NEWS: Who Runs the Wrecking Ball? P. 9 FOOD: Introducing Night Food. P. 23 THEATER: Sympathy for Professor Jekyll. P. 25 WILLAMETTE WEEK PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY
“I ACCIDENTALLY MADE A CRACKER BARREL.” P. 22
SIX WAYS TO R E D E FI N E P O RT L A N D,
TOMORROWLLOYD US I N G J US T ONE DEAD MALL. BY ANTHONY EFFINGER • PAGE 12
WWEEK.COM
VOL 48/03 11.17.2021
Portland Public Schools has opened 40 Full-time Civil Service Custodian positions and our pay rates have increased to $16.70/hour to start. Our need for Custodians is immediate and we would love to hear from you! Portland Public Schools envisions every student, every teacher, every school succeeding. It takes a community to keep our schools comfortable and safe so that our students can thrive. All job locations are in Portland. Find fulfilling work connecting with your community in a variety of school locations. Enjoy a fun and active job where you can have a real impact on Portland’s future.
$16.70 - $20.92 / hour
GROW A CAREER! No experience is required for custodians, but customer service and/or cleaning experience always helps. WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU • Punctuality and reliability • Ability to pass a short multiple choice skills test equipment, safety, and best practices in the field. • Basic computer skills to clock in/out • Ability to perform essential duties/ physical tasks (see job posting) • Ability to pass a background check after job offer SUPPORT IN SUCCESS This job is represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and offers access to the Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Paid training and continued career support from our leaders.
OTHER GREAT PERKS • Paid Holidays • Medical, Dental, Vision, and PERS retirement benefits for full-time • Paid sick leave and other paid time off (PTO) • Swing shifts (afternoons into evenings)
HOW TO APPLY View jobs and apply online at http://careers.pps.net and search for “custodian”
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Oregon officials stand by as Dutch Bros. founder seeks to take revenue from Indigenous tribes.
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SCAN FOR MORE DEALS! Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
3
DIALOGUE
• •••• ••••
A T R E A LRBO S ER E T •••• A E H T
Last week, WW reported on the objections of Oregon’s nine Indigenous tribes to a proposal by Dutch Bros. Coffee founder Travis Boersma to install 225 betting terminals at a horse track in Grants Pass (“Dutch Colonialism,” Nov. 10, 2021). Oregon has historically protected the tribes’ exclusive claim to casinos. Gov. Kate Brown had stood by as the proposal for terminals at the Flying Lark moved forward. After WW raised questions, Brown gently urged the Oregon Racing Commission to delay approval of the machines. Here’s what our readers had to say.
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Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
ALLISON B, VIA TWITTER:
“A billionaire capitalizing on a loophole that’ll harm Oregon’s Indigenous tribes absolutely needs to be challenged.”
JERRY CHANNELL, VIA FACEBOOK: “Class, Oregon
style; make a little money, build a casino.”
FRANK SEMONIOUS, VIA WWEEK.COM: “Near every
Dutch Bros. is a small mom and pop coffee stand that obviously needs our business more than Dutch Bros. does. (In St. Helens, Ore., it’s called Javalation and it is 100% better than any other place I have ever bought coffee.) They are so rich they need to build a tax shelter. Now I have two reasons to never buy their products.”
MAMA K, VIA TWITTER: “Why
does this feel like an episode of Yellowstone? Travis is the bad guy.”
KURT CHAPMAN, VIA WWEEK.COM: “That some
off-track betting on horse races in other locations would harm tribal ‘take’ up at Seven Feathers, the nearest casino, is laughable. Canyonville is about an hour away through some pretty windy mountain pass miles. Certainly not an Uber ride away like the Ilani is to Portlandia. “Also it now appears Boersma, once the darling of progressives for his Horatio Alger rise to success, must now become reviled because he is a ‘billionaire’ due to Dutch Bros. going public.”
Dr. Know
BLUNT FROM THE BLOC, VIA TWITTER: “Every day
is a dystopian nightmare for Indigenous folks. It’d be cool if it wasn’t like that.”
LEON TROTSKY, VIA WWEEK. COM: “Only the libertarian
WW, where there are no sex or drug crimes, would think enabling exclusive gambling rights to the Tribes is a way to solve their economic woes. It’s like, let’s infect them with another white man’s curse.”
ANNE J. APPLEGATE, VIA WWEEK.COM: “Surely there
are other ways to create income other than continuing a tradition of profiting off of the weaknesses and mental health disorders of others… regardless of race. Continuing to build more of these gambling establishments, regardless of their affiliation to native tribes or not, is irresponsible, callous, and negligent when it comes to the well-being of our future generations and all Oregonians who are currently affected.”
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR must include the author's street address and phone number for verification. Letters must be 250 or fewer words. Submit to: 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: mzusman@wweek. com.
BY MARTY SMITH @martysmithxxx
Idly scrolling through remote job ads, I noticed several offering $8 to $9 an hour. Do remote jobs not have to abide by local minimum wages? If so, could a Portland company “relocate” to Alabama and cut their current employees’ pay accordingly? —Cathleen A. I certainly appreciate the penny-pinching fiendishness of your plan, Cathleen, but if it were legal to pay employees based on the minimum wage at corporate headquarters, Jeff Bezos would live in Somalia. Your wage is governed by the laws of the place where you physically do the work, regardless of the state (or planet) your employer calls home. Delta Airlines, for example, is based in Georgia, where the state minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.* But if they hire you to work in downtown Portland—incinerating passengers’ luggage, maybe, or throwing darts to determine which flights to cancel—you’re entitled to the local minimum wage of $14. This holds true even if you were hired in Georgia, your name is Bubba, and you go back home to Macon every weekend. Things are less clear when it comes to taxes, though, especially in a pandemic. Both Oregon
(which has an income tax) and Washington (which doesn’t) have always agreed that if—and only if—you work in Oregon, you pay Oregon tax. Thus, Washington residents who once commuted to Oregon are now getting a major tax break by working from home. New York, on the other hand, claims that (for the duration of COVID, at least) nonresident telecommuters employed by New York firms still legally work in New York. This means there are probably people in New Jersey paying New York income tax who haven’t crossed the Hudson in almost two years. (Maybe that’s one of the reasons cranky New Jerseyans almost elected a Republican governor.) New York’s harder line has been adopted by other states, too. Who’s right? The Supreme Court had a chance to decide in a case called Massachusetts v. New Hampshire, but—possibly mistaking it for a pretty dull-sounding basketball game—they refused to hear it. For now, if you’re going to telecommute to another state, make it Oregon. * Yeah, I know. In practice, folks get the federal minimum of $7.25, but Georgia lawmakers like keeping $5.15 on the books so you won’t forget they’re assholes. QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.
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TINA KOTEK
TWO OF THREE MAJOR CANDIDATES FILE TO RUN FOR GOVERNOR: State Treasurer Tobias Read and House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland) have filed to run for governor in the Democratic primary, on Nov. 15 and 16, respectively. Nicholas Kristof, the former journalist who has raised as much as his two foes combined, has not. One significance of filing, WW has learned, is that it triggers an automatic check by the Secretary of State’s Office to confirm the candidate meets the constitutional qualifications to run. For Kotek and Read, who’ve held elected office since 2006, that won’t be an issue. For Kristof, who voted in New York last year, meeting the threeyear residency requirement to run for governor could be a hurdle. His attorney insists he meets the standard, but voters won’t know until the secretary of state rules. Kristof’s spokeswoman Melissa Navas says the delay is not intentional. “There is no requirement that a candidate file immediately after announcing for office, and it hasn’t really been the norm here in Oregon,” she says. “Right now, we’re focused on building up the campaign.” EVICTIONS RAMP UP IN MULTNOMAH COUNTY: Landlords have filed for 62 nonpayment evictions in Multnomah County since Nov. 1. In October, they filed 126. That number is likely to spike, says Becky Straus of the Oregon Law Center, as more tenants lose their 90-day safe harbor from eviction, which applies if they sought state rental assistance but the money still hasn’t reached their landlord. One of the county’s biggest evictors is Legacy Property Management. Since July 1, when the state’s eviction moratorium ended, Legacy has filed for 43 nonpayment evictions with the court. That number does not necessarily mean 43 households have been kicked out of their homes; if tenants showed up for their court date, it’s possible they were helped by a county team to apply for rental assistance, setting over their
court date an additional 90 days. A representative for Legacy declined to comment. CITY MUST TURN OVER POLICE CELLPHONE NUMBERS: Public interest lawyer and political activist Alan Kessler won another public records case against the city of Portland in Multnomah County Circuit Court last week. This win is different from his recent victories to get personnel numbers that identify Portland police officers who covered up their name tags during street protests. In the new case, Kessler prevailed in a dispute with City Hall over whether employees’ personal cellphone numbers constitute public records. At issue were text messages Kessler requested from the city that included messages from personal cellphones. The city declined to share the personal cellphone numbers attached to some of the texts; Kessler argued Oregon law says such numbers are public information. “The City’s interpretation is inconsistent with both the plain language of the statute and with the Attorney General’s interpretation of that statute as set out in its Public Records and Meetings Manual,” Judge Shelley Russell wrote in a Nov. 10 opinion. “The Oregon Public Records Act is a disclosure law, not a secrecy law,” Kessler says, calling the ruling a “vindication of my yearlong effort to get the city to release metadata about communications to and from city-owned cellphones.” The City Attorney’s Office declined to comment. PORTLANDERS PROVE EVEN MORE GENEROUS: Give!Guide surpassed $750,000 in donations to local nonprofits on Nov. 15. That’s a full four days ahead of the pace in 2020, six days ahead of 2019, and 12 days ahead of 2018. Give!Guide is Willamette Week’s annual campaign to raise funds for—and draw attention to—the good works of local nonprofits. Donate $10 or more on Nov. 18 and you could win one of four $250 gift certificates from Atlas Tattoo. You can join the giving at giveguide.org.
COMFORT SHOES FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY
Mon-Sat 10-6pm Sunday 11-5pm
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PORTLAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS IS NOW HIRING SMALL SCHOOL BUS DRIVERS for the 2021/2022 School Year and Beyond At PPS, we believe that every human has intrinsic value and everyone has the ability to learn. At Student Transportation, our mission is to enable safe, equitable and efficient access to education. We all share and take pride in that responsibility. Adult behavior is a powerful teacher for young people. Who will you inspire today? No Experience is needed. We will offer support while you study for your CDL and you will even be paid during your ‘Behind the Wheel’ training hours. We offer full-time trainers on site to help you realize your goals and provide ongoing training. This is a classified position with union support.
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HOW TO APPLY View jobs and apply online at http://careers.pps.net and search for “Bus Driver”
Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
5
NEWS
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK
POLICE LOG
Where’s the Beef? Burgerville says excessive criminal activity led to the closure of its Lents location. Police reports don’t support that. BY S O P H I E P E E L
speel@wweek.com
Burgerville announced after signing a new labor contract with the Burgerville Workers Union on Nov. 12 that it would reopen all of its currently closed locations, including the one it closed in August in Lents. At the time of the closure, a Burgerville representative said store staff had called police daily, and that “the environment around the restaurant has deteriorated seriously.…Burgerville employees have found weapons, drug paraphernalia, and human waste on the property.” But records show that from the beginning of the year until Oct. 31, Portland police wrote just four reports about incidents that took place on the Burgerville property at 3504 SE 92nd Ave. Those included two assaults, a vehicle theft and a property hit-and-run. All four were filed on or before June 1. Burgerville announced the closure Aug. 3. No reports had been filed at the restaurant for the previous three months. Nonetheless, Burgerville says a dangerous environment fostered by a nearby homeless camp left its employees feeling unsafe, citing “Burgerville reports from 2018-2021, and communication with managers at the Lents location.”
“All of these demonstrate sustained issues at that restaurant. Managers became overwhelmed by the frequency of incidents and ongoing exposure to both criminal activity and noncriminal but still unsafe and unhygienic activity,” said a spokesperson, who would not provide their name. “Despite frequent calls to police, there was no response that addressed or mitigated the human waste, open drug use, paraphernalia, and safety risk that employees and guests were experiencing as a result of the activity and behaviors associated with the growing camp.” Burgerville declined to share its in-house incident log. The lot south of the Lents Burgerville, which contains a bowling alley and arcade called KingPins, has had slightly more reported incidents this year, nine. But that number is not on pace to match the number filed in 2019: 21. Mark Medina, a spokesman for the union representing Burgerville employees, says workers never voiced fears: “I spoke to everyone at the Lents location, and the only notes I got were that they felt sorry for these people.” Residents of the homeless camp next to the Lents Burgerville told WW in August they feared
Burgerville had shut the location to pressure the city to sweep the camp. And that’s what happened. Sometime during the week of Aug. 10, the city swept the portion of the camp situated on city property (near the multiuse path along Interstate 205), according to the city’s Office of Management and Finance. Hillary Barbour, director of strategic initiatives at Burgerville, tells WW that Burgerville has continued to monitor the property with hired security guards and has had to periodically remove campers from its parking lot. “We are fencing off the area that’s Burgerville property to make that more secure,” Barbour says. “We’re continuing to have private security monitor the property, we’re working on deescalation training for our employees, [and] we’re continuing to clean up that area.” Below is a graph of police reports filed in the past five years for incidents at the Burgerville and adjacent KingPins lots. BURGERVILLE LOT KINGPINS LOT
30
25
20
15
10
5
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
SOURCE: PORTLAND POLICE BUREAU
FRIED: The Lents Burgerville location shuttered in August citing vandalism and crime due to a nearby homeless camp. DANIEL FRANK STINDT
HUNZEKER WATCH
We still don’t know what he did. BY TESS RISKI
257 DAYS:
That’s how long it’s been since the Portland Police Bureau opened an internal affairs investigation into the leak of information that wrongly implicated Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty in a March 3 hit-and-run. It has released no results of its inquiry. 6
Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
246 DAYS:
That’s how long ago Officer Brian Hunzeker resigned from his role as president of the Portland Police Association due to what the union described as a “serious, isolated mistake related to the Police Bureau’s investigation into the alleged hit-and-run by Commissioner Hardesty.” We still don’t know what he did. The mayor’s office says it doesn’t know what he did.
