doorstep - Issuu

from Willamette Week, December 9, 2020 - Volume 47, Issue 7 - A Very COVID Christmas

by Willamette Week Newspaper

Christmas

ELIZA ROTHSTEIN

Challah at Your Boy

Have no fear, Challahman is here—to bring kosher bread straight to your doorstep.

SECRET IDENTITY: Rich Meyer, aka the Challahman.

BY ELIZA ROTHSTEIN @saltynectar

Bagel fi ends across Portland suffered a big blow in 2011. Kettleman Bagel Company, a beloved brand that had been boiling bagels since 2006, was bought by Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, the parent company to chains Einstein Bros. and Noah’s New York Bagels. The collective despair was aired on Reddit feeds and Facebook polls. But there was one group of middle schoolers that was particularly put out. For years, the Portland Jewish Academy had been receiving kosher challah from Kettleman. One of the only kosher bakeries in town, its dissolution left a void. Fortunately for the PJA Dragons, their newfound need coincided with the growing hobby of a welcomed superhero. Enter the Challahman. In spring 2012, the aspiring baker then known as Rich Meyer went on a trip to Israel and was struck by the sight of stall-high piles of challah spilling into the streets of the Shuk Mahane Yehuda, one of Jerusalem’s largest markets. Inspired by the towers of braided dough, he started baking more challah when he returned home to Portland. It was around this time he learned that PJA was still looking for a kosher challah purveyor. So he rented out a kitchen at a local synagogue and increased production. “I had a few people who helped me go from baking two loaves at a time to baking many loaves at a time,” Meyer says, “and that’s when the Challahman was born.” Meyer’s challah was a hit at the school, and he started receiving and filling more special requests for home-delivered bread. Two years in, he began working with a local bakery to produce loaves that stocked the shelves of Fred Meyer, Green Zebra, Albertsons, and others He even became the trusted supplier for many local brunch joints, though he won’t divulge exactly where. Meyer’s challah is classic. Each loaf has plump braids and a crust with a brown sheen so uniform it could be the subject of a stock photo shoot. Meyer uses the standard ingredients: oil, fl our, egg, yeast, sugar, salt. When you rip into the challah, you’ll see an inner crumb whiter than some eggier versions and the sought-after shards of pulled dough. Along with his addition of vanilla, however, Meyer’s challah has what most commercially produced challah in Portland do not: a rabbi who oversees the baking and ensures that each loaf is kosher. “It’s important to me that I have a kosher product,” Meyer says. “Not everyone wants or needs challah to be kosher, but a lot of people do.” But not even Challahman has proven immune to the pandemic. The kosher facility where Meyer’s loaves rise cut its hours, forcing Meyer to scale back production and pull his challah from grocery store shelves. Once again, Portlanders who value quality kosher glutenous goods spoke up. And so, in spring 2020, Meyer returned to his roots, delivering loaves to schools, synagogues and homes. Now, you can have the Challahman himself deliver challah to your doorstep every week. Ordering loaves online on Tuesday guarantees both Friday delivery and the donation of a loaf of challah to the Holocaust survivors program of the Jewish Family & Child Service. Meyer doesn’t know how the Challahman will morph again postpandemic. He does, however, have a dream. He hopes to one day trade in his black minivan for a decked-out delivery truck—decals of his logo on the side, blasting klezmer music through the streets of Portland, and tossing loaves to passersby. “People are spread out all over the place,” he says. “I like looking for creative ways to keep community cohesive in diffi cult times.”

TOP 5 HOT PLATES Where to order takeout this week.

Aybendito

Order at aybenditopdx.com. Ataula co-owner Cristina Baez’s tiendita is designed with the pandemic in mind, operating on a family-friendly take-and-make model. The online marketplace is stocked with the street food Baez grew up with in Puerto Rico: sofrito canéles to replace your stale bullion, chimichurri, limited-availability pernil, and pollo guisado, fl an, and the staple pastelillo.

Kemuri Hot Dogs

kemuri.us Afuri, the celebrated Japanese ramen chain, has started a delivery-only “ghost kitchen” focused on hot dogs. These aren’t typical ballpark franks, though. At Kemuri, the dogs are cooked over charcoal and include fi xings such as kimchi, spicy ground pork, tonkatsu sauce and kizami nori, or shredded seaweed.

Ripe Cooperative

5425 NE 30th Ave., 503-841-6968, ripecooperative.com. 10 am-6 pm Thursday-Sunday. Naomi Pomeroy wasn’t necessarily ready to say goodbye to Beast when it closed indefi nitely in March due to COVID19. But she wasn’t going to shed a tear over it, either. Pomeroy’s new venture in the 600-square-foot space is Ripe Cooperative, a gourmet community market with fresh pastas, bread, wine and box meals to go that will continue her mission of taking the mystery out of cooking.

