later, Ariza signed with the Blazers.

Date: Oct. 31, 2012 What happened: Damian Lillard made his Blazers debut against the “This Is Going to Be Fun” Lakers, scoring 23 points with 11 assists in a win and accidentally kicking Steve Nash in the shin.

MOX BOARDING HOUSE

WW: What was it like being both a first-time director and a first-time bikepacker?

Analise Cleopatra: I’m just really happy I was there with friends. Having Dej’uanae there really kept me grounded and made me feel like I could do it.

Mox Boarding House is the sleek gaming den Portland geeks have been waiting for.

GREEN EGGS AND YAM: Damian Lillard dunks against LeBron James in 2018.

The aftermath: Lillard won Rookie of the Year. Nash eventually developed nerve damage in his injured leg and retired. Nothing about L.A.’s season was fun.

Date: Oct. 18, 2018 What happened: The grand purple-and-gold debut of LeBron James was spoiled by…Nik Stauskas?

The aftermath: The Lakers missed the playoffs yet again, while the Blazers somehow made it to the Western Conference finals despite trading Stauskas at the deadline.

Date: Jan. 31, 2020 What happened: Lillard went off for 48 points in the Lakers’ first game since the death of Kobe Bryant.

The aftermath: The Lakers plan to wear Kobe tribute jerseys if they advance to the second round.

Looks like Dame’s got another memorial to disrupt.

MATTHEW SINGER.

It’s been a rough year for nerds in Portland.

The pandemic killed off the Northeast Broadway location of comics store Things From Another World and gaming bar The Nerd Out in quick succession. But times were tough even before COVID19 struck: Time Vault Games, beloved by Magic: The Gathering players, shuttered in April 2019, and robberies at both Portland Game Store and Guardian Games inflicted serious harm on a pair of businesses with tight profit margins.

For a community historically lacking in reasons to leave the house, it doesn’t seem like things could get worse. But then, after months of delays, comes a beacon of hope.

In its first expansion beyond the Seattle area, Mox Boarding House on West Burnside Street is a gilded palace of geeky delight. With chandeliers hanging from vaulted ceilings and clean, heavy wood tables for playing, it’s a convincing rebuttal to the false assumption that all gaming stores must be cramped and devoid of congeniality.

Customers can crack open a freshly purchased game from the showroom or borrow one from the generous game library, then settle in at the expansive bar and restaurant, with full service at a table in the adjacent dining room.

The bar has a 20-handle taplist with reliable regional favorites like pFriem, Breakside and Cascade, and offers something missing from the original Mox locations in Seattle: cocktails. Most are on the sweet side, but the Strategem ($11) balances the tinge of Evan Williams bourbon with the demerara syrup and chocolate bitters quite well.

Appetizers like the soy-glazed Biang Biang Brussels ($8) and the honey gochujang lollipop wings ($10) were excellent for sharing, though a tad too sticky to manage while a heated game of Pandemic drags on. The cumin-roasted Peruvian Porn sandwich (served with fries, $16) is worth the trip on its own, and it’s easy enough to order online to bring home along with your stack of board games, Magic cards or Warhammer figurines.

It’s such a pleasant place to spend time, however, that you might as well sit a spell and, well, cast a few spells while you’re at it. PETE COTTELL. GO: Mox Boarding House, 1938 W Burnside St., 503-506-0669, moxboardinghouse.com. 11 am-10 pm Monday-Friday, 10 am-10 pm Saturday-Sunday.

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

21

WESLEY LAPOINTE

FOOD & DRINK

PATIO REVIEW

The rooftop bar at Kex has Pimm’s Cups, pork eclairs and views worth summiting a mountain for. aprewitt@wweek.com

When Multnomah County first reopened, most bars and restaurants in Portland scrambled to adjust to a world still in the grips of a global health crisis by expanding outward, placing tables in parking lots and side streets.

Kex, instead, looked up.

The boutique hotel—a spinoff of an upscale hostel in Reykjavik, Iceland, that opened last November on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard—is one of those rare gems in the city with a rooftop oasis. In a normal summer, it would almost certainly draw a nightly crowd and a steady line of eager patrons waiting to snag the chairs of anyone who just signaled for the bill.

But even now that COVID-19 has made al fresco dining one of the safest ways to escape our homes—if only for a few hours—Lady of the Mountain should still become one of the most sought-after perches in Portland.

Unlike many of the newly installed sidewalk cafes, Kex’s outdoor patio wasn’t urgently thrown together with social distancing in mind: Renovations to the 1912 structure, which used to function as apartment housing, always included plans for a rooftop bar. The space was set to debut in spring until the pandemic derailed that timeline.

After taking several months to carefully plan its launch during a global health crisis—including the reopening of the Kex’s ground-floor restaurant, Dóttir—Lady of the Mountain finally welcomed its first customers earlier this month. The name refers to Iceland’s centuries-old tradition of personifying itself as a woman, the best-known representation of which is a mid-19th century painting that looks like Game of Thrones concept art: She wears a needlelike crown that’s made of ice yet shoots fire, carries a bejeweled sword, and has a raven resting on one shoulder.

When you emerge from the lobby elevator and step onto the fourth-floor patio, it won’t immediately feel as if you’ve left the Burnside Bridgehead and suddenly slipped into Westeros, or even the Blue Lagoon, Iceland’s famous cerulean steam bath. But if you take in the details and fire up your imaginative powers, an evening at Lady of the Mountain can be transportive. Hell, these days, drinks on any sky-high terrace anywhere seem as indul22

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

WESLEY LAPOINTE

BY AN DI P R E W I T T

PATIO SPECS

Number of tables: 6 Space between them: 6½ feet Additional safety measures: Reservations are required to keep crowds to a minimum; a host escorts customers from the street-level lobby check-in to the elevator up to the rooftop bar; menus available via QR code.

Peak hours: 6-8 pm

GO: Lady of the Mountain at Kex Portland, 100 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 971-345-2992, kexhotels.com/ eat-drink/rooftop. 5-10 pm Wednesday-Sunday; last reservations taken at 8:30 pm.

TOP 5

BUZZ LIST

Where to drink outside this week.

DANIEL EICHLER

Mmmm’Lady

gent as lounging on the sundeck of a privately chartered superyacht.

Thanks to the bar’s stature—four stories up is just enough height to provide an attractive view yet still sit below most of the surrounding buildings—it’s a bit like being nestled in a fjord made of glass and concrete. From a tidy row of five tables, spaced over 6 feet apart, with a sixth against the wall, you can either sit facing the Fair-Haired Dumbbell’s riot of color or take a chair pointed toward the Lloyd District and the Oregon Convention Center’s twin spires. From that vantage point, you can also admire the bar, layered in forest green tiles commonly used for bank exteriors in Iceland, with the skyline replacing liquor cabinetry as the backdrop.

What to order? Start with potato chips ($7) brined in vinegar and then finished with a dusting of parsley, paired alongside a thick, tangy dip that’s best summed up as “Icelandic yogurt.” From there, move on to a plate of deviled eggs ($12), whose whites are now an eye-popping shade of magenta after sharing space in a pickling jar with beets—it was the one dish on every table during our visit.

Consider these the opening acts for the delightfully named “pork eclair” ($14). The puffy, golden-brown pastry has been sliced in half to grasp hold of tender slices of Canadian bacon sweet as a holiday ham and doused in a feisty birch syrup mustard.

If you take on all three dishes, you’ve worked your way through most of the menu of snacks. The list of wine, beer and cocktails stretches much longer. To make things easy, just order the Pimm’s Cup ($13). Arriving in a mound of pebble ice that looks like an adult snow cone, the cocktail—made of cucumber-infused gin, lemon, ginger and soda—is the most refreshing thing you could possibly order on a Portland rooftop in August. The glass will be empty in less than five minutes.