245 DAYS:
That’s how long it’s been since the city signed a contract with an outside investigative firm two probe the leak.
DONOR
Contribution of the Week
LINEUP
HOW MUCH? $1,000 WHO GOT IT? State Sen. Betsy Johnson (D-Scappoose)
6TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT
WHO GAVE IT? State Sen. Lee Beyer (D-Springfield)
The Next Congressperson A new seat in Congress attracts some familiar faces. The Oregon Legislature’s partisan fight to draw lines for the state’s new 6th Congressional District was contentious and continues in the courts. But that’s just the prelude to the contest to decide who will represent an area likely to include parts of Lake Oswego down through Yamhill and Polk counties along with the western portions of Marion County. It’s a district that favors Democrats: 55% of voters within the contested boundaries went for Joe Biden in 2020. And political consultants say the new seat represents new possibilities, particularly in the Democratic primary. “It’s an opportunity for Oregon to get another woman,” says political consultant Paige Richardson. “It’s an opportunity to get the first person of color in our congressional delegation. And it’s an opportunity for the midvalley to get someone representing them.” Plenty of candidates are ready to seize that chance.
DEMOCRATS ALREADY IN: • Loretta Smith, a onetime staffer to U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D - Ore.) and a two-term Multnomah County commissioner, entered the race before the district’s boundaries were drawn. She most recently made two unsuccessful bids for Portland City Council and has already raised $115,032. She doesn’t live in the district and won’t till the court case is decided, when she plans to buy a home within its lines. • State Rep. Andrea Salinas (D -Lake Oswego), a leader in the Oregon House of Representatives on redistricting and an ally of public-employee unions in the state. A well-respected figure in Salem, she’s the first Democratic legislator to join the race—but also doesn’t live in the district. (Federal law says that’s not required.) • Salem doctor Kathleen Harder, who chaired the Oregon Medical Board, entered the Democratic primary on Nov. 15.
38%
• Other Dems who have announced include Intel engineer Matt West. DEMOCRATS STILL CONSIDERING A RUN: • State Rep. Brian Clem (D-Salem), who is leaving the Legislature to care for his ailing mother. Clem, a moderate whose politics may help in a contested general election, could also bring his own money to the race. Clem says he’s planning to give the race “careful consideration.” • S t a t e R e p. Te r e sa A l o n s o L e o n (D -Woodburn), has a strong base of support in the heart of the district. Alonso Leon will potentially compete with Salinas for some of the same endorsements from social justice organizations. (She did not respond to requests for comment.) • Also considering a run is state Rep. Paul Evans (D -Monmouth), who says he’s weighing a bid “very seriously.” A FORMIDABLE REPUBLICAN: • The Democrats are favored, but it’s not clear they’ll carry the seat. The midterm elections of a Democratic presidency may provide an opening for the GOP. Rep. Ron Noble (R-Yamhill), a former police chief who represents a portion of the new congressional district in the Oregon House, is in. RACHEL MONAHAN.
WHY IS IT INTERESTING? Johnson has served in the Oregon Legislature as a Democrat for 20 years but has announced plans to run for governor unaffiliated with any party. That’s a novel strategy in Oregon and, to succeed, will require a shift in voters’ thinking. One key: permission from longtime Democrats to support Johnson. Beyer is about as longtime as it gets. Springfield voters first sent him to Salem in 1990 and, including a timeout to serve on the Public Utility Commission, he’s been there ever since. His contribution to Johnson is modest—a fifth of what he gave fellow Democrat and State Treasurer Tobias Read, who is running for governor in the Democratic primary. But it’s a signal to disaffected Dems and unaffiliated voters that Johnson is viable. “I think she could make a good governor,” Beyer says. WHY DID HE GIVE IT? Beyer says he and Johnson often disagree, but he likes and admires her. “She’s served her constituents extremely well,” he says. Beyer first got involved in Oregon politics as a campaign volunteer in the 1974 Democratic primary for governor, which featured eventual Gov. Bob Straub, State Treasurer James Redden and state Sen. Betty Roberts (D-Portland). He expects this year’s race to be the most competitive since that contest because voters are disaffected. “I’ve never seen the public’s mood like it is now,” Beyer says. “I think they are frustrated on both sides of the spectrum.” That presents an opportunity for somebody in the middle, he adds, although if he’s forced to choose between Read and Johnson in the general election, he’ll face a tough decision: “I’m not sure yet who I’ll vote for,” Beyer says. NIGEL JAQUISS.
THE BIG NUMBER
An increase in federal highway funding isn’t enough to cancel Oregon’s plans for tolls.
President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill increases spending on Oregon’s highways and special transportation projects 38% over the state’s baseline, according to the Oregon Department of Transportation. But the extra $1 billion earmarked for Oregon over five years in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act won’t be enough to make ODOT drop its plans for tolling on Portland-area interstate highways. In part, that’s because only $400 million of the increase is flexible to spend as ODOT wishes. (There’s an extra $200 million in the bill for public transit as well.) The agency says it still needs the
tolling dollars for big projects that don’t fit the restrictions attached to federal money. Asked about the tolling plans at a press briefing on Nov. 12, ODOT officials said they’re also counting on tolls for managing congestion. “We’re starting to hear that from folks these days, ‘Now that you have this money, you won’t need to toll, right?’” said ODOT assistant director Travis Brouwer last Friday. “The reality is that if you do the math, that simply isn’t going to be the case. If we took every single dollar coming in additional money from this bill, it would not be enough to build the Interstate Bridge, or I-205 and the Rose Quarter.” RACHEL MONAHAN. Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
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NEWS J U S T I N YA U
DEMOLITION MAN: Michael Martin hoped to tear down the former U.S. Post Office in the Pearl District.
Lost in the Mail Michael Martin thought Portland officials wanted a Black contractor to tear down the U.S. Post Office. He was wrong. BY NIG E L JAQ U I SS
njaquiss@wweek.com
In just a few months, a contractor will demolish the old U.S. Post Office in the Pearl District, a key step in the city’s largest and most ambitious development project in decades. Nobody was more excited about the demolition than Michael Martin, owner of Northwest Infrastructure, Portland’s only Black-owned demolition firm. Martin recalls watching last year as Prosper Portland, the city’s economic development agency, hammered out an aggressive community benefits agreement with labor and social justice groups, ensuring that minority-owned firms and workers of color would get their fair share of work in rebuilding what the city calls the Broadway Corridor. Martin was understandably eager when he learned that minority firms would get preference in demolishing the post office, a 14-acre property at 715 NW Hoyt St., which Prosper purchased in 2016 for $88 million. “Prosper Portland is the real deal when it comes to fixing the past,” Martin remembers thinking at the time. In February 2020, when Prosper requested proposals for demolishing the building, Martin felt confident. His firm had done demolition jobs for the city of Portland, Portland Public Schools, Portland Community College and TriMet, partnering with the some of region’s biggest contractors. On April 7, 2020, Prosper Portland
passed him over and awarded the contract to a white-owned firm. After Martin filed a formal protest of the decision with Prosper Portland, the agency rebid the project and, on Dec. 17, awarded the work to the same firm—now controlled by new owners, Native Americans from Alaska. On May 12, 2021, Martin filed a lawsuit charging “disparate treatment” and “improper interference with Northwest Infrastructure’s contractual relations by certain Prosper Portland employees.” The lawsuit, pending in U.S. District Court in Portland, seeks $5.5 million in damages.
Prosper Portland says Martin’s lawsuit is “baseless.” Agency officials declined to be interviewed, but provided a statement by executive director Kimberly Branam. “[Martin’s] narrative of a disconnect between our words and actions when it comes to equity is false,” Branam said. “Our handling of the RFP process to select a contractor to demolish the main building was transparent, equitable and complied with the law.” Branam says 70% of Prosper’s business assistance grants in the past five years went to firms owned by people of color, and the agency spent $107 million with minority-owned construction firms. Maurice Rahming, owner of O’Neill Electric, another Black-owned contractor, says he’s astounded by what happened to Martin’s firm. “I recognize that there is a lot of racism and bias in the world,” Rahming says. “I will just accept that and let it go. Not Michael.” Martin, 50, grew up in Portland, went to high school in California, and came back home to start a career. After a couple of
“ It’s like there’s a big building to be built and a doghouse to be built and they’re telling me, ‘You build the doghouse.’” He alleges Prosper went to extraordinary lengths to prevent him from winning the contract. In sworn affidavits, two evaluators Prosper Portland asked to independently rank the bids say agency staff pressed them to change their scores. “It was a very heated discussion where it appeared some of the evaluators were biased against [Martin’s] NWI,” Kelly Haines, a senior project manager at Worksystems Inc., wrote of an Oct. 13, 2020, meeting that Prosper Portland convened. “I felt pressured to change my scores. I refused.”
