NEWS: FEAR OF NEEDLES. CULTURE: HALLOWEEN’S NOT DEAD. FOOD: MORMON MEALS. P. 8
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“IF IT DOESN’T GO OUR WAY, WE’RE GOING TO SMOKE POT AND CHANT MORE.” P. 20 WWEEK.COM
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FINDINGS
THEN AND NOW: In 2016, we tried to imagine the Trump era. See how we did, page 9.
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 47, ISSUE 1 Oregon could outlaw doxxing. 5
The burger at Clyde Tavern will transport you to a simpler time: early 2020. 21
A campaign mailer implies Metro killed Packy. 6
A new cart is cooking recipes inspired by a Mormon church cookbook . 22
Anna Kasachev appears to be the first Old Believer to seek elected office. 8 Residents of Idaho may soon need to visit Oregon for abortions. 10 Crude oil shipped to Oregon
increased 250% in three years. 14
Tillamook Country Smoker, home of the 2-foot beef stick , launched a charter bus to ferry workers from East Portland. 16 This Halloween, you can go to a drive-in and watch a horror movie about a hangnail. 19 A dude flipped a table at Mississippi Studios’ 2016 election night party. Everybody understood. 20
ON THE COVER:
NEWS: FEAR OF NEEDLES. CULTURE: HALLOWEEN’S NOT DEAD. FOOD: MORMON MEALS. P. 8
P. 19
P. 22
“IF IT DOESN’T GO OUR WAY, WE’RE GOING TO SMOKE POT AND CHANT MORE.”
The Damage Trump Did, illustration by Jack Kent.
Author Brian Evenson got fired from BYU for writing stories that featured characters eating severed tongues. 24 You may want to consider just throwing candy at kids from your porch this Halloween. 26 It’s safe to say that Mlima’s Tale is the first play in which an elephant describes a human pouring a glass of Jack Daniels. 24 Donna Hayes wrote a play about a Portland police officer killing her grandson. 28
OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK:
YOUR LOCAL STOP FOR ALL THINGS SNACKS + BEVERAGES
Joey Gibson is in the new Borat movie. Kind of.
P. 20 WWEEK.COM
VOL 47/01 10.28.2020
MASTHEAD EDITOR & PUBLISHER
Mark Zusman
EDITORIAL
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Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
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DIALOGUE Last Friday, state officials announced 550 new COVID-19 cases, a new single-day record for Oregon. Gov. Kate Brown and the Oregon Health Authority have warned that, with flu season and the holidays fast approaching, Oregonians should avoid travel and social gatherings. Nonetheless, the OHA has traced many new cases to get-togethers held in private residences. In an interview with WW, Multnomah County communicable disease coordinator Kim Toevs attributed the spike in house party-caused cases to “pandemic fatigue”—Oregonians are less willing to adhere to health guidelines after eight months of social distancing. Here’s what out readers had to say: Christoph Elliot via wweek.com: “This isn’t rocket science, people. This is a deadly, highly communicable disease. We need to just cancel the holidays this year. People will survive and get over it. It’s a small sacrifice to keep people alive. Stop being selfish children. Wear a mask everywhere, socially distance, don’t socialize, don’t gather, don’t travel. It’s not forever.” Tina Garcia via Facebook: “I have only left home twice, to renew my driver’s license and get my flu shot. I can’t trust my neighbors and fellow citizens to care if I die. So I am home.” @cathyxOR via Twitter: “I can’t believe [Gov. Brown] hasn’t closed everything down again.”
Where do you read Willamette Week? #READWW Tag us to be featured
Just Doing the Math via wweek.com: “With the upcoming holiday season, the prognosis for success of limiting family and social get-togethers is poor. It does not matter whether I agree or disagree with the experts, families will celebrate the holidays together.” Julia Scott via Facebook: “It’s really shitty to be putting in effort to stay away from people when most have given up. I’m not seeing the point anymore. Unless everyone can do it, it doesn’t matter otherwise.”
Dr. Know
@markwoolleygallery: Where do I read Willamette Week? At the cabin next to Still Creek, in the afternoon in the Mt Hood National Forest, accompanied by the New Yorker, a beverage and always a pad and favorite pen...... think about supporting local independent journalism by becoming a friend of WW at wweek.com/support!
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Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
Joel Getz via Facebook: “Well, I think a lot of us figure that if none of us have left the house in the past week, the chance of any of us having COVID is pretty low.” Tyler Whitney via Facebook: “I don’t blame people for having small mindful/cautious gatherings. It’s untenable/unhealthy to be in lockdown mode for months and months and months.” David D. Gray via Facebook: “Pandemic fatigue is a selfish joke. Most people don’t know what real adversity is, they’ve lived their lives in a protected bubble. Try living in a war-torn country or an underdeveloped country, you’ll see what a hard life is all about. The people with ‘fatigue’ are just selfish pricks that can’t sacrifice a little for the good of the entire mankind, it’s all about them.” Scrappymutt via wweek.com: “One day does not make a trend. Over the month of October, Oregon has held steady around 350 new cases per day. Higher than the previous average around 200, but much lower than places like Iowa, that are averaging over 1,000 new cases per day in spite of being a rural state with a million fewer residents than Oregon. Most of the research shows that it is probably related to mask usage. WW has now established a history of exaggerating the threat, so I am not going to trust it.” Katherine Bailey via Facebook: “At what point do I get to complain about my freedoms? All those with compromised immune systems, caregivers, etc., are all forced to live in quarantine because you fuckers refuse to think about anyone but yourselves. Sick of paying for your ignorance with my freedom.” 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
I heard that traffic is something like 90% to 95% back from lower levels earlier in the pandemic, but the patterns are different. What the hell are the patterns now? I want to be able to slice through the city like a hot knife through butta. —Nerd Oh, sorry, Nerd, didn’t see you there—I was just putting the finishing touches on my new all-singing, all-dancing, all-tire-changing Wrestlemania megaevent, “Les Miserables vs. Les Schwab.” (It even rhymes!) Anyway, don’t oversell the new traffic patterns. It’s true that some things have changed, but it’s not like I-205 completely empties every day at 12:49 as people rush home to watch Michelle Obama’s blog post drop. Here’s what we know: At this point, Portland’s average weekday vehicle miles traveled (VMT) has rebounded to about 91% of what it was this time last year. That’s the bad news, both for the planet and for your butta-slicing fantasies. There is good news, however. (Not for the planet, of course; there’s never good news for the planet.) Give a small huzzah as I announce that the little-lamented morning rush hour is dead.
According to “COVID Transportation Trends,” a riveting e-potboiler from the transportation number-crunchers at Streetlight Data, “There is no such thing as ‘peak AM’ anymore. “Instead of the typical sharp increase in morning travel, followed by a drop and then an afternoon peak, our August 2020 VMT analysis shows weekday traffic building gradually toward a more sustained afternoon high.” I can certainly relate; I’ve spent my whole life building gradually toward a more sustained afternoon high. In any case, as long as all the bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists and other layabouts who check their email for a living keep working from home, the formerly jam-packed 7-9 am hour will be smooth sailing (trafficwise, if not hangoverwise). All you need to do to slice through the city is get up an hour earlier than normal, drive to the building you used to work in, kiss it, and drive home. Not only will the trip be gratifyingly traffic-free, you’ll confuse the hell out of the FBI agents surveilling you. QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.
MURMURS WESLEY LAPOINTE
Chloe Eudaly
FORMER STAFFER SAYS EUDALY WAS RACIST: As City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly entered the final week of her reelection battle against challenger Mingus Mapps, a former staffer hit her with a public allegation of racism. On Oct. 26, Robyn Stowers, a Black woman who briefly worked as an aide to Eudaly in 2017, circulated a letter describing her time there as a “bombardment of institutional racism, white feminism, divisive politics and dysfunctional office culture.” Stowers’ allegations range from Eudaly making racially inflammatory remarks to erratic but not bigoted behavior. Stowers recalled Eudaly responding dismissively to a City Hall visit by the family of Quanice Hayes, a 17-year-old fatally shot by Portland police in 2017. Stowers recalls: “[Eudaly] rolled her eyes and said ‘not them again.’” Eudaly called the letter a baseless “smear campaign,” saying, “I was surprised and dismayed to read Ms. Stowers’ various unsubstantiated allegations.” POLICE OFFICERS DEMAND NEW BOOTS: Portland police officers have started a new trend since protests against police brutality began in May: filing legal claims against the city for clothing damaged by paint during demonstrations. In their tort claims, the officers ask for a variety of items, including pants and shirts. By far the most common item is boots. At least 14 officers of the Portland Police Bureau filed tort claims since July 1 requesting a new pair of boots after theirs were damaged by paint-filled balloons or water bottles thrown by protesters. “While serving on PPB’s Rapid Response Team in crowd control situations during a violent riot,” one officer wrote in a September claim, “I was struck with a balloon filled with paint that covered my boots and pants in pink and blue paint ruining their appearance.” The boots range from $145 to $370 a pair; all told, officers are asking the city to pay over $2,700 for new boots. Heather Hafer, spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Management & Finance, says before Black Lives Matter protests began this spring, it was “very uncommon” for city employees to submit tort claims for clothing damaged while working. “However,” Hafer says, “since late May it has become somewhat more common—particularly for Portland Police Bureau employees.” GOV. BROWN FUNDS HOUSE AND SENATE RACES: Gov. Kate Brown’s political action committees have been spreading the money around this fall, including $85,550 in expenditures since Oct. 14 to support candidates in key state legislative races. Those contributions include $40,000
to Melissa Cribbins, Democratic nominee for an open Senate set; $20,500 to Democratic challenger Jason Kropf, who has the best chance of defeating a Republican incumbent in the House, Rep. Cheri Helt of Bend; and $25,000 to Deb Patterson, who is challenging Republican incumbent Sen. Denyc Boles of Salem. So far this year, Brown has spent more than $225,000 to support campaigns or make contributions directly to other PACs. She still has $442,000 on hand in one PAC, a notable sum for a governor who is ineligible to run for reelection. “Some of those may be close races and others we anticipate will be overwhelming victories,” says Brown campaign spokesman Thomas Wheatley. “Gov. Brown is particularly excited to be supporting a number of candidates of color this year.” OREGON COULD OUTLAW DOXXING: Oregon lawmakers are working on a pair of bill concepts for the 2021 legislative session that would make it illegal to post someone’s personal information online with the intent to humiliate them, and that would prohibit law enforcement from releasing mug shots to the public in many circumstances. If the first bill concept is passed into law, “doxxing,” which entails posting an individual’s private and identifying information online, would become a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail and a fine of $6,250. Doxxing has long been a specialty of Portland anti-fascist organizations, which regularly post the home addresses and other personal details of alleged white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The second legislative concept would prevent law enforcement from widely distributing a person’s booking photo, also known as a mug shot. Conservative activists posting mug shots on social media has become a matter of controversy amid wide-scale arrests at Portland protests. WILLIAMSON FINDS LOBBYING JOB: Former House Majority Leader Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland) has a new gig, joining the lobbying and political consulting firm Strategies 360. The firm tends to collect progressive officials who leave office: It’s where former State Treasurer Randall Edwards and onetime City Commissioner Erik Sten hang their hats, and where former House Speaker Dave Hunt (D-Gladstone) worked until recently. Williamson quit her House position to run for secretary of state, then bailed on that race after WW reported on her unusual spending of campaign funds. She cannot lobby lawmakers until she’s been gone from Salem for a year—two more months from now. Williamson could not be reached for comment. Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
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PHOTO: Caption tktktk
NEWS
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK
ELECTION 2020
The Mailer Awards
MOST COMPELLING ART: Multnomah County Circuit Court candidate Rima Ghandour eschewed serious-looking lawyers and legal books, instead positioning herself in front of the George Floyd mural on the plywood covering the Apple Store in downtown Portland.
The most memorable campaign ads arriving in Portland mailboxes— and posted along one freeway. BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS AA RON M E S H
and
503-243-2122
Crisp leaves, warm cider and a good cardigan: Autumn is defined by its rituals. One of them in Portland is trying to find your ballot amid a stack of campaign junk mail. With Portlanders trapped in their homes, those political mailers take on new urgency. For some voters, these will be the only introduction they get to candidates and measures. But they are also filled with dubious claims, tasteless comparisons, and outright howlers. Each election, we award prizes to the best, and worst, of what we found in our mailboxes. MOST CREATIVE: Opponents of Measure 26-218, a $4 billion transportation tax crafted by Metro against business opposition, received plenty of funding from Nike, Intel and The Standard—and proceeded to play around with it in enjoyably absurd ways. One mailer was designed like a lottery scratch-off game and contained choose-your-own questions like “Do you know what Metro is?” and “Who killed Packy?” strongly implying that the regional government murdered a beloved elephant. (Metro runs the Oregon Zoo.) The massive mailer sent by the same campaign with photos of the Titanic, Godzilla and King Kong and the caption “Sometimes Bigger Isn’t Better,” a reference to the largest local tax increase ever proposed in Oregon, was elegant enough to frame.
MOST UNTIMELY ENDORSEMENT: Ghandour’s opponent, Adrian Brown, sent out a mailer with large photos of her endorsers, including NAACP of Portland president E.D. Mondainé. The same day it arrived in mailboxes, The Portland Mercury reported multiple allegations of sexual abuse levied against Mondainé by former parishioners of his church. MEANEST REUSE OF A TWEET: United for Portland, the independent expenditure campaign supporting Mayor Ted Wheeler, ran a series of tweets by his opponent, Sarah Iannarone, on a mailer. Fair enough: Many of her tweets are revealing, some ill-considered. But one is totally out of context: a tweet from Sept. 3, 2018, in which Iannarone wrote, “Oh hell, no way I can support the Blazers this year.” (She was referring to a partnership the team had with a rifle scope manufacturer.) Say what you will about Iannarone, her Blazermania is a consistent and real sentiment.
WORST COMBINATION OF PHOTO AND CAPTION: Iannarone sent out a mailer with the caption “What does Progress for Portland look like?” Aside from the erratic capitalization, the photo beneath it—showing a crowd of supporters who if anything look even whiter than the average Portland crowd—didn’t capture the diversity the candidate touts as her vision for the city. MOST SHAMELESS: OK, this one isn’t a mailer, and it’s been widely reported. But along Interstate 205 near Gladstone stands a billboard that describes Metro’s proposed light rail expansion as a “virus train.” It’s the latest broadside against light rail from a political action committee run by GOP consultant Jim Pasero, who has been fearmongering in Clackamas County about trains bringing crime and “Portland creep” since at least 2012. This time, he’s implying MAX will carry COVID-19 to the suburbs. Gross.
CONTRIBUTION OF THE WEEK WORST PROP: Mingus Mapps, a first-time candidate who wants to unseat Commissioner Chloe Eudaly and become the third Black man elected to Portland City Hall, sent out a picture of an empty chair. We get his implication: Eudaly’s not leading. But given that Eudaly’s chair is currently full and he’s trying to introduce himself to voters, this was poorly done. Also, it reminded us of Clint Eastwood, in a bad way.
Money Walks Hospital cash gets spread around Oregon—and helps a tax measure that hurts hospitals.
BEST BRANDING: Dr. Lisa Reynolds’ mailers in her bid for Oregon House District 33 feature colors and fonts similar to those of Dunkin’ Donuts. At least one East Coast transplant in our newsroom wants a Boston cream-filled every time he opens his mailbox. Just what the doctor ordered!
