09.14.2022VOLWWEEK.COM25P.SINGING.”WASIUNLESSINVISIBLEWAS“I48/45 NEWS: Is Portland?DoomedHookahinP.10 WEED: BucketSummerEnd-of-StonerList.P.24 FILM: Fall Preview.MovieP.27 THE TROUBLE AT DAWSON PARK Crime is encroaching on a landmark of Portland’s Black community. Why won’t City Hall act?
By Lucas Manfield and Sophie Peel.
Page 13
2 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
MR. HOOKAH, PAGE 10
A teenager who allegedly helped set three dozen fires on Mount Tabor posted notes of concern on Nextdoor. 8
ON THE COVER: Dawson Park is a special place for Black Portlanders like Nya Flakes and her family; photo by Brian Brose OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK: Three hotels nearing foreclosure in the heart of Portland o er a warning to city leaders. Masthead EDITOR & PUBLISHER Mark Zusman EDITORIAL News Editor Aaron Mesh Arts & Culture Editor Andi Prewitt Assistant A&C Editor Bennett Campbell Ferguson Staff Writers Anthony Effinger, Nigel Jaquiss, Lucas Manfield, Sophie Peel Copy Editor Matt Buckingham ART DEPARTMENT Art Director Mick Hangland-Skill Graphic Designer McKenzie Young-Roy ADVERTISING Director of Sales Anna Zusman Advertising Media Coordinator Beans Flores Account Executives Michael Donhowe, Maxx Hockenberry OUTREACHCOMMUNITY Give!Guide Director Toni Tringolo G!G Campaign Assistant & FOWW Manager Josh Rentschler Podcast Host Brianna Wheeler DISTRIBUTION Circulation Director Jed Hoesch Entrepreneur in Residence Jack Phan OPERATIONS Accounting Director Beth Buffetta Manager Informationof Services Brian Panganiban OUR MISSION To provide Portlanders with an independent and irreverent understanding of how their worlds work so they can make a Thoughdifference.Willamette Week is free, please take just one copy. Anyone removing papers in bulk from our distribution points will be prosecuted, as they say, to the full extent of the law.
Singer-songwriter Ruby Friedman thinks the music business is like Pet Rocks 25 A Portland-raised director helmed an Oscar front-runner starring Cate Blanchett 27
Wind gusts reached 60 miles per hour at Rooster Rock 8
Willamette Week welcomes freelance submissions. Send material to either News Editor or Arts Editor. Manuscripts will be returned if you include a selfaddressed, stamped envelope. To be considered for calendar listings, notice of events must be received in writing by noon Wednesday, two weeks before publication. Questions concerning circulation or subscription inquiries should be directed to Jed Hoesch at Willamette Week. Postmaster: Send all address changes to Willamette Week, P.O. Box 10770, Portland, OR 97206. Subscription rates: One year $130, six months $70. Back issues $5 for walk-ins, $8 for mailed requests when available. Willamette Week is mailed at third-class rates. Association of Alternative Newsmedia. This newspaper is published on recycled newsprint using soy-based ink.
PFriem vet Gavin Lord produces beer under the label “Hetty Alice,” a tribute to his grandmother. 23
Police haven’t made a targeted drug bust at an open-air cocaine market in over a year.
Clovis Ain recommends hookah newbies start with a shisha blend of cherry, “mighty freeze” and “blue mist.” 10
God help us, we’re bringing back Candidates Gone Wild 7
Grand Ronde tribes plan to build a hotel at the former Blue Heron paper mill. 11
Nerd16
anniversary last weekend. 18
The priest at Immaculate Heart Church sleeps in a back room, fearing gun violence. 15
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 48, ISSUE 45
Hand2Mounth’s latest production takes audiences on a time-shifting journey through a shelter village 20
There is a perfect weed strain to smoke before navigating the midway at Oaks Amusement Park. 24
RAINESMICHAEL WEEKLYPUBLISHEDWEEKWILLAMETTEISBY CITY OF ROSES MEDIA COMPANY P.O. Box Portland,10770OR97296. Main line phone: (503) 243-2122 fax: (503) 296-2874 Classifieds phone: (503) 243-2122 fax: (503) 296-2874 3Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com FINDINGS
Christmas , aka Rose City Comic Con, celebrated its 10th
Chef Jamie Wilcox’s menu at Tartuca gets herbs straight from neighbors’ home gardens. 22
to shed a single tear for the owners, especially [former Provenance Hotels executive Gordon] Sondland, or groups losing money on this, but this is another bad sign for downtown and particularly food trucks. It’s tough down there, and the declining foot traffic has caused food trucks like mine to shift to mobile events only.”
POLIS, VIA WWEEK.COM: “Willa mette Week finally sees the problem. A watershed mark.”
Senility Corner: In my Aug. 31 column, I kept blith ering about the “Hillsdale Poor Farm.” Not even the curved spacetime of Beaverton Hillsdale Highway could warp history enough to make this correct—as several readers reminded me, it was Hillside Poor Farm. Dr. Know regrets the error.
As much as we love the beautiful Benson Hotel I informed them that on any future trips we would be investigating accommodations in more safe and clean areas.
Are there any plans to fix the Intersection of Doom at Southwest Beaverton Hillsdale Highway and Scholls Ferry and Oleson roads? It’s the intersec tion of about six di erent roads. The only thing good about it is Sesame Donuts. Hello, how about a roundabout? —Almost Died Getting a Maple Bar
MOBILE_GAS_9826, VIA REDDIT: “These are three incredibly large hotels in downtown. The Hilton is a historic building. I am not going
WHOOPS123, VIA WWEEK.COM: “I’ve looked into staying at downtown hotels many times over the summer, and usually I eventually decide it’s not worth the $200+/night price tag to rent a room and instead drive back and forth from the coast.
INURE, VIA REDDIT: “Companies should require their workers to return so hotel/office buildings don’t go bankrupt? That’s a hell of a take.”
Last week, WW broke the news that three downtown hotels—Dos sier, the Duniway and the Portland Hilton—were on the brink of foreclosure (“Motel Blues,” Sept. 7). (Dossier’s owner, Provenance Hotels, now says it has reached a deal to avert its hotel from being auctioned by its lender.) That news is the cherry on top of a 26% commercial real estate vacancy rate in the downtown core. Readers were divided: Was this the inevitable result of lefty policies coddling protesters, campers and criminals? Or the comeuppance of an outdated hospitality industry that overbuilt and failed to adjust to competition? Here’s what readers had to say:
In any case, Portland’s complement of round abouts just doubled (to four), with more to come. Now, if we can only learn NOT to yield when we DO have the right of way.
“The warning to city leaders should be that this is the tip of the iceberg. If buildings go vacant all over downtown, the amount of tax collected by the city will drop off of a cliff.”
4 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com DIALOGUE
Submit to: PO Box 10770, Portland OR, Email:97296mzusman@wweek.com
Kit LagunaDobbeNiguel, Calif.
MR. LOGIC, VIA WWEEK.COM: “Ms. Peel has done some fine reporting here. I have been critical of many of her articles in the past. However, credit where credit is due.”
“If the hotels actually want to rent the rooms, make them less expensive. I stayed at the Waterfront Marriott last month and, despite using miles to pay for the room, still ended up paying $110 for fees, parking, and an $8 can of water in the lobby. They are creating their own problems and trying to con the city into giving them money.
I don’t want to get too far into the weeds about an intersection many readers won’t have experi enced. (Those who have, however, will recall tra c unfolding at impossible angles as in some subur bia-themed Escher print, like those space-warping battle scenes in Doctor Strange but with strip malls instead of skyscrapers.) Briefly, the county’s design would surgically separate what are now essentially conjoined twin intersections by moving Southwest Oleson Road to the east. No roundabouts are involved.Butthat was 1996! Today such a plan might well include roundabouts, which are having what, if you’re a tra c-control system, probably counts as a moment. In a 2019 community survey about how
But listen up: Roundabouts are not the same as tra c circles. Until 2021, Portland had only two true roundabouts—one by Lewis & Clark College and one near the airport. That circle in the middle of Ladd’s Addition? Not a roundabout. Joanie on the Pony at Northeast Cesar Chavez and Glisan? That’s not one either. The loop at Southwest 18th and Je erson?
LMITTEN, VIA WWEEK.COM: “If you haven’t seen the writing on the wall for the past year or so, I feel sorry for you. Just like shopping malls, office-dominated downtown cores are never coming back. But I wonder how much of the hotel industry’s trouble is based on the insane popu larity of Airbnb, which I think proves beyond a doubt that the hotel model was outdated, irrespective of COVID and everything else.”
Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.
to fix a similarly fucked intersection 2 miles north of the Oleson morass, a roundabout-based plan beat its competition by nearly 2 to 1. Maybe Americans (or at least Portlanders) are finally warming to Europe’s answer to the four-way stop.
Dr. Know
HESITANT TO LEAVE HOTEL
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR must include the author's street address and phone number for verification. Letters must be 250 or fewer words.
Nope.Ina true roundabout, entering tra c doesn’t have a stop sign, only a yield sign. (Cars already in the roundabout have right of way.) This requires drivers to cooperate, not something Americans are known for. However, Portland drivers already do it with our uncontrolled intersections, so perhaps we’re readier for roundabouts than more road rage-y cities.
PDXARCHITECT, VIA REDDIT: “I don’t know that city leaders are on the hook for the fact that hotels aren’t profitable at the moment, but if they aren’t paying their taxes, that’s a couple million dollars a year out of the city coffers.
BY MARTY SMITH @martysmithxxx
The good news, Died, is that Washington County does have a plan for fixing this intersection. The bad news is that the plan was created in 1996 and has been stalled for lack of funding ever since.
“Why isn’t ‘supply and demand’ kicking in? I’ve got no problems with the homeless people, or any of the other excuses being offered by the hotels. I just don’t want to spend $200 on an overpriced hotel room.”
Our son forwarded an article to us written by you in Willamette Week regarding the loss of business at the Benson Hotel in Portland [wweek. com, Sept. 1]. The article was very timely as my husband and I were in Portland last weekend and stayed at the Benson. I made the following comment that I have been all over the world and never hesitated to walk out of the front door of my hotel to go exploring until Portland! It’s an absolute travesty what has happened to not only the downtown area of Portland, but outskirts as well. Homeless, crazy, drug-addicted people everywhere.
5Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
Get TonightBusy OUR EVENT PICKS,EMAILED WEEKLY. 6 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
NORTHWEST PORTLAND FEARS THE BEAVERS:
FIRE UNION PICKS GONZALEZ OVER HARDESTY: The union that represents Portland firefighters voted Sept. 12 to endorse Rene Gonzalez over incumbent City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, whose bureau portfolio includes Portland Fire & Rescue. That’s a significant defeat for Hardesty, who’s long been an outspoken advocate for labor rights and has overseen the fire bureau for two years. Hardesty’s campaign manager, the Rev. Joseph Santos-Lyons, responded to the snub in a statement: “It’s disappointing to see labor organizations endorse a candidate who has publicly disparaged unions.” President Isaac McLennan of the Portland Firefighters Association tells WW Hardesty did not make time to meet with the union for an endorsement interview. Hardesty’s campaign says the interview conflicted with a vote Hardesty is preparing to make that will a ect the union. Santos-Lyons says Hardesty “believes it is inappropriate to seek a political endorsement” while the city is negotiating a “complex fire union request.”
state Sen. Betsy Johnson can’t duplicate the enormous contributions that national governors associations are making to the major-party nominees, Republican Christine Drazan and Democrat Tina Kotek. (Kotek reported a $500,000 donation from the Democratic Governors Association on Sept. 1.) So Johnson has tapped her own sources for outsized checks: business tycoons. The latest ($100,000 on Aug. 12) comes from Gee Automotive, a Washington-based auto sales company whose departments include the nine Ron Tonkin dealerships in the Portland area. CEO Ryan Gee, who lives in Seattle and Spokane, could not immediately be reached for comment. Johnson’s campaign declined to comment.
AUTO DEALERS RIDE WITH JOHNSON: Running for governor without a party a liation, former
LACK OF PUBLIC DEFENDERS WORSENS:
CANDIDATES GONE WILD HOST TERRY PORTER
CANDIDATES GONE WILD IS BACK: Does this election season seem a little dreary? We’ll take care of that. WW is bringing back Candidates Gone Wild, a variety show that lets o ce-seekers slip out of their khakis and unknot their bow ties to compete in a talent show and pretend to laugh at their own foibles. WW has resurrected the irreverent event—last thrown in 2016—with a mission to demystify politics, make voting more fun, and support local journalism. Trail Blazers legend Terry Porter hosts. Storm Large will show up. Jo Ann Hardesty and Rene Gonzalez have confirmed. It’s Oct. 17 at Revolution Hall. Visit wweek.com to get tickets.
