NEWS: What Sparked a Hate-Crime Spree? P. 9 FOOD: The Pizza Phone Is Open for Business. P. 22 FILM: Forest Wars. P. 27
“WHEN HE’S FANGIN’ IT, WHAT’S IN HIS HEAD?” P. 26
POD
COMPLEX WWEEK.COM VOL 48/28 0 5 .1 8 . 2 02 2
Dissatisfaction at a famed food cart pod demonstrates why Multnomah County wants to regulate them. By Sophie Peel. Page 13
WW’S PATIO PICKS P. 21
Year 10
Featuring Digable Planets
May 28 2
Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
FINDINGS THOMAS TEAL
ONLY AT NEXT ADVENTURE Deals from 5/13-5/26/22
LOVELY’S FIFTY FIFTY, PAGE 22
You must get tested early for Paxlovid to matter. 6 Dutch Bros founder Travis
Boersma is worth $3.6 billion less than he was last year. 7 Mike Bivins follows two accounts on Twitter: Elon Musk and Chick-fil-A . 9 For the cost of replacing the Interstate Bridge, Oregon could make seismic upgrades to every other bridge in the state. 11 No government agency inspects pest control at food cart pods. 13
The owners of a famed Portland
This week, you can watch Sebo Walker paint skateboard decks while enjoying a five-course meal. 20 Lovely’s Fifty Fifty began taking orders via a “pizza phone” in March 2020—and still does. 22 The signature marijuana strain grown by Jim Belushi in Southern Oregon is called Nilla Wafers. 25 A license plate number inspired a new song by the Australian punk trio The Chats. 26 A new documentary features Redwood Forest Defense
activists battling the logging company Green Diamond. 27
ON THE COVER:
OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK:
From mental hospital to food cart pod: Hawthorne Asylum, photo by Michael Raines.
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DIALOGUE
• •••• ••••
A T R E A LRBO S ER E T •••• A E H T MAY 21
JUN 3 Oregon Symphony presents
two shows 6+9pm
Open Music with
Nathalie Joachim Siren Nation presents
the 16th annual
JUN 4
DOLLY HOOT
featuring
Alexa Wiley • Gerle Haggard Band Lindsie Feathers • Miss Iris Tara Velarde • The Apricots White Bike + emcee Tave Fasce Drake
JUNE 18
JUNETEENTH CELEBRATION Eldon “T” Jones + LaRhonda Steele JUN 23
JUN 24
Making Memories:
a gender bending burlesque cabaret
Using Neuroscience to Enhance Teaching & Learning
JUN 28
JUN 29 Chamber Music Northwest
presents
New@Night Rhapsodies & Demons
ACOUSTIC ALCHEMY JUL 15
JUL 2
JESSE COLIN YOUNG
PASCUALA ILABACA Y FAUNA + Alisa Amador
the world’s only light-up orchestra
Highway Troubadour Tour JUL 16
Celtic Light Orchestra presents
SPACE INVADERS
Chamber Music Northwest presents
JUN 29
New@Night
Andy Akiho’s Grammy & Pulitzer nominated album
SEVEN PILLARS + Sandbox Percussion
UPCOMING SHOWS
•••••••••••••
5/31 • PORTLAND YOUTH JAZZ ORCHESTRA + THE MEDLER SEXTET 6/8 • CONSIDER THIS WITH JELLY HELM & NATAKI GARRETT 7/29 • BOOKLOVER’S BURLESQUE: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S TEASE
•••••
albertarosetheatre.com
3000 NE Alberta • 503.764.4131 4
IAIN MCKENZIE, VIA TWITTER: “The situation around
the old Greyhound station has become really bad, as it has in a lot of other places too. Local elected leaders need to find a way to improve the situation, or they’ll soon be replaced with new people willing to be a lot crueler.”
MONGORONGO, VIA REDDIT:
with
SCIENCE ON TAP
For more than a year, several square blocks of sidewalks in Portland’s Old Town have been filled with homeless tent encampments. The epicenter of these camps were the blocks surrounding the Gladys McCoy Health Department Headquarters. Last week, WW obtained internal Multnomah County documents showing a security consultant had identified the camps as a significant threat to health workers in the building (“Breakdown,” May 11). Workers at several county clinics told officials they feared for their safety—one even considered wearing a bulletproof vest to work. Two days after WW’s report, city workers swept camps near the McCoy Building. Here’s what our readers had to say:
Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
“The mental health workers that we need to provide services are afraid to show up to work to provide those services. “When do we admit this isn’t working anymore?” NOPO RESIDENT, VIA WWEEK.COM: “So Multnomah
County’s incompetence and policies are impacting their own employees. Sort of like what citizens experience daily. Felt sorry for a couple seconds, then it passed.” RICH HARP, VIA FACEBOOK:
“I love PDX and it’s so disappointing to watch downtown decline due to ineffective leadership.
“If only you, Willamette Week, could challenge Portland City Council and Metro leadership to live in Old Town for a month.” HELLOGUNNIT, VIA REDDIT:
“After spending three paragraphs explaining how their
Dr. Know
employees have been assaulted, beaten, chased with weapons, and threatened with death, they turn around and say they don’t want the police to intervene because: ‘We don’t want to have our clients become justice-involved, especially our BIPOC clients.’ “The lack of self-awareness is staggering.” NOELLE GUEST, VIA FACEBOOK: “Old Town is seriously
frightening right now. I brought my son to Ground Kontrol a couple of weeks ago. He was startled and scared by some of the scenes and people we saw, just walking to and from the car. There was no sense of order, really, just a feeling of randomness and helplessness.” STEPHEN JUDKINS, VIA TWITTER: “My new, slightly
more authoritarian view on this is that if you are suffering from obvious meth-driven psychosis or mania in public, you should be institutionalized, somehow. My generous liberal view is that the institutions should be as nice as possible.” 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: PO Box 10770, Portland OR, 97296 Email: mzusman@wweek.com
BY MARTY SMITH @martysmithxxx
Why do so many intersections in Southeast and Northeast Portland make you push a button to get a green signal to cross the street? Why doesn’t the signal turn green automatically, and drivers can determine if there’s a pedestrian in the crosswalk or not? —Cross About Crosswalks Count your blessings, Cross—at least the buttons at those intersections do something. In Manhattan, 90% of the crosswalk buttons have no effect at all—a fact that only fuels the urban legend that all crosswalk buttons are placebos from The Man, distracting us from our plight so we won’t rise up and beat our crossing-guard overlords to death with their little flags. I can assure you, however (now that The Man’s check has cleared), that nothing could be further from the truth. It is true that at intersections where there’s nonstop foot traffic (think Times Square) there’s basically always someone waiting to cross, so it’s not unreasonable to disconnect the button and just run every light change as though it had already been pressed. Everywhere else, however, the system really does know when you press the button. What it does with that information, however,
can range from “immediately stopping traffic solely for your benefit” to “nothing,” depending on the type of intersection and time of day. The simplest case is an intersection that has no traffic lights at all until a pedestrian comes along. Here, the intuitive thing actually happens: You push the button, motorists get a red light, and you get a walk signal you wouldn’t otherwise have gotten. At intersections that have full-time traffic lights, things become more complicated. At busy times, the lights may run through exactly the same routine, with the same timing, button or no—the only difference is that when the button is pressed, you’ll hear the electronic voice that says, “The walk sign is on.” However, when there’s heavy traffic in one direction, the light facing the other way may only be green for a few seconds—long enough for one or two cars to clear the intersection, but not long enough for a pedestrian (assumed by law to be a 102-year-old lady using a walker) to cross safely. Using the button in this situation may not let you cross any sooner, but it does give you more time to cross without getting killed. Enough time to take on a crossing guard? Your call. Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.
MURMURS BRIAN BROSE
HE T T A Y F I T TES TER R A H C D N PORTLA ION MAY COMMISS ARINGS PUBLIC HENOVEMBER E BEFORE THCTION ELE Sign up at www.portland.gov/omf/charterreview-commission CharterReview@portlandoregon.gov
GOV. KATE BROWN GROCERS BAG BOOZE MEASURE: The Northwest Grocery Association announced May 17 it was withdrawing Initiative Petition 35, which would have allowed Oregon grocery stores to sell hard liquor. Conceding the end of the NGA’s campaign, president and CEO Amanda Dalton still insists consumers want the convenience of one-stop shopping. “Oregonians firmly believe that we should be able to buy liquor along with beer and wine at their local grocery stores as our neighbors in Washington and California are able to do,” Dalton says. The campaign paid $100,000 to a signature-gathering firm earlier this month but never officially launched the initiative. Now, the NGA has determined it couldn’t have gathered 112,000 valid signatures by July 8, the deadline for placing a constitutional amendment on the November ballot, blaming “the challenges of COVID and court delays in certifying a [ballot] title.” GOVERNOR FACES ADDICTION FRICTION: Gov. Kate Brown’s office scheduled a Zoom call May 17 with 14 leaders in the field of addiction treatment. Members of that group have been critical of the state’s poky efforts to deploy new mental health care funding allocated by lawmakers, as well as the glacial rollout of treatment dollars promised by Measure 110, the 2020 ballot measure that decriminalized many hard drugs. One name notably missing from the invitation: Mike Marshall, executive director of Oregon Recovers. Marshall has been an outspoken critic of Brown and the Oregon Health Authority, and organized a protest on Mother’s Day outside Brown’s Southeast Portland home. After WW contacted the governor’s office May 17 to ask why Marshall was excluded, the meeting was abruptly canceled—just a couple of hours before it was set to begin. Brown spokesman Charles Boyle says the meeting was just for the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, of which Oregon Recovers is not a member. He didn’t say why the meeting was canceled. COUNTY AUDITOR SAYS WORK IS THREATENED: Although the city of Portland’s proposed charter reforms have gotten more ink, Multnomah County is also planning to put reforms on the ballot in November. County Auditor Jennifer McGuirk, who is independently elected, is seeking to peg her office’s budget to the county’s general fund. (She says the auditor’s staff hasn’t increased since the 1990s, while county staff has grown by 15%.) McGuirk also wants to enshrine a fraud hotline and her office’s access to county records in the charter, in part because the current hotline is less
robust than best practices call for and county officials have been slow in some cases to produce requested documents. “These proposed charter amendments address existing threats to the county auditor’s ability to serve the public interest,” McGuirk says. “My team needs to be able to access information to do our work on the public’s behalf, and the public needs to have enough resources dedicated to auditing for their county auditor’s office to provide sufficient oversight.” Kafoury says transparency and accountability are top priorities for her, and she supports, with conditions, adding the fraud hotline to the charter and hiring an ombudsman for the auditor’s office: “I funded every request that the county auditor put forward in my 2023 executive budget in what will be the largest expansion of the auditor’s office in county history.” SPENDING ON FLYNN TOPS $13 MILLION: As of election day, national political action committees had spent more than $13 million in independent expenditures on political newcomer Carrick Flynn, who is running in the Democratic primary for Oregon’s new, 6th Congressional District. Of that spending, $11.4 million came from Protect Our Future, a PAC backed by crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. Nearly $1 million came from House Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC affiliated with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Other Democrats got outside backing, too: Flynn’s chief opponent, state Rep. Andrea Salinas, was buoyed by more than $1.6 million in independent expenditures. LOW VOTER TURNOUT LEAVES DEMS UNEASY: As election day dawned in Oregon, the story of the 2022 primary continued to be a lack of excitement on the part of voters. With a partial count of ballots received Monday, figures released by the secretary of state showed the statewide percentage of ballots returned was 22.5%. Overall, Republicans (31.6%) were voting more frequently than Democrats (30.3%), while unaffiliated voters, who are shut out of party primaries but can vote in nonpartisan contests, were barely bothering to open their ballots (8.9%). Turnout in rural counties was higher than in the Portland metro area. A Democratic Party of Oregon analysis of voter turnout showed that primary voters were mostly older: 79.4% of the first 500,000 voters to cast ballots were 50 or older. That’s a big skew, considering only 49.2% of registered voters are 50 or above. How will that affect top contests, including primary races for governor? Visit wweek.com for results.
