NEWS: WILL OREGON GOP ADMIT BIDEN WON? COURTS: SOMEBODY PEED IN THE COFFEE. VIDEO GAMES: PLAY IT AGAIN, FAM.
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FINDINGS J U S T I N K AT I G B A K
GUARDIAN GAMES, PAGE 18
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 47, ISSUE 11 One broken window at the Multnomah County Courthouse will cost $35,000 to replace. 5
Want to hear a grizzled old sea captain repeatedly talk about getting straight pins sledgehammered up his butt? There is a show. 21
Half a dozen Republican elected officials in Oregon still haven’t conceded Joe Biden won the election. 6
When Atari threw out disks containing the source code for Asteroids, fans dug through their dumpster to save them. 22
The Hazelwood neighborhood around Mall 205 heard gunfire 79 times in 2020. 7
A new play called Capax Infiniti was inspired by a mural with the same name on downtown Portland’s Carlyle Building. 23
An inmate evacuated to Oregon State Penitentiary found a bloody Band-Aid in his mac ’n’ cheese. 8
The best part of graduating from a food cart to a brick-and-mortar?
One local designer created a warstyle card game where the goal is to “out-compliment” the other player. 12
The dishwasher. 24 Friluftsliv is a Scandinavian term for “open-air living.” 25
Tony Miller got the idea for his new game from watching a video of two “chonky beetles” fighting each other. 14
This month, you can take a master class on the “Pope of Pop Cinema.” 27
An artist collective created a “treasure hunting” game meant to be played at Enchanted Forest. 15
ON THE COVER:
NEWS: WILL OREGON GOP ADMIT BIDEN WON? COURTS: SOMEBODY PEED IN THE COFFEE. VIDEO GAMES: PLAY IT AGAIN, FAM.
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Game night in quarantine, illustration by Jack Kent.
A new Oregon City cannabis club resembles a “suburban dad’s converted man-cave.” 29
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OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK: Portland Brewing will close in February, after 34 years in business.
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DIALOGUE Oregon
ARKETS M R A T C E D BY N PRESENTE
(PST) M P 0 3 : 5 , 2021 | 2 1 H C | MAR FRIDAY
A University of Oregon study shows 25% of Oregon women and 21% of men say they won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine. That would mean that too few Oregonians will get the vaccine to get the pandemic under control—Dr. Anthony Fauci recently estimated that as many as 85% of Americans will need to get vaccinated to prevent rapid spread. In last week’s cover story, WW detailed four key demographics with high rates of vaccine opposition, including anti-mask Republicans and natural-oils-loving, naturopath-leaning liberals. Here’s what our readers had to say: Mr. Logic via wweek.com: “From the city that is afraid of fluoride, this is not surprising. Science is not spoken here.” @marziah via Twitter: “Plenty of left-leaning science deniers, too. Their homeopath told them vaccines are full of toxins and they should do a liver detox instead or whatever woo is now fashionable.” Lucille Beever via Facebook: “I think vaccine requirements in schools in the workplace and travel and health care, on and on,
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Dr. Know
BY MART Y SMITH @martysmithxxx
Why do newspapers insist on using criminals’ nicknames, as in Tusitala “Tiny” Toese? I don’t know him by any name, so it doesn’t help me, and those that do know him probably already know that Tusitala Toese is the dude they know as “Tiny.” — I.M. “Curious” N. Beaverton Even when someone is universally known by their nickname, Curious, it’s considered polite to dust off their formal, legal name for weighty criminal proceedings. No judge wants to be in the position of saying, “I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until dead, Poopy Pants Johnson, and may God have mercy on your soul.” According to the folks in charge of WW’s stylebook, there’s no hard and fast rule for when to use just the nickname (think Bud Clark), when to put it in quotes, or when to omit it entirely. That said, while you may be right that Toese’s associates know his given name, in many cases the whole point of underworld nicknames is to keep your full legal name from getting tossed around where the wrong people might hear it. Old-school Mafia business was conducted on a first-name basis for this very reason.
will be consumer driven.…Lots of people are going to take their business to places that demand COVID shots.” Nobody Special via wweek. com: “True herd immunity will require the whole world to be vaccinated. That’s not going to happen soon, and may take decades. Also, Fauci keeps changing the goal posts on herd immunity. I think he was saying 60% at one time, now it’s 85%. Or something in between. The bottom line is this: Get everyone who wants it vaccinated ASAP and forget about the rest. Indeed, once the old people get vaccinated, the fatality rate will become very, very low even without being especially close to ‘herd immunity.’” Steve Tait via Facebook: “You choose: safe, effective lifesaving vaccine or ventilator and coffin.” 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
Unfortunately—at the risk of falling prey to stereotypes—there were a lot of first names like Frank, Tony or Vinnie in the organized crime business. Pungent sobriquets like “Chicken Man” or “Shovel Face” came in handy for distinguishing one Frankie from the next. Mob associates might work together for years without ever knowing each other’s last names—unless, of course, one of them got arrested and had his full legal name printed in the newspaper, with his nickname in quotes to remove any doubt about which Big Head Ed we’re talking about. Intentionally or not, printing that nickname does have the pro-social effect of blowing a crook’s cover. It’s like revealing a supervillain’s secret identity, except the supervillain’s name is something like Frankie Hot Dogs. Finally, I can’t close this column without mentioning the Palermo mobster known as “Cosce Affumate,” or “Smoked Thighs,” so called because his ample body hair reminded someone of wisps of smoke clinging to his undoubtedly supple loins. Who made this rather poetic observation (and what happened to them after they started telling people about it) is not recorded. Still, I think we can all agree: They don’t make aliases like that anymore. QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.
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QANON SUPPORTER FACES STATE AND FEDERAL CHARGES: Cody Melby, the 39-year-old Beavercreek, Ore., man who prosecutors say fired several shots at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in downtown Portland on Jan. 8, now faces criminal charges in both state and federal court. According to the probable cause affidavit filed Jan. 11 in Multnomah County Circuit Court, Melby caused over $1,000 in damage to the building. County prosecutors also noted in the affidavit that Melby faces charges of trespassing at the state Capitol in Salem with a firearm Jan. 6, the same day Trump loyalists stormed the U.S. Capitol. Melby, a veteran who was deployed to the Middle East and the Balkans, has a history of mental health issues, according to custody filings by his ex-wife. Federal prosecutors noted in their Jan. 10 criminal complaint that Melby has posted videos to his YouTube channel expressing support for QAnon conspiracy theories, and making other statements “that subscribe to the ‘Alt-Right’ ideology of ‘Stop the Steal.’” Melby is being held at the Multnomah County Jail on $25,000 bail. COURTHOUSE LOSES A $35,000 WINDOW: Vandals broke a large window Jan. 6 at Multnomah County’s brand-new, $324 million courthouse. The cost for a replacement window: about $35,000, according to county spokesman Mike Pullen. The window itself, which contains argon gas between glass panels for energy efficiency and noise reduction, costs $12,000, but the cost of shipping it from overseas and bringing in an installation team from out of state adds to the price. On Jan. 9, things got worse for the 17-story building, which opened in October. A sprinkler head on the seventh floor failed, leaking water all the way down to the basement. The county is still investigating the cause and determining the extent of the damage but hopes the “significant” cost of fixing it will be covered by the sprinkler’s warranty.
BILL TARGETS DOUBLE-DIPPING LAWMAKERS: Senate Bill 527, sponsored by Senate Minority Leader Fred Girod (R-Stayton) and Sen. Lynn Findley (R-Vale), would prohibit lawmakers from serving on the budget-writing Joint Ways and Means Committee “if member, relative of member or business with which member or relative is associated enters into contracts with State of Oregon for provision of goods or services to state, including capital construction.” As WW reported in 2019, companies associated with state Rep. Greg Smith (R-Heppner), a longtime member of the Ways and Means Committee, secured two large rail-related contracts with the Oregon Department of Transportation. Girod didn’t respond to a request for comment. Findley says he didn’t connect the bill to Smith but signed on because he’s in favor of greater transparency in the Legislature. As for Smith, he said he was unaware of the bill until contacted by WW, but he supports the concept, which would go into effect 91 days after the session and not be retroactive. “I’m signing on as a co-sponsor,” Smith said. OREGON STATE SONG COULD GET NEW LYRICS: The Oregon state song could get a rewrite under a bill proposed by Rep. Andrea Salinas (D-Lake Oswego) or a resolution proposed by Rep. Sheri Schouten (D-Beaverton), among others. “The Legislative Assembly finds that the current state song for the State of Oregon, ‘Oregon, My Oregon,’ has lyrics that are entrenched in racism, that fail to recognize the suffering of Native people who were forcibly removed from this state and that fail to recognize the pain and suffering of Black people who were subject to exclusion laws targeting Black people,” reads the text of House Bill 2329, sponsored by Salinas. That bill would institute a process for modifying the lyrics, which celebrates Oregon as the “Land of the Empire Builders” that is “conquered and held by free men.” House Concurrent Resolution 11 would rewrite it. The legislative session, which began Jan. 11, saw the swearing in of an increased number of lawmakers of color, and Schouten has previously said she has support from the BIPOC Caucus for a new song. Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
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NEWS
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK
J U S T I N YA U
TWO QUESTIONS
Do Oregon Republicans Acknowledge Biden Won? Last month, a dozen Republican state legislators asked Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to join a Texas lawsuit that challenged the presidential election results in key swing states. Rosenblum, who is married to the co-owner of WW’s parent company, declined. That seemed to settle the matter. But Oregon Republicans’ support for the lawsuit again became a point of political contention last week after a mob of Trump loyalists overran the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, seeking to overturn the election. Five people, including a Capitol Police officer, died. “Frankly, every #ORleg Republican who signed this letter is also complicit in today’s violence,” Rep. Julie Fahey (D-West Eugene) tweeted Jan. 6 with a link to the letter requesting a challenge of the election results. Republicans took umbrage. “This was not a coup, and Rep. Fahey’s statement that those of us that signed a letter for the Oregon attorney general to uphold fair elections are ‘complicit in today’s violence’ is shamefully arrogant and wrong,” said Rep. David Brock Smith (R-Port Orford) in a statement Jan. 8. “I have been very clear as this was not an act of sedition, it was to highlight the unconstitutional actions surrounding elections that occurred in Pennsylvania.” Republican unwillingness to accept the election results, and the prospect of a right-wing insurrection, remains a serious threat to the future of the nation—and the peace of Oregon. So WW asked all 12 of the legislators who sought to overturn the results of the presidential election whether they recognized Joe Biden as the legitimately elected president of the United States and what, if anything, they’re telling their constituents to do on Inauguration Day, when right-wing protests are planned in 50 state capitals and Washington, D.C. Five of the legislators responded to a written request for comment along with a follow-up. Sen. Chuck Thomsen (R-Hood River) notably says that his constituents should “acknowledge our new president.” That advice might need to apply to his fellow legislators. Notably, Oregon secretary of state candidate Sen. Kim Thatcher (R-Keizer), who lost to Shemia Fagan, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did seven others. RACHEL MONAHAN.
WE ASKED:
1. Do you recognize Joe Biden as the legitimately elected president of the United States: yes or no? Please explain your reasoning. 2. What are you telling constituents to do on Inauguration Day? Sen. Chuck Thomsen (R-Hood River) “Joe Biden is our next U.S. president. I’m unclear on a need to explain that reasoning. We have elections in this country, and the winner gets inaugurated. “Stay home and acknowledge our new president.”
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Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
Rep. Bill Post (R-Keizer) “Yes, I do recognize President-elect Biden as the incoming president. I signed the letter to the attorney general because I believe there were some inconsistencies in some states.…I felt that the Texas lawsuit was a way for an investigation into those inconsistencies. “I would say select a news/media outlet and watch it if presidential inaugurations are of interest to them! No matter what party wins the presidency, Inauguration Day is a big deal, especially to political geeks like me, so I’ll be watching as I have every four years since the first one I can remember watching in 1968.” Rep. Vikki Breese Iverson (R-Prineville) “The decision to certify the presidential election falls upon Congress, consistent with the vote of the Electoral College. This is the model that has served this country well for over 200 years. Joe Biden is the president-elect. “The focus of state legislatures throughout the country should be to continue to improve our systems, ensure the process is fair and equitable to all voters, and know without a doubt that the integrity of each state’s system, including Oregon’s, is beyond reproach.” Rep. David Brock Smith (R-Port Orford) “Unlike many leaders across our state, who have been vocal over the last four years never accepting Trump as their president, I have already accepted President-elect Biden. As leaders of our state, it’s critically important to lead by example, especially for our youth.” “As I articulated in last Friday’s press release, I support any individual’s right to peacefully protest and condemn unlawful riots and acts violence whenever and wherever they occur. I encourage everyone, especially our youth, to watch President-elect Biden’s inauguration and listen to his address to the nation on his administrations vision for the future. I hope we can come together as a state and a nation for all Oregonians and all people across our great republic.” Rep. Gary Leif (R-Roseburg) “At the time I signed the challenge letter, I was given information that did not actually transpire. I cannot take back my signature, but…I was very much misled regarding the letter in question. “We have concluded the election and Joe Biden is our next president....I’m encouraging everyone to simply treat the upcoming inauguration as we have all those in the past. We will peacefully transition from one elected president to the next elected president.”
DID NOT RESPOND:
Sen. Dennis Linthicum (R-Klamath Falls) Sen. Kim Thatcher (R-Keizer) Former Sen. Alan Olsen (R-Canby) Former Rep. Greg Barreto (R-Cove) Rep. Mike Nearman (R-Independence) Rep. E. Werner Reschke (R-Klamath Falls) Rep. Bobby Levy (R-Echo)
INSURGENCE: On Jan. 6, right-wing protesters gathered on the lawn of the Oregon Capitol, wielding rifles and paintball guns.
NEWS TREVOR GAGNIER
MAPPED
THE BIG NUMBER
$113 Million That’s how much cash the Portland Clean Energy Fund is sitting on.
HOT ZONE: Portland neighborhoods east of 82nd Avenue saw shootings rise by more than 130% in 2020.