República

721 NW 9th Ave., 951-206-8237, @republicapdx. 11 am-3 pm and 4-8 pm daily. República is a casual yet ambitious place built around guisados—the stewed fi llings that go in tortas and tortillas—and corn masa. It also has a not-so-secret weapon in tortilla maker Doña Chapis, who does her own quesadilla pop-ups several days a week.

Fills Donuts

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 fi lling of fruit, chocolate or custard.

TOP 5 BUZZ LIST Where to drink this week, one way or another.

Rally Pizza

8070 E Mill Plain Blvd., Vancouver, Wash., 360-524-9000, rallypizza.com. 3-8 pm Monday-Thursday, noon-8 pm Friday-Sunday for curbside pickup or delivery by DoorDash. Want to experience the thrill of buying a premade cocktail to go? You’ll have to cross the Columbia into Washington, where takeout mixed drinks have been legal since May. That means visiting Vancouver’s fi nest pizzeria, grabbing a fennel sausage pie, a side Caesar and a Little Italy—a whiskey drink in a sealed Mason jar that’s citrusy, sweet and bitter all at once.

Wyrd Leather & Mead

4515 SE 41st Ave., 503-305-6025, wyrdleatherandmead.com. At Wyrd Leather & Mead, you can wear your horn and drink from it too—it is both a meadery and artisan marketplace, with décor that blends Norse history and medieval fantasy, and Middle-earth with modern-day environmental pleas. Pick your own fl ight of four regionally brewed meads, or “cast the runes” and have the bartenders choose for you.

Shine Distillery and Grill

4232 N Williams Ave., 503-825-1010, shinedistillerygrill.com. Big family gatherings might be canceled, but this holiday season doesn’t have to be somber. Every night starting at 4:30, you can watch drag performances at Shine Distillery’s “drag-thru” while you wait for cocktail kits to go and bottles of housemade booze.

Wayfi nder Beer

304 SE 2nd Ave., 503-718-2337, wayfi nder.beer. 3-9 pm daily. If ever there were a beer that could transport you to the brauhauses of Munich, it would be Wayfi nder Hell, a crisp and snappy lager with a gasp of citrus that, in normal times, comes in a fat mug. Sadly, these aren’t normal times, but you can still get it in a can, along with the brewery’s other standout German-style beers. Delivery is also available WednesdaySunday.

Enoteca Nostrana Bottle Shop

1401 SE Morrison St. 503-236-7006, enotecanostrana.com. One of the most beloved wine bars in Portland has assembled a six-pack of holiday wines. And at barely over $20 a bottle, it’s a pretty good deal for a highend, highly curated shop that’s open for pickup and delivery.

SCREENER

MOVIES

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

KEITH BORMUTH surprising thing was how specific to their high school experience this movie is. When I watched Dazed, the one thing I felt was kind of over the top was the hazing. I thought, “There’s no way there’s a high school where the teachers are allowing incoming seniors to hit the incoming freshmen with wooden paddles.” But it literally happened at Linklater’s school! Those people still have really traumatic memories of going through hazing.

SLOW RIDE: Author Melissa Maerz takes readers back to the last day of school in 1976.

Class Reunion

Through nearly 150 interviews, a Portland author chronicles the history of ’90s cult classic Dazed and Confused for a new book.

BY CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER @chance_s_p

Melissa Maerz didn’t set out to pen a nostalgic book about the 1993 fi lm Dazed and Confused any more than director Richard Linklater tried to warmly memorialize 1976 in his last-day-of-school classic. But the Portland author of Alright, Alright, Alright found that such decisions are mostly up to the beholders, or in Maerz’s case, her interviewees. Chronicling the perspectives of Linklater, Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Ben Affleck and about 140 others, the oral history sometimes reads like reminiscences of high school—never mind that the movie was fictional—replete with druggy shenanigans, summer flings and unresolved conflicts from the Dazed set. Still, other chapters perform a di erent kind of snapshotting: parsing early ’90s studio politics in an era when regional iconoclasts like Linklater still had defined pathways to directorial stardom. Maerz—a Portland native who co-founded Vulture and worked as a producer at Vice News Tonight—spoke with WW about her sources’ sometimes contradictory memories, the inscrutability of Parker Posey, and reckoning with the Wooderson character’s creepiness in 2020.

WW: One of your book’s central themes is that Dazed was intended as an anti-nostalgia fi lm, but it became one anyway. How did that happen?