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Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
5
NEWS
Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK
WHERE WE’RE AT
What Emergency? While Home Forward’s emergency vouchers go largely unused, the agency is getting a cash bailout for tenants with unpaid rent. BY N I G E L J AQ U I S S
njaquiss@wweek .com
Earlier this month, Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services produced a much-awaited report on the number of people in the county without permanent homes. That report, known as the point-in-time count, is a snapshot that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires of counties in exchange for federal funding for homeless services. As WW reported May 5, this year’s count showed a 50% increase since 2019 in the number of people who are “unsheltered”—that is, sleeping outside or in vehicles. That rise adds heartache to one of the most frustrating sagas in Portland: the struggle of Home Forward, the local public housing agency, to deploy 476 emergency housing vouchers that the feds awarded it last June. Tom Cusack, a former HUD official who blogs about housing issues, highlighted the payment because he, like WW, has been tracking Home Forward’s lackluster effort to employ those
TRENDING
CITY
VOUCHERS
UNITS LEASED
San Diego
480
324
Seattle
498
198
Oakland
515
136
Portland
476
75
15.8%
Sacramento
494
75
15.2%
U.S. Total
70,000
20,745
29.6%
vouchers. Cusack says it’s “a total mystery” why Home Forward is still sitting on so many. Although HUD statistics through May 15 show other agencies in Oregon have converted 54% of their emergency vouchers into leased apartments, Home Forward has done far worse, putting just 16% of its vouchers to work. Home Forward spokeswoman Monica Foucher told WW earlier this year that the agency expected clients to have used all of its emergency vouchers to secure apartments by the end of this month. She now says that’s no longer the goal. HUD statistics for the number of leased units, Foucher adds, is lagging slightly behind Home Forward’s numbers: She says 87 units have been leased, 12 units more than HUD reports, and another 60 clients just need to turn in paperwork to get their apartments. Still, Foucher concedes Home Forward’s progress toward using all its vouchers is “not great.” She could not explain the dismal numbers. That makes news at the May 17 board meeting of Home For-
PERCENTAGE USED 67.5%
39.8% 26.4%
ward of a $2 million federal windfall “for the purpose of alleviating nonpayment of rent debt of Home Forward households” all the more surprising. Foucher explains her agency cannot use the vouchers it already has to cover unpaid rent. “It’s an entirely different federal resource,” she says, “primarily directed at securing housing for unhoused people, not those already in affordable housing.” Cusack says that’s a reasonable explanation given the strict rules around the use of federal housing money. “I totally get why they can’t use the vouchers,” Cusack says. “I guess one of the beauties of [Metro’s] supportive housing services measure [which helps fund the Joint Office] is, there are a lot of categories eligible for spending.” The chart above shows how Portland’s use of the HUD emergency vouchers compares with that of some peer cities and the national average.
Boersma’s peak net worth: $5.3 billion
80
60
40
20
May 11: Reports first quarter earnings
Dutch Bros IPO: $23
May 17 Close: $26.40
NOV 2021
JAN 2021
Bro-ing Down
DUTCH BROS STOCK LOOKED LIKE A SURE THING—UNTIL IT TANKED. Last month, a writer at the Motley Fool, a stock-picking service popular with tech-loving millennials, recommended buying shares of Dutch Bros. “Want to retire early?” Justin Pope asked on fool.com. “Buy Dutch Bros. The flourishing coffee chain has all the makings of a long-term 6
Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
winner.” Maybe. But in the short term, one of the few people who might retire early thanks to Dutch Bros is company founder and Grants Pass native Travis Boersma, 51, who owns 65 million shares in the coffee company and became a billionaire when it sold shares to the public last
MARCH 2021 September in what became Oregon’s largest-ever IPO (take that, Phil Knight). But he’s $517 million lighter after the events of last week. The stock, which trades under the symbol “BROS,” plummeted 37% in after-hours trading May 11, when it reported quarterly earnings and warned that sales at existing stores, a key metric for restaurant stocks, would be “approximately flat” for 2022. Higher prices for gas and other goods were soaking up dollars that Dutch Bros customers might otherwise spend on Rebel energy drinks and nitro-infused cold brews. Younger customers, especially, had “some discretionary income challenges,” CEO Joth Ricci said (his solution: hype the energy drinks with promotions!).
MAY 2021 Investors hated the report and dumped the stock. On Tuesday, it closed at $26.40, up just $3.40, or 15% from its IPO price of $23. Boersma, meantime, is still doing pretty well. Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that he and “affiliated entities” own 64,724,563 class A shares in Dutch Bros. At $26.40, his holdings are still worth $1.7 billion. That’s down from $5.3 billion, Boersma’s worth late last year, when Dutch Bros soared to a record $81.40. But it’s still enough for anyone, except maybe a Saudi royal, to retire. Anyone else who owns BROS should probably keep working. This chart traces the rise and fall of Dutch Bros. A N T H O N Y E F F I N G E R .
Cover Up
FAQ
WHY MULTNOMAH COUNTY WANTS YOU TO WEAR A MASK AGAIN. Earlier this month, Multnomah County again led the state in the number of COVID-19 cases per capita. And on May 11, public health officials recommended that people once more don face masks indoors. It’s not a mandate. There will be no battles to get those who remain unconvinced of COVID’s risks or mask efficacy to contain their snot droplets. But the responsible are asked to do their part. The person doing the asking is tri-county public health officer Dr. Jennifer Vines. We spoke to Vines this week about common questions Portlanders have about this uncanny stage of the pandemic. R AC H E L M O N A H A N .
Why wear a mask if I’m vaccinated and already protected? Isn’t this variant mild anyway?
For most Oregonians—the vaccinated and those who have been infected before—cases are indeed more mild. But cases, emergency room visits and hospitalizations are all rising. “We don’t have a ton of hospitalizations,” Vines says. “We expect them to peak in early June. We don’t think it’s going to look anything like the big, big surges that we had at the Delta peak or the Omicron peak. But the fact is that to have illness kind of wash over the community like this in a relatively short time period means that there’s a lot of disruption.” That means masking is a way of staying well so kids get to child care and school and adults go to work—and everybody gets to attend spring events. “As a matter of generally staying well and being able to do the things you want to do, consider putting a mask back on indoors,” Vines says. “There are people who, of course, neve`r took their mask off. There are people who have no intention of putting a mask back on. But I think that there’s probably a middle group that wants to do the right thing and is sort of looking for a signal of, you know, ‘What is the right thing to do right now?’”
Who is still getting very sick?
“In general, by far the biggest risk factor is age,” Vines says. “Also, being unvaccinated.” If you’re high risk, or taking care of someone who is, Vines recommends considering other precautions: Maybe avoid indoor places while cases are high. “They can make sure they have COVID tests on hand,” Vines says. “They can watch first symptoms, and they can figure out ahead of time how they might get access to the antiviral medicines that lower people’s risk of severe COVID.” The leading antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, works only if you start it in the first several days. That means it’s a good idea to know if you’re ill. Have tests on hand.
Enjoy the summer respite. It won’t last.
WESLEY LAPOINTE
This wave of hospitalizations is expected to ease by no later than late June. But expect health warnings to resume. By fall, Vines says, case counts may be a public health problem again. Public health officials are already preparing. It looks like you’ll still need to get your shots—and not just for COVID. “We still have yet to go through a full so-called respiratory season with COVID and influenza coming back without a lot of restrictions on gatherings or masking,” Vines says. “I’m nervous because of that. I don’t have a clear picture of how that might go and, given that our health care workforce is still pretty taxed, it still doesn’t take much to potentially overburden hospitals. So we’re already having early conversations about what next fall and winter might look like.”
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LAKE OSWEGO
PORTLAND
NEWS C R E S S I D A S O U VA N H
ANOTHER TIME: Mike Bivins at OMSI in 2019.
What Happened to Mike Bivins? The alleged hate crimes of a former freelance journalist baffle those who knew him. BY R AC H E L S A S L OW
@ R a c h e l L a u r e n1 2
Mike Bivins had supposedly left the scene of political extremism. As of October, Bivins had an administrative job at Oregon Health & Science University, where he had worked since 2006. He and his wife of nine years lived in a high-end apartment building in the Lloyd District. He had ceased the work two years earlier that had brought him some regional notice and bylines in Willamette Week: filming clashes between dueling protesters in the streets of Portland. In November 2021, he got divorced, quit his OHSU job, cashed out his retirement account, and started living on the streets. This month, he allegedly went on a weeklong, citywide hatecrime spree. Bivins, 34, is charged with breaking windows and spray-painting a Nazi-referencing death threat at Congregation Beth Israel in Northwest Portland; attempting to set fire to the Muslim Community Center in North Portland while people were inside the building; and breaking windows at another synagogue and a Blackowned restaurant. He is currently being held at the Multnomah County Detention Center on 11 counts: five charges of second-degree bias crimes, five charges of criminal mischief and one felony charge of first-degree arson. Friends and former colleagues are left with the same question as his alleged victims: How did he get from point A to point B? “I am both stunned and horrified,” says Camilla Mortensen, editor-in-chief at Eugene Weekly, where Bivins interned. Bivins’ ex-wife, Cressida Souvanh, answered questions via text message. Souvanh, who is Laotian, said she’d “never seen a hateful attitude toward minorities with him during our marriage.”