The combination of a fizzy drink that shines like the sun and what is essentially a pork doughnut might just seem a little too happy, too carefree, for a summer that’s largely been dark and heavy with burden. But that might be the brief break we need to maintain our sanity right now. Lady SLUSH PILE: Lady of the Mountain’s Pimm’s Cup. of the Mountain should leave visitors embracing Iceland’s unofficial motto: “Þetta reddast,” which roughly translates, “It will all work out OK in the end.” You’ll believe it to be true—at least for a few gin-soaked hours.

ATLANTIS ANNEX

1. TopWire Hop Project 8668 Crosby Road NE, Woodburn, 503-982-5166, topwirehop.com. 11 am-8 pm Thursday and Sunday, 11 am-9 pm Friday-Saturday.

The state’s most secretive beer garden is hidden among the crops at Crosby Hop Farm in Woodburn. Follow the half-mile gravel road that runs between the bines and you’ll wind up at a 40-foot-long shipping container repurposed as a serving station pouring from 10 rotating taps exclusively featuring batches made with the hops growing around you.

2. Wilder 5501 NE 30th Ave., 971-350-8702, wilderpdx.com.

4 pm-close Wednesday-Saturday.

Simple yet artistic cocktails can be found at this charming corner spot, from the Tamarind Fuego Serrano to the rum-based Immortal Hour, with lime, cinnamon and bitters.

While far too small to accommodate safely distanced indoor imbibing, the bar has filled the street with picnic tables.

3. Dots 2521 SE Clinton St., 503-235-0203, dotscafeportland.com.

4-10 pm daily.

Dots feels like a ’50s diner on the tail end of evolving into a dark and moody lounge, and all of its character comes across in the most comfortable way possible. That barely lit ambience has made it a neighborhood favorite for decades, but the novelty of drinking at Dots in broad daylight on its expanded sidewalk seating cannot be missed.

4. Bar Maven 6219 SE Foster Road, 503-384-2079, barmavenpdx.com.

2-10 pm daily.

Bar Maven strikes a friendly balance between dilapidated neighborhood hideout and urbane hipster hang. The redesigned side patio puts stray cuts of lumber to good use, and it’s completely covered—a godsend in the rainy months or, y’know, any month of a pandemic.

5. Mississippi Pizza Pub’s Atlantis Annex 3560 N Mississippi Ave., mississippipizza.com. 5-9:30 pm Wednesday-Sunday.

With the supernatural-themed Psychic Bar holding off on reopening until next spring, neighborhood staple Mississippi Pizza Pub has expanded onto its patio, serving slushies and slices, and even holding socially distant concerts by local artists.

FOOD & DRINK

POP-UPS

TOP 6 C O U R T E S Y O F L AT E S H A K E

Master Shakes

Late Shake’s milkshakes are good for the ’Gram but won’t make you hate yourself in morning.

BY JAS O N CO H E N

@cohenesque

Taylor London admits it’s a bit weird to say he’s “passionate about milkshakes.” But it’s the truth.

Growing up, the 30-year-old used to make milkshakes for friends “as a way to repay favors,” and he brought an old-fash-

HOT PLATES Where to eat this week.

1. Nacheaux 8145 SE 82nd Ave., 971-319-1134, nacheauxpdx.com.

Noon-7 pm Wednesday-Thursday and Saturday, noon-8 pm Friday, 9 am-3 pm Sunday.

WESLEY LAPOINTE

BARNEY, MY PEBBLES!: The Double Gold at Late Shake.

ioned mixer with him to the University of Oregon, where he met his friend and future collaborator, Grahm Doughty.

While a shake is always welcome at your favorite smalltown soft-serve joint or fast food burger chain, it’s not necessarily the thing to get at one of Portland’s high-end scoop shops—some of those more ambitious flavor combinations just don’t work, or the texture isn’t right, or the employees don’t have practice making them.

For their milkshake-based pop-up Late Shake, London and Doughty put a lot of time and thought into technique, ingredients, temperature and milk-to-ice cream ratio, resulting in a product that is solid enough for funky toppings but also thin enough for slurpability.

“I do like a good, thick milkshake that needs a straw and needs a spoon,” says London. “When someone gets a shake, it’s already melting in some ways. We’ve just kind of put [the ice cream] in a different form.”

Late Shake—which started in summer 2015 along Southeast Division Street and now operates out of Upper Left Roasters in Ladd’s Addition—is big on seasonal flavors and local partnerships: Tillamook ice cream, Woodblock Chocolate, Jacobsen salt and honey, blackberries from West Union Gardens in Hillsboro.

Its top seller is usually Woodblock Mocha, though the staff’s favorite is Double Gold, a turmeric, ginger and apple shake finished with a crown of Fruity Pebbles.

And while shakes like the Beyoncé-inspired Love on Top—a chocolate peanut butter shake topped with caramel and a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie—are good for the ’Gram, flavor ultimately trumps social media aesthetics.

“At the end,” London says, “we want people to be satisfied, not filled with regret.”

CRAWFISH MAC AND CHEESE AT NACHEAUX At Anthony Brown’s garishly teal-colored food truck, Mexican favorites get hitched to Southern food and CajunCreole flavors. You can find “Mexicajun” food in both Louisiana and Southeast Texas, but it’s a rare concept in Portland, if not entirely unheard of. The “Nacheaux nachos” start with a big pile of fresh-fried chips and also feature carnitas that could just as easily be cochon au lait, while a cheesy “crunchwrap” comes stuffed with red beans, dirty rice and fried chicken.

EAT: Late Shake is at Upper Left Roasters, 1204 SE Clay St. 5-10 pm Saturday, Aug. 22, and Friday-Saturday, Sept. 4-5.

A “boozy” grand finale is still to be announced.

See lateshake.com for updates.

JESSA CARTER

Take Care A vegan pop-up continues to nurture Portland’s Black community during the pandemic with unique care packages.

3. Piggins

BY JO R DA N H E R N A N D E Z

By 2016, Salimatu Amabebe had helped introduce plantbased Nigerian cuisine to a wide range of American diners.

But doing so had left them exhausted.

“I got pretty burnt out on the pop-up meals,” says the chef and artist, “because what happens when you’re making Nigerian food or food from your own culture for a largely white audience is that you get asked a lot of the same questions. I felt pressured to present the food that I was making—at least by the company that I was working with—in a palatable way.”

Amabebe began to reimagine what a pop-up could look and feel like. In 2017, Amabebe and poet Annika Hansteen-Izora launched Black Feast, a dinner series using art and food to honor what really matters to their vision: serving and celebrating Black people. Meals were hosted in California, New York and Amabebe’s home base of Portland, each one themed on a different Black artist, such as Audre Lorde or Nina Simone.

But then the pandemic happened and Amabebe had to shift once again.

Since June, Black Feast has pivoted its business model from a multicourse meal to what it calls “Love Letters to Black Folks”— free, intimate care packages featuring donated items, available weekly for Black Portlanders on a reservation basis.

The packages feature everything from flowers, coffee and chocolate to skin care products, CBD and incense to literal love letters from different Black writers and vegan desserts made by Amabebe—past offerings have included peach crisp with maple ginger cashew cream and candied pecans, pineapple coconut upside-down cake with algae buttercream and lime truffles, and black sesame chocolate cake with yuzu

2. Taquería los Puñales 3312 SE Belmont St., 503-206-7233, lospunales.com.

11 am-10 pm daily.