Shooting East Gun violence spikes in Portland’s East Precinct. On Jan. 10, two people attending a vigil were hit by gunfire in an apartment parking lot on Northeast 125th Avenue. The shooting was a continuation of an extraordinary hail of bullets that struck Portland last year: The city saw 890 shootings in 2020, more than double the 393 reported the year before. But the double shooting last Sunday also reflected the 2020 trend because of where it happened: in the Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct. The East Precinct, which covers Southeast 39th through 162nd avenues, accounted for nearly half the city’s shootings last year, and they increased at a steeper rate than in Portland at large: from 187 in 2019 to 439 in 2020. Last week, the Police Bureau released a map of 2020 shootings by neighborhood. The Hazelwood neighborhood, which runs along East Burnside Street east of 82nd Avenue and includes Mall 205, had the most: 79 reported cases. Compare that to neighborhoods like Grant Park and Reed, which had none. “This is a complex topic for which there is no easy answer,” says bureau spokesman Lt. Greg Pashley. “The PPB is interested in community input on this topic, not
just for information after the fact, but we would like to hear from the community as to what their expectations are of the police regarding shooting violence, especially in light of the record number of shootings last year.” Brian Renauer, director of the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute at Portland State University, says the disparity in violence has been developing for years, dating back to previous economic recessions. “It’s important to look at the downturn in the economy that occurred nationally,” Renauer says. “The victims are concentrated in certain areas. Outer east county is where we find that concentration of poverty.” Renauer says many young people commit shootings— and as they lose jobs in a pandemic, they see no future for themselves. He says the solution to this disparity should not solely lie in the hands of the Portland Police Bureau. “The best techniques nationally revolve around finding social networks and intervening, making outreach to potential next victims, and finding the right people to talk to them,” Renauer says. “That becomes problematic when there’s this lack of trust. We’re not going to arrest our way out of it.” LATISHA JENSEN.
Neighborhood Shooting Incidents 2019 - 2021 0
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As the pandemic continues strangling the local economy, the city of Portland is sitting on a pile of cash earmarked for the communities of color hardest hit by COVID-19. The Portland Clean Energy Fund, which voters approved in November 2018, hopes to issue $9 million in grants later this fiscal year. But even if it gets that money out the door, PCEF will retain reserves of $113 million—with $50 million to $60 million more expected every year. The fund taxes large corporations on their Portland sales to provide “dedicated funding for climate action that advances racial and social justice.” One of the measure’s selling points was that it would create jobs in clean energy and energy efficiency. That’s not yet happening, although the need is great. Last month, for instance, the city of Portland handed out $500 cash vouchers to 4,000 residents, the second such disbursal of cash assistance in the face of what officials called “overwhelming demand.” The city of Portland received $114 million in federal CARES Act money last year, but officials say the stimulus money did not come close to meeting the local need. “We are seeing a need for more government support in a bunch of different ways,” says Kristin Dennis, chief of staff to Mayor Ted Wheeler. Dennis says the mayor’s office has asked the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, which oversees the Portland Clean Energy Fund, whether there is any way to get money out the door faster. That’s a little complicated: The fund is supposed to be allocated through a competitive grant process that is first vetted by a five-member volunteer commission and then approved by the City Council. A year ago, city officials told WW they expected to make its first grants by “late summer of 2020.” But in the end, PCEF didn’t finish its competitive bidding process until Nov. 23 and now doesn’t expect to put money into Portlanders’ hands until “early summer.” Donnie Oliveira, deputy director of the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, says the fund was never intended to be a stimulus program. “The Portland Clean Energy Fund was created to be an investment resource for frontline communities most impacted by climate change and to resource climate leadership from BIPOC communities,” he says. “While there is certainly overlap in the impacts to marginalized communities from the pandemic and the climate crisis, PCEF is not a resource to address the pandemic directly.” As for why the fund hasn’t spent any money yet, Oliveira notes the city, like every other organization, saw its work become more arduous because of COVID-19. NIGEL JAQUISS.
Source: Portland Police Bureau Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
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NEWS
CHRIS NESSETH
CHRIS NESSETH
Mess Hall
SLOW BURN: Wildfires destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres across Oregon last September.
DROPOUT: Former gang members say they feared for their lives when they evacuated to the state’s maximum security prison.
Oregon prison inmates were evacuated from wildfires onto the home turf of their former gang associates. BY TE SS R I S K I
tess@wweek.com
It had been a long night, and Derrick Jermaine Jay wanted a cup of coffee. That was a bad idea. On the morning of Sept. 9, 2020, Jay awakened on the floor of the Oregon State Penitentiary. He and the 250 or so other men who had slept on the floor around him didn’t get the best night of sleep. They had arrived in the middle of the night after standing outside the prison under a blood-red sky for hours as ash rained down. The men had been evacuated from Oregon State Correctional Institution—a mere 5 miles away—as the Beachie Creek Fire burned to the east. At their new location, they didn’t get a warm reception. “One of the inmates was like, ‘This coffee tastes funny,’” Jay told WW. “The officers were the ones who took the coffee from us and were like, ‘Somebody peed in the coffee.’” By then, however, several men around him had already sipped it, Jay says. When he went out into the yard, Jay, who is Black, interacted with other Black inmates who warned him about eating the food being prepared by other prisoners. “Hey, dude, don’t eat the food. The white dudes in the kitchen are putting stuff in the food,” Jay, 48, recalls an OSP inmate telling him. The reason, they explained: White supremacist gang members were taking vengeance on inmates who had defected from their gang. One of the OSP inmates handed him soup and potato chips through the fence. That was a relief, because earlier, Jay says, he had found a piece of electrical wire in his cafeteria food. “I heard OSP inmates calling out and identifying ‘gang dropouts’ from OSCI and saying they were going to attack them,” Jay said in a declaration submitted in November in Marion County Circuit Court. Jay, who is imprisoned on an armed robbery conviction, said he witnessed multiple gang fights break out. “The facility did not seem to take any precautions to keep rival gangs separated.” Jay had been evacuated away from a wildfire and into the center of a simmering prison gang fight. In early September, against the backdrop of a global pandemic, the state was burning. The wildfires engulfed over a million acres, prompting the evacuation of more than 2,500 Oregon inmates from four different prisons, three of them into the state penitentiary. 8
Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
It was a remarkable improvisation. And despite media reports at the time describing squalid conditions, the Oregon Department of Corrections praised itself for the handling of evacuations. Brandon Kelly, superintendent at Oregon State Penitentiary, said in an interview with WW that if he were to grade how the department managed the wildfire evacuations, he would give it an A. “Were there a couple lessons learned? Absolutely. But given the circumstances and the extreme emergency and the threat to their physical safety should the fire turn to that direction, I think that we did an amazing job,” Kelly said, adding that an inmate told him DOC staff “scored a touchdown.” But that assessment conflicts with the accounts of five inmates who spoke to WW, as well as the written declarations of four other prisoners submitted on the record in both state and federal court. Those inmates say the turmoil began when gang members retaliated against former gang members, or “dropouts,” through physical assault and contamination of food and drink. Mitchell Randall, a gang dropout, said in a written declaration submitted to federal court that he was “mentally shaken” when he learned he was being evacuated to Oregon State Penitentiary, because he might see former associates. “OSP kitchen workers were messing with our food,” he wrote. “My vegetables tasted like soap one day and there were other debris in our food. There was a bloody BandAid in the mac ’n’ cheese. It was very traumatic.” Jennifer Black, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, says much of it didn’t happen. “If a person were to sabotage the food, it’s likely they would end up eating that food or serving it to their friends,” she says. “OSP reviewed video footage of the preparation of meals and found no evidence to suggest any of the food was tampered with during preparation.” The Band-Aid, she says, was an accident. Since September, the Oregon Justice Resource Center and Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility have called on the governor and the Oregon Legislature to conduct an independent investigation of the wildfire evacuations. At least one state lawmaker is on board: Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Portland). “It is important we have a full
accounting of what occurred in DOC facilities during and immediately after the wildfires,” she says, “to ensure this doesn’t happen again.” Rep. Dexter was one of two legislators who toured OSP after the wildfire evacuations. The other was Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward (D-Portland), who declined to comment. Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-Clackamas), co-chair of the House Judiciary Committee, says she’s discouraged to the point that she no longer trusts the investigative process. “I don’t know that we would get useful information in a timely fashion that we could act on,” she says, “and I’m not sure who would do it.” Since the fall, lawmakers have been asking DOC for a copy of its report on the evacuations. Hours before WW’s story published, DOC released the report, which was largely glowing. “Issues were resolved as quickly as possible, avoiding small issues from becoming big issues,” it said. A spokeswoman for Gov. Kate Brown declined to say whether the governor believes an independent investigation is necessary. Through her spokeswoman Liz Merah, Brown declined to comment for this story. “We look forward to reviewing the [DOC] report,” Merah said. During the wildfires, inmates of three prisons were evacuated to Oregon State Penitentiary: Mill Creek Correctional Facility, Santiam Correctional Institution and Oregon State Correctional Institution. All three were about 5 miles from OSP, or a 10-minute drive along the freeway. DOC spokeswoman Jennifer Black says the agency decided to move inmates to OSP—the state’s oldest prison and its only maximum-security facility, built in the 1800s—because its 25-foot-high concrete walls provided protection from fires that other prisons didn’t have. Of the three prisons that were evacuated, the most turmoil arose among inmates evacuated from Oregon State Correctional Institution, which is known by prisoners and lawyers alike as the “gang dropout” prison in Oregon. (Black says that’s not an official designation.) In other words, when inmates drop out of a gang, they are often housed at OSCI, where they are supposed to be free of retaliation for dropping out. OSCI also houses men who are under some form of protective custody—for acting as informants to police or prosecutors, for example. But the prison into which its inmates were evacuated—OSP—is a hot spot for gangs among Oregon prisons, lawyers and prisoners say. “When I went over there [to OSP], I’m thinking, I’m going to die because I’m not supposed to be going over there,” said Gary*, an inmate at OSCI who was evacuated. He tells WW he previously provided information to an investigator and is therefore a target among OSP inmates. “I was thinking, this is a death sentence. One of the good things about wearing the mask is, it kind of hides your identity.” Tara Herivel, an Oregon lawyer who represents prisoners, says it is the prison’s responsibility to keep known gang members separated from each other. CONTINUED ON PAGE 9
NEWS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8 “Why is it a problem not to keep people separated based on affiliation?” Herivel says. “Because they’ll kill each other. It’s been the protocol since the beginning of prisons to separate known gang members from their adversaries, or dropouts, so they don’t kill each other.” Among the main groups responsible for conflict, according to the prisoners who spoke to WW, were two white supremacist gangs: European Kindred and Insane Peckerwood Syndicate, otherwise known as IPS. Randy Blazak, an expert on extremism in the Pacific Northwest, estimates there are about 20 major gangs in Oregon prisons, and 200 or so subgroups of those gangs. The gangs tend to be divided along racial lines. All of these groups converged in the chow hall, prisoners said. In addition to IPS and European Kindred, prisoners told WW the Southsiders, a Latino gang, were among the groups that fought. But it wasn’t limited to these three groups, and the fighting was not between different gangs: The gangs at OSP targeted former members, men who used to be in their pack but dropped out. And when the men from opposing prisons couldn’t come into direct contact with one another, OSP inmates—who had the home field advantage— allegedly retaliated through other means: the food. Such was the case for William Harvey, a dropout gang member who was transferred to OSP during the evacuations. “There were OSP [inmates] delivering our food, delivering our sheets and blankets, and cooking our food,” Harvey said in a written declaration submitted to federal court in late September. “One day I saw a bloody Band-Aid in the food being delivered; those trays were returned to the kitchen and replaced with sack lunches, but after that they kept feeding us hot trays from the kitchen and were making us eat the food.” Assaulting former gang members isn’t necessarily a choice, either, according to the rules of prison politics. “It means that if you see that dude, you have to take him out,” says Thomas*, an inmate at OSCI. “You have to get them. It’s like a mandatory thing.” Kelly, the OSP superintendent, conceded that corrections officers did need to use chemical irritants like pepper spray to break up fights. In its report, DOC says inmates were “fed separately as much as possible to reduce cross contact.” However, the report says, the OSCI and OSP inmates mixed in the chow hall. “Several [inmate] fights occurred early in the evacuation; some were one-on-one, and some were multiple [inmates] (3-4),” the report says. “These altercations involved [security threat group inmates] and former members of their groups (dropouts). It was difficult at first to identify potential conflicts.” Beyond physical danger from adversaries, the evacuations placed inmates in another kind of danger: the pandemic. Prior to the evacuations, there were zero reported COVID cases among inmates at OSCI, and two among staff, according to DOC’s online COVID tracker. In the weeks following, infections at the prison swelled. To date, 231 inmates and 35 staff at OSCI have tested positive for the virus, including many who were interviewed for or included in this story. “It was horrible,” Jay said. “It was like they didn’t care that it was a pandemic. It was like they didn’t care that some inmates were getting assaulted.” *The inmate did want his real name used for fear of retribution.