She said a “change in him” was the final straw in their decadelong marriage and that he “became really mean” to her. She has not communicated with him since the divorce. An examination of Bivins’ social media feeds and interviews with people who know him personally reveal a profound change in the past year. By this winter, a man who had once reported critically on far-right extremism was spewing hateful rhetoric about Jews, minorities, Spanish speakers, and people with disabilities. People who worked with him are struggling to reconcile the Mike Bivins they knew with the one currently being held at the Multnomah County Detention Center. “I just feel really overwhelmed and sad,” says Crystal Contreras-Grossman, another former WW freelancer. “I feel like he’s an example of someone the system should be built to help. He is clearly not doing well.” Bivins was raised in the Tri-Cities area of Eastern Washington and, according to his ex-wife, attended Benson Polytechnic High School in Portland. He tweeted in 2016 that he was in foster care from 2003 to 2007. He has a bachelor’s degree in communications from Portland State University and wrote for the school’s Vanguard newspaper while a student there. In 2014, he wrote an opinion piece in the Vanguard arguing that President Andrew Jackson should be removed from the $20 bill because of his role in the violent removal tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands. He lamented the “ambivalence, apathy and a general lack of respect for what Native Americans endured.” Contreras-Grossman met Bivins when they were covering Portland protests of the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Contreras-Grossman and
Bivins covered Don’t Shoot Portland meetings together, a protest outside of an immigrant detention center, and even traveled together to Everett, Wash., to report on a campaign rally for then-candidate Donald J. Trump in 2016. “He always seemed really neutral,” says Contreras-Grossman, who is of Mexican and Pueblo descent. “He would just let his camera roll and not edit it one way or another to make one side look better. I always got the general feeling from him that things like racism are wrong.” In 2015, he started an internship at Eugene Weekly, where he wrote about marijuana legalization and a handful of protest stories, according to Mortensen. “As an intern, he was super eager and energetic and on it,” Mortensen says. Immediately after getting hired as an intern, he took it upon himself to copy-edit Eugene Weekly’s entire blog. Bivins didn’t have a car, so he took the train or bus from Portland to Eugene for his internship. Bivins contributed about 20 stories to WW from 2016 to 2019. He covered far-right extremism, from a Lake Oswego Trump rally to the criminal trial of Ammon Bundy to MAX train murderer Jeremy Christian. In 2017, he wrote that neo-Nazi activity in town such as swastika graffiti on a synagogue raised “dark memories” of skinhead violence in Portland in the 1980s and ’90s. After long, stressful days covering protests, Contreras-Grossman felt surprised when Bivins told her he was going straight to work at OHSU. “I don’t know what he was running on,” she says. OHSU would not comment on “confidential personnel matters” but did share that the hospital runs background checks on employees before they are hired and additional checks if
employees need access to secure high-risk areas, funds, or sensitive electronic information. His last bylines for WW and Eugene Weekly both appeared in the spring of 2019. By summer 2021, posts to Bivins’ Twitter account started to seem erratic. Concerned, Contreras-Grossman invited Bivins and his then-wife over to socialize in the backyard in June but never heard back. Bivins and Souvanh divorced due to irreconcilable differences on Nov. 19, 2021. Since the divorce, according to a May 9 Multnomah County court arraignment document, Bivins has been homeless and living outside except for two nights a week, when he slept at his mother’s home. His mother lives in public housing in Sellwood with a front door decorated with Mardi Gras beads, artificial flowers, and a small, napping cat figurine. She did not respond to knocks on her door or a request for comment. He remained active on social media. (He tweeted 93 times on Dec. 30 and 31, for example.) His Twitter account paints a picture of a life spent mostly riding around the city on TriMet while carrying bags of his possessions. He hit the gym to work out and shower, and was “in the best shape ever.” He also said he had “cried more in the last 3 months than in all my life combined” and had a “burning desire to join the military.” Bivins does not use drugs or have any diagnosed mental health issues, according to the May 9 court documents. He currently follows only two accounts on Twitter: Elon Musk and Chick-fil-A. On April 17, Twitter locked his account for violating the rules against abuse and harassment. Bivins turned himself in to the Fox 12 news station on May 4, claiming responsibility for the crimes and making anti-Semitic statements. Since the reporter he hoped to talk to wasn’t available, he agreed to return May 6 for “additional discussions,” according to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office. Police met him there. Steps past the still-visible scorch marks near the sanctuary doors at Congregation Beth Israel, a table is covered with dozens of letters of support from the community, including many from students at St. Mary’s Academy and the Metropolitan Learning Center. “We are reminded that hatred and intolerance continue to infect our world,” Rabbi Michael Z. Cahana wrote to the congregation the night after the vandalism and fire. “Thank [God] no one was hurt.…But the damage to our sense of safety is harmed.” According to Seemab Hussaini, a congregant at the Muslim Community Center, there has been “constant vigilance” at the mosque, with everyone from the imam himself to congregants volunteering to keep watch over the property since the attack. The mosque has hired an armed guard for its large Friday prayer services. The attempted arson took place at the mosque at about 6:48 pm on May 3, according to court documents. The day before was the holiday Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan, so May 3 was quiet: “We were caught off guard completely,” Hussaini says. “The greater problem is how a lot of people are getting desensitized by the barrage of farright messaging in our lives,” Hussaini says. “This is the vulnerability we are all facing when we allow people to consume this type of rhetoric on a daily basis.…It’s really emboldening people who are broken.” Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
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Rep. Khanh Pham (D-Portland) is a leading skeptic of the Oregon Department of Transportation’s record on massive highway projects. Now she’ll seek to hold the agency accountable on the biggest infrastructure project in its history. That megaproject? Replacing the Interstate 5 bridge across the Columbia River. The last time the state tried to replace the bridge, Oregon and Washington spent nearly $200 million between 2005 and 2013—with nothing to show for it. As costs balloon on a highway expansion through the Rose Quarter, the other super-sized Portland highway project, Pham says keeping the price tag in check is her top priority so the transportation agency will still have money for other projects around the state. She’ll get that chance: Last week, she was appointed to Interim Joint Committee on the Interstate 5 Bridge, the legislative committee overseeing the bridge’s replacement on the Oregon side. (Oregon lawmakers have a say because they need to approve additional funding.) Pham worked for the nonprofit OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon and advocated passage of Portland’s clean energy ballot initiative before being elected to the Oregon Legislature in 2020. WW asked her what she thinks of the bridge project, and what she thinks should change.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity. WW: Do you have a view on whether the current proposal for the bridge is the right size? Rep. Khanh Pham: I’m excited to join and dive in deeper, but I am concerned we need to have a clear idea about our budget before we agree on the design. And that’s not the traditional way ODOT and other transportation agencies approach it: Once we’ve approved the project, we’re on the hook as a state, and we will have to pay for whatever it ends up costing. And we know other megaprojects like this often end up being double the cost in the end. But as an example, when I plan even just my own household remodeling project, I need to know my budget in order to make key design questions. I don’t get to choose “I want this, I want that” and then figure out how much it costs. I would love to see an updated cost estimate and an investment-grade analysis by the end of the year in order for us to be able to make a decision in the 2023 session. Why did you want to join the committee that decides on a bridge replacement? Transportation is so connected to healthy commu-
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“We want to think about the legacy we’re leaving to future generations, both in terms of climate but also in terms of the financial debt obligations we’ll be leaving.”
nities. This is the largest infrastructure project in Oregon’s history. And I wanted to make sure that the communities I represent are able to weigh in—to make sure this project is responsibly designed, especially with respect to the fiscal costs, as well as climate considerations and racial equity.
new bridge is fairly simple. I mean, $1 billion is still a lot, but it’s something I would support. I can imagine a situation where we both invest in replacing the bridge but don’t expand the freeways and can still invest in other transportation needs, like seismic retrofits across the state.
What does equity look like for this project? It includes the impact on low-income communities that live along I-5 and will have to breathe dirtier air because of the expanded freeway. But the thing that is really driving me is the opportunity costs—and the investments we cannot make in equitable transportation if we are not able to control costs. Right now, we see these transportation megaprojects ballooning in costs. I’m concerned this will become the transportation ask for the next five sessions.
Should Oregon stop expanding highways? I think highways are fossil fuel infrastructure, and we need to be really thoughtful about how we’re stewarding our public dollars, because this is infrastructure that’s going to last for the next hundred years. We want to think about the legacy we’re leaving to future generations, both in terms of climate but also in terms of the financial debt obligations we’ll be leaving.
What problems do you want the Interstate Bridge replacement to solve? I would like the bridge to solve the problem of seismic resilience. According to ODOT’s seismic report in 2018, we need to seismically retrofit another 718 bridges across the state. And the cost of that is about $5 billion, but ODOT currently says they don’t have enough money to do those seismic bridge retrofits—coincidentally, that’s about the cost of the current estimate for the IBR project. So the cost estimate will determine whether you think it’s worth it to do the seismic upgrade on the Columbia River bridge or pick every single other bridge in the state that needs to be upgraded? Just to be clear, the bridge replacement itself is less than 25% of the cost of the project. Building an actual
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What could the bridge do for climate? Does that mean improving public transportation? It means investing in multimodal transportation so people can use buses and light rail, and replace some of their single-occupancy car trips. One in three Oregonians can’t drive either because of age or because they have a disability or can’t afford to own or maintain a car. We need to be building a transportation system that works for all Oregonians. Public transit ridership is down in Portland— people prefer other options for health and safety reasons. What do you think can be done? I would say both ODOT as well as our transit agencies really need to be leaning into a statewide public transit strategy. How do we increase ridership instead of just kind of accept decline as an inevitability? I think a lot of people have no choice. I wish we were also wearing masks. I still ride the bus, and I do think that if we can improve safety, improve cleanliness, improve frequency and improve the route coverage, I think people will come.
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POD COMPLEX Dissatisfaction at a famed food cart pod demonstrates why Multnomah County wants to regulate them. BY S O P H I E P E E L
speel@wweek .com
P H O T O G R A P H S BY M I C H A E L R A I N E S
Lunch hour at a food cart parked where the Oregon Hospital for the Insane once stood regularly draws a crowd. On a damp Sunday afternoon at Hawthorne Asylum, 40 people sat at polished but rugged pine tables, eating banh mi, Philly cheesesteaks and burritos. Two gas fire pits provided warmth. String lights looped back and forth across the plaza, adding a certain romance to the rain. Hawthorne Asylum, located at Southeast 10th Avenue and Madison Street, just blocks from Ladd’s Addition, is one of Portland’s better-known food cart pods. When it opened in
2019, the collection of 20 food carts was described by WW as “what might happen if Tim Burton were commissioned to design a Portland-themed section of Disneyland,” adding that “there may not be a more crowd-pleasing al fresco dining option this summer.” But there have been problems at Hawthorne Asylum. WW spoke with nine food cart owners who rented space at Hawthorne Asylum in the past three years—five of whom agreed to go on the record. Six have since left the pod and moved their carts elsewhere, were kicked out or dropped out of the business altogether. They say unsanitary conditions at Hawthorne Asylum was at least part of the reason they left.
Some described overflowing dumpsters, portable toilets that were smeared with human waste, and broken promises. Xavier Allen moved his barbecue cart and smoker into Hawthorne Asylum in May 2020. He stayed 16 months—and left because of what he describes as poor sanitation, promised amenities that never arrived, and rising rent: $2,945 a month, including utilities. “There were rodents, the trash bins overflowed, they wanted us to take all our recyclables home,” Allen says. “I had customers take photos of rodents and say they’re not coming back here.” Cart operators documented their claims with photos, emails and texts. Hawthorne Asylum is owned by the Johnson family. Longtime Gresham residents, Steve Johnson’s immediate family own commercial properties across Portland—including those housing an auto parts shop, a ZoomCare office, and the recently shuttered Rogue Brewery
block in the Pearl District. Co-owner Brock Johnson, 31, characterized the concerns of his former tenants as being blown out of proportion. Last week, he points out, he installed permanent restrooms. Johnson says the pod now has regular pest management and janitorial services, and has always had trash pickup, though the pod still struggles with overflow on the weekends. “I think the size of this place and the nature of what it is, there’s always variables we have to deal with,” says pod manager Scott Kinard, who sat down for an interview with WW and Johnson in the pod’s warehouse. “We’ve had situations…dealing with our trash company, dealing with our porta-potty company. But as far as the bigger picture, I think we’ve done a fantastic job.” But what’s puzzling is that Multnomah County regulators say none of this is unusual.
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HOT SPOT: Hawthorne Asylum is well-trafficked on weekends.
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Food carts in Portland are required to have a county license and have strict rules relating to sanitation and food storage and handling; they’re also subject to regular county health inspections. But fewer rules apply to the pods themselves. In effect, pod owners have gotten a pass. No one requires they provide trash and recycling pickup, pest control or electricity for the carts. They aren’t subject to routine health inspections; the Asylum has never been inspected by the county health department. The Portland Bureau of Environmental Services conducts narrow inspections of wastewater disposal, waste storage and grease, mostly after someone complains. Last month, the bureau conducted an inspection at Hawthorne Asylum—not based on a complaint—and found it complied with existing city rules. Jeff Martin, the environmental health inspections supervisor for Multnomah County, says that as a result, most pod owners don’t offer much to their cart owners in the way of
consistency, cleanliness and basic services. “It’s pretty universal,” Martin says. “We have this power dynamic where we have these mobile unit operators for whom English might not be first language or they might be brand new to this area or country,” Martin adds, “and landowners charging them an arm and a leg, providing them little to no services and potentially putting them at risk for health and safety concerns.” In 2018, then-60-year-old Steve Johnson bought the former mental hospital property on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard where the Asylum now stands. He and his son, Brock, rehabbed the property themselves—both were handy and had a woodworker’s attention to detail and quality. Beautifully crafted blue-pine benches dot the area, and the recycling station is topped by metal Minions. (Customers dump food waste into the Minions’ mouths.) When Xavier Allen moved Mack Daddy’s BBQ
to the pod, he had big expectations. “They said they were building a bar with indoor bathrooms and a stage with a covered seating area, and it would be open on Fridays and Saturdays till 1:30 in the morning,” Allen says. These and other promises weren’t written in the leases, but five former cart owners say it was a primary reason they came to the Asylum. For Allen, that justified the initial base $2,000 rent. Monthly rent for carts at pods across the city ranges from $800 to $2,500. His first lease was for one year. Allen says he found Steve Johnson a difficult landlord. After a dispute over whether a rent check was late, Johnson sent Allen letters and a text message (reviewed by WW) that threatened to chain up his barbecue smoker and hold his cart as collateral. Johnson did, in fact, loop a chain around it, according to a text from Steve to Allen and a picture of the chained barbecue, shared with WW by Allen. In summer 2021, Johnson told Allen rent was being raised to $2,945 including utilities,
“ We were constantly being lied to. If you’re paying that kind of rent, you should be getting services.”