PORTERTERRYOFCOURTESY 7Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
The Oregon State University Beavers are o to a fast start this football season, and they’re bringing the tailgate party to…Portland’s Alphabet District? The Beavs face Montana State University on Sept. 17 at Providence Park—the stadium that typically holds Portland Timbers and Thorns matches. Think that sounds like a parking nightmare? You’re not alone. The Northwest District Association sent out an alert to surrounding residents earlier this month: “Attendees are likely to be less knowledgeable and e cient in their travel and parking habits than typical soccer season ticket holders and attendees,” the email read. “It is expected that a higher % of attendees will drive to the game and search for limited local on-street and o -street parking options.” The association added that it’s not aware of any specific plans by the city or TriMet to deal with the influx of fans, other than the typical “major event” protocol. Neither TriMet nor the Portland Bureau of Transportation responded to a request for comment.
Multnomah County’s public defender shortage is only getting more acute, recent data shows. As of Sept. 13, 1,058 defendants in Multnomah County who were eligible to be represented by a court-appointed attorney did not have one, according to a state dashboard. That’s the second-highest daily total since the state created the dashboard in mid-August. The highest was Sept. 12—the day before. The shortage of defenders has caused headaches for prosecutors. Deputy district attorney Eric Palmer cited two recent cases where charges were dropped because no defense lawyer was available. Both involved criminal activity around Dawson Park, the subject of this week’s cover story. In one, a woman accused a man of shoving her head into a doorframe after soliciting sex acts at the Dawson Park bus stop. In another, o cers patrolling the neighborhood found a loaded Glock 9 mm pistol in a car owned by a man with a felony conviction. Oregon Chief Justice Martha L. Walters recently dissolved the commission that oversees the state’s O ce of Public Defense Services after expressing frustration over the agency’s handling of the crisis. “[The] issue needs to remain front and center as we continue to work on systemic issues within our current public defense system,” she said.
Corbett 31 mph
Estacada 42 mph
BY SOPHIE PEEL speel@wweek.com
For now, we’ll have to settle for the wind speeds measured by the National Weath er Service in or near the areas where PGE powered down. They show dangerously high gusts, in some cases rivaling the winds of 2020.
Skyline Drive 30 mph
Neighbors surrounding Mount Tabor, on high alert during a summer drought and more recently a “red flag” warning due to high winds and dry temperatures, leaped into action and started mounting nighttime volunteer patrols to watch for fires, outfitted with shovels if they needed to put out any flames or embers.Arson investigators with Portland Fire & Rescue last week called it one of the “more complex” cases in recent history due to the vastness of the park—191 acres—and the sheer number of entrance and exit points.
The suspects: Samuel Perkins and Malik Hares, both 18 years old, were indicted Sept. 12 on first-degree arson charges. Both pleaded not guilty during arraignment in
Newspapers spend a lot of time examining things that went wrong. It’s harder to gauge what events could have been worse. But a look at the speed of wind gusts roaring through the Columbia River Gorge last weekend suggests state electrical utilities averted calamity by turning off parts of the powerNearlygrid.50,000 Oregonians were without power Sept. 9—many of them only saw pow er restored two days later. The reason? A forecast of an east wind event that could rival the 2020 Labor Day windstorm. That event was a catastrophe: It toppled
Multnomah County Circuit Court and were released into their families’ custody until their next court appearance. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute another defendant, citing lack of evidence.
On Sept. 11, three teenagers were arrested and booked on felony arson charges related to the spree of fires. Fire officials said they believed the threat had been extinguished.
Pierce says. “Then there are those who think, boys will be boys and they should be given a second shot. If these kids had been Black, would the book have been thrown at them? That’s some thing to raise.”
transformers and snapped power lines owned by PacifiCorp, sparking the Beach ie Creek Fire that destroyed much Detroit, Ore. Chastened by that disaster (and law suits), PacifiCorp and Portland General Electric acted quickly to shut off power before the wind arrived.
Hoodoo Butte 60 mph
At the height of the scare, a Nextdoor account under the name Malik Hares warned neighbors of fires in a post: “Scared off a group of teenagers who looked like they were trying to do a fire…I mean who’s dumb enough to do this during the day—these tabor fires needs to Prosecutorsstop!”agreed Monday to allow the pair out of jail without posting bail. As a condition of release, Judge Adrian Brown issued no-contact orders between the two defendants and imposed a restraining order forbidding them from coming within 150 feet of any Portland park. Also, they can’t possess any substances used to ignite fires.
HANGLAND-SKILLMICK
Going Dark
Mt. Hebo 55 mph
Hares told police he didn’t light the fires himself but was the chauffeur for his friends; he also liked to return to the scene of a fire to watch firefighters put it out. “He admitted to speaking with firefighters and an investigator about some of the fires at the scenes,” the affidavit reads.
HOT CASE
of line and equipment, we saw damage from wind gusts that topped 40 and 50 miles per hour in some areas,” says PGE spokesman John Farmer. “With an effort this size, we’re still assessing information, and it’s early in that process—though we are hearing vali dation from some critical service providers that we made the right call.”
The incidents: For the past two months, Mt. Tabor Park has had a problem: little fires everywhere. Thirty-six of them, to beEvidenceexact.
LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE: Mount Tabor under smoky skies.
Midge Pierce, a Mount Tabor neighbor, says she’s not sure what to think of the teens being released.
The motive: A probable cause affidavit provided to WW paints a picture of two teenagers seeking no grander objec tive than thrills.
that an arsonist was at work: dark burn scars up and down the flanks of the Southeast Portland mountain.
TOP WIND GUSTS MEASURED SEPT. 9-10
Rooster Rock 56 mph
MountainonFirethe
“As we patrolled and inspected 1,800 miles
Source: National Weather Service
AARON MESH.
North Plains 33 mph
Hares and Perkins work full time at McDonald’s, according to court documents. Hares appears to have dropped out of high school after 10th grade, while Perkins appears to have graduated. Both live in single-family homes in middle- to high-income neighborhoods on Portland’s east side, west of 82nd Avenue.
Wind speeds suggest Oregon’s electrical utilities were wise to power down.
HINDSIGHT
8 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEKNEWS
As of press deadlines, PGE couldn’t say how many power poles were found toppled as crews worked to restore power after the shutoffs. That’s the key number for mea suring how much danger was forestalled by shutting off electricity across the state.
“I think there’s two schools of thought, and I haven’t deter mined where I am. One is that it was crazy to release them,”
An affidavit paints a picture of two teenagers who lit a series of fires in Mt. Tabor Park just for the thrill of it.
After he was caught, police instructed Hares to call Perkins. During that conversation, as recounted in the affidavit, Perkins and Hares mutually scolded each other: Hares said Perkins took too long to get in the car, which he said led to its identification, and Perkins “told Hares that he was putting his foot down on a few things such as Hares was not to be on the scene anymore and Hares was not to talk to the Fire Marshal anymore or any firefighters.”According to the affidavit, Perkins “said he did it because he liked hanging out with his friends and liked driving away after they did it.”
QUIET ON INTERSTATETHE
“The impact of this decision on him would constitute thousands of dollars per year in airfare and hotels, not to mention the time burden and COVID risk of so much air travel,” SEIU wrote on behalf of the analyst, whose name the treasury has withheld pending resolution.
Google Maps shows there are already two dentist offices nearby and one yoga studio. Otherwise, it’s all apartment buildings and houses along the MAX line. There are very few restaurants in the im mediate vicinity. Maybe the owner would consider a quiet one, with a library theme, say. Boké & Books? The Red Sauce Reading Room?
A storefront in North Portland has never held a tenant. GHOSTS
Plane Speaking
Owner: Cumberland II LLC How long it’s been empty: Since it was built. Why it’s empty: Shhhhhh.
Re: Response to labor grievance filed Aug. 18, 2022
apartments above it, the commercial space at street level at this address on North Interstate Avenue is pretty new and very nice. The only thing that might be keeping it vacant is that the owner, who declined to speak on the record, doesn’t want to rent to a restaurant because he’s worried the noise will bother his tenants upstairs. He says he has been trying to lure an insurance agency or something like that.
The treasury declined to comment beyond its written response. SEIU representatives did not respond to WW’s requests for comment.
Why it matters: The union filed a nearly identical grievance on behalf of the class of workers it rep resents. That means more is at stake than the airfare costs of one Texan. It sets up a battle over whether state agencies are required to reimburse the commutes of employees working from other states.
Every week, WW examines one mysteriously vacant property in the city of Portland, explains why it’s empty, and considers what might arrive there next. Send addresses to newstips@wweek.com.
AARON MESH. CORRESPONDENCE
“Even as lenient and supportive as Treasury’s Working Remotely policy is, it appears the ultimate goal is for employees to never return to the office at all, or for those with the smallest in-office work requirements to receive additional compensation for traveling to and from the workplace,” Kaplan writes. “We find this deeply inequita ble and do not understand why the [collective bargaining agreement] would allow for special compensation for a portion of the represented workforce that already avoids commuting costs or that lives out of state and avoids paying Oregon taxes.”
ANTHONY EFFINGER.
A deputy explains why the Oregon state treasurer won’t pay airfare for remote workers.
Address: 5826 N Interstate Ave. Year built: 2013 Square footage: 35,941 (includes apartments above) Market value: $7,857,020
Key argument: Kaplan, Read’s deputy, contends in his response to the union that the treasury maintains
EDGINGTONBRYANOFCOURTESY
As vacant spaces go, this one has a pretty tame story. No burst water pipe drove the tenant out. It has never been infested by rats. It isn’t owned by a hoarder who has filled it with old machinery. It’s not stuck in red tape at the Portland Bureau of Development Services.Likethe
What’s more interesting to the public is that Kaplan contends the larger state policy—which, remember, ap plies to some 500 employees—is absurd.
9Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
BRING ’EM HOME: State Treasurer Tobias Read.
To: SEIU union steward Scott Robertson
Context: Read, the state treasurer, is locked in a battle with Service Employees International Union 503 Local 170, which represents 105 Oregon State Treasury employees. Two of those employees live in other states. One of those, an analyst with an annual salary of $111,516, filed a grievance last month over Read requiring him to return to Salem once a quarter—and pay his own airfare.
Under a new state telework policy, roughly 500 em ployees designated “remote” by the state “must be reim bursed” for travel back to Oregon. SEIU says Read violated a collective bargaining agreement by moving the analyst to a different classification that calls him back to Salem.
Date: Sept. 2, 2022
BROSEBRIAN
CHASING
a different telework policy than other state agencies. That’s something of a technicality, even if it may prove decisive in this dispute.
From: Deputy state treasurer Michael Kaplan, on behalf of Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read
“You have to be 21 to be on the premises, and if you buy anything, you have to sit and smoke it here,” Ain says. “I’m not selling stuff to go hide it in your backpack and smoke it in school.”
“Hookah is a cultural practice—particularly for religions that do not drink alcohol—to socialize and come together,” says hookah lobbyist Chris Hudgins. “Frankly, it’s something that is hard for regulators and folks in the U.S. to understand.”
Ain’s Tigard location of Mr. Hookah falls un der Washington County’s flavored-tobacco ban that voters passed in May. That ban is on pause, however, snarled up in court after several busi nesses—including King’s Hookah Lounge—sued theCountycounty.commissioners will be briefed on the flavored-tobacco ban Sept. 27, after which the county will draft an ordinance and hold public hearings. (Such a ban would not require a public vote.) So far, commissioners are staying mum whether they’re for or against an exemption for hookah lounges; none of the five were ready to comment.Thehookah lobby’s strategy in response is to seek an exemption for hookah lounges. This has worked in Los Angeles, San Diego and Denver.
BY RACHEL SASLOW @RachelLauren12
Multnomah County health officer Dr. Jen nifer Vines replies that hookah poses a lot of nicotine and tobacco exposure for users—and
At the Tigard location of Mr. Hookah, Ain says his clientele is a “big mix” of African, Arab and American customers. In Gresham, it’s 90% Afri can American and African, including customers from Ethiopia and Somalia. He prides himself on his lounges’ “classy vibe,” with uniformed servers, chandeliers and a three-tiered fountain in the middle of the room.
Lobbyists for the National Hookah Communi ty Association, which includes shisha manufac turers like Dubai-based Al Fakher, have already met with three of the five county commissioners about a possible exemption.
Atmuch.hisStark Street lounge, which he opened in 2015, smoking a hookah costs $24 and lasts a user up to two hours. Often, customers smoke hoo kah in groups and pass the hose around, which costs $10 per person and comes with individual, disposable hose tips for sanitary reasons.
Multnomah County’s quest to ban flavored tobacco products could wipe out hookah lounges.
Still, hookah is not Vines’ primary target. The first of her two goals for the ban is limiting youth initiation to tobacco and nicotine use. (Hoo kah is not a tobacco product commonly used by teens, studies show.) Second, Vines is eager to ban menthol cigarettes, which are dispro portionately used by communities of color that have been heavily targeted by menthol-specific advertising.“Forallthe public health emergencies of the last three years—extreme heat, terrible air qual ity, and COVID—people with underlying health conditions are at a higher risk,” Vines says. “This is a meaningful way to actually address the un derlying conditions themselves.”
she opposes an exemption.
“It amazes me,” he says. “Hookah doesn’t take control over your brain. You’re OK to drive after smoking hookah. But meth? Heroin? All this is OK, but we ban flavored tobacco?”
MIGHTY FREEZE: A customer enjoys shisha at Mr. Hookah on Southeast Stark Street.