Hotseat: Becky Crane Before the pandemic began, her son died—of influenza. BY RACHEL MONAHAN
rmonahan@wweek.com
For Becky Crane, 50, a sixth grade teacher in Coos Bay, the horror of 2020 began a month before the COVID-19 pandemic stuck. On Feb. 17, her previously healthy son, Blake, 16, died after testing positive for influenza B. Those who’ve fought Oregon’s COVID-19 restrictions have often downplayed the risks of the coronavirus by likening it to flu. But plenty of families know there are real risks attached to influenza. Last flu season, an estimated 22,000 Americans died of it. “Unfortunately, we are at all at risk from flu,” says Serese Marotta, chief operating officer of the Virginia-based advocacy group Families Fighting Flu. “And we have a lot of stories like Becky’s.…Simply put, vaccines save lives.” Flu season continues through March—an added risk atop the pandemic. This year, Crane organized a flu clinic through the Coos Bay School District for students. It vaccinated 200 children attending school via distance learning. Crane told WW she wants to reach people who, like her, have a favorable view of vaccines but perhaps don’t realize the stakes attached to an annual shot. WW: Tell me about Blake. Becky Crane: Blake played baseball and he played the trumpet in the band. He was caring and kind, although he was pretty shy. He was definitely a homebody and preferred socializing with his family more than outside friends. He feared change. He was afraid of growing up. He didn’t love school, but he loved reading. I had to tell his teachers through the years, “You have permission to take away his books.” In fact, when we went through his backpack after he passed, he had two huge books in his backpack. He had to keep two books on hand. And I learned why—his friends knew—he had two: In case one was taken away by a teacher, he wanted to have a backup. How did you feel about vaccines? I am pretty much a rule follower. When I would take him to his annual checkups around his birthday every year, they always would tell me to bring him back in October and get his flu shot. What happened with his flu shot last year was simply we had some changes in our schedule. He had started driving. He no longer needed pickup after school to where I could run him over to get his flu shot after I’d picked him up. When did he get sick? We were planning a trip about five hours south for a weekend of snowboarding. It was a Christmas gift from his grandparents, and they were going with us to take him snowboarding. That next morning, his biggest complaint was a severe sore throat. We decided to take him into the emergency room in hopes [it was] strep throat. [He didn’t have strep.] They told us that he must just have a virus and needs to be put to bed, no snowboarding. We took him back to our motel room and we got him lots of fluids, got him some food. He just wanted to sleep. [Later that evening] it had progressed to where he had a cough and he was describing a pain in his upper back. My husband and I both were interpreting it as he had pinched a nerve from coughing. In the middle of the night, he woke up, once complaining of struggling to breathe. The next morning, we decided to get home. He slept the entire way home. We got there, he walked himself upstairs to his bedroom. [Two hour later] he started throwing up blood. So that’s when we decided to take him to our local emergency room. And he walked himself downstairs and he walked himself to our car. [Doctors] wanted to fly him to a children’s hospital four hours away. Once the flight team showed up, which required
REMEMBERED: Blake Crane, 16, died last year of the flu, a month before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
them to transfer him from the equipment because they had intubated him, they weren’t able to get him stable again after they tried to switch the machines. He ended up going into cardiac arrest multiple times until he passed at 2 am that night. I don’t think I knew healthy children could die of the flu. What warning do you wish had been given to you? The most important thing that I wish I would have understood was that trouble breathing was a severe warning sign. It became pretty common knowledge, for a lot of people when COVID came just a month later after Blake’s death, that trouble breathing leads to intubation and death. The worst-case scenario that I knew could happen was people could get pneumonia—to me [that] was something that developed a little slowly. What stuck in my head was we had been to the emergency room, and this was just a virus. That’s what they told us. It’s just a virus. Even as it progressed, I think I was hesitant to think about going back to the emergency room because I had just been there. I can see it very clearly that with the progression that it had taken—the cough and then the back pain even could have been warning symptoms for me, had I known. And, of course, I wish I had known that. What do you think of when you hear people say COVID is just the flu? It doesn’t mean anything to me. I know the flu is very scary as well. But I’m also not naive in understanding what happened to Blake; it’s rare. A lot of people are able to manage flu without dying and COVID even without dying. Blake died on Feb. 17, 2020. So it was just one month before the world shut down. Often, people want to blame Blake’s death on COVID. What I found is, people were more comfortable with the scary COVID being the cause than the everyday flu. When they ask, “Are you sure he didn’t have COVID?” I say I will never be sure because they didn’t test him, but they did test him for influenza. And he was positive for influenza B. And I’ve been told that it would be really rare to learn that he had two viruses at the same time. And after this experience and after learning what I’ve learned, this is a very typical flu story, unfortunately. And so I believe he died from the flu. Do you have different views of the flu vaccine now? [Blake] didn’t get a flu vaccine last year simply because it wasn’t convenient. A couple sick days from school—that was the worst-case scenario in my mind. My story speaks for itself. I had to sit in a room with a doctor telling me my son’s going to die. And she didn’t tell me that it was because he didn’t get a shot, but I said, “You mean he’s dying from the flu and I didn’t get him a shot this year.” Nobody wants to go through that. I just want to share my story with people so people can understand the importance of the flu vaccine. Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
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NEWS
CLARA BERKS
Giving Thanks
The Bottom Line
Portland kicked record-breaking ass this year. The most donors, donations, nonprofits, and community partners in G!G history. More people donated than ever before, and they did so in smaller amounts. This matched our expectations that people wouldn’t have as much to
give in 2020, but more people wanted to help. We saw sharp increases in individual and corporate support as donors stepped up in every possible way.
Give!Guide by the Numbers TOTAL
TARGET GOAL $5 MILLION
DONATED BY
35 & UNDER DONORS: $521 205
You supported Portland’s nonprofits like never before. And we’re so grateful. To all who gave to local nonprofits through WW’s Give!Guide in November and December: In the darkest days of 2020—literally and figuratively—your candles of generosity and belief in the goodness of humankind cast the brightest of lights. You lit up our world in an unprecedented, wonderful way, and we cannot thank you enough. More than 15,860 of you gave 174 nonprofits 6,570,879 reasons to celebrate the end of 2020. We regularly ask: Where would Portland be without our remarkable nonprofit community? Today we ask: Where would Portland’s nonprofit community be without you? You made a total of 62,514 gifts at an average of $104 per donation. Each donor gave to an average of four nonprofits. Give!Guide has never experienced anything like this, at a time when needs have never been more pressing. In a year that has been just plain dreadful in so many ways for local nonprofits, you have provided essential support and, perhaps even more important, powerful emotional and spiritual encouragement. Elsewhere on this page are graphic illustrations of this wonderful outpouring.
There are also lists of our sponsors and business supporters. Give!Guide could not exist without their help. So if you happen across any of them in the weeks and months ahead, please go out of your way to give ’em your thanks. That’s it for Give!Guide’s 2020 campaign. Please stay tuned in these pages and on giveguide.org for news of our 2021 plans. In the meantime: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Toni Tringolo, Executive Director Richard H. Meeker, Founder P.S. Give!Guide can always stand to improve. We’ll be emailing questionnaires to donors soon. When you receive yours, please let us know your thoughts. And you can always email suggestions at any time— giveguide@wweek.com. P.P.S. You can still support this cohort of nonprofits by visiting our website giveguide.org. All donate buttons now route directly to that nonprofit’s giving portal during our offseason.
About Give!Guide Give!Guide is Willamette Week’s grassroots fundraising campaign, which has raised more than $40 million since its inception in 2004. Alongside raising money for nonprofits, a goal of the campaign is to engage Portlanders 35 and under in giving back to the community TOP 10 NONPROFITS ACROSS ALL CATEGORIES, 35 & UNDER 1. Oregon Cultural Trust, 417 donors 2. Wild Diversity, 274 donors 3. Native American Youth and Family Center, 253 donors 4. Don’t Shoot Portland, 220 donors 5. Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, 186 donors 6. Mudbone, 165 donors 7. Wisdom of the Elders Inc., 151 donors 8. Oregon Food Bank, 150 donors 9. Street Roots, 149 donors 10. Blanchet House, 143 donors 10
Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
and to build a culture of youth activation in Portland. We prioritize the community over individual organizations, encourage support between nonprofits, and foster everyday Portlanders’ efforts to make a difference.
BIG GIVE DAYS Treat Yo Self to Patagonia Portland, $168,856 A to Z Wineworks Extravaganza, $190,950 Columbia River Gorge Getaway, $175,110 Powell’s Books Shelf Buster, $265,399 BlaqPak Black Friday, $66,760 PDX Gives Back, $724,036 Music Millennium Plays It Loud, $143,772 Go by Trek, $230,273 Portland Trail Blazers Fan Package, $139,331
$6,570,679
THAT’S A
THAT’S 130% OF THIS YEAR’S GOAL.
TOTAL DONATED
DECREASE OF
A
$62 728 FROM 2019.
37%
INCREASE FROM
$53,000
11,480
The largest single donation
THAT’S A 43% INCREASE FROM
2019.
2019
$10 donations
15,863 62,514
4 950 WERE 35 & UNDER.
UNIQUE DONORS
EACH DONOR GAVE TO AN AVERAGE OF FOUR NONPROFITS.
DONATIONS
Average donation: $104, a decrease from $122 in 2019. Average 35 & Under donation was $47, a decrease from $56.
11 077
WERE 35 & UNDER.
Median donation: $50, no change from 2019. Median 35 & Under donation was $20, no change.
$575,900 Total business and matching gifts: $575,900, an increase from $363,000 in 2019.
TOP 10 NONPROFITS ACROSS ALL CATEGORIES
THE 35 & UNDER CHALLENGE WINNERS BY CATEGORY
1. Oregon Cultural Trust, $560,227 2. Oregon Food Bank, $282,456 3. Friends of the Columbia Gorge, $206,707 4. The Pongo Fund, $187,647 5. Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette, $123,320 6. Transition Projects, $112,605 7. p:ear, $103,320 8. Meals on Wheels People, $96,625 9. Central City Concern, $90,640 10. Adelante Mujeres, $89,820
Animals: Cat Adoption Team (CAT), 123 young donors Civil & Human Rights: Don’t Shoot Portland, 220 young donors Community: Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA)*, 253 young donors Creative Expression: Friends of Noise*, 95 young donors Education: College Possible*, 106 young donors Environment: Wild Diversity, 274 young donors Health: Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette*, 122 young donors Human Services: Oregon Food Bank, 150 young donors * Category winner in 2019.
Tabletop games are essential to surviving quarantine—and Portland makes some awesome ones.
I
t’s well known what the effect all work and no play can have on a person. Of course, anyone lucky enough to even have work right now shouldn’t complain too much. Still, at a time when home and the office are the same place for many of us, it’s crucial to find ways of distinguishing between them. Otherwise…well, just make sure all axes are stowed somewhere safely out of reach. That’s why, when the clock strikes 5 pm, an increasing number of Americans are sweeping the documents and spreadsheets off the dining room table and throwing down a game board. During the pandemic, many households are rediscovering the joys of shuffling cards and tossing dice—national sales of tabletop games have increased by almost 28%. In Portland, gaming has always been big. Game stores are
Twogether Studios
Jenn Ellis (left) and Keith Baker playing Illimat.
Founder: Keith Baker and Jenn Ellis Year launched: 2014 Game type: Card games, role-playing games Flagship game: Illimat, a witchy card game envisioning Colin Meloy playing bridge with the Angel of Death.
everywhere, there are bars specifically aimed at gamers, and there’s even a game museum out in the ’burbs. But the pastime isn’t just for geeks anymore. So in this issue, we’re highlighting nine local designers making the must-play games of quarantine. Some involve building miniature castles, others are as simple as drawing a card and answering a question. One takes place on a sprawling Afrofuturist world, another can be played by reading a zine at Enchanted Forest. And at least one involves sumo-wrestling beetles. And we just had to get in on the action ourselves—on page 16, you’ll find “Escape From Portland,” Willamette Week’s very own playable board game (or paper game, maybe). Think of it as Chutes and Ladders: Anarchist Jurisdiction Edition. Game on. —Matthew Singer, A&C Editor
In 2015, after five years in town, Keith Baker received his Portland baptismal: an invitation to collaborate with a member of the Decemberists. It came in the form of a Facebook message from guitarist Chris Funk, offering free concert tickets in exchange for a tutorial on Gloom, a card game Baker created a decade before. Eventually, it would lead the band to ask Baker and his wife, Jenn Ellis, if they’d like to work together on a whole new game. “When we tell people the origin story of Illimat and we’re not in Portland,” Ellis says, “we say, ‘When you’re in Portland, you get assigned a Decemberist and they’re a creative guide for your time there.’” The band handed over a 2-by-2-foot wooden game board—an old prop from a photo shoot—and asked if they could turn it into something. The result, Illimat, combined occult themes with elements of classic card games. It was weird but accessible, and that made it a hit: 30,000 copies
sold, without big-box store distribution. “I’ve been making games for a long time,” says Baker, “but with Illimat, that was the first game I’ve been involved with where I felt like I could play this with my dad.” Twogether Studios’ newest project, The Adventure Zone: Bureau of Balance, is inspired by similar familial bonding—it’s a spinoff of a popular podcast in which comedians the McElroy brothers play a Dungeons & Dragons-style role-playing game with their own father. Despite the “turdnado” of a year, as Ellis puts it, pre-orders finally went out, and the hope is that its simplified gameplay will attract an audience similar to that of Illimat— people who love games but don’t want to learn a whole new skill just to play. “There’s a lot of different people who enjoy gaming,” Ellis says. “We really wanted to explore that as designers: How do you help people unplug and play?” MATTHEW SINGER.
What game are you really into right now?
“We try to stick to more classic games because it’s a little mind-clearing rather than always looking at something and thinking, ‘How much did this component cost them?’ We’ve probably played cribbage almost every night. If you ever play Illimat, you see where a couple tiny things stuck in there.”
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Pink Tiger Games
Founder: Ami Baio Year launched: 2017 Game type: Party games Flagship game: You Think You Know Me, a card-driven take on truth-or-dare, minus the dares and humiliation. AMI BAIO
“Think of them as Cards for Humanity.” That’s not exactly how Ami Baio describes the games she makes—icebreaking party games designed to forge connections between people rather than plumb the depths of their depravity—but it’s the most obvious elevator pitch. It’s not that she’s against debauchery. But the uplifting approach, she says, is truer to her personality. “I like to put out words and feelings and thoughts that are encouraging, so that when people get up from the game table, they’ve created positive memories,” she says. “You’re not going to need a shower for your brain.” A massage therapist and physical trainer by trade, Baio, 45, never thought of herself as a game designer, though she’s long been surrounded by that kind of creativity. Her husband, Andy Baio, is the founder of XOXO, the popular internet culture festival. She’s not even sure where the idea for her first game, You Think You Know Me, came from: It just hit her while she was making dinner one night. But the concept falls in line with Baio’s conversational nature. Players draw cards featuring various prompts, ranging from the personal (“I know ___ gives you anxiety”) to the frivolous (“I know your most used emoji is ___”), and try to guess the next player’s response. There’s ultimately a winner, but “winning” isn’t the point. It’s about breaking past the superficial relationships of the social media age.
“There will never be enough posts, enough tweets, enough anything to know everything about someone,” Baio says. “Everyone is endlessly interesting and has so many stories.” You Think You Know Me has sold 11,500 copies so far—a major success in the independent gaming world. Her latest project is similarly wholesome: Flatter Me, in which players try to out-compliment each other. Next month, she’s launching a crowdfunding campaign for a Trivial Pursuit-style game focused on superstitions and folklore called Rabbit Rabbit. It’s a departure thematically, but the driving force is the same as the previous Pink Tiger titles: human connection. “Everyone for all of time has been looking for signs, omens—why are we here?” Baio says. “The research has made me feel really connected to everyone who’s ever lived on this earth.” MATTHEW SINGER.
Swordsfall
Founder: Brandon Dixon Year launched: 2018 Game type: Tabletop role-playing game Flagship game: Swordsfall RPG, a semi-utopic, Afrofuturist Dungeons & Dragons.
BRANDON DIXON
When Brandon Dixon initially launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his role-playing game Swordsfall, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to reach his $2,000 goal. He ended up raising 60 times more than he asked for. “I got to watch it go up,” says Dixon. “It was wild.” Due out later this year, art and lore book Welcome to Tikor will give a comprehensive summary of the fictional world where Swordsfall is set. On the fictional planet of Tikor, Swordsfall uses pre-colonial African mythology to construct a futuristic, semi-utopic world. Like an Afropunk take on Dungeons & Dragons, Swordsfall players can choose from premade characters or create their own, and move through each adventure by rolling dice. Though the game is something of a culmination of short stories Dixon has been writing since he was 18, Swordsfall didn’t begin in earnest until 2018, when Dixon came up with the name and started researching pre-colonial Africa. Instead of focusing on a specific region, he made a point of learning about cultures across the continent.