terms at Portland Community College, he entered the construction field. “I always found heavy equipment fascinating,” he says. After working his way up through an apprenticeship program, he launched his own company in 2005. He employs 15, is a father of seven, and is also a Church of Christ minister who enjoys driving sand rails in the Oregon Dunes. Martin has done smaller jobs for Prosper Portland before and is currently demolishing part of the city’s Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant,
a job bigger in dollar terms than the post office. And the Broadway Corridor project was promising, particularly given Prosper Portland’s stated commitment to equity. Prosper has a complicated past. Since its founding as the Portland Development Commission in 1958, the agency developed 25 urban renewal districts. Some, such as the Pearl and South Waterfront, sparked enormous growth on fallow ground. Others, including the areas around Legacy Emanuel Hospital and in the Albina District, resulted in the destruction of Black neighborhoods. In an attempt to atone, the agency embarked on an equity-focused strategy in 2015 and changed its name to Prosper Portland in 2017. “Faced with mistrust and accusations of exclusion and dishonesty, Prosper Portland leadership recognized the need for change,” the agency wrote in its strategic plan. “Advancing racial equity is essential work for each of us.” In the past few years, Prosper has worked to redefine itself, with a focus on helping smaller, historically disadvantaged businesses. The Broadway Corridor provided an opportunity to display its commitment to righting historical wrongs. Even though COVID crushed demand for office space, Prosper moved forward with plans to clear the post office site. It chose a company called Northwest Demolition & Dismantling over Martin’s firm. Northwest Demolition was not in fact minority owned, however, as Prosper required. (It was subsequently acquired by the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, owned by Native Alaskans, making it a minority-owned business. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.) In his lawsuit, Martin details three further rounds of bidding—each one ending in bitter dispute. His most noteworthy allegation is that he scored higher in an independent assessment of which firm was most qualified—but Prosper asked panelists to reconsider their rankings. When the panelists refused, the lawsuit says, Prosper simply named a new panel. Over time, Martin felt increasingly certain that Prosper would never award him the full demolition contract. “I knew they were going to split the job,” he says. “They’d give Northwest Demolition the building and give me the dirt.” His fears came true. In September, Prosper announced its intention to do just that: Northwest Demolition, the Alaskan firm, would get the more lucrative contract to demolish the building, while Martin was slated to haul away contaminated soil, a much smaller job he says is worth about $250,000. “It’s like there’s a big building to be built and a doghouse to be built,” he says, “and they’re telling me, ‘You build the doghouse.’” Martin says Prosper Portland ought to live up to its professed commitment to give firms like his a shot to build their businesses. He’d much rather be hitting the post office with a wrecking ball than battling Prosper in federal court. “Why can’t I have this job?” Martin asks. “I won it fair and square two times, then they moved the goal posts.” Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
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NEWS J U S T I N YA U
Split Seconds Grand jury transcripts show the key decisions that preceded the killing of Robert Delgado. CRIME SCENE: Police officers walk through Lents Park in the hours after the April 16 shooting of Robert Delgado. BY TE SS R I S K I
tess@wweek.com
In September, a Multnomah County grand jury declined to indict Portland Police Officer Zachary DeLong for the shooting death of Robert Delgado. Last Friday, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office released nearly 800 pages of transcripts from the proceedings. In those pages are answers to questions that have lingered since the April 16 fatal shooting in Lents Park. The testimony illuminates the perspective of DeLong as he shouted orders at Delgado from approximately 90 feet away, in an exchange that would turn deadly within four minutes. It also shows the thinking of other officers and bystanders who witnessed the exchange devolve rapidly, and who heard the “pop, pop” from DeLong’s AR-15 rifle at about the same moment that Officer Samantha Wuthrich fired a round from DeLong’s less lethal munition launcher. The shooting was exactly the kind of scenario that city officials had spent years trying to prevent: a Portland police officer killing a distressed, unhoused man with a history of mental illness. Police believed Delgado was armed with a real gun only to discover post-mortem that it was a replica. The documents contain the information that the DA’s office and the Oregon Department of Justice jointly presented to grand jurors, who found no criminal wrongdoing by DeLong on the third day of the proceedings, Sept. 23. The transcripts also show in granular detail the pivotal minutes that led to Delgado’s death. The pages detail five turning points that escalated a potentially benign incident into a fatality. 1. The initial 911 caller told dispatch he wasn’t certain whether the gun was real or a replica. On the morning of April 16, Chase Hagan was on a walk with his fiancée and their dog in Lents Park when they noticed a man quick-drawing a gun. Hagan called 10
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the city’s nonemergency line. (BOEC confirms to WW that Hagan had also called the night before, at 11:47 pm, to report an “unwanted person” camping in Lents Park.) In the call audio from April 16, obtained by WW through a public records request, Hagan tells the call taker he isn’t certain the gun is real. “Hi there. I have a guy in Lents Park who kind of thinks he must be some kind of cowboy,” Hagan told the Bureau of Emergency Communications call taker at 9:28 am. “He’s wielding what looks to be a firearm. I’m too far away to tell whether or not it’s an actual gun or an airsoft gun.” BOEC dispatched DeLong, who then called Hagan back to gather more information. The call between DeLong and Hagan was not recorded, but Hagan testified that he relayed his uncertainty about the gun to the officer. “To my best recollection, I said the same thing,” Hagan recalls, “where it appeared to be a firearm. I wasn’t sure if it was. I wasn’t sure if it was a toy weapon.” It’s common sense for police to assume a weapon is real when a subject is wielding one, especially in public. And because DeLong never got closer than 90 feet from Delgado, it would have been nearly impossible to see the gun’s orange tip from that distance. But it does not appear the Police Bureau made any effort to ascertain the gun’s authenticity, even after Hagan expressed his uncertainty. The bureau did not respond to WW’s request for comment on the matter. 2. Neither BOEC nor PPB coded the call as mental health related. DeLong is one of 146 Portland police officers who have undergone 40 hours of specialized Enhanced Crisis Intervention Training to deescalate crisis situations. He’s also one of 168 PPB officers certified to carry an AR-15 rifle. Despite his enhanced crisis training, DeLong testified he did not believe Delga-
do was experiencing a mental health crisis. “Working this district where there’s a lot of houseless people who suffer from mental health issues…it’s always in the back of my mind,” DeLong testified. “But based on his actions, when I see him, there’s nothing that’s making me think that he’s in crisis or something along those lines.” Later, he added that Delgado appeared to be under the influence of stimulants. “To see somebody go from zero to 100,” DeLong testified, “from just nothing to completely enraged like this, what I’m thinking at this point is drugs, meth, some sort of stimulant. Something has got him spun up.” None of the law enforcement agencies responding that morning thought otherwise. WW obtained the computer-aided dispatch record from the incident, which shows neither the city’s Bureau of Emergency Communications nor the Police Bureau coded the call as mental health related. As WW reported in May, BOEC call takers are trained to flag a call as mental health related if the 911 caller describes what sounds like a potential mental health crisis. That way, the bureau can send an ECIT response and employ its deescalation techniques. BOEC spokesman Dan Douthit says police officers have a responsibility to adjust how they categorize a call based on what they see when they arrive. “The onus is on both [the] call taker and responding officer to ensure the correct call type is entered into CAD,” he tells WW. None of the responding police officers flagged the call as mental health related in their mobile data computers, Douthit says. PPB did not respond to WW’s request for comment on why its officers didn’t flag the call. 3. Police issued conflicting commands to Delgado. DeLong testified that he yelled multiple commands at Delgado, including this life-or-death warning: “Listen, man, if you
reach for a gun, I’m going to fucking shoot you.” But review of eyewitness testimony paints a picture of a chaotic scene in which police commands were contradictory— and Delgado, who at one point appeared to comply, grew agitated. For instance, video from the shooting shows DeLong yell at Delgado to “lay down on the ground now” and then, in the same breath, to “put your hands up, dude.” Immediately afterward, Officer Wuthrich also tells Delgado to put his hands up, followed by another command from DeLong to do the same. Delgado then repeats the cops’ commands back to them: “Get your hands up,” he says. This moment in the video caught grand jurors’ attention. “Right there. He’s right there,” a juror says, referring to Delgado. “And his hands are up.” PPB homicide Detective Anthony Merrill, who testified as the video played, concurred with the juror: Delgado was walking away, with his hands raised and empty at that moment. “And he’s walking away from the—” Merrill says. “And he’s walking away,” a juror says, finishing Merrill’s sentence. “Yeah,” Merrill responds. “And there doesn’t seem to be anything in his hand,” a juror added. “I didn’t see anything in his hand at that point, no,” Merrill says. Wuthrich, conversely, testified that Delgado repeatedly raised his hands instead of complying with DeLong’s commands to lie on the ground. “[DeLong] continued to tell him to get on the ground: ‘We believe you have a gun. Get on the ground,’” she said. “And the subject just continued to throw his hands in the air.” Officer Ken Le, also in the park, testified that he too shouted commands at Delgado from behind a police vehicle. “And then, because I don’t want to have too many people screaming, I stopped the
commands,” Le recalled. “That way he can focus on Officer DeLong and Wuthrich.” Le described seeing Delgado crouch down, then quickly pivot toward DeLong and Wuthrich, pointing a black handgun in their direction. The next thing Le remembered was hearing the shot from a rifle, he testified, and seeing Delgado fall to the ground. 4. Delgado pointed the replica gun at police seconds before they shot him. Eyewitnesses testified that Delgado pointed the replica gun directly at DeLong and Wuthrich in the seconds before they fired at him. No one’s testimony contradicted this claim. DeLong testified he saw Delgado rummage through his belongings and, within seconds, he was “staring down the barrel of a gun”— Delgado’s gun, which police later confirmed was a replica. “How’d that make you feel?” DOJ assistant attorney general Kurt Miller asked. “I thought, I’m going to get fucking shot,” DeLong said. “It scared the shit out of me.…I just remember thinking, oh boy.” 5. Cops fired a less lethal weapon and an AR-15 nearly simultaneously. Wuthrich said the original plan was to fire a less lethal munition at Delgado if he advanced toward her and DeLong. “He kept walking towards us with his fists balled, yelling at us,” Wuthrich said. “And so I believed that a 40-millimeter would be better at that point
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Video from the shooting shows DeLong yell at Delgado to “lay down on the ground now” and then, in the same breath, to “put your hands up, dude.”
when I did not think that there was a handgun in play.” But that went out the window, she testified, when Delgado stood with his feet shoulder width apart in a “triangle stance” and pointed what looked like a real handgun directly at them. “I braced for impact,” Wuthrich said. She then fired DeLong’s 40 mm launcher, which she had retrieved from his patrol vehicle, at Delgado. “After I shot my 40, he immediately fell to the ground,” Wuthrich said. “Did you have a sense of what caused that?” deputy DA Todd Jackson asked. “I would guess it was Officer DeLong’s shot,” Wuthrich said. “We both fired at the exact same time.” Investigators later recovered two shell casings from DeLong’s rifle, and two spent less lethal munitions: one from the 40 mm launcher Wuthrich fired, and another from Officer Cameron Smith, who fired the projectile at Delgado once he was already shot and down on the ground. Oregon State Police Medical Examiner Sean Hurst determined Delgado died from a gunshot wound to his torso.
DeLong, whose AR-15 was equipped with a “holographic sight,” according to PPB’s death investigation report, said he fired two rounds “as quickly as I could.” Delgado’s decision to point the gun startled DeLong, he said, and he reacted to save himself and Wuthrich. He then cited a commonly used, but controversial, theory of policing to justify firing at an armed subject without pausing to assess, called the action-reaction model. “There’s just no way to be ready for it,” DeLong said. “It’s just how the human brain works, I guess. You just can’t keep up. You’re always behind the curve when you’re reacting.” Near the end of the final day of proceedings, Miller asked DeLong—who said he grew up less than a mile from Lents Park—if, in retrospect, he would have done anything differently. “It’s difficult to describe, you know, in hindsight, but I don’t think so. This is my neighborhood,” DeLong said. “I love the neighborhood and I just feel, like, accountable to the people that live there to go and check on this guy, to go to this call. I think I would be negligent, derelict if I didn’t.”
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Six ways to redefine Portland, using one dead mall. BY ANTHONY EFFINGER
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MICK HANGLAND-SKILL
Except maybe the ice rink. IDEA #1:
RAZE THE MALL AND BRING BACK A GREEN STREET GRID
MICK HANGLAND-SKILL
The biggest opportunity to reshape Portland’s landscape currently smells like a Cinnabon. That’s right: Those 23 acres of prime real estate are Portland’s way out of civic malaise. Ever since lenders decided to foreclose on the Lloyd Center Mall, Portlanders have flooded social media with tear-stained memories of childhood ice-skating parties and caramel corn feasts. Most of those people probably haven’t visited for a while. For more than a decade, Lloyd Center has degraded into a carjacker and shoplifter’s paradise. The pandemic accelerated that decline, but Lloyd Center was struggling well before then. (In 2019, this newspaper published a cover story wondering if the mall would last another Christmas.) The four anchor stores—Sears, Nordstrom, Marshalls, Macy’s—have all abandoned ship. A Honey Baked Ham kiosk is one of few signs of holiday bustle. Only a third of the mall’s storefronts are occupied, and several of the shops lower their security gates even during posted business hours. It is a tawdry end to one of Portland’s most beloved, yet much-maligned, institutions, where people have been eating Joe Brown’s Carmel Corn since 1960, where Tonya Harding learned how to skate, and where you could get a Jamba Juice within walking distance of the Willamette River. KKR, the New York City lender that is foreclosing on Lloyd Center, said little about what it planned to do with the 23-acre property, beyond a bit of real estate jargon that could mean almost anything: “We intend to foreclose and to take ownership of the asset, enabling us to optimize value over the near and medium term,” KKR executive Patrick Mattson said. Likely translation: We’re going to put some lipstick on this pig and sell it for bacon. Lloyd Center is big. Eighteen square city blocks big. A plot of land that size is exactly the kind of blank slate an aimless city needs to excite its imagination. It’s no secret that Portland needs a jolt. The pandemic exposed political rifts, social ills, and a lack of leadership. But it also provided an opportunity to reconsider how we should use communal spaces—the places we couldn’t gather around for two years. The Lloyd District has long been a disappointment. Its namesake, Ralph Lloyd, was a California rancher who struck oil under his land and bought a huge swath of the city he loved: Portland. He thought it would be the new Los Angeles. He died, but his daughters pursued his vision, hired the architect who would soon after help design Seattle’s Space Needle, and, in 1960, built Lloyd Center, touted as the largest shopping mall in the world at the time. Its windowless walls loomed over the neighborhood like the sides of an oil tanker. “When they built the Lloyd Center, they turned their back on Broadway,” says Roslyn Hill, a landscape designer known as the “Queen of Alberta” because she grew up in the neighborhood and returned to spearhead its revival in the 1990s.
“They thought Multnomah would be the key street, but there is no one on it, so the mall became an island unto itself.” This is Portland’s chance to fix that development bungle. A property this size, this central to the city comes along every generation or so. We asked some of the smartest people in town: What do we do with it? Almost all of the ideas include affordable housing, which Portland needs desperately. Beyond that, the ideas range widely. New neighborhood. Skateboard park. Wooden tower. Library branch. Robot market. It’s time to rethink Lloyd. Everything must go.
George Crandall has put a lot of thought into the Lloyd Center. In the late 1980s, the Portland architect worked on a new plan for the place that aimed to integrate the mall with the nearby Oregon Convention Center, take advantage of light rail more fully, and make the whole area more walkable. Now, Crandall says, it’s time to tear the whole place down. Malls don’t belong in urban environments, says Crandall, an urban planner who has taken on behemoths before: In the 1970s, he led the fight against the Mount Hood Freeway. Malls cannibalize stores downtown, he says, and their Berlin Wall-like façades destroy the street life of a neighborhood. Instead, what Crandall wants to see is a neighborhood grid that looks more like the commercial corridors Portlanders love best: Southeast Belmont and Clinton streets. If Lloyd Center were gone, the grid could be restored. Crandall says the city must ensure that new retail shops are concentrated on a few streets with no banks, title companies, or fast food outlets, which reduce foot traffic. “We’re not all that competent here at establishing retail centers that work,” Crandall says. Take South Waterfront. The stores there are scattered. “They need to be edge to edge,” he says. Of course, a developer won’t want to spend that kind of money, Crandall says, so Prosper Portland—the city’s economic development agency—must get its hands on the property to make sure the site doesn’t sprout another megalithic structure or rows of crappy condos.
