Willamette Week, June 28, 2023 - Volume 49, Issue 33 - "These Are Portland’s Best New Bands"

BOOKS: PATRICK DEWITT’S LIBRARY OF STRANGE CHARACTERS. P. 24

The local artists who are reshaping Portland’s music scene. Page 12

NEWS: GETTING AWAY WITH FENTANYL DEALING. P. 9

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WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER

VOL. 49, ISSUE 33

Oregon Public Broadcasting has $100 million in the bank. 6

Bonnie Zogby swears The Beatles stopped for ice cream at her parents’ Dairy Queen in 1965. 7

William Stevenson was arrested with $2,000 worth of counterfeit oxycodone pills in his pockets. 9

NONBINARY GIRLFRIEND ’s Anaïs had a role in an Amazon film starring Alison Brie 13

Kill Michael is one of Portland’s gnarliest and most politically outspoken rock bands. 16

Behold: a human being in a bunny mask , cradling a real rabbit as tenderly as if it were a newborn. 18

The creative forces behind Small Million met cute at Holocene 19

This year, the Waterfront Blues

ON THE COVER:

Music insiders unpack Portland’s Best New

Bands of 2023; photo illustration by Mick Hangland-Skill

Festival will kick off each day with light exercise sessions led by Knot Springs. 21

Pop-up Chelo chef Luna Contreras appeared on the new Netflix show Snack vs. Chef 22

Tlayuda is the traditional Oaxacan answer to pizza. 23

Portland author Patrick deWitt’s latest novel centers on a reclusive librarian 24

The costumes of Portland Center Stage’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream include pink polka-dotted jeans 25

A Portland writer translated a collection from legendary Vietnamese author Bao Ninh 26

The 1987 murder of a French bicyclist on the Oregon Coast remains unsolved. 28

OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK: Wild Clackamas County car chase involving La Mota owner Aaron Mitchell ends with nanny indicted.

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ALBERTA ROSE THEATRE

Last week, WW resumed our biennial evaluations of Portland-area legislators, a tradition at the newspaper since 1977 (“The Good, the Bad and the Awful,” June 21). The rankings and anonymous commentary from Capitol insiders are typically devoured by lawmakers who describe themselves as disgusted by the low gossip. This year was no exception—although particular disgust was reserved for our publishing callous lobbyist appraisals of Rep. James Hieb (R-Canby)—one said his history of traumatic brain injury was evident but that his dedication to public service was admirable, while another called him a “village idiot.” Here’s what our readers had to say:

REP. JULES WALTERS, VIA TWITTER: “Some things from the ’70s need to stay in the ’70s.”

AGC, VIA WWEEK.COM: “I wouldn’t expect anything less from WW than a totally biased list gushing for Democrats.”

OREGONGAL80, VIA WWEEK. COM: “WOW. Dr. Dexter suffers from ‘from smart-doctor syndrome’ and Dr. Reynolds from ‘elitist entitlement.’ Both women doctors and both addressed like naughty know-it-all schoolgirls, yet two men, Rep. Pham and Rep. Helm, get comments about their coffee machine and pictures of fish. Jesus Christ. This world sucks. I’d rather have ‘too smart’ women doctors than a guy who fishes.”

DANIEL C HAUSER, VIA TWITTER: “I declined to participate once again because it’s just

gossipy garbage. The pandemic was such a good opportunity to let it die.”

BAG VERBOT, VIA WWEEK. COM: “Calling a guy with a brain injury a ‘village idiot’ is a classless thing to do. I’m sure there were other quotes that aren’t so cruel. Even if you don’t like the guy, come on.”

REP. JAMES HIEB, ON THE HOUSE FLOOR JUNE 23: “It is utterly despicable to mock the brain injuries suffered by myself and other combat veterans who have bravely sacrificed their well-being in service to their country. Such behavior not only displays a profound lack of empathy, but also disregards the immense physical and emotional toll of those who have defended our nation’s freedom, values and liberties.”