“There’s so much fantastic source material that’s never been touched,” he says. Swordsfall highlights conventions that are often taken for granted in fantasy, a genre that’s overwhelmingly Euro-centric. In Dixon’s game, characters wear colorful, woven clothing. “King ” is a gender-neutral term and deities are gender-fluid. Though Dixon still hasn’t released a central rulebook—right now, there are only a few books for individual campaigns—releasing the core guide to the world of Swordsfall will be a major milestone for the game. And besides, the RPG is just a small part of what Dixon hopes to accomplish. He’s already published both a Swordsfall comic book and a graphic novel, and is even working on a Swordsfall anime to be released by Powerhouse Animation, the studio behind Castlevania. “I’m not going to be doing just one thing,” he says. “You’ll see my anime. I’ve had movie studios sniffing around, so we’ll see what happens there. I just want to do whatever I can.” SHANNON GORMLEY.
What game are you really into right now? “I don’t really play games. Can you believe it? I play my own games, but I don’t play a lot of other games. When I do, I like 5 Second Rule. It’s super-fun because you have to think really fast.”
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Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
What game are you really into right now? “I just recently fell back in love with Warframe.”
Junior
Portland Gamecraft
Founders: Ryan Mauk, Evan Halbert Year launched: 2015 Game type: Euro-strategy Flagship game: After the Empire, an epic worthy of Peter Jackson.
Founder: Louie Mantia Year launched: 2020 Game types: Card decks Flagship game: Junior hanafuda, a centuries-old style of Japanese playing cards reimagined with a punchy, modern design. LOUIE MANTIA
For Louie Mantia, it all started with an emoji. An icon designer by trade, Mantia was hired three years ago to design a hanafuda emoji for Facebook. Loosely translated as “flower cards,” hanafuda is a Japanese deck of 12 suits of four cards each, depicting the months of the year and the country’s flora and fauna. As soon as Mantia started researching the art form, he fell in love. “I went totally overkill and bought 50 decks,” says Mantia, the designer behind Portland card company Junior. Before he designed his own deck, Mantia went on something of a quest to learn as much about hanafuda as he could. He called up his friend and colleague, Japanese app designer and Junior adviser Nobtaka Nukui, and let loose a deluge of questions. Mantia and Nukui’s research involved visits to museums in Japan and deep dives into hanafuda’s history, from its origins by way of Portugal in
RYAN MAUK AND EVAN HALBERT
the 1600s to the version that Nintendo released as the company’s first product, all the way up to its modern incarnations. Eventually, Mantia came up with his own contribution to the centuries-old craft—stark, beautifully simple shapes and symbols representing Japan’s plants, animals and legends in bright colors. Junior printed its first decks just before the pandemic hit, but put off releasing them until November. Land Gallery, Junior’s Portland venue, is temporarily closed. But at Tokyo card specialty shop Uso no Tobacco, the decks quickly sold out. Mantia has already designed Junior’s next releases: rare, 14-suit dragon and tiger decks. “Some people just don’t even know that these kinds of cards exist because they’re hyperregional,” he says. “So I really want to bring that stuff to other people because I think it’s cool.” SHANNON GORMLEY.
Portland Gamecraft’s After the Empire has all the hallmarks of a high-budget hobby game blockbuster: lavish and intricate art, a classical theme and depth of possibility befitting its grand-strategy framework. Players construct actual castles on the board while dealing with waves of enemy combatants, feuds with rival lords, coveted supplies, the needs of the population, and even the passing seasons. Despite the intimidating scale, After the Empire is the product of just two designers. Ryan Mauk and Evan Halbert, longtime friends who have both operated their own board game shops in the past, design their games together and playtest them on Mauk’s dining room table. With scraps of paper and pieces taken out of other games they owned, the pair prototyped After the Empire over the course of several brainstorming sessions.
Originally, Mauk and Halbert planned to fund the game themselves via Kickstarter. But while demoing the game at the Geekway to the West convention in Missouri, the owner of board game company Grey Fox was impressed enough to offer to publish it. “We knew there might be a little less money in [a publishing deal], but what we love doing is the design,” Mauk says. “We don’t love the shipping fulfillment and warehousing and printing, so we decided to go that route.” On Jan. 6, after years of playtesting and design iteration, the first copies of Empire arrived at a warehouse in Iowa where they will be prepped for shipping. A blog post on the company website by Halbert reads: “We are so excited to finally have it out in the world :)” NOLAN GOOD.
What game are you really into right now?
Clank, a deck-building game in which players stealthily infiltrate a dragon’s treasure trove. “It’s really fun because you are a terrible thief, so you are making a bunch of noise. The more noisy you’ve been, the greater the chance that turns into damage since the dragon gets you. It’s really zany.”
What game are you really into right now?
“I’ve been enjoying playing scopa with Italian playing cards, though my friend Alessio Gianni tells me I should also learn how to play briscola, another popular—and in his opinion, better—Italian card game.” Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
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Tony Miller
Year launched: 2019 Game type: Board games Flagship game: Fire in the Library, in which players try to save books from a burning building.
Pomegranate
Founder: Thomas Burke Year launched: 1968 Game types: Board games, jigsaw puzzles, memory games Flagship: Knowledge cards, with portraits of historical figures on one side and profiles on the other.
TONY AND RAPHAEL MILLER
“Sumo wrestling beetles” might sound like an obscure premise for a board game. But for designer Tony Miller, Kabuto Sumo is simply an ode to what he loves most: board games, wrestling, and his 7-year-old son, Raphael. To play, opponents compete to knock each other’s small, wooden discs off a raised board. The discs represent different battling bugs, from giant stag beetles to rhinoceros and blister beetles. Due to publish in June, the game’s intentional simplicity is partially in response to Miller’s first release, 2019’s Fire in the Library. Raphael was 5 at the time and just learning how to read—a skill required to play Fire in the Library. “Here I am excited about this game, and he’s excited with me because it’s Daddy’s game and he knows that,” Miller says, “but he can’t play it.” Miller decided to devise his next game based on his son’s interests. He noticed Raphael spent most of his time at arcades playing coin-pusher games. So one day, Miller grabbed some chunky, wooden pieces from his 500-plus board game collection and drew a square on a piece of
paper so he and his son could play their own head-to-head version. But the idea didn’t really take off until Miller saw a clip of battling rhinoceros beetles during a Japanese pro-wrestling match he was watching. “It cuts to this image of two big, chonky beetles fighting each other on a log,” he says. “I’m like, ‘What is this?’ So I proceeded to fall down a rabbit hole of learning all about Japanese rhinoceros beetles.” After pitching Kabuto Sumo at pre-pandemic board game conventions, Miller landed a publisher. Acclaimed illustrator Kwanchai Moriya ended up reaching out and offering to contribute art, due to his own childhood fascination with “chonky beetles.” But each part of Kabuto Sumo—even Moriya’s detailed, slyly cutesy designs— had to be approved by Raphael. “I actually asked his permission to share it with everyone else,” he says. “He was very excited about other people playing his game.” SHANNON GORMLEY.
What game are you really into right now? “With COVID limiting face-to-face game time lately, I’ve been playing a lot of digital card games. Logged a lot of hours on Slay the Spire, Monster Train and Griftlands specifically.” 14
Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
Last May, Katie Burke, publisher and vice president at Pomegranate, had a unique problem: Nearly all the cardboard boxes used for shipping in the company’s 100,000-square-foot warehouse were the wrong size. “We were getting so many orders for just one puzzle, when we’re used to shipping out a couple hundred puzzles to one place,” she says. “It was a little frantic there in the beginning.” Pomegranate, which sells board games, puzzles, coloring books and much more, experienced skyrocketing sales during the first wave of the coronavirus. Typically, the company sells in bulk to bookstores and museums. But with all those closed, its direct-to-consumer sales from the website “exploded.” Pomegranate was founded in San Francisco at the same time hippies flocked to Haight-Ashbury. Burke’s husband, Thomas, sold posters from his kitchen table and had an idea to repurpose and distribute art to the masses,
producing the works of contemporary painters in the form of notecards and game decks. The company sold its first jigsaw puzzle nearly 15 years ago and moved up to Portland in 2013. Now settled near the Columbia River, Pomegranate has all kinds of games, quiz cards and puzzles adorned with the works of Edward Hopper, Joan Metcalf, and Vincent van Gogh. Next month, the company is releasing its third board game, this time based on Addams Family creator Charles Addams’ cartoons. For Burke, the answer to why people have gravitated toward analog puzzles and games in the midst of sustained quarantine is simple: It doesn’t require much thought. “When I’m working on a puzzle, I’m not worrying about anything, I’m just focusing on finding that piece,” she says. “You can learn so much about a painting, putting a puzzle together.” MEIRA GEBEL.
What game are you really into right now?
“I’ve always been a big jigsaw puzzle doer, so I usually have one at home. I just did one of ours [Paul Heussenstamm: Tapestry Mandala 1000-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle]. Usually when I do a puzzle, I start with the edge pieces and put those all together as a frame, but with this one, because it was a mandala, I started in the middle and worked out from the circle.”
Crafty Games
Mt Caz Ranger Clubhouse
A playtest for Telepoem, a pass-it-on poetry game.
Founders: Alex Flagg and Patrick Kapera Year launched: 2005 Game types: Card games, board games, role-playing games Flagship game: Spycraft, an RPG where players hunt down secrets and vanquish threats using high-tech gadgets.
Even before the pandemic, Patrick Kapera and Alex Flagg were accustomed to working remotely. In fact, that’s how they met over 15 years ago as independent game designers. The two eventually broke away from their former employer to found Crafty Games—and took their flagship role-playing game, the espionage-inspired Spycraft, with them. “We’re kind of going through this role-playing game renaissance in the last five years,” says Flagg, 43. “When I was a kid in North Portland, we would roleplay, but it was something you did in the basement of your parents’ house. You never let anybody find out.” Crafty Games has benefited from the shifting narrative surrounding RPGs. In 2012, the company partnered with Brandon Sanderson, author of the bestselling Mistborn series, to create a fantasy game based on his novels. Three years later, they started producing board games for other designers. But with the coronavirus,
Crafty Games can’t rely on big conventions like GenCon to market its products and get its games in front of customers to sell them on the experience. So they’ve had to adjust, making digital versions of some games and creating a Discord channel so fans can meet for game nights on Zoom and Skype. “ With the next game we have coming out, we’ve been putting a lot of effort into making a solo version,” Flagg says. “It’s become a critical thing when pitching people to say, ‘You can also play it by yourself if you want!’ so people know they’ll get to use their new game, even if they can’t get together with people very often.” MEIRA GEBEL.
Founders: Albert Kong and Christina Tran Year launched: 2018 Game types: Zine-formatted games, role-playing games, party games Flagship game: Mt Caz’s artist residency allows creators to take on the role of “artist in residence” and design a game or event during their two-week stay. When Albert Kong and Christina Tran moved to Corvallis from the Bay Area in 2017, they were struck by one thing Oregonians tend to take for granted: ample room to roam. “We rented a house here and noticed we had four times as much space for less than the price of a living room in San Francisco,” says Kong. “Having all this abundance of space felt like there was a responsibility to share it.” Kong, a game designer, and Tran, an artist, wanted to see how they could turn their home into anything but a home—“a performance space, venue, classroom and restaurant,” says Kong. Versatility is the founding principle of Mt Caz Ranger Clubhouse, a collective of artists that includes a lot of work from a lot of different people. But at its core is the essence of immersive gameplay.
Over the past three years, the two have built up a community of players by going to graphic novel book clubs at local libraries, hosting weekly potlucks, and “haunted house meets treasure hunt” events at places like Enchanted Forest, where players act out prompts and follow clues in zine playbooks. Its artist residency allows creators to work on their own craft in a rented room in the house, but also to play the role of “artist in residence” and explore how it feels to be in an unfamiliar, shared space. For Kong, board games can often be “bureaucratic,” with rules, winners and losers. What Mt Caz hopes to accomplish, he says, is for people to stop seeing themselves as players but creators. “I think about games as art, as a participatory medium, where everyone has agency to move around in,” Kong says. “You’re not the audience, you’re making this experience.” MEIRA GEBEL.
A prototype of Scrattlebips, a hybrid of Scrabble and Battleship.
What game are you really into right now?
What game are you really into right now? “Lost Cities is a classic card game that’s very abstract. It’s just for two players and plays in about 15 to 20 minutes. My wife and I can play three times in a night.”
“Alex Roberts made a game called For the Queen. It’s a cardbased storytelling game: You answer a prompt, and it builds up a picture of a world with very little scaffolding—a journey and a conflict and a traveling crew.” Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
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Visiting Portland is easy. Leaving is the hard part. Will you make your flight on time? It’s…a roll of the dice! MATERIALS NEEDED • One die. • A small object to represent each player—e.g., a penny, a paper clip, a bottle cap.
Created by Ben Cheek: instagram.com/magicburgeranimation Illustrated by Jack Kent
HOW TO PLAY Whoever’s lived in Portland the longest goes first. Roll the die, move that many spaces forward, and follow the instructions wherever you land. First to reach home wins. Please note: Due to social distancing, multiple players cannot occupy the same space at the same time. If you land on the square of another player, move back to the nearest empty square. Please do not throw a fit. We will not alert the manager.
Hydrate, preferably at a Benson Bubbler. It’s gonna be a long day.
Your favorite bar is now apartments. Move back 1 space.
Find a toy horse tied to a horse ring on the curb. Move ahead 1 space.
Gooooooooooalllll Timbers! Move ahead 1 space.
Rent a Biketown bike!
Oh no, someone chopped down the only tree at Mill Ends Park! Lose a turn.
Jump on an E-scooter.
Get stuck at an intersection negotiating who should go first. Move another player forward 1 space.
ZooBomb! A wonky internet connection shuts down your livestreamed DJ gig.
Kale shortage. Go back 1 space.
You're on the wrong MAX train! Switch places with last-place player.
Are you high right now? Your boss just called another last-minute Zoom meeting.
NO
YES
Schools are closed: Teach your kid fractions. Move back half your roll. (Round up odd numbers.)
Anarchist jurisdiction, move any other player back 3 spaces.
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You can't find your way out of Powell's Books. Lose a turn.
Oh no, you came within 6 feet of someone not wearing a mask! Shelter in place for 2 turns.
You've been diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency. Join a protest against... something. Move forward 1 square.
Mount Tabor erupts! Take a detour to avoid lava.
The damn Hawthorne Bridge is up. Go back 1 space.
Slather yourself in body paint and join the Naked Bike Ride.
Rose City Rollers tryout: Roll again! (Get it?!)
NO Is it raining right now?
Local journalism rules— donate what you can to WW to continue.
Eat too much at Cartopia food trucks. Go back 2 spaces.
Bumper crop! A stranger offers you eggs from their backyard chicken. Move forward 3 spaces.
YES Use an umbrella in the rain, get shamed by an aging punk dude. Move back 1 space.
You've won the New Year's Day fish toss at Red Fox!