Out of Flavor
Ain has no Plan B for his career if the county shuts down Mr. Hookah. He has a wife and three young boys, ages 5, 2 and 1. He thrives on social izing with his customers in Arabic, French and English.“Thisis the line of my work: hookah,” he says. “If I am not with people every day doing this, I’m not me.”
RAIMESMICHAEL 10 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com NEWS
County health officials have a clear goal for the ban: limit youth access to nicotine. After all, hundreds of yummy-sounding vape prod ucts are available to entice children from the playground into full-fledged nicotine addiction, including such flavors as gummy bear, tropical slushy, banana ice cream and rainbow Skittles.
This fall, the Multnomah County Board of Com missioners could ban flavored tobacco.
But another result of a flavored-tobacco ban would be the closure of all of Portland’s hookah lounges.Hookahs are water pipes for smoking fruit-fla vored tobacco that became popular centuries ago in ancient Persia and India. Today, they are popular in the Middle East and North Africa— and among communities in Portland that hail from those places.
At Mr. Hookah on Southeast Stark Street at 183rd Avenue, customers can choose from about two dozen flavors of sticky, reddish hookah to bacco, also called shisha. Owner Clovis Ain packs the shisha into a hockey puck-sized bowl atop an ornate, 3-foot glass hookah with attached hose. Finally, he uses tongs to place three hot coals made from coconut husks on top of the whole apparatus to heat up the shisha.
Ain’s custom shisha blend for a newbie is cherry, “mighty freeze” (mint and lemon) and “blue mist” (blueberry). Plain shisha exists but it’s rare; even hundreds of years ago, shisha was flavored with molasses and honey.
There are only three hookah lounges in Port land and seven in all of Oregon, down from 10 before the pandemic. They are grandfathered in under the state’s Indoor Clean Air Act to allow indoor smoking, so the hookah industry here cannot expand beyond those 10 licenses.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, users may inhale in a typical one-hour hookah smoking session 100 to 200 times the amount of smoke they would in a single cigarette. People who smoke hookah may be at risk for some of the same diseases as cigarette smokers, including oral, lung, stomach and esophageal cancers, reduced lung function, and decreased fertility, says the CDC.
Ain, 32, is originally from Damascus and came to the U.S. when he was 11. He used to skip school to work at his parents’ Los Angeles restaurant and hookah bar because he loved the business so
The irony of a flavored-tobacco ban in Mult nomah County just two years after Oregon vot ers passed Measure 110, decriminalizing the personal possession of small amounts of hard drugs, is not lost on Ain. Mr. Hookah is next door to the county’s Stark Street Shelter, and he picks up used hypodermic needles in his parking lot “all day long.”
There will be a gathering place that’s built almost in the center of the property where other tribes can come and gather. They can conduct ceremonies. They can enjoy themselves like that. And so, yes, we do have a place for them.
Last week offered the latest tantalizing clue of how that logjam could break.
Falls is a lot harder to reach, or even see. The best views of the cascade come from a bus stop outside Oregon City, or aboard a tour boat floating at its base. There’s no overlook where visitors can get close to the natural wonder.Foryears, such a destination has been promised—only to be washed away in a statewide conflict between government agencies and Oregon’s nine Indigenous tribes.
THUNDER: Cheryle A. Kennedy stands below Willamette Falls.
In a way, yes. An abandonment of what it was there for.
You’ve walked up to the falls. What does it feel like under the spray?
“It fed not only our bodies, but our souls.”
11Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com NEWS
It was a place of subsistence. It was a place of gathering. It was a place of ceremony. It was a place of commerce. So it has thousands of years of history as being possibly one of the most robust places of commerce west of the
What kind of access will other tribes have there?
In a recent interview, you said gaming was not something you were interested in on this site. Why is Wood Village or Spirit Mountain a better site for gaming than Oregon City?
Tumwata Village was a place that our people lived. It fed not only our bodies, but our souls. So we want to retain that.
What is the historical and ceremonial purpose of the falls to tribes and bands within the Grand Ronde?
Hotseat: Cheryle A. Kennedy
In interviews last week timed to the announcement, chairwoman Cheryle A. Kennedy said the Grand Ronde has no intentions of building a casino next to Willamette Falls. This week, in a video conversation, WW asked her why not.
It sounds like you’re saying the word “casino” on that site would be something of a desecration.
A fishing platform is not something that is built into this plan. Just to answer your question directly.
I don’t know whether other tribal leaders really think that or not. We have discussions and friendships that have been long before gaming was even a word here in Oregon.
Do you think your intentions will ease tensions with other tribes?
The Blue Heron property was not there for fishing. It was there for business. In the same way, the plan is to develop that site in terms of businesses that will be there, whether that be restaurants, retail or a hotel. But it’s all about healing. And it’s about allowing people to have access to a powerful spiritual area. It’s very spiritual to us.
We’ve invested so much in Spirit Mountain. Our thought is to always maintain it and to grow it as much as we can. Wood Village: Everyone knows it was a place of gambling to begin with.
The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde announced a name for its 23-acre property alongside the falls: “Tumwata Village.”
So, for years, when Metro was developing a project there, it promised the public could walk up to the waterfall. Will that happen at Tumwata?
So, historically, it’s a fishing site? Yes.
What’s in a name? Quite a bit. In 2019, the tribe bought the former Blue Heron paper mill for $17 million, securing a piece of real estate with huge cultural and economic worth. The mill site is especially valuable as the Grand Ronde seeks to diversify its economic base, which is almost entirely dependent on its casino, Spirit Mountain.
That’sarea.why the announcement of the Tumwata Village name, accompanied by the release of drawings that show a plaza, shopping district and hotel, is far more than a typical press release: It’s a sovereign nation jockeying with other Indigenous nations and several layers of regional government over what commerce along the waterfall will look like. As WW has previously reported, the stakes are high: Poverty is endemic on Oregon reservations, and the nearest casino to Portland, Ilani, is operated by the Cowlitz tribe in Washington state (“Fish Story,” WW, Sept. 12, 2018).
If anyone has ever been to the mountains during a thunderstorm and you feel the rumbling of the thunder under your feet and the clap of the lightning as it’s right there. The power that you feel, that’s the same way I feel at Willamette Falls.
Being able to walk along the side of the river, being able to feel the beauty, the spray of the falls, the flow of the river, and to hear the powerful message that is coming from the falls.
The chairwoman of the Grand Ronde tribe describes a vision for Willamette Falls.
In March, the Grand Ronde pulled out of a partnership with regional government Metro and four other Indigenous nations who had agreed to build a riverwalk along the falls. The ownership of the Blue Heron site now gives the Grand Ronde the ability to act alone—and a significant advantage over other tribes that claim historical legal rights in the Portland metro
BY AARON MESH amesh@wweek.com
Every second, 30,849 cubic feet of water plunge over the edge of Willamette Falls. Among American waterfalls, that’s second in volume only to Niagara, even though the signature falls on the Willamette River is 130 feet shorter.
Mississippi for tribal people. The Europeans who came as explorers and travelers witnessed the abundance of the falls in the amount of fish that lived there.
RONDEGRANDOFTRIBESCONFEDERATEDOFCOURTESYPHOTOS
[Editor’s note: The Grand Ronde purchased the former Multnomah Greyhound Club in 2015.]
GATHERING PLACE: The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde released drawings of Tumwata Village.
Will the village as planned include a fishing platform?
WW: What language is Tumwata? Is it Chinook jargon?
How do you define access?
You may want to check the design that Metro had, because the path that they were contemplating—and it was in their planning documents—was to go up the middle of the property. Our design is to have it right alongside the river. We will provide access to the river itself, not as the former design of those who were interested in development there.
Another difference: You can visit Niagara Falls.Willamette
Cheryle A. Kennedy: Not necessarily. The name came from the people that occupied the area millennia ago. And so they are part of the Willamette Falls people, part of the Clowewalla tribe and the Clackamas people. It predates the trade language. It’s just the name of the people that were there.
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For the better part of two years, Dawson Park has made unwanted headlines—never more so than in recent weeks, when Legacy Emanuel Hospital threatened to move its nearby children’s clinic after one of its employees was assaulted. Bullet holes have penetrated the church rectory nextThesedoor.are not isolated incidents of gunfire. The park lies within a zone that city officials have identified in internal documents as the sev enth-most likely place to get shot in Portland.
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BY MANFIELDLUCAS AND SOPHIE
THE TROUBLE AT PARKDAWSON is encroaching on a landmark of Portland’s Black community.
awson Park, located in the heart of the Eliot neighborhood in North Portland, is 2 acres of oak trees and green grass.
Three people have been killed here in two years.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 14
Crime
Five blocks away stands a New Seasons and a Pi lates studio. Three blocks away, you can buy a $6 oat milk latte. Nearby, an apartment building is charging $2,400 a month for one-bedroom units. Yet what’s happening on the southeast corner of the park feels a world away.
If you’re looking for a social ill that plagues Portland in 2022, you’ll find it here.
STEADFAST: Despite surrounding gentrification, Dawson Park remains a cherished gathering place for the Black community.
BRIANPHOTOS503-243-2122PEELBYBROSE
On North Stanton Street, an open-air drug market sells cocaine to suburban buyers during the day while people smoke crack in the vestibule of a neighboring apartment complex long into the night. Women ask for money from strangers on the corner and, according to a police report, sell sex acts for 20s at the bus stop.
Why won’t City Hall act?
Jason Flakes, who last year moved into a home on Stanton Street with his wife, Brittanie, says his 6-year old daughter, Nya, asks about the people nodding off on the corner. Flakes fears she will pick up discarded hypodermic needles from the sidewalk.“Wehave to tell her, don’t be picking up noth ing,” Flakes says.
Gentrification
Brittanie Flakes, 36, spent much of her childhood in the Eliot neighborhood with her grandmother, who lived there in the 1990s. She remembers drug and alcohol activity in Dawson Park, but her grandma let her play there—it still felt safe.
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What makes the scene more painful is that it is occurring at a park cherished by Black Port landers, some of whom travel 9 miles by TriMet bus each day simply to play dominoes in a place that feels like home.
In 1970, 9 in 10 Black Portlanders lived in Al bina. Now, barely more than 2 in 10 do.
BrittanieRETURN: and Jason (above).playgroundDawsonoftenTheirneighborhood.formerlytoParknearbyboughtFlakesahouseDawsonlastyearhelpreclaimaBlackfamilyvisitsthePark
“Even when they changed everything, you still come to the park,” says Paul Knauls, 91. Knauls owned a series of businesses, including the Cotton Club, one of Portland’s most famous nightclubs, until it closed in 1970. Strolling through the park in his trademark captain’s cap, he’s still greeted
What we found—both in talking to people who visit the park every day and in reviewing city documents—was the story of a place where city leaders appear incapable of making hard choices. Portland officials reject the unjust systems that resulted in warranted rage and protest two years ago. But they haven’t found something to replace themJameswith.Posey, a longtime Black leader in Port land, lives on North Stanton Street. He has for 40Heyears.says Dawson Park “ultimately represents how the city has neglected the Black community.” First, by kicking out Black families. And second,
“As a kid it was like, OK, stay away from the people who are drinking or doing whatever, and
Civil rights marches in the 1960s began at Daw son Park. Martin Luther King Jr. visited the play ground and spoke at a church two blocks away in 1961. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy campaigned there in 1968.
you could absolutely go around and play,” Flakes says. “It feels dangerous now.”
The Flakes are Black. That played a role in where they decided to buy a first home. “It was imperative to me to go back and buy property where my family and other Black families were removed,” Flakes says.
Displacement of Portland’s Black community has been a constant.
In the coming election cycle, candidates across Oregon will describe Portland as a place of danger and lawlessness. In reality, the problems that plague Portland are intense, but they are not distributed evenly across the city. They fester in certain places and affect some Portlanders far more than others.
by abandoning the park as it’s beset by crime.
Over the past two weeks, WW spent time in one of those places.
To understand what’s gone wrong at Dawson Park, you must understand four factors. Some are old, some are new. But they have converged in this place, and what the city does about them will define how Portland works—and for whom.
Even with this exodus, parts of North Portland have maintained their significance to the dis placed Black community. And, for years, Dawson Park represented that.
In 1948, a flood destroyed the largely African American community of Vanport. Many of those Black families and others settled in Northeast Portland, in the Eliot neighborhood—one of seven neighborhoods that collectively make up the his toric Albina area. But many of those families were forced to move with the building of Memorial Coliseum in 1960 and Interstate 5 beginning in 1962 and, a decade later, with the 1972 expansion of Legacy Emanuel Hospital in neighborhoods where the Black community had resettled.
Neighbors, both Black and white, say their calls for help to the city have for years gone unan swered.ThePortland Police Bureau says no targeted drug stings have been made here in at least 14 months. The city hasn’t installed traffic diverters in an attempt to disrupt the drug drive-thru and gun violence. And the park has not been selected as a priority in the city’s campaign to slow gunfire.
“If you get cops off the record, they’ll say, ‘We’re not going to go over there and police that area because we’re going to be told we’re harassing the Black community,’” Posey says. “And that’s a damn shame.”