This tacho shop is not yet 2 months old, but it feels like it’s been serving the Sunnyside neighborhood for years. Every tortilla is made in-house that day, stuffed with an array of guisados—complex braises of meats and vegetables, including carnitas, barbacoa and chicken tinga. If you want innovation, there’s unique, Argentine-inspired pesto carne asada. But the classic tinga is a perfect gateway to the guisado style, and chef David Madrigal’s version is subtly excellent.

FLOWER POWER: Black Feast founder Salimatu Amabebe.

cashew cream and butterscotch.

“It has been overwhelmingly positive,” Amabebe says of the response, “though people in the beginning are always skeptical and suspicious of being given something for free and feel undeserving.”

At a recent pickup, Amabebe gave away 112 packages. The program has been so successful, they’re now hoping to create a physical space for self-care items, with the goal that Black people would come to them with their needs.

As for Black Feast, Amabebe recognizes the loss in not sharing a communal meal, but says they are “finding ways to work around that and to still be able to offer something this way,” even if it means going virtual.

“I have some thoughts and ideas of what I would like it to look like in the future, so I’m trying to dream those up,” Amabebe says. “I want to continue to make art and food available for free for Black folks. That is my priority—to keep doing this work forever.”

Reservations for the final Love Letters box are open now.

RSVP at msha.ke/black.feast.

1239 SW Broadway, 503-222-9070, higginsportland.com.

11:30 am-8 pm daily.

Piggins is the parkside patio pop-up reimagining of Higgins, a Portland dining landmark since 1994. The menu is effectively a greatest-hits package of some of the restaurant’s most beloved dishes—served from a food cart kitchen on the grounds of the Oregon Historical Society—with no big chances taken, no vast departures accorded. That’s a good thing, because it means you can get the Higgins Salad and the city’s best charcuterie plate, and also peruse its famed beer selection.

4. Han Oak 511 NE 24th Ave., 971-255-0032, hanoakpdx.com.

5-8 pm Friday-Sunday. Takeout only.

Peter Cho’s Han Oak wows diners nightly with its modern, progressive take on Korean cuisine—at least, it did until, well, y’know. But the restaurant—one of Portland’s current best, regardless of cuisine—has suddenly revved back up again, offering BBQ meals for two to go, made up of banchan, barbecued meats and dessert, plus Cho’s world-beating dumplings for $10 extra. Watch its Instagram (@hanoakpdx) for menu updates.

5. Sunshine Noodles 3560 N Mississippi Ave., 971-220-1997, sunshinenoodles.com. 11 am-3 pm Thursday-Saturday.

Sunshine Noodles is an avowedly irreverent, none too serious take on contemporary Cambodian food by Revelry vet Diane Lam. The corn pudding is a candidate for the city’s best new dessert, but the lime pepper wings are the breakout hit—spicy and complex, they want for nothing except a beer, and perhaps a napkin.

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

23

Men’s Virility Restored in Clinical Trial; 275% More Blood Flow in 5 Minutes A newly improved version of America’s best-selling male performance enhancer gives 70-year-old men the ability and stamina they enjoyed in their 30’s.

America’s best-selling sexual performance enhancer just got a lot better.

It’s the latest breakthrough for nitric oxide – the molecule that makes E.D. woes fade and restores virility when it counts the most.

Nitric oxide won the Nobel Prize in 1998.

It’s why “the little blue pill” works. More than 200,000 studies confirm it’s the key to superior sexual performance.

And this new discovery increases nitric oxide availability resulting in even quicker, stronger and longer-lasting performance.

One double-blind, placebo-controlled study (the “gold-standard” of research) involved a group of 70-year-old-men.

They didn’t exercise. They didn’t eat healthy.

And researchers reported their “nitric oxide availability was almost totally compromised,” resulting in blood flow less than HALF of a man in peak sexual health.

But only five minutes after the first dose their blood flow increased 275%, back to levels of a perfectly healthy 31-year-old man! “It’s amazing,” remarks nitric oxide expert Dr. Al Sears. “That’s like giving 70-year-old men the sexual power of 30-year-olds.”

WHY SO MUCH EXCITEMENT? Despite the billions men spend annually on older nitric oxide therapies, there’s one wellknown problem with them.

They don’t always work.

Dr. Joseph Loscalzo explains why. He’s studied nitric oxide for over 43 years. He is the physician-in-chief at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He says a “deficiency of bioactive nitric oxide… leads to impaired endotheliumdependent vasorelaxation.”

In plain English, these older products may increase levels of nitric oxide. But that’s only half the battle. If it’s not bioactively available then your body can’t absorb it to produce an erection.

Experts simply call it the nitric oxide “glitch.”

And until now, there’s never been a solution.

NEXT GENERATION NITRIC OXIDE FORMULA FLYING OFF SHELVES Upon further research, America’s No. 1 men’s health expert Dr. Al Sears discovered certain nutrients fix this “glitch” resulting in 275% better blood flow.

He’s combined those nutrients with proven

nitric oxide boosters in a new formula called Primal Max Red. In clinical trials, 5,000 mg is required for satisfying sexual performance.

Primal Max Red contains a bigger, 9,000 mg per serving dose. It’s become so popular, he’s having trouble keeping it in stock.

Dr. Sears is the author of more than 500 scientific papers. Thousands of people listened to him speak at the recent Palm Beach Health & Wellness Festival featuring Dr. Oz. NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath recently visited his clinic, the Sears Institute for Anti-Aging Medicine.

Primal Max Red has only been available for a few months — but everyone who takes it reports a big difference. “I have the energy to have sex three times in one day, WOW! That has not happened in years. Oh, by the way I am 62,” says Jonathan K. from Birmingham, AL.

HOW IT WORKS

A new discovery that increases nitric oxide availability was recently proven in a clinical trial to boost blood flow 275%

buy a test kit from Amazon,” reports 48-yearold Jeff O. “Monday night I showed depleted.”

Then he used ingredients in Primal Max Red and, “The results were off the charts. I first woke around 3 a.m. on Tuesday very excited.

My nitric oxide levels measured at the top end of the range.”

FREE BONUS TESTOSTERONE BOOSTER

Loss of erection power starts with your blood vessels. Specifically, the inside layer called the endothelium where nitric oxide is made.

Every order also gets Dr. Sears testosterone boosting formula Primal Max Black for free.

The problem is various factors THICKEN your blood vessels as you age. This blocks availability causing the nitric oxide “glitch.” The result is difficulty in getting and sustaining a healthy erection.

“If you want passionate ‘rip your clothes off’ sex you had in your younger days, you need nitric oxide to get your erection going. And testosterone for energy and drive,” says Dr. Sears. “You get both with Primal Max Red and Primal Max Black.”

How bad is the problem?

Researcher shows the typical 40-year-old man absorbs 50% less nitric oxide. At 50, that drops to 25%. And once you pass 60 just a measly 15% gets through.

To make matters worse, nitric oxide levels start declining in your 30’s. And by 70, nitric oxide production is down an alarming 75%.

Primal Max Red is the first formula to tackle both problems. Combining powerful nitric oxide boosters and a proven delivery mechanism that defeats the nitric oxide “glitch” resulting in 275% better blood flow. There’s not enough space here to fully explain how it works, so Dr. Sears will send anyone who orders Primal Max Red a free special report that explains everything.

MORE CLINICAL RESULTS Nutrients in Primal Max Red have logged impressive results.

In a Journal of Applied Physiology study, one resulted in a 30 times MORE nitric oxide. And these increased levels lasted up to 12 hours.

“I measured my nitric oxide levels, you can

HOW TO GET PRIMAL MAX To secure free bottles of Primal Max Black and get the hot, new Primal Max Red formula, buyers should contact the Sears Health Hotline at 1-800-580-6359 within the next 48 hours. “It’s not available in drug stores yet,” says Dr. Sears.

“The Hotline allows us to ship directly to the customer.”