MICK HANGLAND-SKILL
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Michele Reeves of Civilis Consultants says restoring a walkable grid in the Lloyd District is also a way of addressing the biggest problem facing humanity: climate change. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., so cities must get people out of their cars if we’re going to survive, she says. Most American cities, including Portland, are falling down on the job. “You can’t claim that you are a climate-friendly city and support the widening of I-5,” Reeves says. “The Lloyd District is the place to start putting our money where our mouth is.” If any part of the city could curb car use, it’s the Lloyd District. It’s close to downtown, and it’s served by lots of mass transit. Reeves says Portland should look beyond the mall and reverse much of the “urban renewal” that blights the Lloyd District: the one-way “car funnels” on Northeast Broadway and Weidler Street, and North Vancouver and Williams avenues; the super-sized blocks that discourage pedestrian traffic; the dead zone around Veterans Memorial Coliseum. All those things tore the delicate fabric of Portland, where the blocks are smaller than in most cities (200 by 200 feet), creating more corners for stores and an attractive experience for pedestrians. “The original tapestry that was here at the turn of the century is the most valuable thing we have,” Reeves says. Kevin Cavenaugh of Guerrilla Development, the company that developed the Fair-Haired Dumbbell at the east end of the Burnside Bridge, is on board with more grid, too. He visited Tucson recently and had to walk an hour and half on huge blocks to get a pizza. “It sucked,” he says. “We are a granular city. Most interesting cities are.” IDEA #2:
A GIANT APARTMENT BUILDING—WITH AN ICE RINK IN THE LOBBY In the late 1940s, a group of Portland women got fed up with housework, decided to play hooky, and hit the rink at the now-defunct Portland Ice Hip-
MICK HANGLAND-SKILL
podrome. They called themselves the Hooky Club. When Lloyd Center opened in 1960, they moved the party to the ice rink there, skating twice a week. They’re still at it, along with lots of other Portlanders. Coaches give lessons in multiple languages. Lillian Karabaic, host of a Portland podcast that takes financial advice from cats (no, really), skates at Lloyd Center at least five days a week. Keeping the rink makes good business sense, Karabaic says. Going east from the Willamette River, the next rink you hit is in Bend. There are only four in the Portland metro area—two on the
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tony westside and another in Vancouver. Ask around and you’re sure to find a friend who plays beer league hockey at 5:30 am because that’s the only time their team can get on the ice. “The city of Portland is too large not to have a rink,” Karabaic says. Her idea? Keep it—and build apartments above it. On the upper floors, Karabaic would like to see transitional housing. The Arcade Providence, the oldest mall in America, is her model. Built in 1828, the Rhode Island building is now home to 48 micro-loft apartments on the upper two floors,
with retail, restaurants, and a whiskey bar below. Robert Liberty of Cascadia Partners, a local urban planning firm, agrees with Karabaic on both points: a rink and affordable apartments. With the Blumenauer Bridge for walking and cycling almost complete above Interstate 84, kids living in the new complex could cycle or walk to the new Benson High School, due to be renovated and reopened for the 2024 school year. Liberty says the city should keep much of the mall’s structure because its midcentury modern aesthetic would prove popular in the long run. “Tearing everything down is not my idea of sustainability,” he says. For the new stuff, Liberty proposes a design competition. Portland doesn’t have a signature architectural style, and a competition for the whole Lloyd District might help remedy that. Just for fun: Judges could say that all the buildings must be timber-frame construction. Milling wood is better for the environment than forging steel, and Portland has a tall wood-frame building already: the eight-story Carbon12 on the corner of Williams and Northeast Fremont Street. He’d like the competition to be local, too, excluding big names that build a monument to their egos. “I don’t want a starchitect building like the public library in Seattle,” Liberty says. (That was done by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, for those keeping score at home.) IDEA #3:
A PUBLIC MARKET LIKE PIKE PLACE IN SEAT TLE Architecture major Nathalie Hutchinson, 30, and a group of students at Portland State University has been eyeing Lloyd Center for months. (Her team includes a biology major, a computer scientist, and a business major.) They envision a public market like Pike Place in Seattle, with a vast farmers market and lots of small businesses selling second-hand clothing, art galleries, and craft nooks. High rents make it hard for people to start businesses in Portland. A city-owned center for such businesses could act as an incubator, much the way food carts do for restaurants. In the big boxes at either end of the mall, Hutchinson’s group would put maker spaces. Few people know it, but Pike Place Market manages eight apartment buildings, four of which are subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and include housing for seniors. Hutchinson and her team think a Lloyd Public Market could do the same. She’d put in public showers and a laundry, too, modeled on the services of Hygiene4All, which operates shower trailers, and launders clothes and bedding for houseless people. Like Robert Liberty, Hutchinson wants to retain most of Lloyd Center’s structure for environmental reasons and its architectural importance. “It’s one of the last midcentury modern buildings in Portland,” Hutchinson says. “Preserving it as a landmark would be amazing.” What about the garages that form a perimeter around much of the mall? Hutchinson sees that asphalt jungle becoming a zero-acreage farm, where farmers grow crops in containers. A startup in Vancouver, Wash., called Forward Greens is doing just that.
Also in the garage: a really big skateboard park. “Portland has such a strong skate culture,” she says. Hutchinson’s group is dead serious about all of this. They are scheduled to present their plan to the Portland City Council on Dec. 15. IDEA #4:
A RACIAL INJUSTICE REPARATION WITH A MUSEUM AND THEATER As was often the case in the 1950s and ’60s, the “urban renewal” that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with a zombie mall, a sprawling hospital, and lots of empty lots took its biggest toll on Black Portlanders, who were evicted in the name of “progress.” The leaders of Albina Vision Trust, who seek to restore that lost neighborhood, wouldn’t discuss how Lloyd Center might fit into those plans. But Lakayana Drury, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Word is Bond, recommends that the mall be reconfigured to include a museum on the history of race in Oregon and a performing arts center that caters to youth of color. “All we ever get thrown is sports,” Drury says. Lloyd Center Mall has long been one of the most diverse places in the central city. Drury argues that civic leaders should recognize the role it came to play in a splintered Black community and formalize it. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the needs here,” Drury says. He sees a market modeled on My People’s Market, which connects Black entrepreneurs with the Oregon travel industry to boost their sales. Kiosks reserved for merchants of color would give them a similar leg up, he says. IDEA #5:
UN HÔTEL LOGISTIQUE FOR AMERICA Parisians, they’re just like us! People in Paris order food and goods for delivery, but, being French, they’ve found a way around the ghastly warehouses on the fringes of town. French companies build “logistics hotels” from which deliveries can be made right in the city center. They’re far more than concrete warehouses. One such hotel, the Chapelle International, has tennis courts and an urban farm, according to Wired magazine. If we’re serious about climate change, we must find a greener way to move goods through the city, says Kelly Clifton, professor of civil and environmental engineering at PSU. With a logistics hotel in Lloyd Center, companies could ship goods from Portland International Airport by rail, either using special cargo cars on the MAX or via small freight trains. Interstates 5 and 84 pass within less than a mile, so trucks could pull in easily to drop off product. Even the river and the railroad are close by. Once they arrived, goods could be delivered to shops and homes by electric truck, e-bike, or even by drone. “It’s the most accessible parcel of land in inner Portland,” Clifton says. A logistics center would generate revenue,
which the site will need if it’s going to be something great. “You need something that will pay the bills,” she says. Lloyd Center already has loading docks, where Macy’s and Nordstrom once took delivery of racks of clothes. But there’s more, as Steve Jobs used to say. You could turn the upper floors into housing for workers on those docks. There could be a BIPOC-owned food court. And a library branch. You could even add small manufacturing, the way a company called Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center is doing in New York City. “It’s an opportunity to live without a car,” Clifton says. That’s even better for the climate. IDEA #6:
THE ROBOT ZOO Does all of this sound a little too drably practical, too earthbound? Fine. What if we turned the mall into a town for robots? Artificial intelligence is winning, so we might as well learn to live with it—maybe even make friends. Gary Hirsch, artist and co-founder of On Your Feet, a creative consultancy that uses improv to help companies like Intel, Nike, and Kaiser Permanente, sees a vast space where humans and robots could interact, for fun, for science, for the hell of it. “You could see how the robot babysitter does with actual babies,” he says. It would be BattleBots, but less organized. People could bring in robots they build. They could fly drones. There would be a special Mayhem Room where Macy’s was. “There will be a really long waiver that you have to sign,” Hirsch says. He proposes a special section, maybe along Weidler Street, where androids and people could take turns selling things to unwitting customers. It would be the Turing Test in action. English mathematician Alan Turing proposed that a machine could be said to be intelligent if a human couldn’t tell it was a machine. Perhaps an AI Mall seems a little…out there. But outside-the-big-box thinking is what Portland should seek in the Lloyd District. So we want to hear from you: What development do you want to see where the mall now sits? Send ideas to mall@wweek.com, and we’ll publish one a week until 2022.
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STREET
ORYCON 2021 Photos by Chris Nesseth On Instagram: @chrisnesseth
On Nov. 12≠ 14, the Red Lion on the River saw Atlantean ambassadors, astronauts, wizards and others reading and writing tales, wearing mermaid tails, watching sparking Tesla coils and whirling around an evening masquerade. The fan≠ run sci≠ ence ct ion and fantasy convention has skipped only one year since its creation in 1979, but the con is taking 2022 offór eturning in full alchemic force in 2023.
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HIRING PORTLAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS LUNCH SERVICE ROVERS! Growing minds need your support. Work to help us nourish and shape Portland’s future with Nutrition Services at PPS. Find fulfilling work connecting with your community in a variety of school locations. Every day is an adventure! Feel the pride of creating delicious, healthy food from scratch. Serve it to and alongside students with a smile. Be home in time for dinner. Have your weekends, evenings, and summers free!
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STARTERS
THE MOST IMPORTANT PORTLAND CULTURE STORIES OF THE WEEK—GRAPHED.
READ MORE ABOUT THESE STO R I E S AT WW E E K .CO M .
RIDICULOUS SUZETTE SMITH
Portland Book Festival celebrates a return to in-person readings, panels and other literary shenanigans—the most popular being a Gastro Obscura vending machine.
LEAH NASH
Prix fixe seafood restaurant Roe reopens downtown as Tercet. Fans clamor to get up that elegant white staircase and into those bite-sized dishes.
The Portland Pickles open a downtown retail space in a former Starbucks, which will on certain nights transform into an event venue hosting live music and sports broadcasts.
Le Pigeon co-owner Andy Fortgang and former Little Bird wine director Sergio Licea will open Flor Wines just in time for your last-minute Thanksgiving wine needs.
Bamboo Sushi reopens its Northeast Alberta location for the first time since the 2020 pandemic lockdown, due to an unexpected maintenance issue at its Southwest 12th Avenue location.
Restaurant and wine bar Arden debuts its little sister cafe Wild Thing, which features an entirely plantbased menu.
RJ MUNA / WHITE BIRD
After holding off on a fall season, White Bird announces a new festival of shows in the spring called We Are One.
SERIOUS 20
Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
AWFUL
AWESOME
D E A N C A M B R AY
Loyal Legion opens a second location, in Old Town Beaverton, where diners can drink in a former ballroom renovated into a 150-seat taphouse or in more intimate rooms that were once office space.
GET BUSY
STUFF TO DO IN PORTLAND THIS WEEK.
LA LUZ
☛ DO | Portland International Cider Cup Awards Party Secure your seat at one of the most prestigious cider competitions in the country. The Northwest Cider Association is celebrating the best hard-pressed beverages in the industry with an in-person ceremony this year, though keep in mind that tickets will be limited due to COVID. While watching the Portland International Cider Cup, you can enjoy complimentary appetizers and ciders for purchase. Prizes won’t just go to the cideries, either—wear your best ceremony ensemble and vie for the title of Best Dressed. And if you can’t make it to Swift to watch the awards, you can still join via Zoom. Swift Cider, 100 NE Farragut St., Unit 101, 503-719-3402, picc.nwcider.org. 5-7 pm Thursday, Nov. 18. $10.
WESLEY LAPOINTE
�GO | La Luz A guaranteed good show, surf-rockers La Luz roll through Portland to promote their fourth—and first self-titled—album, La Luz. When a band’s album goes self-titled, it means this one is really special. La Luz is a triumph of harmony-driven, catchy hooksladen songs, like “Metal Man” and “I Won’t Hesitate.” If you’re looking for something to hold onto in this wild world, La Luz is your solid ground that will rock the audience like psychedelic clockwork. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 503-284-8686, wonderballroom.com. 8:30 pm Thursday, Nov. 18. $20.
SEE | Eating Raoul
In this 1982 black comedy, an uptight couple (Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov) discover a murderous way to both dispose of their rowdy swinger neighbors and scrounge up funds for their dream restaurant. All proceeds from ticket sales go toward paying the medical bills of Ray Tillotson, founder of Ray’s Ragtime, who recently died; this was his favorite film. Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 7:30 pm Friday, Nov. 19. $8-$10. 80’S MOVIE GUIDE
VA N G O G H I M M E R S I V E E X P E R I E N C E
☛ DO | Beyond Van Gogh: An Immersive Experience For those who can never seem to get close enough to a painting’s brushstrokes— without suffering the glares of museum guards—Beyond Van Gogh offers a unique, immersive opportunity to experience the work of the Post-Impressionist master Vincent van Gogh. French Canadian creative director Mathieu St-Arnaud and his Montreal Normal Studio place the audience inside classic paintings like The Starry Night, Sunflowers and Café Terrace at Night, via groundbreaking projection techniques. Starting in December, yoga classes are offered Thursdays and Saturdays inside the installation—at the wallet chakra-opening price of $56.99 a session. Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., vangoghportland.com. 10 am-10 pm daily, Nov. 19-Jan. 9. $36.99-$93.99.