Dr. Know

BY MARTY SMITH @martysmithxxx

CHASING GHOSTS LEADS TO MONKEY BUSINESS

I really enjoyed your article about the building that used to house the Organ Grinder restaurant [“Organ Donor,” WW, June 21]. I’m a native Portlander and I was a kid in the ’70s. I have fond memories of that place. It was a kid’s paradise, especially since the parents of us Gen Xers took a more, let’s say…”relaxed” stance around child safety in those days.

I am attaching a picture that you might find amusing. I’m about age 5 or or so (1975 or ’76 most likely) here, posing with a scary Santa and sitting amazingly close to a real, screaming chimp, and clearly loving every minute of it!

The ’70s were a helluva time.

Lesa Pinker Milwaukie

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR must include the author's street address and phone number for verification. Letters must be 250 or fewer words.

Submit to: PO Box 10770, Portland, OR 97296

Email: mzusman@wweek.com

house isn’t the same as a meth lab.

A meth house is a place where people use (and often sell) meth. Disturbances are frequent and lawn care tends to be substandard. A meth lab, on the other hand, is a place where people are actually combining lots of toxic, flammable and corrosive chemicals (often with little regard to the relevant Materials Safety Data Sheet) to manufacture as much meth as they can manage.

—Lauren M.

There is a former meth house on my block that is for sale. I would bet it hasn’t been decontaminated. Of course, the listing for the “adorable bungalow” does not mention its former use. How can I warn potential buyers?

Zillow currently describes five homes within Portland city limits as “adorable bungalows.” I’ll rule out the three expensive ones—meth users usually won’t pay extra for amenities like “charming rock garden with antique sundial”— leaving two possibilities, both in the $300K range. It’s a tough call, but I think I’m going to go with the one with holes in the sheet rock, the floors ripped out, and an all-spray-painted living room with the words “Blaze It” on the wall in 3-foot-high letters. You’re right, Lauren—how will we warn these potential buyers, who otherwise might tour this house and never suspect a thing?

Japery aside, even if the house’s past weren’t obvious, it’s not clear a warning is necessary. Sure, the listing agent is stretching the definition of “adorable” to a degree not seen since George W. Bush stretched the definition of “accomplished.” But even though the house is gross, it’s probably not dangerous: A meth

It’s the difference between neighbors who grill too many steaks and neighbors who run an illegal slaughterhouse in their basement. Meth houses may be annoying (and maybe a tiny bit toxic), but they pale in comparison to labs in terms of potential health hazards. The laws requiring decontamination and buyer notification are primarily concerned with the meth labs (and, occasionally, warehouses) where these hazards are most pronounced.

Luckily for us, these days most meth is produced in Mexico by ruthless, hyperefficient cartels. Those guys can make more and cheaper meth than some yokel in his basement, so stateside meth labs are a lot rarer than they used to be. That’s why I’m guessing your neighbor was merely running a garden-variety meth house.

(Though with a little love, it could have been a meth home.)

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

COUNTY AUDITOR LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO AMR CONTRACT:

Multnomah

County Auditor Jennifer McGuirk has launched an investigation into the county’s contract with its ambulance provider, American Medical Response, citing public complaints and WW ’s report at wweek.com last month that the county had declined to fine the company despite its poor performance. AMR has been failing to meet on-time performance standards for over a year, blaming an industrywide shortage of paramedics. McGuirk asked County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson whether the county knew, prior to WW ’s report, of a highly publicized hit-and-run in which the victim died shortly after an ambulance arrived late. Vega Pederson said the county indeed knew. Yet it hasn’t fined AMR. The county’s contract with AMR runs until 2028. At the direction of the auditor, County Ombudsperson

Cheryl Taylor told the chair in an email last week that she was looking into the contract: “I will mainly look at the parts of the contract that relate to response times and the remedies available to the county when there is a material breach of the contract, such as the ongoing failure of AMR to meet the response time requirements. There are valid questions around these issues, and the public has an interest in the answers to those questions.”