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You know the saying about politics and strange bedfellows. But election season can make for loose pocketbooks, as groups that normally conflict pool their resources to promote shared interests—sometimes at their own expense. Money shared between a couple of the many tax measures on this year’s ballot highlights the compromises that come with volunteering to pick up the tab. 1. On the last day of the 2019 session of the Oregon Legislature, Democrats, with strong support from public employee unions, refer a $2-a-pack cigarette tax increase to the ballot.
NEWS
CHOICES
2. Between referral in 2019 and now, Oregon hospitals and health systems poured $13 million into passing Measure 108, the cigarette tax hike. Their sometimes nemesis, Service Employees International Union, contributes another $250,000 to the campaign. (SEIU represents many hospital workers.) The measure will produce $165 million a year in new tax money, most of which will eventually go to healthcare and fund some SEIU jobs. “We are always willing to work with folks that are willing to work with us to get people the health care they need,” says SEIU Local 503 executive director Melissa Unger. 3. Meanwhile, regional government Metro puts a $4 billion transportation measure on the ballot, funded by a payroll tax. Among the largest groups that would pay that tax? Hospitals who employ tens of thousands of health care workers in the region and would pay millions in taxes every year if it passes. It might seem logical for them to oppose it. They haven’t.
4. Big Tobacco, which was expected to fund opposition to Measure 108’s hike on cigarette taxes, decides to sit the race out. That leaves the Yes on 108 campaign with millions of dollars and little to spend it on. So the campaign contributes $250,000 to Our Oregon, the union-backed group that produces a voter guide encouraging voters to support both the tobacco tax and the Metro measure. 5. The result? The hospitals indirectly support a measure that would hurt them. “Our top electoral priority this year is the passage of Measure 108, which will reduce vaping and tobacco use while providing valuable funding for the Oregon Health Plan,” says Michael Cox, spokesman for the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems. “Yes for a Healthy Future has assembled a diverse coalition in support of Measure 108, and strategic decisions by the campaign are made as a coalition. Participation in the voter guide is an effective way to reach voters and is consistent with the campaign’s winning strategy.” NIGEL JAQUISS.
WW’s 2020 Endorsements Ballots must be returned by 8 pm Tuesday, Nov. 3 U.S. PRESIDENT Joe Biden (D) U.S. SENATE Jeff Merkley (D) U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES District 1: Suzanne Bonamici (D) District 3: Earl Blumenauer (D) District 5: Kurt Schrader (D) OREGON SECRETARY OF STATE Shemia Fagan (D) OREGON TREASURER Tobias Read (D)
AUDIT
Cold Case After the release of a bombshell city contracting audit, silence. BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS
njaquiss@wweek.com
Amid unparalleled demands for racial and gender equity, an aggressive city audit examining failures in public contracting appears to have stalled. Last month, Portland City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero released a damning evaluation of a 2012 program approved by the City Council to give women, people of color and emerging companies more opportunities to win certain city construction contracts. The audit tackled a sore point in the construction trades: White male-owned firms get most of the city’s business and always have. The city sought to address that inequity with a 2012 policy that makes it easier for women and people of color to win construction and professional service contracts. Small contractors have long grumbled that the city’s program is ripe for abuse, particularly by companies that claim in the state certification process to be owned by women or people of color but are not. Auditors found many problems. “City officials responsible for administering the contracting equity system report being disempowered, disengaged, and without requisite funding and oversight,” they wrote. “The result is dissatisfaction from top to bottom, inside and outside the government.” A central contention: that companies bidding for city contracts under the 2012 policy were fronts for established companies owned by white men. Even before publicly releasing the findings, the auditor’s office took the unusual step of sending a formal letter to the City Attorney’s Office asking for further investigation, pointing out that some contractors that won business under the program “may be fraudulently certified.” “The City Attorney’s Office and Procurement Services should use their powers to investigate these companies’ certifications and take appropriate action if lawbreaking is found,” the auditors’ letter, dated Aug. 26, said. “We request notification of your decision whether to investigate or take any other action.” Auditor Hull Cabellero says her office has not yet been informed of any follow-up by city officials. “The city has a responsibility to make sure that those who are supposed to benefit from these initiatives are being served,” Hull Caballero says. The City Attorney’s Office says it is still pondering what to do. Penalties could include loss of certification and a fine.
“We are currently reviewing the auditor’s findings,” Chief Deputy City Attorney Robert Taylor says. “We understand the importance of the allegations and plan to discuss them, as well as the city’s future options, with our client.” In the letter to the City Attorney’s Office, the auditors raised questions about whether three firms were properly certified as “socially disadvantaged.” Here are the three companies the auditor forwarded to the city attorney. COMPANY: Iron Horse Excavation LLC, of Fairview LISTED OWNERS: Carlie and Kathy Moore VALUE OF CONTRACTS: $1.9 million AUDITORS FOUND COMPANY IS CLOSELY RELATED TO: Firms owned by Roy Moore, Carlie’s father and Kathy’s husband WHAT THE AUDITORS’ LETTER SAID: “Ties between Iron Horse and non-certified firms owned by Roy Moore may affect Iron Horse’s eligibility for state certification.” WHAT THE OWNERS SAID: Iron Horse’s attorney, Tyler Howell, sent the city a 95-page rebuttal letter on Oct. 12. Howell says any allegation that Iron Horse is improperly certified is false. “Many of the allegations in the audit services letter are simply not true, or do not constitute a condition that would render a company disqualified for certification,” Howell wrote. Hull Caballero says she stands by her auditors’ work. “We follow professional standards,” Hull Caballero says. “They require we collect evidence and it be relevant and we document it. All those steps were followed.” COMPANY: D3 Excavation LLC, of Boring LISTED OWNER: Chris Dukart VALUE OF CONTRACTS: None awarded AUDITORS FOUND COMPANY IS CLOSELY RELATED TO: Duke Construction & Excavation LLC WHAT THE AUDITORS’ LETTER SAID: D3 Excavation “appears to be a new company started by the same LLC members as Duke Construction with shared resources and not a company operating independently.” WHAT THE OWNERS SAID: Did not respond to calls or emails seeking comment. COMPANY: LCP LLC, of Aloha LISTED OWNER: Allison Rhea VALUE OF CONTRACT: $100,000 AUDITORS FOUND COMPANY IS CLOSELY RELATED TO: Titan Utilities LLC WHAT THE AUDITORS’ LETTER SAID: “LCP does not appear to be operating independently of non-certified firms.” WHAT THE OWNERS SAID: Did not respond to calls or emails seeking comment.
OREGON SENATE District 14: Kate Lieber (D) District 24: Chris Gorsek (D) OREGON HOUSE District 26: Courtney Neron (D) District 27: Sheri Schouten (D) District 28: WLnsvey Campos (D) District 29: Susan McLain (D) District 33: Maxine Dexter (D) District 35: Dacia Grayber (D) District 36: Lisa Reynolds (D) District 37: Rachel Prusak (D) District 38: Andrea Salinas (D) District 39: Christine Drazan (R) District 40: Mark Meek (D) District 41: Karin Power (D) District 44: Tina Kotek (D) District 47: Ashton Simpson (WFP) District 49: Zach Hudson (D) District 50: Ricki Ruiz (D) District 51: Janelle Bynum (D) District 52: Anna Williams (D) PORTLAND MAYOR Ted Wheeler PORTLAND CITY COUNCIL Position 4: Chloe Eudaly METRO COUNCIL District 3: Gerritt Rosenthal District 5: Chris Smith MULTNOMAH COUNTY CIRCUIT JUDGE Position 12: Adrian Brown BALLOT MEASURES 107 (Campaign finance limits): Yes 108 (Tobacco, vaping tax): Yes 109 (Psilocybin therapy): Yes 110 (Decriminalizes drug possession): Yes 26-211 (County library bond): Yes 26-213 (Portland parks levy): Yes 26-214 (Tuition-free preschool): Yes 26-215 (Portland schools bond): Yes 26-217 (Police oversight board): Yes 26-218 (Transportation tax): No 26-219 (Water Fund spending): Yes
Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
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NEWS WIKI COMMONS
SHOT CHASER: Many Oregon Democrats want to eliminate philosophical exemptions for childhood vaccinations.
A Shot at Politics Activists who opposed public health efforts to increase vaccination rates are now running for office. BY R AC H E L M O N A H A N
rmonahan@wweek.com
Anna Kasachev got her start in Oregon politics by lobbying against a bill aimed at increasing vaccinations of schoolchildren. Kasachev is a member of the Old Believers, a Russian Orthodox sect with an enclave outside Woodburn. She appears to be the first Old Believer to seek elected office. Kasachev is campaigning on a wide range of Republican issues, but she’s adamant about one: freedom from vaccine requirements. “In America, we as U.S. citizens have the right to get sick if we want to, right?” Kasachev said in an Oct. 9 campaign Q&A posted to her Facebook page. “That is the beauty of this country.” She hasn’t returned calls from WW. But allies say she was energized by 2019’s House Bill 3063, which would have removed an exemption from vaccinations for children whose parents don’t believe in them. Adding to her motivation to run for office? A snub by incumbent state Rep. Teresa Alonso León (D-Woodburn) during that lobbying effort. “Anna Kasachev met with her opponent, who assumed she, like many of the members of the community of Russian Old Believers, wasn’t a registered voter,” says Bob Snee, a board member of Oregonians for Medical Freedom, a lobbying group that opposes increasing vaccination rates. “She and others were told that they were not ‘constituents’ and her opponent would not even give them any time to listen to them.” Alonso León disputes that account, saying she sat down with her and offered to meet again on other issues. “It’s an absolute lie,” she says. “I take a lot of pride in representing my entire district and all the people in it.” Now Kasachev wants Alonso León’s seat, to give voice to people who believe immunizations are harmful. For many Oregonians, the hope for a return to normal existence hinges on the development of a safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine—along with widespread acceptance of its use. But members of Oregonians for Medical Freedom, the group that lobbied against HB 3063, have moved beyond lobbying to run for office. 8
Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
Kasachev joins Beaverton state Senate candidate Harmony Mulkey as well as McMinnville City Council candidate Brittany Ruiz among vaccine skeptics seeking office on a platform that no one should be required to get a shot. “The women you’ve named and others likely were inspired to run because they didn’t like what they saw and heard from elected representatives, both privately and in legislative hearings and chambers,” says Snee. “There are many Oregonians who believe strongly enough in medical freedom that the vaccine issue makes them single-issue voters.” As the coronavirus pandemic dominates daily life, vaccines have become an election-season battleground. Oregonians for Medical Freedom has also given relatively modest campaign contributions to Republicans who opposed HB 3063, including $250 to secretary of state candidate Sen. Kim Thatcher, $1,000 to state Sen. Tim Knopp of Bend, and $1,500 to state Sen. Denyc Boles of Salem. But Democrats have seized on the issue, too. In a couple of key Senate districts, Democrats are using the vaccination issue to damage Republicans, particularly in the hotly contested Marion County legislative seat held by Boles. “Our future depends on a lot of science and a safe vaccine,” reads one mailer from the Democratic Party of Oregon. “Denyc Boles doesn’t believe in either.” Democrats are attempting to link Oregon vaccine debates to the unscientific response of national Republicans to the pandemic. “Our candidates trust public health experts and science,” says Meghan Cavanaugh, executive director of the Senate Democratic Leadership Fund. “They are running against Republican incumbents who are questioning the science behind vaccines. The anti-vaccine movement both threatens public health and is entirely out of step with the position of most Oregonians, who have made clear that they trust scientific experts.” Boles, then a member of the House, opposed HB 3063. “My kids all received vaccinations,” she says now. “I believe in science. I also believe parents should have a say over their children’s healthcare. I also think it’s important
to note that HB 3063 was opposed by members of both parties.” Democrats are pursuing a similar strategy against Sen. Knopp in Bend. Like Boles, Knopp holds one of the GOP seats most vulnerable to Democrats. One mailer from the Democratic Party of Oregon includes in a list of bullet points: “He’s Anti-Vaccines” with the tagline “Tim Knopp: Too extreme for Central Oregon.” Knopp was the only Republican state senator not to join the last GOP walkout in 2020, so it may be difficult to call him an extremist. But he’s opposed efforts to increase vaccination rates. Knopp was the sole sponsor of a 2019 bill to forbid employers from requiring vaccinations as a condition of employment, and he voted against a bill that would have required vaccination rates to be disclosed. “When the government can send you a mandate that you have a medical procedure that you do not want, there is no freedom in America,” he said at a 2019 rally. Knopp says he’s not campaigning on the issue of vaccines and he’s not “anti-vaccine.” “Democrats are misrepresenting everyone’s position on the issue,” he says. “I am for informed consent—which is part of the Democrat platform, by the way.” Democrats hope to defeat Boles and Knopp to foreclose future GOP walkouts, a tactic Republicans have repeatedly used to stall carbon-reduction bills. Defeating the duo would have a secondary benefit for Dems: clearing a path for vaccination requirements. Vaccinations have not historically been a party-line issue. In 2019, state Sen. Chuck Thomsen (R-Hood River) co-sponsored HB 3063, while three of his Democratic colleagues, Sens. Jeff Golden of Ashland, Lee Beyer of Springfield, and Betsy Johnson of Scappoose, weren’t counted on for support. Most Oregonians and most Americans support expanding vaccine laws. A national survey by Pew Research in 2016 found 83% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans favored a vaccine requirement for healthy schoolchildren. Similarly, the vast majority of Oregonians vaccinate their children, but for many of the tiny sliver who don’t, it can be the most important issue around. It’s unclear whether the pandemic will shift that, particularly as trust in the COVID-19 vaccine has eroded. A third of Republicans and 19% of Democrats say they will not get a COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available, according to an Economist/YouGov poll in September. Meanwhile, another vaccine activist is running for city council in Willamette Valley wine country. In perhaps the unlikeliest endorsement of the Oregon political season, a Hollywood actress weighed in on a McMinnville City Council race, urging a vote against a challenger named Brittany Ruiz. “Her sole purpose for running is to secretly represent Scientology and gain influence for this destructive cult’s activities,” Leah Remini, an apostate Scientologist who starred in the sitcom The King of Queens, tweeted on Oct. 14. Even though the city council position is nonpartisan and unpaid, Ruiz’s candidacy is attracting attention. While the Church of Scientology hasn’t formally endorsed an anti-vaccine position, Scientologists were part of the effort to lobby against California bills to crack down on exceptions for vaccines. Ruiz has been a vocal opponent of a vaccine requirement in Oregon. Oregon’s rate of exempting children for nonmedical reasons is among the nation’s highest. But after the measles outbreak in 2019, Ruiz called the Oregon Health Authority’s characterization of vaccination rates “bogus.” “I have appreciated the insights from Scientology,” she says. “My worldview takes a broad look at a number of ideologies. Through this, I’ve learned to accept everyone’s path without judgment.” Rachel Monahan reported this story with the support of the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, a program of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2020 National Fellowship.
JOE REIDEL
THEN: In November 2016, Portlanders began marching against President Donald Trump.