Dr. Sears feels so strongly about Primal Max, all orders are backed by a 100% moneyback guarantee. “Just send me back the bottle and any unused product within 90 days from purchase date, and I’ll send you all your money back,” he says.

The Hotline will be open for the next 48 hours. After that, the phone number will be shut down to allow them to restock. Call 1-800-580-6359 to secure your limited supply of Primal Max Red and free bottles of Primal Max Black. You don’t need a prescription, and those who call in the first 24 hours qualify for a significant discount. Use Promo Code NP0820PMAX36 when you call in. Lines are frequently busy, but all calls will be answered.

THESE STATEMENTS HAVE NOT BEEN EVALUATED BY THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION. THIS PRODUCT IS NOT INTENDED TO DIAGNOSE, TREAT, CURE OR PREVENT ANY DISEASE. RESULTS MAY VARY 24

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

POTLANDER

Doob Dash Cannabis delivery service Pot Mates wants to combine the tech of the legal industry with the casual vibes of calling up your dealer.

BY BRIA N N A W H E E L E R

COURTESY OF HAMMOND POTTER

Hammond Potter couldn’t have predicted the series of But just as Potter and Khajavei approached their offievents that led to the deliberately under-the-radar launch cial launch, now joined by a third partner, Jason Hinson, of his cannabis delivery platform, Pot Mates, on 4/20. But COVID-19 arrived in full force, essentially undercutting he’s certainly shown the tenacity to endure them. their big coming-out party.

“It was rough, but it kind of trained this market to start “When COVID hit, all of my investors, except for one, thinking about delivery, right?” he says. “But even still, pulled out,” says Potter. “I had just enough money to get when we launched on 4/20, nobody knew who we were.” inventory and pay for licensing and stuff like that. We Pot Mates was first conceived in 2017 when Potter, launched with a $5,000 budget.” then an Apple Store employee and longtime cannabis It certainly doesn’t feel that cheap, though. Scrolling enthusiast, conceptualized a delivery service aimed to fill through the curated inventory feels more like skimming a specific gap: marrying the personalthrough a cannabis influencer’s ized approach of a pre-recreation-era personal stash. The site itself has the weed dealer to the contemporary tech feel of a lifestyle blog, with poetic of a burgeoning cannabis industry. descriptions of each product, photos He recruited co-worker Hakon staged with a maximum commitKhajavei, who also worked as a partment to aesthetic, and a lexicon that time business consultant, to help largely eschews complicated stoner build a business plan for what would lingo, replacing commonplace soon become Pot Mates, an online classifications with one-word dispensary intent to set a new standescriptions of potential effects like dard for delivery services: prioritizing “Relive,” “Dream” and “Flow.” quality over quantity, centering user Unencumbered by lengthy lineage experience by analyzing testing data descriptors, phenotype explaand offering streamlined pricing nations, and pie charts detailing structures, all while maintaining an contextless terpene percentages, aesthetic that was more in line with a the site feels far more in tune with lifestyle blog than an online cannabis the wide swath of modern cannabis catalog. The plan, the build-out, and users who fall somewhere between the licensing took close to three years cannabis as a casual hobby and canto complete and was primarily funded nabis as a full-fledged lifestyle.

FIRST MATE: Pot Mates founder

by Potter.

Hammond Potter.

“Every product that’s in the seed-to“Luckily for me, when I worked at sale system that the state uses and Apple, I got in on their employee stock purchase program,” reports to has testing results associated with the terpene he says, “and that their stock has just taken off over the profile.” says Potter. “We use that terpene profile to design years is pretty much what has funded 90% of the business” a system based on how the customer wants to feel.”

Pot Mates also avoids the concepts of “bottom,” “middle” and “top shelf.” Even the shopping cart has an ease of use that prioritizes customer contentment: no uploading an image of your ID, no waiting for approval before being allowed to order, no getting bounced offsite for payment processing. Everything is sleek, easy to use, and emphatically on-brand.

But for all the sophistication of its platform, Pot Mates is also very much like hollering at your erstwhile weed dealer—albeit in a cleverly specific way.

“The pricing that we have is as straightforward as possible,” Potter says. “You won’t see us price based on perceived quality. I really tried to keep that old-school dealer feel to our pricing. Back in the day, that’s what we were used to. We didn’t go to our dealer asking for a gram of this and a gram of that.” That pricing structure also makes it possible for Pot Mates to deliver anywhere inside city limits with no minimum order.

That Potter is Black has only recently become integral to Pot Mates’ brand.

“At first, I really didn’t want to advertise that too much for various reasons,” Potter says. “But people have really taken to supporting local Black-owned businesses. And that’s actually made me feel really positive and proud about slapping ‘Black-owned’ on my company. We stand for something. We’re actually out there in the community trying to connect with people and just making a positive impact. So it’s not just about selling weed and making money to us. It’s about making a difference, being a leader in the community, and helping push this industry forward in Oregon.”

GO: Order from Pot Mates at potmatespdx.com.

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

25

PERFORMANCE

BOOKS

Editor: Andi Prewitt | Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com B R O A D WAY R O S E T H E AT R E C O M PA N Y

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

FIVE ATHLETE MEMOIRS, RANKED

#1 Second Wind, Bill Russell Co-written with historian Taylor Branch, Bill Russell’s biography gives you everything you want in a sports memoir, bringing readers into his time as an NBA great with the honest reflection of someone 10 years removed. Most athletes have good stories to tell. Not all of them can tell them well.

Plus: The basketball juggernaut has a lot of stones to turn and Russell has single-handedly decided to turn all of them, from NCAA corruption and racism to drugs, politics, women and semi-regular existential crises.

Minus: There are no drawbacks. It is a model memoir.

#2 I Always Wanted to Be Somebody, Althea Gibson

YOUR TABLE’S WAITING: Upcoming Midday Cabaret shows will feature (left to right) Sheryl McCallum, Charles Cook and host Dan Murphy.

Come to Midday Cabaret, Old Chum Broadway Rose’s Dan Murphy found a new outlet for his passion for musicals: a weekly YouTube show.

BY BE N N E T T C A M P B E L L FE RGUS O N

Dan Murphy doesn’t just adore musicals; he’s like a character in a musical. His life is a showbiz success story: Broadway Rose, the Tigard musical theater company that he co-founded with his wife, artistic director Sharon Maroney, has been in business for 29 years. And his vocabulary wouldn’t be out of place in a G-rated song-and-dance spectacular (he’s fond of words like “flippin’” and “pickle”).

So you can imagine how surreal it was for Murphy, Broadway Rose’s managing director, to have to shut the company’s doors due to COVID-19.

“For 40 years, I’ve been working nights and weekends, mostly doing shows or managing here,” he says. “I have so much free time that I’m not used to it.”

Murphy isn’t wasting that time. He’s been hosting Midday Cabaret, a YouTube show filled with songs and behindthe-scenes reminiscences by Broadway Rose stars. It’s his way of staying in sync with the world of musical theater, which has been a part of his life ever since childhood—he grew up playing characters like General Bullmoose in Li’l Abner and Albert in Bye Bye Birdie.

“Nothing beats live performance, which is why we do it live,” Murphy says of Midday Cabaret. “Mistakes happen.

And it does kind of fill the void, a little bit.”

COVID -19 struck when Broadway Rose was on the cusp of a $3 million expansion of its theater, the New Stage, a renovated elementary school cafetorium. In the wake of the pandemic, Murphy put his ambitions for the company’s future on hold and started coming to the New Stage every Wednesday for virtual chats with cast and crew members of the company’s past plays, including The Addams Family, Cats, Hairspray and Once.