FINANCIAL WOES

RAT GONE BUT PAMPLIN

CONTINUE: The International Union of Operating Engineers has removed the 12-foot inflatable rat from outside R.B. Pamplin Corp.’s headquarters in Milwaukie. Scabby the Rat was installed to protest the alleged nonpayment of contractual benefits. But others are seeking payment from various Pamplin Corp. affiliates. The Oregon Department of Revenue filed a $101,000 tax lien against Pamplin Communications in late May for unpaid corporate activity taxes from 2021. Meanwhile, Pamplin Real Properties, which owns the Milwaukie headquarters, owes the Clackamas County assessor $179,000 in property taxes on the building. In early June, the county agreed to buy the property for $11 million for use as a health clinic. Selling to an outside buyer is an unusual move for Pamplin Corp. and its affiliates, which have recently sold $50 million of company property to the company’s own pension fund in a series of highly controversial transactions. Concerned pensioners hope that the U.S. Department of Labor, which regulates corporate pension plans, is looking out for their interests. Department of Labor spokesman Mike Petersen says his agency is doing just that. “When the administration learns about irresponsible investment practices that may endanger [pension] benefits, we take it very seriously and will do everything within our authorities to protect workers and their families,” Petersen says, adding, however, “As a matter of policy, DOL will

not confirm or deny the existence of an ongoing investigation.” A Pamplin representative declined to comment.

ONE LAWMAKER REFUSES TO CRIMINALIZE FENTANYL POSSESSION: When the Oregon Legislature voted last week to criminalize possession of small amounts of fentanyl, the hyperpowered opioid that kills more people under 50 than even cancer, there was one dissenter: Rep. Farrah Chaichi (D-Beaverton). It was a bold position, bucking every other member of her caucus. In a letter to the clerk of the House, Chaichi, 37, said she reviewed testimony “really trying to get to yes,” but couldn’t because the bill marked a return to the war on drugs, which was an abysmal failure. “This bill has been referred to as another tool in the toolbox, but like so many tools in the War on Drugs, this is another hammer,” Chaichi wrote. Supporters say the bill fixed a blind spot in Oregon law: Without it, there is no misdemeanor charge for fentanyl possession, as there is for all other illicit drugs. And Measure 110, the 2020 referendum that decriminalized small amounts of some hard drugs, makes no mention of fentanyl. Chaichi, who works at a Portland law firm, is an iconoclast, even for Oregon. She sponsored the controversial Oregon Right to Rest Act, which would have decriminalized camping in public places and allowed homeless people to sue if harassed.

MURDERS DOWN SLIGHTLY IN PORTLAND:

Portland’s homicide numbers were slightly down as of May, mirroring national trends. There were 36 homicides in the first five months of this year, compared to 39 during the same period in 2022. At a routine press briefing Tuesday, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt highlighted more reasons for optimism that the recent wave of violence in Portland may be receding. The city has seen a 14% decline in homicides with guns. Gresham had an even sharper decline, from seven homicides to one. Schmidt noted, however, that his office has responded to more homicides so far this month than it did in June of last year. There were three in the past week alone, including a case in which a son allegedly beat his mother to death with a baseball bat. Schmidt said his office is partnering with Oregon Health & Science University to form a commission to review recent murders and what could have been done to stop them. “It’s the same kind of health approach and methodology that led to seat belts in cars,” he says. Here’s one thing the commission might find: Cheap guns have proliferated on Portland’s streets. “It’s a downward spiral,” Schmidt says. “The more that people are in fear and are actually in jeopardy, the more people want to get guns.”

WEED FROM TWO FARMS RECALLED OVER NEW FUNGUS TEST: The Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission recalled batches of cannabis from two farms June 22 because the weed tested positive for aspergillus, a common fungus that grows everywhere in natural environments. Despite outcry from the industry, which argued new testing rules would eliminate organic weed in Oregon and wreak havoc on farmers, the agency implemented the rules March 1 (“Fungus Among Us,” WW, April 19). This week’s recall of seven batches of weed from a farm owned by the cannabis giant Nectar and one batch from Eugene farm Rebel Spirits was met with fury. “We fear these regulations will destroy the very things that make Oregon’s cannabis so special,” says Jesse Bontecou, executive director of the Cannabis Industry Alliance of Oregon. The OLCC said in a statement that tests indicated the strains—sold in an estimated 75 dispensaries across the state—could “pose a risk to public health and safety.” However, no cases of illness from ingesting cannabis with aspergillus have been identified in Oregon.

