Willamette Week, February 9, 2022 - Volume 48, Issue 14 - "25 Reasons to Love Portland"

POLITICS Wooing Donald Trump.

P. 9

25

NEWS No Camping on the Highways.

P. 11

REASONS TO LOVE PORTLAND No. 11: Because our pizza scene is STILL having a moment. PAGE 18 WWEEK.COM

VOL 48/14 02.09.2022

“WHY DO YOU CARE WHETHER I SHOW MY LEGS?” P. 6

FOOD New Zealand-Style Ice Cream.

P. 26

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148th + POWELL 14800 SE Powell Blvd

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Sale does not apply to already discounted items. Prices do not include tax.

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162nd + SANDY 16148 NE Sandy Blvd

Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug.

For use only by adults twenty-one years or older

FINDINGS COMFY

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 48, ISSUE 14 Bud Clark poled a canoe down the Little Sandy River. 6 Bill Sizemore is running for governor because Stan Pulliam was in a swingers’ club. 9 The most deadly streets in Portland are the same roads where people complain about trash. 11 Portland is the No. 1 city for pumpkin lovers and the No. 13 city for witches. 16

10140 SE DIVISION ST., PAGE 17

Stone Barn’s batch of whiskey made with yakisoba was turned into hand sanitizer. Yes, it smelled like noodles. 20 Portland’s oldest bookstore has been resurrected inside Union Station. 21 Making New Zealand-style ice cream requires a special appliance imported from the Tasman region.

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The best place for live underground music right now is at a venue with no name. 17

The co-founder of star-shaped edible gummy company Astral Treats worked for NASA. 28

Olympia Provisions’ pork roll will set you back $45. 18

Gus Van Sant: The Art of Making Movies is not a how-to book . 30

Portland’s best view of Mount St. Helens is from a former garbage dump. 19

ON THE COVER:

OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK:

Reason to Love Portland No. 11: The pizza! Photo of Pizza Thief by Thomas Teal.

Stan Pulliam acknowledged he and his wife “explored relationships with other couples.”

MASTHEAD EDITOR & PUBLISHER

Mark Zusman

EDITORIAL

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How two Portland professionals landed roles at the region’s top companies and what they’re doing to tackle the new challenges facing their industries.

Sponsored Content Presented by University of Oregon Executive MBA • By Meira Gebel

The list of things that make Portland great is long. We know that.

The city’s prestigious parks, rivers, and outdoor recreation make it a destination for visitors of all kinds, while its iconic food scene, arts, and nightlife are just the cherries on top.

But what gets people to stay here? The answer is simple. The City of Roses is also home to a vast, diverse ecosystem of industries and well-known, name-brand businesses that draw professionals from all over the world from all kinds of backgrounds.

Willamette Week spoke to two professionals who have leading roles at companies across the Pacific Northwest about the new challenges facing each of their industries and how University of Oregon’s Executive MBA program prepared them for a path to success.

Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Emily Sloan, 33

Head of Marketing, Lazarus Naturals

Tell us about your professional background and current role. I’ve worked for consumer products most of my career - starting on the merchandising operations side. Pretty early on, I realized I had a passion for marketing.

At every company I’ve been at, I took roles wherever I could stretch to gain more responsibility and leadership opportunities - slowly working myself up in marketing.

Once I began my journey with the UO executive MBA program, my career began to accelerate at a faster pace, and I was hired as the head of marketing and eCommerce for Lazarus Naturals.

Here, I’m responsible for driving the brand mission and values. I’m focused on new customer acquisition and customer lifetime value. We create demand for the brand by connecting to the consumer and creating personalized experiences.

How is technology changing what you do or how the business operates, and how do you keep up?

The speed of information allows for a more educated consumer in an industry that was previously a bit overwhelming for people to understand. This means our team needs to be able to pivot and change direction on products to better

meet consumer needs. The subscription model is becoming more popular and requires CBD brands to create a frictionless experience for customers to enjoy.

You graduated last June from Oregon’s Executive MBA program.

How has that changed what you bring to work? I knew the program was heavily focused on financial acumen, and I needed to grow professionally in this area.

Since graduation, the benefits of having a more profound understanding around managerial accounting and finance has provided significant benefits to my company and my career. I am a better communicator and can tackle complex situations while bringing my whole self to work.

John Fredericks, 32

Director of Quality Systems, Health, Safety, & Environment (QHSE), and Social Distancing Officer, Burgerville

Tell us about your professional background and current role. With a broad range of professional experiences from teaching Tae Kwon Do to

working as a direct support provider for people with disabilities, a “Mad Scientist” for after school classes, a ropes course safety guide, a private security professional, an environmental health engineer, and a safety engineer, I developed an interest in learning more about systems and ways of working that enable safe, high-quality contributions from people that lead to extraordinary outcomes.

I’m currently the Director of QHSE for Burgerville LLC, which is a new role and department for the company that I have been cultivating since 2017.

I’m also the Social Distancing Officer as a result of Covid-19 requirements in 2020.

How has the pandemic changed the way you work? COVID-19 and all related upstream and downstream effects are still significant. This includes supply chain and distribution impacts as well as staffing and talent. Fortunately, our teams and partners are committed to working safely while serving to the best of their ability so wherever we can, we will be there to serve our communities.

What are you doing to continue to grow professionally?

My goal is to broaden and deepen my business acumen and skills, and I joined the in-person Oregon Executive MBA program in 2020.

It’s been extremely challenging. The coursework and fast-paced nature of the program require a lot of intentional planning and ongoing re-prioritization of other things in life.

Fortunately, the faculty and staff do everything they can to accommodate individual needs while maintaining the standards of excellence expected in a graduate program. Having a reliable academic and personal support network has also been invaluable. We’ve covered a range of critically important hard skills like accounting, finance, and operations, but we also cover equally critical aspects of leadership, communication, strategy, and innovative ways of doing business. It’s some art and some science!

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

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DIALOGUE

ALONZO KING LINES BALLET

Last week, WW examined the cautionary tale presented to Oregon transportation planners by toll bridges in Louisville, Ky. (“Kentucky Fried Bridge,” Feb. 2). Those bridges over the Ohio River now sit nearly empty at rush hour—because commuters would rather drive to other bridges than pay a $2 toll. As Oregon and Washington revive talks for a new Interstate Bridge over the Columbia River, their financial projections now rest on a $3.25 toll. The Kentucky example calls that formula into question. Here’s what our readers had to say:

FOUNDER & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, ALONZO KING

“Movement that is linear, sharp and powerful.”

- Fjord Review

Photo by RJ Muna

MIKE SANDERS, VIA FACEBOOK: “The Interstate Bridge

did have tolls at one time—the tollbooths were on the Oregon side. They were removed in the mid-1960s after the bonds were paid off—in retrospect, a huge mistake. Electronic tolling, like the facilities recently introduced on the turnpikes in New York and New Jersey and rapidly being adopted elsewhere, might be in play today if the tollbooths had been left in place. The tolls pay for the maintenance costs, which means tolls get increased every few years. That happened in New Jersey last month, and commuters were left grumbling about it. Would people be using public transit more to avoid tolls across the river if we had adopted that idea 50 years ago?”

CATHERINE RONDTHALER, VIA WWEEK.COM: “Seems to

me that if they are planning to put a toll on the new I-5 bridge, they will need to toll the I-205

bridge as well. Just charge the toll for only northbound traffic on both bridges, set it up like the tolls are done in the Northeast U.S., or like the Seattle tunnel, with automatic tolling and bills sent to the car owner by the license plate. It could be a very inexpensive toll, like 50 cents.”

BRIAN OWENDOFF, VIA FACEBOOK: “Comparing

Portland to Louisville is like comparing apples to bowling balls. Greater Louisville has half the population of Portland and three times the number of highway lanes crossing the river between the two states.”

WES M, VIA WWEEK.COM:

“There will always be some that would drive 20 miles out of the way to avoid paying a nickel toll, but overall the Ohio River bridges are a great success. Most other cities that have a bridge bottleneck spend 20 years arguing about it while the costs continue to rise. Overall, more

Dr. Know

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ROGER A STRAUS, VIA WWEEK.COM: “I suspect that

this economist’s argument [by Joe Cortright, a bridge critic] is based on the usual rational choice/game theory approach of his discipline, boiling down to the notion that consumers will make ‘rational’ decisions to avoid crossing the river due to the cost of tolls. This ignores both the socioeconomic impacts and the reality that many drivers have no choice.

They are commuting back and forth from their place of work or transporting goods.”

FRANK VEHAFRIC, VIA TWITTER: “You don’t ‘control’

traffic by tolling, you regressively punish low-wage working people who can’t afford to live in the city they work in. It’s indefensible from an equity perspective.”

JASON SABOURIN, VIA FACEBOOK: “It’s almost as if all

the projections and modeling are always geared to be overly generous with revenue generation and downplay the negative effects so they can sell their bad ideas to the public.”

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

Smartphones make it easy to create photos of one’s entire wallet. But what types of photographed ID are valid? Can phone pictures help me “get by” if my wallet is stolen? Losing one’s wallet seems like losing part of your world. —Harlan B.

FEB 24-26 THU-SAT | 7:30 PM Newmark Theatre

roads should have tolls, IMO.”

You didn’t say how old you were, Harlan, but I’m going to guess you’re well past your 20s (and not just because “Harlan” isn’t exactly the kind of name you hear a lot of down at your local skatepark): Only someone for whom getting carded is a distant memory could imagine Oregon’s dour, gimlet-eyed liquor clerks cheerfully accepting a selfie of somebody’s driver’s license as ID. Hell, you’re lucky if they take a U.S. passport.

As far as I know, there’s no government-related credential where a phone picture is acceptable in lieu of the original—unless you count proof of vaccination, where usually you can hand the bouncer a note in crayon signed “Sincerely, Harlan’s Doctor” and get waved through.

The private sector is a different story. While obviously (I hope) a phone picture still won’t cut it, lots of the credit card companies, insurance providers and banks whose plastic fattens your

wallet do offer digital versions of their cards that you can carry in apps like Apple Wallet or Google Pay. These virtual cards may make your wallet-deprived economic activity a little easier, but when it comes to actually proving your identity sans wallet, you’re out of luck: You can’t get a virtual Oregon driver’s license to put in your virtual wallet with all the virtual credit cards and virtual concert tickets (and one virtual condom, just in case).

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately; see below) there are currently no serious plans to create a digital driver’s license, or DDL, program in Oregon. But as you probably guessed from the snappy acronym, DDLs are already a thing in a handful of states, including Colorado and Arizona.

This development could be convenient or Orwellian, depending very much on who gets to see data about where and when such IDs were presented. Also, there are digital-divide issues: 40 million American adults still don’t own a smartphone, which is about the same number who think Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

(Too bad they’re not the same people—they’d still be crazy, but we’d hear a lot less about it.)

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

MURMURS B R U C E E LY / T R A I L B L A Z E R S

FAREWELL, CJ MCCOLLUM LEGISLATION COULD BLOCK DUTCH BROS. PONY DREAMS: Three conflicting bills in the current legislative session capture the muddled state of gambling in Oregon. Senate Bill 1503, sponsored

by Senate President Peter Courtney (D-Salem), would legalize betting on college sports. SB 1504, also sponsored by Courtney, prohibits greyhound racing, or accepting bets on the same, no matter where a race is held. Meanwhile, the disagreement between Dutch Bros. CEO Travis Boersma and Oregon’s tribes over Boersma’s proposal to install 225 historical horse racing betting terminals at the Flying Lark resort at Grants Pass Downs continues. HB 4046, introduced at the request of tribes, would call a halt to any expansion of gambling for a year, giving all stakeholders, including the tribes, the Oregon Lottery and private interests, time to hash out the future. The bill explicitly blocks the Oregon Racing Commission from approving any new gambling operations in the meantime.

On Feb. 8, the Racing Commission, which would regulate Boersma’s proposed development, met in executive session to “discuss written legal advice” from the Oregon Department of Justice on the Grants Pass dispute. The substance of that meeting is confidential, but the session lasted less than 10 minutes.

PORTLAND INKS NEW POLICE CONTRACT: The city of Portland released a copy of its collective bargaining agreement with the Portland Police Association on Tuesday following the Feb. 4 announcement that the parties had reached a tentative agreement after more than a year of contract negotiations, including more than six months of closed-door meditation. “I want to thank both sides of this labor negotiation for the difficult work they put in to bring this contract to a close. It is important to me that we are able to attract and keep quality police officers and that we have a discipline guide that ensures our officers are held accountable for their actions,” Mayor Ted Wheeler said in a statement Feb. 8. “We also agreed on an approach to develop and expand Portland Street Response in a way that allows for an integrated and appropriate public safety response, including responding to 911 calls for people experiencing

mental health crisis. These accomplishments are gained by this new agreement.” The Portland City Council is slated to vote to ratify the agreement Feb. 24 following a Feb. 17 council session where the public can testify.

TOBIAS READ WINS VACCINE ENDORSEMENT: Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read, a Democratic candidate for governor, has won the “Green Light” from the vaccine advocacy group Our Shot Oregon. The group asked candidates to commit to supporting a legislative change that would limit the philosophical exemption to vaccines for school kids, in part because Oregon has among the highest vaccine exemption rates in the country. Read has championed COVID-19 vaccine mandates for teachers, staff and students to help keep schools open. “Every candidate seeking to hold our state’s top executive office should be able to state clearly and unequivocally that they stand on the side of the public’s health,” said Our Shot Oregon director Meg Olson. “We hope to add other candidates to this list.” The group is reviewing a questionnaire submitted by former New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof after its deadline. Former House Speaker Tina Kotek has not responded to the group’s questionnaire. “I’m proud to have the support of an organization who is fighting misinformation around vaccines and prioritizing public health,” says Read.

CJ MCCOLLUM TURNS INTO A PELICAN: The Portland Trail Blazers are dismantling their roster.

The dismissal of longtime general manager Neil Olshey, surgery for superstar Damian Lillard, and a glut of players no taller than 6-foot-3 have resulted in a fire sale at the trade deadline. The most notable departure? Lillard’s backcourt partner CJ McCollum, who helped propel the team’s magical 2019 run to the Western Conference finals.

The Blazers traded McCollum to the New Orleans Pelicans on Feb. 8, four days after sending Norman Powell and Robert Covington to the Los Angeles Clippers. What did the Blazers get in return? A roster of youngsters and journeymen designed to fetch ping-pong balls for the NBA Draft Lottery.

Read an analysis at wweek.com.

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NEWS

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK

IN MEMORIAM

This Bud’s Forever Portland will never see another mayor like Bud Clark.

BY N I G E L J AQ U I S S

njaquiss@wweek .com

When John Elwood “Bud” Clark Jr. died at 90 last week, Portland lost a leader who embodied what voters often say they want: a political outsider who ran his the city the way he ran his small business, the Goose Hollow Inn. In his eight years as mayor (1985 to 1993), he’d talk to anybody anytime and treated the city’s challenges like a grease fire in the Goose’s kitchen: He rolled up his sleeves and took action.

Clark won national attention for a 1978 poster in which he opened his trench coat—presumably wearing nothing underneath—to flash a bronze statue. The caption: “Expose yourself to art.” A first-time candidate, he stunned incumbent Mayor Frank Ivancie in the May 1984 primary, ushering in a new, progressive era in the city’s history.

Word of Clark’s death arrived a few hours before our Feb. 2 issue went to press. A week later, here are snapshots of Clark in the words of old friends.

HE FEARED NOBODY.

When Ivancie produced a campaign ad late in the 1984 campaign showing himself talking to Portlanders from a helicopter, Tim Hibbits, the young pollster advising the upstart Clark, thought his candidate just might win.

Ivancie, a dour favorite of the downtown business set and blue-collar North Portland, didn’t connect with the average Portlander. He also never took Clark seriously, for some good reasons. In the campaign’s first poll, Clark trailed Ivancie 49% to 14%.

But as Ivancie snoozed, Clark put in 16-hour days and tapped the progressive wave sweeping Portland. Some wealthy candidates finance their own campaigns. Clark, a father of four trying to keep his tavern afloat as he canvassed the city, took out a second mortgage on his home to pay for lawn signs and ads. “He was absolutely committed,” Hibbits says.

Voters noticed. “I think it was a combination of Ivancie’s arrogance and Bud’s effervescence,” Hibbits says. “The more people knew him, the more they liked him.”

HE SOLVED PROBLEMS.

“The thing about working for Bud was that the man was fearless,” says Chris Tobkin, his first chief of staff.