Midday Cabaret reveals a scrappier side of Broadway Rose, which is known for its slick productions (according to Murphy, its 2017 version of Mamma Mia! cost $300,000 to produce, including royalties). Murphy conducts the interviews from his computer and doesn’t appear to cen26

Willamette Week August 19, 2020 wweek.com

sor his guests—as audiences learned when Addams Family star Amy Jo Halliday revealed that she peed her pants multiple times during a scene in which she would sing and collapse onto a table.

“She had to sing all over the octaves and up and down the scale,” Murphy remembers. “She was so exhausted that she’d hit that last note and pee every night on the table. But she would get off the table and she’d leave and she gave kudos to the crew, who never said anything.

They’d wipe the table—I mean, it’s not like it was a huge amount.”

The tales told on Midday Cabaret make you wonder what sort of stories will emerge from a post-pandemic Broadway Rose.

“2021 will be our 30th anniversary,” Murphy says. “So it’s a little depressing to think about that, because that’s a milestone that we were hoping to celebrate.”

Murphy hopes Broadway Rose will reopen in October with a yet-to-be-revealed show for a limited in-person audience that would also stream online. Though it’s hard to predict whether that hope can become a reality at this point.

Yet Murphy remains buoyant, not least of all when he talks about his most memorable Midday Cabaret guests, like Maria Tucker, who danced on camera to P!nk’s version of “A Million Dreams” from The Greatest Showman, and Audrey Voon, whose soulful ukulele performances are among the show’s most beautifully heartbreaking highlights.

“Theater can sometimes be a service organization,” Murphy says. “We’re not changing the world, but maybe we’re giving a little respite, a little bit of entertainment, something fresh, something new.”

SEE IT: Midday Cabaret streams at broadwayrose.org/ at-home-with-broadway-rose at 1 pm Wednesdays. Free.

Memoirs by Black women in sports are rare, often passed over for whichever Major League Baseball player wants to write about bravely pitching with his left hand. Althea Gibson’s book is a shining exception, detailing her journey to life as the first African American Grand Slam champion at Wimbledon.

Plus: Gibson writes with incredible candor and a true gift for reflecting critically on the regularly hostile world around her.

Minus: The memoir serves as a reminder of all of the progress we have yet to make, and all the lessons we have willfully refused to learn.

#3 Under the Lights and in the Dark, Gwendolyn Oxenham Gwendolyn Oxenham, a onetime Duke University soccer player and Santos FC alum, deepdives into the world of women’s soccer, profiling players in leagues around the globe and celebrating their accomplishments against widespread cultural dismissal.

Plus: The book scores easy points for regional pride—the cover features the Thorns on the field at Providence Park, and Oxenham calls Portland the “Promised Land” for women’s soccer.

Minus: There are no salacious tell-alls—you’re forced to settle for inspirational stories about the “romance of the game.”

#4 It’s Good to Be Gronk, Rob Gronkowski It’s time to start taking Gronk seriously. He has written two memoirs, the first of which he admits having only read 80% of. The second is a somber reflection on life as a New England Patriot and the trials and tribulations of being a 6-foot-6 retired millionaire and folk hero.

Plus: It’s a true classic of the genre, with passages on sleeping 18 hours a day and hitting his head on a chandelier while going wild to House of Pain’s “Jump Around.”

Minus: It was ghostwritten by sports agent Jason Rosenhaus, so you have to accept that some of the raw brilliance has been filtered through a corporate mouthpiece.

#5 Barbarian Days, William Finnegan When he was a child, William Finnegan began surfing the shores of Hawaii and California, a pastime turned fixation that brought him to remote coasts on almost every continent. Barbarian Days is his own coming-ofage story and has won praise for its lucid prose and romantic depiction of boys and their relentless pursuit of danger.

Plus: You don’t have to surf to appreciate Finnegan’s image of the ocean as an “uncaring God.” Minus: Try all you like, but there is a finite number of ways you can describe the intervals of wave patterns.

Editor: Andi Prewitt / Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com R E D D I T. C O M

SCREENER

MOVIES

GET YO UR REPS I N While local rep theaters are out of commission, we’ll be putting together weekly watchlists of films readily available to stream. This week, we’ve selected a bevy of animated films that are not so kid-friendly, exploring themes ranging from societal revolution to mental illness to erotic deals with the devil. Cartoons are for adults, too!

Fantastic Planet (1973) In this beautifully animated French allegory about human rights, an advanced race of gargantuan blue aliens (Draags) on planet Ygam have enslaved a humanoid race (Oms) as pets. Fed up with this violent oppression, the Oms eventually revolt, and the two species must hash out a way to live together in harmony. Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel, Google Play, HBO Max, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube.

Made in

Oregon

My Life as a Zucchini (2016) LOST HORIZON

A surprising number of famed directors have taken pit stops in our state. We examined the results.

BY C H A N C E SO L E M - P FE I FER

@chance_s_p

For as long as Hollywood has sought arresting vistas and tax incentives, Oregon has beckoned.

But when renowned auteurs have ventured one state north, the results often end up bizarre or as beautiful B-sides in their careers. From William Friedkin to Frank Capra, filmmaking stalwarts have tended to work in Oregon when ascending or descending. That, or they’re Steven Spielberg, and they can shoot anything they want, anywhere they damn well please.

Note that you won’t find any Oregon directors on this list, nor any quintessential Oregon films, like Stand by Me or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—this is a tribute to Hollywood heavyweights and their Oregon curios.

Lost Horizon (1937), dir. Frank Capra Largely remembered as a studio flop and for 40 minutes of (once) missing footage, Lost Horizon was filmed partly in Oregon, though it’s difficult to say exactly how much. Production notes cite Mount Hood as a location, and certainly, the picturesque peak is visible in this strange fable of a hidden Himalayan utopia. Coming off It Happened One Night earlier in the ’30s, Frank Capra’s beautifully assured directing shines through a script bordering on the nonsensical in Lost Horizon. In retrospect, the film’s most fascinating and damning feature is what passed for post-colonial utopia in 1935. (It’s still insanely colonial.)

1941 (1979) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), dir. Steven Spielberg First, there’s 1941—a sprawling World War II comedy widely considered to be Spielberg’s worst movie. Its Jaws-spoofing prologue employed Cannon Beach to portray Northern California, where a Japanese submarine surfaces. That’s it for 1941 and Oregon, which leaves the rest of this blurb to celebrate the couple scenes in A.I. Artificial Intelligence filmed in Oxbow Park.

Those woods provided the backdrop where android child David (Haley Joel Osment) gets abandoned by his mother and encounters robo-gigolo Joe (Jude Law). If perhaps you haven’t seen the 2001 film since being disturbed by it as a child, definitely revisit: It’s profoundly painful and well-imagined science fiction— among Spielberg’s very best work.

The Hunted (2004), dir. William Friedkin Nobody does “two corrupted souls duel through the muck of their expertise” quite like William Friedkin, director of The French Connection, The Exorcist and numerous other gripping crime dramas. 2004’s The Hunted stands as one of Friedkin’s many attempts to reclaim his ’70s mojo. Filmed at Silver Falls State Park and in downtown Portland, this fugitive procedural stars Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro as two—what can really only be called—stabbing experts? The hand-tohand violence is brutally simple and naturebound, which suggests a far more rugged film than the basic cable-destined cop story that resulted. That said, The Hunted does settle any debate over whether a 57-year-old Tommy Lee Jones could catch a MAX train on foot.

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), dir. Philip Kaufman It’s somewhat forgotten these days that Hollywood Swiss Army knife Philip Kaufman directed acclaimed works as divergent as The Right Stuff (1983) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). A few years earlier, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid found Kaufman on the ascent, shooting Jacksonville, Ore., for Eastern Minnesota. While Southern Oregon’s hills and fir trees are distinctly not Midwestern, the difference hardly dents this thoughtful yarn about a harebrained heist. Forgotten stickup artist Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson) rides alongside Jesse James (Robert Duvall) in a Western fascinated by the difference between making a memory and becoming one.