“ It’s scary you can lose your life and the city will say oh well, that’s just how it is.” Cook Morris St. Stanton St. Graham St. Dawson Park N Go Market
Bullet holes have pierced the church twice in recent years, says the Rev. Fr. Paulinus Mangesho. He lives in the neighboring rectory. But, fearing for his safety, he’s taken to sleeping in a back room, facing away from the park.
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That afternoon, a young couple sunned themselves on the grass. Children played on the swings. Men gathered around the domino tables. Says Harris, “What you see is why this park matters.”
Royal Harris, a community strategist, was there on a recent Friday afternoon with his grandson. He grew up near the park, until his grandmother’s house was turned into a parking lot. In recent years, he’s organized a series of rallies to bring attention to the problem of gun violence.
Gunfire
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While it’s arguable whether the area around Dawson Park is that much more violent than the rest of the city, few neighborhood streets see as much drug activity as the southeast corner of the park.
Across from the park is Immaculate Heart Church. Built in 1890, it has welcomed successive waves of newcomers: Irish, German, Black, Vietnamese. But two years ago, it did the unthinkable. Church leaders built a fence, shutting the building off from the neighborhood—and the drug dealers who ply their trade on the sidewalk outside its doors.
On a Thursday afternoon, a WW reporter
To Harris, headlines about crime in the park only reinforce racial stereotypes. “The park is sexy because pathologizing Black men always sells.”
Immaculate Heart Church
New Seasons Market Oat Milk Latte
There’s been three homicides around the park in the past two years. In December 2020, a 53-year-old Uber driver, Kelley Marie Smith, was killed in her car when a gunfight broke out in the park. Three months later, Titus McNack, 42, was shot multiple times on the sidewalk outside the park on a busy Tuesday in broad daylight. Both of those homicides are unsolved. Prosecutors declined to comment about them, citing ongoing investigations.Ayearlater, Mark Johnson, 55, was killed in the road near the park by Joseph Kelly Banks, who had schizophrenia. Banks had killed two other people already, and all three murders are
St. Ave.KerbyN Ave.VancouverN Ave.WilliamsN Ave.RodneyNE N
Drug Market
In recent years, suspects have been prosecuted for firing guns into the park’s trees, beating up a prostitute soliciting at the nearby bus stop, and stealing a 2-year-old out of a stroller.
“They still come here every day,” he says, “because this is where their daddy and their grandfathers came to play.”
Gun violence has risen nearly everywhere in Portland since 2019, not just in Dawson Park and not just in Black communities.
N Fremont St. N
Mangesho blames city leaders for not doing enough to protect the neighborhood. “They hear, they see, and they don’t act,” he says.
believed to have been random—in other words, Banks hadn’t known his victims.
Randall Children’s Hospital
Drugs
HOME: Dawson Park sits at the center of the neighborhood.awhichneighborhood,Eliotusedtobemajority-Black
Stop
police from the neighborhood appear to be rising, slowly. In 2012, around 14 out of every 1,000 dispatched calls for help came from Eliot. By 2022, that number had risen to 18.
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as royalty. On a recent visit, he pointed out the tables across the park, where old men gather with coolers of beer to play dominoes in the shade.
Still, a map provided to WW by the city’s Community Safety Division shows the area around Dawson Park ranks seventh on a list of 18 gun violence “clusters” identified by the city this summer.Callsto
The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office has not prosecuted a single person for deal ing cocaine in 2022, data provided by the office shows. There’s been a steep decline in the charge in recent years. In 2018, prosecutors charged 71 people. By 2020, it had fallen to 12 and, in 2021, toWhilenine. the DA’s office declined to prognosti
Jones says police have increased patrols in Eliot but don’t have the staff or the time to tar get dealers, let alone invest in the community policing that neighbors are demanding. “We’re just putting out fires everywhere,” she says.
Meanwhile, the Community Safety Division funded three nonprofits beginning in August to reduce gun violence at Dawson Park and other places (see “Keeping the Peace,” page 17).
Those familiar with the market say the drug is cocaine, but fentanyl and meth can be found here too, according to court records.
Drug dealing near Dawson Park is not new, even if its scale has increased since the pandemic descended and possession of small amounts of hard drugs were decriminalized in Oregon last year. It’s a place where a Portland Police Bureau Street Crimes Unit once conducted investigations of “open-air narcotic trafficking,” a unit that was disbanded in 2020 amid staffing shortages.
“We’re not able to obtain the sentence that a reasonable person would expect,” says deputy district attorney Eric Palmer.
Nearly every person WW spoke to in and around Dawson Park said it feels as if City Hall doesn’t care about them.
witnessed five drug deals on the Stanton Street side of the park within an hour. A young white man pulled up in a new gray Mercedes Benz. He stepped out of the car, ran to the dealer’s car, exchanged money for product, and drove away along Williams Avenue. The exchange took less than 30 seconds. The dealer moved inside the park, lounging against a public trash can as he casually executed the next four deals.
City inaction
On a recent warm night in September, two women and a man huddled in the vestibule in the shadow of a neighboring church and smoked a crack pipe.
“We’relens.not just going in like we would a couple decades ago and saturate the area and stop every one,” Jones says. “We have to factor in whether we’re going to be overpolicing.”
For close to two years, residents of the neighbor hood have begged city officials to quell the drug dealing and gun violence along North Stanton Street. For three years, they’ve been told the city doesn’t have the resources to help.
City officials say they’re mostly focused on addressing gun violence in East Portland.
It’s not that the city doesn’t spend money on the park; in 2013, it spent $2.7 million alongside private partners to rehab the park. It’s currently renovating the basketball courts. Boulders etched
“I don’t know how the city truly feels about it, but it’s scary you can lose your life and the city will say oh well, that’s just how it is,’ says Joseph Young, who grew up in Eliot, played basketball in Dawson Park as a youth, and still lives in the neighborhood with his family.
She says it’s a priority of the bureau as it beefs up staffing over the next few years to figure out what Portlanders want from their police force.
The city says it’s taking actions it can within funding limits: The Office of Violence Prevention contracts with groups that “conduct outreach in and around the park,” says Freeman, and it supports events hosted at the park. The parks bureau increased ranger visits at Dawson Park in response to gun violence and because it had funding for more rangers across the board.
A 2019 email reviewed by WW shows that when the Police Bureau decided to prioritize Dawson Park that year, it backfired: “Several community members became upset about the project before it really even got started,” a police captain wrote at the time, adding that the bureau’s approach to the park after the backlash “changed dramatically. Through this process we have identified areas within the [bureau] where we ourselves need to improve. Some of these areas are centered around providing further education to our officers about the history of Dawson Park.”
“I think it’s really important to make sure we’re working with the community about how they want to solve some of these problems.”
cate why prosecutions have dropped so steeply, spokeswoman Elisabeth Shepard says the DA’s issuance rates are a “reflection of referrals” from police, and referrals have decreased over the past twoPoliceyears.Bureau spokesman Lt. Nathan Sheppard says: “I would imagine between staffing levels greatly reducing the size of specialty units and the advent of Measure 110, our ability to inves tigate drug-related crimes has been greatly di minished.”Cmdr.Jones says such arrests are complicated by Measure 110, which decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard drugs in 2021. The DA’s office says recent changes in Oregon case law have made it harder to punish known drug dealers.
It’s not just the police that neighbors have gone to for help. Since 2020, they have begged the Port land Bureau of Transportation to install a traffic diverter or calming device that would make it harder for drug dealers to sell along Stanton and
But what most neighbors want is for the city to show that drug dealing and gun violence along Stanton isn’t welcome.
with the park’s history, funded by the city, sit in the center of the park.
Cmdr. Jones says police conduct is “scrutinized at all these different levels,” including through a racial
LOCKED OUT: The church next to Dawson Park erected a fence early in pandemicthedue to safety concerns.
The men on the corner drift in and out of the Stop N Go Mini Mart on the corner. The man behind the register keeps a gun prominently dis played on his hip. He declined to discuss what happens on Stanton Street.
16 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
“It is clear from the map that outer East Port land is the part of the city most impacted by gun violence,” says Lisa Freeman, programs manager for the Community Safety Division. “We also know that many residents of outer East Portland feel disconnected from and neglected by the city.”
And while the bureau does have a Narcotics and Organized Crime Unit, the bureau says it’s a “very small unit” now, and the North Precinct has done no targeted drug busts in the past year, according to Tina Jones, commander of the precinct.
“She says, ‘Oh, Mommy, I hate walking through all these people,’” Flakes recalls. “I said, ‘Nya, you have to remember that you live here. These other people do not. You have every right to be here.’”
“We used to own these homes, and now we don’t.” Irving says. But, he adds, “They’re not going anywhere. And we’re not leaving either.” SPOTS: A map generated by the city shows places gunfibemostPortlanderswherearelikelytoinjuredbyre.
Hardesty tells WW she supports more policing in places where violence is high, but that it “must adhere to the Constitution and not engage in racial profiling or criminalizing people just for hanging out in a public park.”
If there’s hope for Dawson Park, it may look like Lionel Irving.
SOURCE: CITY OF PORTLAND
She adds: “Violence and drug trafficking have been occurring in this area for a long time, but it’s just now getting more attention as the area becomes more gentrified.”
Young calls the meeting “the biggest shitshow I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“We’re positive influences. We’re violence interrupters,” Irving says. “We’ve come to build relationships, and we capitalize on relationships we already have with guys on the street.”
COMEBACK: “Gang veterans” Lionel Irving and Troy Ramsey now do outreach in Dawson Park on a city contract.
The three of them once repped di erent gang colors in the streets, before spending decades behind bars for their crimes.
done just isn’t enough.
Now, the trio contracts with City Hall through a nonprofit called Love Is Stronger, which holds events in the park. They received a $201,000 grant from the city this summer.
Neighbors at the meeting tell WW the calls for more policing—even when it came from Black residents—went unacknowledged, particularly by Hardesty’s staffer.
Dawson Park
17Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
According to emails obtained by WW, PBOT told neighbors they needed to bring in more Black voices before it would make any changes.
“I heard my Black neighbors asking for appropriate policing in this neighborhood,” recalls Cassie Muilenberg. “A nuanced conversation around policing was just not welcomed.”
“The key to any improvements in this area will be a coalition that specifically includes Black Portlanders,” a bureau staffer wrote in November 2020. “Particularly for something as potentially divisive as restricting auto access to a street (and one that leads directly to a key community gathering place like Dawson Park), we’ll need to include more Black voices into the proposal.”
Mayor Ted Wheeler, who oversees the Police Bureau, declined multiple requests for an inter-
The goal, Irving says, is making the park a welcoming place for everyone—the grandparents who grew up down the street, and the young families that just moved in.
On a recent Friday afternoon, Irving met up at the park with two of his business partners, Troy Ramsey and Talmage Ellis.
Brittanie Flakes says what’s being
Keeping the Peace
Some say it’s working. “It’s changed a lot: calmer, quieter, not a lot of violence. Especially when you guys are here,” a man in a yellow suit says, gesturing at Irving. He, like most of the regulars at the park who spoke at length with WW, declined to give his name.
In March, City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty’s office and the Community Safety Division held a meeting at Matt Dishman Community Center. They acknowledged the area has been ravaged by gun violence.
Former gang members themselves, the three maintain an unspoken rule for Dawson Park: Dealers stay on the corner, known shooters stay out.
view this past week. His office did not say why. Instead, mayoral spokesman Cody Bowman says: “We know we have work to do in Dawson Park and other areas around the city that are experiencing a disproportionate level of crime in the city. We will continue our efforts until we seeNeighborresults.”
HOT
would help quell gun violence.
She and Nya were walking home from school last week when they approached Stanton Street.
18 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com STREET
FAN OUT
Did you spot Darth Vader on the MAX last weekend? Maybe you did a double take while walking by Freddy Krueger fixat ed on his smartphone. The wild and often elaborate costumes in September always mean one thing: Rose City Comic Con has returned. This year, our city’s version of Nerd Christmas celebrated its 10th anniver sary and drew tens of thousands who came for celebrity autographs from the likes of Giancarlo Esposito, LeVar Burton and Sean Astin, deep-dive seminars, and the cosplay— especially the cosplay.
19Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
Photos by Chris Nesseth On Instagram: @chrisnesseth
If you have mixed feelings about clowns, it might be time for some exposure therapy at the CoHo Clown Festival. The event features performances by clowns of all types: extremely tall clowns, clowns bearing rubber chickens, clowns who bring along a sex-positive ally, Frenchy clowns, and everything in between. Join in the performance of the Opening Follies: Clown Dance Ritual, dip into one or two of the diverse performances, or snag a CoHo Clown Festival FastPass to enjoy all the events at a discount. CoHo Theatre, 2257 NW Raleigh St., 503-220-2646, cohoproductions.org. Various times Thursday-Sunday, Sept. 16Oct. 9. Tickets to individual shows are pay what you can, $50-$200 for a FastPass.