Kinard says. “But after you sign a lease for the third time, I mean, whose fault is that at this point?”
a 40% increase. Allen negotiated to stay at his remaining rent until Johnson found a new tenant. Allen moved out in October 2021. By that time, Steve Johnson had died in August 2021 at age 63. Brock took over. Michael Keskin, who owns the Bark City BBQ cart, was at the pod for a year. He left, he says, because “we were constantly being lied to. If you’re paying that kind of rent, you should be getting services.” Six cart owners say the Johnsons told them in early 2019 that a 40-tap beer bar would be up and running within six months. It’s still under construction, and Kinard now says they’ve stopped putting a timeline on it. (Kinard says he isn’t paid by the Johnsons to be pod manager, but he’s the owner of the planned bar at the Asylum and currently owns a beer and wine cart at the pod.) Kinard and Brock Johnson add that cart owners could leave at any time if they felt promises were broken. “Everyone had an opportunity to leave if they didn’t feel good about a scenario,”
Aside from what cart owners describe as broken promises, a number of them point to the lack of sanitation as a particular concern. Jeremy Lucas, who co-owned a cart called South with his wife, Siobhan Passmore, until they moved out of the pod in late 2020, says that portable toilets were always “fetid.” Former cart owners shared over a dozen pictures with WW of human feces smeared on the floor and seats of the toilets. Given that the portable restrooms weren’t illuminated, says Dax McMillan— whose food cart, Daily Fuel, operated at the pod until it was kicked out this spring—customers didn’t know what they were getting into when they entered a toilet. And social media has examples of customers complaining about the Asylum, including one who wrote to a cart owner via direct message on Twitter: “Last night my wife went into the disgusting porta-potties and without ANY lights she was unable to see the human shit on the toilet seat and wiped her hand all in it as she was trying to wipe off the seat in complete darkness.” (Five similar customer messages were shared with WW.) Pat Singh, whose family owned Taj Mahal at the pod, says of the restrooms: “They were disgusting. I never used them. I would go to the gas station nearby.” The Johnsons kicked out the cart in August 2020. All nine cart owners who spoke with WW said trash had been an ongoing issue: It was often overflowing and it smelled particularly bad on warm days. Emails from summer of 2020 show the Johnsons told cart owners to help out with emptying trash cans and picking up litter. In June 2021, the Johnsons told cart owners they would no longer handle recycling at the pod—it would be up to individual cart owners. (The Johnsons threatened cart owners with fines if they didn’t flatten boxes before putting them in the receptacle; once the change took effect, a flyer warned carts they’d be kicked out of the pod if they put recycling in a Minion’s mouth two times.) Brock Johnson says the change was partly inspired after the recycling receptacle caught fire in August 2020, as did a shipping container and five portable toilets at the pod. He blames political vandalism: “That was during the riots.” For a time, as five cart owners recounted to WW and Brock Johnson acknowledged, janitorial service was provided by an unhoused man who lived in a shipping container at the pod and was paid a small sum for his work. “It felt like exploitation of a guy who was desperate for the opportunity,” Passmore says. Brock Johnson says he was trying to help the man turn his life around. “We caught him rustling around looking for cans, and we started
talking to him, and we were trying to help him,” Johnson says. (He couldn’t recall how much the man was paid—he guesses between $200 and $500 a week.) And the Minions at the recycling center? Everything thrown in them except aluminum cans goes to a landfill, Brock Johnson says. When asked if he thought that was misleading, Johnson said, “That’s not the intention.” Today, some carts have installed their own makeshift cans to deal with the overflow of garbage: One cart uses a Home Depot bucket, another an empty produce box. On a recent visit, soggy piles of cardboard boxes lay behind nearly every cart. Customers hopped or lunged over several inch-deep puddles of water at the pod to reach certain carts. The portable toilets didn’t smell great, but no waste was visible. A cleaning log on one toilet’s blue plastic wall showed inconsistent cleanings. (Johnson and Kinard joke that they now have the portable toilet company “on speed dial.”) Kinard says the pod deals with sanitary issues as they come up. “I think some folks maybe don’t understand that because they haven’t had to manage such a large, organic thing. It’s like a carnival out here,” Kinard says. “We’ve always had open dialogue with all of our cart owners as much as we can. Some of them are happy, some of them are not. Some of them will never be happy.” One cart owner texted a statement to WW and asked to remain anonymous. That owner also went to bat for Johnson. The owner said, in part: “While struggling to stay afloat throughout the pandemic, a report boasting about issues within the pod that are all exaggerated by an upset cart owner will only make things worse.” If the corrals that hold food carts remain the Wild West, that’s because it’s taken Multnomah County and Portland City Hall a long time to implement and enforce adequate rules. In 2005, Multnomah County had 314 food carts. By 2022, there were 1,039. Jeff Martin, the health inspector with the county, estimates there are about 70 to 90 food cart pods across the county, but no database to track those pods. While the city does have some rules for pods, most of which went into effect in 2020, enforcement is based primarily on a complaint-driven process. That means enforcement can be spotty when there’s no comprehensive database of pods. And the city rules are limited mostly to waste storage, grease and pollution control. The city estimates it has conducted inspections of 12 pods in the past year and taken a total of
BACKUP: Some carts have makeshift garbage receptacles to deal with trash.
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They Paved Paradise In 2008, Roger Goldingay bought three lots of land along North Mississippi Avenue. Two were tear-down buildings; a third was a vacant lot filled with dilapidated toilets and other junk. His plan was to develop a four-story residential and commercial building. The recession hit. He had to find a way to pay his mortgages on the land. Meanwhile, a food cart owner asked to park on his property and sell lunch to construction workers laboring across the street. That sparked an idea: What if he found 10 other carts to park on his land? So Goldingay approached the city with his plans and got sewage and electrical permits, among others. He spent days driving around quadrants of the city handing out handmade flyers on printer paper to every cart he could find. “The carts were all over, in people’s driveways, gas stations. I probably left a flyer with 50 to 100 carts,” Goldingay recalls. “That saved my property. It saved my ass.” For the next couple of years, Goldingay says, landowners sought his counsel on how to open a pod. “I saw most of them as being opportunistic. They thought it was easy and cheap, and all they had to do was charge carts monthly rent and everything was fine,” Goldingay says. “That wasn’t the case behind any of it. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on infrastructure for the carts.” He went on to open Cartlandia, one of the most famed pods in the city, along the Springwater Corridor on Southeast 82nd Avenue. Goldingay wasn’t the only landowner who was desperate; there was a boom of pods in the years following the recession, many of them landowners turning their vacant lots into outdoor food courts. Carts were licensed and regulated by Multnomah County and underwent regular inspections, just like brickand-mortar restaurants, since they first emerged. But pods never were and had no obligation to provide sanitation services. Few pod owners provide everything cart owners want. Richard Stein operates one of those unicorns. He established the Hillsdale Food Cart Park in 2012. He provides cart owners, all of whom are immigrants, with trash, utilities, pest management and janitorial services. He employs a pod manager who cleans it four times a day. He says he doesn’t turn a profit. “I don’t have a profit margin, the expenses and the profits are the same. We keep it clean, that all takes money. Everything’s really primo,” Stein says. “If I wanted to make money, I’d have to raise everybody’s rent. It offers immigrant families the chance to make it in the new country.” Other pods are dumps. “I didn’t like to see people doing it in a substandard way,” Goldingay says. “They’d just dump their gray water into their street, no trash pickup—there was a lot of what I would consider unsanitary practices, I didn’t think it was good for the industry. But my way is also expensive.” SOPHIE PEEL .
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FLASHBACK: Former cart owners Dax McMillan and Georgette Laman peer inside the pod.
four enforcement actions. But the lack of rules regarding sanitation and services that pods must provide to cart owners means that pod owners have gotten away with not providing services that any other landlord would be expected to provide, like trash service. “They have a loophole, and we’re trying to close it [for] these new cart owners who may not have been in the restaurant business before, who don’t speak English, who are getting charged $2,000 a month for a parking spot and getting no services,” Martin says. “We’ve heard many stories about that.” Local officials have been well aware of these issues at pods for a decade. But it wasn’t until 2017 that the county began to explore how to tackle them. Martin says county inspectors conducting routine inspections of carts were seeing alarming things at pods: overflowing trash cans, pooling water, carts clustered too close together, fire-gutted carts and graywater spills. In late 2019, Multnomah County commis-
sioners unanimously approved a new licensing program for pods. It required pod owners to take on responsibilities like pest management, trash and recycling pickup, providing electricity and ensuring that carts use potable water. It also regulated the type of restrooms a pod must provide, and required 5-foot setbacks between carts and rights of way. And it allowed the county to enforce the new mandates with random, twice-yearly inspections. “People are really interested in making sure these regulations work, because they kind of should’ve been done already, as we’ve heard,” Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury said at the time. The new rules were supposed to take effect in 2020. Then the pandemic hit. The county finally launched its licensing program in January. The county rules took effect Jan. 1. But enforcement hasn’t happened yet— the inspections hinge on pod owners applying for a license, and only 10 of them have done so. “Launching a program that involves permit-
Keeping Up With the Johnsons
ting—especially when those rules are new—is a slow process,” says Kate Yeiser, a spokeswoman for Multnomah County. The county’s new licensing program will help the city enforce its own rules by creating a database of pods and reporting issues found during regular county inspections to the city. Matt Criblez, the city’s environmental compliance division manager, says the city and county “rely on each other’s regulations…the county license closes loopholes that allowed pods to be largely unregulated up until this year.” Kafoury tells WW she’s “proud of the way [we have] responded to the needs and recommendations of food cart and pod owners and operations, public concerns, and the recommendations of health inspectors and advisory committees.” Cart owners worry that the cost of the added services will only be transferred to the carts through increased rent; the county put no stipulations on who must bear the cost burden. “I
suspect that some landlords are just going to pass it on to the cart owners,” Passmore says. “It’s hard to police.” Passmore and Lucas were lucky—they both had outside jobs, and their food cart was more of a passion project. The couple worries about the other cart owners they know. “If they lose their income, even for a few weeks, with any kind of dispute with their landlords, they don’t pay their bills,” says Lucas. “It wasn’t something they just did when they wanted. They were dependent on it.” Brock Johnson, who received the county’s license paperwork last week, tells WW he hopes the county will make an exception so the pod doesn’t have to abide by the new 5-foot setback requirement between carts. (The county says it might make exceptions depending on pre-license inspections at pods.) Johnson has yet to turn in his license application for Hawthorne Asylum.
FAMILY AFFAIR: Murals of Steve Johnson’s son and daughter adorn the walls of the pod.
The walls of Hawthorne Asylum are painted with the faces of Steve Johnson’s children: his son, Brock, and his daughter, Ariel. Brock wears a construction hardhat printed with the American flag. Steve Johnson was born and raised in Portland. He met his wife, Paula, at a church dance. They moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a real estate broker and later moved back to Gresham to start a family and had two kids, who are now grown. He and his siblings owned a scattering of commercial properties around the Portland area. The family owns a 150-acre ranch in Joseph, Ore., along with Steve’s siblings. Brock Johnson and his sister both list themselves on social media as representatives for Young Living Essential Oils—a multilevel marketing company founded in 1993 that touts the ability of essential oils to enhance wellness, including claims they can spur weight loss. (In 2014, the company got in trouble with the feds for allowing distributors to market its oils as a possible cure for Ebola.) Steve Johnson’s obituary described him as a larger-than-life handyman who fiercely loved his family: “Some favorite hobbies included his salt water aquariums, remote control cars, boats and planes.” The obituary described Hawthorne Asylum as Steve’s last project, and his first undertaken with Brock. “Their vision together continues on with Brock at the helm. Steve has left an incredible legacy that will live on throughout generations to come,” it reads. “No doubt a ‘YEAH BABY’ was echoing through the concourses of angels—Steve’s signature expression.” Brock Johnson says his intention at Hawthorne Asylum was always to make something unique alongside his dad. Johnson lit up when talking about the next project after the bar at Hawthorne Asylum is completed: an area that somehow benefits those with mental health issues, an issue that was meaningful to Steve because much of his family suffered from mental illness. “I want to build some type of tower in the back area that acts as an elevated seating area as well as a live stage and concert area. And somehow, via this tower, I want to create a way for people to donate to mental health in some way, shape or form,” Johnson says. “Those gears are just starting to turn.” S O P H I E P E E L .
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STREET
OUR BODIES, OUR CHOICE Photos by Mick Hangland-Skill On Instagram: @mick.jpg
Hundreds of people rallied in downtown Portland on Saturday, May 14, to demand safe and legal access to abortion nationwide. The Bans Off Our Bodies protest, organized by Planned Parenthood and others, was just one of many held across the country on the same day. Demonstrators marched in the streets before gathering in Chapman Square and in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center. The protest was a response to the leaked U.S. Supreme Court majority draft opinion that suggested the landmark Roe v. Wade decision would likely be overturned. If that happens, more than 20 states have laws that could restrict or ban abortion.
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Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
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HANDMADE IN PORTLAND, OREGON Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
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GET BUSY
STUFF TO DO IN PORTLAND THIS WEEK, INDOORS AND OUT.
WIDMER BROTHERS
ALSO is hiring. Are you looking for the kind of job where you can make a difference everyday? Make heart work your work. Hiring bonus | Great benefits | Make an impact Visit heartworkoregon.com to learn more.