Melissa Maerz: That’s actually what made me want to write the book. You can see it in the movie, right? Cynthia’s character literally says, “The ’70s obviously suck.” Now, I know so many people who’ve watched Dazed a billion times because of all those levels of nostalgia…because they’re nostalgic for high school…because they’re nostalgic for the ’70s…and now because they’re nostalgic for the ’90s and watching it back then.

You tracked down several Huntsville, Texas, residents who partially inspired Linklater’s characters. Did any of their real memories surprise you?

That was probably my favorite part to report. The most

In your introduction, Ethan Hawke calls Linklater a “mysterious entity.” Even after all your interviews, do you still fi nd him a little mysterious?

Definitely. He seems like a pretty transparent person in terms of how honest his answers are, but he has a really good bullshit detector. I think anytime someone is trying to paint him as a certain type of character, he has this knee-jerk reaction against it. You see that in his characters too. In an ’80s high school movie, you’d see, “Oh that’s the nerd character, that’s the jock.” Dazed was the first time I remember seeing “Oh, the nerds are also the smart political kids, and the jocks are also the stoners.” Linklater himself is very against anyone painting him as a saint or this Zen guy.

Do you have a favorite exchange between your oral history sources?

I just love any moment where there are like 5 million people disagreeing. That’s part of nostalgia too. Someone’s like, “Oh, the biggest pot smoker was Rory [Cochrane].” And Rory’s like, “No way, I was just acting. The biggest pot smoker was Shawn [Andrews]!” Or Ben A eck saying he never intentionally hurt anybody in doing the paddling scenes, when some of the kids remember getting hurt. It’s just interesting to see how people’s perspectives end up being totally di erent accounts of the truth.

Was there anyone whose tone doesn’t fully come through in their quotes?

Parker Posey. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or funny or cutting. But I think that’s really true to how some other people on set experienced her too. Some people thought she was really sweet and funny, and other people felt she was kind of mean.

Were the actors eager to talk about how the film’s politics had aged, or did you have to make that a priority?

The one thing everyone is kind of “ugh” about is McConaughey’s famous line [about high school girls], “I get older, they stay the same age.” I asked everybody if they thought today that line would be different. When I saw this movie in high school, there were a lot of scenes that pissed me o that people were laughing at. And now that I’m older, I think, “That’s not supposed to be funny.” One of the things that’s allowed this movie to age is that Linklater doesn’t moralize. He just let the movie be as teenage life really was, and let people judge for themselves how to interpret it.

READ: Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused by Melissa Maerz, Harper, 464 pages, $26.99. GET YOUR REPS IN

While local rep theaters are out of commission, we’ll be putting together weekly watchlists of fi lms readily available to stream. Winter is coming in hot (cold?), so here are fi ve frosty fl icks that revel in the crisp chill of fresh snow and the cozy warmth of the perfect cashmere scarf.

Little Women (2019)

Greta Gerwig’s fresh retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s seminal novel follows the March sisters (Saoirse Ronan, Eliza Scanlen, Emma Watson and Florence Pugh) as they come of age in 19th century Massachusetts. At once a snow-frosted tearjerker, a comforting period drama, and a heartfelt ode to young women who dare to make art. Amazon Prime, Google Play, Hulu, Sling TV, Starz, Vudu, YouTube.

Winter Light (1963)

If you liked the Ethan Hawke’s excellent 2017 drama First Reformed, check out the movie it drew massive inspiration from: Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s 81-minute parable about a pastor su ering from health problems and an existential crisis spurred by his failure to help a suicidal fi sherman (Max von Sydow). Criterion Channel, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube.

Private Life (2018)

When a middle-aged New York couple (Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti) struggle with fertility issues, they ask their 25-year-old niece (Kayli Carter) to donate her eggs. Because she majored in journalism and cinema studies, she’s strapped for cash and happily agrees. Tamara Jenkins wrote and directed this charming, down-to-earth dramedy. Netfl ix.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Stanley Kubrick’s fi nal fi lm is also one of his very best: a twisted erotic mystery about a doctor (Tom Cruise) whose life comes crashing down when his wife (Nicole Kidman) admits to her dissatisfaction with him. Her blunt confession sends him spiraling down Christmas-lit New York streets, where he stumbles into a jazz club, a costume shop and, oh yeah, a secret orgy society. Amazon Prime, Google Play, Hulu, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube.

The Hateful Eight (2015)

In this stormy Western mystery from Quentin Tarantino, a group of eight ruthless strangers, all with something to hide, become trapped in an isolated lodge by an unrelenting blizzard. Netfl ix also released an extended version last year, splitting the 210-minute epic into four episodes. Amazon Prime, iTunes, Netfl ix, Vudu, YouTube.