EAT: Annual Corn Roast and Harvest Festival
STUFF TO DO IN PORTLAND THIS WEEK, INDOORS AND OUT SEE MORE GET BUSY EVENTS AT WWEEK.COM/CALENDAR 20 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com GET
A stranded drag clown, a seagull with irritable bowel syndrome, the world’s last surviving polar bear, Liberace, Liza Minnelli and puppets of all sorts convene in Clown Down 2: Clown Out of Water. It all sounds like something out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel, but as part of PICA’s internationally renowned Time-Based Art Festival, the theatrical performance promises to be hyperrelevant. If you’re into absurdist commentary, the environment, or unhappy seagulls, be sure to put acclaimed Portland drag artist Anthony Hudson/Carla Rossi’s work on your calendar. Portland Institute for Contemporary Art Annex, 15 NE Hancock St., 503-242-1419, risk-reward.org. 6 pm Thursday-Friday, 2 pm Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 15-18. $10-$25.
WATCH: Home/Land
LISTEN: Beatrice
Portland Opera to Go takes the operatic experience on field trips to regional schools, and this year it showcases Beatrice by Dave Ragland and librettist Mary McCallum. The opera explores the history of Beatrice Morrow Cannady, associate editor of The Advocate —the first African American newspaper in Oregon. Those of us not attending middle school have just two opportunities to sample the performance POGO will share with kids all over the state. Hampton Opera Center, 211 SE Caruthers St., 503-241-1407, portlandopera.org. 7:30 pm Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, Sept. 17-18. $35.
Corn is amazingly versatile: It’s grainlike yet counts as a vegetable; it’s sweet yet works amazingly well in savory dishes; and it’s among the few foods that pop. There are so many reasons to celebrate corn that the town of Forest Grove is doing just that. Head to Pacific University in the heart of downtown FG to enjoy corn roasted, toasted and popped, along with live music, family-friendly activities, and a scenic setting. Pacific University, 2043 College Way, Forest Grove, 503-357-3006, forestgrove-or. gov. 11 am-5 pm Saturday, Sept. 17. Free. BUSY
LISTEN: Jackson Browne
� GO: CoHo Clown Festival
The Portland Art Museum and the Center for an Untold Tomorrow, collectively known as PAM CUT, invite film bu s to stop debating the merits of 8 mm over digital (at least temporarily) and attend the Doc-O-Rama film festival instead. The event’s five selections showcase boldness in all senses of the word, from Workhorse Queen ’s story of a drag artist struggling to create a meaningful career in the entertainment industry to Aggie ’s tale of a wealthy art investor using her assets to fight for justice. The festival culminates with a showing of Moonage Daydream, which features a live musical performance in honor of Ziggy Stardust (aka David Bowie). Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave., 503-221-1156, pamcut. org. Showtimes vary Friday-Saturday, Sept. 16-17, and Friday, Sept. 23 and 30. $12 for
A free, family-friendly festival featuring everything from a vintage T-shirt collection to an exhibition made by local Latinx artists (Xochitl Santana Nuño, Alex Valle, Karen Taylor and others) kicks o JUNTOSpdx, a new celebration marking Hispanic Heritage Month. Events take place every weekend through Oct. 15, including a gallery show at the Old Town Chinatown Community Association’s headquarters on Saturday, followed by live music performances and dancing throughout Portland’s original downtown. ¡Estás invitado! Portland’s Old Town-Chinatown neighborhood, juntospdx. net. 2-6 pm Saturday, Sept. 17. Free.
individual screenings, $55 for a festival pass.
� GO: OpeningJUNTOSpdxCeremony
Hand2Mouth may be a small theater company, but it’s one of the most signifi cant drama institutions in Portland. Its 2021 virtual epic Distancias was the most poignant portrait of life in quarantine to emerge from the PDX theater scene—and it’s easy to imagine 2017’s wondrous Psychic Utopia (about the history of communes in Oregon) being talked about for decades. For its latest endeavor, Home/Land , Hand2Mouth teams with France’s Begat Theater and NYC’s WaxFactory to take audiences on a time-shifting journey through a shelter village. With a brilliant creative team in charge, the production promises to do what Hand2Mouth does best: astonish. Zidell Yards, 3121 S Moody Ave., 503-217-4202, hand2mouththeatre.org. 7 pm Thursday-Sunday, through Sept. 18. $5-$25.
Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Jackson Browne’s early lyrics captured hard-toexpress emotions, exemplified by “Late for the Sky” (1974) and “Here Come Those Tears Again” (1976). His later work has turned outward—often expressing dismay over the state of the environment and social injustice. Browne’s upcoming Edgefield concert is sure to o er a solid mix of both iterations of his music, performed in the venue’s beautiful outdoor amphitheater and serviced by McMenamins’ amply oiled event machine. McMenamins Edgefield Amphitheater, 2126 SW Halsey St., Troutdale, 503-669-8610, mcmenamins.com. 6:30 pm Wednesday, Sept. 14. $50.50-$145.50.
WATCH: Doc-O-Rama
WATCH: You’re Wrong About Live
Sarah Marshall has made a career of bursting people’s bubbles with her podcast You’re Wrong About. Her modus operandi is to shatter long-held beliefs and collective misremembrances by shining a light on commonly misunderstood topics, such as the Donner Party, Go Ask Alice and Tom Cruise (specifically, an incident with a couch). Marshall teams up with Chelsey Weber-Smith of the American Hysteria podcast for an evening of perspective-alerting revelations set to the music of Carolyn Kendrick. McMenamins Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 503-223-4527, mcmenamins.com. 8 pm Friday, Sept. 16. $30 in advance, $35 day of show.
WATCH: Clown Down 2: Clown Out of Water
THEATREHAND2MOUTHCOURTESY
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“Everything’s super seasonal,” Wilcox adds, “so if you come in a month, things are probably going to be very different.”
3. TITO’S TAQUITOS
5. TERCET
4. PONO BREW LABS
1935 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-208-3948, todotaco.com. 5-9 pm, Sunday-Monday, 5-10 pm Tuesday-Saturday.
1728 NE 40th Ave., 503-432-8143, ponobrewing. com. 4-10 pm Sunday-Thursday, 4 pm-midnight Friday-Saturday.
2. POETRYCHAMPAGNEPÂTISSERIE
This new bakery is a pink wonderland of colorful macarons, airbrushed tarts and sou é pancakes. Chef-owner Dan Bian is dedicated to infusing classic French desserts with exciting ingredients— from yuzu to guava to ube. The real stars here are the hyperrealistic cakes, including one that looks like a perfect Homer Simpson doughnut.
515 SW Broadway, #100, 971-865-2930, tercetpdx. com. 5:45-10 pm Wednesday-Saturday.
Tartuca is classic Italy-meets-Oregon farm-to-table elegance.
The bucatini ($22) is an incredibly considerate and cozy dish—you could almost call it a vegetarian carbonara. Thick-sliced lobster mushrooms are meaty and perfectly cooked, whole sungold tomatoes are bursts of sunshine, and the bright-orange yolk pooled at the bottom of the bowl recalls Amy Adams trying her first poached egg in Julie & Julia: “It tastes like…cheese sauce. Yum.”
A PerformanceBravura
When was the last time you tasted a dessert so vibrant, so shockingly alive, that it caused you to laugh out loud with sheer joy? Have you ever tried an appetizer so salty, sweet and oily that it warranted a burst of applause, as if it had just performed a magic trick? I was lucky enough to have both experiences at Tartuca, the sensational new Italian restaurant occupying the former Radar space on North Mississippi Avenue.
3343 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-265-8834, champagnepoetry.biz. 9:30 am-7 pm Tuesday-Thursday and Sunday, 9:30 am-9 pm Friday-Saturday.
Editor: Andi Prewitt
Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com
3975 SW Beaverton Hillsdale Highway, 503406-5935, titos-taquitos.square.site. 11 am-6 pm Wednesday-Saturday.
Build-Your-Own-Taco Night is a weekly staple for many families, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s something so playful and satisfying about the creative construction. That fun, familial feeling is a big part of the experience of dining at Todo, where you can choose from half- or fullpound plates of taco fillings and adventurously shu e them with various toppings on soft corn tortillas or crisp tostadas. Our go-to: the pastor de trompo.
Located in the mezzanine of downtown’s historic Morgan Building, Tercet is the rebirth of beloved prix fixe seafood restaurant Roe, and you’ll find the new iteration maintains its predecessor’s high standards. Head chef John Conlin has expanded the menu to include meat—a recent visit saw morels draped over a tender beef tartare—though fish dishes are still superb, like a lightly poached wild Chinook in a green sorrel sauce.
Hot Plates
LEEAARON
PHOTOS BY AARON LEE
At Tito’s, the taquitos are neither an appetizer nor an afterthought but an elaborate—and elaborately composed—entree. They’ve got a spectacularly crispy crackle, strong corn flavor, and chunky-soft potato filling, plus an assortment of vegetable garnishes and your choice of proteins laid on top.
22 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
tiny whole-roasted mushrooms, garlic oil, and Cypress Grove’s seminal party cheese Humboldt Fog. To feature that brielike goat cheese with its signature vegetable ash on top of a pizza whose bottom is all crispy char is a stroke of genius.
WHERE TO EAT THIS WEEK.
Housemade radiatori with blistered sungold tomatoes and kale ($20) reads rich and spicy on the page, but actually comes off as incredibly refreshing on a 90-degree day. A gorgeous wooden bowl is swiped with a halo of ethereal Calabrian chile ricotta, which surrounds a swirly pile of springy, al dente nuggets of pasta topped with a mini-salad of spring onions and basil. Summer squash ($12) with sundried tomato pesto, pine nuts, and Castelvetrano olives, is roasty and bracingly salty. The tender sweetness of little gems in the Caesar ($12) contrasts with Parmesan frico bits that crunch like Royal Umami croutons.
Pono fans now have a dependable place to find the brewery’s beer on tap and can accompany those pints with some stellar Pacific Island- and Asian-inspired food. You really couldn’t go wrong with building an entire meal out of the starters, which include Filipino lumpia, kalua pork sliders, french fries topped with either more of that pig or beef bulgogi and sticky garlic shoyu wings.
Top 5
So if, like me, you’ve been bemoaning Portland’s recent barrage of fried chicken, smashburgers, and soft serve, and craving some of that good ol’ Pacific Northwest farmto-table elegance, it’s hiding in plain sight on Wilcox’s ever-changing menu.
Before the chill of fall sets in, you may be drawn to Tartuca’s front and back patios, which are serene and casual—ideal settings for sharing a bottle of red wine and good discussion with friends. But the narrow brick interior, lined with local art, is where you’ll get dinner and a show: Chef Jamie Wilcox is running a bustling machine of an open kitchen, pumping out dishes that are at once iconically Italian and quintessentially Oregon.“We have a really wonderful team, and we’re getting all our produce from local farms and farmers markets,” Wilcox says. “We’ve had a lot of freedom to source things the way we want to. I’m really excited about that.”
BY THOM HILTON
FOOD & DRINK
1. TODO
This includes taking advantage of the bounties of Sauvie Island and clipping bay leaves from neighbors’ home gardens.
You’ll see most tables sharing pizzas, and Tartuca’s current, most-popular offerings are all bangers. The #2 ($16) with red tomato sauce, fresh yellow tomato hunks, purple basil, and cloves of confit garlic, has a defiant personality—there are so many layers of sweetness and sharpness that it would be rude to classify it as a mere margherita. The #6 ($20), with silky sheep’s milk cheese, pesto and zucchini, benefits the most from Tartuca bucking the sourdough pizza trend, which can often be distracting. Instead, this dough’s mild airiness allows subtler ingredients to shine, and its olive oil-brushed crust shimmers like a savory doughnut. The #4 ($21) is just about perfect, with spicy lamb sausage, softly sweet caramelized onions,
8537 N Lombard St., 503-384-2076, rockabillycafe.com. 8 am-8 pm Wednesday-Thurs day and Sunday, 8 am-9 pm Friday-Saturday.
Buzz List
About a month after opening last winter, Rocka billy added alcohol-soaked shakes to its menu, as if it knew we’d need another painkiller as the year wore on. Right now, you should be drinking the White Ukrainian, and not just because it’s trendy to protest the Russian invasion by boycotting the country’s exports along with its name. The shake’s soothing rum-and-co ee flavor is like slipping into that first light sweater of the season as we transition into fall.
5. THE SUNSET ROOM
8070 E Mill Plain Blvd., Vancouver, Wash., 360-524-9000, rallypizza.com. 3-8 pm Mon day-Thursday, noon-8 pm Friday-Sunday.
The rooftop oasis that once held Kex’s Lady of the Mountain has a new occupant. Renowned bartenders Je rey Morgenthaler and Benjamin “Banjo” Amberg opened the Sunset Room in late July after launching the hotel lobby’s watering hole Pacific Standard. The top-floor perch has a menu that’s more whimsical and experimental, which goes well with views of the riot of color that is the neighboring Fair-Haired Dumbbell.
Desserts are also playful and compelling. The olive oil cake ($11) with macerated blue berries, Earl Grey gelato and mascarpone, is lighter and spongier than any other I’ve tasted, and the blackberry stracciatella gelato ($7) crunches with crackly threads of dark
with a mildly grassy olive oil, corn, cucum bers, sliced red onion, and the luscious local fruit, it’s pure creamy heaven, particularly when scooped up with housemade focaccia ($6) that’s fluffy, oily and charred—every thing a superlative appetizer could be. The dish that elicited laughter was the corn cake ($11), served with half a roasted peach and a stratospheric lemon verbena gelato. Chef Wilcox seriously knows her way around a stone fruit, and who knows how long they’ll be on the menu. That’s the best thing about seasonal food, and perhaps why I felt the need to clap. Like a performance, it’s here and then gone, and it forces you to feel and remember. I can’t wait to make Tartuca a regular spot; I’m sure there will be many more memorable performances to come.