In 1985, the Amalagamated Transit Union, which represented bus drivers, deadlocked with TriMet after months of contract negotiations. Transit officials came to City Hall to tell Clark a strike was imminent and inevitable. “He said, ‘There’s no way you’re going to let this happen,’” Tobkin recalls. The city was digging out from a crushing recession, and officials feared a work stoppage would hobble downtown.

Clark asked Gov. Vic Atiyeh, who appointed the TriMet board, to intervene. Atiyeh declined. Clark then reached out to Ed Whelan, the retired AFL-CIO boss and most respected man in Oregon labor. Whelan agreed to help, but only under conditions of total secrecy. Clark sequestered ATU and Whelan at the Hilton Hotel for three days. Strike averted.

“I hate it when people think of Bud being best known for the ‘expose yourself to art’ poster,’” Tobkin says. “That’s just wrong. Bud cared more about the city than anything else. He

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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

“ I had to tell him he couldn’t wear his lederhosen when he went to a convention. He said, ‘I don’t care if you run naked down Northwest 23rd; why do you care whether I show my legs?’”

didn’t have any power over any of those people, but he jumped in where nobody else would and he got a settlement—that’s the kind of mayor he was.”

HE WAS A REAL OREGONIAN.

Mayoral aide Chuck Duffy recalls that when a question arose about the city’s water supply, Clark and about 20 others journeyed to the source, the Little Sandy River in the Bull Run Watershed. Clark picked up Duffy that morning with his canoe atop his car.

When they arrived at the river, Water Bureau officials had procured a fleet of large rubber rafts and a mound of safety equipment. One official, already in his life jacket, approached the mayor. “When I saw that canoe, I thought you were going to try to take it down the river,” Duffy recalls the man saying.

“What the hell do think I brought it for?” Clark replied.

He pushed off in the boat by himself, without a paddle or a life jacket.

“When we came to rapids, he’d squat down and put the pole parallel to the water to steady himself,” Duffy says. “He was a hell of a guy.”

HE NEVER ASPIRED TO A PROMOTION.

For many politicians, the only antidote for ambition is embalming fluid.

Julie Williamson, the veteran political consultant who ran Clark’s 1988 reelection campaign, recalls he was the rarest of elected officials—he had no interest in higher office. “He didn’t care about politics,” she says. “He cared about Portland.”

Williamson worked to rein in some of the habits that she thought undermined Clark’s gravitas, such as his favorite expressions, “Tits up,” or “Whoop, whoop!” the mating call of a male guinea pig.

“I had to tell him he couldn’t wear his lederhosen when he went to a convention,” she says. “He said, ‘I don’t care if you

run naked down Northwest 23rd; why do you care whether I show my legs?’”

Williamson wanted voters to focus on Clark’s intellect, often overshadowed by his flamboyance. “He was much smarter than some people thought,” she says, adding that Clark’s style was to help others achieve their goals and not seek credit for himself.

But his greatest skill was connecting with people. “He was extremely tolerant and extremely inclusive,” Williamson says. “Bud and [his wife] Sigrid would close the Goose on Thanksgiving and open their house so all of the people who halfway lived at the Goose would come over for dinner.”

DONOR

PHOTO CREDIT

SAFE REST SITE

Menlo Park Park & Ride The owner of the East Portland village property wants an escape clause.

It’s been eight months since City Commissioner Dan Ryan pledged to open six “safe rest villages” across the city as an alternative to street camping. In that time, his office has selected only three locations. As the clock ticks on Ryan’s pledge, we examine the status of one of the three sites Ryan has selected.

Site: Menlo Park Park & Ride, a parking lot owned

by TriMet. Location: Southeast 122nd Avenue and East Burnside Street, in the Hazelwood neighborhood.

What’s there now: A mostly empty parking lot used by commuters to board the MAX Blue Line west to Hillsboro or east to Gresham.

Status: Safe rest villages communications liaison Bryan Aptekar says his team hasn’t yet requested permits from the city but has completed land survey work at Menlo Park.

Ryan’s office announced on Tuesday the site’s operator: Cultivate Initiatives, a nonprofit that works solely in Southeast Portland.

Last week, Ryan’s office released a “request for proposals” to solicit contractors for two critical pieces of the sites: pod makers and architects who can design the sites to include plumbing and utilities, traffic flow and layout. His office will be seeking proposals for two weeks.

Who stands in the way: The Hazelwood neighborhood and business associations are skeptical.

“We have legitimate concerns. Our attitude is, how many shelters do we have to have in Hazelwood till we’ve done our part? Before some other neighborhood has done their part?” says neighborhood association board member Ann McMullen, who adds there’s already a “concentration of really vulnerable populations competing for the same resources.”

The group asks that the village’s capacity be reduced from a maximum of 60 to 30 and campers already living within the neighborhood be given priority. McMullen says the city hasn’t agreed to either.

TriMet, which owns the land, is seeking a way out of the deal if the camp becomes unsafe for the neighborhood.

Spokeswoman Tia York says the finalized lease will “contain a clause where either party can terminate it by giving notice, or in the event the lease terms are breached. We have confidence that the village will be operated in a safe manner, but we need to be sure that we have options in case problems arise.” (Ryan’s office says this is a standard clause in many leases.)

LINEUP

MICK HANGLAND-SKILL

Several measures made the Oregon ballot while failing a standard that officials now impose.

Secretary of State Shemia Fagan last week told Oregon campaign finance reformers she planned to reject the language they proposed for three ballot measures that would slash the amount of cash that donors can shower on candidates.

Oregon is one of just five states that have no limits on campaign contributions. That’s why Nike co-founder Phil Knight could write a $250,000 check to candidate for governor Betsy Johnson, and why donors, mostly labor unions, could plonk more than $3 million into Fagan’s 2020 campaign.

Fagan says she plans to reject the ballot measures because they didn’t include, word for word, the full text of Oregon laws they

would change, as required by a 2004 court ruling, Kerr v. Bradbury. A final decision from Fagan is expected Feb. 9.

The founders of Honest Elections Oregon say Fagan is killing their effort to get big money out of state politics by citing Kerr, which doesn’t qualify as legal precedent because it was declared moot before the Oregon Supreme Court addressed its merits.

Honest Elections Oregon says plenty of ballot measures have qualified without reproducing every word of the Oregon statutes they would change. Examples it cites appear below.

Fagan spokesman Ben Morris

says those initiatives were handled by prior secretaries of state. “All of those initiatives were approved by previous administrations,” Morris wrote in an email. “Our administration has consistently interpreted the full text requirement in accordance with the court’s opinion in Kerr and the advice of the [Oregon Department of Justice].”

ANTHONY EFFINGER .

Initiatives approved by previous Oregon secretaries of state without the full text of Oregon laws they would change, according to Honest Elections Oregon: IP-1 (2020) Get Big Money Out of Oregon Elections III Would have

amended the state constitution to allow laws that regulate contributions and expenditures made to influence elections. (Did not make the ballot for lack of signatures.)

IP-34 (2020) Oregon Psilocybin Services Act Allowed manufacture, delivery and administration of psilocybin at supervised, licensed facilities. Imposed a twoyear development period. (Passed by voters.)

IP-3 (2022) Environmental Quality Commission Reform Act Would change the makeup of the Environmental Quality Commission to require that four of five members represent industries. (In process.)

HOW MUCH? $250,000 WHO GOT IT? Former state Sen. Betsy Johnson (D-Scappoose), who is running for governor unaffiliated with any party.

What Ryan says: WW first reported last Thursday hat Mayor Ted Wheeler would implement an administrative rule that bans camping around the safe rest villages. Ryan and Wheeler released a joint statement Friday announcing the rule.

Ryan called it a “buffer” to help support people inside the villages and residents nearby.

The rule seems to have softened certain neighborhoods to the villages, such as the downtown stakeholder group for the rest site along Southwest Naito Parkway.

While McMullen feels the ban is a small step forward in Hazelwood, she’s not entirely appeased: “Fundamentally, we want the village to serve our neighborhood.” S O P H I E P E E L .

Full Text Fight

CONTRIBUTION OF THE WEEK

WHY DOES IT MATTER? Oregon remains one of only five states that places no limits on campaign contributions in statewide races. Democratic nominees for governor can count on the financial support of labor unions, other progressive groups, and some wealthy individuals.

Republicans in Oregon have not won a governor’s race since 1982, and their losing streak seems to have frustrated many of the business community donors who are the GOP’s natural fundraising base.

Although Johnson now belongs to neither major party, she’d already won the support of two of the state’s wealthiest men: Portland real estate investor Jordan Schnitzer ($235,000) and Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle ($225,000). Now, she’s gotten her first check from Knight, whose net worth Bloomberg pegs at $56 billion.

In 2018, Knight gave the GOP nominee for governor, Knute Buehler, $2.5 million.

There’s no guarantee he’ll dig that deeply for Johnson, but he’s starting early in what promises to be a pitched three-way battle to succeed Gov. Kate Brown.

Johnson’s rivals in both of the major parties are grousing that her fundraising prowess (nearly $4 million, far more than any other candidate) shows she’s the candidate of the 1% rather than the people.

Her campaign coordinator, Emmet Duffy, disagrees. “We think there are a lot of people who want Oregon to get back its independent spirit and force the two parties to actually get things done,” Duffy says. “Phil Knight seems to share a love of this state and frustration with its current government with the rest of Oregon.”

WHAT DOES KNIGHT SAY? The Nike co-founder could not be reached for comment. N I G E L J AQ U I S S .

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NEWS

Swing Voters Stan Pulliam’s bid for the hearts and minds of Trump voters has hit a few snags.

BY R AC H E L M O N A H A N

rmonahan@wweek .com

A little over a year ago, WW asked Sandy Mayor Stan Pulliam whether he believed President Donald Trump bore responsibility for violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. “I absolutely do,” Pulliam said then. “I think in his speech he definitely helped incite violence.”

Those comments are a sharp contrast from the campaign Pulliam has waged to become the Republican nominee for Oregon governor.

In the last month alone, he escalated his claims around the conspiracy theory that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. “It was absolutely fraudulent,” he said at a candidate forum—and shared video of that claim Jan. 28. “I am the ONLY candidate who has the courage to say what needs to be said about the integrity of our elections,” he added Feb. 1.

Pulliam seems to be wagering that he can land a Trump endorsement, or at least the backing of the former president’s most ardent supporters.

And by most measures, Pulliam’s Trump-loving ways, along with aggressive criticism of Gov. Kate Brown’s pandemic and criminal justice record, have worked. Pulliam recently won a straw poll of Republicans; finished second in a poll conducted for his rival, Dr. Bud Pierce; and has raised nearly a million dollars.

Before last week, says DHM Research pollster John Horvick, “I would’ve put him as my favorite. A Trump endorsement would make him an even stronger favorite.”

But in the last week, Pulliam hit two related snags that threaten to undo all of that work.

First, he acknowledged to WW that he and his wife, McKensey, were once part of a Portland swingers’ club. Four days later, he drew a notable opponent who will question Pulliam’s record. Other conservatives are also now questioning whether he can be the party’s standard-bearer.

Conservative Bill Sizemore entered the race Monday, citing his belief he could beat Pulliam after last week’s WW story in which Pulliam acknowledged he and his wife “explored mutual relationships with other couples.” Sizemore also leveled charges that Pulliam is being less than sincere in his Trumpism.

“Stan was hoping that Trump will come to Oregon and endorse him if he trumpets the Trump message loud enough,” says Sizemore. He also criticized Pulliam’s remarks a year ago blaming Trump for violence as a sign Pulliam’s MAGA devotion is inauthentic. “I don’t know what he’s going to do now,” says Sizemore, “but that turnaround is striking.”

Pulliam says his position hasn’t changed. “It seems when the president put the truth to the facts about election fraud, he inadvertently emboldened a small portion of the crowd headed towards the Capitol on Jan. 6,” Pulliam tells WW now. “Your newspaper quoted me as saying such, and it was no different from the opinions of pundits like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. If you’re not careful, you’ll wind up with a governor who only says things they know they can defend a decade later.

I’d rather be authentic and candid.”

Many view Trump as potentially the decisive force in the Republican primary. Multiple polls have shown the loyalty the former president commands among Oregon Republicans.

But one example: The Pulliam campaign shared a memo from pollster J.L. Wilson at Nelson Research, which reported that a poll of 400 likely Republican voters said 54% were “less likely to vote” for a candidate that has disavowed President Trump; 13% were more likely—a 41 point margin.

It’s not clear that Trump will endorse, particularly after last week’s revelations, in part because Trumpists want to endorse a winner. And there are reasons for Trump not to weigh in: Pulliam’s opponents aren’t aggressively criticizing Trump;

they’re just not talking about him.

“I think a few Republican candidates will certainly take a shot at getting Trump’s endorsement via their second cousin’s Uber driver who once delivered an order to Trump Tower, but that almost never pans out,” says GOP consultant Reagan Knopp, who is not currently working for any of the campaigns. “Trump hasn’t endorsed in any Republican primaries in Oregon and I haven’t seen any evidence he will start now.”

Pulliam’s leading opponents to date haven’t seized on his troubles. Former Oregon House Minority Leader Christine Drazan (R-Canby) declined to comment last week. Pierce expressed his support for Pulliam: “I have met both Stan Pulliam and his wife during this campaign. They are nice people, and I wish them the best in all aspects of their lives.”

The consultant and conservative writer Bridget Barton raised an eyebrow. “I’m not running for governor to weigh in on someone’s personal life, but Oregonians are tired of career politicians who think they can get away with not being honest about who they really are,” she said in a statement.

“All Oregonians, not just Republicans, are frustrated with being lied to over and over again by the people elected to serve them.”

Plenty of Republicans remain skeptical that the past week will impact Pulliam. And some key Republican constituencies may still be figuring out if Pulliam’s past swinging matters.

The conservative group Oregon Right to Life did not respond to repeated requests for comment about how such revelations might affect its endorsement process. (The group’s former political director, David Kilada, is Pulliam’s campaign consultant.) Executives at the Leathers Enterprises, a fuel company that appears to have indirectly given Pulliam his largest donation—$145,000—through the Heart of Main Street Political Action Committee, have not responded to inquiries from WW. Perhaps sex scandals have lost their hold, even on Re“ I would’ve put him as publican voters. my favorite. A Trump “I look at the last president endorsement would that we had in office who had extramarital whatevers,” make him an even says former state Rep. Julie stronger favorite.”

Parrish (R-West Linn), who has not endorsed or consulted in the race.

Republican voters, she argues, “don’t care as much [about a sex scandal] as why are we living under these mandates or why does every state agency have some sort of issues.”

But over 60% of Oregon Republican voters identify as evangelical, according to a November poll by Fallon Research. And according to a DHM Research poll from 2019, just 6% of Republicans approve of non-monogamous or polyamorous relationships.

“It does matter in the Republican primary, and it’s going to be very difficult to overcome,” says former state Rep. Jeff Kropf (R-Halsey), who self-identifies as a Christian and conservative Republican, in that order. “There’s a huge, huge part of the Oregon Republican base that is very, very pro-Trump. With Stan for all intents and purposes neutered, where do those voters go?”

WESLEY LAPOINTE

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NEWS BRIAN BURK

EXILED: A new ban prohibits campers from sleeping near highways, such as Interstate 84 in Portland.

Dead End Mayor Ted Wheeler’s ban on camping along busy roads is a response to a safety crisis—and to frustrated voters.

BY S O P H I E P E E L

speel@wweek .com

Last week, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler viewed two staggering numbers.

The first, enclosed in a Portland Bureau of Transportation report on traffic deaths, was 19. That’s the number of homeless people killed by cars while on foot in 2021—70% of the 27 pedestrian deaths in the city. That statistic confirmed what advocates had warned for months: The city’s housing crisis was placing vulnerable people in the paths of cars.

The second number was a poll result. A December survey of voters, commissioned by the city’s most powerful business association, the Portland Business Alliance, showed 79% of Portlanders supported requiring people sleeping on the streets to move to a shelter or sanctioned camping area. That’s the kind of voter support usually reserved for public libraries.

Together, the two numbers gave Wheeler fresh motivation to enact an idea he had started discussing last fall: sweeping campers living along highway shoulders and the city’s busiest surface streets. Those roads, called “high-crash corridors,” make up 8% of the city’s street network.

Wheeler acted swiftly. The camping ban along busy roadways went into effect Feb. 5 via an emergency order. Observers of City Hall say it’s the strongest indication in a year that the mayor feels the dismay growing among constituents regarding Portland’s homelessness crisis.