Mank

In his first movie in six years, filmmaker David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network) hasn’t lost his ability to beguile, fascinate and vex. Working from a screenplay by his late father, Jack Fincher, the director has concocted a superb cinematic portrait of Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), co-writer of Citizen Kane. In 1940, a bloated Mank drunkenly dictates the script to his formidable transcriber, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins). He’s preparing the project for Orson Welles (Tom Burke) to direct, but flashbacks insinuate that Citizen Kane is powered by a personal grudge Mank holds against William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). Tormented by his tacit participation in a Hearstbacked smear campaign against the writer and liberal California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye), Mank models the megalomaniacal Charles Foster Kane on Hearst. Was Citizen Kane’s origin that simple? Hardly, but you don’t have to buy the theory to dig the movie. Beneath the seductive sheen of Erik Messerschmidt’s black-and-white cinematography lies Fincher’s conviction that Hollywood—like the melting ice sculpture of an elephant at a party Mank attends—should be liquefied for its sins. Mank may not be cheery, but no one goes to Fincher for good vibes. Gleeful pessimism is his drug of choice, and for us, it can be an improbable and exhilarating high. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Netflix.

OUR KEY

: THIS MOVIE IS EXCELLENT, ONE OF THE BEST OF THE YEAR.

: THIS MOVIE IS GOOD. WE RECOMMEND YOU WATCH IT. : THIS MOVIE IS ENTERTAINING BUT FLAWED. : THIS MOVIE IS A PIECE OF SHIT.

ALSO PLAYING

Collective

When Bucharest nightclub Colectiv burned in 2015, 27 people died—and that was just the beginning. In the following weeks, 37 injured survivors of the fire perished, a loss that led to the exposure of a sweeping conspiracy that had corrupted the Romanian health care system. That scandal is the subject of Collective, a mesmerizing and enraging documentary directed by Alexander Nanau. The film focuses on Catalin Tolontan, a journalist at a sports newspaper who reported on the use of heavily diluted disinfectants in Romanian hospitals, and former Minister of Health Vlad Voiculescu, whom we watch soberly struggle to reform the institution he serves from within. Devoid of didactic narration and expert interviews, Collective trusts that images of horrendous injustices (like a neglected patient’s maggot-covered face) will speak for themselves. The greed, lies and apathy revealed are almost too much to bear, but there’s no turning away from a film this morally urgent, thoroughly researched and beautifully paced. When Tolontan declares, “All I’m trying is to give people more knowledge about the powers that shape our lives,” it’s as if he’s speaking for the filmmakers. Collective is the embodiment of his words—a masterpiece that is both cinematic and journalistic. NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. On Demand.

Higher Love

To say that Hasan Oswald’s debut documentary is a snapshot of America’s opioid crisis implies something too quick. There’s nothing snappy about spending 10 minutes cramped in a room of New Jerseyans endlessly shooting up. The camerawork is graphic and unsteady, and you can feel the lack of control permeating every inch of squalor. Despite this grotesque intimacy, Higher Love finds its more interesting subject idling outside the trap house. We first meet Daryl, a 47-year-old printing press owner and father of eight, trolling dilapidated industrial parks in search of his pregnant girlfriend, Nani. If she’s depicted as one of the opioid crisis’s ceaseless tragedies (her mother died of an overdose), Daryl is one of its memorable supporting characters. You couldn’t script his boundless patience with Nani or his explosions of contempt at how deep her addiction runs. Secondary stories of other Camden residents battling the needle aren’t as layered, though they do reveal untold absurdities of the recovery system, like needing to score one final time in order to receive a suitably high dose of Suboxone for detox. In that light, Higher Love reveals utter extremity becoming dismally banal. For Daryl, the burning question becomes, when is giving up the only rational response? NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On Demand.

Light Years

Vermont, 1999: A hot pink lacrosse cap, a fistful of psilocybin mushrooms—things are obscure in Light Years before the actual obscurity even kicks in. The third indie dramedy from writer-director Colin Thompson (Loser’s Crown, It’s Us) employs mushrooms as an informal time machine, transporting mid-30s Kevin back to the first night he ever partook, at 16. The result is a bit like if Charlie Kaufman directed (and interrogated) a Mike White comedy for less than $100,000. Thompson himself quite charmingly plays most characters on Kevin’s trip—man, woman, young, old—but it’s Russell Posner as Kevin’s loopy, almost telepathically synced best friend, Briggs, that cements the film’s pathos and justifies the flashback in the first place. We’re swept into Kevin and Briggs’ teenage idiolect, borderline nonsense about Burlington rock bands and NBA draft busts to everyone else. But the love wrapped up in their shared language is enough to sustain and choke Kevin for the rest of his life. Even if the superimposed animation of the trip feels more obligatory than valuable and Thompson’s acting isn’t as strong in wholly dramatic scenes, the theme hoists this indie above its weight class. Selective memory is its own kind of drug, and you can always travel back one way or another. TV-14. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On Demand.