3350 SE Morrison St., 503-477-9663, oldpalpdx.com. 4-10 pm Sunday-Monday and Thursday; 4-11 pm Friday-Saturday. New Sunnyside neighborhood restaurant Old Pal wants to become your regular drinking buddy. You’ll currently find a lineup of eight cocktails, including its eponymous drink made with rye, Campari, and Dolin Dry vermouth, as well as beer, wine and zero-proof drinks. Pair your beverage with the flavors of late summer, like an heirloom tomato gazpacho.
1. HETTY ALICE BREWING AT BELMONT STATION 4500 SE Stark St., 503-232-8538, belmont-sta tion.com. Noon-11 pm daily.
SEASON’S EATINGS: Chef Jamie Wilcox uses ingredients ripe and available from area farms, which means the menu will change frequently.
dishes I mentioned at the be ginning that prompted sheer joy and bravos? It all comes down to the peach. The burrata ($18) is what warranted applause and is pos sibly the best thing I’ve eaten all year. Served
3. OLD PAL
EAT: Tartuca, 3951 N Mississippi Ave., 503477-8008, tartucapdx.com. 4-10 pm Tues day-Thursday, 11:30 am-10 pm Friday-Satur day, 11:30 am-9 pm Sunday.
chocolate.Asforthose
4. ROCKABILLY CAFE
Top 5
After launching Living Häus Beer Company with two other well-known Portland brewers at the former Modern Times space this summer, pFriem vet Gavin Lord has spun o his own project inside that same space. The brewery is named after his grandmother, who had a rough upbringing yet became known for her hospitality, a legacy he hopes to carry on with this business. Beer nerds know Lord best for his time as head brewer at Hood River’s pFriem and, after his year o from the industry, are undoubtedly pumped by his re turn. Get the first pours of Hetty Alice at Belmont Station starting Sept. 15.
2. RALLY PIZZA
Rally Pizza serves some of Southwest Washing ton’s best Neapolitan-style pies, hand-stretched pasta and frozen custard milkshakes, like the piña colada. The use of fresh-squeezed, sweet-tart pineapple juice makes all the di erence. The custard floats across the tongue as smoothly as a whipped cloud of meringue, while flavors of the tropics, from coconut cream to molasses rum, slowly dissolve like a sunset.
100 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., kexhotels. com/eat-drink/thesunsetroom. 4-10 pm Fri day-Sunday.
BARRALLISON 23Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
WHERE TO DRINK THIS WEEK.
SummerBuzzin’
The season may be coming to an end, but you still have time to complete a short sun-soaked bucket list that’s enhanced by the right weed strain.
For countless Portlanders since 1905, no summer is complete without a trip to iconic Oaks Amusement Park, even if these days you’re just there to watch the Screaming Eagle from the riverfront picnic area. However, if you do make it onto the actual midway, the right strain can protect you from carnie overstimulation, keep you loose enough to avoid whiplash on the Adrenaline Peak roller coaster, and ensure you stay focused enough to finish a game of mini golf.
Alpine lake floats in September? Yes, please. Hide-and-seek on Larch Mountain in shorts during Virgo season? Count me in. Whispering farewell to summer from the sandy shores of Sauvie Island while corn mazes hum with visitors in the background? Babes, I’m already in my plus-size bikini. And I’ve got all my strain recommendations for these bittersweet, summer finale vibes at the ready.
BY BRIANNA WHEELER
The aptly named Skullcap is a balanced hybrid, which is to say its effects walk the line between soothing and invigorating. Users report a calm, happy, easy-to-manage head high and a relaxing, elastic body high perfect for flower strolls and parasol twirling. Expect a sour funk perfume and sweet, doughy exhale.
Peninsula Park Rose Garden + Velvet Glove
Oaks Amusement Park + Purple Cotton
BUY: Happy Leaf Portland Dispensary, 1301 NE Broadway, 971-800-0420, happyleafportland.com.
If you’re a longtime resident, you already know about this scene, but for newly minted Portlanders, taking in a summer sunset from the west-facing slopes of Mount Tabor is a rite of passage. Substantial crowds gather to bathe in the otherworldly golden-hour light, while random musicians pluck away at their instruments. The air is lightly perfumed with cannabis—in a wholesome kind of way, not a music-fest kind of way—and from that vantage point, Portland is the one of the easiest cities to fall in love with.
Mount Tabor Sunset + Sour Sunset
Swan Island Dahlia Festival + Skullcap
Velvet Glove results in a classic, space cadet head high that feels a bit like having cotton between your ears, and almost acts like a sedative to the body. Before taking a meditative walk through the labyrinth, a puff of Velvet Glove might deliver just the right attitude adjustment to enjoy the space without any inner background noise. Expect a gassy, citrus nose and pungent exhale.
Wandering through acres of flower farms in the full summer sun may soon no longer be a pleasant activity as Oregon temperatures continue to creep upward. But since we’re losing daylight in September, the afternoon highs are not quite as brutal, making this the perfect time to pack a parasol, sun hat or visor and twirl around Swan Island’s dahlias (the annual titular festival runs through Sept. 30).
BUY: Gram Central Station, 6430 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 503-284-6714.
BUY: Homegrown Apothecary & Dispensary, 1937 NE Pacific St., 503-232-1716, homegrownapothecary.com.
The pile of pumpkins outside my neighborhood grocer is a harbinger, as is the growing pile of leaves in my driveway. Though the thermometer and seasonal calendar still say it’s summer, I can smell autumn on the breeze. The countdown to fall has begun, and we have precious few (hopeful emphasis on few) days of summer left. Maybe it’s time to consider completing an end-of-season recreational to-do list and also restock your stash box with summer faves, because before we know it, harvest season will be here and we’ll be putting our water shoes away for another nine months.
This year’s outdoor recreational opportunities may have been a bit more tame due to a succession of fierce heat waves, but here’s a news flash: This is the new normal.
Portland newbies in search of the perfect, last selfie of summer will be crowded into Trillium Lake with novelty floats, but if that’s not your scene, Frog Lake is just as lovely, typically a bit less crowded, and biologically diverse enough for all your nature-photo needs. Bonus: Its sandy shores are the perfect place for stoned sunbathing.
One potential lake day smoke is Dirty Taxi, a super-euphoric, bright and enthusiastic hybrid sativa. The body effects can last for hours, and the head highs are reportedly crystalline and giddy. Expect a stank perfume, peppery exhale and powerful onset .
BUY: The Kings of Canna, 1465 NE Prescott St., C, 971-3196945, thekingsofcanna.com.
Sour Sunset is known as a physically relaxing strain, with a crisp, creative head high. At the onset, the high is euphoric but eventually softens as you fall into a mellow bliss. It’s ideal for an evening spent lounging on a picnic blanket while imagining the painting you could probably make of the epic sunset you’re watching.
Tucked behind Portland Community College’s Cascade campus is a whimsical rose garden with a short hedge maze, sparkling fountain, paths of intricate brickwork, and shade trees perfect for playing hide-and-seek. Of all the rose gardens in town, it’s arguably the most charismatic and, thus, a great place to be stoned with your arms, thighs and toes out.
Frog Lake + Dirty Taxi
BUY: Electric Lettuce Dispensary, 203 NE Weidler St., 971407-3150, electriclettuce.com.
Purple Cotton delivers a weightless, euphoric head high, and a silky, springy body buzz that, while not necessarily energizing, still supplies some measure of perk. Expect a cotton candy sweet mouthfeel and funky fruit aroma.
24 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com POTLANDER
BY LIBBY MOLYNEAUX
Everything about Friedman, who majored in history at UCLA, feels out of time, and it’s always been that way for her. “All my idols are so long dead. I’m very much into deep context,” she tells WW, citing Patsy Cline, Bessie Smith and especially gospel singer LaShun Pace, of whom she adds, “I’d like to sound like her all day every day. Gospel is my favorite. Real gospel.”
SHOWS WEEK
By junior high in SoCal’s Orange County, she met a singer with a popular local roots band who asked her to get up with his group. That connection led to performing with other OC luminaries, such as Mike Ness of Social Distortion (Friedman would give him vocal lessons); Billy Zoom and DJ Bonebrake of X; and psychobilly legends Lux Interior and Poison Ivy of The Cramps. “I was able to morph into whatever they wanted me to sing,” she says.
GELBKENTBYFRIEDMAN/PHOTORUBYOFCOURTESY
Of Montreal began life as part of Athens, Ga.’s ’60s-enamored Elephant 6 collective, with early albums sounding like the Beatles fronted by a psychedelic glam poppet obsessed with Dionysian imagery (and words long and multisyllabic enough to induce ASMR). The driving obsessions of Kevin Barnes’ project remain, but they’ve transitioned over the years into a sort of bookworm version of Parliament-Funkadelic, with dancers, outrageous outfits, and beats that straddle the line between lithe funk and meticulous British Invasion pop. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 503-2848686, wonderballroom.com. 8 pm. $20. 21+.
To Friedman, the music business is an addiction. “You can’t expect to make money. The music business is like the Pet Rock— remember that?” she asks, alluding to the 1970s fad of selling actual rocks in gift boxes. “If you got the money, then you can be the famous rock.”
It was Friedman’s MySpace page (look it up, kiddies) that caught the attention of then-Interscope vice president Tony Ferguson in 2009 while Friedman was at UCLA. “I was going to be an attorney,” she says. A record deal never transpired, but her career has included opening for Brian Wilson and Jeff Bridges, the acclaimed album Gem in 2016, and her music on Justified and the overseas version of Peaky Blinders, among numerous other accomplishments.
THURSDAY-FRIDAY, SEPT. 15-16:
In the world of underground metal, Boris rivals only their heroes the Melvins in terms of longevity, prolificacy and boldness of experimentation. First building their reputation in the ’90s with amp-frying albums with names like Feedbacker and Dronevil, the Japanese trio has since dipped a toe in everything from ambient music and noise to dream pop and shoegaze. This August’s Heavy Rocks is the third in a series of albums with that name that play as attempts to get back to basics—but, inevitably, they launch right into the stratosphere. Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark St. , 971-808-5094, revolutionhall.com. 8 pm. $25. All ages (minor seating in balcony).
Her mom briefly performed musicals in New York City before having five children, and Friedman began vocal training when she was 5. “I was unnaturally powerful,” she says. “My mom was afraid my belting would ruin my vocal cords.”
The “less glamorous” part of Friedman’s life is her part-time job at a Fred Meyer home and garden department, which is providing plenty of inspiration for a TV musical she’s working on. She shares a story about a homeless guy who brought in two off-leash pit bulls and let them tear into a bag of dog food one day. “You can’t make this shit up,” she says. “So I am really blessed. The balls of people here.”
SATURDAY, SEPT. 17:
WHAT TO SEE AND WHAT TO HEAR BY DANIEL BROMFIELD @bromf3
Portland musician Kyleen King, who plays with Brandi Carlile’s band, says: “I would say that Ruby has one of the most unique and intensely powerful voices I’ve ever heard. I crave the timbre of her voice and the energy of her vibrato. She is also an entirely captivating presence onstage.”
“MY MOM WAS AFRAID MY BELTING WOULD RUIN MY VOCAL CORDS.”
25Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com MUSIC Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson | Contact: bennett@wweek.com
Ruby Friedman and That Voice
SATURDAY, SEPT. 17:
Friedman was that child who would sing for everybody in the room. “I would get up on tables at my mom’s birthday parties and just start singing,” she says. “We’d go out to dinner, and if there was somebody at the piano, I’d go sing with the piano player and freak people out because I had this huge voice. I was invisible unless I was singing.”
Friedman particularly relates to her moving and rootsy “The Ballad of Lee Morse,” a song about the tragic life of deep-voiced vocalist Morse, an Oregon-born jazz and blues singer who performed at the Ziegfeld Theatre on Broadway, but whose career was plagued by addiction. It’s a song that should have been a chart-topper on the Americana charts.
It’s fitting that singer-songwriter-musician Ruby Friedman lives in a glorious old brick building in the Alphabet District that just as easily could be in New Orleans, Paris or Old Hollywood. You would not want to see her in a humdrum living environment. With her long red hair a hue somewhere between Atomic Fireball and Fisher-Price and her vintage-fab fashion sense—lace-up platform boots on a summer Monday afternoon—Friedman is a showbiz soul who may as well have landed here from yesteryear. An antique phone on her wall doesn’t look out of place at all. Even her deadpan French bulldog, Clovis, is sepia tone.
You really can’t categorize Friedman’s voice, but let’s just say she truly can do it all. On her frightening “I’m Not Your Friend,” there’s a commanding swagger that rises to a near-yodel. Her orchestrated “Shooting Stars” starts off passionate and slow and builds to a wondrous life-loving anthem.