The line at Voodoo Doughnut is around the block. Lose a turn while you wait. You accidentally caught the bus to Beaverton. Go backward on your next roll.
Find love at Mary's Club. Move forward 2 spaces.
Uh oh, it's a political street brawl. Detour: Move back 2 spaces
Skate a duet with Tonya Harding. Salchow ahead 2 spaces.
Join a Teletubby-themed Adult Soap Box Derby team.
YES Can you reach your face mask from where you're sitting?
NO
Election 2020 new leader: Move 1 space ahead of the leader.
Dame Time: If the Blazers play today, move ahead 2 spaces. Rush hour: If you are playing between 6 am and 10 pm, lose a turn.
Hey, is that Sasquatch? Jump back on the MAX to follow him.
You've fallen into a ShanghaI Tunnel. Bummer! Go back 1 space.
Delayed at PDX. Move back 2 spaces. YOU’RE HOME. Now what?
Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
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STREET
ROOM & BOARDS Shoppers at Guardian Games in Southeast Portland. Photos by Justin Katigbak On Instagram: @ justin.katigbak
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PORTLAND’S MOST IMPORTANT STORIES SENT DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
SUBSCRIBE NOW WWEEK.COM/NEWSLETTERS Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
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STARTERS
T H E MOST I MP ORTANT PO RT LA N D C U LT U R E STO R I E S O F T H E W E E K— GRAP H E D.
RIDICULOUS
One of Portland’s iconic drinking fountains disappears from downtown.
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LOCAL
A Portland designer tricks the internet into thinking Olive Garden revoked a “Lifetime Pasta Pass” for Sean Hannity— forcing Hannity to address the issue on Fox News.
CHRI
SN ES SE T
H
INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM BECOME A FRIEND OF WILLAMETTE WEEK
Oregonians miss going to bars more than the gym, according to a new survey.
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AWESOME
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CHRISTINE D ON G
Seafood favorite Jacqueline is rebranding as a brunch cafe.
Portland Brewing will close in February after 34 years of business. The
Oregon Zoo euthanizes Inji, possibly the world’s oldest orangutan.
Portland Audubon is lobbying the EPA to ban Avitrol, the bird poison that caused dozens of crows to drop from the sky in 2018.
Powell’s says it will not promote or sell Andy Ngo’s new book in its stores.
OREGON ZOO MICHAEL DURHAM
MICK HANGLAND-SKILL
SERIOUS 20
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GET...INSIDE
WHAT TO DO WHILE YOU’RE STUCK AT HOME THIS WEEK.
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Catch Up On: Below Deck
Keeping up with prestige TV is exhausting. In this era when there’s always time to be watching something, everyone needs some multiseason trash they can throw on in the background while noodling around on their phones, and this Bravo reality series about a rotating cast of beautiful idiots working aboard a superyacht is ideal. Every episode is exactly the same, down to tan and grizzled Captain Lee’s aphorisms (“You couldn’t drive a straight pin up my ass with a 10-pound sledgehammer” gets a surprising amount of play), but whenever it gets to the part where the crew goes out on the town between charters, you’ll always stop doom-scrolling long enough to see if they get into a sloppy-drunk fight over nothing then try to bone. Spoiler alert: Yes, they will. Streaming on Hulu, Peacock and YouTube TV.
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Attend: Dan Halsted’s Roger Corman Master Class
PHOTO: Caption tktktk AMENTA ABIOTO
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Listen: Soundwalk by Amenta Abioto
At the end of last year, Third Angle music began releasing “soundwalks”—compositions by Portland musicians designed to be listened to while exploring specific parts of the city. Sonically, the series is all over the map, from serene piano and bubbling synths, to soundscapes and interviews recorded at Mt. Tabor Park. But so far, every piece has been supremely meditative. The newest edition is by Amenta Abioto, whose layered electronic music always sounds gorgeous, and is meant to be played while walking around North Portland’s Whitaker Ponds Natural Area. Available for streaming and download starting Jan. 15 on thirdangle.org. Free, donations accepted.
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Watch: Promising Young Woman
Carey Mulligan often delivers her best work in unexpected places. But Promising Young Woman, the debut feature by Killing Eve scribe Emerald Fennell, feels designed as a showcase. Mulligan plays Cassie, a mysteriously reclusive barista who exposes men’s sex crimes by night. She is as malleable as this tone-shifting movie, seemingly flicking the light in her eyes on and off at will. Distracting though the leaps from gonzo thriller to credible rom-com to edgy character study may be, the ambition of Promising Young Woman is impressive. Available On Demand.
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Watch: Blazers vs. Hawks
With the Brooklyn Nets moving up to the big leagues in terms of free agent signings—and jettisoning all the ex-Portland role players it was hoarding—the Atlanta Hawks have emerged this season as the Blazers’ unofficial Eastern Conference sister team. Both have thrilling backcourt players and disappointing big men, both made significant if not particularly splashy offseason moves to legitimize themselves, and both are playing inconsistently to start the year. Should be an illuminating game for both sides—unless, of course, the NBA season gets COVIDed again. 7 pm Saturday, Jan. 16.
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Stream: Mike Hsu
Acro-PDX founder and violinist Mike Hsu is leading a night of solo classical music to raise money for the Oregon Food Bank. The concert will stream live from Holocene and include everything from Italian baroque to modern minimalism and even some originals. Though most of us have been missing Holocene for its dance nights, some soothing classical music sounds pretty good right now. 7:30 pm Saturday, Jan. 16. Stream on twitch.tv/holoceneportland. Pay what you will.
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Watch: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
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Hear: Theo Parrish’s Wuddaji
A number of remarkable movies premiered on streaming services in the waning weeks of 2020 yet flew under the radar. One of them is this Netflix adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play that was part of his series of scripts about the African American experience throughout the 20th century. Based on the life of legendary singer Ma “The Mother of Blues” Rainey (Viola Davis), it chronicles a tumultuous recording session in 1927 Chicago. The late Chadwick Boseman, in his final film role, plays Levee Green, a headstrong trumpeter who clashes with the equally strong-willed Rainey. Streaming on Netflix.
Roger Corman’s singular film career is often preceded by his reputation. Corman’s nicknames include “the Pope of Pop Cinema” and the tag “schlockmeister,” which he always detested. Overshadowed in all this are the films themselves. In turn, Hollywood Theatre head programmer Dan Halsted began his online Roger Corman Master Class on Jan. 5 with a firm conviction: Corman is one of America’s great filmmakers and grossly underrated. Tickets are still available for this month’s live online discussions with directors John Sayles (Matewan, Eight Men Out) and Joe Dante (Gremlins, The ’Burbs), each discussing one of his own Corman-produced films, conversing with Halsted and answering audience questions. 7 pm Tuesday, Jan. 19 and 26. $12. See hollywoodtheatre.com for tickets. See feature, page 27.
☕
Bake: Anything from 100 Cookies
At this point in quarantine, most bored home chefs have moved on to perfecting the casual weeknight steak tartare, but if you want get back in touch with your first-wave pandemic baking skills, the recipes in Sarah Kieffer’s 100 Cookies offer 100 reasons to keep pushing through at least the next 100 days of this bullshit. After that, you’re on your own, but a big enough batch of brown butter brownies should get most of us through the summer. $10.97 at Amazon.
Techno was invented in Detroit, and Theo Parrish is its stern dean, demanding you see it as a great American contribution to the arts as much as something to get down to. But he’s so good that his music can’t help but come across as playful and free-flowing. His new album, Wuddaji, is formidable in size and scope but ultimately comes across as a five-finger exercise, its bustling organs and electric pianos brushing up against spidery drums that splinter and snap all over the place. Streaming on Spotify.
Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
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CULTURE
Save Point How a local company is rescuing forgotten video games from the dustbin of history.
GAME ON: Vancouver-based Nightdive Studios has created complete remakes of such video games as (from left) Doom 64, System Shock 2 and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. BY NOL A N G O O D
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Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
the Turok games, Doom 64, The 7th Guest, and the Harlan Ellison adaptation I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The company is even developing a complete, from-the-ground-up remake of the first System Shock game. The process isn’t always as simple as Kick’s first acquisition. Often, the games are old enough that the legal particulars can be hard to untangle. “We’ve had times where we’ve licensed the rights for a game from one party, announced that we’re working on it, then had people just come out of the woodwork and say, ‘Hey I own the rights, what are you doing?’” Kick says. “Then we have to go back to our original partner and pull these contracts from the ’90s. It just gets really messy.” Once the games are acquired, the Nightdive team uses an in-house engine to STEPHEN KICK
It was a dark night in Guatemala, and Stephen Kick just wanted to play an old video game. Specifically, System Shock 2, the 1999 first-person shooter lauded as one of the most influential PC games of its time. It was 2008, and Kick, who had recently left his job as a character artist for Sony Online Entertainment, was traveling South America with his girlfriend in search of inspiration for what to do next. He was holed up in a hostel, and a tropical thunderstorm was raging outside. The atmosphere was perfect. “I went to GOG.com [an online storefront known for classic games] thinking, ‘Well, it’s one of the greatest games of all time, it has to be available on there,’” says Kick, now 35, “and I discovered it wasn’t.” As he’d come to learn, System Shock 2 was one of many pieces of “abandonware”—games not supported or distributed by the copyright holder. Sometimes that means a game has been largely ignored or forgotten by its creators. In other cases, those creators are defunct. Abandonware games are at high risk of disappearing forever since, unlike other media, video games require proprietary hardware to play. That means the ability to play them is contingent on the availability of often-aging, out-of-print
equipment and peripherals. Even on PC, where a multitude of online distributors exist, bringing classic games into the modern day can require a lot of reworking and restoration that copyright holders have little incentive to do. Kick was amazed to find that a game less than a decade old could end up just vanishing like that. So he did some digging. He discovered the rights to the game had, somehow, ended up with an insurance company in Michigan. He sent an inquiring email, not expecting an answer. A day later, the company’s lawyer confirmed the rights were still in its possession — and asked Kick if he wanted to make the third game in the series. Kick had a different idea: Let him get System Shock 2 back into the world. He got in touch with old co-workers from Sony to help with the technical side of things. He christened the new team Nightdive Studios, setting up an office in Portland and later moving across the river to Vancouver, Wash. “I went to GOG and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got the rights. Let’s sell it,’” Kick says. “At first, they didn’t believe me. But I showed them the paperwork and they set the schedule.” The re-release launched in February 2013 and it was an instant success. Since then, Nightdive Studios has gone on to procure the rights to restore similarly abandoned games, including including
STEPHEN KICK
make them fully compatible with modern computers and consoles. The process involves reverse engineering, sprucing up old source code, and sometimes even making alterations to the game to fix loose ends. The goal is not necessarily to remake a game but to make it available in its original form, minus its original defects. “When we remember video games from our past, they ran smooth, the controls were flawless, and it’s this great experience,” Kick says. “But then you go back and you play it, and it’s like, this thing is running at 15 [frames per second], and I can’t use the N64 controller anymore because you’ve got this one analog stick. It’s just kind of a rude wake-up call.” Bringing older works into widescreen and higherresolution formats also requires taking artistic liberties from time to time. Video games are careful constructs, and changing the field of view or increasing the resolution on older titles can be like pulling back the curtain. While remaking 1997’s Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, for example, Kick discovered that the weapons the player uses are “literally just a floating barrel and nothing else. We had to model and texture the rest of it and make it match the style so that essentially you could see something that didn’t even exist.” In practice, though, the effect is invisible: The games
are essentially identical while simultaneously meeting modern standards of playability. As old computers and consoles fall out of use, physical media deteriorates and software fades quietly away over time, many games stand to be lost. Sometimes, publishers cash in on old intellectual property in the form of remakes and re-releases, but for every triumphant franchise return there are a dozen forgotten works. Groups like the International Center for the History of Electronic Games and the Museum of Modern Art work to preserve old software, but catching everything is not guaranteed. In 1996, Atari went so far as to throw the source code for several historically notable games, including Asteroids, literally in the dumpster behind its office in California. A total loss was averted only by a few fans recovering the diskettes at 3 am. For Kick and the rest of Nightdive, contributing to that effort of restoration is a worthwhile pursuit. “Famous directors grew up watching old movies and have gone on to create new things that we enjoy. We need that in the video game industry as well,” Kick says. “Being a part of that and being able to maintain the idea that video games are art is probably the highest honor.”
PERFORMANCE
Editor: Andi Prewitt | Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com C O U R T E S Y O F T H E P L AY W R I G H T I N I T I AT I V E
WRITERS’ BLOC: Six playwrights are developing new scripts to be filmed and streamed in 2021 and 2022.
Taking the (Playwright) Initiative While the pandemic surges, new plays arise at the Theatre Company. BY BE N N E T T C A M P B E LL FE RGUS O N
Last March, Yussef El Guindi couldn’t write. While the pandemic raged, the Egyptian American playwright’s artistic fire smoldered—and it didn’t reignite until he was asked to write a 10-minute play for students at UC Santa Barbara. “I said, ‘I’m frozen,’” he remembers. “And then a few days after that, I realized, ‘It’s a 10-minute play, for Christ’s sake. Just write something. Anything.’” El Guindi subsequently wrote Cha-Cha, a play about a divided couple dancing via Zoom. It became the first of several creations he concocted during the pandemic—and it paved the way for him to participate in the Playwright Initiative, a series of six solo works commissioned by the Theatre Company founded by Portland theater luminaries Jen Rowe and Brandon Wooley in 2019. “We were like, ‘Let’s try to do a couple plays so people know who we are first, and then we’ll do some commissioning.’ And 2020 had a lot of different ideas,” Wooley says. “These playwrights of both local and national renown are trusting us—a brand-new company that is just getting started—enough to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll write something for you and see what we can do together.’” Rowe and Wooley had planned to stage Jen Silverman’s The Moors last March. When COVID-19 worsened, they turned the production into an audio drama and started plotting the Playwright Initiative, which will feature works by Idris Goodwin, Emily Gregory, Ren Dara Santiago, DeLanna Studi and Claire Willett. The first playwright Wooley and Rowe approached was El Guindi, who lives in Seattle and initially considered writing a play about an exchange student living in the Pacific Northwest. “He would be reporting on the pandemic, having just arrived, and he would start talking about the protests that arose after the George Floyd murder,” El Guindi says. “And then I felt, ‘I think this might date very quickly.’” El Guindi eventually conceived The Cut-Up, about a character who discovers that the man he sees when he looks in the mirror is actually his doppelgänger. “The story is basically about a man who’s losing his mind, but it also could be about an alien visitation,” El Guindi says. “Somehow for me, that perfectly summed up a traumatic year of total
dislocation, disembodiment, discombobulation, a wrenching from our routine.” Like all of the plays included in the Playwright Initiative, The Cut-Up will be filmed and released via the streaming service Stellar, but it doesn’t yet have a release date. Among the plays closest to completion is DeLanna Studi’s Capax Infiniti, which was inspired by the Portland mural of the same name painted by South African artist Faith47. It’s about a white businesswoman named Karen (the name was chosen for its combustible cultural baggage) giving a keynote speech on Zoom for an organization called Empowering Women Empowers Women. “Throughout the speech—because it’s Zoom, because of the time we’re in—she starts to become really reflective of privilege and it kind of morphs into an uncomfortable therapy session,” says Rowe, who is directing the play. “If it were real, it would be really uncomfortable and I think that it would go viral pretty quickly.” Capax Infiniti’s willingness to confront disquieting questions about white privilege embodies the Playwright Initiative’s blend of art and activism. “All of our playwrights are also activists in their own right,” Rowe says. “I don’t think that was something that we were looking for, but we looked at this group of playwrights and we were like, ‘All of these people are working within their own communities at large to enhance a better way of living for all of us.’ I think that’s just inherent in their writing.” Given the persistence of the pandemic and the anticipated longevity of the Playwright Initiative, which will run from at least March 2021 to May 2022, it’s hard not to wonder what state both Theatre Company and the Portland theater scene will be in when the last of the six plays premieres. Rowe, however, refuses to indulge in speculation. “My experience as an artist in Portland has been full of voids,” she says. “I’m an actor who has never ever, ever been invited to be a part of a company here. I feel a little bit prepared for this time. My body, my brain and my heart know what it means to adapt constantly. All we can do is do what we can do.” SEE IT: Premiere dates for the Playwright Initiative are TBA. See thetheatreco.org. Access to films will cost $20 each, a season ticket $100.