The Damage Trump Did In 2016, we thought President Trump would be bad for Oregon. He was a catastrophe. Four years ago, a sickly orange cloud fell over Oregon. Only now can we fully survey the damage done by Hurricane Trump. Portland greeted the 2016 election of Donald Trump with revulsion. For a week in November, protesters chanted and marched. Opportunists followed in their wake, destroying property. A week after the election, WW said: “Trump’s election doesn’t just mean a triumph for Republicans at the far right edge of the party. It means that a boor, admitted sexual predator, and racist will occupy the White House. His victory emboldens white nationalists who would make this country great by silencing anyone who doesn’t look like them.” In that issue, we attempted what reporters often don’t do well: We tried to predict our future under Trump in several specific categories. Some readers accused us of being alarmist. “I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more doom-and-gloom, worst-case-scenario article,” one reader wrote. This week, with hopes that the nation will choose a different president, we decided to revisit our forecast. And we must admit: We were wrong about how bad a Trump presidency would be.
It was worse than we imagined. In short, we lacked a sufficiently dystopian imagination. In particular, we didn’t foresee how Trump and his fans would single out liberal Portland as a target for street brawls and federal policing. We did not predict that the president’s attention would turn Portland into a scene of violence, and how his inattention would allow a virus to kill our loved ones and shutter our shops and restaurants. To be sure, some things worked out better than we expected. So in the following pages, we look back on most of the predictions we made in 2016. We’ve graded ourselves on the following scale: Is today’s reality better, worse or the same as we expected? Many of Oregon’s problems are of our own making. And the partisan divisions in this state existed long before 2016. (See page 16 for a look at a part of Oregon where that divide widened.) But where possible, we’ve tried to look at how the decisions of this White House specifically affected Oregonians. It’s a useful lens through which to view one of the strangest and most scarring four years in the history of the republic. —Nigel Jaquiss, Latisha Jensen, Aaron Mesh, Rachel Monahan CONT. on page 10 ALEX WITTWER
NOW: This summer, city officials removed an iconic elk statue from downtown after its base was set on fire by protesters. Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
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CHRIS NESSETH
LONG TALE: Activists dressed as handmaids are common sights at Portland get-out-the-vote rallies.
In 2016, WW said that under Trump, women were unlikely to lose reproductive rights and the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t overturn Roe v. Wade. In 2020, the reality is worse. It took the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, but this week Trump delivered what he promised Christian conservatives: A majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices oppose a woman’s right to an abortion. Meanwhile, 17 abortion cases in circuit courts of appeals across the country are one step away from reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a Planned Parenthood analysis. This makes it within the realm of possibility that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, will be overturned in the next few years. So what does that mean for Oregonians? Abortions will still be legal here, thanks in large part to the Oregon Legislature’s 2017 passage of the Reproductive Health Equity Act. “In Oregon, we are one of the few states without restrictions to access abortion because our state and voters have made it really clear that abortion is health care,” says Emily McLain, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon. “It will fall to states like us to be haven states.” Residents of Idaho, where abortion would likely be criminalized should Roe fall, would need to cross the border to Oregon or Washington to access it legally. And some Oregonians, too, will need to travel long distances to access those services. TR.
DIEGO DIAZ
DREAM ON: Advocates for children who were brought to the U.S. as children rally after the president threatened to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
In 2016, WW predicted many Mexican immigrants would be deported. By 2020, that prediction came true—and then some. We gave this policy the highest likelihood of happening— and it did. But plenty of undocumented immigrants were deported before Trump’s election. In fiscal year 2019, Trump deported 267,258 immigrants, up 14 percent from 2015, the end of the Obama administration, though still 40 percent below the peak year of fiscal year 2012. What no one expected was how ghoulish immigration policy would become. Most recently, it has become clear that 545 children who were removed from their parents as they crossed the border may never be reunited. 10
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“Four years ago, I would have absolutely said that no administration would deliberately harm children as a policy strategy,” says U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). “That’s something that evil dictators do in faraway lands, not something that would ever happen in the United States of America. How wrong I was.” Carmen Rubio, a Portland city commissioner-elect and executive director of the nonprofit Latino Network, knew that anti-immigrant policies were coming, because Trump had campaigned on the issue, but she too was caught off guard. “It was the way they confidently stepped over the line of decency and ethics time and time again that was terrifying,” says Rubio. “The cruelty which seemed to root all these policies seems bottomless.” RM.
In 2016, WW said that Trump would not place Muslims in internment camps, though we predicted a rise in discrimination. In 2020, it’s clear we were mostly right. Trump issued no executive order enacting internment camps, the way FDR did with Japanese Americans in the 1940s. (The detention centers on the Mexican border strike many observers as effectively concentration camps.) But he did institute what was effectively a Muslim travel ban in 2018. Trump’s policies and rhetoric fanned the flames of racism that have increased since 2016. No incident was more searing for many Portlanders than the MAX stabbings in 2017, when Jeremy Christian verbally harassed two Black teenage girls, one wearing a hijab, about their faith and then killed two men and wounded another who tried to intervene. (One of the teenagers, Walia Mohamed, said during Christian’s murder trial in 2020 that she no longer feels safe wearing her hijab in public.) “I think [Trump] has caused four years of trauma that’s going to be hard to overcome,” says Zakir Khan, board chair of Oregon’s Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Changing a president doesn’t stop the trauma of being discriminated against in a store or from a job.” TR.
In 2016, WW said that even Trump and his U.S. Department of Justice couldn’t outlaw cannabis where it was legal. In 2020, it appears we were right. Trump did take a swipe at our weed stash. In 2018, his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, rescinded the Obamaera Cole Memo, which limited the federal prosecution of crimes in states where cannabis is legal. But as WW reported in 2018, there was no evidence that U.S. Attorney for Oregon Billy Williams had done much with weed other than crack down on Oregon’s flower being sold across state lines. All told, 11 states now have legalized recreational use, and 33 legalized medicinal use. Four states—Arizona, Montana, South Dakota and New Jersey—have November ballot measures to legalize recreational use. Meanwhile, Oregon 3rd District Congressman Earl Blumenauer continues to chip away at legalizing cannabis federally. “The Trump administration has been no friend. Jeff Sessions at every instance tried to put sand in the gears,” Blumenauer says. “But we had a united front that was quite effective We’re basically on track to have the most productive four-year period in terms of advancing the cause of eliminating the federal prohibition of cannabis.” TR.
In 2016, WW said pay equity and workplace child care were lost causes. In 2020, the reality is better than we expected. Here’s one example of Oregon pioneering while the nation stalled. In 2017, Oregon passed a pay equity law, which prohibited employers from asking job applicants about previous compensation and required equal pay for equal work. So, while Trump surrounded himself with Cabinet members and advisers hostile to such policies, Oregon moved forward—although equal pay is still more of a concept than a reality in many workplaces. As for workplace child care, no one made much progress in the past four years. That’s part of why Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has made federally funded universal preschool a key plank in his platform and why Multnomah County placed one of the nation’s most aggressive and novel preschool measures on the November ballot. NJ.
A A R O N S C H WA R T Z
In 2016, WW said any progress on the Portland Harbor Superfund cleanup would be lost. In 2020, the reality is better than we expected. In 2000, the federal Environmental Protection Agency declared parts of the Willamette River in Portland a Superfund site because of the industrial waste that had accumulated on the river bottom. Because more than 100 companies—many no longer in business—as well as the city of Portland and the Port of Portland bore some responsibility, getting responsible parties to agree to a
billion-dollar cleanup plan has been like herding catfish. We expected chaos after Trump, famously averse to environmental regulation, took office. But in fact, some useful compromises were forged. The EPA finally released a cleanup plan the month Trump took office, and the agency has now gotten many of the largest actors to agree to pay their share. It did, however, in 2019, downgrade the toxicity of one of the chemicals found on the river bottom, which will save companies $35 million in dredging costs. NJ.
BRIAN BURK
VIRAL PHOTO: A drive-thru COVID-19 testing site in North Portland.
In 2016, WW said federal agencies would still respond to a natural disaster in Oregon. In 2020, no one did. In 2016, we wondered what the Federal Emergency Management Agency would do in the aftermath of a Cascadian megaquake. Would the president withhold aid as retribution to a state that had supported Hillary Clinton? We said that was unlikely because of faith—perhaps naive faith—that even under Trump the rules of politics forbade abandoning a large swath of the country. Of course, the Big One did not hit in the past four years, but with 225,000 Americans dead, a similar disaster unfolded that Trump failed to address because of his incompetent, overly political response. COVID-19 behaved like an earthquake the president could pretend didn’t happen. He publicly denied the threat of the virus, dismissed mask-wearing, and settled on a “response” of just letting the virus infect more Americans. If enacted in a second term, his plan would kill millions.
Oregon was left to its own devices to set policy, with decent if not extraordinary results. “Clearly, there have been major shortcomings with the Trump administration’s lack of a coherent federal strategy to address the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Charles Boyle, a spokesman for Gov. Kate Brown. “And the politically charged statements the president has made on everything from wearing masks to white supremacist groups has caused irreparable harm.” Four years ago, Steve Novick, then the city commissioner in charge of emergency preparedness, predicted incompetence from Trump’s FEMA rivaling former President George W. Bush’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina. He was right. “I certainly stand by my statement that this administration is at least as incompetent as ‘heckuva job, Brownie’—although in this case it really seems that the incompetence flows directly from the top,” Novick says now. “There have been competent people in the government trying to deal with the pandemic, but Trump only listens to crazy people like [Dr. Scott] Atlas.” RM.
In 2016, WW said thousands of Oregonians would lose their health insurance with the elimination of Obamacare. In 2020, it hasn’t happened—yet. In 2016, the prospect of tens or hundreds of thousands of Oregonians losing health insurance seemed a real possibility, considering Trump wanted to get rid of Obamacare. But early on, there were clues that Trump didn’t really have the attention span, policy chops or legal team required to destroy his predecessor’s signature domestic policy achievement. “Nobody knew health care was so complicated,” Trump said on Feb. 27, 2017, less than two months after taking office.
Multiple efforts to repeal the law in Congress failed during Trump’s tenure, most famously in 2017, when terminally ill U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) crossed the aisle to cast the deciding vote against repeal. Bottom line, says Allyson Hagen, who tracks data for the Oregon Health Authority: no loss. “Coverage has remained fairly stable,” Hagen says. But that could change the week after the election, when the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear another argument for repeal with Trump’s newest appointee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, sitting on the court. NJ.
ALL SMILES: Gordon Sondland testifies to Congress on Nov. 20, 2019.
In 2016, we said Trump would award Oregon’s top federal legal jobs to far right-wingers and Oregon would lose all influence in Washington, D.C. In 2020, the reality is better than we expected. In Oregon, Trump made only one serious effort to put a strident conservative on the federal bench, and it didn’t work. Trump nominated a former protégé of U.S. Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), Assistant U.S. Attorney for Oregon Ryan Bounds, to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s most liberal appellate panel. But a national advocacy group dug up inflammatory op-eds Bounds wrote as an undergraduate, scuttling his nomination. (Former Washington County Circuit Judge Danielle Hunsaker got the job instead.) Trump left U.S. Attorney for Oregon Billy Williams, an Obama holdover, in place, and the one judge he named to the U.S. District Court of Oregon, Karin Immergut, is a moderate. “We lucked out,” says Beth Bernard, executive director of the Oregon Trial Lawyers Association. “We got people who put fairness ahead of politics, and that’s not what we’ve seen in the rest of the country.” It’s true that Oregon’s largely Democratic congressional delegation has been sidelined for much of the Trump era, which doesn’t put the state in a good position to score federal pork. And Trump’s unpopularity arguably cost Republicans control of the House in 2018, leading to the retirement of Rep. Walden, the only Republican in the state’s congressional delegation and one of the senior members of his conference. “I think he retired because he thought they’d be in the minority for a while,” says GOP political consultant Jim Pasero. We’d be remiss not to mention Gordon Sondland, the Portland hotelier whose companies quietly contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. He became very influential—with the House committee that tried to impeach the president. Trump named Sondland ambassador to the European Union, where, according to former national security adviser John Bolton and others, Sondland tried to insert himself into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and later told Congress there was indeed a quid pro quo. “Everybody was in the loop,” Sondland testified. “There was no secret.” Trump survived the Portlander’s testimony. NJ.
“NOBODY KNEW HEALTH CARE WAS SO COMPLICATED.” —DONALD TRUMP
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BRIAN BURK
In 2016, WW said new light rail projects would be scrapped for decades. In 2020, the reality is better than we expected. Mass transit, including trains, is not a priority of the Trump administration. Despite that, major projects around the country have moved forward in the past four years and the feds propose to put more than $4 billion into four new projects next year. Among those: two projects in Washington state, where Trump lost by a bigger margin in 2016 than he did in Oregon. TriMet, in fact, remains confident that if voters pass Measure 26-218 and provide seed funding for a new light rail line between Portland and Tigard, the feds will kick in $1.3 billion—and perhaps more. “We have shared with the [Federal Transit Administration] that TriMet intends to request a minimum of $1.3 billion, and we believe that amount is feasible,” says TriMet spokeswoman Roberta Allstadt. “It is possible that a higher amount could be pursued if Congress moves forward with an infrastructure package and/or the funding for the program increases.” NJ.
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NEVER TWEET: Nicholas Kristof, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, takes a social media break during Portland protests.
In 2016, we said freedom of the press would wither. In 2020, we admit we misunderstood the threat. Our worry in 2016 was that Trump would seek to throttle his longtime nemeses—newspapers—by encouraging court restrictions on a free press. In particular, we feared he would (using his words) “open up the libel laws” to allow powerful people to sue their critics and watchdogs out of business. Flat out: We guessed poorly. Trump not only failed to narrow press freedoms, he didn’t even try. Arguably, his overall impact on the media was neutral: He yelled “Fake news!” at the TV reporters in the press pen at his rallies, but he also increased their ratings. Maybe he wanted that result. Clowns need a circus. However, there’s no question the press is in worse condition now than it was four years ago. It’s just that the real threats to journalism were digital behemoths like Facebook and Google, and a crumbling business model further ravaged by COVID-19. Trump got the media landscape he wanted, even if he didn’t act to create it: Many citizens get their news directly from the president and his toadies, and rarely encounter a newspaper headline. This week, the Washington Monthly reported that Trump has more followers on Twitter—53 million—than there are digital subscriptions to all American newspapers combined. AM.
In 2016, WW said organized labor would be gutted by right-to-work laws. In 2020, the reality is much as we predicted. In June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Janus v. AFSCME that union members could not be compelled to pay dues. That 5-4 decision probably happened because Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first appointee, joined the court rather than Obama’s last appointee, Merrick Garland. For foes of organized labor, such as the Oregon-based Freedom Foundation, the court ruling was decades in the making. Jason Dudash, director of Freedom Foundation, says 18,000 Oregon union members have stopped paying dues since the decision. “Oregon has seen some of the most dramatic losses in union membership in the entire
country,” Dudash says. Among those who’ve taken hits: the Oregon School Employ- ees Association, the American Federation of Teachers and Service Employees International Union. SEIU Local 503 executive director Melissa Unger, who leads the state’s largest union, acknowledges many SEIU members stopped paying dues. But she says Dudash’s numbers tell only part of the story. Unger says the union has actually grown substantially during Trump’s tenure, mostly through new home-care members. “We are a much bigger union today,” she says. Most the departures came right after Janus, Unger says.”The Freedom Forum wants to say we’re a dying breed,” she says. “That’s definitely not true.” NJ.
J U S T I N K AT I G B A K
GETTING WARMER: Portland students lead a 2019 climate march.