Wheeler said Friday the poll numbers did not change his timing, but “underscore the urgency of the issue and the anger and frustration that our constituents have about the lack of action.”

He’s reopened a fierce debate about safety, livability and the ethics of sweeps in the city’s neighborhoods—one that has rarely left anyone satisfied. And conversations with eight observers close to the issue show Wheeler’s plan may have a pivotal political impact as well as a practical one.

Here are three keys to understanding what Wheeler’s order means.

Many of the most dangerous streets in the city are also shopping districts.

A quarter of the high-crash corridors where Wheeler banned camping are also home to the city’s business districts. The corridors include Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard, Burnside Street and Northeast Fremont Street—all shopping destinations where business owners complain that tent camping has slowed commerce.

Adams says the ban was initially to apply only to highways owned by the Oregon Department of Transportation—only on Wednesday were PBOT corridors added. Deaths along PBOT roads decreased slightly the past two years, from 33 to 31 in 2021. Deaths along ODOT roads have doubled since 2019, from 16 to 32.

Ashton Simpson, co-founder of the advocacy group Oregon Walks, publicly called for the city to move campers from alongside freeways earlier this year. But he’s outraged that the mayor’s ban doesn’t promise to relocate campers to safer locations. He says that points to the real winners from last week’s announcement.

“One small section will benefit: the business owners,” says Simpson, who adds he doesn’t want to presume Wheeler’s motivations behind the ban. “I’ll let the map speak for itself.”

Sam Adams, a top aide to Wheeler, says the policy was not informed by business interests.

The decision was purely “evidence-based”— on the Transportation Bureau’s map of where crashes occur most often.

“Some business districts happen to be covered by this, and a lot are not,” Adams says.

Indeed, the president and CEO of the Portland Business Alliance says he wasn’t consulted until 48 hours before the announcement. But he supports the ban, calling it “common sense.”

“It’s possible that this will be welcome news for storefront retailers and employers in certain

areas of the city, but we first need to see the implementation details,” Andrew Hoan says.

“We would hope that every one of our elected officials, including the mayor, would be motivated to help employers, especially main street retailers, thrive.”

Several months ago, new political advocacy group People for Portland began threatening legal action against the city for the presence of trash along roads and highways.

In the group’s solicitation of complaints about trash that it says it’ll use in potential legal action, the group lists specific roadways that bother it the most: Interstates 5, 84 and 205 and Powell, Sandy and Columbia boulevards, among others.

Eight of the 10 freeways and major thoroughfares the group lists as most cluttered with trash will be part of the mayor’s ban on camping.

Wheeler’s office insists his ban “is based on what is the healthiest and safest option” for homeless Portlanders.

“ While an urgent response is needed, the mayor’s unilateral action has me concerned these policies lack important details while ignoring the expertise of our houseless community, their advocates, and the devoted street safety experts at PBOT.” The city already had the authority to keep people from camping along busy streets.

So far, the details provided by the mayor’s office and the Office of Management and Finance are scant about how the policy will be enforced.

Wheeler said Friday that “for the most part, when asked to leave, people will move.”

While it’s true that few campers resist moving when swept, they often return within days to the same spot. Wheeler promises that such camps will receive first priority to keep people from resettling there—but he hasn’t explained how. (Wheeler says he would support fencing off freeway shoulders, but that’s up to ODOT.)

The city prioritizes camps for removal based on several criteria—including proximity to a park or school, the size of the camp, and reports of crime. A complaint must be made through an online portal for a camp to be considered.

OMF provided few clarifying details to WW about how some roadside camps would be cleared more quickly than others.

“Camps located in high-traffic areas are already high on the list, so those by on- and offramps and freeways are a big focus,” says Mark Alejos, a spokesman for the office. “If someone returns, the program will work with that person to have them move. If the person stays, and/ or more return, the camp will continue to be posted for removal until there are no returns.”

That is a change: Campers who return to swept roadsides will move to the top of the city’s priority list. Alejos says the city will team “with the public,…ODOT and PBOT to identify specific locations of concern.” (PBOT says it’s been provided “no details” how that will work.)

But the city portal already gets around 1,000 complaints a week. The city recently beefed up its cleanup teams from nine to 18 members, but it’s unclear whether specific teams will be dedicated to enforcing the ban.

The ban places two sitting commissioners in a tough spot.

How the two city commissioners up for reelection this May—Jo Ann Hardesty and Dan Ryan—respond to the mayor’s ban could be pivotal to their flagging bids to keep their seats.

Hardesty expressed disappointment last week that she first heard about the ban from media reports, and that PBOT, which she oversees, was not briefed on the decision. (Wheeler disagrees: He said last week commissioners “were certainly aware” of the impending order.)

It makes sense that Hardesty would be frustrated: Wheeler, her longtime frenemy on the City Council, has placed her in a spot where her traditional opposition to camp sweeps flies in the face of the public mood.

The PBA’s poll that showed homelessness was a higher priority for Portlanders than any other issue also found 54% of voters said they would not vote for Hardesty. That means she’ll have to persuade undecided voters she’s right to oppose the mayor on the single issue that frustrates voters most.

She tried to strike a balance in her response.

“While an urgent response is needed, the mayor’s unilateral action has me concerned these policies lack important details while ignoring the expertise of our houseless community, their advocates, and the devoted street safety experts at PBOT,” Hardesty tells WW. For Ryan, who has a higher number of undecided voters he could sway to his side, the issue is simpler: He supports the mayor’s ban.

He just has to hope it works.

“Removing people living unprotected next to high-crash corridors is necessary to save lives,” Ryan tells WW. “Now [we] need to partner with Multnomah County…to increase our shelter capacity so that we can safely enact the declaration.”

But shelter capacity lags. None of the city’s safe rest villages are open yet. The city and county set aside funding last fall to make available 100 beds in existing shelters for people displaced by sweeps; Wheeler said last Friday the beds would be prioritized for people displaced by his emergency order.

But it’s likely to be weeks before the beds are made available at existing shelters, according to the Joint Office of Homeless Services.

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

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“But don’t tha n k the Government. As Director of Coin and Currency for Federated Mint, I get paid to inform and educate the general public regarding U.S. coins. Ever since the decision by Federated Mint to release rarely seen Gov’t issued coins to the general public — I’m being asked how much are the unsearched Vault Bags worth? The answer is, there’s no way to tell. Coin values always fluctuate and there are never any guarantees, but we

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UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT ISSUED COINS SEALED IN EACH BAG:

Silver Morgan Dollar 1878-1921

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■ UNSEARCHED: Pictured above are the unsearched Vault Bags being handed over to Oregon residents who call the National TollFree Hotline before the 48-hour deadline ends. And here’s the best part. Each Vault Bag is loaded with over 200 Gov’t issued coins, including all the coins pictured in today’s publication, some dating back to the 1800’s and worth up to 50 times their face value.

Each coin is verified to meet a minimum collector grade of very good or above before the bags are securely sealed and the dates and mint marks are never searched by Federated Mint to determine collector value. If you find your zip code listed, call 1-800-8693164 EXT.UV32568 immediately.

(Continued from previous page)

Silver Walking Liberty 1916-1947

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marks were never searched to determine collector values and the bags were securely sealed.

That means there’s no telling what you’ll find until you search all the coins,” said Lynne.

The only thing U.S. residents who find their zip code printed in today’s publication need to do is call the National TollFree Hotline before the 48-hour deadline ends.

This is very important. After the Vault Bags were loaded with over 200 Gov’t issued coins, each verified to meet a minimum collector grade quality of very good or above, the dates and mint marks were never searched to determine collector values.

The Vault Bag fee has been set for $1,500 for residents who miss the 48-hour deadline, but for those U.S. residents who beat the 48-hour deadline the Vault Bag fee is just $980 as long as they call the National Toll-Free Hotline before the deadline ends.

“Remember this, we

cannot stop collectors from buying up all the unsearched bags of coins they can get in this specia l adver tising announcement. And you better believe with each bag being loaded with nearly 3 pounds of Gov’t issued coins we’re guessing they’re going to go quick,” said Lynne.

The phone lines w ill be ringing off the hook beginning at precisely 8:30 a.m. this m o r n i n g. T h a t ’s b e c a u s e each unsearched Vault Bag is loaded with the rarely seen coins pictured left and highly sought after collector coins dating clear back to the 1800’s including iconic Morgan Silver Dollars, a historic Peace Silver Dollar, stunning Silver Walking Liber t y H a l f Dol la rs , the collectible Silver Eisenhower Dollars, spectacular Silver Liberty Head Half and Quarter Dollars, rarely seen Silver Franklin Half Dollars, high demand President Kennedy Silver Half Dollars, beautiful

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“With all these collectible Gov’t Issued coins up for grabs we’re going to do our best to answer all the calls,” said Lynne.

Thousands of U.S. residents stand to miss the deadline to claim the U.S. Gov’t issued coins.

That means U.S. residents who find the first three digits of their zip code listed in today’s publication ca n cla im the unsearched bags of money for themselves and keep all the U.S. Gov’t issued coins found inside.

If you find your zip code listed, call 1-800-869-3164 EXT. UV32568 immediately. Just be sure to call before the deadline ends 48 hours from today’s publication date. ■

FEDERATED MINT, LLC IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE U.S. MINT, THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, A BANK OR ANY GOVERNMENT AGENCY. IF FOR ANY REASON WITHIN 30 DAYS FROM SHIPMENT YOU ARE DISSATISFIED, RETURN THE PRODUCT FOR A REFUND LESS SHIPPING AND RETURN POSTAGE. THIS SAME OFFER MAY BE MADE AVAILABLE AT A LATER DATE OR IN A DIFFERENT GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION. OH RESIDENTS ADD R1054R-2 6.5% SALES TAX. FEDERATED MINT, PO BOX 1200, MASSILLON, OH 44648 ©2021 FEDERATED MINT Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

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25 REASONS TO LOVE PORTLAND

Not that long ago, everyone had a crush on Portland. These days, we’d be lucky to get even one swipe right.

Well before Fred and Carrie shaped the global perception of our city as a haven for bearded brewers, bike-loving animal rights activists, and jobless hipsters following their dreams, publications like The Washington Post and The New York Times were swooning over Stumptown’s livability and niceness.

Not anymore.

Now, headlines focus on Portland’s “summer of rage” and “year of unrest.”

Sure, 2020 was tough on all of us.

But we came into 2021 with renewed hope. Then we saw skyrocketing gun deaths, an unprecedented heat wave, and a Greek alphabet’s worth of COVID variants.

Yet the fact remains that there’s still much to adore in our great city. And in our annual valentine to Portland, we’re giving you 25 reasons to love the place you call home. Some may not be new, but new to you. Others are projects that got underway in the past 12 months.

We’re grateful, for instance, that Portland has built two handsome new bridges not meant for cars, but for people (page 20), making it safer to get around.

The city is also greener now that tens of millions of dollars have been invested in parks east of 82nd Avenue (page 19).

Our food and beverage scene continues to find creative ways to thrive, whether that’s by building impressive outdoor dining rooms (page 22), launching wacky theme bars that make us smile (page 16), or opening so many high-quality pizzerias that it garners national attention (page 18).

And you’ve got to admire Portland institutions that refuse to die, which include a moldering mall (page 21) and the city’s oldest bookstore (page 21).

Like any long-term relationship, maintaining that spark with your hometown takes work. With any luck, this issue will help rekindle your passion for Portland just like it has for us.

—Andi Prewitt, Arts & Culture Editor

THOMAS TEAL

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15

NO. 2 BECAUSE WE HAVE A CITYWIDE ALTERNATIVE TO POLICING.

CHRISTINE DONG

NO. 1 BECAUSE WE’RE STILL OPENING QUIRKY THEMED BARS, EVEN DURING A PANDEMIC. Despite years of social unrest, ongoing redevelopment that upends neighborhoods, and a painfully long pandemic, there’s at least one joyful trend that has managed to persist in Portland: the themed pub.

We’ve long had a lounge decked out like a circus, a watering hole dedicated to all things Elvis, a book bar that makes you question whether it’s really more public library than public house, and a nightclub for horror-worshipping goths.

Thoroughly fleshing out these concepts takes dedication and a good chunk of change, which makes the recent boomlet of themed bars a delightful surprise. Not only are these businesses opening in an environment that’s not been particularly hospitable to the service industry; they’re going all out developing ambitious motifs that will, if nothing else, put a much-needed smile on your face when you order your next beer.

“A theme can provide comfort in familiarity, a sense of humor and even a slice of community in these isolating times,” says Hanna Seidel, general manager of the soon-to-open Lord of the Rings-inspired Treebeerd’s Taphouse in downtown. “It provides space to nerd out about things that have been bringing joy to people’s lives for years.”

We’ll drink to that. A N D I P R E W I T T .

Raven’s Manor

235 SW 1st Ave., 971-319-6182, ravensmanorexperience.com.

Opened: May 2021 Theme: This sprawling bar inside the historic Henry Failing Building is a mashup of a macabre villa and mad scientist’s laboratory, perfect for goths, ghost hunters and self-professed geeks who count down the days until Halloween.

Benbear’s Beers

5029 SE Division St. Opened: October 2021 Theme: Benbear’s took over this rustic-meets-industrial chic taproom in the Lot after Scout Beers left the food cart pod last year. You’ll find a solid list of brews made by Pacific Northwest brands both established and new as well as numerous paintings of bears on the walls.

The 4th Wall

1445 SE Hawthorne Blvd., the4thwallpdx.com.

Opened: November 2021 Theme: Part coffee shop, part lounge, the 4th Wall was born out of two friends’ appreciation for film—the pair met years ago while working at Seattle’s beloved Cinerama and spent time dreaming up unique movie festival ideas, like “sequels that are better than the original” and “Teen-angstgiving.” Now, they can host their own version of Sundance every single day on the bar’s 150-inch screen.

Treebeerd’s Taphouse

822 SW 2nd Ave., treebeerdstaphouse.com.

Anticipated opening: End of February Theme: Named after the oaklike giant that first appeared in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Two Towers, Treebeerd’s pays homage to The Lord of the Rings. The series will be gently alluded to in the design, which includes the use of actual trees and some nods here and there to beards.

Next week marks the one-year anniversary of Portland Street Response’s pilot program. And next month will see what is perhaps an even bigger milestone: The program is slated to expand citywide.

That means Portland Street Response’s team of paramedics and licensed mental health clinicians are no longer restricted to the greater Lents area they were bound to for the duration of the trial run.

“Portland Street Response is an exciting change to our community safety system, and I am proud to have championed its development. After a yearlong pilot, we are gearing up for expansion,” Hardesty tells WW. “This March, PSR will be going citywide and we’re currently interviewing people to fill those positions. My office just submitted our budget request for next year, and if my colleagues vote to approve it, by this summer Portland Street Response will be coming to every corner of the city 24/7. ” The team of unarmed first responders is dispatched in lieu of Portland Police Bureau officers to certain types of calls, including reports of an individual who is intoxicated or experiencing a mental health crisis. But Portland Street Response and PPB are not mutually exclusive; they have the ability to “co-respond” on calls, too, if need be.

For years, Hardesty has pushed for Portland to implement an alternative first-response system for mental health crisis calls that’s akin to Eugene’s nationally renowned Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets program. But after launching last February, Portland Street Response got off to a rocky start.

In May, Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioners Mingus Mapps and Dan Ryan voted against a citywide expansion, citing a need for more data. Those “no” votes drew sharp criticism from community members because, less than a month prior, a PPB officer shot and killed Robert Delgado in Lents Park—located squarely within the geographic bounds of the pilot program.

Delgado’s death heightened community demands for a citywide expansion of Portland Street Response: Both Portland police and the city’s emergency dispatchers failed to flag the call as mental health-related. And even if they had, Portland Street Response’s shift did not begin for another half-hour after the shooting occurred—a schedule that was restricted in part by budget limitations.

In November, however, the City Council voted unanimously to approve a citywide expansion. And preliminary data shows the program can divert 5% of calls away from Portland police, who are understaffed and struggling to respond quickly.

“We’ve learned so much during this past year,” Hardesty says, “ and the community’s investment in [Portland Street Response’s] success has been a highlight of my time in office.” T E S S R I S K I .