�GO | Bury Me by Unless PDX A new brand of streetwear—curated by local shoe designer Frank Cooke, in collaboration with local names like Quanie, Diane Lam and Matthew Vu—Unless is a clothing line that, in addition to looking stylish and durable, is 100% plant-based and free of plastics. This brand launch presents an opportunity to score some of the ultra-ethical line, which will no doubt be snapped up quickly. One selling point is that each piece is biodegradable— although we have been assured it will not melt in the rain. We’re still figuring out the science, but what’s obvious is, some of the city’s most interesting creative voices are involved in this project. Pomarius Nursery, 1920 NW 18th Ave. 11 am-4 pm Saturday, Nov 20.
☛ DO | The Dark and the Barrel-Aged Pre-Thanksgiving Funk Now that you, Grandma and even your elementary school-aged cousin have been vaccinated, a big ol’ traditional Thanksgiving dinner is back on the schedule this year. If the thought of being stuck with your entire extended family for hours on end has you in a panic, take the edge off with Threshold Brewing’s pre-holiday drinking festival. The taps will be pouring plenty of huge stouts and specialty releases, including a robust barleywine that spent two years resting in a whiskey barrel, and an imperial stout aged in syrah vessels. Don’t forget to take some home in 22-ounce bottles—you’ll need those to get through Thanksgiving. Threshold Brewing & Blending, 403 SE 79th Ave., 503-477-8789, threshold.beer. 3 pm Saturday-Sunday, Nov. 20-21. Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
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FOOD & DRINK SUZETTE SMITH
FEATURE
SUZETTE SMITH
OH MY: Zuckercreme’s November theme is “An Ode to Diner Pie.”
Out of Strawberry Museum and Into Pie Month Zuckercreme is the Montavilla cafe market successor to Brittany Sigal’s summer of successful pop-ups.
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BY CAR I NA H E RNANDE Z
Walking through the doors of Zuckercreme, you smell fall. The market’s owner Brittany Sigal stands at the shop counter behind displays of baked goods and Mutt’s Coffee bags, serving up fresh apple cider, cherry pie and, as the sign outside says, “a damn fine cup of coffee.” There’s a fruit, vegetable and floral mural painted by local artist Brianna Vizcaino stretching across one of the walls that looks like something a child could wonder about for hours or a cool librarian might get tattooed all over their body. Zuckercreme, which means sugar cream in German, is a neighborhood market that is part cafe, part rotating cast of wares. Located in Montavilla, it looks like a knickknack shop from the outside, but it’s full of useful—surprisingly practical—locally made goods. But it’s also obvious that Sigal takes her own approach to whatever Zuckercreme will become. Over the summer, Sigal created the hugely popular series of pop-ups called Strawberry Museum in the Southeast Portland neighborhood’s Küchenhaus. Local vendors sold strawberry-themed art, pastries, kombucha, shaved ice, clothing and more. At the moment, a month out from Zuckercreme’s first soft opening, some areas of the cafe have come together— like the corner where Sigal sells Mountain Mama Knitting Co’s pumpkin-tone knit hats. The shop feels like a baby Pattie’s Home Plate Cafe—if you ever made it up to the St. Johns mash-up of a ’50s-
era breakfast diner and an art supply store before it closed in 2019. “I’m from the Midwest,” Sigal says, “and I think I accidentally made a Cracker Barrel.” Of course, Zuckercreme is almost the antithesis of the homogenized road-stop eatery. The wares you buy at Sigal’s shop are all made by local vendors. You’ll find a variety of things like vegan nail polish by Palate Polish, handmade crocheted nylon scrubbers by Ellyontherun, Warm Vanilla Oat bath bombs and fall-scented handmade soaps by Bumble Bath Soap, and even pies made from felt—which Sigal says she’s teaching a workshop on soon. The rest of the storefront is furnished with brightly clothed tables, which during the week await cafe visitors and on Sundays—at the weekly popup markets—are rearranged to display baked goods and other delights. Sigal remains dedicated to the popup model she was so successful with over the summer. She often works with the same local vendors, asking if they’re interested in contributing to the ever-changing themes. November is pie month at Zuckercreme, and at the weekly Sunday pop-up, all the cafe tables are filled with different pies. Among them, Crystal Ayala sells unconventional but memorable fish sauce pecan pies (it’s in the aftertaste!) and Darth Baker offers a
classic twist in the form of pumpkin pie cheesecake. Also available at the cafe, Zuckercreme sells ice cream, baked goods from Yellow Heart Sunshine, and fresh apple cider made by Sinensis Tea Company PDX—which makes apple cider only in the month of November. Zuckercreme will change with the seasons—and because it’s still a very new shop, Sigal seems focused on continuing to bring in new vendors and items. If you want to get a bath bomb and vintage jacket and top that off with a slice of cherry pie, Sigal’s boutique market is the place. EAT: Zuckercreme, 414 SE 81st Ave, 317366-6938, instagram.com/zuckercreme. 10 am-6 pm Wednesday-Saturday, weekly pop-ups 10 am-4 pm Sunday.
FOOD & DRINK TOP 5
Night Food We Love Love Verona BY S U ZE TTE SM ITH suzette @wweek.com
BUZZ LIST
Where to drink this week.
Where to eat this week.
1. Wild Thing
1483 NE Alberta St., wildthingpdx.com, 10 am-3 pm Wednesday-Sunday. Pearl District restaurant and wine bar Arden recently debuted its little sister cafe, Wild Thing. The entirely plant-based menu centers on build-your-own bowls with a base of brown grains or mixed greens rampaged by fruits, vegetables and nuts from all shades of the color wheel. Wild Thing has been a threeyear project in the making from Arden owner Kelsey Glasser. The cafe also serves its very own label of canned wines and cold-brew coffee made in collaboration with Never Lab.
2. Quaintrelle
2032 SE Clinton St., 503-200-5787, quaintrelle.co. 5-10 pm Wednesday-Sunday. Mississippi fine dining spot Quaintrelle reopened in late August on Southeast Clinton with a noticeable upgrade. Chef Riley Eckersley and bar manager Camille Cavan stayed on and built out the former Burrasca location into the kitchen and bar of their combined dreams. There are now splurge-worthy five-, seven- and nine-course tasting menus with available add-ons and drink pairings, along with an à la carte menu. Eckersley continues his uncanny knack for drawing from wherever his culinary interests take him—a fish sauce here, freshly foraged mushrooms there, and a touch of Spanish flair. Plates always look like art, and also taste like it.
1. Cooperativa
1250 NW 9th Ave., Suite 100, 503-342-7416, cooperativapdx.com. 7:30 am-9 pm Wednesday-Saturday. New to the menu at the Pearl’s Italian market, the World Vermut Tour flight comes with three 3-ounce pours to remind drinkers that—to quote bar manager John Schmeck—“really killer vermouths” are made internationally and domestically. Alongside Spanish Lustau vermut rosé and Cnia Mata red vermouth, Cooperativa features Son of Man’s “Someday” vermouth. Made with the Basquestyle Sagardo cider, brewed in Cascade Locks, this dry white warps the vermouth category—a category known to have few requisites other than being made with wine. The cloudy yellow bottle carries tart sips of kumquat and rhubarb.
2. Midnight Society
3. Pacific Crust Pizza Company
Love Verona opened at the Alder Street pod in 2015. But when the carts received notice they would have to move to make way for a Ritz-Carlton hotel, Sto became nervous. In 2019, he opened a St. Johns brick-and-mortar location as a backup plan before securing a place for Love Verona among the 3rd Avenue carts. All through the pandemic and the protests, Love Verona never closed. “We never have a problem with the protesters,” Sto says. “They were customers. Many people start talking, ‘Oh no, so scary, they’re gonna break.’ They never did.” After the cart’s move into the PSU storefront in the next few months, Sto plans to begin a new venture to bring back the city’s beloved—long gone—entertainment and dining spot Greek Cruisina. You know, the one with the infamous inflatable purple octopus? Sto is in talks to buy the recipes and business model from John Papas and move the whole enterprise up to St. Johns. “I just wanna bring back entertainment,” Sto says. “Same recipes, same entertainment. I think it’s what people need.” EAT: Love Verona Pizza & Pasta; 218 SW Harvey Milk St., 971-295-9090; 8436 N Ivanhoe St., 503-285-8033; loveverona.com. Downtown cart: 4 pm-2 am Sunday-Thursday, 4 pm3am Friday-Saturday. St. Johns: 10 am-midnight Monday-Saturday, 10 am-10:30 pm Sunday.
400 SW Broadway, 503-719-5010, pacificcrustpizzaco.com. 11 am-10 pm daily. Almost exactly one year after Vitaly Paley’s downtown pizzeria, The Crown, switched off its ovens due to the pandemic, the ground floor of Hotel Lucia will once again have a restaurant slinging discs of baked dough. Pacific Crust Pizza Company quietly opened Oct. 29 with a Northwest outdoors-themed menu created by chef Aaron Dionne, formerly of New American and Higgins. You’ll find ingredients like elk fennel sausage, Cascade lox and elderberry vinegar atop pies here. The pizzas are categorized like hikes—“easy,” “intermediate” and “expert”—indicating how adventurous the toppings might be to someone used to ordering plain old cheese and pepperoni.
4. Purrington’s Cat Lounge
3529 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 503-334-3570, purringtonscatlounge.com. 9:45 am-6 pm ThursdaySunday. Be warned that Purrington’s, Portland’s only cat cafe, regularly sells out its weekend sessions—45-minute reserved slots for an assortment of singles and small groups. However, sitting outside the cat enclosure can be almost as delightful as being inside, especially since the realities of social hierarchy dictate that all adults must take a backseat to the wonder of well-mannered kids fixed on petting all available cats. This particular incarnation of the lounge is still new—co-owners Garret Simpson and Helen Harris bought the business from the original owners in 2019 and renovated the space. You can thank Simpson’s food and wine background for the cafe’s above-average snacks, which include a vegan board of carrot hummus, sunflower seed dip and kale pesto, served with baguette and veggies for dipping as well as an indulgent cheese board sourced from local monger Cowbell.
5. Brasa Haya B R A S A H AYA
Portland once had a night food scene. Now we’re lucky if a restaurant stays open until 10 pm. This new column, Night Food, is about a sincere love for the food we eat in the early hours of the morning. The workers, the ragers and the anxious all need sustenance. And this column will seek to raise the profiles of the eateries that serve them. If you order takeout after midnight in this town, you are familiar with Love Verona’s excellent, crispy 10-inch pizza pies. You might even have ventured into its coma-inducing pasta dishes: cheesy lasagna or fettuccine baked into deep pie tins. What you may not know is that at 1 in the morning, Love Verona will sell you a spinach salad that—to be real—is better than most of the salads you can get anywhere else, period. The Verona Salad comes legit—spinach in better shape than you’d see at a Whole Foods salad bar, generous quantities of bacon cherry tomatoes, artichokes and feta. Everything Love Verona sells is way better than a midnight eatery needs to be, but even now owner Mariano Sto has his eye on higher-quality dishes. “We’re getting very popular,” he tells WW. “We’re breaking the quality now because we’re so busy.” During the interview for this column, he revealed that the downtown location will soon move near Portland State—into the former Joe’s Burger’s space at 540 SW College St. “They gave us a good deal just to be there,” Sto says. “Many of our customers are college kids so it made sense, but it will be bittersweet. The cart is where I started.” That first year, working the cart by himself, his mom made the pasta, Sto says. “I worked 14 hours some days. Still do that, but I have help now.” He began at his family’s restaurant in Bulgaria when he was 6 or 7. He hated it at the time, but now he’s grateful for the strong work ethic he gained there.
HOT PLATES
MIDNIGHT SOCIETY
The pizza and pasta cart serves up an unnecessarily good midnight salad.
TOP 5
3341 SE Belmont St., themidnightsocietypdx.net. 4 pm-midnight Tuesday-Thursday, 4 pm-2 am FridaySaturday. When it’s an option, vermut de la casa is the best and cheapest vermouth choice you can make— and is assuredly the least FDA approved. Midnight Society co-owner and bartender Estanislado Orona makes two secret-menu blends. The white combines Dolin Dry and Padró & Co.’s Myrrha Blanco with saline to give the sweet and nutty mix a tang, like sour verjus. The red is a mix of Dolin and Cocchi Storico reds, set over cacao nibs for a week. The first sip is cherry cola and fudge. As it mellows on ice, clove and banana come out.
3. Speed-o Cappuccino
402 SE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 503-754-4371, speed-o-cappuccino.business.site. 7:30 am-5 pm Monday-Friday, 10 am-4 pm Saturday-Sunday. In the summer, most of Speed-o Cappuccino’s staff served drip coffee and Spanish cortados (a cappuccino that’s equal parts espresso and milk), wearing hot pink crop tops and booty shorts. The cart’s brunch menu is equally bright and colorful enough to wake up diners or restore them after a long night at neighboring Coffin Club. The Glory Bowl toast plate’s smorgasbord of peanut butter, banana slices, almond granola, coconut shavings, cocoa nibs and honey are the sweetest breakfast sex pun south of Voodoo Doughnut.