In 2016, we said Trump would reverse efforts to halt climate change. In 2020, he has. Of the many bleak consequences of Trump’s presidency, this one is perhaps the most crushing to contemplate. The planet, like the reporters writing this story, is up against a hard deadline: Cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 or watch much of the globe become uninhabitable. By some estimates, we already blew that chance: The effects of a rapidly warming planet are underway, and the best we can hope for is suffering rather than extinction. In September, a climate research firm estimated Trump’s rollbacks of Obama’s climate regulations will result in an additional 1.8 billion tons of carbon emissions pumped into the atmosphere in the next 15 years. Other
choices can be reversed. This one can’t. And so Oregon is reaping the whirlwind: weeks on end of unbreathable air, filled with ash from forests turned to kindling. Local attempts to address the problem brought state government to a halt, as Republicans refused to cooperate with bills reducing carbon emissions. Some activists have simply turned to the task of helping people deal with the inevitable disasters. In 2018, Portland voters passed a Green Energy Fund to help low-income people of color weatherize their homes to save energy and handle extreme temperatures. Earlier this year, fund champion Oriana Magnera described success: “Having lower energy bills, building resiliency and helping folks stay in their homes.” AM.
WESLEY LAPOINTE
J U S T I N K AT I G B A K
BUSTED: Burgerville union workers and ally go on strike at the Montavilla Burgerville in 2019.
In 2016, WW said Nike would be hampered by trade restrictions. In 2020, the reality is better than we expected. Although Trump followed through on threats to place tariffs on Chinese imports, this concern fizzled completely. Nike had already shifted major operations to Vietnam and also sold a lot of product in China—so the amount of Chinese-made goods the company brought to the U.S. was modest. Meanwhile, online sales boomed everywhere, and the sportswear giant saw its revenues grow steadily through Trump’s tenure. And like other big corporations, Nike enjoyed a hefty tax cut in 2017, when Trump slashed the top corporate rate from 35% to 21%. As for the indicator that would matter most to the president, who is famously fixated on stock prices, Nike’s shares have risen from about $50 when Trump was elected to about $130 today. “The athletic footwear and apparel markets have been very strong over the last four years,” says Matt Powell, a longtime industry analyst at the NPD Group. NJ.
In 2016, we said LGBTQ+ rights would be rolled back and violence against women would spike. In 2020, protections are disappearing. President Trump governed as he campaigned. For LGBTQ+ people, that’s meant the erasure of their rights. On his first day in office, his administration erased mentions of LGBTQ+ people from government websites. The White House has banned transgender people from enlisting in the military, allowed health care facilities to deny care based on religious beliefs about gender, and refused to allow LGBTQ people to identify their demographic in the 2020 census. Kieran Chase, manager of the transgender justice program at Basic Rights Oregon, says LGBTQ people are making decisions to get married and file for adoption now, in fear the new Trump-appointed Supreme Court will roll back more victories. “There are people taking quiet preparatory steps because they don’t know what the future is going to look like,” says Chase. “The Trump administration has been holistically antagonistic to the LGBTQ community in a way that’s frightening.” Trump’s tenure was also marked by a sneering disrespect for women. He mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. His often-bewildered secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, succeeded in rolling back Obama-era protections for college sexual assault survivors. But Rosemary Brewer, executive director of the Oregon Crime Victims Law Center, says one of the most damaging impacts of the Trump administration is what he hasn’t done: renew the expired Violence Against Women Act, which provides funding for thousands of organizations. “A lot of organizations only exist because of government funding. All these victims in Oregon are going to lose out on critical services,” Brewer says. “There’s clearly a lack of respect for an entire gender that the president shows. It doesn’t feel good as a woman that our president doesn’t respect women.” LJ.
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ASLAEMX GWEIHT R TK WEE R
ALEX WITTWER
NOT OK: Right-wing protesters have appeared this year in North Portland (above) and Delta Park (right).
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BRIAN BURK
In 2016, we said white supremacist groups would flourish. In 2020, they’re flourishing. In 2016, we had no way of predicting Trump would summon a goon squad of Fred Perry-wearing brawlers who would target Portland for regular fistfights with the locals. Still, we got the gist of it correct: Nationalists, especially those who despise people of color, would be emboldened. Eric Ward, executive director of Western States Center, a nonprofit that tracks extremism, says Trump performed as he expected. “What frightens me more is not what Trump is doing, but lack of vigorous response from state and local governments and business leaders,” Ward says. “That’s what’s much more disturbing and surprising to me.” Ward points to three ways white extremist groups gained traction in Oregon through Trump’s administration: They’ve achieved visibility and credibility, making them feel empowered; Trump’s rhetoric created a space for belief that political violence is acceptable; and white nationalist groups appear to have cemented intimate connections with law enforcement. After Election Day, hate crimes spiked. And the Southern Poverty Law Center reported the number of U.S. hate groups increased by 30%. In this region, extremist groups, such as Patriot Prayer, founded by Joey Gibson in Vancouver, Wash., in 2016, and the Proud Boys, which have three Oregon chapters, gained traction. Ward says Trump’s administration targeted the rights of people of color, the LGBTQ community, and women through budget policy executive orders and rhetoric. All of those gestures signaled to the far right it was OK to go after these marginalized groups. Even if Joe Biden wins, Trump’s followers, such as those who allegedly plotted the kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, will not go quietly into the night. “When paramilitary say they will use violence, we should believe them,” Ward says. “When these paramilitary groups say they believe civil war is coming, we should believe that that is what they will be attempting to do. We have to be smart enough to know there will be folks there to intimidate us.” LJ.
PHOTO: Delta park September 26.
ON THE WATERFRONT: Shipping containers on Swan Island.
In 2016, WW said that the Columbia River could become a freeway for fossil fuels. In 2020, it appears we were half-right. Oregon doesn’t produce fossil fuels, but the companies that mine coal in Wyoming and pump crude oil in North Dakota and Canada were hoping the Trump administration would turn the Columbia River and adjacent rail lines into a giant energy export facility. Results have been mixed. Washington regulators blocked both what was supposed to be the largest coal export facility in the U.S. at Longview, Wash., and a huge crude oil export terminal at Vancouver. But crude oil trains continued to roll along both sides of the Columbia to terminals in the region. During Trump’s tenure, U.S. crude oil production increased significantly and state figures show the volumes
shipped to Oregon increased 250 percent from 2016 to 2019, to 24,639 rail cars. Columbia Riverkeeper executive director Brett VandenHeuvel says Trump succeeded in placing energy industry lobbyists or supporters in key federal regulatory positions, but adds that opposition in the courts and by state regulators has staved off major threats. “There’s been an all-out assault on the climate and our environment by the federal government for the past four years,” VandenHeuvel says. “Its been one problem after another. Fortunately, in Oregon, we’ve been able to push back on a lot of the worst projects by challenging them in court or pushing local and state officials to deny permits. There’s been real important contributions to pick up the slack.” NJ.
ALEX WITTWER
AO K AD RY O NW W H IETSTSI L K IENRG
MEN WITH GUNS: We’d like to tell you everything will work out. But we have doubts. AARON WESSLING
QUASHING AN UPRISING: Portland protesters of police violence (above) were met by federal agents deployed by Trump (top).
In 2016, we said the Portland Police Bureau’s settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice would be gutted. In 2020, the reality is worse than we thought. Policing in Portland turned out to be of far more interest to President Trump than we ever could have imagined. The feds were monitoring Portland police already—to make sure they were complying with a 2014 settlement to correct a “pattern or practice of using excessive force” against people with mental illness. Observers say the White House and its Department of Justice haven’t paid much attention to that. “I think DOJ has been largely hands off since the Trump administration took office,” says J. Ashlee Albies, a Portland attorney representing the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform in the settlement agreement. “I don’t see tremendous outcome changes.” What Trump has cared about is Portlanders protesting (and sometimes rioting) against police brutality. He deployed hundreds of federal officers to Portland this
In 2016, WW said gun control might be abandoned, and gun violence might increase. In 2020, the reality is about as we expected. WW predicted correctly that the only hope for gun control legislation was on the state level. Oregon lawmakers delivered, yet gun violence has not abated. In 2017, the Oregon Legislature passed Senate Bill 941 with bipartisan support. The bill was effectively a “red flag law,” based on the principle that people who want to harm themselves or others with firearms tend to show signs beforehand, i.e., “red flags.” The law allows family members or law enforcement to petition the court for an “extreme risk protection order” to temporarily restrict a person’s access to firearms. It also revokes a gun license if that person currently has one. The petition is usually granted within 24 hours. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that between Jan. 1, 2018, when the law went into effect, and Oct. 31, 2019, 166 petitions for extreme risk protection orders were filed. Judges granted 122 of those and denied 44. The majority of petitions filed were for people at risk of suicide. That’s the good news. The bad news? Gun violence in Portland reached a historic peak this summer, with 103 instances of gun violence in July, 121 in August, and 118 in September (a 243% increase from 32 shootings in September 2019), according to data from the Portland Police Bureau. The reason behind the spike in shootings is unclear, though the mayor’s office told KGW-TV it may be related to “economic conditions and COVID-19.” TR.
summer, some of whom yanked demonstrators off the street in unmarked vans. He used Portland as a testing ground for how he might quash civil unrest nationwide. Even though Trump cares only about a show of strength, the protests this summer also matter because they grew out of years of broken promises to Portlanders that policing would change. Instead, Portland police continue to fatally shoot people with mental illness. Between 2015 and 2019, the Portland Police Bureau shot and killed six people who were in mental health crises, according to The Washington Post’s police shooting database. Juan Chavez is a lawyer with the Oregon Justice Resource Center who has closely followed the agreement for years. “It didn’t even need to gut itself. This wasn’t a tree that was going to flower,” Chavez says. “The only metric that we can really hold ourselves to is, has the life of people experiencing mental illness as it relates to how they interact with PPB improved? And it hasn’t.” TR.
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Oregon’s Bellwether Forecast
BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS , A B B E Y M C D O NALD
and
NI C K
ROS E N BER G E R
Except for four years in the military, Logen Steinbach has lived his whole life on Oregon’s North Coast. He’s part of an electorate with an uncanny record of picking presidential elections: As Tillamook County goes, so goes the nation. In 2020, he expects it will go for President Trump. “My outlook is, the incumbent will win,” says Steinbach, 35. “From what I’ve gathered, there’s good support in this community for Trump.” Steinbach’s community is Tillamook, the largest city (pop. 5,355) in the county of the same name. Although it’s small in population, Tillamook County (pop. 27,036) occupies an outsized place in the state, home to fertile fishing grounds, a wildly popular surfing beach—Short Sands— and, of course, the namesake cheese factory. Tillamook County has cast a majority of its votes for the winner in each presidential contest since 1992. In recent years, the county went big for President Barack Obama in 2008, supported him again in 2012, and then flipped to Donald Trump in 2016. That’s unusual for a state in which most counties are either red or blue. Polls show Oregon is voting for Joe Biden next month. But the polling lead for the Democratic nominee is 11 percentage points. If that number sounds familiar, it’s because Hillary Clinton carried Oregon by the same margin in 2016. When you talk to Steinbach and his neighbors, four years under Trump haven’t changed any minds. They’ve merely driven people further apart. Many of those people, Steinbach says, feel disenfranchised. “The voice of rural Oregon is not really heard,” Steinbach says. “The governor and people from Portland are drawing a line and saying you can’t do this or you can’t have that.” The fact that Trump delivered tax cuts for the wealthy 16
Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
heard a lot of frustration: once-affordable rentals morph-
ALEX WITTWER
Tillamook County usually picks the presidential winner. Its residents are more polarized than ever.
ing into Airbnbs and attracting free-spending Portlanders who wanted Starbucks, organic arugula and freshly brewed craft beer wherever they went on the coast. Mangano noticed that a lot of people who graduate from local high schools can’t afford to live in their hometowns. “They are flipping mattresses at local motels for nine to 12 bucks an hour,” he says. “It’s hard work and it’s unpredictable.” Affordable housing is so scarce, Mangano says, that one of the county’s biggest employers, Tillamook Country Smoker (home of the 2-foot beef stick), which makes meat products, began running a shuttle bus to carry workers from 82nd Avenue in Portland, about 80 miles away. It wasn’t always this way. State Sen. Arnie Roblan (D-Coos Bay), whose district covers the southern part of the county, recalls a time when wealth from coastal forest and fisheries sent money to the Willamette Valley rather than the other way around, as is the case today. The lack of affordable housing and good jobs have fed into the growth of Timber Unity, a fiercely rural collection of loggers, truckers, farmers and their allies who rose up in 2019 to oppose a carbon reduction bill. Roblan understands the frustration that buoys Timber Unity. “The techniques of forestry are DAIRYLAND: Tillmook County produces more milk than any much different, so you don’t need other Oregon county except Morrow. as many people,” he says. “The milling of wood is much different. and large corporations while destroying farm exports and largely ignoring the real needs of working-class Americans The industry has changed. And a lot of people are angry does not bother Steinbach, a loyal Lars Larson listener that it changed out from under them.” Tillamook Mayor Suzanne Weber, a retired teacher and who’s married to a former police officer and runs a small construction firm. He says he can’t point to a particular longtime Republican currently running for the Oregon Trump policy that has made his life better—but he likes House, hopes to ride Timber Unity’s energy into an open House seat long held by Democrats. She thinks the ecowhat he hears. “He’s looking out for us,” Steinbach says. “And he’s nomic grievances Timber Unity has highlighted are real. “Everything that comes into Tillamook County and trying to do things that would help, like lower the cost of goes out of Tillamook County, whether it is made here or health insurance.” If you drive Tillamook County’s highways—101 along whether it gets bought somewhere else, has to come on the coast, or 6 through the coast range—you’ll see a lot of a truck,” Weber says. “Cap and trade as it was proposed Trump flags and even a couple of Confederate flags. But would have raised the cost of goods and gas.” She says Trump struck a chord with her constituents you won’t see many Biden signs, even though Democrats still outnumber Republicans by 2.3 percentage points in and those she hopes to represent. “If you push somebody back into a corner, they have the county (that’s down from 6.4 in 2004). two choices: fight or flight,” Weber says. “I think a lot of “The North Coast is not red, it’s not blue, it’s purple,” says state Rep. David Gomberg (D-Otis) who represents people are deciding that fight is what they have to do. And the southern part of Tillamook County in the state the only way they can fight is to identify with the guy who’s Capitol. “And what they are increasingly seeing is their saying all the ridiculous, mean things.” Weber’s city, like Hood River before it, is finding that fear that the agenda is being driven by Portland with not the old brick structures and stately sidewalks are catnip enough attention to more rural communities.” Demographics tell part of the story of Trump’s pop- to city slickers. On a recent day, a shiny Tesla with Washularity: Census data shows Tillamook County residents ington plates sat in front of the award-winning de Garde on average are whiter and less educated than the average Brewing, which along with a branch of Pacific City’s PeliOregonian. More than a quarter of county residents are can Brewing, has nosed out beer-and-a-shot joints. Recalls Mangano: “The people who used to ride my bus 65 or older, a percentage nearly 50% higher than the state would say, ‘I could afford maybe one beer at Pelican or average. County residents also earn about 20% less than the I can get a six-pack of Bud Light, and I can do more with that than this expensive tourist crap.’” state’s average income. For people like Steinbach, a vote for Trump is a way For the past 15 years, John Mangano, 70, saw the county from the driver’s seat of a Tillamook Transportation to fight back. He’s resigned to Democratic control of the District bus. Ferrying county residents as far south as the governor’s office and the Legislature but not the White Chinook Winds Casino in Lincoln City, north to Cannon House. “I see a huge divide between what’s going on in PortBeach, and east to Union Station in Portland, Mangano land and what’s going on in Tillamook County,” Steinbach saw the county change. says. “Trump’s for the average guy.” From the passengers on his bus, Mangano, a Democrat,
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Scenes from Walk the Vote in Mill Park on Oct. 24.