MUSIC Written by: Daniel
Bromfield
| @bromf3
Now Hear This
Listening recommendations from the past, present, Portland and the periphery.
SOMETHING OLD 2011’S 50 Words for Snow isn’t often mentioned among the great Kate Bush albums, but it’s one of her best, most ambitious and most beautiful efforts. Her voice is duskier than in her youth, and when “Snowflake” and “Lake Tahoe” begin with other singers, the surge of power once she finally enters is hair-raising. The 13-minute centerpiece is “Misty,” which is infamously about having sex with a snowman. He melts three minutes in—but “it’s still snowing,” she cries, which in her universe means “magic is real.”
SOMETHING NEW
Techno was invented in Detroit, and Theo Parrish is its stern dean, demanding you see it as a great American contribution to the arts as much as something to get down to. But he’s so good that his music can’t help but come across as playful and free-flowing. His new album, Wuddaji, is formidable in size and scope but ultimately comes across as a five-finger exercise, its bustling organs and electric pianos brushing up against spidery drums that splinter and snap all over the place.
SOMETHING LOCAL
Joel Shanahan gives his icy, regal vision of electronic music room to breathe on the double cassette Frozen Clock Hovering. The backbone of these tracks are squiggling sequencers that suggest the pulse of the club without quite forming a groove. But it’s the gothic touches—cathedral organ on “Follow,” bursting chords on “Stabilizer”—that give it such grandeur and scale. The opening track is called “Laurelhurst,” and it’s as imposing and inviting as that neighborhood’s stone gates.
SOMETHING ASKEW
Nathan Salsburg is the curator of the Alan Lomax Archive, which has put out some fantastic folk compilations in the last decade. He’s also a guitarist, and on his new Landwerk series he engages in dialogue with his vast collection of old 78s, mostly of Jewish music. Landwerk does interesting things with sampled horns and organs, but it’s Landwerk No. 2 where he hits the sweet spot, letting his guitar melt in between the notes of those lonesome, endlessly looping records.
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FEATURE
CHRIS NESSETH
FOOD & DRINK
THE ORIGIN
Gumba’s longest-standing dish came about by chance the second week the cart was open, when its meat purveyor offered up some short rib samples. “All right, what do we have around the cart that we can use to make pasta for tonight?” Martinez asked himself. It was featured in these pages just a few weeks later, and Gumba now goes through 60 pounds of beef a week and 50 to 80 orders a day.
THE NOODLE
Cardboard and Cloth
Gumba was already fancy for a food cart. It’s now one of Portland’s best restaurants—even if it has to stick to takeout. BY JAS O N CO H E N
@cohenesque
As a food cart, Gumba punched above its weight, serving fresh pastas, handmade burrata and ambitious snacks that made you want to linger at an outdoor table. Now it’s a brick-and-mortar in a time of takeout only—but you’ll still want to break out the candles, placemats and cloth napkins once you get the food home: No meal in 2020 provided more of a “this feels like we are in a restaurant” frisson than Gumba’s beet, cabbage and endive salad, pappardelle with braised beef sugo, pan-roasted steelhead trout, and eggplant olive oil cake. Jesse Martinez and Robin Brassaw first opened Gumba in 2016, earning multiple Cart of the Year plaudits, and have made several location changes since then, all along Northeast Alberta. Now they’re in the space that was once Aviary, mere blocks from its most recent cart spot, as well as the street’s other high-profile new arrival, GrindWitTryz. Like its neighbor, Gumba got a big break on rent, making it possible to open without taking on the usual upfront costs. “It’s such a bummer to see so many places close right now,” says Martinez, who paid his pasta dues at Bar Mingo in Nob Hill for eight-plus years. “But I think it’s given a lot of opportunities to people that otherwise would not have received opportunities. It’s cool to see so many people open up restaurants without having to go through investors or restaurant groups.” For now, the bigger space just means more room to prep and cook, as well as for storage and refrigeration. At the cart, Gumba might have gone through 10 pounds of beef a week for the pappardelle. Now it’s more like 60. It’s also upgraded its pasta-making tools, can roll out dough all over the empty dining room, and no longer has to use 24
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a ladder as a drying rack. The increased production also means it offers uncooked pasta, a pandemic add-on that simply wouldn’t have been possible at the cart. “And we have a dishwasher, which is so cool,” Martinez says. “That’s really what it all comes down to. We have a fucking dishwasher!” Gumba still calls itself a “pasta parlor”—there’s a sweet neon sign in the window of the new place—but its menu keeps expanding and changes every day. The tail-on steelhead trout ($20), stuffed with pecorino bread crumbs and sauced with bacon jam and pickled pepper puree, is something of a stalwart, as is the eggplant olive oil cake ($8). For that, Martinez turns the vegetable into a coffee-caramel glaze, an idea he had while making caponata. “It has a sweet smell when you’re sautéeing it—it kind of reminded me of banana,” he says. “So I wanted to figure out a way to utilize it in a dessert.” Other recent offerings include St. Louis pork ribs ($22), chicken liver pâté with a miniature croissant and prunes ($10), and a crab cake with salsa verde and cucumber salad ($8). Gumba is also famous for its Wednesday-only hot fried chicken sandwich and mostly Sunday pizza fritta—fried pizza dough wrapped around everything from chicken Parm to meatloaf with mac and cheese. The plan is to eventually have a late-night bar menu of “trashy elegance.” The first cocktail to go was a tequila yuzu Jell-O shot. But there are two things that are always on the Gumba menu. One is the tagliatelle ($17) with egg yolk, candied shallots, burrata, black pepper and sesame seed bread crumbs. The other is the pappardelle ($17). Here’s the lowdown on the latter:
All of Gumba’s pastas use an egg dough comprising eggs, Caputo 00 flour, water, salt, and a “little bit” of both heavy cream and olive oil. Pappardelle, the widest of the flat, ribbon-style noodles, provides plenty of surface area for the sugo.
THE SUGO
With beef prices rising during the pandemic, the sugo is now made with chuck roast, which is no less tender. “And we actually put more beef in the dish,” Martinez says. In addition to a long, slow braise, the meat gets some of its toothsomeness from lard—another change from the cart days, when smaller quantities allowed Martinez to use duck fat. Also on the plate: toasted red chile flakes, garlic, pecorino, tomato and toasted bread crumbs. EAT: Gumba, 1733 NE Alberta St., 503975-5951, gumba-pdx.com. 4:30-8 pm Wednesday, 4:30-8:30 pm ThursdayMonday.
FOOD & DRINK CHRIS NESSETH
BAR FEATURE
TOP 5
BUZZ LIST Where to get drinks this week, one way or another.
Tiny Bubble Room
Tropicale
Cold Comforts
GO: GlüBar at Imperial Bottle Shop & Taproom, 2006 NE Alberta St., 503-954-2021, imperialbottleshop.com/glubar. 4-10 pm Wednesday-Friday, noon-10 pm Saturday-Sunday.
Drinking outdoors in a Portland winter sounds miserable. GlüBar makes it a joy. BY AN D I P R E W I T T
aprewitt@wweek.com
PATIO SPECS Number of tables: Six to eight. Space between tables: At least 6 feet. Additional safety measures: Sidewalk placemarkers near the ordering window to space guests apart; hand sanitizer pumps; surfaces sanitized after every guest leaves; displayed menu; contactless payment available. Peak hours: 4-6 pm Fridays, 4-6 pm and 8-9 pm Saturdays.
Eem
3808 N Williams Ave., Suite 127, 971-2951645, eempdx.com. 11 am-9 pm daily. A big part of what’s made Eem the buzziest Portland restaurant of the past two years are the creative beverages dreamed up by co-owner Eric Nelson. Eem sold mixit-yourself kits before the law changed, but let’s face it: a drink is always better when it’s made for you. The restaurant now offers four cocktails to go in what look like recycled Odwalla bottles, including the popular bourbon-hibiscus Acid Test for $13.
Tulip Shop Tavern
825 N Killingsworth St., 503-206-8483, tulipshoptavern.com. Noon-10 pm daily. While the building has seen quick turnover in recent years, Tulip Shop Tavern feels like a neighborhood staple that’s been around far longer than not even three years. It’s achieved that by hitting the deceptively simple trifecta that many nouveau Portland bars struggle with: good vibes, good food and damn good drinks. You can now get those drinks to go—from well-made standards to house cocktails such as the fruit-forward Paper Tiger—and pair them with the under-the-radar burger. The vibes, though? Those are up to you for now.
The Old Gold & Paydirt
Order online at drinkinoregon.com and paydirtbar.com, respectively. Before voluntarily shuttering his four properties in November, owner Ezra Ace Caraeff had a whole takeout drink program ready to roll if it ever became legal. Now that it is, he’s reopened two of his bars for to-go orders only, with old fashioneds, Manhattans and other classics served in 4-ounce glass bottles that make them resemble medicine—because that’s sort of what they are.
standouts. Despite the new neighbors, though, Nak Won remains the king of the ’hood, serving authentic, tasty bites, along with the best soup names in town: Comfort Buttercup, When Miss Piggy Met Hot Potato, etc.
TOP 5
HOT PLATES Where to get food in Portland this week.
ChefStable Kitchen Collective
Lottie & Zula’s
Delivery available through Postmates, Grubhub and DoorDash. Don’t call it a ghost kitchen. ChefStable Kitchen Collective is something like a digital version of a food hall: multiple eateries under one umbrella so users can select items from different restaurants in one order. The current lineup includes everything from smoked beef and pork sandwiches to vegan, Asian-inspired noodle bowls.
120-A NE Russell St., 503-333-6923, lottieandzulas.com. 8 am-4 pm TuesdaySaturday. Breakfast all day, lunch 10:30 am to close. Takeout and delivery only. Toro Bravo is gone, replaced by a punky sandwich window with New England roots. The heart of Lottie & Zula’s breakfast menu are bolo levedos, or “Portuguese muffins”—something like a cross between an English muffin and a King’s Hawaiian roll, which makes their version of a McGriddle extra satisfying.
Birrieria PDX
GrindWitTryz
16544 SE Division St., 971-336-6804. 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.
2017 NE Alberta St., 971-865-5160, grindwittryz.square.site. Instagram: @grindwittryz. Noon-8 pm Tuesday-Saturday. As a food cart, GrindWitTryz was a near-instant sensation, its crowds and wait times harking back to the early days of Salt & Straw or Apizza Scholls, and the lines have only grown longer since owner Tryzen Patricio moved into the former Bunk space on Alberta. The most popular dish by far is the ono chicken: 12 pieces of crispy, sweet-glazed fried chicken thighs— more than a pound of meat— piled onto a double-portion bed of furikake-topped rice.
Nak Won
4600 Watson Ave., Beaverton, 503-6469382. 11:30 am-2 pm and 5-8:30 pm Monday-Thursday, 11:30 am-2 pm and 5-8 pm Friday-Saturday. One of the area’s best Korean spots is back—finally. After a prolonged reopening process following the initial statewide pandemic lockdown, Nak Won has returned, now just a pot sticker’s throw from Old Town Beaverton’s impressive new outdoor dining hall that features several Portland
CHRIS NESSETH
Before the pandemic, Portlanders had long embraced the hygge lifestyle. The Danish concept of finding comfort in all things cozy is practically knitted into our DNA—see our obsession with wrapping even street signs in crocheted scarves. But after spending months cooped up inside, now is not the time to burrow into a woolen blanket. Our pandemic winter demands that we abandon hygge in favor of a different European approach to these dark days: friluftsliv. The Scandinavian term roughly translates to “open-air living,” and GlüBar makes it easy to whip yourself into a state of outdoor bliss. Inspired by the outdoor Christmas markets in Northern and Western Europe, Imperial Bottle Shop & Taproom’s new curbside pop-up makes patio drinking in the dead of winter not only feasible but downright jolly, pouring hot beverages such as mulled wine and beer. In the weeks after the Dec. 16 launch, GlüBar has drawn nostalgic German expats sipping mugs of glühwine to skiers defrosting following a day on Mount Hood. The scene itself causes sidewalk traffic to pause—behind the shop’s rolled-up garagestyle window is a row of coffee urns holding the mulled drinks—though it’s difficult to snag a seat as a walkup now that most are reserved online. “Our tables have been mostly filled,” says owner Alex Kurnellas. “Sales pretty much rose 500% from the previous month.” The lineup of mulled drinks changes about once a week. That’s because Kurnellas is dipping into his reserve of cellar beers to use as the base—pricier barrel-aged styles like stouts, sours and barleywines
that simply don’t sell as well as they used to five-plus years ago. Though the infusion of nutmeg or anise steamrolls many of the nuances the brewers would’ve wanted you to appreciate, these beers’ high ABV and robust flavors make them well suited for mulling. “It is a little bit of a tragedy in the same way I would never make a bloody mary with really expensive vodka. You’re putting a ton of spices and tomato juice on top of it,” Kurnellas says. “While it is a tragedy, the drinks we’ve been making are really delicious and very unique.” Whatever options are available, always spring for something that can be set on fire. For us, that was the Yule Log, which came with the added flair of a tableside preparation. Kurnellas topped off the cup of Founders KBS chocolate coffee oatmeal stout with a load of mini-marshmallows, doused them in a peppermint tincture, lit the blaze, then finished it with a cinnamon stick. The result was a warming slap of bourbon followed by a wisp of sweet clove and a candy cane bite. It was a drink that was part holiday cookie, part Dad’s nip of stiff booze to get him through Christmas morning— precisely the right blend to fortify your stay on a patio during a bone-chilling evening.