4. Black Rose Market
6732 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 503-894-9698, instagram.com/blackrosemarket_woodlawn. 9 am-11 pm Monday-Wednesday, 9 am-11:30 pm Thursday, 9 am-12:30 pm Friday-Saturday, 10 am-10 pm Sunday. At North Portland’s Black Rose Market, owners Keith and Kirin Johns make shelf talkers—similar to the notes you see on the stacks at Powell’s—with handwritten information about some of the products they carry. The notes point out that a Flying Embers hard kombucha donates money to aid fire relief, that Joyroot Tea is Black-owned and brewed in the Pacific Northwest, and that Premium Northwest’s “PNW” lager is Keith Johns’ favorite, an honor given to only one beer in the shop. Brewed in Johns’ hometown of Tukwila, Wash., by a two-man team, it’s a beer Johns stakes his reputation on as “better and cheaper than Rainier.”
5. Bellwether 412 NE Beech St., 503-288-3499, brasahayapdx.com. 5:30-10 pm, Wednesday-Sunday. Indoor seating not ADA accessible, vaccination required to dine indoors. A new Spanish restaurant in a converted home that was formerly Beech Street Parlor, Brasa Haya is a fine(r) dining restaurant with textbook salt cod croquettes. The portion was too small to split effectively, but this is a problem inherent to tapas, not Brasa Haya.
6031 SE Stark St., 503-432-8121, instagram.com/bellwetherbarco. 4-11 pm daily. The climb up Southeast Stark Street to 60th Avenue is steep. But that just makes the little pub at the top of the hill tastier for the effort. From the hazy, romantic back patio to the roaring front room, Bellwether feels like a pub that fell into the world fully formed. The cocktails are named in an egalitarian manner, numbered from 1 to 8. The 1 is perfect for a sunny day: rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, cranberry grenadine and salt, served with a curled lemon rind. Not overly sweet, the tangy little number is like a loud, talkative friend whose energy you can’t help but find cheerful.
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POTLANDER
GETTING IN BED WITH CANNABIS
GEM FAIRE America’s Premier Jewelry & Bead Faires
Sleep-and-wake remedies to combat our old foe, the endless dark of winter.
NOVEMBER
19, 20, 21 HILLSBORO
BY BRIA N N A W H E E L E R
Westside Commons
Nothing reminds us that we were built to hibernate like daylight saving time. Work or school days beginning and ending with an overcast black sky and six hours of paltry sunlight that barely stays even with the crest line of the West Hills are enough to cloud the dispositions of even the sunniest stoners. And I should know: I’m a peppy, playful, professional pothead, and no amount of SAD lampage has yet to reprogram my DNA to thrive through a sunless season. Oh no, honey, I need weed for that. Thankfully, we found many of the forthcoming seasonal mood and sleep effects can be mitigated with the right cannabis products. Whether you’re having seasonal trouble getting in and staying in bed, or getting up and staying awake, there may be a cannabis panacea for you. Here are a few of the standouts we’ve auditioned so far this year:
GO TO BED!
WAKE UP!
Greater Goods Evening Chocolate Bar Greater Goods uses both full-spectrum CBD and a CBN isolate in its evening suite of products. The results are deeply relaxing but responsive, which is to say, a square or two of this chocolate bar can assist with light, afternoon, anxiety-quieting dozing (as I experienced on a flight earlier this year). The same dose can also support a restorative, full eight hours of sleep. The effects depend on users’ resting state when they pop a dose—a full bar contains 60 mg of CBD and 30 mg of CBN, divided neatly among 12 scored sections. Either way, users can expect manageable, buildable waves of relaxation that can easily spiral into super-restful sleep. Get it from: hellogreater.com
Caps by Cookies Energy Blend We first came across Caps by Cookies while rounding up functional mushroom-cannabis blends, and of the several products we ended up recommending, Caps is the only one that remains part of my daily routine. Its energy blend of lion’s mane, cordyceps, CBD and CBG gets me together better than any cup of coffee, green tea, or fresh-pressed juice. Effectswise, I found the jitterless energy boost to be on par with a potent yerba mate or ambitious espresso concoction. For those feeling the effects of seasonal changes more profoundly in the early morning hours, reprieve from hibernation prohibition might be found in two of these gel caps each morning. Get it from: cbd.cookies.store
Dosist Sleep The recreational cannabis market is flush with CBD oil tinctures—we tried several dozen this year alone—but Dosist stood out for a couple of reasons: First, it features CBD and CBN exclusively, using isolated cannabinoids rather than a full-spectrum infusion. Without THC and other minor cannabinoids, Dosist tincture feels as suitable for the family medicine cabinet as it does the bedtime stash box. Second, the mouthfeel of this MCT oil is straight-up ethereal. It dissolves under the tongue and against the cheeks, leaving behind a refreshing, soothing, peppermint vapor that won’t interfere with your pre-sleep oral health routine. Third, the formula delivers an even 1-to-1 ratio of CBD and CBN per dose, 15 mg in each dropperful, which can easily be dosed drop by drop, simplifying the quest for the perfect amount per user. Get it from: dosist.com Rhythm CBD Dream Seltzer Rhythm CBD-infused seltzers are very straightforward CBD-enhanced sodas, flavored with ultra-mild fruit essences. Rhythm’s Dream variety tastes of blackberry and lavender essences and includes 3 mg of melatonin alongside 10 mg of broad-spectrum CBD. For users who have a solid relationship with melatonin and CBD but are less inclined to experiment with novel cannabinoids, this playful aperitif is an easy, low-stakes way to slowly sip yourself into slumber. Real talk, an hour after testing this soda, I was dozing off, and the morning after, I felt well rested and refreshed. Get it from: drinkrhythm.com 24
Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
Telescope Vibe Check Tincture Vibe Check is a terpene-enhanced oil tincture developed with defined-spectrum hemp CBD: a form of broad-spectrum extraction that enables manufacturers to raise or lower cannabinoid percentages to create highly specialized products. Vibe Check’s Defined Spectrum relies on a 2-to-1 CBD -CBG ratio but also includes minor cannabinoids and cannabis-derived terpenes to dial in a precise formula. Altogether, the finished product is terp-heavy tincture that, when included in an morning routine, tempers caffeine, improves mood and focus, and offers a sheer suggestion of euphoria that might have even the summeriest of kayaking mountain stoners reveling in these short, foggy days and long, misty nights. Get it from: telescopeCBD.com Willie’s Remedy Breakfast Blend Tea You don’t have to be a fan of the outlaw-country genre of music to appreciate Willie Nelson. His dedication to cannabis advocacy has eclipsed his redheaded stranger celebrity; he literally is a cannabis brand. Willie’s Remedy Breakfast Blend (also available as a green tea) is a black Assam/Ceylon tea blend infused with full-spectrum hemp extract, that, despite its no-frills formulation, is pretty outstanding. The first impression is basic, but the straightforwardness of this tea is appealing. The 12 mg of CBD in each tea bag delivers a satiny mood boost that arrives with zero fanfare. For all intents and purposes, this is simply a black tea that soothes, enlivens, and could make a pitch black 6 am call time or twilight lunch break marginally more bearable. Get it from: williesremedy.com
Formerly Washington County Fairgrounds
{ 801 NE 34th Ave., Hillsboro, OR } GEM FAIRE HOURS: FRI 12pm-6pm SAT 10am-6pm SUN 10am-5pm
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Editor: Andi Prewitt | Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com
CLOUD CITY PHOTOGRAPHY
MUSIC Written by: Daniel Bromfield | @bromf3
Now Hear This
Listening recommendations from the past, present, Portland and the periphery. SOMETHING OLD
TWO-FACED: Zelda (Kate Faye Cummings, right and center left) is the alter ego of professor Mary Jekyll, a killer whose crime is left to her assistant (Rachel Ladd, far left) to solve.
Vengeance Is Hers Professor Jekyll and Miss Hyde reconfigures a classic story for a post-Me Too world.
BY BE N N E T T C A M P B E LL FE RGUS O N
Theatre Berk’s Professor Jekyll and Miss Hyde stars a cast of ferociously fascinating characters, but we don’t hear them at the start of the play. Instead, we hear Dr. Christine Blasey Ford during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—her voice shaking as she recalls him sexually assaulting her in high school—and Kavanaugh’s wrathful defense. It’s a bold beginning—and a declaration that Professor Jekyll and Miss Hyde will borrow from both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde author Robert Louis Stevenson and Me Too movement founder Tarana Burke. Unlike Burke, however, professor Mary Jekyll (Kate Faye Cummings) believes that words are useless against sex offenders. She prefers to use a knife. By adapting Stevenson’s story for the 21st century and transporting it to a college campus, playwright William Thomas Berk—Theatre Berk’s producer—has created a brutal and potent form of entertainment. The play offers more questions than answers, but from start to finish, it remains confident in its ideas and brazenly, beautifully alive. Professor Jekyll and Miss Hyde, directed by Shannon Walcott-Cluphf, introduces us to Daniel (Samuel Alexander Hawkins), a tenured professor. He has been accused of raping eight students, but that doesn’t stop him from going to a bar and coming on to Zelda Hyde, a mysterious woman who beguiles him by ordering a whiskey sour and agreeing to a night of no-consequences sex. That’s the last time we see Daniel alive. Before he can receive a vaguely defined prize called “the Cullen Award,” he is stabbed to death. Is Zelda to blame? Perhaps, but she’s just one part of a mystery that deepens when the murder weapon is dropped on the doorstep of Bobbi Poole (Rachel Ladd), who works as an assistant to Mary Jekyll. It takes Bobbi a while to figure out the obvious—that Mary is Zelda. Her transformation is sparked by medical experiments with psychedelics, but it is clear that Zelda is not an aberration. Mary simultaneously fears Zelda and craves the exhilaration she experiences when she slays Daniel. The savage satisfaction of not giving a fuck is psychedelic in and of itself. When Mary becomes Zelda, she adopts a sleek, Louise Brooks-style wig, a clingy crimson dress and an imperious
voice that sends a subzero chill through the theater. When Mary abruptly shouts, “You’re a dead fucking bitch!” you hear Mary vanish and Zelda emerge within the span of a few words—a seamless magic trick that is a testament to Cummings’ mastery of her multifaceted role. While Professor Jekyll and Miss Hyde has the visceral force of a great horror film, it wants to do more than terrify us. The core of the play is the intellectual contest between Bobbi and Mary/Zelda—a battle that, depending on your perspective, is either a showdown between pragmatism and extremism or weakness and decisiveness. Mary/Zelda rationalizes killing Daniel by arguing that the college was failing to protect its students from him. She’s not wrong—dean Joan Otteson (Shelley Tate) is startlingly indifferent to the allegations against Daniel— but Bobbi believes that altruistic intentions don’t justify murder. Bobbi is also skeptical that the crimes Daniel may have committed cancel out his academic successes. She appreciates his work without forgiving his actions, a perspective that Professor Jekyll and Miss Hyde critiques without dismissing. It’s a pro-ambiguity play—and it argues that if Bobbi is willing to look for nuance in Daniel, she should do the same for Mary/Zelda. Mary/Zelda has no interest in nuance—she believes that when it comes to sexual violence, America’s criminal justice system is so inadequate that she had no choice but to slay. It’s impossible to say how many people in the audience will agree, but her pessimism is all too understandable in a world populated by a seemingly endless supply of convicted and accused predators like Harvey Weinstein and Andrew Cuomo. Professor Jekyll and Miss Hyde never definitively decides whether Zelda is a necessary evil—it’s a play haunted by stories yet to be told and ideas yet to be expressed. A provocateur of the finest order, Berk doesn’t want the play to settle comfortably into your soul. He wants it to churn and burn, leaving you wondering whether Zelda is too much and Bobbi is enough.
The Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops is one of the crown jewels of ’80s pop. Paul Buchanan plays a cold, cruel character who’s enough of a romantic to understand the allure of the dolce vita that sprawls before him. “There’s a red car in the fountain,” he sings on center- and masterpiece “Tinseltown in the Rain,” and it’s hard to say if he’s describing a scene of yuppie decadence or saying, “Fuck it—let’s go.” Wait until you hear what he sings on the chorus; has anyone ever sung something so brutal with such heart-on-sleeve passion?
SOMETHING NEW As Lone, Matt Cutler has spent the past decadeplus marrying his candy-colored chords to just about every drumbeat he can program: instrumental hip hop, house, breakbeats or no drums at all. Always Inside Your Head, his first album in five years—and his first for Greco-Roman Records after leaving the disgraced R&S label—feels like a culmination of all these threads just as much as it feels like a fresh start. It’s his warmest and most organic-sounding record yet, assisted by a hyper-compressed mix and the atmospheric vocals of Morgane Diet.
SOMETHING LOCAL Rapper and visual artist Old Grape God has the most surreal punchlines in Portland, but how he delivers them is just as important. He raps elastically but with great gravitas, remembering that the rapper’s voice is just as much of an instrument as a delivery method. (He also plays drums with his feet sometimes.) Da Fence Less is his 33rd release, a 23-minute head trip with skeletal beats that hark back to golden-age milestones like LL Cool J’s Radio. “It ain’t funky if I can’t smell it,” he says. Da Fence Less reeks like a fire in a cannabis field.
SOMETHING OLD German techno lifer Wolfgang Voigt initiated Love Inc. as a tribute to the glam rock bands he grew up on as a kid in the ’60s and ’70s. The group’s sole full-length, 1996’s Life’s a Gas (available on YouTube or the Earquake box set), stretches and distends samples of classic glam tracks until they become environments. The 15-minute title track is a proto-vaporwave milestone, but Life’s a Gas works best when Voigt finds common ground between the stomp of glam rock and the relentless rhythm of techno, as on his monster remix of T. Rex’s “Hot Love.”