NO. 3 BECAUSE WE’RE STILL NO. 1 IN SEMI-FACTUAL SUPERLATIVES. No. 1 Foodie City in America (WalletHub, October 2021) No. 1 Best City for Pumpkin Lovers (LawnStarter, October 2021) No. 1 Best Coffee City in America (WalletHub, September 2021) No. 1 Best City for Vegans and Vegetarians (WalletHub, September 2021) No. 2 Highest Number of Dog Parks Per Capita (OneVet, January 2022) No. 2 Most Bikeable City (Bicycling, July 2021) 16

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

No. 3 Street Art Hot Spot in America (Singulart, August, 2021) No. 3 Best City for Singles (WalletHub, November 2021) No. 3 Greenest City in America (WalletHub, October 2021) No. 4 Most Charitable State (WalletHub, November 2021) No. 5 Best U.S. City for Fitness Pups (OneVet, January 2022) No. 9 Best City for Beer Drinkers (SmartAsset, December 2021)

No. 9 Fittest City in America (American Fitness Index, July 2021) No. 9 Best Place to Live (U.S. News & World Report, 2021) No. 10 Best State for Remote Work (WalletHub, April 201) No. 13 Most Fun City in America (WalletHub, December 2021) No. 13 Best City for Witches (WalletHub, October 2021)

Terrance Moses began a one-man trash pickup operation in 2016 in North Portland, offering to clean up homeless camps along the Peninsula Crossing Trail.

Now, his nonprofit Neighbors Helping Neighbors PDX is 64 volunteers strong—each logs four hours of garbage collection a month. Moses, who still completes his route daily, started dropping sandwiches and hand warmers at the camps as well. The route includes the neighborhoods of St. Johns, Arbor Lodge, Cully and Kenton.

“Our model was simple: build a bridge between the housed and the unhoused and help housed folks understand why people are living like this and how you can be a better neighbor to them,” Moses says.

He stresses his work is important because not only has the houseless population ballooned during the pandemic, Moses says the city’s appalling inaction to get people off the streets makes his services all the more necessary.

“It’s all about how you interact with them,” he says.

“You have to humanize them because they feel so dehumanized.”

Moses adds that the reasons for our homelessness crisis are complex, but that sometimes people “take common sense out of the equation” when it comes to simple solutions, like helping someone keep their space clean.

“One of the first things I tell them is: I don’t work for the city, and I’m not here to remove you.” S O P H I E P E E L .

NO. 5 BECAUSE PORTLANDERS CAME UP WITH THE APP TO GET PEOPLE OFF THE GRID. Long before she developed the camping app that rose to the top of the rankings in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, Sarah Smith was just another Midwesterner lured to Portland by the surrounding terrain.

“There are so many places for camping,” she marvels.

“You can go camp on the coast, in the mountains, near wine country. That’s really the reason we started The Dyrt in the first place. We were living in a beautiful area and wanted to take advantage, but not knowing exactly where to go, the options felt overwhelming.”

Appalled by the lack of campsite information on the internet, Smith and her husband and CEO Kevin Long launched The Dyrt in 2014 as a digital hub for underserved outdoors enthusiasts. (Web directories did list area campsites, but Long compares using that minimal data to choosing an Airbnb rental by address alone.) Diligently crowdsourcing online footprints from people off the grid, they’ve now cultivated a vast, all-inclusive community that has contributed over 4 million user-generated pictures, videos and critical reviews of 40,000-plus campgrounds. In Smith’s words, they’re “using technology to get away from technology.” And The Dyrt has a big tent.

Following a recent eight-figure capital investment, the company is in the process of doubling its approximately 30-member workforce that’s, quite literally, scattered across the country. While most firms may be returning to business as usual, The Dyrt found that COVID-forced virtual cubicles dovetailed perfectly with their corporate culture.

“The majority of our employees are still here in Portland,” reports Long, “but when the pandemic hit, we went to a fully remote workforce that everyone loved.

We increased the users of our website and apps by over 100 percent. After tripling our revenue, it just didn’t make sense to go back to the office.” J AY H O R T O N .

NO. 6 BECAUSE A SEMI-SECRET, ALL-AGES CLUB WITH A STRICT VACCINATION POLICY IS THE HOTTEST PLACE FOR UNDERGROUND MUSIC RIGHT NOW.

COMFY

NO. 4 BECAUSE PEOPLE LIVING IN NORTH PORTLAND HOMELESS CAMPS CAN HAVE THEIR TRASH PICKED UP FOR FREE.

The best place to see live music in Portland these days doesn’t really have a name. Posters for upcoming shows that bookers post to their Instagram accounts only list an address: 10140 SE Division St. It’s an unassuming location right next to a burrito shop and a paint store, and a stone’s throw from a typically busy stretch of Interstate 205.

During the height of the pandemic, this unusual venue has been a crucial hub for an underground music scene— and its fans—that, during normal times, are generally ignored by the city’s tastemakers. Shows here tend to be genre agnostic, combining electronic noise artists with emo bands and rappers, and are always inclusive when it comes to LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC talent. One upcoming show has six young drag performers on the bill alongside knotted-up punk group Swiss Army Wife and nasty-sounding metal band Father’s Milk.

The shows are also cheap, never costing more than $10 for entry, and they are all ages. Like the many house concerts taking place throughout Portland, the club is filling a clear need for young music fans looking to blow off steam and hang with friends in a safe space.

It’s a responsibility that organizers in charge of the venue take seriously. They’re strict about checking vaccination cards and making sure patrons are masked. They use their IG Stories to call out creeps and drug dealers. And they maintain a separate Insta account for lost-and-found items, which currently include a denim jacket, three pairs of sunglasses, and a black bra.

As a result, shows tend to be packed, raucous and a hell of a lot of fun. For an older music head like me, it harks back to the halcyon days of venues like X-Ray Cafe and 17 Nautical Miles. For all the teens bouncing off the walls and each other at these gigs, it’s heaven on earth. R O B E R T H A M .

NO. 7 BECAUSE WE FINALLY GOT BIG MONEY OUT OF LOCAL POLITICS. Oregon’s still the Wild West when it comes to political contributions—one of just five states with no limits on campaign contributions. But Honest Elections Oregon, an advocacy group opposed to the tsunami of campaign cash, has triumphed here.

For the first time, following Honest Elections’ wins at the ballot box, both the city of Portland and Multnomah County will run the 2022 election cycle under new laws. The limits—$500 per donor in county races and $508 in city races—also prohibit corporate contributions and require more disclosure than before.

That’s a huge change from previous practice, when candidates routinely collected checks of $2,500 and much more. The city’s program also allows for matching funds of up to 6 to 1 on the first $50 a donor gives. That makes small donors more consequential and levels the playing field for new or lesser-known candidates, because the city’s limits also cap the amount of money a candidate can spend.

Jason Kafoury, a Portland lawyer and one of the organizers of Honest Elections, says that’s a big deal: “With so many states moving to weaken their local democracies, our local community has made big strides to remove the influence of big money and force transparency of donors.” N I G E L J A Q U I S S .

NO. 8 BECAUSE OUR CITY’S SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING TEAM IS AQUADORABLE! Most people remember the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta for a pipe bombing and a dramatic one-legged vault landing

by Kerri Strug. Not Michele Bennett.

Though it received far less attention than the American gymnasts that year, the U.S. synchronized swimming team dominated, earning three perfect 10s in the technical round followed by a flawless freestyle routine that secured gold. It simultaneously mesmerized and motivated a young Bennett.

“It was very inspiring,” she recalls. “I was a little dancer and gymnast, and I said, ‘I want to do that instead.’ So I immediately signed up.”

More than two decades later, Bennett is still in the pool performing graceful leg maneuvers alongside other swimmers, in harmony with both their movements and the music as co-founder of the Rose City Raindrops.

Portland’s only artistic swimming team (“synchronized” was officially dropped from the name in 2017) was formed seven years ago as a way for athletes experienced in the uncommon sport to connect and stay in practice. But the Raindrops are more than just a club for people who want to keep up their skill Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

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set. The troupe regularly performs elaborately choreographed water ballets in a wide variety of settings ranging from weddings to company retreats to film studios.

Bennett, for instance, has bobbed around Puget Sound for an Y La Bamba music video; swam in the Columbia for a Blind Pilot shoot; and extended limbs from the Willamette for a Blazers promo.

“We do fundraisers and birthday parties,” says Bennett. “We just did this corporate incentive party for the top sales performers and they had to learn artistic swimming Dancing With the Stars style and compete.”

Like many performers, the Raindrops are emerging from an extended COVID hibernation. Pools, after all, were among the communal gathering places that remained off-limits for much of the pandemic. But as celebrations return to our social calendars, the swimmers are now back in their brightly colored bathing caps and matching sparkly suits, bringing some of that Esther Williams’ Old Hollywood glamour to all manner of events.

The team has anywhere between 20 to 30 active members at any given time, and their skill level ranges from recreational to former Olympian. There’s also a wide variety of ages, too: The youngest Raindrop is 18 while the oldest is still spinning and kicking at 78. In fact, Bennett stresses, synchronized swimming is one of the best sports to continue as you age because it’s low impact.

Ultimately, though, she hopes that the Raindrops’ appearances will expose more individuals to the activity and encourage them to give it a shot.

“I think it is a good fit for a lot of people, where maybe gymnastics is a little too intense and swimming is a little too boring,” Bennett explains. “It’s like, here it is! Right here! The perfect sport.” A N D I P R E W I T T .

NO. 9 BECAUSE NOT A SINGLE INDEPENDENT PORTLAND MOVIE THEATER WENT OUT OF BUSINESS DURING THE PANDEMIC. Last November, when the Roseway Theater reopened after 20 months, Portland’s film exhibitors could breathe a collective sigh of relief—every local theater had survived the pandemic closure. For his part, Roseway owner Greg Wood was in no rush.

“I was joking to myself that we’ll be the last to open,” he says. “I wanted to see business going through theaters first.”

As a single-screen, first-run operation, the Northeast Sandy Boulevard venue also needed studios to generate hits. Spider-Man: No Way Home helped; now Wood is banking on Uncharted and The Batman.

Meanwhile, independents like Cinemagic, the Academy and Clinton Street dabble enthusiastically in regular repertory screenings. Clinton owner Lani Jo Leigh says pandemic isolation has enhanced the appeal of arthouse titles that wouldn’t draw audiences before, leading to a February slate featuring French director Robert Bresson’s works and international Black History Month films.

Moreover, many studios have waived guarantee fees on rep screenings, making smaller crowds more tenable.

“I really believe in social distancing, so I’m showing stuff not a lot of people come to,” Leigh jokes.

From Cully to Southeast, theaters can again offer vastly different cinematic experiences any night of the week. Leigh says community support has taught her not to fear the worst.

“People aren’t going to let us fail.” C H A N C E S O L E M - P F E I F E R .

NO. 10 BECAUSE THE PORK ROLL IS STILL HAVING A MOMENT...

“Whatever You Want to Call It, the New Jersey Pork Roll Is Having Its Portland Breakfast Sandwich Moment.” That was the WW food headline March 31, 2021, and not long after the story came out, the two pop-ups that featured the dish—Dimo’s SPK and Lamotta’s Handmade—quietly disappeared.

But Portland’s love of the breakfast meat also known as Taylor Ham cannot be killed quite so easily. Philly-centric cart Moore Food & Co., which opened two days after that story ran, still serves a Taylor pork roll and American cheese as a lunch sandwich—no egg, just more slices of meat.

And because the spirit of Portlandia cannot be killed, we also have, you guessed it: an artisan pork roll. Southeast Division Street food cart Ruthie’s sometimes makes its own and, as of late last fall, so does Olympia Provisions in collaboration with former Bon Appétit video dude Brad Leone.

That roll, described on the label as “a uniquely perfect breakfast meat,” looks the part and will set you back $45 for 20 ounces in the shop; you get pasture-raised pork from small Oregon farms instead of factory-tortured swine, plus the curing agent is Swiss chard powder rather than sodium nitrite.

It’s also very good, though Moore Food co-owner Tom Amick doesn’t sound too interested in trying it. “If it isn’t wrapped in burlap with ‘Taylor Provisions’ stamped on it, it ain’t pork roll.” J A S O N C O H E N .

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THOMAS TEAL

NO. 11 …AND SO IS OUR PIZZA SCENE. In July, Portland’s pizza scene went viral after a Bloomberg article previewing Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya’s three-volume Modernist Pizza proclaimed Portland the “Best Pizza City in the United States.” The book, which came out in October, highlighted Apizza Scholls, Ken’s Artisan, Scottie’s, Sizzle Pie, Lovely’s Fifty Fifty, Handsome Pizza and Red Sauce, as well as the since-departed Crown and Checkerboard.

What’s incredible is that Portland has just kept gaining solid pizza joints since then. There’s Pizza Thief and Pizza Kat, both of which use Pacific Northwest flour and naturally leavened dough.

What was briefly Pizza Doughnais, in Brooklyn, is now Meta Pizza, from former Ración chef Anthony Cafiero. Wood-fired restaurant Ned Ludd is now Cafe Olli, which uses the space’s brick oven to make two different styles of pizza for lunch and dinner.

And we can’t leave out the Precious Pizza food cart (square nonna-style) and Pacific Crust in the old Crown space—plus the planned return of Checkerboard, which Sizzle Pie owner Matt Jacobson purchased from Ken Forkish.

You can eat pizza in Portland once a week for two months without getting bored or disappointed. Not only do you no longer need a plane ticket to New Haven or New York—you barely need to walk more than a few blocks. J A S O N C O H E N .

BRIAN BURK

NO. 12 BECAUSE EAST PORTLAND USED TO BE A PARK DESERT BUT NOW IT’S GOT MORE GREENSPACES. Portland’s best view of Mount St. Helens at sunset is from a garbage dump.

Well, technically, Thomas Cully Park hasn’t been a landfill since 1990. For two decades, it sat as another industrial stain off Northeast Killingsworth Street—until Portland Parks & Recreation cleaned the brownfield and transformed it into a 25-acre city park that opened in 2018. From atop a knoll on a winter’s afternoon, St. Helens presides over a view that encompasses young ponderosa pines, a suspension bridge leading to playground slides, and oil trains gliding past on a railroad line. It’s a vista that shows how much the neighborhood has changed—and how far it still has to go.

Over the past decade, Portland has witnessed an extraordinary civic investment in parkland in its easternmost neighborhoods.

Since 2013, the parks bureau has dedicated $84 million to parks east of 82nd Avenue. (Because Cully Park sits at Northeast 72nd Avenue, it isn’t even included in that total.) The result is one of the most tangible achievements by City Hall in decades to make the city more equitable to low-income people of color, who disproportionately live at the eastern edge of Portland.

Spurred by then-City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, city officials decided they had a duty to redress what you might call a parks gap.

“Data from 2017 show that across the city, 1 in 5 households do not have ready access to a park or natural area within a

15-minute walk—that’s 20% of all Portlanders,” says Portland Parks & Rec spokesman Mark Ross. “But in East Portland the discrepancy in access grows to 2 in 5 households.”

The campaign to fix that imbalance has resulted in some works of public architecture that could easily go unnoticed—unless you find yourself on a stroll along Northeast 127th Avenue.

There, tucked into a modest residential neighborhood, are 16 acres of paradise: Luuwit View Park. (“Luuwit” is a Chinook name for Mount St. Helens—and the view of the peak here makes me reassess my earlier award for best view.) Nationally renowned firm Skylab Architecture designed the pathways, basketball courts, skate bowl, and a geometric, yellow picnic shelter that looks like a newly landed spaceship.

It’s a landscape you’d expect to see on a revitalized waterfront or the Nike campus—places built to attract and celebrate capital.

Instead, it was planted in one of the most neglected parts of the city.

Two years of pandemic have taught us the importance of communal outdoor spaces. Yet East Portland’s parks have mostly landed in the headlines only when they host a gun homicide or a homeless camp. It’s worth taking a moment to consider that the very existence of these places—Gateway Green, Gateway Discovery Park, Leach Botanical Garden—is one of the few signs that Portland is headed in the right direction: east. A A R O N MESH.

NO. 13 BECAUSE FOREST PARK’S NOOKS AND CRANNIES CAN STILL SURPRISE. Last month, the Forest Park Conservancy announced it had received a 60-acre land donation—the first in over 25 years. The conservation easement ensures the property around the greenspace will remain off-limits to developers—a moving chapter in the ongoing love story between the park and the hikers, bikers and wanderers of Portland.

For decades, Forest Park has offered a blissful escape from the bustle of the city, but during the pandemic, it has morphed into something more. As our world grew cramped and airless, the park offered an increasingly rare opportunity to roam and get lost—like I almost did when I stumbled onto a muddy, hilly trail that I worried would deposit me in a netherworld between Portland and Beaverton.