Bandits (2001), dir. Barry Levinson While his award rakers Rain Man and Bugsy haven’t aged particularly well, Barry Levinson’s films of the 1980s and early ’90s are still a fascinating run: Diner; The Natural; Good Morning, Vietnam; Sleepers. Soon after, Levinson turned studio journeyman, which is when Bandits brought him to Oregon circa 2001. While the film ends in a Los Angeles bank robbery gone awry, the Sleepover Bandits (Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton) hone their craft in Oregon City and Silverton, leafy towns where the robberies seem politer and more manageable. The Broadway Bridge and West Linn make cameos as well. Overwrought and overcaffeinated, Bandits is, let’s say, almost fun. Certainly, it’s an all-timer for movie stars wearing wigs on top of their wigs.

Nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, this 70-minute stop-motion dramedy opens with the titular young boy accidentally killing his alcoholic mother. Yup, it’s another French film! After adjusting to his new life at an orphanage, however, little Zucchini finally experiences the joys of friendship, love and chosen family. Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Netflix, Vudu, YouTube.

Belladonna of Sadness (1973) After a peasant woman in medieval France is sexually assaulted by an evil feudal lord on her wedding night, she suffers from psychedelic hallucinations, ultimately prompting her to make a deal with the devil for power and revenge. Mostly consisting of a series of still watercolor images and erotically charged montages, this was Japan’s first X-rated animated film.

Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Kanopy, Tubi, Vudu, YouTube.

Joy Street (1995)

Written, directed and animated by the late, great Suzan Pitt, this uncanny portrait of a woman debilitated by depression unfolds like a fever dream. Within the span of just 24 minutes, Pitt depicts the disorder with a raw dedication to both authenticity and absurdity, combining the real and the surreal. Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel.

Millennium Actress (2001) An exquisite love letter to Japanese cinema and history, anime auteur Satoshi Kon’s poignant drama centers on a legendary yet reclusive actress who mysteriously disappeared at the peak of her career.

As she tells her story to two documentary filmmakers, she reflects on the myriad ways in which her varied film roles and real life meld together. Amazon Prime, Kanopy, Pluto TV, Vudu.

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

27

MOVIES VOX.COM

TOP PICK OF THE WEEK Boys State Politics makes strange bedfellows, and as the new VOD release Boys State showcases, largescale political simulations bring about some weirdass dormmates. The documentary by Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, the married couple behind 2014’s Sundance-winning The Overnighters, follows an engaging quartet—Reagan-obsessed double-amputee Ben, loquacious Chicago expat Rene, hunky silver-spooner Robert, and progressive Mexican American Steven—among the 1,100 teens invited to participate in Texas’ 78th annual Boys State. Remarkably, apart from some sneering glimpses of a young Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and other members of the literal old boys’ club, the camera rarely stops to relish the scenes of future policy wonks at the peak of teenage awkwardness. Considering that the documentary opens with a George Washington quote warning us about the tyranny of political parties and features spliced footage of a raccoon sifting through garbage, the filmmakers appear helplessly drawn to the nihilist joys of rooting on participants as they fashion fake platforms to sell fake campaigns for a fake governorship in a manner that is troublingly real. And while Robert’s exceedingly electable brand of swagger is surely intended as a cautionary tale, there’s no reason why natural charisma should be any worse a qualification for leadership than instinctive talents for demagoguery or manipulation. Even if this game isn’t rigged, the best players feel inherently suspect, nevertheless. PG-13. JAY HORTON. AppleTV+.

OUR KEY

: T H I S M O V I E I S E X C 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.

ALSO PLAYING 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.

28

She Dies Tomorrow Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) knows for a fact that she’s going to die tomorrow. She’s seen things. Heard things.

She knows. Obviously, her best friend Jane (Jane Adams) doesn’t believe her at first. But then Jane begins having the same ominous visions. Now, Jane knows for a fact that she’s going to die tomorrow. As does Jane’s brother (Chris Messina), and his wife, and her friends, etc., etc. In most mainstream thrillers, we’d probably see the characters team up to fight death, but writer-director Amy Seimetz is detached from narrative convention, and her kaleidoscopic sophomore feature is, honestly, a lot less thrilling than it sounds. This is by no means a negative—it’s contemplative and challenging, harnessing dread from the fatal contagion of existentialist-fueled anxiety. In Seimetz’s neon-soaked world, death is a natural process, something to resign to instead of futilely resist. Though some viewers may find the aimless ambiguity baffling, this is a film to fully feel with all senses—to marinate in—rather than agonize over the intentional lack of logic and answers. Anxiety itself is often irrational, so this is Seimetz’s impressionistic response to that all-too-ubiquitous frustration. Embrace it. R. MIA VICINO. Google Play.

A Thousand Cuts If it’s felt as though democracy has been on the ropes this month, this year, this century, A Thousand Cuts is a harrowing snapshot of its knockout.

Since President Rodrigo Duterte’s election in 2016, the Philippines’ “War

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

BOYS STATE on Drugs” has effectively given the federal government carte blanche to execute anyone suspected of dealing or using narcotics. In A Thousand Cuts, director Ramona S. Diaz turns her lens on the beleaguered Philippine free press illuminating that state violence—mostly Maria Ressa, CEO of the journalism website Rappler and Time’s Person of the Year in 2018. (Ressa is currently appealing a conviction for “cyber-libel” that Reporters Without Borders has deemed “Kafkaesque.”)

The most tragic and canny component of Diaz’s documentary is simply its demonstration of how unpopular journalists are in a country where propaganda has accelerated through social media at an unprecedented pace.

Sure, Ressa procures Amal Clooney’s personal email in one slightly hopeful scene, but Diaz shrewdly cuts back to a rally of several thousand Duterte supporters bellowing for a strongman who freely jokes about rape and turns murder into explicit federal policy. It’s a terrifying reminder for pro-democracy advocates to act now. Because once one side is unpacking publishing principles and the other is wholly comfortable with bloodshed, it’s probably too late. NR. CHANCE SOLEMPFEIFER. Cinema 21 Virtual Cinema.

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 new-wave 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.

Random Acts of Violence Serving as a fixture in the Apatow universe, directing a Canadian hockey comedy, and acting as lead voice in the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, Jay Baruchel has a career that’s pleasantly odd—and growing odder. For his second outing as director, Baruchel helms the Shudder original horror film Random Acts of Violence, a jittery and disjointed adaptation of the 2010 graphic novel. The rapidly escalating yarn follows comic book artist Todd (Jesse Williams, Grey’s Anatomy) and his partner Kathy (Jordana Brewster, the Fast & Furious franchise) as they road-trip into the Great Lakes boonies. There, Todd seeks to conclude his Slasherman series once and for all, while Kathy reports on the serial murders that inspired the comics. And, would you believe it, people start dying gruesomely. Mirrored in Todd and Kathy’s relationship, the film’s most interesting feature, by far, reckons with artistic exploitation versus victim-oriented journalism. Through a self-aware script and Williams’ agitated performance, Random Acts suggests a long look in the mirror that almost any crime story (true or not) could stand to take in 2020. Ultimately though, this 80-minute bloodbath is more entrails than brains or, worse yet, actual scares. Plots are gonna plot, and contrivances about the killer’s interest in Todd and vice versa all but mutilate its knotty potential. NR. CHANCE SOLEMPFEIFER. Shudder.

Rebuilding Paradise When he’s directing fiction, Ron Howard’s voice tends to be that of a centrist dad: Obstacles loom impossibly large in movies like Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind, but that’s what makes these men’s jobs worth doing, kids.