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EVENT ROUNDUP
MICHAEL DURHAM/OREGON ZOO
GET...OUTSIDE?
WHAT TO DO—AND WHAT OTHERS ARE DOING—AS PORTLAND REOPENS.
Dress up your pup... If the hellscape that is 2020 has prompted you to seek out a Halloween more adorable than terrifying, look no further than Stem Wine Bar. The recently rebranded shop is hosting a costume contest for all the good boys and girls whose humans decided to shove them into costumes and parade around the covered patio for a photo op. Tag those pictures on Instagram using #StemPatioPup to enter a costume contest by 5 pm on Halloween. The best-dressed pooch will earn its owners free flights of wine. Bet your human child has never won you free booze before. AP. Stem Wine Bar, 3920 N Mississippi Ave., stemwinebarpdx.com. 3 pm Friday, Oct. 30, through 5 pm Saturday, Oct. 31. Take a drive-thru tour of Halloween history...
RED SCARE: Spend Halloween at the Oregon Zoo with frightening creatures like, uh, Mei Mei the Red Panda.
Substitute Scares Halloween isn’t canceled. Not completely. Here are seven ways to get spooked in Portland. BY AN D I P R E W I T T
and
M ATTH EW S I NGE R
Of course Halloween just had to take place on a Saturday this year. On the long list of tragedies beget by 2020, the fact that we’re missing the rare occurrence of Oct. 31 falling on a weekend doesn’t even register, but it certainly adds a tinge of insult to many, many injuries. But never fear—fear is still an option. Sure, this isn’t going to be a typical Halloween, but there are still opportunities to catch a whiff of the holiday as we know it. Here are seven socially distant or otherwise safe events happening in Portland that should conjure that old spooky feeling. Watch horror movies at an amusement park… From the creators of Hump comes a film festival theoretically more frightening than getting surprised by your neighbor’s genitals onscreen. For Slay, The Portland Mercury and its Seattle sister paper, The Stranger, have rounded up 30 short DIY horror movies that will screen drive-in style at the home of champion roller derby squad the Rose City Rollers. Some involve puppets, others go the found footage route, and at least one appears to marry The Exorcist with the era of teleconferencing. Personally, though, the most disturbing on paper is called Hangnail, in which “a common nuisance turns into a grisly nightmare,” according to the synopsis. That’s some body horror even Cronenberg won’t touch. MS. The Hangar, 7805 SE Oaks Park Way, slayfilmfest.com. 6 and 9 pm Wednesday-Saturday, Oct. 28-31. $40-$60.
Scavenge for candy at the zoo... Going door to door is off the table this year. Cage to cage, however? Perfectly acceptable! While many neighborhoods will be turning off the porch lights, the Oregon Zoo is opening the gates for its annual Howloween event, welcoming families to wander the grounds in costume—stay on the designated path, please—and gawk at the animals while participating in a wildlife-themed scavenger hunt. (Face masks are required, so hopefully you’ve convinced your child that going as Bane is totally cool this year.) Sure, it sounds placid, but sit your li’l pumpkin down in front of the tiger exhibit and gasp at how quickly that big-ass cat would devour him like a box of Boston Baked Beans if there wasn’t a foot of glass separating them. Your neighbor’s foam-graveyard lawn display can’t compete. MS. Oregon Zoo, 4001 SW Canyon Road., oregonzoo.org. 9 am-4 pm Thursday-Saturday, Oct. 29-31. Learn the truth about creatures of the night... Bats get a bad rap—have you ever actually seen one up close? They’re friggin’ adorable! Sadly, this year hasn’t helped their reputation as portents of doom and carriers of disease. As an appropriately timed act of PR, the Friends of the Columbia Gorge are hosting a live webinar about bat conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest, which aims to correct the misconceptions about the important role these winged kittens play in the regional ecosystem while illuminating their own health crisis: white nose syndrome, considered “one of the first wildlife diseases of modern times.” Please, though, no questions about Robert Pattinson. MS. See gorgefriends. org for registration information. 5:30 pm Thursday, Oct. 29. Free.
If anyone was going to make sure Halloween wasn’t completely canceled, it’s the Reformers. In the past, the scare-driven immersive theater troupe has created a zombie apocalypse in a garage, “abducted” people in a Ford Econoline van and exploited the uneasiness of a half-empty Lloyd Center by setting last year’s production in the mall. For 2020, the group takes audiences through the history of Samhain—via car or bicycle to adhere to physical distancing guidelines. Don’t get too cocky: Just because you’re likely to be safe from the ’rona doesn’t guarantee your experience won’t be frightening for other reasons. The venue location will be shared the day before each performance. AP. thereformerspdx.com. 7-9:20 pm Friday, Oct 30. $15-$45 per car, $8-$20 per bike. Go trick-or-treating at a vending machine... Marching up to a stranger’s doorstep and demanding free shit should have always come across as a sketchy enterprise. This year, more than ever, trick-or-treating is looking like a high-risk proposition. Pix Pâtisserie offers a safer alternative: On Halloween, the doors of its outdoor Pix-O-Matic vending machine will open for free, which means you don’t have to sift through a bucket of duds— Tootsie Rolls, we’re looking at you—in order to find the good stuff. The automat will be stuffed with gems, like mini candy bars, toys and Pix’s beloved truffles. Want to make the experience feel more Halloween-y? Come in costume and pose in the nearby photo booth. Pix will award the person who wore its favorite with a giant box of candy. AP. Pix Pâtisserie, 2225 E Burnside St., pixpatisserie.com/ pixomatic. 6:30-9 pm Saturday, Oct. 31. Free. Take a virtual ghost tour… Of all the experiences forced to go digital this year, a virtual paranormal tour seems an especially poor substitute for the real thing. The whole idea is to stand in an allegedly haunted room and let your mind play tricks on you. At home, any mood you manage to conjure can easily be spoiled by a neighbor’s loud-ass Zoom call or a DoorDash delivery. But Ghostflix, a ghost tour livestream platform, has a few things going for it. For one, it’s not limited by geography—yes, you can take the Portland Ghosts tour of downtown’s spookiest spots, but also visit classic haunts in Virginia, New Orleans and Salem, Mass. And interacting with dead strangers is often preferable to being around living ones. Going it alone on your couch might actually be an improvement without someone’s drunken aunt chattering behind you. MS. portlandghosts.com/ghostflix.
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GET...OUTSIDE? Schinderle: I remember everyone was like, “It’s going to come down to Wisconsin,” and being that’s my home state, I was like, “You motherfucker.” I distinctly remember people clearing out and admitting defeat, and I was holding onto this last string of hope. I was like, “There’s no way. I’m from there, I know people from there. There’s no way they believe in this guy. There’s no fucking way.” On the big screen, the Wisconsin numbers came in. It was just this state, huge on the screen, and it was red. And I was like, “Oh my God.” I was speechless. I started crying to myself a little bit. It felt like a betrayal.
The Age of Innocence On election night 2016, Mississippi Studios threw a party. It didn’t go as planned. BY MAT THEW SIN GER msing er @wwe e k.com Where were you the night Donald Trump was elected president? For some, that’s like asking what they were doing the morning of Sept. 11, or during the Challenger explosion, or any other shared American tragedy. For others, the specifics of Nov. 8, 2016, have been blurred by time, the shock of the moment, or lots and lots of alcohol. Bri Pruett, for one, knows exactly what she was doing. She was onstage at Mississippi Studios, hosting a party. The comic had been asked to emcee the North Portland music venue’s election night party—an event she, and presumably everyone else who attended, assumed would mark the end of a chaotic campaign, the election of Hillary Clinton as America’s first woman president, and a return to some semblance of political normalcy. There were raffle prizes, advertised as a “Basket of Adorables.” Kittens adorned the fliers. Bus Project founder Jefferson Smith analyzed the local results, while Pruett did standup in between updates on the presidential race. “I was writing jokes about the news anchors and the pageantry,” Pruett says. “I was not thinking about how to respond if the house of cards started to wobble.” It was one thing to process the results alone at home. Doing so in public was another. It happened at bars and theaters across town, but the party at Mississippi Studios represented perhaps the most stark example of expectation crashing headlong into reality and 20
bursting into flames. With the country on the verge of another high-anxiety election, we asked several attendees to revisit the night Portland’s liberal bubble burst. Many of them say confronting their own naivety stung worse than the result itself. Bri Pruett, host: It’s wild that I woke up that day thinking, “This is going to be such a fun event and I’m going to host the shit out of it.” Amy Dials, producer: I think it was just called “Election Night in America With Bri Pruett,” and we had really fun raffle prizes. In the Basket of Adorables there was, like, stuff from Tender Loving Empire. And in the Basket of Deplorables there was vodka and stuff from a weed store on Hawthorne. It was like some sinful stuff and some cute and cuddly stuff. Pruett: I found the email they sent me asking to host, and if you could read this email, the lightness and lack of anticipation is astonishing. We were so fucking dumb. Dials: I would have comfortably bet an irresponsible amount of money that Hillary would absolutely win. JoAnn Schinderle, attendee: I woke up that day and made coffee, I brought fresh flowers into the house, and I just had the sense of, “We’re going to have a female president by the end of the day today.” Whitney Streed, attendee: I had decided to stay home for the evening just because I was sure she was going to win. And
Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
then as the night progressed, it became more and more clear that it wasn’t guaranteed. I felt like, “I don’t want to be alone anymore.” Dials: There was nothing but excitement going into the night. The night felt so historic and festive. And then it just crumbled. Pruett: It was truly only an hour into the show when the energy changed. Dials: I was talking to DJ Tex Clark and [co-host Jefferson Smith’s wife] Katy. They’re two of the smartest people in the room, if not in Portland. And something happened to where they both were like, “Holy shit, he just won.” Pruett: There was a time in the night when I looked at Jefferson and he started drinking. I remember thinking, “If you’re on a sinking ship, look at the captain and you can tell how bad it is by their face.” Dials: There was just this moment of before and after for me. I didn’t understand why they knew or how they knew that he had won. But I knew these two people were not wrong because I trust them. And so it was this really weird thing of looking at them and then looking at the room, who had no idea. I can’t remember if it was 10 minutes later or a half-hour later when everybody caught up with what it actually meant. Pruett: Some of the Midwestern states went. I don’t have a background in the Electoral College, but there was this slow parade of people leaving.
Streed: When I left my apartment, it was probably 8:30, maybe 9. Nothing was certain, but it was uncertain enough that I was like, “I don’t want to be here.” I took a bus, so it took probably half an hour, 45 minutes to get there. By the time I got to Mississippi Studios, it was far more clear that he was going to win. And it was really empty. There had clearly been a lot of people there until very recently. Pruett: Mississippi Studios has these standing tables. There was a guy standing at a bistro table, and when the news station called [the election], he flipped the table over. Candles and fliers went everywhere. I’m from the bar industry, I expected him to get bounced. Somebody walked over to him and in that second I could see on his face, “We still need to be human. This is happening to us all.” He picked everything up. Everybody got it. Schinderle: Everyone was kind of just grieving in their own way. I remember there was this hippie-looking couple in their 60s seated down in front of me. They turned to each other and went, “If Bernie had won the nomination, this would have never happened.” I saw red. I clenched my fist and was about to scream at them. I bit my tongue so hard and just got up and ordered a shot of whiskey. Streed: The thing I remember most was there was this skeleton onstage. It was decked out in Hillary paraphernalia. It was the saddest-looking skeleton I had ever seen. Pruett: The smart people were the ones savvy enough to ignore the Nate Silver polls and stay home because they knew if they were in public they’d turn a table over. The naivety in all of us was breathtaking. Schinderle: I was determined to stay to the end out of sheer disbelief, and this weird feeling of solidarity. At the end there were
only like six of us left. I remember a lot of people had cleared out before [Bri] had given her concession speech. Pruett: I had to do something to land the plane. I got onstage, got on my knees, and I made some speech. “I know a lot of people who will say things like, ‘I have a cousin or an uncle who is voting for Trump and I blocked them on Facebook and I’ll never talk to them again.’ I think it’s important to have a narrative of how people who have hate in their heart, for whatever reason, to find their way back. That can only happen if you keep those people in your lives and try to let your message, your mission in life, ripple outward. Reach people, connect. We have an amazing community in Portland. I’m from Portland, I’m overjoyed to be part of this community. But sometimes it’s a community and sometimes it’s a fucking echo chamber. What we’ve seen tonight is, we don’t exist in a vacuum.” —Bri Pruett on election night 2016 Pruett: I smoked pot until I felt less ashamed enough to sleep. Then got on a plane at 4 am to fly to Denver for my first TV spot. Schinderle: Walking home was scary. I don’t even know what time in the morning it was. But I have curly blond hair. I have a lot of makeup on [and] red lipstick. I’m wearing a presidential-looking dress and this American flag shawl. As I was walking out, I was like, “Oh my God, I look like a Trump supporter.” I took the flag shawl off and kind of scurried to my car. I was like, “I don’t want people to think I was on the wrong side of history tonight.” Dials: The next day had that post-9/11 stillness in the air. Everywhere you went there was this thickness of startled emotion in every room and every person you passed on the street. It was very eerie. Schinderle: I feel like with this election, I was so scarred from the last one that I truly am like, whatever, nothing matters. Dials: I’ll be obsessively watching the news, looking at my phone and eating a lot of snacks. Pruett: I’ve booked two nights at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs. I’m going with two witches. We’re going to smoke pot and chant, and if it doesn’t go our way, we’re going to smoke pot and chant more.
FOOD & DRINK CHRIS NESSETH
FEATURE
HEART OF PLEXIGLASS: Jeffrey Morgenthaler behind the bar at the new Clyde Tavern, formerly known as Clyde Common.
Wanna Eat With Common People Clyde Common is dead. Long live Clyde Tavern. BY JAS O N CO H E N
@cohenesque
A cheeseburger to go is not exactly Proust’s madeleine. But to bite into the Clyde Tavern burger is to be transported back in time—to early 2020, when you could still stop at Clyde Common at the Ace Hotel for pimente de espelette popcorn and a barrel-aged Negroni before heading to a Timbers game, or pop in for a burger, fries and salad after a concert at Crystal Ballroom. That’s all gone, at least for now. The Ace is closed, while Clyde, like every restaurant, is navigating the current reality of limited capacity, social distancing and pickup and delivery. It also has a brand new name—two of them, in fact. The bar and restaurant is now Clyde Tavern, while a portion of the former dining room is currently being transformed into Common Market, a bottle shop-meets-gourmet bodega, with beer and wine, take-home meal kits, snacks and prepared food. “It’s a way to keep cooking,” says owner Nate Tilden, “and to keep connected with our customers.” Clyde Common—named for the Clyde Hotel, which the Ace replaced—opened in 2007, the same year as Beast (which is also retooling) and Toro Bravo (which is closed). It was something like the bar at Higgins for a new generation of foodies, with communal tables, an emphasis on cocktails, and an equal mix of neighborhood regulars, outon-the-town locals, and tourists. To see a Clyde that isn’t bustling drives home the reality of a downtown short on tourists, office workers and live entertainment, as surely as an empty Powell’s, Multnomah County Central Library or Pioneer Square. It is now essentially a counter-service restaurant, with a
single bartender behind plexiglass. Gone are the communal tables, with one of them raised up and partitioned into small seating options. There are three tables on the main floor, four tables on the mezzanine and three outside under the Ace’s awning, with heat lamps. “It’s an adjustment, but I don’t hate it,” says bar manager Jeffrey Morgenthaler, who has worked there since 2009. “It has been really great reconnecting with our regulars.” And with only a few dozen customers per night, instead of 200, there’s theoretically more opportunity for individual interaction, albeit masked and from a distance. “This summer, when we had the outdoor seating, and it wasn’t super busy, we could just go out and, you know, tell some of the old jokes with old friends from 10 feet away.” Clyde’s tagline remains “domestic and foreign cooking,” and while its various chefs—including, most recently, Carlo Lamagna, who left two years ago to open Filipino restaurant Magna—have put their own individual stamp on things, ultimately, Clyde had always been a place for upscale tavern food: a meat and potatoes place, even if the meat is brick chicken with preserved lemon, and the potatoes came with herbs, Sriracha and aioli. Nobody likes the word “gastropub.” But everybody loves that style of food. Chris DiMinno, most recently of Trifecta Tavern and Clyde’s chef for five years beginning in 2009, is now back in the kitchen. So is the restaurant’s original burger: a freshly ground, 50-50 brisket-sirloin blend on a brioche bun topped with a cheese of your choice, plus wine-dark tomato jam that was originally created by opening chef Jason Barwikowski ($15-$16).