2337 NE Glisan St., 503-894-9484, tropicale.co. Noon-10 pm Tuesday-Sunday. Nothing combats long Pacific Northwest winters like the drinks that remind us most of summer, and that’s precisely what this recently opened Latin American fusion joint specializes in: piña coladas, margaritas, etc. Sadly, the cocktails to go are not served in pineapples as they are in person, but rather plugged bottles so big the law requires you purchase three food orders to go with them.
CHRISTINE DONG
2025 N Lombard St., 503-208-2660, tinybubbleroom.com. 3-10 pm daily. Growing up in Northeast Portland, Jeremy Lewis remembers family dinners at the Lung Fung Chinese restaurant. Now, the place is his. His new bar, Tiny Bubble Room, is named for Lung Fung’s adjoining old-school lounge, and gives Arbor Lodge and Kenton a “not-so-divey dive” similar to Roscoe’s in Montavilla, which Lewis also owns.
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Editor: Andi Prewitt / Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com MICK HANGLAND-SKILL
PHOTO CREDIT
SCREENER
MOVIES
GET YOUR REPS IN While local rep theaters are out of commission, we’ll be putting together weekly watchlists of films that are readily available to stream. Here we have another roundup of remarkable movies that recently premiered on streaming services in 2020 yet flew under the radar. Check ’em out before you make your Best of the Year list!
Let Them All Talk (2020) Meryl Streep headlines the latest dramedy from Steven Soderbergh, in which she plays a conceited author traveling by luxury cruise ship to accept a prestigious writing award. She invites three guests along: her amiable nephew (Lucas Hedges) and two estranged friends from college (Candice Bergen and Dianne Wiest). The longer the journey goes on, the higher the tensions become. HBO Max.
PHOTO: Caption tktktk
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Roger Corman’s singular film career is often preceded by its reputation. There’s its sheer volume (over 50 titles directed, over 300 produced). There’s the slew of famous filmmakers—Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and many more—whose careers were effectively launched by his stewardship. Corman’s nicknames include “the Pope of Pop Cinema” and the tag “schlockmeister,” which he always detested. And don’t forget the almost avant-garde frugality that led Corman and his acolytes to turn financial bottom lines into playgrounds. Overshadowed in all this are the films themselves. In turn, Hollywood Theatre head programmer Dan Halsted began his online Roger Corman Master Class on Jan. 5 with a clear superlative: Corman is one of America’s great filmmakers and grossly underrated. “It’s amazing to me he isn’t given respect as a director,” says Halsted, the instructor for the four-week Movie Madness University course. “I think what’s really fascinating about him as a director is that so many of his movies are vastly different from each other, like Orson Welles’ movies.” To prove that point, the four sessions carefully outline Corman’s overwhelmingly large filmography and the cinematic visions he cultivated, starting with his own. The series began two weeks ago with documentarian Alex Stapleton and a discussion of The Intruder (1962), a little-seen drama following a devilishly slick white supremacist (William Shatner) agitating white Southerners against school integration. It’s a searing character study that illustrates Corman’s facility with a camera,
a controversial idea, a young movie star and a guerrilla style at its most daring. To say nothing of Corman’s teaching ability or prolific producing, The Intruder makes its own case for why Master Class’ other three guests—Peter Bogdanovich, John Sayles and Joe Dante—were attracted to the independent film giant. He could render so much with so little. Tickets are still available for this month’s live online discussions with directors Sayles (Matewan, Eight Men Out) and Dante (Gremlins, The ’Burbs), each discussing one of his own Corman-produced films, conversing with Halsted and answering audience questions. On Jan. 19, Sayles will revisit his 1979 gangster film, The Lady in Red, which Quentin Tarantino hailed as boasting “the best script ever written for an exploitation movie.” It also represents a high-water mark for Julie Corman, who, in addition to being Roger’s spouse, was an integral producer throughout his 1970s exploitation glory days. “Tarantino is right,” Halsted says. “It’s a great movie, really gritty, fun, violent, just rips along.” The following week, Dante talks Piranha, his 1978 creature feature that swam in Jaws’ bloody wake. As a just-announced bonus, Allan Arkush (Rock ’n’ Roll High School) will also join the Piranha discussion; he and Dante came up together in Corman’s editing room. “[Joe Dante] does dark comedy better than anybody,” Halsted says, “and I love all the animals-on-a-rampage movies. I always want the animals to win.”
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@chance_s_p
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BY CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER
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This month, you can immerse yourself in Roger Corman masterpieces by enrolling in Hollywood Theatre’s online class about the often-underrated director.
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DISTANCE LEARNING
SCHOOL’S IN SESSION: Hollywood head programmer Dan Halsted recruited multiple directors to join him in discussions about Roger Corman films.
up, Halsted and the Hollywood have excelled at connecting with film icons during the pandemic. Last year, Guillermo del Toro recorded a Hollywood at Home video for them, and Halsted joined Tarantino and RZA in conversation for other projects. The past 11 months have, at the very least, made famous artists more available to chat. As for the Master Class guests, Halsted credits Corman’s influence for his request emails getting enthusiastically returned “in, like, 10 minutes.” “They owe their careers to him,” Halsted says, “Those [first films] are the movies they’re really passionate about.” Even if the sheer status of the guests borders on the “surreal,” Halsted views the interviews mostly as an opportunity to share unheralded work with Portland, especially since Movie Madness University falls within the Hollywood’s education wing. Whatever he can do to elevate the films themselves (which Halsted mentions are all available at Movie Madness) alongside Corman’s larger legend. “I’m always interested in showing movies that people don’t know,” Halsted says. “What’s the point if people have seen it 100 times? I would consider this a success if more people appreciate Roger Corman’s work and take him seriously.” SEE IT: Tickets to the remaining sessions in the Roger Corman Master Class on Tuesday, Jan. 19 and 26, are available at hollywoodtheatre.org. 7 pm. $12 per class.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) Based on the life of legendary singer Ma “The Mother of Blues” Rainey (Viola Davis), this August Wilson play adaptation chronicles one tumultuous recording session in 1927 Chicago. The late Chadwick Boseman, in his final film role, plays Levee Green, a headstrong trumpeter who clashes with the equally strong-willed Ma. Netflix.
Sylvie’s Love (2020) A music lover (Tessa Thompson) working in her father’s record store and an aspiring saxophonist named Bobby (Nnamdi Asomugha) fall for each other in this romantic drama set against the backdrop of 1950s and ’60s Harlem. When Bobby nabs a job at the same shop, the pair’s love grows from a meager spark to a roaring flame over the course of five years. Amazon Prime.
Pieces of a Woman (2020) In a similar vein as John Cassavetes’ seminal A Woman Under the Influence, this searing portrait of grief focuses on a woman (Vanessa Kirby) whose life is rocked by tragedy. The opening scene is a 22-minute unbroken shot of a brutal home birth, and Kirby’s devastating performance is inciting Oscar buzz. Netflix.
I’m Your Woman (2020) After her criminal husband Cal suddenly goes missing, an infertile woman (Rachel Brosnahan) is forced to go on the run— along with the infant boy Cal had recently mysteriously procured for them to raise. Written and directed by Julia Hart, this neo-noir offers a welcome spin on the male-dominated world of gangster movies. Amazon Prime.
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MOVIES COURTESY OF THE STUDIO
TOP PICK OF THE WEEK
Promising Young Woman Carey Mulligan often delivers her best work in unexpected places: snooping quietly through a BBC detective series, overlooked in a Paul Dano family drama, ripping Llewyn Davis a new one. But Promising Young Woman, the debut feature from Killing Eve scribe Emerald Fennell, feels designed to showcase Mulligan. She plays Cassie, a mysteriously reclusive barista who exposes men’s sex crimes by night. Across from a cast typically connoting standup dudes (Bo Burnham, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Sam Richardson, Max Greenfield, Adam Brody), Cassie knowingly awaits their heel turns, and Mulligan is as malleable as this tone-shifting movie, seemingly flicking the light in her eyes on and off at will. Distracting though the leaps from gonzo thriller to credible rom-com to edgy character study may be, the ambition of Promising Young Woman is impressive. Perhaps Fennell’s shrewdest move is suggesting the film’s bad men are actually too guilty to let these more earnest genres take hold of her film. So, thriller it is. And a riveting one throughout, even if the film’s taste for neatness and resolution cleaves off a full exploration of Cassie’s catharsis and damage. A distinctly #MeToo film, Promising Young Woman knows well (to the point of icy mockery) the tricks men use to justify predatory behavior. And in Mulligan, you couldn’t ask for a better actor to grind this ax. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On Demand. 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 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 Hearst-backed 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, exhilarating high. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Netflix.
Soul After plunging into the human mind in Inside Out and 28
PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN then the afterlife in Coco, Pixar Animation Studios takes us into both in Soul. It’s a psychedelic journey through the life of Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a middle school band teacher who ascends to the “Great Beyond” on the eve of a potentially career-making jazz gig. Desperate to return to Earth, Joe strikes a bargain with 22 (Tina Fey), a cranky soul who hasn’t been assigned a body. Soul was directed by Pete Docter (Monsters Inc., Up, Inside Out), who is a master of sublime surrealism. When Joe enters the Great Beyond, we see countless souls on a staircase that extends into the cosmos—a beautifully terrifying vision of consciousness entering the void. Joe believes he doesn’t belong there, and Soul wants us to share in his desire for earthly delights like pizza, street music and fresh haircuts. The film saves some of its wonderment for Joe’s musical aspirations, but Docter seems convinced the ecstasy Joe experiences when he plays the piano before an audience can’t compare to the simple joy of watching a whirligig fall from a tree. He fails to acknowledge that passion and ambition have the power to connect human beings—and that they’re forces that fuel entrancing movies like Soul. PG. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Disney+.
Greenland The latest Gerard Butler vehicle doesn’t add much to the global disaster genre. Hell, it doesn’t add much to the year that was 2020. In fact, you might see Greenland’s exploding comets turning the sky orange and think, “I saw that color of sky this fall; do we really need to pretend this shit anymore?” Granted, the Gerry Butler indus-
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trial complex (with its unpretentious geostorms and dens of thieves) can be charming as he holds up the fading action mantle of gruff transplants like Liam Neeson and Mel Gibson. As John Garrity, Butler plays a slightly sensitive oak of a family man, fleeing Atlanta for non-exploding pastures. This whole comet apocalypse might actually help him patch things up with the estranged missus (Morena Baccarin), assuming their diabetic son doesn’t need insulin at the worst possible time. While director Ric Roman Waugh deserves credit for illustrating just how achingly unfair any disaster scenario would be (or is) to the populace, those details don’t render Greenland particularly fun, or gripping either. In fact, it wedges the movie in a no man’s land—a Greenland if you will—between, say, The Road and Armageddon. Its best wrinkles are oddly authentic, even anti-escapist, but who comes to a Gerard Butler planetary extinction movie for the reality check? PG-13. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Amazon Prime, Google Play.
The Midnight Sky Don’t give up on George Clooney yet. He may have directed multiple duds (remember The Monuments Men or don’t), but there are flickers of greatness in The Midnight Sky, his seventh feature as a filmmaker. The film stars Clooney as the absurdly named Augustine Lofthouse, a scientist struggling to survive in the Arctic in 2049. A crisis known as “the event” has decimated Earth, forcing Lofthouse to trek to a distant antenna with enough power to warn a returning crew of astronauts not to land. The Midnight Sky, which is based on a novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton, wants to be a sci-fi riff on The Revenant, but it lacks the necessary visceral brutality—Martin Ruhe’s slick cine-
matography makes the Arctic look about as treacherous as a Coke commercial. Yet after searching for gravitas for over an hour, the film finds it in a climactic conversation between Clooney and Felicity Jones, who plays one of the astronauts. The scene—which unearths tender and transcendent hope in the face of the apocalypse—may not be enough to salvage this stale slog of a movie, but it gives us a reason to root for Clooney to succeed the next time he sits in the director’s chair. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Netflix.
Pieces of a Woman Pieces of a great film don’t necessarily make a great film. While Kornél Mundruczó’s haunting saga of a home birth gone bad unleashes a deluge of wondrous performances, it isn’t as profound as it wants to be. Vanessa Kirby (The Crown, Mission: Impossible— Fallout) plays Martha Weiss, a woman who descends into the haze of grief after the death of her baby. The birth scene is a master class in artful traumatization—it unfolds in a 24-minute shot that seems to drill every ounce of Martha’s agony into your body. Unfortunately, the film’s narrative discipline slackens as Martha’s anguish deepens. Rather than offer a nuanced portrait of a grieving family, Kata Wéber’s screenplay abruptly turns Martha’s partner (Shia LaBeouf) into a philandering villain and forces Martha’s mother (Ellen Burstyn) to deliver guilt-tripping lines so heavy-handed that even the formidable Burstyn almost breaks beneath their weight. Pieces of a Woman improves when Martha’s midwife (Molly Parker) is unjustly tried for manslaughter, but when Kirby and Parker wordlessly forge an emotional connection across the courtroom, they remind you what the film should have been
about—two women painfully and intimately united by tragedy. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Netflix.
Wonder Woman 1984 Romantic, idealistic and ebullient, Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman is one of the most beautiful superhero films ever made. It should have been a springboard for a brilliant series, but that hope dims in Wonder Woman 1984, a garish, garbled sequel that leaves the franchise on life support. Gal Gadot returns as Diana, the Amazon princess who defends mortals from godly threats. Her newest nemesis is Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), a deranged tycoon who uses a magic rock to unleash global chaos during the Cold War (no, I’m not joking). Jenkins returned to direct 1984, but the sleek narrative momentum of the first film has vanished. For 151 minutes, we’re pummeled with clunky violence, limp lectures and Lord’s obnoxious antics (Pascal’s frantic, Jim Carrey-aping performance is excruciating to behold). By the time the film forces poor Gadot to deliver a nonsensical speech about the importance of telling the truth, you start to wonder whether Jenkins has anything meaningful left to say about Wonder Woman. She shows more interest in supporting characters like Cheetah (Kristen Wiig) and Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), but even their charisma can’t buoy a movie this bloated, exhausted and depressingly wonderless. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. HBO Max.
POTLANDER
Stay and Smoke Awhile
Inside Kaleafa Social Club, the man cave of cannabis lounges.