SEE IT: Professor Jekyll and Miss Hyde plays at Twilight Theater, 7517 N Brandon Ave., 503-816-2044, theatreberk. com/current-projects. 8 pm Friday-Saturday and 3 pm Sunday, through Nov. 28. $15. Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
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Editor: Andi Prewitt / Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com
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MOVIES
Eating Raoul (1982) In this black comedy, an uptight couple (Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov) discover a murderous way to both dispose of their rowdy swinger neighbors and scrounge up the funds for their dream restaurant. All proceeds from ticket sales will go toward paying the medical bills of Ray Tillotson, founder of Ray’s Ragtime, who recently died; this was his favorite film. Hollywood, Nov. 19.
Double Indemnity (1944) LETTERBOXD
INTO THE WOODS: A fictional Oregon mining town is the focus of a new supernatural drama The Girl in the Woods.
Wild, Wild Woods YouTube short-turned-Oregon-made Peacock series The Girl in the Woods closes windows, opens door. BY JAY H O RTO N
@hortland
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Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
down teen queen diverted from cheer practice by a warrior’s destiny and an alt friend group can trace her dyed roots back to Buffy Summers, while shadowy sects of hemp-robed zealots holding back end times through blood-steeped asceticism may as well be an entire YA genre. Even set against the Sunnydale spectrum, though, the Peacock series decidedly leans into filler scenes borrowed from superherodom yet focuses on all the dullest tropes. Despite all the furious exposition and diligent lore-tending, we never quite get a full picture of the world they spend so much time building, and the ever-lengthening flashbacks suggest a series flowing backward. Like Netflix dramedy Everything Sucks! and ABC sitcom Suburgatory, The Girl in the Woods delves deep into the suffocating mundanity of small-town life for teenagers dreaming big. There’s more than a whiff of Grimm in each glimpse of beasties hidden within the forest. Mostly, though, our native soil contributes more torpor than terrain. Along with the drizzling melancholia that perma-gray skies encourage, The Girl in the Woods taps into the dampened ambitions and mouldering dreams hovering alongside the shuttered mines and mills. Productions can grow enchanted framing drone-shot vistas of majestic wilderness while ignoring how creepily oppressive acres of old growth can appear from below. Most Oregon location shoots miss the forests for the trees, in other words, but this program digs deep into the area’s darkening undergrowth. In small doses, the grim climate and unending succession of terrible parents present the irrepressible joie de vivre of our core trio, but the show isn’t what you’d call fun. Layering exposition with an unrelenting morbidity the clunky narrative could never justify, the show suffers from both dismal excesses of a failed story and an underplayed telling too artfully morose. Though the original shorts always felt more proof-of-concept for a series to come, the constraints of format did The Girl in the Woods a disservice. Later episodes’ quality of scarecraft combined with easy interplay between such appealing leads argues for a narrower focus absent the training montages and wonky backstory digressions pumping up the convoluted mythology for future arcs hardly guaranteed. Honestly, clear out the interminable flashbacks and awkward info dumps that constitute nearly half of the series, add some semblance of satisfying closure, and you’d find the winsome coming-ofage shriek fest this material would best support. SEE IT: The Girl in the Woods streams on Peacock.
Ran (1985) Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare’s King Lear (and, unofficially and anachronistically, Succession) as a historical epic set in medieval Japan. When an aging warlord decides to retire, he divides his kingdom among his three sons, but the sudden shift in power causes them to turn on each other, and him. Clinton, Nov. 20.
Nightmare Alley (1947) CRITERION
A cheapish YA horror series unceremoniously dumped behind Peacock’s paywall just before Halloween, The Girl in the Woods may have seemed a relatively humble addition to the recently launched NBCUniversal streaming platform’s premier tier, but its overseers have far greater plans. As the first intellectual property from Blumhouse-funded digital abattoir Crypt TV to cross the mainstream threshold, the locally filmed series represents patient zero for the coming onslaught of monstrous content threatened ever since Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever) founded the virtual studio six years ago. Like fellow Crypt TV-born, Oregon-made fan fave The Birch, The Girl in the Woods first came to life via funsized grindhouse shorts seeded across the web. 2018’s The Door in the Woods followed the struggles of Carrie—sole survivor among the preteen guardians charged by a folkie religious colony called Disciples of Dawn to protect our realm from the ravages of a dimension-hopping predator (think curdled-milk Venom) who’s aching to open a doorway deep in the forests of Columbia County. Two years later, another short called The Girl in the Woods found our heroine aged into former Disney Channel star Peyton List and outfitted with a blade-wielding robot arm courtesy of itinerant electrical engineer and demon-hunting sensei Arthur Dean (Kal Penn). This latest incarnation of the same name, whose first season of eight 30-minute episodes dropped en masse Oct. 21, has retained the short’s essential elements—the girl, the door, the woods—but is now focused on the fictional Oregon town of West Pine. Arthur and Carrie, now played by Stefanie Scott (Insidious: Chapter 3) and Will Yun Lee (Altered Carbon), have tracked the netherworld refugees to a rural mining community where a hooded illusionist practices a rather more intricate brand of soul-snatching from families on both sides of the tracks. The mineworker thinks he found gold, the environmental lawyer disappears following a trail of cigarettes, and their teenage BFFs Tasha (Sofia Bryant) and Nolan (an incandescent Misha Osherovich) are sufficiently creeped out and join Carrie’s crusade, accepting the dagger-limbed newcomer’s explanations, however nonsensical in retrospect. (Keeping in mind that the only access to the nightmarish hellscape is an actual, ordinary, non-metaphorical door, why did the original contractors even include a knob? Wouldn’t a wall have made more sense?) To be sure, The Girl in the Woods’ expansive take on horror isn’t particularly groundbreaking. Every dressed-
Celebrate Noirvember with the classic that pioneered the film noir genre! From director Billy Wilder and writer Raymond Chandler, this seven-time Oscar-nominated crime thriller stars Barbara Stanwyck as a duplicitous housewife and Fred MacMurray as the insurance salesman she seduces. Academy, Nov. 19-25.
This acclaimed film noir charts the scandalous rise and fall of an ambitious carnival barker (Tyrone Power) who dreams of ditching the sideshow and starting his own psychic “business” (read: scam) with beautiful mentalist Mademoiselle Zeena (Joan Blondell). Check out the original before Guillermo del Toro’s star-studded revamp hits theaters this December. Hollywood, Nov. 20-21.
Watermelon Man (1970) Inspired by Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the revolutionary Melvin Van Peebles directs this dark comedy about a bigoted white insurance salesman (Godfrey Cambridge, in whiteface) who inexplicably wakes up one day to find that he’s Black. Screening as part of the Hollywood’s Burn Hollywood Burn! The Films of Melvin Van Peebles series. Hollywood, Nov. 21.
ALSO PLAYING: 5th Avenue: Animal House (1978), Nov. 19-21. Academy: The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Nov. 17-18. Strangers on a Train (1951), Nov. 17-18. The Glass Key (1942), Nov. 19-25. Clinton: Malombra (1942), Nov. 17. The Hidden Fortress (1958), Nov. 18. Samurai Cop (1991), Nov. 19. Rad (1986), Nov. 21. The Shining (1980), Nov. 22. Hollywood: Pale Flower (1964), Nov. 18. Donnie Darko (2001), Nov. 20-21. A Face in the Crowd (1957), Nov. 22. Burial Ground: Nights of Terror (1981), Nov. 23.
MOVIES JAAP BUITENDIJK / AMAZON STUDIOS
NOW PLAYING TOP PICK OF THE WEEK
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain Fans of cats and Benedict Cumberbatch, get ready to purr. With manic charm and moving grace, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain welcomes us into the psychedelic world of Wain (Cumberbatch), a real-life English artist who brought whimsy and wonderment to the Victorian era with his feline-filled drawings and paintings. The film begins with an elderly Wain withering in an asylum, but it swiftly skips back to his marriage to Emily Richardson-Wain (Claire Foy), a fellow cat lover. When she dies of breast cancer, Wain becomes such a cat fanatic that his mind starts to reshape the world to his liking. When he looks at people, their heads sprout fur and whiskers, and when he looks at cats, they talk to him via subtitles. These fantastical touches are not standard biopic fare, but the film’s last half reveals the fragility of its decadeslong narrative—it’s so anxious to get to Wain’s death that it doesn’t take enough time to savor his life. Yet the gleam of Louis and Emily’s love brightens the movie long after she’s gone. When he tells her she makes the world beautiful, she simply tells him that the world is already beautiful. By finding sweet silliness in everyday life, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain proves her right. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Amazon Prime. 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. : THIS MOVIE IS A STEAMING PILE.
ALSO PLAYING
TV, Pioneer Place, Studio One, Tigard.
Last Night in Soho
They Say Nothing Stays the Same
Of all the spectral menaces bedeviling Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), fresh-faced protagonist of the marvelous new paranormal thriller Last Night in Soho, the worst moments of vicarious dread occur early on as the rural scholarship student first braves her couture-draped classmates at a chic central London fashion institute. Soon fleeing an insufferable roommate (Synnove Karlsen), our plucky homespun heroine chances upon a boarding house flat with a stern landlady (the ever-imperious Diana Rigg’s final role) and dusty furnishings. The first evening Ellie lays herself down to sleep while spinning 45s, she’s transported back to swinging ’60s Soho, where she meets Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), a striving chanteuse whose perspective Ellie giddily adopts during what become nightly visitations. Even without Matt Smith’s heel turn as Sandy’s abusive manager/paramour, the storyline’s guiding conceit threatens an all-too-Whovian clever-clever irrelevance, but director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Hot Fuzz) pivots gracefully from rom-com to sumptuous period musical to snark-free Hammer horror, committing fully to each disparate genre. Whatever whiff of glib vacuity lurked beneath the sleekened charms of Wright’s earlier films, Last Night in Soho leans into every stylistic flourish as further illustration of the retro delights binding Ellie to the past while also seamlessly disguising the plot’s inevitable twists. Audiences needn’t be oversold on the dangers that await a damsel falling head over heels for the wrong man or the wrong era. The trick lies in convincing us why she’d keep coming back. R. JAY HORTON. Bridgeport, City Center, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Movies on
Every day, Toichi ferries villagers across a remote Japanese river in an unspecified age, watching the construction of a bridge that will mark his obsolescence. Still, Toichi doesn’t much seem to care, as star Akira Emoto (Dr. Akagi) embodies a weathered loner accustomed to experiencing life, like the wind on the water, just befalling him. The fabulist core of Japanese actor-musician Joe Odagiri’s directorial debut bolsters and deepens its twilight portrait of a community fixture that many passengers view as an Old World inconvenience soon to be resolved. But Toichi is also an impassable conduit for their aspirations, grief and violence unfolding beyond the little-seen banks, especially in the form of an abandoned young woman (Ririka Kawashima), whom he finds floating unconscious in the river and nurses to health. All the while, he questions whether she arrived at his shack as the result of some local crime or by more supernatural means. In this stretch of the plot, despite frequent Wong Kar-wai collaborator and cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s unmatched eye for beauty, the film suffers badly from leaping into interstitials of horror, folklore and dreamscapes nowhere near as convincing as the film’s main visual palette and pacing. Thankfully, it always returns to rowing up and down this boatman’s elegy—poignant, calming and inevitable with each oar stroke. NR. CHANCE SOLEMPFEIFER. On Demand, Virtual Cinema.
into relevancy. Set in the fictional town of Cispus Falls— but shot largely in Hope, British Columbia—director Scott Cooper’s horror debut tangles with rural poverty, addiction, environmental pillaging and indigenous erasure that literalize into a monster. In this case, the monster is a Wendigo—the cannibalistic, horned humanoid of many Algonquin-speaking tribes’ folklore. In a town analogous to any number of isolated Northwest Oregon highway communities, Keri Russell stars as Julia, an elementary schoolteacher in the midst of an uneasy homecoming. Grappling with her own troubled past, Julia fixates on a frail, introverted student, Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T. Thomas), whose bloodthirsty family of beasts that appear in his class drawings imply that just maybe all is not well at home. With her brother the sheriff (Jesse Plemons) in tow, Julia gradually strives to scope out the Weavers’ dilapidated home. Antlers is based on a short story about a well-intentioned young teacher playing savior in rotting Appalachia. While Cooper’s film maintains that mood, it’s mired in additional paint-by-numbers screenwriting. Combine that with Cooper’s inexperience directing horror, and it’s a superficially polished, well-acted movie that gravely stammers through a repetitive 95 minutes. To be fair, Antlers does possess one unexpected screenwriting flourish that pivots the movie away from hillbilly exploitation. But that sensitivity and the care that went into consulting on Wendigo lore with Native artists and experts amounts to very little. Honestly, check out last year’s Blood Quantum if you seek a recent, well-done First Nations horror movie. R. CHANCE SOLEMPFEIFER. Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Dine-In Progress Ridge, Eastport Plaza, Evergreen Parkway, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza.