“I want the tavern burger to be a rock on our menu,” says Tilden. “It’s morphed over the years, but we’re keeping it, like, just a burger—a burger you want in your hands four times a month, if you’re a burger person.” The menu also includes two types of popcorn (spicy and truffle, $6), housemade focaccia ($5), radicchio and Little Gem salads ($10 and $8), and Morgenthaler’s salted chocolate chip cookie ($3). The poultry entree is currently crispy hot chicken ($18), while DiMinno’s handmade pastas include a rich and buttery Dungeness crab spaghettini with Calabrian chile, corn and lemon ($17) and squid ink Fideau pasta ($15), another Clyde classic. There are only seven cocktails on the menu, including that Negroni and an Elijah Craig old fashioned. But you can still order others that you might remember from a past visit. Holiday cocktails, such as eggnog and the scotch and apple cider Flannel Shirt, are also about to hit the menu. And if you go between 3 and 6 pm, you can knock two bucks off all those prices, food, drink and cookie included—the entire menu is available. While we all desperately need crowded restaurants to come back, at least for now you don’t have to share your table with an Instagram influencer. And Morgenthaler gets a break from cocktail geeks. “People really came to kind of fetishize the cocktails,” he says. “Now we get to just be bartenders. Nobody that comes in really wants anything terribly esoteric. People are looking for comfort food and comfort cocktails. The national palate has changed in the past seven months.” EAT: Clyde Tavern and Common Market, 1014 SW Harvey Milk St., 503-228-3333, clydecommon.com. 3-9 pm Wednesday-Sunday. Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
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BUZZ LIST
HOT PLATES
Where to drink outside this week.
Where to eat this week.
Fills Donuts
Threshold Brewing & Blending
403 SE 79th Ave., 503-477-8789, threshold. beer. 4-7 pm Tuesday-Saturday, noon-3 pm Sunday. The Montavilla brewery has built itself a shelter from the storms. To fortify their expanded streetside taphouse, the owners built a raised deck and put up three walls and a corrugated roof now adorned with dangling string lights. It’s a work in progress—but then, so is most of the city’s bar scene as it prepares for a COVID-ravaged winter.
Baerlic Brewing’s Super Secret Beer Club
FROM UTAH, WITH LOVE: Ruthie’s seasonal menu draws upon recipes from co-owner Collin Mohr’s grandmother and locally sourced ingredients.
TREVOR
Grandma’s Handiwork
1020 SE Grant St., 503-477-9418, baerlicbrewing.com. 2-8 pm daily. Baerlic Brewing is among that inspired group of entrepreneurs during the pandemic that looked at the cracked, gray parking lot behind its building and somehow saw a socially distanced party. The 6,000-square-foot space has turned into a Bavarian-inspired drinking lawn, complete with a huge faux foliage backdrop affixed with the words “Super Secret Beer Club.”
BY E L I Z A R OT H ST E I N
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EAT: Ruthie’s, 3634 SE Division St., instagram. com/ruthiespdx. Noon-8 pm daily.
Birrieria PDX
16544 SE Division St., Portland, 971-3366804. 11 am-9 pm Tuesday-Thursday, 9:30 am-9 pm Friday-Sunday. The birria boom has reached Portland, and this cart in deep Southeast is one of its main purveyors. Birria de res, like its sibling, barbacoa de res, has a long tradition in many parts of Mexico, but Birrieria PDX’s menu goes beyond classic applications: Other inventive options include the keto taco, made with crispy melted cheese instead of a tortilla, and birria ramen, the Japanese noodle soup made with the broth of the birria, resulting in something that tastes more like pho or Thai boat noodles.
Rock Paper Fish
2605 SE Burnside St., rockpaperfishandchips.com. 11 am-9 pm WednesdaySunday. Rock Paper Fish is yet another fast-casual Micah Camden restaurant, and yet another quick pandemic pivot. Open since mid-August, it’s a pickup- and delivery-only fish-and-chips window operating out of what used to be Boxer Ramen in the Burnside 26 building. The seafood may be mostly local or regional, but the style is New England: double-battered, double-fried, with thick fries reminiscent of Belgian frites. MICHAEL BANH
Growing up, Collin Mohr spent Sundays after church in the kitchen with his grandmother, Ruth. Most of what she cooked came out of a cookbook, and one in particular. It wasn’t The Joy of Cooking, or anything by Edna Lewis. Her go-to was the ward cookbook that circulated among members of one congregation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ogden, Utah. The collection of recipes was community-approved and iterated upon over generations. “We call it Mormon cooking,” Mohr says. “Grandma would always cook the recipes from that cookbook, plus what was in her backyard garden.” Now, Mohr and his childhood friend, Aaron Kiss, have brought those dishes to a food cart on Southeast 36th Avenue and Division Street. The two have been cooking together since they were 6 years old. What started under the tutelage of Mohr’s grandmother led the pair to work side by side at the now-defunct Park Kitchen in the Pearl, then Ava Gene’s, and now, smushed together in an old food cart with a wood-fired oven as its only heat source. The cart is at once an homage to Mohr’s grandmother and a shrine to Oregon’s natural bounty. Appropriately, they’ve named the business Ruthie’s. Mohr and Kiss use the pizza oven to char broccoli, burn garlic and bake Grandma Ruth’s honey butter rolls early in the morning with residual heat from the previous
night’s blaze. Though they source the honey for those rolls from Utah to stay true to the bun’s roots, it’s about the only thing served out of the cart that isn’t produced in Oregon. Mohr and Kiss launched the cart in early October. Ruthie’s menu will change with the seasons, and every bite undergoes some form of fire application. The inaugural lineup includes four salads ($10-$13) and two meats ($22 each). You won’t feel Ruth’s touch coming through in the vegetable-forward dishes, though. “Grandma doesn’t do salads,” Mohr says. On opening day, the only way to get one of Ruth’s famous buns was to order the ribs. Set your expectations accordingly: These are not saucy pork ribs. They’re subtly spritzed with grape must and topped with a heavy dose of what the menu calls “crunchy shit”: candied coriander, puffed barley, and black lime. On the side, enjoy Grandma Ruth’s roll and turmeric pickles, plus two moist towelettes. Mohr and Kiss acknowledge they’ve endeavored on a bold path by opening a food cart amid a pandemic. But right now, nostalgic bites have increased in stock. For the duo behind Ruthie’s, “comfort food” is synonymous with Grandma’s cooking, and that’s what they aim to serve. “During winter, we’ll do really solid, hearty food,” Mohr says. “Come eat something comfortable.” Kiss pipes up: “Do it for Ruthie!”
GAGNIER
Ruthie’s introduces Portland to “Mormon cooking.” Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.
1237 SW Washington St., 503-477-5994. 8 am-2 pm Wednesday-Sunday. If you thought Portland didn’t need another doughnut maker, this one introduces a new style to the culinary scene: the Berliner, traditional German pastries with no center hole and a filling of fruit, chocolate or custard. Expect plenty of inventiveness in Fills’ finished products, including flavors like matcha, pumpkin, hazelnut and even a pimento cheese doughnut with a sesame seed topping.
McMenamins Crystal Hotel Zeus Cafe
303 SW 12th Ave., 503-384-2500, mcmenamins.com. 7 am-10 pm daily. Business is back at McMenamins, though it doesn’t look quite like it used to, at least not at the Crystal Hotel’s streetside patio. The space was simple at first, with tables in the street along with a smattering of potted plants. Then Edgefield lent some of its collection of black, wrought-iron tables and chairs, along with barrels that evolved into miniature gardens.
Old Town Brewing
5201 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 503200-5988, otbrewing.com. 4-9 pm SundayThursday, 3-9 pm Friday, noon-9 pm Saturday. While many makeshift pandemic patios are nothing much to look at, Old Town’s is different: It immerses you in nature. The temporary woodland is laden with trees on loan from the city of Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services. Some are squat and bushy, others taller than the red umbrellas shading the patch with blooming flowers in a complementary shade of crimson.
Teardrop Lounge
1015 NW Everett St., 503-445-8109, teardroplounge.com. 4-10 pm WednesdaySaturday. Reservations required. Unlike the other establishments on this list, the pioneering craft cocktail bar does not have outdoor seating. Instead, the bar has reopened with the intent of creating the safest possible environment for indoor imbibing. That includes a new, heavy-duty HVAC system and plexiglass around its center bar. Will it all make customers comfortable enough to drink inside again? Hard to say—but the cocktails remain mighty enticing.
Pacific Crust Pizza
2703 NE Alberta St., 503-719-5010, pacificcrustpizzaco.com. 4-10 pm Monday-Friday, 11 am-10 pm SaturdaySunday. Normally, whenever Portland gets a new pizza joint, we ask ourselves if the city really needs another one. But, hey, it’s 2020. We’re going to need all the comfort we can get. In case the name didn’t tip you off, Pacific Crust has an outdoors theme, with Northwest-style ingredients, like elk fennel sausage and alder-smoked trout. You can also end the meal around the campfire, s’mores style, with a dark chocolate brownie with graham cracker and toasted marshmallow.
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 best, regardless of cuisine— has revved back up again, offering Cho’s world-beating dumplings and what on paper sounds like it will soon be the city’s favorite new obsession: a steamed bao burger.
PERFORMANCE
BOOKS
Editor: Andi Prewitt | Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com
P R O F I L E T H E AT R E
AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS: Mlima enhances the illusion that we are listening to the words of an animal.
An Elephant’s Voice A slain animal’s words echo from beyond the grave in Mlima’s Tale. BY BE N N E T T C A M P B E LL FE RGUS O N
What thoughts fly through an elephant’s mind before he is slain by an ivory poacher? Does he remember his mother calling him handsome? Does he remember his grandmother teaching him to listen? Does he think to run from his children, hoping to protect them from the humans who hunt him as prey? According to Profile Theatre’s new audio play Mlima’s Tale, the answer is all of the above. Written by Lynn Nottage and published in 2018, the play invites us into the soul of Mlima, an elephant who is slaughtered by poachers for his tusks on a Kenyan game preserve. His death opens the play, but it isn’t the end of his story—his voice echoes throughout the narrative, as if to taunt his killer. In a year when most people would probably rather watch cute YouTube videos of baby elephants taking baths, Mlima’s Tale might sound like a tough sell. Yet the play is as fascinating as it is heartbreaking. It’s a requiem for Mlima, and also a character study of the people impacted by his death—participants in a cycle of conquest, survival and death that director Reginald L. Douglas and his cast have brought to hauntingly vivid life. Mlima’s Tale begins with the title elephant addressing the audience with poetic flair (he calls himself “a shadow warrior”). He’s instantly sympathetic, but his murderers aren’t as hateful as you would expect. One of the poachers at least respects his prey enough to look him in the eye before he ends his life, and not all those who seek justice for Mlima are necessarily heroes (Andrew Graves, Kenya’s director of wildlife, covers his ass by vaguely and callously blaming Mlima’s death on government inaction). The play tracks the journey of Mlima’s tusks, which are eventually smuggled off the continent and end up in the hands of an ivory carver known only as Master Yee, who molds them into a work of art worth millions. It’s an act that leaves you wondering how you’re supposed to feel. Should we be relieved that a part of Mlima lives on through someone’s artistic expression? Or should we despair because he has become a commodity, a symbol 24
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of the losing battle that endangered species have fought against humanity for generations? The actors navigate the narrative’s ambiguities with grace. As Mlima, Keith Randolph Smith exudes the solidness of granite and the expressiveness of water—his deep, throaty voice and hypnotically slow speech convince you you’re listening to the words of a being who is wiser and stranger than a human. Mlima is capable of rage, but Smith’s presence radiates both fury and acceptance, personifying the elephant’s awareness of his vulnerable place in the universe. The cast also includes Treasure Lunan, Ithica Tell and Delphon “DJ” Curtis Jr., who play multiple characters (the roles range from a desperate smuggler to a salesman in a Beijing ivory shop). Mlima’s Tale must have been a demanding play for the actors—accents must shift as the story crosses borders—but they meet its challenges beautifully, working in concert with Elisheba Ittoop’s enveloping sound design and Jenn Mundia’s overwhelming score, which is filled with funereal cries. Mlima’s Tale’s many triumphs include overcoming the difficulties of conveying wordless action in an audio play. It can be tempting to use an omniscient narrator, but Mlima’s Tale tries something different—Smith reads stage directions in character as Mlima (it’s safe to say that this is the first play in which an elephant describes a human pouring a glass of Jack Daniels). While it’s hard not to wonder what Mlima’s Tale might have looked like onstage, there’s something beautiful about being forced to imagine it. Hearing, but not seeing, Mlima enhances the illusion that we are listening to the words of an animal—words that capture the essence of a spirit that remains whole, even after that body that contains it is destroyed. Nottage embraces nuance—she isn’t afraid to associate environmental activism with privilege—but her play is a clear warning to mind how we treat our planet. For Mlima is watching. LISTEN: Mlima’s Tale streams at profiletheatre.org/mlimas-tale through Nov. 4. A 24-hour rental costs $5-$40. WW readers who use the code OnAir50 will receive 50% off.
Written by: Scout Brobst Contact: sbrobst@wweek.com
FIVE MORE TERRIFYING BOOKS FOR HALLOWEEN
Altmann’s Tongue, Brian Evenson The thoroughly original Brian Evenson has managed to pull together— and keep—his cultlike following by rattling readers with the strangest of circumstances. His first collection of stories, published in 1994, drew comparisons to Edgar Allan Poe, not least because it involved characters forced to eat severed tongues and ultimately got him removed from his post teaching writing at BYU. Altmann’s Tongue trades brutality like a common currency, pushing violence to its furthest points where the horror lapses into comedy. A gut-punch read for the strong stomached.
The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness, Gaby Wood Literary critic Gaby Wood’s micro-novella, published in the late 1990s, is less of a horror story than an exercise in sociological discomfort. She tells the story of Caroline Crachami, the Italian child sensationalized for being the smallest person in recorded history in the 1800s, which unfolds as equal parts tragic and unsettling. Wood describes viewing her body, preserved in London’s Hunterian Museum, before breaking down the preparation of a human skeleton and effortlessly indicting our treatment of the things we don’t understand.