BY BRIA N N A W H E E L E R
I N S TAG R A M . C O M / K A L E A FA _ S O C I A L _ C L U B
Just because cannabis is legal in Oregon, don’t assume you can smoke several consecutive blunts in your own apartment consequence-free. Landlords can, and often do, prohibit smoking on their property. For non-homeowning stoners without balconies, covered porches or yard space, this creates a tenant conundrum: How can weed be legal in my state but illegal in my home? Establishments like Kaleafa Social Club serve to solve that particular riddle. It’s a private club, tucked into the shadow of a dispensary, where members can consume away from muddied yards, windswept stoops, and tyrannical, straight-edge landlords. It’s not the only club of its kind in the metro area, but the Oregon City location is the flagship for a format Kaleafa hopes to expand to all eight of its dispensary locations. Oregon City, for the uninitiated, is a quiet suburb 20 minutes south of Portland. Kaleafa and its associated social club sit at the south end of the city’s commercial district, on a bustling strip of Mollala Avenue, wedged in the corner of a strip mall next to a sports bar, an O’Reilly’s Auto Parts, and a Subway. At the far end of the strip mall’s backside, a low-profile marquee and a small OPEN sign reassure novice patrons they are not lost in a random parking lot and that there is, in fact, a business operating back there. Because the club is set in a former pool hall, it has the breadth of a warehouse, but its atmosphere screams “suburban dad’s converted man cave.” Corrugated steel walls, shuffleboard, a stage, a small video game room, a single pool table, and furniture in shades of concrete and fire engine red make the space feel equal parts like a club and a place where you can take a long nap. And that vibe is calculated. Rather than emulate the bohemian ambience of an Amsterdam coffee shop or chic West Coast cannabis club, Kaleafa owners John and Julie Widmer went in favor of something they thought appealed more to their customer base. “When the pandemic hit, this place had already been built out, so we sat on it for a while,” says Julie Widmer. “We don’t want to contribute to the pandemic, so we thought, ‘Let’s just do a soft opening and see what the need
is,’ and a soft grand opening is what ended up happening.” “This isn’t a revenue stream,” adds John Widmer, “it’s a gift to our clientele.” “Gift” might be a little hyperbolic. After flashing my ID to the on-duty club-tender, paying an annual $25 membership fee as well as a $5 day-use fee, I ponied up the four-seat bar to check out the assorted rentable glassware and dab devices (available for $3 an hour), and Volcano vaporizers ($10 an hour). While no cannabis is sold at the club, the dispensary on the opposite side of the building maintains specials designed for club use, like half-gram dabs and pre-rolls, for example. Also: Once you’ve entered and your hand has been stamped by the club-tender on duty, neither the dispensary nor the neighboring dive bar will serve you, so arrive prepared. In addition to bongs, dab rigs, bubblers, hemp rolls, rolling trays, and grinders, the bar area offers a small variety of CBD sodas and slushies on tap, plus a basic soda fountain and cold case stocked with bottled drinks. Once I’d gotten settled, I ordered a fruity CBD soda and an extra-large glass beaker bong, which the club-tender gen-
erously offered to fill with ice. I’d brought a gram of flower from home, which I smoked while the club-tender on duty ran through the club’s rules: no booze, no tobacco, masks stay on unless you’re taking sips or rips. (Occupancy is also capped at 25 right now due to COVID-19 regulations, and there’s enough space to keep everyone appropriately distanced.) He also listed a handful of local restaurants that deliver via Grubhub, since there’s no kitchen. Bonus: The Wi-Fi and the lighting were both strong enough for remote work, a perk that I doubt flies under the radar. After I cleared my bowl, the tender showed me the game room, a dim nook in the back of the club separated from the rest of the space by a large office window and glass door. Inside is a couch for three, a large flat-screen connected to a PS4 with a dozen or so games and a Nintendo Switch in a locked case, a ping-pong table, board games and a projection screen for VR gaming. The room has a distinct suburban bachelor vibe—not quite barren but intentionally free from any distractions that aren’t playable games. Even the dividing window had blinds. Before I chugged the last of my CBD soda, I got a rundown of the club’s event calendar: Weekends are dedicated to televised sports; open-mic nights occur every Friday; a pool tournament happens on the first week of the month; and that night happened to be “Tie-Dye Night.” The club also livestreams hip-hop shows hosted by Cool Nutz. As my tender described a scene that featured rappers performing while smoking weed, middle-aged cannamoms hitting 11 am dabs, and gamers flexing their skills over thick clouds of Volcano vapor, I got the sense that the club is acting like a stoner community center. Kaleafa Social Club’s suburban sensibility might lack the aesthetic swagger of New Portland, but that’s not a drawback. On the contrary, the lack of pretense makes it an even more comfortable place to sit back and just get really, really high. It’s not your own living room, but if you live in Oregon City or under a weed-restricted roof, it might be the next best thing. GO: Kaleafa Social Club, 19199 S Molalla Ave., Oregon City, 541-288-9670, kaleafasc.com. Noon-10 pm daily. $25 membership fee, $5 cover. 21+.
KALEAFA SOCIAL CLUB Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
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ART N’ COMICS!
Be a Willamette Week featured artist! Any art style is welcome! Let’s share your art! Contact us at art@wweek.com. Get Gallery PDX is a new live-in gallery, where you can experience artwork displayed in an actual home setting. All work is shown in six airbnb rental units. You can arrange a private tour, book a room to stay with the art for a night, or join one of our special events (when we can gather in small groups safely again). Great for collectors, designers, and art lovers. Representing the following Portland artists: Mayfair, Mitch Friefeld, Leah Kohlenberg, Hazel Glass, Julie Moore, Sienna Morris, Melissa Hogan, Cedar Lee, Kelly Williams, Jon Gottschall, and Nicole Mark.
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Jack draws exactly what he sees n’ hears from the streets. IG @sketchypeoplepdx kentcomics.com
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Willamette Week JANUARY 13, 2021 wweek.com
JONESIN’
Week of January 21
©2020 Rob Brezsny
by Matt Jones
"Goodbye, Mr. Trebek"--a retrospective.
ARIES (March 21-April 19)
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)
On May 4, 2019, my Aries friend Leah woke up in a state of amazement. During the night, she felt she had miraculously become completely enlightened. Over the next 16 hours, she understood her life perfectly. Everything made sense to her. She was in love with every person and animal she knew. But by the next morning, the exalted serenity had faded, and she realized that her enlightenment had been temporary. She wasn't mad or sad, however. The experience shook her up so delightfully that she vowed to forevermore seek to recreate the condition she had enjoyed. Recently she told me that on virtually every day since May 4, 2019, she has spent at least a few minutes, and sometimes much longer, exulting in the same ecstatic peace that visited her back then. That's the Aries way: turning a surprise, spontaneous blessing into a permanent breakthrough. I trust you will do that soon.
You're entering the potentially most playful and frisky and whimsical phase of your astrological cycle. To honor and encourage a full invocation of gleeful fun, I offer you the following thoughts from Tumblr blogger Sparkledog. "I am so tired of being told that I am too old for the things I like. No cartoons. No toys. No fantasy animals. No bright colors. Are adults supposed to live monotonous, bleak lives ? I can be an adult and still love childish things. I can be intelligent and educated and informed and I can love stuffed animals and unicorns. Please stop making me feel bad for loving the things that make me happy."
TAURUS (April 20-May 20) One morning, famous French army general Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934) instructed his gardener to spend the next day planting a row of saplings on his property. The gardener agreed, but advised Lyautey that this particular species of tree required 100 years to fully mature. "In that case," Lyautey said, "plant them now." I recommend that you, too, expedite your long-term plans, Taurus. Astrologically speaking, the time is ripe for you to take crisp action to fulfill your big dreams.
GEMINI (May 21-June20) Someone asked poet E. E. Cummings what home was for him. He responded poetically, talking about his lover. Home was "the stars on the tip of your tongue, the flowers sprouting from your mouth, the roots entwined in the gaps between your fingers, the ocean echoing inside your ribcage.” What about you, Gemini? If you were asked to give a description of what makes you feel glad to be alive and helps give you the strength to be yourself, what would you say? Now would be a good time to identify and honor the influences that inspire you to create your inner sense of home. ACROSS
55 Honey Graham _ _ _ (cereal brand)
22 Water filter brand
1 Make like a cricket's legs
58 Go in
4 Talk like Cindy Brady
59 Canadian series hosted by Trebek from 1976-1980, featuring professional skaters alongside B-list celebs
28 Smarten (up)
8 Georgia senator-elect Jon 14 H in Greek 15 Peruvian ancestor 16 Flat, geometrically 17 Canadian equivalent of "American Bandstand" hosted by Alex Trebek in 1963-64 19 _ _ _-weensie 20 Biblical boats 21 1976 trivia show (not the Nickelodeon kids' show) hosted by Trebek 23 Bent down
27 Aromatic compounds 29 Reykjavik's country 33 Aloe vera yield 34 Had some haggis 35 Some Spanish titles, for short 36 Dallas cager, informally 39 1981 game show (not the classic Atari game) hosted by Trebek 42 Armani competitor, briefly 43 "'Tis a shame" 45 Part of TGIF 46 Meme response
30 String quartet instrument 31 "Cherry Wine" rapper
63 "Aw, heck!"
32 High-speed internet initials
64 Roll in mud
34 "Sing the Sorrow" band
65 Emmy-winning game show hosted by Trebek starting in 1984
36 _ _ _ and cheese
67 Genetic variant 68 Tennis player Kournikova 69 Abbr. on remotes 70 Prepped for serving 71 "It's for the _ _ _" 72 Ethyl or methyl ending
25 Place to order a round 26 Kilmer of "MacGruber"
24 Golfing hazard
DOWN
37 Start for carte or king 38 Wagnerian opera setting 40 Test the fit of 41 Major vein 44 Blood-red 47 _ _ _ hand (give help) 49 Shoe padding 51 "Feed a cold, _ _ _ a fever" 52 Forward, as mail 53 Sock pattern
1 New version of an old film
56 Burqini headpiece
2 Reversals on the road
57 Segment of a play
3 Vessel for thematic gifts
59 Trade
4 Permit to drive (abbr.)
60 Like some tales
5 How most TV is broadcast these days
61 Due
6 2020 CGI movie that featured the origin story of a cartoon canine
62 Seemingly forever 66 Butter square
7 _ _ _ New Guinea 8 German car name 9 Something a vest lacks 10 Casual footwear
48 Harden, in a way
11 Not paid by the hour
50 "Battleship Potemkin" locale
12 Not rainy 13 Duty-_ _ _ shop
54 "Star Wars" character Solo
18 "Survivor" locales
©2021 Jonesin’ Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com) For answers to this puzzle, call: 1-900-226-2800, 99 cents per minute. Must be 18+. Or to bill to your credit card, call: 1-800-655-6548. Reference puzzle #JNZ990.
last week’s answers
CANCER (June 21-July 22) "Be sweet to me, world," pleads Cancerian poet Stephen Dunn in one of his poems. In the coming weeks, I invite you to address the world in a similar way. And since I expect the world will be unusually receptive and responsive to your requests, I'll encourage you to add even more entreaties. For example, you could say, "Be revelatory and educational with me, world," or "Help me deepen my sense that life is meaningful, world," or "Feed my soul with experiences that will make me smarter and wilder and kinder, world." Can you think of other appeals and supplications you'd like to express to the world?
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22) Throughout his many rough travels in the deserts of the Middle East, the Leo diplomat and army officer known as Lawrence of Arabia (1888–1935) didn't give up his love of reading. While riding on the backs of camels, he managed to study numerous tomes, including the works of ancient Greek writers Aeschylus and Aristophanes. I'd love to see you perform comparable balancing acts in the coming weeks, Leo. The astrological omens suggest you'll be skilled at coordinating seemingly uncoordinatable projects and tasks—and that you'll thrive by doing so. (PS: Your efforts may be more metaphorical and less literal than Lawrence's.)
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) Sculptor Stefan Saal testifies that one of his central questions as a creator of art is to know when a piece is done. "When making a thing I need to decide when is it thoroughly made, when is it dare-we-say 'perfected.'" He has tried to become a master of knowing where and when to stop. I recommend this practice to you in the next two weeks, Virgo. You've been doing good work, and will continue to do good work, but it's crucial that you don't get overly fussy and fastidious as you refine and perhaps even finish your project.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) "Nature cannot be ordered about, except by obeying her," wrote philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626). That paradoxical observation could prove to be highly useful for you in the coming weeks. Here are some other variants on the theme: Surrendering will lead to power. Expressing vulnerability will generate strength. A willingness to transform yourself will transform the world around you. The more you're willing to acknowledge that you have a lot to learn, the smarter you'll be.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) In his book *The Lover’s Dictionary*, David Levithan advises lovers and would-be lovers to tell each other their very best stories. "Not the day’s petty injustices," he writes. "Not the glimmer of a seven-eighthsforgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you." No, to foster the vibrant health of a love relationship— or any close alliance for that matter—you should consistently exchange your deepest, richest tales. This is always true, of course, but it's especially true for you right now.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) On October 18, 1867, the United States government completed its purchase of Alaska from Russia. How much did this 586,000-acre kingdom cost? Two cents per acre, which in today's money would be about 37 cents. It was a tremendous bargain! I propose that we regard this transaction as a metaphor for what's possible for you in 2021: the addition of a valuable resource at a reasonable price. (PS: American public opinion about the Alaskan purchase was mostly favorable back then, but a few influential newspapers described it as foolish. Don't let naysayers like them dissuade you from your smart action.)
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) "My business is circumference," wrote poet Emily Dickinson in a letter to her mentor. What did she mean by that? "Circumference" was an important word for her. It appeared in 17 of her poems. Critic Rochelle Cecil writes that for Dickinson, circumference referred to a sense of boundlessness radiating out from a center—a place where "one feels completely free, where one can express anything and everything." According to critic Donna M. Campbell, circumference was Dickinson's metaphor for ecstasy. When she said, "My business is circumference," she meant that her calling was to be eternally in quest of awe and sublimity. I propose that you make good use of Dickinson's circumference in the coming weeks, Aquarius. It's time to get your mind and heart and soul thoroughly expanded and elevated.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) Should I quote the wisdom of people who have engaged in behavior I consider unethical or immoral? Should I draw inspiration from teachers who at some times in their lives treated others badly? For instance, Piscesborn Ted Geisel, better known as beloved author Dr. Seuss, cheated on his wife while she was sick, ultimately leading to her suicide. Should I therefore banish him from my memory and never mention the good he did in the world? Or should I forgive him of his sins and continue to appreciate him? I don't have a fixed set of rules about how to decide questions like these. How about you? The coming weeks will be a good time to redefine your relationship with complicated people.
HOMEWORK: Where in your life do you push too hard? Where don't you push hard enough? Testify: 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
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