Forest Park was dedicated in 1948 and conceived by brothers John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., whose father designed Central Park. It’s an auspicious connection, but if Central Park is a pocket of space, Forest Park is akin to another plane of reality.

You go there to feel comforted by the womblike embrace of the trees and liberated by the way it looms above downtown. Now more than ever, it’s our soul-expanding second home. B E N N E T T C A M P B E L L F E R G U S O N .

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NO. 14 BECAUSE OUR CANNABIS COMMUNITY CONTINUES TO FIND CREATIVE WAYS TO COLLABORATE WITH OTHER INDUSTRIES. Portland has long had a reputation for producing an abundance of quality craft goods—from beer to coffee to chocolate to charming, homemade knickknacks. So when two of those independent creators from entirely different industries team up to make something new, you know you’re usually in for something special.

Our cannabis community is no different. Their mashups with other businesses are notably trailblazing. Here are the highlights of the past year’s dopest local cannabis collaborations.

BRIANNA WHEELER .

The Mini Bar by Greater Goods and chef Liv Vasquez

Netflix’s Cooked With Cannabis winner and cannabis justice advocate Liv Vasquez linked up with Greater Goods—the child company of Leif Goods, which defined contemporary branding at the onset of recreational legalization—to produce an organic, 50 mg, hemp-derived CBD dark chocolate bar finished with linalool-infused Bali Pyramid Salt from Bitterman Salt Co.

Dark Chocolate Bar by Lazarus Naturals and Ranger Chocolate

Wellness brand Lazarus Naturals’ foray into craft collabs began with this chocolate treat produced by small-batch chocolatier Ranger. The bar is produced with Lazarus’ Central Oregon-grown hemp and Ranger’s premium Maker’s Blend, an ethically sourced cacao mélange that harmonizes thoughtfully with the terpene profile of the cannabis.

an ever-changing array of whiskeys. By 2018, head distiller Andy Garrison had spent seven springs fermenting not-so-common grains (spelt, sorghum, millet). So when his wife shared that Lola Milholland, CEO of thennew noodle maker Umi Organic, had freezers full of failed attempts at fresh ramen, he leapt at the opportunity.

“I’d already experimented with turning day-old bread into whiskey,” shrugs Garrison.

“Grain is grain.”

The chewy texture of traditional ramen noodles comes from an alkaline solution called kansui that, when fermented, imparts a distinct mineral aroma and “unplaceable noodly flavor” to the whiskey.

Given the heightened efficiency of Umi Organic’s kitchen, Garrison doubts they’ll have an opportunity to keep the business as a distilling partner.

“We got one last batch of yakisoba during the early stages of the pandemic, but resources were so scarce, we ended up turning them into hand sanitizer that we donated to farmers market vendors and delivery truck drivers,” he says. “Sanitizer is just alcohol, basically, plus a few additives. It still smelled like noodles.”

J AY H O R T O N .

Wake-Up Call Muddy Chai Tea

by Barbari and lion’s mane

Less a collab and more a mashup between witchy herbalists and a functional fungi lifestyle, Barbari’s Wake-Up Call Tea features lion’s mane, a mushroom that grows wild in the Pacific Northwest. Functional mushrooms have been used in herbal blends as wellness supplements for generations, but the contemporary iterations featuring isolated cannabinoids are relatively novel.

Kites Pre-Roll Packs and NuLeaf Project

Cannabis and nonprofit partnerships are always a good thing, especially for those still investigating how they can contribute to a more diverse, equitable industry. NuLeaf (or NuProject) is a great starting point for that search. These pre-rolls come in a variety of strains and are priced commensurate to other 10-roll packs. Frankly, the whole affair is enough to make the average customer wonder, as the best collaborations do, why don’t all brands do shit like this?

NO. 15 BECAUSE WE MAKE VODKA FROM CHEESE… The inspiration for Wheyward Spirit came to founder and CEO Emily Darchuk while waiting in line at the liquor store.

The young product development specialist with master’s degrees in food science and technology from Oregon State University and innovation and entrepreneurship from the University of Oregon had been contemplating possible remedies for the environmental havoc wrought by whey. Yes, whey—the cheesemaking residue that is arguably one of the nation’s most underutilized byproducts.

At the same time, Darchuk observed that the same handful of categories had been dominating the adult beverage market for more than a century. Why hadn’t some entrepreneur tried distilling, say, the untapped abundance of a nutrient-rich liquid currently clogging the American ecosystem to create a versatile, delicate, creamy but never cheesy, utterly new breed of liquor?

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“We’ve fermented dairy for millennia,” marvels Darchuk, “but never as its own spirit with its own complexity and flavor and sippability.”

Initial test runs employed whey from local dairies, but Darchuk soon realized that her plans of scaling up production and releasing Wheyward as a national brand required greater capacity than Oregon farms could feasibly ensure. Although the spirit itself is now manufactured in California under her personal oversight, she remains committed to keeping Wheyward’s corporate headquarters in her adopted hometown.

“We’re trying to do things differently for the right reason,” Darchuk says, “and I think that’s Portland in a nutshell.” J AY H O R T O N .

NO. 16 …AND WHISKEY FROM RAMEN! As a boutique distillery specializing in European-style brandies dependent on locally sourced fresh fruit, Stone Barn uses the fallow stretch between February and May to produce

CHRIS NESSETH

NO. 17 BECAUSE WE’RE BUILDING BRIDGES FOR PEOPLE, NOT CARS. One is short and flat, the other long and curvy.

They are Portland’s two newest bridges: the 200-foot-long Ned Flanders Crossing Bike and Pedestrian Bridge (opened last June), which spans Interstate 405 and connects Northwest Portland to the Pearl District, and the 475-foot-long Congressman Earl Blumenauer Bicycle and Pedestrian Bridge (scheduled to open this summer), whose arches will span Sullivan’s Gulch, Interstate 84 and two rail lines at Northeast 7th Avenue.

As pedestrians die in record numbers on Portland streets, and officials push to spend nearly $5 billion to replace the Interstate Bridge, Portland’s commitment to low-budget spans ($9.5 million for Flanders, $13.7 million for Blumenauer) that will make getting around on foot or by bike safer and more fun is a cause for celebration.

“These two new bridges are important infrastructure from a transportation perspective, creating safe, comfortable connections for people walking, rolling and biking across parts of town that were previously noisy, stressful and dangerous,” says Sarah Iannarone, executive director of the Street Trust. “But they’re also important from a cultural perspective: Model cities don’t just build projects, they build dreams and visions. These might be little bridges, but they’re big symbols for Portland as a city that prioritizes human health and happiness over motordom—a city with soul.”

N IGE L JAQUISS .

NO. 18 BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO BE REWARDED WITH CHEAP, SECOND-HAND BLAZERS TICKETS. Finally, folks: The Blazers stink. It took two years, a series of false hopes, an injury to Damian Lillard, and one VERY fired bully boy GM, but the rotten foundations of this squad finally gave out.

You might be thinking, “Hey, that’s bad! I like the Blazers! This is not SOMETHING TO LOVE, sir!” But you, dear reader, are WRONG. First off, you need to realize that change is the only constant, and this Blazers squad has been dusty for years now. Bring back the sheen! Draft weirdos! Trade everyone! Isn’t it cathartic to accept these possibilities in your heart?

But the real treat? Cheap NBA tickets, baby! Sure, the Blazers stink, but the teams they play against? Some of them are good!

You can go to the game, pay lip service to Blazer fandom, then invest all of your psychic energy in the other team, which might NOT have squandered their best player’s prime with a series of increasingly mismatched rosters with no viable NBA wings.

These are the rewards of awfulness! Reap them with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. C O R B I N S M I T H .

NO. 19 BECAUSE OUR THRIFTING SCENE IS THRIVING DESPITE THE PANDEMIC. It’s no secret that Portland is a second-hand shopping paradise. But it’s our thrifting scene’s resilience—even during a global pandemic—that has us marveling.

For shoppers seeking previously loved treasures, there’s never been a better time to go on the hunt. That’s true for in-person and online stores alike.

Portland Vintage Market launched in September 2020 in the parking lot behind Hollywood Vintage off Northeast Sandy Boulevard. Even though COVID cases were on the rise, which might have deterred customers, the collective quickly outgrew its location.

The market, now located in another parking lot behind home goods store Urbanite on Southeast Grand Avenue, hosts 100 different sellers over the weekend in the warmer months. One vendor, vintage clothing curator OURStore, which offers everything from country-Western wear to 1960s mod pieces, was so successful it expanded to its first brick-and-mortar location.

Virtual thrifting is also flourishing during the pandemic. A Facebook group titled “Buy Nothing Portland Oregon and surrounding area” launched last year and has more than 8,500 members. It’s a giant online swap meet, with sellers posting photos and descriptions of furniture, art and electronics they’re trying to get rid of. It’s a space for the truly thrifty—after all, there’s no better price than free. C A L L E Y H A I R .

MICK HANGLAND-SKILL

NO. 20 BECAUSE DOWNTOWN’S OLDEST USED BOOKSTORE LIVES AGAIN! Reports of Cameron’s Books death have been somewhat exaggerated. Last April, Portland’s oldest bookstore did indeed lose its longtime brick-and-mortar location (and iconic signage) on Southwest 3rd Avenue. COVID shutdowns and ever-worsening area violence forced the store’s current shepherd, Crystal Zingsheim, to surrender the keys 18 months after negotiating a stay of eviction from the building’s landlord, who also owns upstairs adult venue Golden Dragon.

At the last moment, however, city officials stepped in to protect the shop’s valuable inventory.

“When the press reported we had only six days left,” recalls Zingsheim, “our patrons reached out to the mayor’s office, and Ted Wheeler told the strip club’s owners to back off their city’s legacy bookstore and, you know, not be such bullies.”

Governmental intervention not only allowed Zingsheim to safeguard her daunting stock, but local officials working in tandem with the Lewis & Clark Small Business Legal Clinic, Portland State University Business Advisory Board, and Oregon Native American Chamber found an impossibly picturesque landing spot for the 84-year-old bookstore’s massed troves of aging media: the floors above Union Station. The historic railroad depot seems to be ideal housing for a vast array of rare books and vintage magazines in just about every way but one.

“It’s not zoned for retail sales,” Zingsheim sighs, “which I didn’t know until a bit late in the game, but I never really intended on running the shop as it had been prior.”

Alongside hand-scanning page after page for her eventual goal of a virtual archive accessible to all, she’s transitioning the business toward a second life as a nonprofit resource—distributing old floor stock to schools and prisons and instituting a subscription membership program for creative professionals.

“Basically, we facilitate research,” she explains. “Wieden+Kennedy had been [located] a stone’s throw from the shop, so designers would come for inspiration or seek out past material showing the color palette of the times. In [period] movies and television, where there’s a magazine or calendar that place-sets the era, the set designer got it from us more often than not.”

By some accounts, Cameron’s repository holds the most pre-bar code periodicals outside of the Library of Congress, and Zingsheim laughs, “We’re the only ones that deal in smut.

People think books will be around for centuries and write different things than they would in magazines, which are expected to be disposable. You can hear how people actually respond to global happenings like pandemics and wars. Magazines are a much truer telling of the times—more candor, more innocence. They’re snapshots of the cultural heartbeat.” J AY HORTON.

NO. 21 BECAUSE EVEN OUR “SLOW DOWN” SIGNS ARE ABSURDLY POLITE. There’s nothing inherently cutesy about traffic commands. But when local artist Mike Bennett started reminding people to pay attention behind the wheel, Portlanders were both charmed and prompted to drive more carefully.

After noticing an uptick in traffic through his quiet residential neighborhood, Bennett— who’d spent the entire pandemic creating art to display in front of his house—designed a few custom lawn signs urging drivers to slow down. Each notice incorporates a notoriously torpid critter like a sloth, snail or turtle. He’s since expanded his repertoire by including enough characters to make the world’s most lethargic basketball team: Chameleons, inchworms, koalas, banana slugs, stegosauruses and manatees have all joined the lineup.

The signs went viral last year. Now more than 4,000 are posted around Portland, and it’s easy to see why. They’re bizarrely pleasing, with the kind of winsome, cartoonish sensibility you’d expect from a preschool teacher turned full-time artist.

For Bennett, that’s kind of the whole point.

He makes art that appeals to the inner child.

Today he’s working on a new project: creating an immersive, walk-through dinosaur museum.

“I feel like when I’m coming up with ideas, I’m often thinking about what my parents would have taken me to and trying to emulate that, as best I can, with paint and plywood,” Bennett says. C A L L E Y H A I R .

NO. 22 BECAUSE LLOYD CENTER REFUSES TO DIE. On Aug. 6, 2021, smoke filled Lloyd Center after an electrical fire in the basement triggered a power outage. Shoppers were instructed to flee, but the mall reopened a few weeks later, which didn’t surprise anyone who had been following the soap-operatic saga of Lloyd Center’s defiant refusal to meet its maker.

When it was announced late last year that KKR Real Estate Finance Trust would foreclose on Lloyd Center, it seemed like that might finally put an end to the mall and the moaning of Portlanders wondering how many more Christmases it would survive. In giddy anticipation of a complete overhaul, ideas for the future blossomed, including WW’s suggestions that a Lloyd Center skatepark or robot market might be in order.

Then a new owner, Seattle’s Urban Renaissance Group, swooped in and announced its plans for Lloyd Center—retail and workspaces. For anyone imagining a more ambitious or progressive prospect, like new affordable housing, it was a groan-worthy revelation, but there is something perversely poignant about the mall’s endurance. At least the beloved, historic ice skating rink will be saved.

For all its fumbles, Lloyd Center has the power to make Portlanders ooze nostalgia, even if they despise actually spending time there. It’s not just a mall—it’s a myth. Maybe that’s why it’s seemingly too big to fail. B E N NET T CAMPBELL FERGUSON .

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MICK HANGLAND-SKILL

NO. 23 BECAUSE THE JAZZ SCENE IS BETTER THAN EVER THESE DAYS. Thanks to the presence of foundational artists like Mel Brown, Rebecca Kilgore and Darrell Grant, as well as a steady flow of graduates from the music programs at Portland State University, Lewis & Clark College and Alan Jones Academy of Music, the pool of jazz talent in Portland is always full. These days, though, it seems to be overflowing.

Over the past few years, the city has seen an explosion of young players who have brought a renewed sense of energy to the scene. They are a fearsome and fearless bunch that, much like the artists who have fueled new waves of jazz in L.A. and London, are drawing from a vast assortment of influences in their work.

In the music of multi-instrumentalist Machado Mijiga, for example, there are strains of R&B, hip-hop and modern electronica. Damnation of Memory, the first album from trombonist James Powers that debuted last November, has a warped psychedelic spirit worthy of Sun Ra or Broadcast. Vocalist Saeeda Wright imbues her performances with shades of gospel and pure soul. And trumpeter Noah Simpson easily jumps between hard bop and electric fusion.

They’re not alone, either. At spaces like the 1905, Derby and Cruzroom, those aforementioned artists and players like drummer Cory Limuaco, pianist Charlie Brown III, and trumpeter Pablo Rivarola are in regular rotation. They’re also getting some vital support and mentorship from more established musicians and institutions. Powers’ album, for instance, was released by the in-house label of the long-standing Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, and Mijiga regularly collaborates 22

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

with Darrell Grant.

The only question that remains is how much longer we can expect to keep these artists here. While the local scene is vibrant, there are more opportunities for jazz musicians in larger cities.

That’s what sent saxophonist Nicole Glover to New York City and, until her recent return to Oregon, caused bassist Esperanza Spalding to move to Massachusetts. It feels like only a matter of time before we start seeing the current class of players following suit. Let’s enjoy them while we can. R O B E R T H A M .

NO. 24 BECAUSE OUR STREET DINING SETUPS ARE BETTER THAN MOST CITY’S INDOOR RESTAURANTS. Few places in Portland can brag they look better now than they did before the pandemic began. Cartopia is an exception.

On a brisk winter’s evening, the cart pod on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard has a chic vibe best described as “Zooey Deschanel’s wedding reception.” Twinkling lights are strung above planters of bamboo. The smells of rotisserie chicken, fish-sauce tater tots and wood-fired pizza waft from once-mobile kitchens now sheltered in shiplap. Groups share piles of poutine around covered fire pits.

The place doesn’t feel like a cart pod—it’s an upscale food hall that happens to be outdoors.