Fledgling, Octavia E. Butler Fledgling, beloved science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s last novel, holds a funhouse mirror to society in exactly the way Butler does best. Published after Butler took a seven-year break from writing, the book blurs the lines between person and “other,” imagining a young, amnesiac girl who discovers she belongs to a vampire species that lives among—and feeds on—nearby humans. Butler begins with this discovery and moves backward, deconstructing terror and injustice with an otherworldly lens.
The Cipher, Kathe Koja A favorite among fans of speculative fiction, Kathe Koja manages to write a story in which no character is particularly likable or worthy of an audience, but you read on anyway just to see what happens next. The premise is deceptively simple: Couple Nicholas and Nakota find a black hole in a storage room, slowly grow curious enough to investigate its depths, and then become maniacally obsessed with what they might find. The Cipher is a bleak churn through the worst of human nature, but absorbing enough to pass for a small revelation.
Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin Argentine author Samanta Schweblin carves out her place in the new genre of eco-horror with Fever Dream, suggesting the environmental terror we face is scarier than any myth we could fixate on. Originally published in Spanish, the novel is written as the unbroken dialogue between a woman in a hospital bed and a young boy, and the story unravels as the two speak—the outside world is marred by worms, toxic chemicals and poisoned water, and fear sets in with the realization that little can be done or salvaged.
WHAT’S NEXT?
T E C H F E S T N W. C O M
TECH FEST20 NW 20
DEC 2-4 VIRTUAL EXHIBIT HALL SOCIAL NETWORKING INSPIRING SPEAKERS INCLUDE:
KEVIN ROSE
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THE FUTURE OF: WORK | CITIES | HEALTH PRIVACY | EQUITY Join us in December for a virtual conference with captivating talks about the challenges and opportunities our world is facing. Also, get to see more than 70 startups pitching their ideas to some of the country’s smartest investors.
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Early Bird tickets on sale now! $15 techfestnw.com TOM GRUBER Co-Founder, Siri
Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
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POTLANDER
I Want Candy Ideal treats for sweet-toothed stoners on this socially distant Halloween. BY B R I A N N A W H EELE R
You never really grow out of Halloween. When you’re a kid, the anticipation is up there with Christmas and your birthday, and when you’ve got children of your own, it’s an opportunity to form bonds over creativity, the pagan origins of so many of our modern celebrations and, of course, candy. So what happens with many of this year’s festivities reworked or altogether canceled? You can still throw fun-size candies at children from your porch, and make a cardboard Baby Yoda costume for the kid, and form a socially distanced circle with your coven to do some full-moon manifestation spells—or sit around a Williams Sonoma fire pit with the other moms in the cul de sac and overpour a few glasses of red wine. Same diff. This Halloween is a chance to celebrate what we do have, and maybe get weird under the full moon. To that end, these edible suggestions are the 21-plus trick-or-treats we all deserve after this horror show of a year.
For the Straight-Up Witches: Junk Marshmallow Bon-Bons
For the Crestfallen Party Animals: Sour Bhotz All these poor victims of canceled party plans have been robbed of meaningless sexual interactions with willing partners of their choosing—and as a retired slut, I feel their pain. But there’s something to be said for getting wrecked in a Zoom chat while wearing a sexy Colonel Sanders costume. Sour Bhotz is the high-potency edible that will satiate the need to get uninhibited without completely couch-locking your body. Even the 5 mg microdose is a bit of a ride. The gummies aren’t strain-specific, but the high is generally peppy and bright. The cerebral effects are chatty and creative, and the body buzz is electric. If the Zoom party is lit, this gummy will probably be why.
Junk—the throwback candy arm of Leif Goods’ confectionary kingdom—recently introduced a high-potency version of its Cannabis Cup-winning marshmallow bonbons that I foresee dressing the graham crackers of several bonfire-haunting witches this Halloween. Leif was founded by Carrie and Jody Solomon, visual artists who both lend their brand of magical creativity to the Leif and Junk brands, resulting in some of the most memorable medicated sweets in the city. Each of these pixie-dusted and chocolate sea salt-freckled bonbons contain approximately 20 mg of THC, and each pack contains two sweets. My crystal ball portends this chocolate-covered marshmallow launching some hardcore Scorpio season Halloween magic, or at the very least some very fancy s’mores. Get them at: Amberlight Cannabis, 2407 SE 49th Ave., 503-233-0420, amberlightcannabis.com.
Get them at: Green Muse, 5515 NE 16th Ave., 503-954-3146, gogreenhop.com.
Fo r t h e B e l e a g u e r e d Parents: Hapy Kitchen Truffle Shuffles Hapy Kitchen’s chocolate factory puts out some great edibles, but a house fave are its artisan Truffle Shuffles. When you’re at home on candy-throwing duty, this mouthful of chocolate medication is going to make the entire affair much more enjoyable. It’s an outstandingly complacent high: unruffled, completely calm, and totally imperturbable. Bonus: The truffles are available in packs of two at 25 mg, or just one 50 mg truffle—which is nice since everyone’s tolerance has been tested this year. Get them at: Green Mart, 12745 SW Walker Road, Suite 100A, Beaverton, 503-747-0333, greenmartpdx.com.
For the Cranky Codgers: Edibology Cannacubes Halloween is not for everyone. Loud-ass children banging on your door all night, bored teenagers tossing toilet paper across your yard, drunken parents sloshing down the street, eating handfuls of their children’s candy—if it’s all just too grotesque for you, close your curtains, put a Do Not Disturb sign on your door, and settle in with Edibology’s Chocolate Cannacubes. Edibology’s chocolates are available in uplifting, sedative and calming varieties. For Halloween grinches, though, blue is likely the best-suited high for an evening of potential annoyances. A package contains five cubes of chocolate, each containing two 5 mg servings. Edibology’s blue variety is formulated with indica terpenes meant to calm and relax without putting you straight to bed. Cue up the Shudder marathon, settle in, and just try to forget children exist for a few hours. Get them at: potmatespdx.com
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Para Dia de los Muertos: La Mota Guava Gummies All my Latinx homies currently decorating their ofrendas with candles, calaveras and pictures of their departed family members are also going to be indulging in some special event cannabis on Dia de los Muertos. Whether you’re spreading orange blossoms around your altar or wondering what a calavera is, La Mota’s gummies are going to deliver an easy, manageable, meditative high. Each of La Mota’s gummy packs contain one 50 mg candy that can be portioned out into 10 mg or 5 mg segments. While not strain-specific, both uplifting and calming varieties are available, with guava falling into the latter category. Look, when the veil is lifted and your ancestors want to have a hangout, calm indica vibes are going to keep the scene both serene and celebratory, which is the optimal vibe for attending to the spirits of your ancestors. Get them at: La Mota, multiple locations.
Elisabeth Jones Corporate Rentals 516 NW 14th Ave. Portland, OR 97209 503.286.4959 www.elisabethjones.art We exhibit work based on Environment, Social Justice, and Contemporary Issues.
Lorem Ipsum
Ila Rose, “Our Mother” Acrylic on 4 wood panels, 10’ x 26’ $10,000, Monthly Rental $525, Rental fees go toward purchase.
EJ Art CoLab, “Communion with All” Acrylic on Panel, 8’ x 8’ $9,000, Monthly Rental $475, Rental fees go toward purchase.
Shop Locally. Shop Responsibly.
John Teply, “The Burden of Forever” Acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, 10’ x 26’ $35,000, Monthly Rental $1,775, Rental fees go toward purchase.
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MOVIES
Editor: Andi Prewitt / Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com K AT H R Y N K E N DA L L
SCREENER
GET YO UR REPS I N While the local rep theaters are out of commission, we’ll be putting together weekly watchlists of films readily available to stream. As our horror coverage for October comes to an end, we highlight some of the best recently released streaming debuts—from thought-provoking documentaries to social issue dramas to...the Borat sequel. Very nice!
Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020)
SPEAKING UP: Quanice “Moose” Hayes’ grandmother Donna Hayes (right) and great-grandmother Sylvia Dollarson work to keep telling the 17-year-old’s story after he was killed by police.
Giving Voice
After her grandchild died during an encounter with Portland police, Donna Hayes penned a play-turned-film about eight more similarly lost lives. BY C H A N C E SO L E M - P F E I FER
@chance_s_p
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SEE IT: Silent Voices streams at watch.opensignalpdx.org/ premieres. Free.
American Utopia (2020) Talking Heads frontman David Byrne is back with another acclaimed concert documentary, this one directed by Spike Lee and shot by Ellen Kuras. For anyone who didn’t get the chance to see his famed show American Utopia live on Broadway (most of us, probably), this filmed version is accessible to all (with a subscription service). HBO Max, Hulu.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020) Almost 15 years after he first bumbled his way into our hearts, Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) returns just when we need him most. The sequel finds the unflappable Kazakhstani journalist back in America, but this time everyone recognizes him. Still, that doesn’t stop him from taking on Trump, COVID and so much more. Amazon Prime.
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) After a teenage girl finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she and a friend travel from rural, conservative Pennsylvania to New York to procure an abortion. Writer-director Eliza Hittman’s searing independent drama was a critical darling, scoring prestigious awards at this year’s major film festivals, including a special neo-realism prize at Sundance. Amazon Prime, Google Play, HBO Max, Hulu, Vudu, YouTube.
R O G E R E B E R T. C O M
Consecutively absorbing the stories of nine different Portlanders killed by police, a Silent Voices viewer might notice commonalities seldom seen in headlines or hearings. Several of those killed were experiencing the worst crises of their lives before police ever arrived on the scene. Others share prior encounters with the same cops who killed them. Mental illness is a recurring theme. Then, there’s the credo upon which Silent Voices creator and writer Donna Hayes ends every monologue in her film: “That ain’t right.” That repetition prioritizes a simple human morality over more conceptual designations—what a parent or a child would deem “right” as opposed to what a legal system deems “justified.” “The police weren’t considering these low moments,” Hayes says of the nine slayings she chronicles. “They didn’t think about these people and what’s going on in their lives. Suspect! Danger! Danger! I hate the word ‘suspect’ because it takes humanity away.” Hayes’ artistic life began with Silent Voices—and tragically so. Her grandson was Quanice “Moose” Hayes, an unarmed, Black 17-year-old shot to death by Portland police on Feb. 9, 2017. The killing sparked ongoing protests and a civil rights lawsuit by the Hayes family. On March 21, 2017, a Multnomah County grand jury called officer Andrew Hearst’s use of deadly force “justified.” “The grand juries always do,” says Silent Voices’ director of performance, Kathryn Kendall, a retired theater professor and Don’t Shoot PDX photographer who helped Donna Hayes shape her collected stories of police violence into the monologues. Moose’s soliloquy caps the film, which is available for free via Open Signal’s YouTube page, following first-person testimonials by Kendra James, Aaron Campbell, Bodhi Phelps, Brad Lee Morgan, Christopher Kalonji, Merle Hatch, Jack Collins and John Elifritz. While the victims’ narration of their fatal encounters with Portland metro-area law enforcement certainly stands out, they also offer detail-heavy snapshots of lives cut short: Collins’ amateur boxing career, Elifritz’s family movie nights, Campbell losing his brother on the same day as his own death. Interspersed among the monologues is a “chorus”
of pundits, three actors dramatizing verbatim internet comments about the killings. Some remarks trend toward the hateful, of course. Some honor the deceased, seemingly for political capital. Whatever the intent, the chorus largely reveals how public discourse on police violence has precious little to do with the victims’ humanity. “I had more anger than pain,” Hayes says of diving through comment sections after Moose’s death. “No matter what they said, it didn’t relate to [Moose]. How are you going to open your mouth and talk about someone you don’t know?” The final product of Silent Voices—for now—is 50 minutes of filmed, DIY black-box theater. Last winter’s plans to simply host a live reading of Hayes’ script shifted due to COVID-19, but video production volunteers, like Olivia Ellis, Jessica Daugherty, Mike Hull and Lloyd Lemmermann, and a stage donated by Portland Playhouse allowed the transition to a filmed document. Kendall, for one, harbors future theatrical hopes for Silent Voices. “I really feel it needs a Black director,” Kendall says, “and I hope one comes forward who has the enthusiasm and the nerve to make something quite different than the movie.” Meanwhile, Hayes has broader ambitions to continue penning first-person accounts on behalf of those killed by police in communities like Detroit and New Orleans, where she’s forged connections with victims’ families. As for the responsibility that comes with depicting these personal narratives, Hayes welcomes it. Even her business card now reads, “Speaker for the Dead.” “People need to know these were people,” Hayes says. Attentive viewers may notice one differentiating wrinkle in Moose’s concluding monologue, delivered by Portland actor Solaman Ibe (who also plays Aaron Campbell). Twice, Moose halts his description of his immense but tight-knit family, where grandmothers are like second mothers and aunts like siblings. These memories are tough to get through, he admits. The emotional pauses might feel like Hayes tipping her hand. In the ninth and final narrative, maybe it’s all just too personal to bear. “No,” says Donna Hayes, speaker for the dead. “That was Moose. He could be emotional when it came to his family. He loved them dearly.”
To cope with her father’s impending death, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson decided to document their remaining time together. Using both candid footage and fantasy sequences, the result is a genre-bending documentary in the vein of Agnès Varda, a feel-good tearjerker and reminder to hold your loved ones close. Netflix.
The Assistant (2019) In this timely office drama, we follow one fateful day in the life of a young woman (recent Emmy winner Julia Garner) working as an assistant for a powerful entertainment executive. As the harsh reality of her abusive work environment is revealed, she decides to take a stand—with chilling results. Hulu, Vudu, YouTube.
MOVIES
JUNKEE.COM
TOP PICK OF THE WEEK Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Angrier, funnier and smarter than the original, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan brings back Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev to prank real-life American bigots. Ordered to woo the Trump administration with a gift, Borat embarks on a quest to make Mike Pence marry his daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova). The plot isn’t the point—it’s an opportunity for Baron Cohen and Bakalova to stage witty assaults on anti-Semitism, misogyny and racism (no one bothers to stop Borat from walking into the Conservative Political Action Conference dressed as a Klansman). Baron Cohen is just as dementedly entertaining as he was in the original Borat, but Bakalova relentlessly upstages him. Just when you think nothing can top the scene in which Tutar has her period and performs a fertility dance at a debutante ball in Georgia, Bakalova pulls off the film’s brashest stunt—an encounter with Rudy Giuliani that gleefully lays bare the sadism and sexism of Trump’s legal lapdog. That sequence is the film’s climax, but still to come is a twist that attempts the seemingly impossible: to make COVID-19 funny. It’s a great gag and a great testament to Baron Cohen’s apparent belief that the world will only end when human beings lose their lust for inappropriate laughs. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Amazon Prime.
The Trial of the Chicago 7
OUR KEY
: T H I S M O V I E I S E XC E L L E N T, O N E O F T H E B E S T O F T H E Y E A R. : T H I S M O V I E I S G O O D. W E R E C O M M E N D YO U WATC H I T. : T H I S M O V I E I S E N T E R TA I N I N G B U T F L AW E D. : T H I S M O V I E I S A P I E C E O F S H I T.