Howard takes pretty much the same stance in his documentary Rebuilding Paradise, sifting through the ashes of a 2018 inferno that consumed Paradise, Calif., claiming 85 lives and leaving little standing. Like all Howard efforts,

except maybe that Grinch remake, Rebuilding Paradise clings to the best intentions, and it’s more emotive than inquisitive. The documentary’s favorite refrain is that the Paradise residents didn’t just lose homes, they lost home.

That’s a powerful and worthy sentiment the first few times, but Howard’s tendency to bask in the Rockwellian fantasy of this lost community clearly takes precedence over more hardnosed insights on lawsuits against the electric company PG&E, regional and international climate concerns, and relevant Indigenous history in Butte County. The documentary actually tips its hat to all three of those ideas, which only really serves to highlight the more melodramatic approach. In interviews, Howard has called himself merely a “wannabe journalist.” He’s being humble, of course, but with this documentary, it shows. PG-13.

CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. rebuildingparadise.film.

Words on Bathroom Walls Adam Petrazelli (Charlie Plummer) is, for the most part, an average teenager. He dreams of being a chef, cooks for his divorced mother (Molly Parker), and crushes on his cute tutor, Maya (Taylor Russell). At the same time, he has chronic hallucinations caused by schizophrenia. His new medication seems to be working at first, but when he begins to experience detrimental side effects, Adam must decide what’s most important: his sanity, his relationship with Maya, or his culinary aspirations. Based on Julia Walton’s eponymous novel, this coming-of-age drama is at its best when it’s poking holes in the self-flagellating and false ideation that those who struggle with mental illness don’t deserve love. It’s an all-too-common burden to bear and quite an interesting one to explore, even if it occasionally feels crafted by and for people without mental disorders. For example, the over-the-top visualization of schizophrenia reads as inaccurate, and the three people Adam constantly hallucinates (a bohemian hippie girl, an often-shirtless playboy, and a raging bodybuilder) are stereotypical archetypes. Despite these trite flaws, the saccharine story itself is a valiant effort that could provide much-needed validation for alienated teens grappling with similar issues. PG-13. MIA VICINO. Virtual Cinema.

FLASHBACK

THIS WEEK IN '93

Willamette Week Classifieds AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

29

SPOTLIGHT

CHANTEL CAMILLE ROICE

JACK KENT’S

Portland based illustrator Chantel Camille Roice really knew how to make the most of her quarantine time. Utilizing the period to craft illustrations and launch the Etsy shop Stillwater Teacup Art. Chantel (or Tillie as her friends call her) has been drawing since she could hold a pencil and holds her BFA in Illustration from PNCA. That right there is commitment to one’s art. Her work mixes digital with analog to create modern, witchy work with a vintage twist. She draws a lot of inspiration from antiques, edwardian & victorian illustrations, and folk tales. Oh, and she likes drawing animals in vintage clothes.

Tillie is not afraid to admit that it took her years post college to decide to prioritize becoming a professional artist. At first, the idea of sharing her work professionally felt intimidating, showing that event he most talented among us has their doubts from time to time. Now look at her. Her Etsy shop, featuring prints, stickers and shirts with illustrations of the witch/ pagan type launched at 12am on August 1, 2020 to incredible sales numbers. Her t-shirts featuring an illustration called the Sea Knight sold out by preorder before the site even went live. As her shop continues to grow she is also hard at work on the intricate art needed to produce a stunning, detailed tarot deck for local Tarot reader Aileen Halvorson.

She is a fine example of the fact that the path to becoming a professional artist with an occult like following is a slow process like any other, but it is well worth it once you make the building blocks.

30

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

Jack draws exactly what he sees n’ hears from the streets.

IG @sketchypeoplepdx | kentcomics.com

JONESIN’

Week of August 27

©2020 Rob Brezsny

by Matt Jones

"For the Birds"--multi-tasking for the "modern Stone Age family." [#34, Feb. 2002]

ARIES (March 21-April 19) Aries author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes, "Some stuff can be fixed, some stuff can’t be. Deciding which is which is part of maturing." I offer this meditation as your assignment in the coming weeks, Aries. You are in a phase when you'll be wise to make various corrections and adjustments. But you should keep in mind that you don't have unlimited time and energy to do so. And that's OK, because some glitches can't be repaired and others aren't fully worthy of your passionate intensity. You really should choose to focus on the few specific acts of mending and healing that will serve you best in the long run.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20) "There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice," wrote author F. Scott Fitzgerald.

This is true even between the same two people in an intimate alliance with each other. The love that you and your spouse or friend or close relative or collaborator exchanged a month ago isn't the same as it is now. It *can't* be identical, because then it wouldn't be vibrant, robust love, which needs to ceaselessly transform in order to be vibrant and robust. This is always true, of course, but will be an especially potent meditation for you during the next four weeks.

GEMINI (May 21-June20) As a professional writer, novelist Thomas Wolfe trained himself to have keen perceptions that enabled him to penetrate below surface appearances. And yet he wrote, "I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once." In other words, it was hard even for him, a highly trained observer, to get a deep and accurate read of what was going on. It required a long time and many attempts—and rarely occurred for him on the first look. Even if you're not a writer, Gemini, I recommend his approach for you in the coming weeks. You will attune yourself to current cosmic rhythms—and thus be more likely to receive their full help and blessings— if you deepen and refine the way you use your senses.

ACROSS 1 Drains, as energy 5 R&B singer Cantrell 8 Cause counterpart 14 Jog like a horse 15 Presidential monogram during the 1960s

56 Pension plan alternative 57 Writing implement using a bird's beak 59 Talking bird flying back and forth between stone boxes 61 Cover for a platter

16 "Starlight Express" director Nunn

62 "Little piggy," really

17 Gigantic bird with a stone passenger cabin

64 Tousles, like a puppy

19 Item with an image-chiseling bird

66 Corrida cheers

20 Suffix for McCarthy 21 With a tilde, "year"; without, something nastier 22 Darkness and obscurity 23 Musical item using a pointy-beaked bird

63 "_ _ _ but known ..."

65 AMA members

DOWN

34 Elisabeth of "Leaving Las Vegas" 35 Woody Allen "regular guy in famous situations" movie 38 Old paint additive 40 Ostrich or kiwi, e.g.

41 "First Do No _ _ _" (Meryl Streep TV film) 44 Sallie _ _ _ (student loan provider) 47 Site of a 1949 European "Convention" 48 Takes to the soapbox 49 Wishes

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)

2 Obey Viagra?

50 Carreras, Domingo, or Pavarotti

"To be successful, the first thing to do is fall in love with your work," says author Sister Mary Lauretta. Have you been making progress in accomplishing that goal, Leo? According to my astrological analysis, fate has been offering and will continue to offer you the chance to either find work that you'll love better than the work you're doing, or else discover how to feel more love and excitement for your existing work. Why not intensify your efforts to cooperate with fate?

3 San Francisco and New Orleans, for two

51 Etch away

4 Frequent NASCAR sponsor

29 Birds on a ranch Down Under 30 Word after tight or rear

5 Uses an iron, maybe 6 Quick stretch in the alphabet song

33 "Ad _ _ _ per aspera" (Kansas state motto)

7 Article written by Voltaire?

57 AOL or MSN, e.g., once ...

8 List-ending abbr.

35 PBS kids' show that taught Ubby-Dubby 36 Fortune 500 member, most likely 37 Signaling item, when the bird's tail is pulled 39 Motorist's signal, when the bird is squeezed 42 Parisian street 43 Annoying "Sesame Street" muppet 45 "Biography" network 46 "Abso-friggin-lutely!"

58 ... and where to find them

9 Web design option that's obsolete

59 "_ _ _ be my pleasure!"