Perhaps more than most cities, Portland was ready to pivot to al fresco dining. More than 1,050 businesses, mostly restaurants and bars, participated in the city’s “Street Seats” program, which moved dining rooms onto parking spaces and sidewalks. Sure,

some of these are little more than sheds. But when I compare notes with friends in other burgs, they’re shocked by how elaborate the setups are at places like Northwest Portland’s Cafe Nell—which moved its entire dining room outdoors, complete with a cocktail bar in what was once a parking lot—or the Woodlawn neighborhood’s Tamale Boy, where the wooden deck is twice the size of the indoor seating area.

The effect, if you’re in a good mood or at least had a Manhattan before dinner, is that Portland’s restaurant scene took a Hawaiian vacation, and we’re all at the poolside bar. Please let the pandemic end, but the patios can stay. A A R O N M E S H .

NO. 25 BECAUSE YOU STILL HAVE A FREE PRINT ALT-WEEKLY. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism warned of a “total annihilation” of alt-weekly newspapers. The report tallied more than a dozen that had either ceased publication of a print edition, or folded altogether, in March 2020 alone.

Portland wasn’t spared. The Mercury announced that same month it would no longer publish a physical paper, although the newspaper still continues to regularly publish stories online.

Now, almost two years into the pandemic, Willamette Week is the only alt-weekly in Portland that publishes a print newspaper. The physical presence of the hard copies, available for free throughout the city, is a weekly notice that independent journalism is alive in Portland.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s a note we received in December from bestselling author Cheryl Strayed: “Thanks for your good work. Portland needs you!”

STREET

STRIKING DISTANCE Photos by Chris Nesseth On Instagram: @chrisnesseth

Last Saturday, Portlanders marched in support of city workers preparing to strike.

The District Council of Trade Unions, which represents more than 1,200 members responsible for everything from maintaining the city’s drinking water system to keeping sewage flowing, has yet to reach a deal on a new contract with the city. The last contract expired over a year ago. Supporters of the workers rallied downtown and walked from City Hall to the 1900 Building, home to the city’s Bureau of Development Services, holding signs making clear they stood in solidarity.

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STARTERS

T H E MOST I MP ORTANT P O RTLA N D C U LTU R E STORI E S OF T H E W E E K—G RA P H E D .

R E A D M O R E A B O U T TH E S E STO R I E S AT WW E E K .CO M .

RIDICULOUS

OREGON CHILDREN’S THEATRE

H I G H R OA D T O U R I N G

Portland’s living room is set to become the city’s hottest music arena after True West announces a new concert series in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Oregon Children’s Theatre is producing a play about preparing for the apocalypse.

The former Bar King space is becoming an event center called House of Tasty.

AW F U L

PORTLAND MOUNTAIN RESCUE

T R E N T F I N L AY

AW E S O M E

SAGE BROWN

NIKI DIAMOND

Top Burmese is spinning off a fourth fondue-focused location in Hillsboro.

Away Days Brewing is opening a second location in Troutdale’s former city hall.

Emergency crews come to the aid of an injured climber on Mount Hood for the fourth time in a week.

innocent Tickets from $35. Visit portlandopera.org

Ma rc h 1 8 – 2 6 Ne w m ar k T h eat re

The Oregon Historical Society launches its Museum Collection Portal, a public online database.

Artists Repertory Theatre hires a firm to help it search for a new artistic director.

L AVA A L A PA I

OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Composed by Anthony Davis Libretto by Richard Wesley

CoHo Productions unveils a new mural honoring its late producing artistic director.

SERIOUS

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S T E FA N I E K N O W LT O N

503 Distilling opens a lounge next to its Southeast Portland distillery.

M.O. STEVENS

503 DISTILLING

T HE CENTR AL PARK FIVE

In a new series of comic books, Portland State University students recount their experience with homelessness.

GET BUSY

STUFF TO DO IN PORTLAND THIS WEEK, INDOORS AND OUT.



DRINK | Galentine’s Day Bottle Exchange Holidays ranging from Festivus to Slapsgiving have persisted in popular culture long after emerging in fictional sitcom form, but no fake celebration has taken off quite like Galentine’s Day. Launched by the always-plucky Leslie Knope in a 2010 episode of Parks and Recreation as a way to toast her lady friends over brunch, the occasion is now regularly marked by pals coming together to honor their platonic relationships. Swap Knope’s waffles for beer at this event, where Galentine’s Day is essentially a white elephant exchange with 22-ouncers. Hammer & Stitch Brewing, 2377 NW Wilson St., 971-254-8982, girlspintout.org. 6 pm Thursday, Feb. 10.

 EAT | Valentine’s Day at Norr Kitchen

A local company that specializes in making food look appealing for marketing campaigns is inviting the public to sample its creations—now inside the dining room—just in time for Valentine’s Day. Norr Kitchen, which launched takeout and delivery last summer, is introducing on-site restaurant service this weekend, and it will continue biweekly after that. Chef Matthew Hobbs is preparing an indulgent six-course feast of Kusshi oysters, cuttlefish with a foie gras sausage, corn agnolotti, beef tenderloin and a chocolate tart as a goodnight kiss.

Norr Kitchen, 920 NE Glisan St., 503-941-0407, norrkitchen.com. 5 and 7:30 pm seatings Friday-Monday, Feb. 11-14. $125 per person.



RUTH MARION BARUCH AND PIRKLE JONES / VANPORT MOSAIC

WATCH | Funhouse Lounge Date Night Double Feature W hat, you thought a bar with a clown room would throw a stereotypical Valentine’s Day bash? Perish the thought! This year, Funhouse Lounge is celebrating V-Day with two peculiar-sounding shows, ’Til Death Do Us Part: An Improvised Love Story and Secrets, Lies & Alibis: An Unscripted Drama.

Funhouse artistic director Andy Barrett directed both, which will apparently unleash death, desire and dessert on the audience. Funhouse Lounge, 2432 SE 11th Ave., 503-841-6734, funhouselounge.com. 7 pm Thursday-Saturday, Feb. 10-12 and 17-19. $14-$80.

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� GO | All Power to the People You may not have heard of Kent Ford, but you should know his name—he was a founding member of the Portland chapter of the Black Panther Party. At All Power to the People, a threeday event organized by Vanport Mosaic, attendees can listen to Ford recount memories of a life of activism and see a staged reading of Don Wilson Glenn’s play Walking Through Portland With a Panther: The Life of Mr. Kent Ford. All Power! and much more. Cerimon House, 5131 NE 23rd Ave., 503-307-9599, vanportmosaic.org. Friday-Sunday, Feb. 11-13. Free. � GO | Galactic Despite having a name that evokes the sweep of the cosmos, Galactic has always had its eyes on Louisiana. The New Orleans quintet—Ben Ellman, Robert Mercurio, Stanton Moore, Jeffrey Raines and Richard Vogel—is bringing its signature brand of jazz funk to the Crystal Ballroom, where they will be joined by Too Many Zooz, which pioneered the jazz-fusion style that they have dubbed brasshouse. Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 503-225-0047, crystalballroompdx.com. 8 pm Friday, Feb. 11. $35$45. 21+.

1022 NW Marshall Street #450 Portland OR | (503) 226-6361 | paulsoncoletti.com

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THOMAS TEAL

FOOD & DRINK

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

Pink Frost

Oregon berries play the starring role in New Zealand-style ice cream at Nico’s on Northeast Fremont.

BY J A S O N C O H E N

Ice cream in February? Where do you think we are, New Zealand?

At Nico’s Ice Cream, yes.

The Northeast Portland shop’s only item, vanilla soft serve blended with berries, has its roots in the land of kiwis. It’s also a method for berry farms to get their harvest directly into frozen treats, and requires its own appliance to prepare.

At Nico’s, which started out as a cart in the Prost! Marketplace pod, that’s a Little Jem Elite Real Fruit Ice Cream Blender, which is sold by a particularly able family of berry growers in New Zealand’s Tasman region.

“We import the machine,” says owner Nico Vergara. “You throw vanilla ice cream in there, then put fruit in, and then an auger blends it all together.”

The device basically consists of a cone and a drill that functions like a pastry tip. It’s also magic. The ice cream is nothing more than plain vanilla Tillamook, while the frozen fruit—marionberries, blueberries, raspberries and strawberries—is sourced from the Willamette Valley Pie Company in Salem. Once the ice cream comes out of the Little Gem, you have something with the butterfat richness of hard-pack, but the airiness and mouthfeel—plus the delightful swirl—of soft serve. It’s also fun to watch your ice cream being made.

The technique is like a more natural version of Flavor Burst— 26

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

the soft serve machine attachment that allows you to blend flavored syrups and candies into your ice cream—highlighting not only the flavor and color of the fruit, but also the all-important bits of berries and seeds. Marionberry, the most classically Oregon option, is both Nico’s bestseller and Vergara’s favorite.

He recommends raspberry if you want something tart, while kids tend to prefer the more familiar strawberry.

Vergara had previously slung New Zealand-style frozen treats at Zeds Real Fruit Ice Cream in Austin, Texas, but the Grant High School alum wanted to be home, and is now in business mere miles from where he grew up in the Rose City Park neighborhood.

He hadn’t aspired to go from cart to brick-and-mortar quite so quickly, but plans changed when a space became available—in this case, a spot in the two-story building at Northeast 57th Avenue and Fremont Street that is also home to Peter’s Bar & Grill.

Nico’s menu keeps things simple: You choose one of the four berry flavors for a cup ($5) or waffle cone ($6)—kids’ cones are $4—then pick your toppings: rainbow sprinkles, toasted coconut flakes, graham cracker dust, chamoy (a pickled fruit-and-pepper sauce) and Tajín (a pepper, lime and sea salt seasoning). The last two are usually found at fruit stands or in Mexican supermarket candies.

“Those are toppings that are near and dear to my heart, me being from a Latinx background,” says Vergara, who is Chilean

American. “I just thought it would be fun to bring some of my heritage and twist it into the New Zealand-style ice cream.”

Pro tip: Double up on toppings (no extra charge)—graham cracker dust on chamoy, for instance, or Tajín and coconut.

Eventually, Vergara hopes to make his own vanilla ice cream base. The Little Jem is also capable of mixing in chocolate, coffee and other ingredients, but for now, Nico’s is all about the fruit, especially on “Tropical Thursday,” when the berries are replaced by mango, pineapple and banana. There have also been a few collaborations, including one with Pip’s Original Doughnuts (yup, the mini-doughnuts went right in the blender), a Timbers-themed strawberry green matcha ice cream with Tea Bar, and coming soon, a sticky toffee pudding soft serve with Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard soccer bar the Toffee Club.

Once the weather warms, Vergara’s cart will reopen at Prost!

Until then, Nico’s Ice Cream blesses us with a taste of summer during winter. After all, this is a city where people line up for ice cream anywhere and any time.

“Yeah, I crack jokes with my family or my buddies,” Vergara says. “If you’re a true Portlander it really doesn’t matter, the time of year for ice cream.”

GO: Nico’s Ice Cream, 5713 NE Fremont St., 503-489-8656, nicosicecream.com. 3-9pm Wednesday-Friday and noon-9 pm Saturday-Sunday.

Top 5

Buzz List WHERE TO DRINK THIS WEEK.

1. PUNCH BOWL SOCIAL

340 SW Morrison St., #4305, 503-334-0360, punchbowlsocial.com/location/portland. 11 am-11 pm Sunday-Thursday, 11 am-1 am Friday-Saturday.

Multicourse romantic meals and bouquets of roses aren’t everyone’s style when it comes to celebrating Valentine’s Day. So if you’d rather spend the evening trying to rack up the high score on The Simpsons arcade game or picking up spares in a bowling alley, head to Punch Bowl Social. During Valentine’s week, the 32,000-square-foot gaming palace will be serving a special, pink-hued Shot Through the Heart Punch. More interested in the Super Bowl? You’ll find $3 old man cans, $12 wings and the game playing on many TVs this Sunday.

Top 5

Hot Plates WHERE TO EAT THIS WEEK.

1. SUNSHINE NOODLES

2. ECLIPTIC BREWING MOON ROOM

930 SE Oak St., 971-383-1613, eclipticbrewing.com.

Noon-9 pm Wednesday-Thursday, noon-10 pm Friday-Saturday, noon-8 pm Sunday.

Legendary brewmaster John Harris’ spinoff of his North Portland brewery is darker and moodier than the flagship—an aesthetic meant to evoke conditions on Earth’s natural satellite. The design also continues the brand’s space theme, reflecting the founder’s passion for astronomy. Inside the former Base Camp Brewing building, you won’t find a full kitchen, but there is an extensive tap list and a gin-focused cocktail program. And the on-site food cart serves a lineup of hearty sandwiches.

3. HOLY GHOST

4101 SE 28th Ave., holyghostbar.com. 3 pm-late daily.

This may be the fifth entry in Ezra Caraeff’s bar portfolio, which includes long-standing favorites like Hi-Top Tavern and Paydirt, but Holy Ghost has its own personality, which can be found in everything from the goddesslike blue and gold color scheme to the impressively deep selection of agave spirits. Make it a point to always order at least one gin fizz while you’re here. A machine behind the bar named “Shake Gyllenhaal” agitates the New Orleans classic for at least five minutes—a manual task that keeps the drink off many other menus.

4. BRASA HAYA

412 NE Beech St., 503-288-3499, brasahayapdx. com. 5:30-9 pm Tuesday-Thursday, 5:30-10 pm Friday-Saturday.

Though only open since June, Brasa Haya serves a traditional Spanish coffee that’s already one of the best in town. Rich chocolate vies for dominance with locally roasted Junior’s brew and a cool cloud of amaro whipped cream. Start your meal with a glass and have a second at the end—you’ll be justified because the decadent drink appears on the dessert menu, too.

5. PINK RABBIT

2175 NW Raleigh St., Suite 105, sunshinenoodlespdx. com. 5-9 pm Monday-Thursday, 11 am-3 pm and 5-9 pm Friday-Sunday.

Diane Lam, the former chef de cuisine at Revelry, is back in full force with Sunshine Noodles, a relaunch of her pandemic pop-up that now has a brick-and-mortar home in Slabtown. Snag a seat at the countertop, where you can watch the kitchen team work the wok station, then dig into the catfish spring rolls. Though not a noodle dish, it’s the current standout. The fish is blackened, then rolled into rice paper with herbs, vermicelli noodles, a slice of watermelon radish, and then topped with a citrusy nuoc cham sauce that’s a mixture of bitter, sweet, salt and funk.

2. PASTIFICIO D’ORO

8737 N Lombard St., doropdx.com. 5-8 pm Monday-Tuesday.

Pastificio d’Oro is a restaurant inside another restaurant in St. Johns. But its heart—and thus, your stomach—is in Bologna, the Northern Italian city known for its handmade pasta, meat ragù (aka “Bolognese”) and mortadella (which America turned into, yes, “bologna”). Chef Chase Dopson had never cooked this style of cuisine until he caught “the pasta bug” at the start of the pandemic. With just a single induction burner to boil water and Gracie’s Apizza’s wood-fired oven, Dopson generally builds his menu around just two pastas, most frequently a tagliatelle ragù and a filled pasta in the tortellini family. It’s very heavy food, but incredibly soul-soothing.

3. SEBASTIANO’S

411 SE 81st Ave., 503-841-5905, sebastianospdx. com. 11 am-3 pm Wednesday-Saturday.

As we continue to ride the Omicron crest, Montavilla’s Sicilian deli, Sebastiano’s, has launched a take-and-bake dinner program to keep you cozy through winter. Specials rotate, but the extra-large, Catanese-style arancini are a must-have. Each order includes two goose egg-sized fried balls of rice mixed with Olympia Provisions mortadella, Tails & Trotters ham and mozzarella. Add a radicchio salad, a bottle of wine, and a slice of olive oil cake, and you’ve got yourself a nice little weeknight meal.

PORTLAND’S MOST IMPORTANT STORIES SENT DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX

4. UNICORN CREATIONZ

4765 NE Fremont St., 971-319-1134, nacheauxpdx. com. 4-8 pm Wednesday-Thursday, noon-8:30 pm Friday, 10 am-4 pm Saturday-Sunday.

Despite its name, Unicorn Creationz is more of a tricera-corn. The bar/restaurant is split into three concepts inside the former Alameda Brewhouse space: food cart favorite Nacheaux—whipping up breakfast, lunch and, if you make it there in time, weekend brunch—as well as a bakery/dessert shop called Karnival Kreations, and Bourbon St. Bar. The cart is the heart of this food hall, so get there early on a Saturday to ensure owner-chef Anthony Brown has a spicy chorizo burrito left for you.