Come for the amazing vocal pipes, stay for even more amazing vocal pipes.
If you drive by the Laurelthirst Public House and notice the roof raised a bit, that’s because Friedman’s played her first of four September Tuesdays. She insists it was “a rehearsal.” It was hellaciously great. Her “House of the Rising Sun” will kill you.
SEE IT: Ruby Friedman Orchestra plays the Laurelthirst Public House, 2958 NE Glisan St., 503-232-1504, laurelthirst. com. 9 pm Tuesday, Sept. 20 and 27. Free.
Though The Shins are one of the quintessential Portland bands, their great debut, Oh, Inverted World, was recorded in Albuquerque, N.M., where bandleader James Mercer lived and worked before the royalties from the morbidly catchy “New Slang” allowed him to pack his bags and move to the Northwest. It’s a psychedelic pop album that doesn’t thrust the listener into an Alice in Wonderland world so much as provide a new perspective on the deep weirdness of everyday life. Pioneer Courthouse Square, 701 SW 6th Ave., 800-5143849, pdx-live.com. 6:30 pm. $53. All ages.
James Lipton once asked Chris Rock during an episode of Inside the Actors Studio if he would explain the use of the N-word in Black culture to his audience—prompting Rock to look back at him with the wide-eyed, terrified response, “Now I got this job!?”
This is in line with Roland Emmerich’s “historical” Revolutionary War film The Patriot (2000). Both movies loosely tie together backstories within an authentic setting while shoehorning an egregious love story into the plot (again, chalk it up to the accessibility factor).
Viola Davis stars as a 19th century African warrior in The Woman King.
Meanwhile, the supporting cast of fellow warriors accomplishes an astonishing amount of characterization through slight looks and limited dialogue that distinguish each of them within the unit. But the breakout star is the young Thuso Mbedu, who plays the headstrong recruit Nawi.
Davis does an amazing job of playing Davis, without ever seeming to embody the persona of a stoic African warrior. Lucky for the film, this hardly matters. The sheer force she brings as an actor
BY RAY GILL JR.
The Woman King rejects the notion that its responsibility is to teach African history in two hours. Instead, it tells a tale of pride, dignity and agency against the backdrop of the fascinating Kingdom of Dahomey. In short, filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood (who wrote for A Different World and directed Love & Basketball and The Old Guard) and a stellar cast bring the legendary Agoji warrior women to life.
accessibility over a fiercely accurate, R-rated depiction of war and slavery. That may be the one thing holding The Woman King back from being an epic, as opposed to merely a very good film.
Not so much, it turns out. In The Woman King, the Africans are shown with relative historical accuracy concerning their own brutal war tactics, slavery for profit, and attitudes towards women. And as for the French slavers, they’re not demonized beyond the understanding that the slave trade existed.
SEE IT: The Woman King, rated PG-13, plays at Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza.
provides the essential emotional beats that a more authentic portrayal might have asked her to sacrifice.
The tribe’s most passionate advocate for forsaking the slave trade is Nanisca (Davis), the general who leads the Agoji, which is Ghezo’s fiercest fighting force. Her previous experience in slavery traumatized her to the point of clarity, convincing her that the Dahomey must break from the system they’ve chained themselves to before the tribes devastate each other.
Dahomey Forever
In other words, The Woman King is directed at a Black audience, but it’s a movie for everybody. And if it causes people with racial animus to inadvertently study African history? Cool.
A similar sentiment surely haunted everyone involved with The Woman King, which attempts to tell a 19th century African story to a multicultural audience. The film has received plenty of scrutiny already, both from people skeptical that it could offer an accurate portrait of Africans’ role in atrocities as well as those looking for a beacon of light to be shone on a misunderstood people and their history.
The brutality on display in the tribal war is measured. This is a PG-13 movie, after all, and the filmmakers seem to have chosen
26 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com MOVIES Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson | Contact: bennett@wweek.com
At the beginning of the film, Nawi is a teenage girl being married off by her caregiver. Vigorously resistant to the choice being made for her, she’s sent to live and train with the Agoji warriors, which requires her to take no lovers and bear no children (it’s not unlike joining the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones). She’s stubborn, but her desire to be a warrior drives her through brutal trials to become a proud warrior.
The Woman King sidesteps the accusations of its loudest prerelease critics, who demanded that all warts be shown in its depiction of the French, the African tribes and the slave trade. The trailer elicited quite a backlash from people who claimed the film would depict the “noble” Africans murdering their “evil” white oppressors.
TIFF
Set in 1823, The Woman King finds the Dahomey in a cyclical conflict with a neighboring tribe, enriching themselves with the sale of each other’s prisoners to the international slave trade—and King Ghezo (John Boyega) of the Dahomey is being pressured to abandon the practice.
“I knew what it would mean to us as Black people,” the film’s star Viola Davis told Vanity Fair. “Something that has never been done before. And what it would mean for Black women sitting in that movie theater. The responsibility is high.”
After a summer that saw Top Gun: Maverick lead the box office on both Memorial Day and Labor Day, bookending one of the quietest theatrical Augusts in American movie history, here comes heavy-hitter season. With a promising film slate ahead, let’s unpack the fall movie offerings across categories like awards favorites, international standouts, big-swing blockbusters, and more.
HOLLYWOOD PICK:
We’re at least a decade into the much-discussed decline of the movie industry’s middle class, but that makes theatrical attempts at midbudget adult dramas and comedies stand out all the more.
THE CENTER MIGHT HOLD?
People like to joke that James Gray is one of the greatest living American filmmakers, but that only the French truly appreciate him. Yet he’s no arty weirdo—his storytelling is clean, clear and unashamedly sentimental. One of his best films is The Lost City of Z (2017), which stars Charlie Hunnam as Percy Fawcett, a real-life English explorer who vanished (along with his son, played by Tom Holland) in 1925 while searching for an ancient city he believed to be hidden in the Amazon. Amazon Prime.
It’s so accepted that Paddington 2 (2018) has earned a place in the pantheon of all-time classics that Nicolas Cage sang its praises in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. If you somehow missed director Paul King’s second lithe London romp with the beloved animated bear (voiced by Ben Whishaw), further your cinematic education by doing so immediately—and make yourself a scrumptious marmalade sandwich to complete the experience. HBO Max.
HIDDEN WORLDS, GIANT MOVIES
Bros (Sept. 30), co-written by and starring Billy Eichner, is
Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson Contact: bennett@wweek.com
Another paradox is the much-dreaded NC-17 rating lobbed at the Ana de Armas-starring Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde (Sept. 28). What does that even mean in the context of a Netflix film?
The unyielding dignity of Queen Elizabeth II flowers in Stephen Frears’ The Queen (2006), which stars an Oscar-winning Helen Mirren as the late monarch. Set in the days following the death of Princess Diana, the film shows Her Majesty struggling to console a grieving nation without forsaking her natural reserve. (“She respects emotion, and cannot fake it,” Martin Amis wrote in The New Yorker in 2002.) Restraint, it turns out, can be one of the greatest acts of love. HBO Max.
These days, the pleasures of gleeful amorality are apparently lost on Paul Schrader, who keeps making movies about repentant loners soberly seeking redemption. After writing and directing the transfixing religious drama First Reformed (2017), he beautifully continued the trend with The Card Counter (2021), about a stoic gambler (Oscar Isaac) who becomes a mentor to a vengeful young man (Tye Sheridan) and falls in love with a glamorous woman (Ti any Haddish) who manages professional gamblers. HBO Max.
STREAMING WARS
BY CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER @chance_s_p
27Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
FROM SWEDEN TO SOUTH KOREA
YOUR WEEKLY FILM QUEUE
One minor joy of movie calendar scrutiny is those few titles that are downright baffling. Enter Don’t Worry Darling (Sept. 23), the object of mind-boggling gossip surrounding Olivia Wilde, Harry Styles and everyone who’s ever interacted with them (this despite Don’t Worry reportedly being a pretty inert Stepford Wives riff).
WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL AGAIN?
With Top Gun: Maverick soaring past the $1.4 billion mark at the worldwide box office, two enormous releases will look to fly higher. First, there’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Nov. 11), the year’s most anticipated Marvel film (in part due to the question of how director Ryan Coogler will handle T’Challa’s succession after Chadwick Boseman’s tragicFinally,passing).looking toward to the year’s end, James Cameron’s decade-in-the-making Avatar: The Way of Water (Dec. 16) is finally being released. Just how badly does the world want an Avatar sequel? That’s probably not a question Cameron asks himself. Why should you?
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Return trips to Wakanda and Pandora are just the beginning.
Any Oscar prognosticator should keep an eye on Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans (Nov. 23) and She Said (Nov. 18), about New York Times journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor breaking the Weinstein scandal. Finally, September gives us a possible front-runner for Best Documentary: the kaleidoscopic Moonage Daydream (Sept. 15), the first David Bowie documentary authorized to use his music.
It’s looking like a banner autumn for international cinema, frontloaded with new movies by Ruben Östlund and Park Chan-wook. Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (Oct. 7) finds the acerbic Swede stranding the super rich on a desert island, for which he nabbed his second Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Probably October’s most exciting horror-adjacent movie is the return of director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas), whose Portland animation crew has been stop-motioning their tails off on Wendell & Wild (Oct. 28) for years to craft the story of two demon brothers (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele).
IN MEMORIAM PICK:
SLIGHT SCARES
BY BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON @thobennett
South Korean master of vengeance Park (Oldboy) directs his first movie in six years, the already acclaimed murder mystery Decision to Leave (Oct. 14). And with Martin McDonough (Three Billboards, In Bruges) bringing Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson back to their native Ireland for The Banshees of Inisherin (Oct. 21), he can get a shout-out in this category as well.
MOVIES
INDIE PICK 1:
INDIE PICK 2:
Next month looks longer on Halloween-themed titles than actual horror movies. Halloween Ends (Oct. 14) counts as both (Michael Myers is definitely, really, truly going down this time, folks) and Hocus Pocus 2 (Sept. 30, Disney+) might scare millennials into feeling ancient.
OSCARS IN AUTUMN
With the Telluride and Venice film festivals concluded, awards season is upon us, despite the Oscars being six months away. One of the most-heralded festival performers was Tár (Oct. 7), the return of the enigmatic and infrequent (and Portland-raised) director Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children), here directing Cate Blanchett as a maestro flying too close to the sun.
one of only a dozen studio comedies to hit theaters this year. And Ticket to Paradise (Oct. 21)—starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts as a bantering divorced couple—will marshal sheer star wattage against the rom-com’s possible extinction. Meanwhile, James Gray’s Armageddon Time (Nov. 11) sees the Ad Astra filmmaker team with Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong to reflect on his upbringing in 1980s Queens.
Michael Stuhlbarg stars in the Coen brothers’ serious ly underrated black comedy as a serious Minnesotan Jewish physics teacher in the middle of a serious crisis of faith and family. Screens as part of Cinemagic’s Roger Deakins Retrospective, a tribute to the Oscar-winning cinematographer. Cinemagic, Sept. 14.
Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s eponymous novel, this film noir from Alfred Hitchcock centers on, well, strangers on a train. When an unhappily married tennis player and a charming psychopath meet on the rails, the latter convinces the former that, if they each want to “get rid” of someone, they should “exchange” murders, and that way neither will be caught. Living Room, Sept. 14-15.
In Spielberg’s seminal blockbuster, an unrealistically handsome archaeology professor (Harrison Ford) su er ing from ophidiophobia eschews teaching to hunt down supernatural artifacts. Our hero competes against the Nazis to secure the biblical Ark of the Covenant, which is said to make armies invincible (as long as you don’t look into it). Hollywood, Sept. 16, 18-19.
SEE HOW THEY RUN
A Serious Man (2009)
FLUX GOURMET
After two women (both named Marie) have had enough of being “good,” they decide to rebel by pulling o a series of absurd pranks and schemes. Quickly banned by the Czech government upon release for “depicting the wanton,” this avant-garde, o -the-wall feminist romp from director Vera Chytilová is as playful as it is radical. New 4K restoration! Living Room, Sept. 14-15.
Director Tom George and writer Mark Chappell indulge in meta mystery in this film noir, leaning primarily on established tropes (and almost getting away with it). The story begins in 1953 with a murder at an after-show party celebrating the 100th performance of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. The victim, a brash American director named Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), had been commissioned to adapt the play for the screen—and apparently rubbed the wrong people the wrong way. Leo’s murder leads to the introduction of an enigmatic collection of sus pects, who are investigated by a weary veteran inspector named Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and his overzealous rookie partner, Con stable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan). Stoppard takes the lead on the case, but Rockwell takes a no ticeable backseat to Ronan in the film, delivering a performance that can’t match his charismatic turns in hits like Three Billboards
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.