DRINK: Hefe Day
The beer that symbolizes the beginning of the city’s modern craft era continues to prove that it’s still relevant: Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen just snagged a silver at the prestigious World Beer Cup competition. The win came at a perfect time, too—just weeks before the return of an in-person celebration of Hefe Day at the North Portland production facility. The event will kick off an updated brewery tour, introduce the classic beer’s new branding, and allow attendees to sample just-released beers from Widmer’s innovation program. Widmer Brothers Brewing, 929 N Russell St., 503-2813333, widmerbrothers.com. 11 am-4 pm Sunday, May 22. Free.
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personal injury product liability wrongful death medical malpractice
WATCH: Akira Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic 1988 film is a must-see for fans of anime and cyberpunk cinema in general. A tale of young rabble rousers in the futuristic city of Neo-Tokyo, it builds to a psychedelic climax that will leave you scratching your head—in a good way. Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 9:30 pm Saturday, May 21. $8-$10.
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LISTEN: Land of Talk Here are three words that will instantly make your day better: Canadian indie rock. Recorded during the pandemic, Land of Talk’s new EP, Calming Night Partner, takes listeners on a journey of healing—a journey that continues with their upcoming Portland show. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 503-231-9663, dougfirlounge.com. 9 pm Thursday, May 19. $16. 21+.
SEE: Vanport the Musical
Before being destroyed by the 1948 Columbia River flood, Vanport was a thriving multiracial community and the largest World War II federal housing project in the United States. This musical, presented by World Stage Theatre in collaboration with Northwest Children’s Theatre as part of the 2022 Vanport Mosaic Festival, celebrates the 80th anniversary of the building of Oregon’s lost city. Northwest Children’s Theatre and School, 1819 NW Everett St., nwcts.org. 7 pm Friday-Saturday, May 20-June 5. 2 pm performances Saturday and Sunday, May 28 and June 5. $20-$25.
EAT: Sebo Art Dinner
1022 NW Marshall Street #450 Portland OR | (503) 226-6361 | paulsoncoletti.com
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Oregon native Sebo Walker first made a name for himself as a skater, but more recently he’s been getting attention for his art, which includes everything from massive, abstract murals to colorful, custom-designed skateboard decks. You can watch him work at Cooperativa’s first ticketed event that combines live art and dinner, which includes antipasti, salad, Roman-style pizza, pasta and dessert. Admission also guarantees you’ll go home with one of Walker’s creations. Cooperativa, 1250 NW 9th Ave., 503-342-7416, cooperativapdx. com. Multiple seatings begin at 6 pm Thursday, May 19. $100 per person.
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PATIO PICKS
W
e’re hoping that this highlight on great patios is a premonition for consistent sunshine in the coming weeks. We’re ready for that warm weather! Sun or no sun, the bars and restaurants featured on this page are great places to catch some summer vibes with excellent drinks and outdoor seating. Enjoy these patio picks - we recommend you check out all of these spots before we’re forced indoors again.
Workers Tap
Feel good about knocking back a few pints at Portland’s first worker owned & operated bar. Housed in a 1904 Victorian building with a beer garden around back, this spot has the neighborhood feel down. With 20 rotating taps of European inspired local craft beer and cider, it’s the perfect place to drink well, while feeling like you’re in your friend’s (very comfortable) backyard. workerstap.com | 101 SE 12th Ave
Fire on the Mountain Buffalo Wings
10 Barrel Brewing Co. 10 Barrel recently upgraded their rooftop patio in a major way. With more heating and year-round coverage this patio will deliver a great experience even in an unexpected rainstorm. Great spot for a weeknight dinner, or extending the weekend with live music every Sunday night. Easy to forget this spot lives right in the heart of the Pearl! 10barrel.com | 1411 NW Flanders St
Shine Distillery & Grill
Hit up this North Portland rooftop patio for good eats, local taps, and craft cocktails made with Shine’s own spirits. Grab a table or perch on a pair of barstools overlooking North Williams Avenue. Plenty of parking for happy hour, dinner, or weekend brunch at this destination hot spot. shinedistillerygrill.com | 4232 N Williams Ave
Stem Wine Bar
What’s better than beer and wings? With outdoor seating at all three eastside locations, Fire on the Mountain - the original wing joint in Portland - is bringing the heat. House-brewed beer, and a menu that goes far beyond pub-fare (vegan options!), don’t skip this spot this summer.
Stem’s covered patio is in the heart of N Mississippi, making it a great place to anchor yourself before or after dinner or shopping. But the real reason to head to Stem is their drink specials and flights. With different specials every night, and flights that focus on reds, whites or Oregon only bottles - this is a great place to try something new. Plus, they’ve got live music every weekend throughout the summer!
portlandwings.com | 3443 NE 57th Ave.
stemwinebarpdx.com | 3920 N. Mississippi Ave Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
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FOOD & DRINK
Top 5
Buzz List WHERE TO DRINK THIS WEEK.
1. FLORA
THOMAS TEAL
4500 SW Watson Ave., Beaverton, 503-372-5352, exploretock.com. 6 pm-close Thursday-Sunday. You can now reserve a stool inside the hidden bar perched above the new Beaverton Loyal Legion taproom. Flora is an intimate and refined cocktail-focused venue, serving concoctions in crystal glassware in a swanky setting—here the lights are dimmed and the wallpaper depicts mythical creatures. Customers can expect an eclectic, plantbased drink menu that’s as playful as it is colorful. Opening offerings included a Caribbean horchata, a Tang-based cocktail and a whiskey-Aperol mix with a kick thanks to the addition of cayenne simple syrup.
Editor: Andi Prewitt Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com
2. URDANETA
3033 NE Alberta St., 503-288-1990, urdanetapdx. com. 5-10 pm Tuesday-Thursday and Sunday, 5-11 pm Friday-Saturday. If you live by the slogan “Rosé all day,” then you’ll want a standing reservation at Urdaneta this spring. The tapas restaurant just announced its wine of the season is Punctum Petulante Pét Nat—essentially a wilder version of Champagne with a vibrant pink hue, bright berry aroma and red summer fruit notes. Urdaneta’s wine director chose this particular rosé because it pairs perfectly with chef Javier Canteras’ Spanish-inspired dishes, such as burrata drizzled with harissa honey, tortilla de bacalao (confit salt cod), and croquetas de jamon filled with béchamel.
3. SUCKERPUNCH SUCKERPUNCH
OFF THE HOOK: Lovely’s Fifty Fifty still takes orders via a “pizza phone,” which started as a temporary pandemic fix to stay in business.
There’s an App for That 1030 SE Belmont St., 503-208-4022, suckerpunch. bar. 6-10 pm Thursday-Saturday, 6-8 pm Sunday. You will leave Suckerpunch as sober as you were when you walked in, but the thing is, Portland’s first non-alcoholic bar still works its magic: It’s a place where adults can enjoy some complex yet balanced cocktails in a cozy place and catch up with friends. Andy McMillan, who founded the business because he was desperate for better zero-proof concoctions around town, recently changed the three-item menu, so you’ll find some new options if you’ve already been.
4. TOPWIRE HOP PROJECT
8668 Crosby Road NE, Woodburn, 503-765-1645, topwirehp.com. 11 am-8 pm Thursday and Sunday, 11 am-9 pm Friday-Saturday. The average beer nerd can’t score a badge to the Craft Brewers Conference, the brewing industry’s largest annual gathering. But you can get a taste of some of the same beers that were only available to attendees of this year’s event. TopWire Hop Project—the beer garden that opened in the middle of Crosby Hop Farm in 2020—has announced it will kick off its third season with a selection of special collaboration beers, many that were available only at the 2022 convention in Minneapolis. Even when those kegs have tapped, return for the view of the hop bines, which grow 18 feet tall and surround the space like emerald green curtains.
5. THE EMERALD ROOM
2117 NE Oregon St., Suite 202, 971-213-1085, aimsiremerald.com. 4-10 pm Wednesday-Saturday. Portland’s Aimsir Distilling Company just nabbed three awards from the prestigious San Francisco Spirits Competition, so if you haven’t made your way into the brand’s swanky bar the Emerald Room, now you have as good an excuse as any to book a reservation. Be sure to sample the Aimsir Bourbon, its first whiskey that won double gold, and the Cold Brew Bourbon, which took home silver. The latter can be ordered in a boulevardier starting April 20, National Cold Brew Day.
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With a local cap on food delivery app fees set to expire, are restaurants and digital companies prepared to collaborate? BY M AT T T R U E H E R Z
@mattytrueherz
Two summers ago, following the initial pandemic online ordering boom, local restaurants and organizations like the Portland Independent Restaurant Alliance fought tooth and nail to reduce third-party delivery app fees. Companies like Uber Eats, Grubhub and Caviar were charging businesses as much as 30% of the total cost of an order—an amount restaurant owners said was eating into their profits during an already challenging time for the industry. Relief came when the Portland City Council passed an emergency ordinance that temporarily capped app commissions at 10%. However, that’s set to expire at the end of June. Extreme growth in demand for takeout has cemented third-party apps in many restaurants’ operations, but some have managed to sidestep digital delivery services by turning to creative alternatives. Lovely’s Fifty Fifty was forced to close its dining room in March 2020, along with every other restaurant in the state. Just days later, co-owner and chef Sarah Minnick decided to serve pizzas to go three nights a week, new territory for her North Mississippi Avenue pizzaand-ice cream haven. She cobbled together an ordering system with what was on hand: an old iPhone, which became the “pizza phone;” her personal Instagram account, which displayed the rotating menu; and Venmo, which served as the contactless payment method. More than two years later, the system hasn’t changed. “Text your orders to the pizza phone,” read the Instagram posts, followed by a list of pies flaunting local vegetables and hard-to-find imported cheeses. What started as a friendly—if not quirky—way to get pizza to the people in unprecedented times has persisted. Presumably, the business would have outgrown its charmed mix of repurposed technologies; perhaps it would have streamlined things,
sorted out the details. Comments rolled in on the weekly posts: “You know there are apps that automate this all for you.” Those apps—which offer everything from bare-bones online ordering systems to fast, automated delivery and marketing packages—also stand to threaten restaurants’ famously thin profit margins. When COVID hit, third-party delivery became the middle man between everyone and the local restaurants they were desperate to repatronize. In turn, what was once a small stream of revenue before the pandemic became their sole means of staying afloat. And with apps taking a significant portion of those sales, circumstances forced some restaurants to operate at a loss. Cities across the country responded by capping delivery-app commissions. Portland’s cap aims to ease “the financial burden on struggling restaurants while not unduly burdening delivery platforms.” But online ordering platforms have pushed back. Grubhub’s website, for instance, argues that commission caps allow restaurants to “access delivery, marketing and other services at artificially low prices.” Portland’s cap was temporary from the outset, “while restaurants are unable to provide unrestricted dine-in service.” But perhaps COVID shed light on a problem that had not yet fully surfaced. The delivery-app market consolidated significantly during the pandemic. By July 2020, the Big Three—DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub—owned 97% of the U.S. market. Commissions grew under the hegemony to an industry standard of 30%, a rate capable of funding the services both customers and restaurants want, but one that also exceeds the average restaurant’s 5% profit margin. And despite app companies’ soaring revenues, they’ve long been criticized for their inability to turn a consistent profit. The knee-jerk reaction may be to boycott apps, though it’s difficult to imagine dropping the habit of ordering through them as quickly
THOMAS TEAL
Top 5
Hot Plates WHERE TO EAT THIS WEEK.
1. YES PLEASE SMASH BURGER
3950 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 707-500-2117, yespleasesmashburger.com. Noon-5 pm Wednesday-Sunday. As the child of a naturopath and a herbalist, Tai Pfeifer grew up eating fresh and healthy, and was determined to bring that to his slow fast food. The Yes Please Smash Burger is grass-finished (as opposed to “grass-fed,” a term that still allows grain consumption), and until recently, Pfeifer ground the meat himself, using a mixture of brisket and heart. He also makes his own American cheese from real cheddar, which doesn’t have the dozen-plus ingredients you’ll find in Kraft Singles. It’s also actually a cheese sauce, which gets poured directly on the burger during cooking, resulting in an almost fricolike crusty crispy cheese halo.
2. PHUKET CAFE AARON LEE
1818 NW 23rd Place, 503-781-2997, phuketcafepdx. com. 5-10 pm Monday-Friday, 10 am-2 pm and 5-10 pm Saturday-Sunday. Rocketship Earl has catapulted skyward again. Phuket Cafe, located inside the compact former Ataula space in Northwest Portland, is Akkapong “Earl” Ninsom’s newest restaurant and co-venture with bartender Eric Nelson. After barely a month, waits can run long for Ninsom’s new, twisted take on Thai cuisine, a niche he owns. It’s a challenge to describe the menu, but it reflects the pair’s recent travels in Thailand, and includes everything from oysters on the half shell to bacon bites to paella to a glorious pork chop—a massive 18-ounce Tails & Trotters cut, sliced from the bone for service.