Antlers
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
As far as faux-Oregon movies go, Antlers tries tapping
Like all the great ones, the latest from Romanian filmmaker
Radu Jude opens with uncensored pornography. Next, it’s 30 mind-numbing minutes of a teacher (Katia Pascariu) wandering Bucharest, while the camera insinuates that billboards and toy ads are perhaps pornographic as well. Then comes an enjoyable glossary interlude, balancing terms of human history with the Romanian Urban Dictionary. Finally, it’s the trial of the century, as we discover the aforementioned teacher, Emi, actually appeared in the opening adult videos, while her school’s parents make an inquisition out of it. All in all, a real mix of antic social commentary and blowjobs. Hot pink title cards and ragtime music nowhere near mask a seething hatred for the country’s autocratic past and what’s portrayed through the third act’s kangaroo court as a misogynistic, anti-Semitic present. There’s distinct bravery in taking a bite this big and mean out of one’s own country, but it’s also far too much to chew: city planning, Fox News, rape culture, genocide, pandemic conspiracies. The film might be polemical if it focused. None of this really explains Bad Luck Banging’s Golden Bear win at the Berlin International Film Festival. Maybe an award for Best Whiplash would be more appropriate. NR. CHANCE SOLEMPFEIFER. Cinema 21.
Belfast Near the end of director Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan dance to “Everlasting Love,” Love Affair’s lustrous anthem of desire, regret and hope. It’s an intoxicating scene, but it’s also an outlier. Burdened by a suffocating cloak of nostalgia, Belfast is unable to reconcile the demands of a tale defined by trauma and a director who can’t stop gazing wistfully into the past. The setting is Ireland and the year is 1969, during the 30-year clash between Catholics and Protestants known as the Troubles. Sectarian violence rages, but religious battles hold no interest for Buddy (Jude Hill), a young Protestant who’s happiest watching movies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with his parents (Balfe and Dornan). Based in part on Branagh’s child-
hood, Belfast is a safe, smooth film where kids are adorably spunky and life has a never-ending Van Morrison soundtrack. Branagh seems to be trying to get away from the glorious excesses of his Shakespeare films, but restraint doesn’t suit him— nothing in Belfast is so vibrant and truthful as the sight of him jubilantly frolicking in a fountain in 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing. If the play is still the thing for Branagh, it’s because he speaks more eloquently through the stories of others than he does through his own. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Clackamas Town Center, Fox Tower, Living Room, Vancouver Mall.
13 Minutes Fans of Love Actually or the cursed Taylor Lautner and Taylor Swift vehicle Valentine’s Day may find elements of 13 Minutes familiar. The film follows in the grand tradition of clunky ensemble flicks that are totally devoid of substance. The only difference here is that most of those movies are lighthearted and actually fun to watch. 13 Minutes isn’t fun, nor is it meant to be. It follows the residents of a small Oklahoma town as they navigate their daily lives just before a tornado is about to hit. While the premise is interesting, writers Travis Farncombe and Lindsay Gossling are entirely to blame for the film’s many failures. The script is grisly and exploitative—a half-baked tragedy porn about stock characters who feel like they were written by a bot. In fact, the whole script has an AI-generated quality. The writers seemed to pick from a grab bag of Important Social Topics, among them: abortion and crisis pregnancy centers, homophobia, racism, barriers to medical access, and immigration. Each plotline is introduced and then abruptly abandoned or, worse, wrapped up with a jerky, treacly sincerity that totally flattens the very real problems the characters face. You’d be better off streaming He’s Just Not That Into You. PG-13. GRACE CULHANE. On Demand.
Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
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JONESIN’
by Matt Jones
"A Lot of Back and Forth"--here are a few examples.
Week of November 25
©2021 Rob Brezsny
ARIES (March 21-April 19)
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)
Aries author Chris Brogan says, "Don't settle. Don't finish crappy books. If you don't like the menu, leave the restaurant. If you're not on the right path, get off it." That's the best possible counsel for you to hear, in my astrological opinion. As an Aries, you're already inclined to live by that philosophy. But now and then, like now, you need a forceful nudge in that direction. So please, Aries, go in pursuit of what you want, not what you partially want. Associate with the very best, most invigorating influences, not the mediocre kind.
There's a Grateful Dead song, with lyrics written by John Perry Barlow, that says, "You ain't gonna learn what you don't want to know." I propose you make that your featured advice for the next two weeks. I hope you will be inspired by it to figure out what truths you might be trying hard not to know. In so doing, you will make yourself available to learn those truths. As a result, you'll be led on a healing journey you didn't know you needed to take. The process might sound uncomfortable, but I suspect it will ultimately be pleasurable.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20) Author Kurt Vonnegut wrote wistfully, "I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don't matter anymore." If similar things are running wild in your head, dear Taurus, the coming weeks will be a favorable time to banish them. You will have extra power to purge outdated emotions and reclaim at least some of the wild innocence that is your birthright. PS: There's nothing wrong with feeling sad. In fact, feeling sad can be healthy. But it's important to feel sad for the right reasons. Getting clear about that is your second assignment.
GEMINI (May 21-June20) "I'll walk forever with stories inside me that the people I love the most can never hear." So says the main character in Gemini author Michelle Hodkin's novel *The Evolution of Mara Dyer*. If that heart-rending statement has resonance with your own personal experience, I have good news: The coming weeks will be a favorable time to transform the situation. I believe you can figure out how to share key stories and feelings that have been hard to reveal before now. Be alert for unexpected opportunities and not-at-all-obvious breakthroughs.
CANCER (June 21-July 22) ACROSS 1 Regular doofus 6 Spits some bars 10 Noun's modifier (abbr.) 13 "The Crown" crown 14 _ _ _ Parker (fashion brand) 15 1998 figure skating gold medalist Kulik 16 Deodorant brand
55 Dinosaur with large thumb spikes 56 Sidewinder, e.g.
30 "Que _ _ _?" (Spanish greeting)
57 Attendee
31 Savage of "MythBusters"
58 Davidson of "SNL"
32 His items were too big, hard, and hot
59 Word before workings 60 '21 World Series champs 61 River in World War I headlines
19 Facts and figures about a flat paddleboat?
62 Megan Thee Stallion song about which Weird Al tweeted: "Just listened to this. Not a very faithful cover version, if you ask me."
21 Noteworthy span
DOWN
22 Mississauga's prov.
1 Lacking new ideas
23 "The Orville" creator MacFarlane
2 Job offerer
17 Contestant who may show up seemingly out of nowhere
24 Prognosticator 26 "The Matrix Resurrections" star
29 Admin's domain, for short
3 Early earwig? 4 Brendon of Panic! at the Disco
34 Jamie Foxx's Oscar film 35 Specialty of Emo Philips or Milton Jones 36 16-bit hedgehog 37 Her backing group is The Banshees 41 Triceratops feature 42 It's written for commercials 45 Polygon's count 47 "Oh what the hell, I'll just crush him like _ _ _" (Mr. Burns quote) 48 "Oh Myyy!" memoirist George
30 French Polynesia's capital
5 One who doesn't take defeat well
33 1950s French president Rene
6 Identify with
50 Latvia's capital
7 Page-_ _ _ (calendar brand)
51 Awards distinction for Audrey Hepburn
34 Long stories about a "M*A*S*H" character's featured instrumental breaks?
8 Falafel holders
49 Apply
9 Quest participant
52 Tank filler
38 Quickly
10 Ski resort near Salt Lake City
54 Paquin of "The Piano"
39 Sanctifies, in a way
11 Gossip
40 Big name in violins and jet skis
12 Toronto team, casually
43 "Strange" prefix
15 Completed, in Hollywood parlance
44 Physiques
18 90 degrees from norte
46 "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" star Simu
20 Genuflection joints
47 Suffix after potent or caliph 50 Prescribe city-wide anxiety medication?
25 "Don't sweat it!" 27 "Mad TV" cast member Paul (the only openly gay cast member at the time)
53 Show of hands
last week’s answers
A study of people in 24 countries concluded that during the pandemic, over 80 percent of the population have taken action to improve their health. Are you in that group? Whether or not you are, the coming weeks will be a favorable time to go further in establishing robust self-care. The astrological omens suggest you'll find it easier than usual to commit to good new habits. Rather than trying to do too much, I suggest you take no more than three steps. Even starting with just one might be wise. Top three: eating excellent food, having fun while exercising right, and getting all the deep sleep you need.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22) Leo-born scholar Edith Hamilton loved to study ancient Greek civilization. She wrote, "To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before." One sign of Greece's devotion to joie de vivre was its love of play. "The Greeks were the first people in the world to play," Hamilton exulted, "and they played on a great scale. All over Greece, there were games"—for athletes, dancers, musicians, and other performers. Spirited competition was an essential element of their celebration of play, as was the pursuit of fun for its own sake. In resonance with your astrological omens, Leo, I propose you regard ancient Greece as your spiritual home for the next five weeks.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) Virgo singer-songwriter Florence Welch of the band Florence and the Machine told an interviewer why she wrote "Hunger." She said, "I looked for love in things that were not love." What were those things? According to her song, they included taking drugs and performing on stage. Earlier in Florence's life, as a teenager, "love was a kind of emptiness" she experienced through her eating disorder. What about you, Virgo? Have you looked for love in things that weren't love? Are you doing that right now? The coming weeks will be a good time to get straight with yourself about this issue. I suggest you ask for help from your higher self. Formulate a strong intention that in the future, you will look for love in things that can genuinely offer you love.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) Scorpio author and philosopher Albert Camus was a good thinker. At age 44, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature—the second-youngest recipient ever. And yet he made this curious statement: "Thoughts are never honest. Emotions are." He regarded thoughts as "refined and muddy"—the result of people continually tinkering with their inner dialog so as to come up with partially true statements designed to serve their selfimage rather than reflect authentic ideas. Emotions, on the other hand, emerge spontaneously and are hard to hide, according to Camus. They come straight from the depths. In accordance with astrological potentials, Scorpio, I urge you to keep these meditations at the forefront of your awareness in the coming weeks. See if you can be more skeptical about your thoughts and more trusting in your emotions.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) Poet Renée Ashley describes what she's attracted to: "I'm drawn to what flutters nebulously at the edges, at the corner of my eye—just outside my certain sight. I want to share in what I am routinely denied or only suspect exists. I long for a glimpse of what is beginning to occur." Although I don't think that's a suitable perspective for you to cultivate all the time, Sagittarius, I suspect it might be appealing and useful for you in the coming weeks. Fresh possibilities will be coalescing. New storylines will be incubating. Be alert for the oncoming delights of the unknown.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) What could you do to diminish your suffering? Your next assignment is to take two specific steps to begin that process. You're in a phase of your astrological cycle when you're more likely than usual to see what's necessary to salve your wounds and fix what's broken. Take maximum advantage of this opportunity! I proclaim this next chapter of your life to be titled "In Quest of the Maximum Cure." Have fun with this project, dear Capricorn. Treat it as a mandate to be imaginative and explore interesting possibilities.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) "It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves," wrote my favorite Aquarian philosopher, Simone Weil. I agree. It's advice I regularly use myself. If you want to be seen and appreciated for who you really are, you should make it your priority to see and appreciate yourself for who you really are. The coming weeks will be a favorable time to make progress in this noble project. Start this way: Write a list of the five qualities about yourself that you love best.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) Nigerian author Ben Okri, born under the sign of Pisces, praises our heroic instinct to rise above the forces of chaos. He writes, "The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love, and to be greater than our suffering." You've been doing a lot of that excellent work throughout 2021, dear Pisces. And I expect that you'll be climaxing this chapter of your life story sometime soon. Thanks for being such a resourceful and resilient champion. You have bravely faced but also risen above the sometimes-messy challenges of plain old everyday life. You have inspired many of us to stay devoted to our heart's desires.
HOMEWORK: Gratitude is the featured emotion. See how amazing you can make yourself feel by stretching it to its limits. Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
28 Train station figs. Check out Rob Brezsny’s Expanded Weekly Audio Horoscopes & Daily Text Message Horoscopes
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COMiCS!
Jack Kent’s
Jack draws exactly what he sees from the streets of Portland. IG @sketchypeoplepdx kentcomics.com
Art show @PDXchange_Gallery 3916 N Mississippi Ave.
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Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
COMiCS!
SPOTLIGHT ARTIST
Be a Willamette Week featured artist! Any art style is welcome! Let’s share your art! Contact us at art@wweek.com.
Michael Viola
www.michaelpatrickviola.com @michael_viola_artist Michael Viola is a gay Latino artist, psychotherapist, and shamanic practitioner/ coach based in Portland. He is trained as an herbalist and has a deep and intuitive connection with the earth and the natural world. His journey has taken him through the corporate and educational structures of New York City, the desert of New Mexico and the jungle and Andean peaks of Peru. These spaces and cultures have influenced his capacity to stretch, adapt and energetically understand a wide range of consciousness as reflected in his vibrational resonance. The work he does is intuitive and empathic and smacks of a style
well described as neo-primitive. He facilitates peoples’ opening to higher consciousness in all of the complementary work he does as a therapist and healer. As a visual artist he paints, draws and designs work that shifts and challenges viewers’ perspectives as multilayered pieces, a journey really. As a therapist and healer he works with groups and individuals facilitating a connection to their transpersonal consciousness. He is grateful that these disciplines, seemingly disparate, that he’s been pursuing for the past 20 years have finally come together.
Willamette Week NOVEMBER 17, 2021 wweek.com
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CLASSIFIEDS
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