232 NW 12th Ave., 971-255-0386, pinkrabbitpdx. com. 4 pm-midnight Monday-Thursday, 4 pm-2 am Friday-Saturday, 6 pm-midnight Sunday.

Even before Pink Rabbit transformed its curbside patio into an outdoor discotheque, the Pearl District bar’s collection of picnic tables were consistently full. But now, there’s a weather-fortified patio full of mirror balls, string lights, additional speakers, and living plant installations. The flamboyant vibe is balanced by a lineup of warm cocktails, including the top-shelf toddy, which drinks like counterprogramming—it is restrained, mellow and deeply comforting.

5. XINH XINH VIETNAMESE BISTRO

970 SE Morrison St., 971-229-1492, xinhxinhbistro. com. 11 am-8 pm Monday-Tuesday, Thursday, 11 am-9 pm Friday-Saturday, 11:30 am-8 pm Sunday.

Tucked inside a small strip of businesses on Southeast Morrison, Xinh Xinh is best known for its banh mi and soups. It makes some of the best vegetarian pho in town. Bowls overflow with fresh broccoli, carrots, bok choy, mushrooms and green onions.

When packed to go, it’s like Christmas morning—so many presents to open!

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POTLANDER MAGIC HOUR CANNABIS

GET HAPPY: At The Happiest State of Being on Feb. 14, you can sample a noninfused version of these new vegan gummies.

Stars Aligned Portland weed events are back, starting with a Valentine’s date night from Astral Treats and Magic Hour Cannabis, which collaborated on a new edible.

BY L AU R E N YO S H I KO

Forget news of England dropping its mask mandates or South Africa ending isolation requirements—perhaps the biggest indicator that Portlanders are inching back toward a sense of “normalcy” is the announcement that a real-life, vibed-out, consumption-friendly weed experience is back on the city’s calendar.

The Feb. 14 event, titled The Happiest State of Being, celebrates the launch of the new Deep Space Dragonfruit gummy from local edible company Astral Treats, made in partnership with Magic Hour Cannabis. Infused with the full-spectrum extract from 28

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

Magic Hour’s beloved Memory Loss strain, the collaboration marks the farm’s first-ever edible offering—a big deal for a little grower that’s gotten a lot of national press the past couple of years.

It’s notable for Astral, too, which is hot off a rebrand and a reconnection to the founders’ “universal interest in space, time and joy.” This collab is about more than novel flavors and memorable highs, though. It’s about love—of weed, of romance, of Portland’s cannabis community and the return of its nightlife.

To start, both brands are founded and led by couples.

“I reached out to [Magic Hour co-owners] Will [Perry] and Adriana [Ruiz Carlile] at MJBizCon in Las Vegas last October,” says Elle Rahman.

A scientist-turned-real estate savant who used to do contract work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the United Kingdom-based National Physical Laboratory, Rahman co-founded the space-inspired Astral Treats with partner Kevin Collins in April 2021.

“I’d met with many growers, and having been CEO of a cultivation operation, I knew Magic Hour was special and wanted to collaborate,” Rahman says. “We share the same ethos, vibe and dedication to quality people and quality plant products.”

Once back in Portland, it was only a matter of time before the power pot couples began discussing a marriage of Astral’s patented star-shaped gummy with Magic Hour’s flower, and the “Astral Hour” concept solidified from there. Although not the driving force of the collab, the representation of two minority-owned, couple-operated companies is not lost on these young, ambitious entrepreneurs.

“For me, it was all about the mutual respect for one another’s strengths and craftsmanship in each other’s lane of expertise,” adds Collins, who came to Portland for a potential career at Nike but found his entrepreneurial calling in cannabis once he arrived. “Magic Hour grows some of the best flower in the

state—dare I say country—and the combination of our brands calls for a celebration with the community that got us where we both are today.”

Magic Hour co-founders Perry and Ruiz Carlile feel the same, pleased with the way Memory Loss’ terpene profile complements the unique flavor of dragon fruit—a milder sweetness often described as falling somewhere between a pear and watermelon—and the ability to celebrate this union in person.

“We’re super happy with how the gummies turned out,” says Ruiz Carlile. “They have an uplifting and euphoric effect perfect for activities like a hike or workout.”

“We’re excited about this collab with Astral Treats because our company values are similar,” adds Perry. “The release event is going to be dope and bring something different and fresh to Portland.”

At The Happiest State of Being, you can expect noninfused samples of the vegan and gluten-free gummy, real dragon fruit cocktails from Ilegal Mezcal, music by DJ Sworth and special Astral Hour merch, to boot. And, yes, there will be a hot-box experience for on-site consumption.

Although a post-pandemic “normal” feels closer than ever, Astral’s and Magic Hour’s founders know we’re not out of the woods yet. Masks are required, and in order to maintain an adequately ventilated space without crowds, attendees must reserve their one-hour visiting window in advance. There is a special time slot for dispensary employees only starting at 4:20 pm, and the general public is welcome starting at 6 pm. Naturally, Astral and Magic Hour are saving that golden-hour selfie lighting for the community that helped propel them to this point.

GO: The Happiest State of Being takes place at the Solterra Building, 959 SE Division St., #130, exploreastral.com/ the-event. 4:20 pm for dispensary employees, 6 pm general admission Monday, Feb. 14. Free. 21+.

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PERFORMANCE

MUSIC

Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson / Contact: bennett@wweek.com

ALEC LUGO

Now Hear This Listening recommendations from the past, present, Portland and the periphery.

BY DANIEL BROMFIELD // @BROMF3

SOMETHING OLD The laudatory press around Neil Young’s departure from Spotify was deflated when he struck a deal with Amazon, so if you’re looking to get into Young, skip streaming and head to the record store. It’s easy to find copies of Harvest and After the Gold Rush. Less familiar from rock radio are Time Fades Away—a live document of a frustrating tour where the band’s anger and drunkenness actually benefits the music—and Rust Never Sleeps, a treatise on death that encourages the listener to value life a little more.

DOUBLE THREAT: Tommy Bo in The Great Leap.

Hoop Dreams America and China clash on the basketball court in The Great Leap.

BY J O H N R U D O F F

Manford, the protagonist of Lauren Yee’s elegant gem of a play The Great Leap, is—in his own words—relentless.

“I am the most relentless person you have ever met, and if you have met someone more relentless than me, tell me and I will meet them and I will find a way to become even more relentless than them,” he declares.

Manford is a fascinating individual, but he’s just one of many in The Great Leap, which is set largely in 1989 and has been beautifully brought to life by Artists Repertory Theatre and Portland Center Stage.

The play is packed with crisply developed characters who only become more compelling as their motives reveal themselves over the course of a story that brilliantly subverts sports movie clichés.

Tommy Bo stars as Manford, a basketball-obsessed 17-year-old Chinatown high school kid who pursues a spot on the University of San Francisco’s Division I basketball team, which is set to play a “friendly game” in Beijing against the Beijing University team.

That means Manford has to impress the USF team’s coach, Saul (Darius Pierce), an aging, wildly obscene Bronx taskmaster.

Saul is determined to beat China—he once foolishly claimed it could never beat an American team—but glory will only get him so far, given the slim odds of his contract being renewed.

Manford’s single-mindedness—and 99 30

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

free throws in a row—convince the irascible Saul to put him on the roster for the game in China. Despite the objections of his cousin, Connie (Sami Ma), Manford then joins the team as it flies to Beijing, with Saul berating the players along the way with what is best described as a more colorful version of Nancy Pelosi’s warning to “not risk incurring the anger of the Chinese government, because they are ruthless.”

While Manford’s journey dominates The Great Leap, Yee keeps glancing back to the days when Saul traveled to Beijing as a young man to teach basketball. That’s how we learn the life story of Wen Chang (Kenneth Lee), who in 1971 served as Saul’s translator and is now Beijing University’s coach.

Wen Chang’s initially passive approach to basketball at least partly derives from the experience of surviving the Cultural Revolution. “You wanted to be the person three people behind someone. Because being someone could get you killed,” he says, offering an explanation that is echoed by Saul when he warns his athletes not to become involved with the Tiananmen Square protests.

With its daunting array of eras and basketball courts, The Great Leap can’t have been easy to produce. Yet director Zi Alikhan keeps the pace fast and incessant, echoing his director’s note, “This is a play about basketball, but it is also a basketball play. The game is reflected…in the rhythm, structure, language and how the characters move through space.”

It’s worth noting that the Asian American characters in The Great Leap consistently defy racist stereotypes. A lesser play might have portrayed the authoritative Connie, for instance, as a “tiger mom,” but her humanity and complexity are never in doubt, even when she is at odds with Manford.

The same is true of Manford, who contains zero traces of the “model minority” myth. There’s nothing deferential about him—driven by caffeine-fueled ambitions, he’s endearingly certain, as Saul would say, it is always his turn.

If The Great Leap has an emotional heart, it’s Wen Chang, who we essentially see as two people—a deferential young man and an accomplished, middle-aged apparatchik who reaches his limit and dares to defend the things that matter to him. It is his evolution that makes the play’s final image— which evokes one of the most important moments in Chinese history—feel genuine.

There is much more to The Great Leap.

Manford’s motormouth lands him in hot water, Saul and Wen Chang clash and, of course, there is a basketball game. Yet the pleasures of the play go beyond the specifics of the plot. It’s not just a story—it’s an invitation to watch all the pieces of these living characters surface and fall into place.

SEE IT: The Great Leap plays at Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th Ave., 503-445-3700, artistsrep.org. 2 pm Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, 7:30 pm Thursday and Saturday, through Feb. 13.

SOMETHING NEW When artists try to get back into the headspace of their glory days, the results usually make you wish they’d just tried something fresh. Yet while Soichi Terada made Asakusa Light with ’90s equipment and in a ’90s mindset, it’s as good as anything he’s ever made. Terada is best known as the composer for the Ape Escape games, but in an album format, his mysterious, good-natured take on classic deep house expands into its own little universe. Nostalgia is irrelevant to this music: This stuff sounds great now, and it’ll sound great for years.

SOMETHING LOCAL Michael Hurley, known as “Snock” to his friends, is still a live fixture around town at 80. His music’s balance of deep weirdness and domestic comfort could only come from a man who’s spent more than five decades as a respected cult figure; the few who know him know how good he is. His newest album, Time of the Foxgloves, is one of his most rustic and beautiful records, but to really understand the Hurley cult, queue up Have Moicy!, his hash-perfumed 1976 collab with Portland band Jeffrey Frederick and the Clamtones and yawp-voiced jester Peter Stampfel.

SOMETHING ASKEW Yoko Ono doubters need only seek out Season of Glass to have their worldview permanently changed.

Recorded in 1981 after John Lennon’s death, Glass expresses grief not through laments to heaven, but by describing Ono’s attempt to lead a routine life while in a daze. Everything feels a little surreal, a little off, a little topsy-turvy.

And it’s pop music! Ono’s a good singer, belying hard-earned wisdom with a naive posture, similar to latter-day quirksters like Regina Spektor. It’s rough listening, but not in the way you’d expect from Ono.

MOVIES

Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson / Contact: bennett@wweek.com

IMDB

SCREENER

YOU’RE BREATHTAKING: Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho.

A GVS Bible Gus Van Sant: The Art of Making Movies explores the director’s eclectic career.

BY CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER

@chance_s_p

At first glance, the subtitle of Katya Tylevich’s new Gus Van Sant biography—The Art of Making Movies—might suggest a lesson in technique from the director of My Own Private Idaho (1991).

But sink into Tylevich’s expansive interviews with the legendary Portland filmmaker and that craft-oriented suggestion takes on an almost comic energy.

Examining Van Sant’s career in these pages won’t teach readers how to frame a shot, redefine a city’s cinematic reputa-

tion or balance art and commerce.

Rather, the book (Laurence King Publishing, 288 pages, $25) profiles Van Sant’s artistic mentality—one that shifts with the wind across a 40-year career marked by subversion, acclaim, influence, failure and obscurity. And even after reading, fans could reasonably debate which films fall into which of those phases.

“That’s the irony of writing a ‘howto’ book about Gus Van Sant’s process: There’s no way to replicate his last-minute decisions, his personality, experiments and unexpected or even absurd

Get Your Reps In

outcomes,” says Tylevich, a Los Angeles arts and fiction writer who’s collaborated on projects with Marina Abramovic.

Tylevich first met Van Sant on assignment for the arts journal Elephant in 2014. The interviews that fuel the biography unfolded over several years at Van Sant’s Hollywood Hills home, typically “surrounded by his paintings in progress,” says Tylevich.

While the book skims shifting interpretations of Van Sant’s oeuvre, its career survey will satisfy the curiosity of most cinephiles. There are delectable insider tales about everything from how River Phoenix’s improvisation changed the course of Idaho to the hazards of shooting the unscripted Gerry (2002), which starred Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, in Death Valley.

Tylevich’s book delves into Van Sant’s challenging “Death Trilogy,” which includes Gerry, Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005). Despite being overlooked by moviegoers approaching his work from a Portlandian perspective, Tylevich believes that this stretch of extemporaneous narratives is crucial to understanding the lengths of Van Sant’s Hollywood subversion.

While writing, Tylevich says she grew notably fonder of Last Days, a portrait of a doomed, languishing Kurt Cobain analog (Michael Pitt). “The emphasis on boredom in a calamity belonging to the collective psyche—wow, that’s a bold move!” Tylevich says. “I wanted the book to communicate some of the dark humor of Gus’ films.”

Tylevich also highlights the comedy of Van Sant films like Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and To Die For (1995), as well as the cosmic hilarity of his difficult studio dealings. His determination to strike the pose of an uncompromising artist may have led to triumphs like Elephant, which

IMDB

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

When a Canadian mining town decides to hold its traditional Valentine’s Day dance despite warnings from a deranged killer (the sole survivor of a deadly mining accident 20 years before), young adults start turning up dead. No relation to the acclaimed Irish English shoegaze band! Academy, Feb. 11-17.

Child’s Play (1988)

Pariah (2011) Inducted into the Criterion Collection last year, Dee Rees’ coming-of-age drama follows Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year-old Black girl in New York City, as she begins to embrace her butch lesbian identity and her aspirations to be a poet despite her mother’s vicious disapproval. 5th Avenue, Feb. 11-13.

A widowed mother (Catherine Hicks) gives her son Andy a highly coveted Good Guys brand doll named Chucky (Brad Dourif) for his sixth birthday, unaware that the toy is possessed by the vengeful spirit of a serial killer…and he wants nothing more than to commit violent murders and possess Andy’s soul. Screens in 35 mm!

Hollywood, Feb. 12.

True Romance (1993)

won the Palme d’Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, but it also led to his muchmocked 1998 Psycho remake, which still baffles devotees of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 original.

As in Van Sant’s films, Portland is a notable presence in Tylevich’s book, especially in the chapter about Mala Noche (1985), a film about a convenience store clerk (Tim Streeter) who falls in love with Mexican migrant worker (Doug Cooeyate). For Van Sant, the city became not just a setting, but a crucial component of conceiving a new way to make movies.

“I loved Gus’ recollections of the former clergy mansion in Northwest Portland, full of film fanatics and professionals,” Tylevich says. “That was a strong reference for me; it gave physical parameters to a completely unique artistic atmosphere.”

The modestly sized coffee table book also showcases rare and exclusive photos, including Van Sant’s Polaroids, images of his paintings, and art collages by cinematographers Eric Alan Edwards and Christopher Doyle. The shots of Van Sant working often appear disarmingly ordinary, showing him simply pausing or conversing with an actor amid a process that would ultimately give rise to influential art.

Like so many GVS films, Gus Van Sant: The Art of Making Movies offers an intimate experience, but not a delivery system for meaning. Anyone who treats it as a how-to guide would be just as likely to design a transgressive, open-world VR game on the moon as they would to film a sequel to My Own Private Idaho.

“I love that Gus’ work is difficult to define,” Tylevich says. “Ambiguity, metaphor, poetry…those are the qualities that, when done right, reach audiences for reasons that transcend rational explanation.”

Penned by Quentin Tarantino, this romantic crime flick follows lovers Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) as they race across the U.S. to escape the clutches of the Mafia. Brad Pitt co-stars as Clarence’s friend’s stoner roommate, somehow managing to steal the show despite (or due to?) spending all of his screen time sprawled on the couch, hitting a bong.

Hollywood, Feb. 14.