NEKO CASE

CREATURES’

LUCINDA WILLIAMS ‘STORIES FROM A ROCK N ROLL HEART’

REP. FARRAH CHAICHI

MICK HANGLAND-SKILL

‘Stories From A Rock N Roll Heart’ marks a triumphant return from one of our most revered artists and songwriters.

‘Wild Creatures’ is a career retrospective album containing twenty-three of Neko Case’s most impactful tracks.

Pork Feast

Money comes to those who wait until the end of the legislative session.

BY NIGEL JAQUISS njaquiss@wweek.com

Oregon’s coffers are overflowing. State officials have brought in so much tax revenue they expect to return more than $5 billion in credits to taxpayers next year via “the kicker.” It should be no surprise then, that in the frenzied last few days of the legislative session that ended June 25, lawmakers found plenty of places to make one-time expenditures.

Many of those checks will go to fund items of broad public benefit or help penniless operations. Some, not so much.

Here are five of the line items that caught our eye:

HOW MUCH: $8 million

WHO GOT IT: Landowners with natural resources in their estates

DID THEY NEED IT? Oregon already gives an inheritance tax credit for estates worth up to $15 million if they include farmland, commercial timber or other resource operations. This bill expanded the benefit to estates of any size, giving them exclusions on the first $15 million of taxable value. The watchdog group Tax Fairness Oregon says the bill will “benefit a tiny number of Oregonians at a cost of $8 million annually.”

HOW MUCH: $7.4 million

WHO GOT IT: Willamette Falls Locks Authority

DID THEY NEED IT? The locks at Willamette Falls closed in 2011 because they were a century and a half old and didn’t

serve enough commercial traffic to keep them open: A federal decommissioning in 2016 reported less than 1,000 tons of traffic in 1999 and almost nothing since—with no new commercial demand in sight. “There are insufficient benefits (commercial navigation) to justify the repair and rehabilitation of the facility,” the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said then.

HOW MUCH: $5 million

WHO GOT IT: Music clubs DID THEY NEED IT? State Rep. Rob Nosse (D-Portland) asked for $50 million this session for cultural institutions ranging from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to the smallest nightclubs. Lawmakers shrank the list and the funding, kicking out the big groups but still helping venues such as the Aladdin Theater ($270,000), the Roseland ($264,000) and Revolution Hall ($235,000). “They were the first to close and last to reopen,” Nosse says, “and the culture of going out hasn’t returned here like it has in other states.”

HOW MUCH: $1 million

NOT IN FRONT OF THE GUESTS

Ahead of a visit by Detroit officials to learn about Portland Street Response, internal divides get awkward.

Officials from Detroit will arrive in town next month to learn about Portland Street Response, the city initiative that sends mental health clinicians rather than police officers to soothe people in distress. Visitors will include staff from the Detroit mayor’s office, one city council member’s office, and the fire and police departments.

But records obtained by WW show that just two weeks ahead of the visit, tensions at Portland City Hall over the purpose and future of the program are bleeding into the itinerary for the Detroiters’ visit.

That’s apparent from an email thread between Detroit officials and city of Portland staff.

The thread involves a onetime policy staffer for former City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, the official who championed PSR but was then unseated by Rene Gonzalez in November. That staffer, Andre Miller, advised Detroit officials that the climate in Portland City Hall “has

definitely changed politically,” and advised that the visiting officials speak about the program with Hardesty—who’s no longer in office.

It appears the Detroit officials changed their itinerary to take Miller’s advice.

But then the email exchange made its way to officials at Portland Fire & Rescue, who were unhappy with the pivot in the visitors’ itinerary, which appeared not to include Gonzalez and his staff.

Gonzalez has been a fierce advocate for the firefighters’ union, which backed his campaign against Hardesty. The fire bureau, under which Portland Street Response operates, harbors uneasy feelings about the progressive program—and, as WW first reported last month, PSR is now competing for funding with a similar program run by firefighters (“Flame War,” May 31).