48 Other, to Osvaldo 49 Garden tool, when the bird's legs are squeezed 53 "The Heat _ _ _" 55 Dig in

It's sometimes tempting for you to seek stability and safety by remaining just the way you are. When life pushes you to jump in and enjoy its wild ride, you may imagine it's wise to refrain—to retreat to your sanctuary and cultivate the strength that comes from being staunch and steadfast and solid. Sometimes that approach does indeed work for you. I'm not implying it's wrong or bad. But in the coming weeks, I think your strategy should be different. The advice I'll offer you comes from Cancerian author and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh: "Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found."

1 It's made to step on

28 Eye color location

47 Mother of all, in Greek mythology

CANCER (June 21-July 22)

52 Harold of "Ghostbusters" 53 "To Live and Die _ _ _" 54 Twist, as statistics

10 Thighbone

60 Sorority letter

11 "The Greatest Story _ _ _ Told"

57 AOL or MSN, e.g., once ...

58 ... and where to find them

12 Stopper for the bubbly

59 "_ _ _ be my pleasure!"

13 Singing syllable

60 Sorority letter

18 Cowboy's rope 24 Hockey great Bobby and family 25 Summer sign 26 Service station owned

by BP 27 Arizona City, today 30 Cost-friendly 31 Bookish type 32 Cooked to perfection 33 Off-kilter

©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.

last week’s answers

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) "Self-love is also remembering to let others love you.

Come out of hiding." Poet Irisa Yardenah wrote that advice, and now I'm passing it on to you, just in time for a phase when you will benefit from it most. I mean, it's always good counsel for you to Virgos to heed. But it will be especially crucial in the coming weeks, when you'll have extra potential to bloom in response to love.

And one of the best ways to ensure this extra potential is fulfilled is to make yourself thoroughly available to be appreciated, understood, and cared for.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22) Libran poet Wallace Stevens wrote that if you want to be original, you must "have the courage to be an

amateur." I agree! And that's an important theme for you right now, since you're entering a phase when your original ideas will be crucial to your growth. So listen up, Libra: If you want to stimulate your creatively to the max, adopt the fresh-eyed attitude of a rookie or a novice. Forget what you think you know about everything. Make yourself as innocently curious and eager as possible. Your imaginative insights and innovations will flow in abundance to the degree that you free yourself from the obligation to be serious and sober and professional. And keep in mind that Stevens said you need courage to act this way.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) "As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off," writes author Michael Lewis. According to my analysis, the coming weeks will provide you with ample evidence that proves his hypothesis—on one condition, that is: You will have to cultivate and express a *thoughtful* kind of optimism.

Is that possible? Do you have the audacity to maintain intelligent buoyancy and discerning positivity, even in the face of those who might try to gaslight you into feeling stupid for being buoyant and positive? I think you do.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) Author Rebecca Solnit writes, "The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation." Her statement is especially apropos for you right now. The experiences you're yearning for will indeed change you significantly if you get them—even though those changes will be different from what your conscious mind thinks they'll be. But don't worry. Your higher self—the eternal part of you that knows just what you need—is fully aware of the beneficial transformations that will come your way when you get what you yearn for.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) At age 22, future pioneer of science Isaac Newton got his college degree just as the Great Plague peaked in 1665. As a safety precaution, he proceeded to quarantine himself for many months. During that time of being sealed away, he made spectacular discoveries about optics, gravity, and calculus—in dramatic contrast to his years as a student, when his work had been relatively undistinguished. I'm not predicting that your experience of the 2020 pandemic will prove to be as fruitful as those of your fellow Capricorn, Isaac Newton. But of all the signs in the zodiac, I do think your output could be most Newton-like. And the coming weeks will be a good time for you to redouble your efforts to generate redemption amidst the chaos.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) The rapper named Viper has released over 1,000 albums. In 2014 alone, he created 347. His most popular work is *You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack*, which has received over three million views on Youtube. According to *The Chicago Reader*, one of Viper's most appealing features is his "blatant disregard for grammar." I should also mention that he regards himself as the second Christ, and uses the nickname "Black Jesus." So what does any of this have to do with you? Well, I'm recommending that you be as prolific, in your own field, as he is in his. I'm also inviting you to experiment with having a fun-loving disregard for grammar and other non-critical rules.

And I would love to see you temporarily adopt some of his over-the-top braggadocio.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) "If you don't ask the right question, every answer seems wrong," says singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco.

I suspect you may have experienced a version of that predicament in recent weeks, Pisces. That's the bad news. The good news is that I expect you will finally formulate the right questions very soon. They will most likely be quite different from the wrong and irrelevant questions you've been posing. In fact, the best way to find the revelatory questions will be to renounce and dismiss all the questions you have been asking up until now.

HOMEWORK: What could you actually change about your life that would give you a great sense of accomplishment? FreeWillAstrology.com Check out Rob Brezsny’s Expanded Weekly Audio Horoscopes & Daily Text Message Horoscopes

freewillastrology.com The audio horoscopes are also available by phone at

1-877-873-4888 or 1-900-950-7700

Willamette Week AUGUST 19, 2020 wweek.com

31

5/31/2020

Brothers.jpeg

CLASSIFIEDS

TO PLACE AN AD, CONTACT: MICHAEL DONHOWE 503-243-2122 / mdonhowe@wweek.com

Drive New Cars!

Get Paid Weekly. North Portland, M-F, Day positions open, part & full-time., men & women, 18 years up. Must drive stick shift. Immediate openings. Call 360-718-7443

CASH for INSTRUMENTS Tradeupmusic.com SW 503-452-8800 SE 503-236-8800 NE 503-335-8800

Do you have questions about sex?

Send your query to: askshebop@sheboptheshop.com Select questions will be answered in Ask She Bop's next sex advice column

Steve Greenberg Tree Service Pruning and removals, stump grinding. 24-hour emergency service. Licensed/Insured.

CCB#67024. Free estimates.

503-284-2077

TRADEUPMUSIC.COM

Sunlan Lighting For all your lightbulb fixtures & parts 3901 N Mississippi Ave 503.281.0453 Essential Business Hours 9:00 to 5:30 Monday thru Friday, 11:00 to 4:00 Saturday

Buying, selling, instruments of every shape and size. Open 11am7pm every day. 4701 SE Division & 1834 NE Alberta.

SUPPORT

LOCAL

INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

Complete Yard Service Senior Discounts

We do it all!

Trimming, hedges & shrubs, pruning, bark dust, gutter cleaning, leaf cleanup & weeding, blackberries and ivy removal, staining, pressure washing & water sealing 503-235-0491 or 503-853-0480

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=rm&ogbl#advanced-search/from=mdonhowe%40wweek.com&query=in%3Asent+brothers&isrefinem

BECOME A FRIEND OF WILLAMETTE WEEK Sunlan cartoons by Kay Newell "The Lightbulb Lady" Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Google

WWEEK.COM/SUPPORT

www.sunlanlighting.com

SURF SUP SKATE GORGE PERFORMANCE 7400 SW Macadam, Portland visit gorgeperformance.com M-F 10-8, Sat 10-7 Closed Sun

BOARD RIDING SINCE 1983

Great Deals. Every Day. All 4 Floyd’s Locations!

9240 N. Whitaker | 801 NE Broadway | 5944 NE Sandy | 5217 SE 28th

5 8

$ $ .33 GRAMS 1/8THS CONCENTRATE of

Open Daily 9am- 9:55pm 21+ Recreational

| 18+ Medical

FloydsFineCannabis.com While supplies last. Some restrictions may apply. Tax not included.

Keep marijuana out of the reach of children. Do not operate a vehicle or machine under the influence of marijuana.