ALSO PLAYING Kajillionaire In the new film by legendary former Portland polymath Miranda July, a miserable con artist called Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) could use space from her parents (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger). For one thing, she literally bends over backward for their nickel-and-dime schemes, limboing beneath security cameras to shoplift. For another, they had the gall to name her Old Dolio. Whether in film (Me and You and Everyone We Know) or fiction (The First Bad Man), July’s worlds typically hang on off-kilter drabness. In Kajillionaire, the family lives in an office building where soap seeps through the walls each afternoon, and a barely recognizable Wood dresses in Biff Tannen tracksuits and talks a bit like Napoleon Dynamite. Yet the truth of the hyperbole is that the Dyne family is just trying to make the rent. When a captivatingly bubbly stranger (Gina Roriguez) questions the family’s methods, July’s film poses a clear and timeless question: Can parents ever change? Crushing, hilarious and hopeful, the central conflict becomes Old Dolio versus attachment theory. Will her first relationships on this earth shape all future ones, like a heartless developmental cookie cutter? Don’t be scared of the final answer. By the end, you’ll want to call a parent. Or you won’t. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On Demand.
BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM
On the Rocks When your second film is a universe of compassion, wit and wonderment, it’s not easy for the rest of your career to keep up. Yet On the Rocks is one of the most intelligent and moving films that writer-director Sofia Coppola has made since her transcendent Tokyo odyssey Lost in Translation. It’s the kind of movie that gets you guessing about what a great director is up to, then surprises and pleases you when she doesn’t go where you imagined. On the Rocks stars Rashida Jones as Laura, a writer who suspects that her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), is cheating on her. Since Laura’s father, Felix (Bill Murray), is eager for an excuse to spy on his son-in-law, the two embark on a shambling investigation of Dean, which culminates in a surreal sojourn in Mexico. Murray suavely sells the contradictions of Felix, a decrepit playboy who defends his daughter’s honor but delights in demeaning women. Felix can be a mesmerizingly phony charmer, but On the Rocks is about Laura awakening to the emptiness behind his incandescence—an awakening that sets the stage for her spiritual rebirth. That journey may not match the visual and emotional heights of Lost in Translation, but On the Rocks triumphs on its own terms by telling the story of a woman who, scene by scene, gradually claims the movie as her own. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Apple TV+.
Anyone who thinks nonstop talk can’t be cinematic hasn’t seen an Aaron Sorkin movie. Sorkin (who won an Oscar for writing The Social Network) is living proof that film is both a visual and a verbal medium. Actors tear through his tender-witty-wrathful writing as if attacking crisp, chewy steaks—and the stars of his courtroom epic The Trial of the Chicago 7, which he also directed, are no exception (the cast includes Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne and Joseph Gordon-Levitt). The film is set mostly in the late ’60s, when seven anti-war activists were accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The bravery of the brutalized defendants is justly legendary, but the film is no self-righteous history lesson. The script is stocked with zingers (“This is the Academy Awards of protests and as far as I’m concerned, it’s an honor just to be nominated,” one defendant says of the trial), and Sorkin’s depiction of patriotism curdling into fascism is visceral, not didactic—Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman unleashes a nauseating portrait of real-life evil. Sorkin also shows us devastating images of demonstrators being tear-gassed by police, but he doesn’t belabor the similarities between 1968 and 2020. He knows when to shut up and let history speak for itself. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Netflix.
Chop Chop A cast of David Harper’s head should appear in every (socially distanced) haunted house in America. Like Boris Karloff (Frankenstein) or Doug Bradley (Hellraiser), the bald, hangdog character actor endows Chop Chop with the most proven horror concept of the past 120 years of film: a very scary-looking man with a sharp object. So when Harper’s murderous form appears on the doorstep of a young couple, Liv
(Atala Arce) and Chuck (Jake Taylor), the spine tingles in classic fashion. The fact that Rony Patel’s would-be slasher film pivots so quickly and aggressively away from an unstoppable-monster bloodbath is potentially to his creative credit, but unfortunately, no part of the disturbed underworld odyssey that follows works anywhere near as well. Chuck and Liv’s fly-by-night encounters with a string of sadists in bathrobes recalls the “Gimp” interlude of Pulp Fiction or a swingand-miss like Hotel Artemis, where fate leads the main characters into alternate hells that suggest an entire universe of pain merchantry just off screen. It doesn’t cohere in Chop Chop, and Arce and Taylor reach for a murmuring naturalism that stunts their terror and ours. The nice thing about meat-cleaver menaces—they don’t overthink anything. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On Demand.
Coming Home Again Adapted from a 1995 New Yorker essay by Chang-rae Lee, this quiet little drama by director Wayne Wang follows a young man (Justin Chon) who returns home to care for his cancer-stricken mother. The bones of the story have been told countless times due to its universality, but rarely from the unique perspective of Korean American culture. Filmed mostly using static shots and one-takes, Coming Home Again encourages its audience to bask in the stillness, like gazing into a reflecting pool. It’s also devoid of a manipulative dramatic score—emotions are stirred naturally. Yes, this means there are occasional bouts of monotony as we watch Chang-rae cook in silence for minutes at a time. It’s intended to be elegiac, since Korean food plays such a crucial role, even if it often comes off a bit stagnant. One dynamic scene in particular stands out, however: Chang-rae runs into an
old friend, and after a few minutes of catching up, he inevitably asks how Chang-rae’s mother is doing. “She has cancer,” he says, then laughs at his own devastation, then apologizes for laughing. This moment defines the spine of the entire film: a poignantly authentic exploration of the complexities of grief, and the pain embedded in its hovering anticipation. NR. MIA VICINO. Virtual Cinemas.
Rebecca Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is one of the most sensual novels ever written. Published in 1938, it’s the story of a nameless heroine who marries Maxim de Winter, lord of a forbidding English estate known as Manderley. There’s nothing explicitly paranormal about the novel, but Manderley is figuratively haunted by Maxim’s late wife, Rebecca. Her desires endure through the vindictive housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, and her unmistakably erotic rivalry with Maxim’s new bride infuses the novel with transgressive force. Director Ben Wheatley’s new adaptation of Rebecca is barely transgressive at all, but it offers a few pleasures. Lily James radiates both vulnerability and strength as the protagonist, and Wheatley (whose films include the 2016 shootout flick Free Fire) unleashes some clever visions of terror, including a crowd of partygoers endlessly chanting “Rebecca!” What’s missing is du Maurier’s mastery of subtle menace. The heroine’s romance with Maxim (Armie Hammer) is summed up in a dopey sequence that plays like a PG-13 Fifty Shades of Grey, and Wheatley serves up an artificially perky finish in lieu of du Maurier’s devastating final sentences. The clash between the heroine and the memory of Rebecca was rich with romantic triumph and despair in the novel, but Wheatley settles for the weakest form of romance: niceness. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Netflix.
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Willamette Week OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
JONESIN’
Week of November 5
©2020 Rob Brezsny
by Matt Jones
"Cool, Cool"--another door opens. [#984, Apr. 2020]
ARIES (March 21-April 19)
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)
Aries poet Charles Baudelaire championed the privilege and luxury of changing one's mind. He thought it was natural and healthy to always keep evolving beyond one's previous beliefs and attitudes, even if that meant one might seem inconsistent or irrational. "It is lamentable," he once proclaimed, "that, among the Rights of Human Beings, the right to contradict oneself has been disregarded." I bring these thoughts to your attention, dear Aries, so that you will feel at peace with the prospect of outgrowing rules, strategies, and approaches that have worked well for you up until now—but that have outlived their usefulness.
In the 1970s, an Englishman named Stephen Pile founded the Not Terribly Good Club. It was designed to be a gathering place for mediocre people whose lives were marked by inadequacy and incompetence. To organize his thoughts about the club's themes, Pile eventually published a book entitled *The Book of Heroic Fallures*. Unfortunately, it sold so many copies that he got expelled from his own club. He had become too successful! I suspect that in the coming months, you may have an experience akin to his. The odds are good that you'll find interesting success in an area of your life where you have previously been just average.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20) The horoscopes I write are my love letters to you. As I compose them, my goal is to celebrate your beauty and strength even as I discern what's lacking in your life and what confusions might be undermining you. In my philosophy of life, that's how love works at its best: remaining keenly aware of the good qualities in the beloved while helping them deal with their problems and heal their wounds. I suggest that in the coming weeks you adopt my approach for use with your own close relationships. Your allies are in special need of both your praise and your rectifications.
"At every crossroad, be prepared to bump into wonder," wrote Scorpio poet James Broughton. I believe that's stirring advice for you to keep in mind during the coming weeks. Broughton's words inspired me to come up with a corollary for you to heed, as well: "At every turning point, be ready to stumble into an opportunity disguised as a problem." I've got one more clue for you. Last night in my dream, my Scorpio poetry teacher offered a thought that's well-suited for you right now: "Whenever you want to take a magic twisty leap into the big fresh future, be willing to engage in one last wrestling match with the past."
GEMINI (May 21-June20)
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)
ACROSS
68 Words before ante
33 Omit
When Charles de Gaulle was 15 years old, he wrote "General de Gaulle," a short story in which he envisioned himself, many years in the future, as a general in the French army. Thirty-five years later, his imaginary tale came true, as he became a general of the free French army fighting against Germany in World War II. In the spirit of de Gaulle's prophecy, and in accordance with current astrological omens, I encourage you to compose a comparable tale about your own destiny. Have fun as you visualize in great detail a successful role you will play months or even years from now.
1 Completely chill
69 It ended on April 9 this year
35 Initialism for the series of "Avengers" movies
CANCER (June 21-July 22)
70 Musk of Tesla Motors
37 "Keep _ _ _!" ("Don't give up!")
5 Cat's resting spot 8 "Sweat smile" or "moneymouth face," e.g. 13 Et _ _ _ (Latin for "and others") 14 Golden _ _ _ O's (cereal variety that somehow exists) 16 Fix with a needle 17 ITEMS IN THE FREEZER 20 ITEMS IN THE FREEZER 21 Affectionate greeting (that I'm guessing there will be a lot of when this is done) 22 Raphael's weapon, in "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" 23 Gallery offering 24 RaÌz c˙bica de ocho 27 Long sandwich 29 Makeshift car cleaners 32 Exclamations that have their moments? 34 Ewe's mate 36 Answer a stimulus 40 ITEMS IN THE REFRIGERATOR 44 Phone maker from Finland 45 "Born in the _ _ _" 46 New employee
71 Bedding item 72 Get the idea 73 Some TV rooms DOWN 1 Golden State, informally 2 "30 Rock" star Baldwin 3 Longest possible sentence 4 Go together perfectly 5 With "The," 2008 Mike Myers flop
43 Make retroactive, like a payment 48 "Hawaii Five-O" detective, to McGarrett 49 Go letter by letter
62 Rapper in "Law & Order: SVU"
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)
54 Transform bit by bit
9 Alternate nickname for Sporty Spice (as opposed to Scary)
57 Asks intrusive questions
11 2000 World Series MVP Derek 12 "_ _ _ let you down!" 15 Green "Sesame Street" character 18 "It's either them _ _ _"
52 It's usually due April 15
25 The _ _ _ State University
53 Breakfast hrs.
26 Jonas who developed a polio vaccine 28 Actress _ _ _ Ling of "The Crow" 30 "Despicable Me" supervillain 31 "Late Night" host Meyers
©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.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)
61 Hurt all over
53 Photographer Diane
10 Home of Suntory's headquarters
In 1903, archaeologists digging in a cave in Cheddar Gorge, England found the fossilized remains of "Cheddar Man," a person who had lived there 9,000 years earlier. In 1997, DNA tests revealed that a teacher named Adrian Targett, who was living a half-mile from the cave, was a direct descendant of Cheddar Man. I propose that we invoke this scenario to serve as a metaphor for you in the coming months. According to my analysis of the astrological omens, your ancestors are likely to play a bigger role in your life than usual. Connections between you and them will be more vivid and influential and worthy of your meditations.
According to the film *Amadeus*, composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) and Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) were adversaries who disliked and undermined each other. But there's evidence that this was not entirely true. In fact, they collaborated on creating a cantata that was performed by Nancy Storace, a famous singer they both admired. It's unlikely they would have cooperated in such a way unless they had a working relationship. I suspect that a comparable correction is due in your world, Leo. It's time to dissolve a misunderstanding or restore a lost truth or fix an old story that got some of the facts wrong.
8 Words in the middle of everyone's favorite Napoleon-based palindrome
24 Rhett Butler's last word
67 ITEMS IN THE VEGETABLE CRISPER
42 Preternatural power
7 Stereotypical '80s hairdos
50 Alternatives to Macs
60 ITEMS IN THE VEGETABLE CRISPER
41 God, to a Rastafarian
6 Carpet calculation
19 Karmann _ _ _ (classic VW model)
58 Carp in some ponds
39 "Jurassic Park" beast
51 "Bon _ _ _" (good evening, in France)
47 Degs. for many professors
56 Android program
38 "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" star Michael
55 Dealt a sharp blow, in the Bible 59 "The Sky _ _ _" (1950 Italian drama)
63 Dermatologist's case 64 Miniature golf goal 65 English school founded by Henry VI 66 1040 IDs
last week’s answers
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)
The coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to ask for help and seek support. I urge you to be forthright in doing so! Resources that have been inaccessible before may be more available now. I suspect you will be able to capitalize on the luck and skill of allies who have benefited from your favors in the past. Their successes could bring you blessings and their breakthroughs should inspire you to instigate breakthroughs in your own life. Be straightforward: Ask them to lend their influence in your behalf.
Actor Gary Busey is quirky and kooky, but his peculiar rants sometimes make good sense. Here's one that I suspect might be useful for you to consider during the next two weeks: "It's good for everyone to understand that they are to love their enemies, simply because your enemies show you things about yourself you need to change. So in actuality enemies are friends in reverse." I don't mean to imply that your adversaries and nemeses are totally accurate in their critiques of you. But there may be a thing or two you can learn from them right now that would truly improve your life.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) Musician John Coltrane described one of his life goals as follows: "There are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world," he said. "But I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good." Even if that's not an intention at the core of your long-term plans, Capricorn, I recommend you consider adopting it during the next few weeks. Being a vigorous and rigorous force for good will be especially needed by the people with whom you associate—and will also result in you attracting interesting benefits.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) Known as "the bad boy of bridge," Aquarian-born Geir Helgemo is a champion in the card game of bridge. At times he has been the top-rated player among Open World Grand Masters. But in 2019, he was suspended from the World Bridge Federation for a year because he tested positive for taking testosterone supplements that are banned. Why did he do it? He hasn't said. There is some scientific research suggesting that testosterone may boost cognitive function, but other evidence says it doesn't. I'd like to use Helgemo's foolishness as a teaching story for your use, Aquarius. According to my astrological analysis, you're approaching the peak of your competence and confidence. There's no need for you to cheat or sneak or misbehave in a misplaced effort to seek an even greater advantage. In fact, righteous integrity will enhance your intelligence.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) "I might really have gone round the bend," confessed Botswana author Bessie Head. "I mean people who get visions and see a gigantic light descend on them from the sky can't be all there, but if so I feel mighty happy. If one is happy and cracked it's much better than being unhappy and sane." Although I don't expect your state of mind in the coming weeks will be as extreme as Bessie Head's, Pisces, I do suspect it will have resemblances to her dreamy cheerfulness. If I had to give a title to this upcoming phase, it might be "Wise Folly." And yes, I do think your "craziness" will generate useful insights and fertile revelations.
HOMEWORK: At what moment in your past were you happiest about the person you were? Can you recreate it? 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 OCTOBER 28, 2020 wweek.com
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