3. KING TIDE FISH & SHELL
1510 S Harbor Way, 503-295-6166, kingtidefishandshell.com. 7 am-1 pm and 4-9 pm Monday-Thursday, 7 am-1 pm and 4-10 pm Friday, 8 am-1 pm and 4-10 pm Saturday, 8 am-1 pm and 4-9 pm Sunday. One of Portland’s rare downtown riverfront restaurants has a new chef helming the kitchen. Alexander Diestra is a familiar name to anyone who pays attention to the city’s culinary scene, boasting more than 18 years of experience at places like Saucebox, Clarklewis and Andina. The Peruvian native is now shaking up the menu at King Tide by introducing new items such as bluefin tuna tartare, kanpachi crudo, ono ceviche, Wagyu coulotte and a seafood risotto with prawns and scallops—lively dishes that are a mashup of the flavors of his home country and Japan.
4. BLUTO’S as we picked it up. Many, including Minnick, don’t think apps should be shunned. She loves her pizza phone (“it’s literally the best!”) but is pragmatic about the larger picture: “Everyones wants it; they want to be able to order on DoorDash. So the question is: How do we make it work better? How can we make it work for us?” Fixed regulations are an obvious answer. Both New York City and San Francisco implemented permanent caps of 15% per delivery, but many contend that ceilings on commissions can actually harm restaurants. “Price controls can lead to increased costs on customers, which can reduce orders for restaurants,” says Briana Megid, a representative of DoorDash. Another argument is that caps limit what apps can do. “Services go well beyond delivery,” says Grubhub spokeswoman Liza Dee, “and price controls limit every restaurant’s ability to opt into marketing services that boost orders and generate added revenue.” Given that the current 10% commission rate is unsustainable, coupled with the cap expiration on the horizon, it’s hard not to wonder: Is third-party delivery that allows all parties to profit even possible? Apps are expensive for restaurants, but they’re also capable of helping them. Storefront, a platform created by DoorDash, enables restaurants to post their menus online and easily accept digital or-
ders—removing the need to set up their own online platforms. It charges only 30 cents per order and a Visa processing fee, and Storefront advertises the option of passing on all delivery expenses to the customer (a $3.99 fee plus 10%). Transferring costs to the consumer is one way to make the system work, but faced with additional expenses, like tips for the restaurant and the driver, some customers may be priced out. Some apps’ latest move is to implement a tiered system in which restaurants choose from escalating commission percentages that correspond with a range of marketing benefits and an expanded delivery radius. Since introducing tiered systems, DoorDash has continued operating in Portland with a 10% fee, but commissions will rise to anywhere from 15% to 30%, depending on a restaurant’s chosen tier, when the cap expires. After relying for years on third-party apps to connect to the restaurant industry, most people seem to agree on only one thing—that there is no magic fix. The power of Lovely’s pizza phone is undeniable, but certainly not the answer for everyone. Traveling back to a time when we all picked up our own takeout is not a feasible solution either. And because business owners seem to have their own preferences when it comes to delivery, perhaps getting food to customers requires as many different delivery systems as there are restaurants.
2838 SE Belmont St., 971-383-1619, blutospdx.com. 11 am-10 pm daily. Bluto’s, named after John Belushi’s hard-partying character in Animal House, comes from Lardo and Grassa mastermind Rick Gencarelli and the ChefStable restaurant group. Like Lardo and Grassa, it aims for that fancy, fast-casual niche, with counter service and midrange prices belying some seriously tasty cooking. Bluto’s portion sizes are perfect for sharing, so covering a table in a variety of dishes and allowing the flavors to mingle is the right way to eat here. The zippy citrus and sour labneh in the chicory salad should be eaten in between bites of the savory skewers and hummus scooped up with pita bread.
5. MERCATO AT CAFFE MINGO
807 NW 21st Ave., 503-226-4646, caffemingonw. com. 11 am-9 pm Tuesday-Friday, 2-9 pm Saturday-Sunday. Mercato’s Jerry Lasagna is named after Mingo chef Jerry Huisinga, who’s been feeding Portland pasta for three decades. This is a petite and classic white lasagna, with a strongly nutmegged béchamel sauce playing the starring role in every bite. The noodles and the pork-and-beef Bolognese add texture as much as flavor, with one cheese, grana Padano, capping it off. Add a salad and some bread and you’ll definitely get two servings from one order.
Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
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Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. For use only by adults twenty-one years or older
POTLANDER
Celebrity Stoners We put brands tied to famous names to the test to see if they live up to the hype. BY B R I A N N A W H E E L E R
As cannabis continues to go mainstream, plenty of famous faces are not only open about what they’re smoking; an increasing number of actors, athletes and musicians are lending their names to new industry products, or actively investing in startups. But have you ever wondered which cannabis product a dead celebrity might endorse? Because we sure have. For the sake of debate, we auditioned everything from Garcia Hand Picked flower to the recent George Harrison-Dad Grass collaboration as well as strains from Berner Cookies and Oregon-based Belushi’s Farm—yes, some of the famous people in the lineup are still living. As we’ve all learned from witnessing decades of celebrity endorsements, slapping a well-known name or likeness onto a product doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any good. So we put the cannabis branded by pop culture icons to the test. Here are the results:
Gary Payton by Berner Cookies Cookies seems like a good place to start when it comes to celeb-backed cannabis brands. The company was founded by Bay Area rapper Berner in 2008, and responsible for the Girl Scout Cookies strain that has since become a household name. In fact, Cookies has become such a popular lifestyle brand, its hoodies and hats are often displayed in the windows of mall-dwelling retailers like Zumiez and Vans. Gary Payton is one of Cookies’ top-rated strains grown in collaboration with Powerzzz Genetics. Named after the NBA player who’s widely considered to be one of the greatest point guards of all time (Payton’s jersey number was 20, which corresponded with the number of this promising phenotype), this cultivar’s genetics come courtesy of a cross between Y Life and Snowman. The nugs are on the small side, but still dense and sugary with crystals. Expect deep green buds, a funky, piney nose, and a heavy body high that could easily result in couchlock depending on the smoker’s condition. At 34% THC, Gary Payton definitely has a “by varsity stoners, for varsity stoners” vibe, which is about as legit as any celebrity-backed megabrand can be. BUY: Lemonnade PDX, 6218 NE Columbia Blvd., 971-279-2337.
Mendo Trips by Garcia Hand Picked Founded by Trixie Garcia, Jerry’s daughter, Garcia Hand Picked partners with area farms to cultivate a selection of familiar strains, and a number of the growers the company works with are Sun+Earth certified, the gold standard when it comes to organic, outdoor production. We scored an eighth of Mendo Trips, a syrupy indica cultivar with airy, aubergine buds acceptably sparkly and fragrant for the price ($35 for a prepackaged, glass jar embossed with Jerry Garcia’s face). The flower was a perfectly delightful, quick-smoking
mouthful of candy that, though couched in indica genetics, delivered an elastic body high. I smoked this before organizing my notes for an upcoming episode of WW’s Dive podcast and found the high to be clear enough for quick thinking but languid enough to keep me relaxed. However, at 25% THC your results may vary. My primary takeaway was that this brand would probably appeal most to an older generation of smokers or die-hard Deadheads. BUY: Gnome Grown Dispensary, 5012 NE 28th Ave., 971-346-2098, gnomegrownorganics.com.
All Things Must Grass by George Harrison and Dad Grass The most gratuitous of the celeb-backed brands we sampled was a CBG-CBD blend produced by novelty cannaisseurs Dad Grass. The branding suggests heavily that George Harrison has somehow given his blessing to this box of hemp-blend pre-rolls, but prospective buyers should also consider that Harrison died of lung cancer, which makes this post-mortem collab a bit tone deaf. The pre-rolls smoke smoothly, but the flavors and textures just leave too much to be desired. Even for a hemp enthusiast, these are too bland to get enthusiastic about. Would George Harrison smoke Dad Grass? We’ll never know, but I’d like to think he’d be more into vaping Jerry Garcia’s selects from a combustion-free Volcano, you know, for his health. BUY: dadgrass.com
Nilla Wafers by Belushi’s Farm Who knew that when Jim Belushi, of all people, moved to the Rogue Valley to build a cannabis farm that he would become an esteemed cultivator? Because that is very much what happened, so much so in fact, that Belushi’s Farm has become a marijuana hub of sorts for Southern Oregon’s cannabis community. That’s all well and good, but we put Belushi’s reputation as a neighborhood steward aside to try a pre-roll of one of the farm’s signature strains: Nilla Wafers. Nilla Wafers is a sweet, piney, dank cultivar with a rich, cottony exhale, bred from a cross of Wedding Cake and Sundae Driver. The result is a balanced expression of both bouncy and relaxing genetics, and Belushi’s variation has a robust, fragrant terpene profile that evokes both a damp, evergreen forest and a sugar-spiked diesel tank. After smoking roughly half the joint, my high was, more than anything, responsive. The high never really veered toward spacey oblivion or hyperactive focus, but rather supported my resting mood. This is really tasty, well-processed herb. It just happened to be grown by a household name. Bottom line: Belushi’s flowers are welcome in my stash box anytime, but I don’t expect I’ll be streaming K-9, K-911, or K-9: P.I. anytime soon. BUY: Nectar, 3350 NE Sandy Blvd., 971-703-4777, nectar.store.
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PERFORMANCE
Shows of the Week
Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson | Contact: bennett@wweek.com
LUKE HENERY
TAKING A STAND: The Chats boys.
Three From Queensland The Chats have released a new set of “shed rock” bangers. BY M I C H E L L E K I C H E R E R
After playing a couple of shows in Australia’s Northern Territory, The Chats landed back at the Brisbane airport. As they were taking their gear to the car, bassist and lead singer Eamon Sandwith saw a parked car with the license plate number 6L GTR. “We thought it was such a hilarious plate number, we just had to write a song about this dude’s car,” says Sandwith. The resulting song, “6L GTR,” was written alongside drummer Matt Boggis and guitarist Josh Hardy. The song was inspired by a question Sandwith had about the car’s driver: “When he’s fangin’ it [speeding] in his car, what’s in his head?” Sandwith had good reason to wonder, given that he doesn’t drive or have any idea what a 6-liter Gran Turismo Racer would look like. But here’s the thing: The Chats don’t do the kind of shout punk where you have no idea what they’re saying under all the shredding. Their lyrics are meant to be heard. On their first couple of albums, they wanted us to hear about being broke, drunk and hungry—and with their forthcoming album, Get Fucked, they seek to immerse us in dark situational comedy. The album’s first single, “Struck by Lightning,” is a fast ’n’ wild blitz in which Sandwith imagines what a strike from above would be like. “We were just having a jam. I was on the drums this time,” he recalls. “And I just started playing this little pattern, kind of like, ‘struck by—lightnin’!’ I was like, that could work, that could sound pretty cool for a song.” Sandwith was fascinated by fortunate people who have survived lightning strikes. “I heard that people can’t grow their hair back and shit, which is weird—especially the whole no-eyebrows thing,” he says (this is dubious; when it comes to hair and lightning, it’s more 26
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likely that your hair will simply stand on end before you are struck). Superstitious about being struck now that he’s written a song about it, Sandwith adds, “Touch wood!” (That’s “knock on wood” to you Americans. The Chats hail from Queensland.) A lot of The Chats’ songs are self-contained stories about young dudes (cue classics “Dine N Dash” and “Bus Money”). One of the band’s first big hits, “Smoko,” is a contagious song about just trying to take a damn smoke break. Familiarity aside, the trio is one of the most interesting punk bands out there. Listening to their music, which they describe as “shed rock,” is like slamming an espresso and taking a sip of laughing gas while dancing on the roof of, well, a speeding GTR. Which brings us back to “6L GTR,” which spawned a music video (featuring the work of illustrator Marco Imov) in which the Chats boys crave a 6L GTR to replace their shoddy ol’ van. It’s full of their cheeky energy—and serves as a perfect encapsulation of the song and their style. Clever storytellers with a fuck-off attitude, The Chats are in fine form with Get Fucked. When asked what they like about the new album, Sandwith says simply, “It’s just better. I’m really happy with how it’s turned out, so it will be nice to get it out there.” As far as the band’s songwriting process goes, Sandwith notes, “We don’t overthink it too much. I’ll come up with a song or Josh will have an idea. We’ll catch up and work it out, then Matt will come in and make it better. Then I’ll just keep some notes in my phone about some ideas for lyrics that could work for a song. Nothing too scientific about it.” SEE IT: Get Fucked is out Aug. 19 on Bargain Bin Records. The Chats play the Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 503225-0047, crystalballroompdx.com. 8:30 pm Thursday, May 26. $22.50.