Mississippi Masala (1991)

Celebrate Valentine’s Day with Denzel Washington, who stars in Mira Nair’s groundbreaking romantic drama about a family of Ugandan Indians forced to relocate to Mississippi after being expelled by dictator Idi Amin. There, Meena (Sarita Choudhury) falls

for the dreamy Demetrius (Washington), but their interracial relationship causes tension in the mistrustful family. Clinton, Feb. 14.

ALSO PLAYING: Academy: Do the Right Thing (1989), Feb. 9-10.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (2009), Feb. 9-10. Dirty Dancing (1987), Feb. 11-17. Clinton: The Proud Valley (1940), Feb. 10. A Man Escaped (1957), Feb. 11. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Feb. 11. Cleopatra Jones (1973), Feb. 12. Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Feb. 13. Hollywood: The Princess Bride (1987), Feb. 10.

Valentine (2001), Feb. 11. To Be or Not to Be (1942), Feb. 12-13. Ninja Scroll (1993), Feb. 13.

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

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MOVIES TIFF

NOW PLAYING TOP PICK OF THE WEEK

Drive My Car After you see Drive My Car, you will never look at snow, suspension bridges or stages the same way again. When you see the world through the searching eyes of director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, there is no such thing as mere scenery. There is only the living fabric of the places and objects that envelop Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Misaki (Tôko Miura), whose compassion and complexity are a world unto themselves. Most of the film is set in Hiroshima, where Yûsuke is directing a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Misaki is assigned to be his driver, but their relationship transcends the divide between the front seat and the back. During drives, conversations and surreal yet strangely believable adventures, their reserve gradually erodes as they reveal their losses and their inner lives to each other, building to a cathartic climax that leaves you at once shattered and soaring. The film, based on a novella by Haruki Murakami, isn’t afraid to face the agony of grief and loneliness, but Hamaguchi’s obvious love for his characters suffuses the entire journey with life-giving warmth. A tender, hopeful coda set during the pandemic could have been cringe-worthy, but like every moment of the movie, it’s worth believing in because Hamaguchi’s sincerity is beyond question. “We must keep on living,” Yûsuke tells Misaki. With those words, he speaks not only to her but to us. NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cinema 21, Studio One.

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.

Jockey “You get older and start to realize you and your body… just ain’t the same,” says ailing jockey Jackson Silva (Clifton Collins Jr.) when his career’s finish line finally comes into view in Jockey. This brand of gristly wisdom typifies Clint Bentley’s terrific directorial debut, which is reminiscent of The Wrestler (2008) and The Rider (2017), but has a laconic cowboy wit that harks back to The Lusty Men (1952). Racing in Arizona, Jackson is one bad spill away from paralysis, while younger riders breathe down 32

his neck personally and professionally. That’s poor timing, since his trainer, Ruth (Molly Parker), finally has a promising pony for him. While “one last ride” is obviously one of sports movies’ most popular premises, Jockey keeps a firm, deft grip on its drama, while leaning into rarely explored track subculture.

Most of all, Clifton Collins Jr. capitalizes achingly on 30 years of supporting parts, subliminally suggesting that this star turn could be his last big chance too. With a Marlboro baritone, he embodies an athlete shrewd enough to know he’s washed

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

up, but philosophically unable to admit it. From one angle, he’s in total control. From another, he’s just hanging the hell on. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Fox Tower.

Sundown At its outset, director Michel Franco’s new film is a study in selfishness. While vacationing in Acapulco with his sister and her children, Neal (Tim Roth) indefinitely extends his stay in paradise, though to no apparent end. Alone on the beach, he drinks a Dos Equis, graduates to a bucket of Dos Equis, and then begins to resemble a beer bucket himself, practically melting onto the sand and inviting onlookers to check whether there’s any of him left. Best known for twitching in Tarantino movies, Roth proves masterful and provoking here, even when he’s seem-

ingly doing nothing. Though Sundown eventually forces a plot on his understated performance, Neal appears only mildly apologetic that family and locals have to deal with his masturbatory beach-bumming.

But what good is a true character study when the back half of the narrative functions as an answer key? Franco’s effort to make Neal’s destructive behavior more realistic backfires almost fatally. Ultimately, Sundown flirts with brilliance when it scrutinizes the most universal of all vacation fantasies—“what if I never went back?”—but it would be nothing without Roth’s portrayal of the most pathetic Jimmy Buffett character you’ll ever see on film.

R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.

Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster

Of all Boris Karloff’s acting roles, this documentary fixates on an episode of This Is Your Life. Remember that ’50s reality show where guests became the subjects of biographical walkthroughs? Well, Karloff seemed to despise his appearance on the show. Though Thomas Hamilton’s documentary can’t pinpoint why, it returns fruitlessly to that episode as an implied key to Karloff’s private humanity. Maybe his reticence owed to trauma; the horror icon suffered a cruel mother and ostracism for his Anglo-Indian heritage, but the documentary fails to show how those wounds shaped him. Otherwise, there’s nothing wrong with the film—it’s a loving chronicle of Karloff’s 50-year career across film, Broadway and TV.

He was relentless in his creativity; perhaps his biographies don’t have to be. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Streams on Shudder.

Moonfall The disaster movie has aged like an ’80s hair metal band clinging to relevance in the age of grunge—and Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall is no exception. The film begins with the moon inexplicably hurtling toward Earth, but any semblance of a story is swiftly lost as Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) buries a talented cast, including Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson, beneath a frantic pace and a seemingly endless score

by Harald Kloser and Thomas Wanker that worsens the onscreen chaos, proving that Emmerich will never match the perfect fusion of image and sound that Christopher Nolan achieved with epics like The Dark Knight Rises.

The only thing that keeps Moonfall from being intolerable is the presence of John Bradley (Game of Thrones) as a clichéd yet lovable conspiracy monger who brings some life to the film, but he’s not reason enough to buy a ticket.

At a time when there are better things to watch in the comfort of your living room, Moonfall isn’t worth putting on pants for, much less going to a theater and risking exposing yourself to anyone who “did their own research.” PG-13. RAY GILL JR. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, Studio One, Tigard, Wunderland Milwaukie.

JONESIN’

FREE WILL

B Y M AT T J O N E S

"Mixed Emotions"--feeling a little unusual.

ASTROLOGY ARIES

(Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Author Gayle Forman offers a set of truths that I suspect will be useful for you in the coming weeks. They may even be inspirational and motivational. Forman writes, "Sometimes fate or life or whatever you want to call it, leaves a door a little open, and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key, or pick the lock, or knock the damn thing down. And sometimes, it doesn't even show you the door, and you have to build it yourself." Are you ready for the challenge, Libra?

I think you are. Do whatever you must do to go through the doorways you want and need to go through.

TAURUS

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Singer-songwriter

GEMINI

(May 21-June 20): "The thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else," says Gemini author Vikram Seth. I bring this truth to your attention because I believe you will soon be the beneficiary of steady, strong waves of inspiration. I also predict that these waves will transport you away from minor irritations that are best left alone for now. Be alert and ever-ready to spring into action, my dear, so that as the inspirational surges flow, you will harvest the maximum rewards from their gifts.

CANCER

54. Song from "Turandot"

1. "Pee-wee's Playhouse" genie

58. Like Peru and Mexico

32. Sultanate inhabitant

6. Wing measurement

61. Sex Pistols' genre

33. Historical object

62. Vital spark

34. Aerial photography aid

63. Gate part

39. Audition tape

64. Planet dwellers of film

40. Give birth, informally

65. Indicate boredom

42. "Prometheus" actress Rapace

10. Rack purchases, briefly 14. Burger topping 15. "Pam & Tommy" streamer 16. Singletons 17. One of the "Friends: The Reunion" attendees

66. Stated further

DOWN

31. "Zut _ _ _!"

43. 3-D screening 45. Certain swimwear

20. Boo-boo

1. Reduplicative name in a "Bizarre Adventure" manga

21. March time

2. Over again

22. Filing target

3. Smaller version

49. "_ _ _ Named ScoobyDoo" (cartoon spinoff of 1988)

23. Yang's complement

4. Cemetery

50. Daily Planet reporter

25. Dept. of Justice agency

5. "Here Comes the Hotstepper" singer Kamoze

51. "Transformers" actor LaBeouf

26. Setting the new mark, as in the Olympics

46. Do landscaping work

6. Lawnmower's building

52. "Clicker beware" letters

35. Book, in France

7. Untarnished

53. Not hidden

36. Felt badly

8. "What a shame"

55. Fruit peel

37. "La _ _ _" (Debussy opus)

9. Sister or mother, maybe

38. Stuff in batteries

10. Art made of tiles

56. "Bus Stop" dramatist William

39. Chunk of grass

11. Prefix for body or gravity

40. Upcoming Paramount+ series based on a video game

12. Earth sci.

41. "Volare (_ _ _ Blu Dipinto Di Blu)"

13. Tax ID 18. Foreign film ender

58. Relaxation spot 59. Shifty 60. "A clue!"

19. Asleep, usually

42. Absolutely not

24. Actor Barinholtz

43. "_ _ _ the Mirror" (song in the Broadway musical "MJ")

25. Worry (about)

44. Call center activity

26. Mel who voiced Yosemite Sam

47. "Winnie-the-Pooh" character

27. Houston campus, for short

48. "No Time to _ _ _" (2021 Bond film)

28. Bad things

49. Grad

30. Charitable person

51. Kiss, in British slang

57. Like some steaks

29. Gullible

©2022 Jonesin’ Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com) For answers to this puzzle, call: 1-900-226-2800, 99 cents per minute. Must be 18+. Or to bill to your credit card, call: 1-800-655-6548. Reference puzzle #JNZ990.

last week’s answers

© 2022 ROB BREZSNY

(March 21-April 19): You're slipping into a phase when stuff that has been invisible will become visible, at least to you. You will have extra power to peer beneath the surfaces and discern the hidden agendas and study the deeper workings. Your interest in trivia and distractions will dissipate, and you'll feel intensified yearnings to home in on core truths. Here's your guiding principle during this time: Favor the interests of the soul over those of the ego. And for inspiration, have fun with this quote by religious scholar Huston Smith: "The Transcendent was my morning meal, we had the Eternal at lunch, and I ate a slice of the Infinite at dinner."

(April 20-May 20): "You cannot have fun with anything that you don’t love or admire or respect," declared comedian Mel Brooks. I agree!

The joyous release that comes through playful amusement is most likely to unfold when you're in the presence of influences you are fond of. The good news, Taurus, is that in the coming weeks, you will have a special inclination and knack for hanging around people and influences like that.

Therefore, you will have an enhanced capacity for mirth and delight and pleasure. Take full advantage, please! As much as possible, gravitate toward what you love and admire and respect.

ACROSS

WEEK OF FEBRUARY 17

(June 21-July 22): The advice that Reb Nachman of Breslov offered two centuries ago is just right for you now: "Never ask directions from someone who knows the way, or you will never be able to get lost." In the coming weeks, you will attract tricky but palpable blessings from meandering around without knowing exactly where you are. It's time for you to find out what you don't even realize you need to know; to stumble upon quiet little wonders and marvels that will ultimately prove to be guideposts for your holy quests in the future. Yes, I understand that being in unknown territory without a reliable map isn't usually a pleasure, but I believe it will be for you.

PS: Our fellow Cancerian, author Rebecca Solnit, wrote a book entitled A Field Guide to Getting Lost. It might be helpful during your wanderings. Read a summary of it here: tinyurl.com/ GuideToGettingLost

LEO

(July 23-Aug. 22): "You face your greatest opposition when you're closest to your biggest miracle," wrote author and filmmaker T. D. Jakes. According to my analysis of upcoming astrological omens, that's good advice for you. I suspect that the problems you encounter will be among your best and most useful ever. With the right attitude, you will harness the challenges to generate magnificent breakthroughs. And what's the right attitude? Proceed with the hypothesis that life is now conspiring to bring your soul exactly what your soul needs to express its ripest beauty.

VIRGO

(Aug. 23-Sept. 22): "Always remember this," said actor Hattie McDaniel (1893–1952). "There are only 18 inches between a pat on the back and a kick in the rump." Metaphorically speaking, I believe her advice will be useful for you in the coming days. Lately, you've had to deal with too many experiences and influences akin to kicks in the rump. But now that will change. Soon there'll be a surge of experiences and influences that resemble pats on the back. In my estimation, you have finished paying your dues and making course corrections. Now it's time for you to receive meaningful appreciation and constructive approval.

LIBRA

Rosanne Cash described her process. "I dream of songs," she began. "I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and backbeats." Scorpio, I would love for you to explore comparable approaches to getting the creative ideas you need to live your best life possible. I would love for you to draw freely from sources beyond your conscious ego—including your ancestors, the people you were in previous incarnations, gods and spirits, heroes and allies, the intelligence of animals, and the wisdom of nature. The coming months will be a favorable time to expand your access. Start boosting the signals now!

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Author Madeleine Thien has lived in Vancouver, Montreal, and Iowa City, and has taught at schools in Hong Kong and Brooklyn. Her father was born and raised in Malaysia and her mother in Hong Kong. She has a rich array of different roots. Not surprisingly, then, she has said, "I like to think of home as a verb, something we keep recreating."

That's an excellent meditation for you right now, Sagittarius. And it will continue to be worthy of your ruminations for another four months.

What's the next step you could take to feel comfortable and secure and at peace?

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): The fastest animal

on earth is the peregrine falcon, which can reach speeds of 200 miles per hour when it dives from a great height. The seventh-fastest creature is the humble pigeon. Having been clocked at 92.5 miles per hour, the bird outpaces the cheetah, which is the fastest land animal. I propose we make the pigeon your spirit creature for the coming weeks. On the one hand, you may seem mild and modest to casual observers. On the other hand, you will in fact be sleek, quick, and agile.

Like the pigeon, you will also be highly adaptable, able to thrive in a variety of situations.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): "Self-control might

be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion," wrote Aquarian author W. Somerset Maugham. Yes! I agree! And that's the perfect message for you to hear right now. If you choose to take advantage of the potentials that life is offering you, you will explore and experiment with the mysteries of self-discipline and self-command. You'll be a trailblazer of discernment and poise. You will indulge in and enjoy the pleasures of self-regulation.

PISCES

(Feb. 19-March 20): In 1961, Piscean cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit the Earth in a spacecraft. As his feat neared its end, Gagarin left the capsule at 20,000 feet above the ground and parachuted the rest of the way.

He arrived in a turnip field where a girl and her grandmother were working. They provided him with a horse and cart so he could travel to the nearest telephone and make a call to get picked up and brought back to headquarters. I foresee a metaphorically comparable series of events transpiring in your life, Pisces. Be flexible and adaptable as you adjust to changing conditions with changing strategies. Your exceptional and illustrious activities may require the assistance of humble influences.

Homework: Name the three things most worthy of celebrating right now. Then celebrate them!

Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com CHECK OUT ROB BREZSNY’S EXPANDED WEEKLY AUDIO HOROSCOPES & DAILY TEXT MESSAGE HOROSCOPES

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

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COMiCS!

34

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

SPOTLIGHT ARTIST HAYLEY CASSATT

Website: hayleycassatt.com Email: hayleycassatt@mac.com Instagram: @hayleycassatt Hayley Cassatt has been the in-store artist at Music Millennium since 2016.

They paint all the windows, make displays, and do all the signage in the store.

They have been branching out and painting other local business and residential windows in the area. Cassatt started painting seasonal windows for Lippman’s party store last year. They are also an illustrator. Cassatt’s work is very colorful, cartoony and inspired by the 80s. They sell prints of their illustrations on Etsy and do freelance commissions.

ARE YOU AN ARTIST?

Be a Willamette Week featured artist!

Any art style is welcome!

Contact us at art@wweek.com

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 9, 2022 wweek.com

35

CLASSIFIEDS

TO PLACE AN AD, CONTACT:

MICHAEL DONHOWE

503-243-2122 mdonhowe@wweek.com CASH for INSTRUMENTS Tradeupmusic.com SE 503-236-8800 NE 503-335-8800

Steve Greenberg Tree Service

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

Pruning and removals, stump grinding, 24-hour emergency service.

Licensed/Insured. CCB#67024. Free estimates: 503-284-2077

TRADEUPMUSIC.COM

Buying, selling, instruments of every shape and size. Open 11am-7pm every day. 4701 SE Division & 1834 NE Alberta.

MARK STEN

Author: History of Portland Punk Rock.

Presents a History of Everything Else.

See reptilicus.substack.com. Providers of hospital-grade Serpent DNA since 2015.

Sunlan cartoons by Kay Newell “The Lightbulb Lady” Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Google

sunlanlighting.com

DISCOVER THE GODDESS We specialize in women’s emotional well-being.

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