Wander Darkly

Adrienne and Matteo (Sienna Miller and Diego Luna) are not-sohappy new parents. They fight at home, at parties, in the car…until a head-on tra c collision cuts their final argument short. This propels Adrienne into an out-of-body experience, trapping her in a limbo where she’s forced to silently and invisibly observe the paramedics fail to revive her, and her subsequent funeral. And then she wakes up. She’s not dead, but she’s convinced she is, triggering an existential crisis that causes her to reflect on the truth behind her relationship with Matteo. This is the point where the film becomes visionary, evoking dreamy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-esque reveries across memory in order to pinpoint where their love began to fade. In these retrospective journeys through the most salient events of their relationship, Adrienne and her imagined version of Matteo communicate frankly about their ups and downs—something they struggled to do in the real world. Reminiscent of a less esoteric She Dies Tomorrow (another three-star 2020 release), this confident direccommercial success until late-life

torial debut from Tara Miele is a psychological probe into the ways we reckon with trauma, e ectively blurring the malleable lines between reality and memory. R. MIA VICINO. On Demand.

Sound of Metal

If a noisecore drummer loses his hearing, should anyone care? Sound of Metal presents a remarkably empathetic portrait of that rare beast—the working hardcore percussionist committed to sobriety and a girlfriend/bandmate—yet shows just a taste of the goodish life Ruben (Riz Ahmed) and Lou (Olivia Cooke) share while touring in a cozy Airstream before his sudden loss of hearing tears their plans asunder. While the plotline might seem eerily similar to the 2004 indie flick It’s All Gone Pete Tong, this story isn’t about punishing hubris. Ruben, unlike Pete Tong’s superstar DJ, has already dealt with his substance-abuse issues at the film’s start, and he tries his damnedest to embrace the silence suggested by deaf guru Joe (Paul Raci) at a cultish American Sign Language camp. Unable to abandon his eterna-gigging life plans, our hero neither hears nor listens to the increasingly gloomy diagnoses en route to a ording the semblance of hearing promised by cochlear implants, which prove a maddeningly false tease. This directorial debut from The Place Beyond the Pines screenwriter Darius Marder exploits next-gen soundcraft and Ahmed’s electric vapidity to its best advantage while ignoring moralistic conventions, but there’s a troubling condescension pegged to the protagonist’s chosen genre and instrument. Would a talented singer-songwriter be so blithely expected to accept medical practicalities rather than further damaging health in pursuit of doomed passions? Would Beethoven? At the end of the day, this is an expertly crafted labor of love championing the abandonment of dreams. What’s the sound of one hand clapping? R. JAY HORTON.

Zappa

Possessed of an abstruse, willfully di cult muse that bled impossible time signatures and dark humor into even the most approachable sections of his daunting discography, Frank Zappa e ectively evaded Amazon Prime.

novelty single “Valley Girl” inexplicably cracked the charts. But his fame as an iconoclastic counterpop-cultural figure somehow still burns bright a quarter-century after his 1993 death from prostate cancer at the age of 52. How, exactly, did an avant-rock misanthrope best resembling a cross between social activist Abbie Ho man and Beaker ever end up becoming one of The Muppet Show writers’ dream guests anyway? Zappa, the long-awaited doc that began streaming Nov. 27, doesn’t much care and may be o ended by the question. While nearly all authorized rockumentaries shelve criticism of the man for access to the music, Zappa leans into the infernal bargain with generic platitudes and overtold anecdotes scattered throughout 120-plus minutes of performances, interviews and home movies—family keepsakes plus the artist’s own experimentalist collages—stitched together from the evidently overflowing estate vaults. It’s all sure to be a treat for fans and seems fitting tribute to a largely unknowable polymath whose creative oeuvre, which includes a stint writing greeting card copy as a teenager and a final turn as a symphonic composer, survives largely through sarcastic quips and critical reputation. Still, so much of his life story—growing up near a chemical weapons plant, arrested for recording a fake sex (audio) tape, signed by a distracted label rep hoping for a white blues band—feels su ciently compelling if only the nonstop miasma of footage would get out of its own way. NR. JAY HORTON. On Demand.