Listening recommendations from the past, present, Portland and the periphery.
BY DANIEL BROMFIELD // @BROMF3
FRIDAY, MAY 20: Though you’re still more likely to know Steely Dan from classic-rock radio or your pop’s record collection than hip word of mouth, the long-running band— now with singer Donald Fagen as the sole original member—still resonates with burned-out hipsters who suddenly realized they were kinda LCD Soundsystem before LCD Soundsystem. Virtuosic funk-jazz ensemble Snarky Puppy opens. Veterans Memorial Coliseum, 300 N Ramsey Way, 503-235-8771, rosequarter.com. 7:30 pm. $26$246. All ages. SATURDAY, MAY 21: Jenny Hval is one of pop’s most unabashed philosophers. The Norwegian’s lyrics are defined by bizarre free associations and metatextual musings, but the beauty of her voice makes getting to the bottom of her knotty ideas a blast. Her eighth album, Classic Objects, is one of her best, ditching the club beats of 2019’s The Practice of Love for almost reggae-lite arrangements centered on hand drums and keyboards. But if “Year of Love” is any indication, please don’t propose to your partner at one of her shows. Holocene. 1001 SE Morrison St., 503-239-7639, holocene.org. 6 pm. $23. 21+. SUNDAY, MAY 22: Suavity? Subtlety? In the age of hashtag relatability? Destroyer mastermind Dan Bejar’s sharp wit and debonair charm shine through the winedrunk haze of his smart-bastard persona. He’s one of the last rock musicians carrying on in the tradition of Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, albeit far more cryptic and Canadian. 2011’s Kaputt might be his lounge-pop masterpiece, a horn-drenched opus told through the eyes of a wizened playboy, but this year’s Labyrinthitis leans into his talent for jumbling words until they make just the right amount of sense. Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark St., 971-808-5094, revolutionhall.com. 7 pm. $25. 21+. MONDAY, MAY 23: Thrash metal might’ve sprung up spontaneously around the world, an inevitable product of heavy metal and punk mutating into more and more extreme forms, but the Bay Area has a good claim as the genre’s epicenter. “The Bay Strikes Back” tour brings together Berkeley’s Testament, Richmond’s Exodus and Daly City’s Death Angel. Exodus even boasted future Metallica member Kirk Hammett in their initial lineup! This is a must-see for any metal fan with a Monday night to spare. Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., 971-230-0033, roselandpdx.com. 6:50 pm. $27. 21+.
MOVIES
Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson Contact: bennett@wweek.com
DEREK KNOWLES
SCREENER
STREAMING WARS YOUR WEEKLY FILM QUEUE BY B E N N E T T C A M P B E L L F E R G U S O N @ t h o b e n n e t t
PORTLAND PICK: ALLRED FILMS
TREE OF LIFE: One of the redwood giants in Sentinels.
Forest Frontlines Redwood Forest Defense activists star in the documentary Sentinels. BY C H A N C E S O L E M - P F E I F E R
@chance_ s _ p
SEE IT: Sentinels streams for Los Angeles Times subscribers at latimes.com/about/shortdocs. The film also streams June 1-12 as part of the San Francisco Documentary Festival at sfdocfest2022.eventive.org. $10.
INDIE PICK: Still crying over Justin Lin not directing Fast X? Then surrender to the silliness of Finishing the Game, his 2007 mockumentary about the battle to complete the unfinished (and real!) Bruce Lee film Game of Death. Roger Fan steals the show as the egomaniacal Breeze Loo, whose dreams of martial arts superstardom are slightly hampered by his heinous moves. AMC+, IFC Films Unlimited, Roku, Sling TV.
HOLLYWOOD PICK: Before seeing Alex Garland’s Men, watch his alleged directorial debut: 2012’s Dredd, a gruesomely funny satire starring Karl Urban (who claims Garland directed the film, despite Pete Travis getting sole credit). Urban is hilariously humorless as the titular enforcer from John Wagner’s comic book, but he’s upstaged by Lena Headey as Ma-Ma, a former sex worker who fights fascism with fascism. Amazon Prime/Epix, Philo, Sling TV, Roku.
INTERNATIONAL PICK: CENTRAL MOTION PICTURES
Behind the new documentary Sentinels lies a forest of stories. There’s one about how the logging company Green Diamond owns the fourth-most land in the United States, another about how Pacific Northwest tree-sitting protests have evolved since the timber wars of 30 years ago, and more still about the convictions of anonymous activists and their efforts to block clear-cuts. Sentinels, though, leads the audience into the trees hoping they’ll see the forest eventually. In the film, Portland documentarians Derek Knowles and Lawrence Lerew capture a Humboldt County, Calif., tree-sit with a bare, sensorial, vérité style, often through the sightlines of airborne Redwood Forest Defense activists committing a half-decade to their mission. Influenced by the observant, naturalistic approach of directors like Kelly Reichardt (First Cow, Old Joy), the nonfiction filmmakers orient Sentinels around the atmosphere and processes of tree-sitting: the rain’s patter, a backhoe’s screech, and the care required to make a 100-foot manual ascent into a redwood. “It’s such a big story when you think about deforestation and what they’re really up against,” says Knowles, the film’s cinematographer and co-director, and a veteran of multiple documentaries about California wildfires (Last Days at Paradise High, After the Fire). “It felt appropriate to do something microscopic to get at this larger overwhelming issue.” Streaming currently via the Los Angeles Times and screening June 1-12 at the San Francisco Documentary Festival, Sentinels hoists the viewer onto an elevated network of platforms connecting the 18 acres cordoned off by the activists. As direct-action protests go, it doesn’t get much more direct. We even witness activists rope trees into their blockade, hoping that loggers won’t risk their safety and that of the protesters by felling the connected giants. Above all, Sentinels emphasizes the protest as a devotional act of time. Even though the film’s runtime hovers around 20 minutes, we intuit how long it might take to fill a jug with rainwater, that the holidays have quietly arrived, that hummed songs cycle through the protesters’ heads and, most notably, that there are still years left to go. Shot in 2020, Sentinels covers about 200 days, but the
activists aim to continue their sit until 2024 when Green Diamond’s logging permit expires. “Many times direct action is in support of a legal challenge, a stalling tactic,” says co-director Lerew, who has worked on documentaries that have embedded with Oakland hospitals (The Waiting Room) and police units (The Force). “In this instance, there’s nothing like that.” While defiance is inherent in this form of protest, daily confrontation with lumberjacks isn’t the goal. In fact, the one instance of face-to-face contact captured in the film catches an activist who goes by the “forest name” Lupine genuinely off guard. For his part, Knowles was rocked by the sudden gnashing of machinery on his first night filming from a canopy. “That was some harrowing shit,” he says, likening the scene to the memorable sequence in The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001) in which Saruman’s Orcs raze Fangorn Forest. Though anonymity is a priority, the Redwood Forest Defense does operate a website and Instagram outlining its cause and ways to assist. At the time of filming in 2020, Knowles and Lerew say their subjects operated the only active tree-sit in the Western United States. Others have since taken off, including the escalation of a substantial blockade at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. “It’s a youth-led movement,” Lerew says. “A lot of the people arrived at [tree-sitting] because signing petitions and writing to their state and federal representatives was not leading to any real change that they could see for themselves.” Even if the 18-acre site of the Sentinels protest counts for a mere fraction of Green Diamond-owned land primed for what the company terms “harvesting,” the film seeks to showcase the grounded, ecological vibrance nestled within the protest’s symbolism. “It is a forest teeming with life,” Knowles says. “What you realize from just spending five minutes there is when you come in and destroy an ecosystem, you can’t just replant that.”
The world wasn’t ready for the sumptuous and surreal PDX romance The Texture of Falling when it debuted in 2018. Now that the feature directorial debut of Maria Allred (who was profiled in WW’s Filmmaker Issue last week) is streaming, it’s time for it to be discovered by an audience open to its enveloping exploration of passion, submission and creation. Amazon Prime, Roku, Tubi.
Ang Lee fans should check out Film Movement’s 2K restoration of his 1991 first film, Pushing Hands. But if you’re not ready to splurge on the Blu-ray, try streaming this quietly brutal tale of a steadfast tai chi master (Sihung Lung) and his exasperated son (Bo Z. Wang), which poignantly suggests that parents need dignity as much as love. Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube. Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
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MOVIES G ET YO U R R E P S I N
A24
TOP PICK OF THE WEEK
I TA M I P R O D U C T I O N S
Tampopo (1985)
MEN Let’s talk about the dress. It’s pale pink, it’s long sleeved, and it’s worn by Jessie Buckley, the star of Alex Garland’s dreamy and blood-chilling thriller Men. An archetypal symbol of femininity, the dress is the first of many clues that Buckley is playing not just a woman, but all women—just as her co-star, Rory Kinnear, is playing all men. Haunted by the death of her husband (Paapa Essiedu), Harper (Buckley) flees to an English country estate to recuperate. Almost the moment she arrives, she’s tormented by seemingly everyone in the area with a Y chromosome, including a little boy who calls her a “stupid bitch,” a silent stalker who appears in her garden naked, and a priest who hides his predatory nature behind courtly manners and long locks. All of these men are played by Kinnear, but it doesn’t seem strange to Harper that they have the same face. Why would it? The idea of a woman being persecuted by males who represent a single malevolent force feels sickeningly real. It could be argued that Men’s points about gender are obvious—and that its attitude toward topics like race and mental health is offensively glib—but like Garland’s previous films, Ex Machina and Annihilation, it digs impressively deep under your skin and into your psyche. Harper may be afraid, but she isn’t powerless. And as she goes from fleeing to fighting, the film solidifies its power over you. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. AMC Vancouver Mall, Bridgeport, Cascade, Cinema 21, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Progress Ridge, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza.
DOWNTON ABBEY: A NEW ERA
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Far too many movies feel like commercials, but it’s exceedingly rare to find a film birthed as an ad that wrestles loose into artistic oblivion. God knows what Saint Laurent thought it was getting when commissioning a film from internationally renowned bad-vibes maestro Gaspar Noé (Enter The Void, Irreversible). Maybe a short film in which Charlotte Gainsbourg poses in sunglasses and an evening gown? Granted, she does, but it’s while pretending to be burned alive. Displayed in split-screen (like Noé’s other new film this month, Vortex) and punctuated by unrelenting strobe lights, Lux Æterna is 51 minutes of largely improvised vitriol on a set helmed by Béatrice Dalle, a French actor who plays herself as a director. Relative to the grotesque immersion of Noé’s prior works, Lux Æterna is slight, but the experience of watching it is still jarring enough to deliver and dilute its exploration of how self-possessed women are objectified and undermined to the point of transcendent madness. Here, Noé is so confrontationally unromantic that he nearly works back around to passion for how a demented movie experience can change everyone involved. Well…you wanna buy a jacket now? NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Clinton, May 21.
DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS
Last year, the Marvel Cinematic Universe birthed the spry battles of Shang-Chi, the
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cosmic splendor of Eternals, and the sweet melodrama of Spider-Man: No Way Home. It was a hell of a hot streak— and it was too hot to last. All MCU movies are a collection of computerized showdowns and sequel-baiting cameos, but the best films in the series both fulfill and transcend the formula. Despite being directed by the brilliant Sam Raimi (the original Spider-Man trilogy), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness does the opposite— it’s basically a feature-length commercial for the WandaVision streaming series and countless other properties. The story features Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) defending the universe-hopping America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) from demonic forces, but their apocalyptic adventures are depressingly irrelevant. Gomez has spunk aplenty, but Cumberbatch coasts through the multiverse with apathy, as if killing time until his next Power of the Dog-caliber role. He looks especially wan next to Elizabeth Olsen, who shreds the screen as Scarlet Witch, a reality-warping warrior whose power is only matched by her motherly ferocity. Why wasn’t the entire movie about her? Stephen Strange’s name may be in the title, but a goatee-adorned action figure is no match for a living, breathing, raging woman. The sorcerer never stood a chance. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, City Center, Eastport, Cinemagic, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, Roseway, St. Johns, St. Johns Twin, Studio One.