TOP PICK OF THE WEEK
Daisies (1966)
GET YOUR REPS IN
A century of Westerns have relied on land squabbles—and in the West of 2022, you have to watch where you park. That’s what starts the trouble between Sandra Guidry (Thandiwe Newton), a college professor living in a remote canyon home after her mother’s death, and the deer hunters who want to use her driveway. One of God’s Country’s great strengths is how far and wide it escalates this elemental conflict. Most of the film’s complexity comes from director Julian Higgins and co-writer Shaye Ogbonna adapting the original James Lee Burke short story to center on a Black woman largely alone in the snowy remoteness. Still, some of the resulting ideological strug gles feel more grafted on than organic. As Sandra fights for her safety, God’s Country becomes a cascading polemic, expositorily touching on #MeToo, diversity in academia, police violence, and recent American history in ways that sometimes drown out her character. Fortunately, the ideas can’t drown out Newton. You’ve never seen the Westworld star given the chance to show such versatility: Sandra is vulnerable, grieving, inspiring, caretaking, self-sabotaging and hard-bitten as frozen earth. With a nod to Do the Right Thing, this is one of the few modern Westerns that becomes something new while invoking age-old American conflicts. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Cinema 21, Clackamas, Progress Ridge, Vancouver Mall.
Peter Strickland (In Fabric) makes the kind of art-horror films that can experiment their way right out of the genre. Make no mistake, terrifying corpo real experiences abound in Flux Gourmet and its invention of a hybrid gastro-audio arts residency, but fear and suspense are nearly totally absent. Instead, the film becomes an arena for bizarro creativity and the reflexive mocking of bizarro cre ativity, as an avant-garde band (Asa Butterfield, Ariane Labed and Fatma Mohamed) bicker among themselves and with their residency host (Gwendoline Christie) about their performance art (which employs stove tops, blenders and so many soupy drips as the source of industrial music). It’s an absurdly original premise that eventually lands in the discordant, empty space between black comedy and body horror (imagine an awkward Yorgos Lanthimos-Gaspar Noé collaboration). Certain moments are so bluntly weird they elicit involuntary laughs, most of them due to Christie’s oversized bows and sleeping caps. But the movie so thoroughly takes the piss out of its own high-art pretension that there’s not much left to care about, save for some committed cringe work and lingering curios ity about how the hell Strickland came up with this. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Shudder.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
ALSO Academy:PLAYING:National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), Sept. 14-15. Cinemagic: No Country for Old Men (2007), Sept. 15. Clinton: Black Waves: Experimental Cinema in Yugoslavia, Sept. 14. Twister (1996), Sept. 17. Hollywood: Space: 1999 (1975) and UFO (1970), Sept. 14. Top of the Heap (1972), Sept. 16. The Matrix (1999), Sept. 16, 20. RBG (2018), Sept. 17. The Shining (1980), Sept. 17-18. The Mist (2007), Sept. 18. Supersonic Man (1979), Sept. 20. PAM CUT: Wildness (2012), Sept. 17.
Patricia Highsmith may have invented Tom Ripley and Strang ers on a Train, but she opens this documentary espousing no love for mysteries. Fitting, maybe. Portrayed here, hers was a life time of intermittent hope (see: Carol ) and overriding tragedy (see: everything else) as she lived out the loneliness, globe-trotting and crippling sexual repression so often found in her novels. With Gwendoline Christie narrating Highsmith’s diary pages and romantic letters in a voice like dry vermouth, we’re immersed in the author’s unrequited longing, most of all for her cruel moth er’s affection (and for one great love whose identity remains a secret). Director Eva Vitija clearly devoted tremendous effort to interviewing and researching Highsmith’s romantic partners, but she lacks the footage neces sary to provide narrative fuel. The film inexplicably overemphasizes Highsmith’s alienation using Tex as rodeo B-roll, and Vitija’s sud den yet sparse first-person nar ration comes off as a last-ditch device to move us through the author’s biography. An interview with a Highsmith scholar or two could have added artistic insight without sacrificing intimacy, but instead Loving Highsmith paints itself into a melancholy corner. It fails to understand that while Highsmith’s life was sad, it was full. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIF ER. Living Room.
LOVING HIGHSMITH
Luckily, Chapell’s script is laden with clever callbacks that come into play during the final reveal, and Stalker’s earnestness won derfully plays off the cynicism of the people around her. This is Ronan’s movie, and she knocks it out the park, even if she gets re grettably (and surprisingly) little help from Rockwell. PG-13. RAY GILL JR. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Living Room, Tigard.
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Xanadu (1980)
FEATURESFOCUS IMDB 28 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
When a frustrated artist (Michael Beck) meets his literal dream girl (Olivia Newton-John), a Muse sent from Olympus to reignite his creativity, he becomes inspired to create a nightclub called Xanadu. The inimitable Gene Kelly co-stars in his final film performance, memorably tap dancing while on roller skates. Screens as a tribute to the late Newton-John. Hollywood, Sept. 15.
GOD’S COUNTRY
MOVIES
@sketchypeoplepdxSTREETS!THEFROMSCENESTRUE by Jack Kent 29Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Tips to get the most out of the next three weeks: 1. Use your imagination to make everything seem fascinat ing and wonderful. 2. When you give advice to others, be sure to listen to it yourself. 3. Move away from having a rigid conception of yourself and move toward having a fluid fantasy about yourself. 4. Be the first to laugh at and correct your own mistakes. (It'll give you the credibility to make even better mistakes in the future.) 5. Inspire other people to love being themselves and not want to be like you.
Homework: Fantasize about an adventure you would love to treat yourself to in the spring of
CANCER (June 21-July 22): I'm getting a psychic vision of you cuddled up in your warm bed, surrounded by stuffed animals and wrapped in soft, thick blankets with images of bunnies and dolphins on them. Your headphones are on, and the songs pouring into your cozy awareness are silky smooth tonics that rouse sweet memories of all the times you felt most wanted and most at home in the world. I think I see a cup of hot chocolate on your bedstand, too, and your fa vorite dessert. Got all that, fellow Cancerian? In the coming days and nights, I suggest you enjoy an abundance of experiences akin to what I've described here.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In a poem to a lover, Pablo Neruda wrote, "At night I dream that you and I are two plants that grew together, roots entwined.” I suspect you Pisceans could have similar deepening and interweaving experiences sometime soon—not only with a lover but with any treasured person or animal you long to be even closer to than you already are. Now is a time to seek more robust and resilient intimacy.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn poet William Stafford wrote, "Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hear ing." Those ideas are always true, of course, but I think it's especially crucial that you heed them in the coming weeks. In my oracular opinion, you need to build your personal power right now. An important way to do that is by being discriminat ing about what you take in and put out. For best results, speak your truths as often and as clearly as possible. And do all you can to avoid exposing yourself to trivial and delusional "truths” that are really just opinions or misinformation.
ASTROLOGY
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Tips for making the most of the next three weeks: 1. Be proud as you teeter charismatically on the fence. Relish the power that comes from being in between. 2. Act as vividly congenial and staunchly beautiful as you dare. 3. Experiment with making artful arrange ments of pretty much everything you are part of. 4. Flatter others sincerely. Use praise as one of your secret powers. 5. Cultivate an open-minded skepticism that blends discernment and curios ity. 6. Plot and scheme in behalf of harmony, but never kiss ass.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In 1946, medical professionals in the UK established the Common Cold Unit. Its goal was to discover practical treat ments for the familiar viral infection known as the cold. Over the next 43 years, until it was shut down, the agency produced just one useful inno vation: zinc gluconate lozenges. This treatment reduces the severity and length of a cold if taken within 24 hours of onset. So the results of all that research were modest, but they were also much better than nothing. During the coming weeks, you may experience comparable phenomena, Taurus: less spectacular outcomes than you might wish, but still very worthwhile.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Here’s a scenario that could be both an invigorating metaphor and a literal event. Put on rollerblades. Get out onto a long flat surface. Build up a comfortable speed. Fill your lungs with the elixir of life. Praise the sun and the wind. Sing your favorite songs. Swing your arms all the way forward and all the way back. Forward: power. Backward: power. Glide and coast and flow with sheer joy. Cruise along with confidence in the instinctive skill of your beautiful body. Evaporate thoughts. Free yourself of every concern and every idea. Keep rambling until you feel spacious and vast.
Testify:2023.Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 22 © 2022 ROB BREZSNY FREE WILL last week’s answers
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): You are an extra authentic Aquarius if people say that you get yourself into the weirdest, most interesting trouble they've ever seen. You are an ultragenuine Aquarius if people follow the twists and pivots of your life as they would a soap opera. And I suspect you will fulfill these potentials to the max in the coming weeks. The upcoming chapter of your life story might be as entertaining as any you have had in years. Luckily, imminent events are also likely to bring you soulful lessons that make you wiser and wilder. I'm excited to see what happens!
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Poet Mary Oliver wrote, "There is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity." During the coming weeks, Scorpio, I will be cheering for the ascendancy of that self in you. More than usual, you need to commune with fantastic truths and transcendent joys. To be in maximum alignment with the good fortune that life has prepared for you, you must give your lov ing attention to the highest and noblest visions of your personal destiny that you can imagine.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): "Love your mistakes and foibles," Virgo astrologer William Sebrans ad vises his fellow Virgos. "They aren't going away. And it's your calling in life—some would say a su perpower—to home in on them and finesse them. Why? Because you may be able to fix them or at least improve them with panache—for your ben efit and the welfare of those you love." While this counsel is always relevant for you, dear Virgo, it will be especially so in the coming weeks.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): For 15 years, Leo cartoonist Gary Larson created The Far Side, a hilarious comic strip featuring intelligent talking animals. It was syndicated in more than 1,900 newspa pers. But like all of us, he has had failures, too. In one of his books, Larson describes the most dis appointing event in his life. He was eating a meal in the same dining area as a famous cartoonist he admired, Charles Addams, creator of The Ad dams Family. Larson felt a strong urge to go over and introduce himself to Addams. But he was too shy and tongue-tied to do so. Don't be like Larson in the coming weeks, dear Leo. Reach out and connect with receptive people you'd love to com municate with. Make the first move in contacting someone who could be important to you in the future. Be bold in seeking new links and affilia tions. Always be respectful, of course.
CHECK OUT ROB BREZSNY’S EXPANDED WEEKLY AUDIO HOROSCOPES & DAILY TEXT MESSAGE HOROSCOPES freewillastrology.com The audio horoscopes are also available by phone at 1-877-873-4888 or 1-900-950-7700 30 Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 wweek.com
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Even when your courage has a touch of foolhardiness, even when your quest for adventure makes you a bit reckless, you can be resourceful enough to avoid dicey consequences. Maybe more than any other sign of the zodiac, you periodically outfox karma. But in the coming weeks, I will nevertheless counsel you not to barge into situations where rash bold ness might lead to wrong moves. Please do not flirt with escapades that could turn into chancy gambles. At least for the foreseeable future, I hope you will be prudent and cagey in your quest for interesting and educational fun.
©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. 1.ACROSS Vegetarian cookout option 8. Hammered hard 15. Silent partner, to others? 17. Cryptozoologist's subject 18. Fifth of a foot 19. Like, last week 20. Robot attachment? 21. Stylist's job 23. Venerating verse 25. "Stepped away for a break" acronym 28. Angler's accessory 30. Lhasa ___ (shaggy dog) 32. Exuberance 33. Kid-lit series with side characters Too-Tall Grizzly and Professor Actual Factual 36. Dad-joke punchline that ends a 1978 REO Speedwagon album title 37. Title for Haile Selassie, with "His" 38. Really secure, in some brand names 39. Some crafting projects, initially 40. Futbol cheers 41. GPS lines 42. "I Can Barely Take Care of Myself" author/comedian Kirkman 43. Carson Daly's former MTV show with screaming fans 44. "Special Agent ___" (Disney Channel series voiced by Sean Astin) 46. Like some fireplaces 49. Pronoun sometimes paired with they 52. Approval that may influence a purchase 57. Daytime show with the euphemism "making whoopee" 58. It might as well be sprig 59. Everything usually includes them 1.DOWN Table warning, maybe 2. Melville novel published 4 years before "Moby-Dick" 3. D20 side 4. "Not that again!" 5. Tumultuous sound 6. ___ a time 7. Tenacious D bandmate Kyle 8. Scholarly gatherings 9. Band with the 1999 hit "Summer Girls" 10. Muppet with a duckie 11. Medium for Myst, originally 12. Earns more at work 13. Su x with butyl 14. Mus. arcade game with lots of descending arrows 16. World Cup host with the vuvuzelas, for short 21. ___ Chapman, Favorite Country New Artist nominee at the 1990 AMAs 22. Radial counterpart 24. Summer in the club 26. Guinness Book entries 27. Host Liza of "Dancing With Myself" and the "Double Dare" reboot 28. Leave o the list again (how'd that get in there?) 29. Blows up about, as in an argument 30. How some goals can be met 31. In a glib manner 32. Happened to 33. Book-cover filler? 34. Subtly obnoxious 35. Home planet of Ensign Ro and many subsequent "Star Trek" characters 42. Russell Crowe, in "Man of Steel" 43. "Atlanta" actor Brian ___ Henry 45. Word on Steinway pianos 47. Underhanded 48. Conforms (to) 49. Thailand, in the past 50. Iron-rich blood pigment 51. Some pasture animals 52. Letters in uploading to servers, once 53. "A clue!" 54. Wowed condition 55. Wired workers, briefly 56. Upscale computer monitor letters, in the '80s JONESIN’ BY MATT JONES "Freefall"--another themeless puzzle for y'all.
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