All That Jazz (1979)
Legendary choreographer Bob Fosse directs this musical adaptation of his own life (with Roy Scheider as the lead), detailing his stellar rise and drug-fueled fall—all told with his signature pizazz and showmanship. Screens as part of the Hollywood’s Roy Scheider “Into the Scheider-verse” series. Hollywood, May 20.
Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) Maggie Cheung headlines this Hong Kong-set romantic drama, in which she plays an entrepreneur with aims to get rich by taking financial advantage of naïve Chinese mainlanders. When she meets an engaged man (Leon Lai), a tempestuous yearslong and country-spanning affair begins. 5th Avenue, May 20-22.
Stunt Rock (1980)
In this Australian mockumentary musical, a stunt man helps a fantasy-themed rock band develop stunts and special effects for their act. This screening (of Kino Lorber’s new restoration) will also feature director Brian Trenchard-Smith and star Margaret Trenchard-Smith (aka Margaret Gerard) in person for a post-film Q&A. Hollywood, May 21.
Dirty Dancing (1987)
While mostly famed for its steamy summer romance between Baby (Jennifer Grey) and her dance instructor (Patrick Swayze), this ’80s classic also features a well-done (and still relevant) abortion subplot. Proceeds from this screening will go directly to Texas’ Lilith Fund and Oregon’s own Northwest Abortion Access Fund. Clinton, May 22.
G R E AT A M E R I C A N F I L M S
The secret touch in series-to-cinema transitions is finding a compelling reason to get the band back together— and Downton Abbey: A New Era has some fun with it. Compelled by “financial issues,” Lady Mary Talbot (Michelle Dockery), née Crawley, agrees to allow a film to shoot at the titular estate, which elicits everything from enthusiasm to outright disdain from her elders. Simultaneously, another group of characters embark on a trip to the South of France to inspect a villa bequeathed to the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), leading to the unraveling of the mystery as to why. Balancing so many beloved characters can’t have been easy, but screenwriter and series creator Julian Fellowes weaves them all together delicately enough and handles moments of gravitas with grace. A New Era may be a tale of rushed romances and obscenely affluent people falling ass-backwards into even more wealth, but those potential pitfalls are diluted by whimsical storytelling leading to a satisfying ending. The Crawleys live in a fantasy world with its own rules—and Fellowes clearly demonstrates that he understands his audience and the depth of their passion for his characters and the universe they inhabit. PG. RAY GILL JR. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza.
LUX ÆTERNA
Marketed as the first “Ramen Western,” this tasty love letter to the art and joy of quality cuisine is about an eccentric band of culinary ronin determined to help the widowed Tampopo and her family perfect their ramen recipe and create the superlative Japanese noodle restaurant. Hollywood, May 19.
ALSO PLAYING: Cinema 21: Rear Window (1954), May 21. Clinton: Femme Femmes (1974), May 18. Hollywood: Akira (1988), May 21. The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988), May 22. Diva (1981), May 23. The Heroic Trio (1993), May 24.
OUR KEY
: THIS MOVIE IS EXCELLENT, ONE OF THE BEST OF THE YEAR. : THIS MOVIE IS GOOD. WE RECOMMEND YOU WATCH IT. : THIS MOVIE IS ENTERTAINING BUT FLAWED. : THIS MOVIE IS A STEAMING PILE.
JONESIN’
FREE WILL
B Y M AT T J O N E S
"I'm Gonna Have Some Words"--themeless time again!
ASTROLOGY ARIES
(March 21-April 19): In defining the essential elements at play in a typical Aries person's agenda, I'm not inclined to invoke the words "sometimes" or "maybe." Nor do I make frequent use of the words "periodically," "if," or "ordinarily." Instead, my primary identifying term for many Aries characters is "NOW!!!" with three exclamation points. In referring to your sign's experiences, I also rely heavily on the following descriptors: pronto, presto, push, directly, why not?, engage, declare, activate, venture into, enterprising, seize, deliver, and wield. You are authorized to fully activate and deploy these qualities in the next three weeks.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I like Joan Didion's
definitions of self-respect. As you enter a favorable phase for deepening and enhancing your self-respect, they may be helpful. Didion said self-respect is a "sense of one's intrinsic worth," and added, "People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday. They are willing to invest something of themselves." And maybe the most essential thing about self-respect, according to Didion, is that it is "a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth."
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): "Reality is not simply
ACROSS
56. Scam Tracker agcy.
title
1. Goes with the flow?
58. Div. of a fiscal year
30. Signs of the future
5. Swing your arms around like Kermit
59. "It's _ _ _-win situation"
31. Perez who did a guest voice on "Dora the Explorer"
10. Has no presence
60. Best Picture winner of 2022
14. Snack that turned 110 in March
62. Offer that may bring you a lot
33. Put _ _ _ the test
15. Grounation Day participant
65. Weather report stats
16. Philistine
67. Picture, in old product names
35. "_ _ _ Little Deeper" (song from "The Princess and the Frog")
17. Altered, before Photoshop, maybe 19. "Knights of Cydonia" band 20. 2000 TV show with a 2021 sequel 21. Suffix for Quebec 22. Barrett of Pink Floyd 24. Greek goddess of night 25. Former German chancellor Kohl
66. Fade out, like a light
68. Quickly, on memos 69. Throw barbs (at)
46. Febrero preceder
1. Recent Canadian "Jeopardy!" super-champ Mattea 2. Come up 3. Thin ice, say
6. Aberdeen teen
40. Uruguayan currency 42. Commedia dell'_ _ _ 43. Gal on screen 45. Switches around the kids' room? 47. Advice to those not wishing to win completely 49. "How foolish _ _ _!" 50. M&M variety 54. It holds a lot of coffee
37. Home of Microsoft's corporate HQ
DOWN
29. Vitamin C, alternately
39. Name in machine-made frozen drinks
36. "Superfruit" berry
41. Freeze, in a sci-fi story
4. Show sorrow
38. Compete like gold medalists Momiji Nishiya and Keegan Palmer
34. "Disco Duck" DJ Rick
70. Chest contents
27. "The Handmaid's Tale" actress Ann 35. Specialty of Lenny Bruce or Jimmy Carr
32. Bucking horse
5. Round item in a bag lunch 7. Retired tennis star Barty 8. Suffix meaning "residents" 9. "Candle in the Wind 1997" dedicatee, familiarly 10. "Big Blue" company 11. Computer audio installation 12. Overly curious 13. "Jurassic Park" dinosaur, for short 18. The "R" of NASCAR's RFK Racing 23. Physicians, informally 26. Steal, with "with" 28. Place referenced in the "Black Panther" sequel's
©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.
44. Archaeological find 48. Packs again at the checkout 51. Home planet of Queen Amidala 52. Solidarity 53. Commotions 54. Pac-12 team 55. Joeys and other jumpers 57. "_ _ _ giorno!" (Italian for "good morning!") 58. Swab on a stick 61. Snake that bit Cleopatra 63. One-fifth of MMV 64. Part of a Bored Ape collection, e.g.
last week’s answers
there; it does not simply exist," claimed author Paul Celan. "It must be sought out and won." I think that is excellent advice for you right now. But what does it mean in practical terms? How can you seek out and win reality? My first suggestion is to put your personal stamp on every situation you encounter. Do something subtle or strong to make each event serve your specific interests and goals. My second suggestion is to discern the illusions that other people are projecting and avoid buying into those misunderstandings. My third suggestion is to act as if it's always possible to make life richer, more vivid, and more meaningful. And then figure out how to do that.
CANCER
(June 21-July 22): Wilma Mankiller was the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. She said, "The cow runs away from the storm, while the buffalo charges directly toward it—and gets through it quicker." Political analyst Donna Brazile expounded on Mankiller's strategy: "Whenever I'm confronted with a tough challenge, I do not prolong the torment. I become the buffalo." I recommend Mankiller's and Brazile's approach for you and me in the coming days, my fellow Cancerian. Now please excuse me as I race in the direction of the squall I see brewing in the distance.
LEO
(July 23-Aug. 22): *The New Yorker* is an influential Pulitzer Prize-winning magazine that features witty writing and impeccable fact-checking. In 2017, its stories exposed the extensive sexual misconduct committed by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein—and helped lead to his prosecution. How did the magazine get its start? It was co-founded in 1925 by Harold Ross, who had dropped out of school at age 13. He edited every issue for the next 26 years. I'm sensing the possibility of a comparable development in your life, Leo. In the coming months, you may get involved in a project that seems to be beyond the reach of your official capacities or formal credentials. I urge you to proceed as if you can and will succeed.
VIRGO
(Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo-born Jocko Willink is a retired naval officer and author. In his book *Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual*, he lays down his manifesto: "Become the discipline—embrace its cold and relentless power. And it will make you better and stronger and smarter and faster and healthier than anything else. And most important: It will make you free." While I don't expect you to embrace Willink's rigorous ethic with the same fanatical grip, I think you will benefit from doing the best you can. The cosmic rhythms will support you if you make a fun and earnest effort to cultivate liberation through discipline.
WEEK OF MAY 26
© 2022 ROB BREZSNY
LIBRA
(Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “Some nights you are the lighthouse, some nights the sea," writes Libran author Ocean Vuong. According to my astrological analysis, you are better suited to be the lighthouse than the sea in the coming days. Lately, you have thoroughly embodied the sea, and that has prepared you well to provide illumination. You have learned new secrets about the tides and the waves. You are attuned to the rhythms of the undercurrents. So I hope you will now embrace your role as a beacon, Libra. I expect that people will look to your radiance to guide and inspire them.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): "Movie people are
possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons," observes author Edna O'Brien. She should know. She has hung out with many big film stars. Since you're probably not in the movie business yourself, your demons may be much higher quality than those of celebrity actors and directors. And I'm guessing that in the coming weeks, your demons will become even finer and more interesting than ever before—even to the point that they could become helpers and advisors. For the best results, treat them with respect and be willing to listen to their ideas.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): I'm all in favor of
you getting what you yearn for. I have no inhibitions or caveats as I urge you to unleash all your ingenuity and hard work in quest of your beautiful goals. And in the hope of inspiring you to upgrade your ability to fulfill these sacred prospects, I offer you a tip from Sagittarian author Martha Beck. She wrote, "To attract something that you want, become as joyful as you think that thing would make you."
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): According to author
Caroline Myss, "You should see everything about your life as a lesson." Whoa! Really? Each trip to the grocery store should be a learning opportunity? Myss says yes! For example, let's say you're in the snack foods aisle and you're tempted to put Doritos Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips and Lay's Barbecue Potato Chips in your cart. But your gut is screaming at you, "That stuff isn't healthy for you!" And yet you decide to ignore your gut's advice. You buy and eat both bags. Myss would say you have squandered a learning opportunity: "You've harmed yourself by blocking your intuitive voice," she writes. Now, in accordance with astrological omens, Capricorn, here's your homework assignment: Regard every upcoming event as a chance to learn how to trust your intuition better.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): An Aquarian poet
was disturbed when a suitor told her, "I'm really very fond of you." She responded, "I don't like fond. It sounds like something you would tell a dog. Give me love, or nothing. Throw your fond in a pond." I don't advise you to adopt a similar attitude anytime soon, Aquarius. In my oracular opinion, you should wholeheartedly welcome fondness. You should honor it and celebrate it. In itself, it is a rich, complex attitude. And it may also lead, if you welcome it, to even more complex and profound interweavings.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): "I need a playlist of all
the songs I used to love but forgot about," wrote Tumblr blogger Yuyuuyuyuu. I think you could use such a playlist, too, Pisces. In fact, I would love to see you receive a host of memos that remind you of all the things you love and need and are interested in—but have forgotten about or neglected. The coming weeks will be an excellent time to recover what has been lost. I hope you will re-establish connections and restore past glories that deserve to accompany you into the future.
Homework: Is there a postponed dream that you might be able to resume working to fulfill? What is it? Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
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COMiCS!
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Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
SPOTLIGHT
ARTIST
Jack draws exactly what he sees from the streets of Portland. @sketchypeoplepdx kentcomics.com
BOOK RELEASE! FIRST THURSDAY, JUNE 2ND. @CULTPORTLAND | NW PDX
Jack Kent’s
Be a Willamette Week featured artist! Any art style welcome! Let’s share your art. Contact us at art@wweek.com
Willamette Week MAY 18, 2022 wweek.com
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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
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-6pm every day. 4701 SE Division & 1834 NE Alberta.
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