Below is the email exchange, which took place over two weeks in June and exposes the

WHO GOT IT: Literary Arts, a Portland nonprofit

DID THEY NEED IT? The nonprofit behind the Portland Book Festival (formerly known as Wordstock) has been around for 37 years, promoting literacy and bringing notable authors to Portland. Now, it’s buying new space. “Literary Arts is one of the most beloved organizations of its kind in the U.S.,” Rep. Nosse says. “The center is going to make it easier for them to offer more programs and become more financially sustainable.”

HOW MUCH: $500,000

WHO GOT IT: Oregon Public Broadcasting DID THEY NEED IT? OPB does a fine job of filling the airwaves. So fine that it has earned about $27 million in net revenues (i.e., profits) over the past two years, and has more than $100 million in the bank. OPB’s Steve Bass says the Legislature has long helped pay for broadcasting to 85% of the state. “The cost of providing service to [rural] communities is significant and greatly exceeds the revenue that can be generated,” Bass says. “So, the appropriation helps in fulfilling our commitment to provide service across the region.”

simmering tensions over the future of a city program that’s received wide support from citizens and legislators alike.

A representative of Detroit City Council member Gaby Santiago-Romero wrote June 7 to Andre Miller, former policy staffer for Hardesty and now a policy adviser in another city bureau: “[Officials] are looking to create their own program in Detroit and wanted to inquire about going back out to Portland so they and the police chief could get a better understanding of the mechanics,” the staffer wrote. “Would you be able to connect them to the right folks to move that forward?”

Miller wrote back on June 8: “The climate has definitely changed politically in Portland as well as what current electeds think Portland Street Response should do. I think the best people to get you in contact with is Jo Ann who is the Commissioner I previously worked with that championed Portland Street Response and then the new Commissioner who oversees Portland Street Response so you can get the different perspectives.”

Miller appears to have spoken on the phone with Santiago-Romero’s chief of staff, Kristin Dayag, who emailed Miller on June 13: “It was great speaking with you over

the phone. I’m really sorry to hear how much the political climate has changed since we last visited,” Dayag wrote. “Hopefully we can work our way around that to ensure we focus on the overall benefits of the program!”

Dayag shared a tentative list of people and divisions the Detroit officials wanted to speak with during the July visit. The list included Hardesty, Deputy Police Chief Mike Frome, the deputy fire chief, the nonprofit Street Roots, and the director of the city’s Bureau of Emergency Communications, Bob Cozzie. Neither Gonzalez nor his staff made the list.

The email chain made its way to the chief of the fire bureau’s Community Health Division, Ryan Gillespie, who emailed other city officials to express his displeasure: “I am concerned with the expectations of the folks visiting based on their reply to Andre,” Gillespie said, quoting part of Dayag’s email commenting on the political climate. “If Detroit folks wish to hear about the PSR program, they should expect to hear different perspectives from the stakeholders. There are several challenges within PSR that will also be communicated along with the benefits.”

Detroit officials are now scheduled to meet with Gonzalez’s office during their trip. SOPHIE PEEL.

BUTCHER SHOP: Lawmakers brought home the bacon.

CHASING GHOSTS

Blizzard Island

What happened to the Division Street Dairy Queen.

ADDRESS: 5605 SE Division St.

YEAR BUILT: N/A

SQUARE FOOTAGE: 0.2 acres

MARKET VALUE: $1.1 million

OWNER: Akum Investment Group LLC

HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: Since 2019

WHY IT’S EMPTY: The owner wants to build a bigger and better Dairy Queen.

Bonnie Zogby, 68, who is prone to hyperbole, swears her mother served the Beatles ice cream as the Fab Four made their way to Portland International Airport in 1965. That was at the first Dairy Queen her parents owned, on Northeast Broadway. (And the story’s at least plausible: The Beatles performed at nearby Memorial Coliseum that summer.)

Zogby’s parents would accumulate seven more. One of them, at the corner of Southeast 55th Avenue and Division Street, is now demolished and used by locals as a dump. A new Dairy Queen— bigger, better and friendlier to cars, according to permit applications filed with the city—is supposed to rise in its place.

Until then, Zogby has a tale to tell of her parents’ Dairy Queen empire.

Theodora and Paul Arter moved to Portland in 1950 from California, where they had been lily farmers. Paul Arter became a franchiser for Archway Cookies. Zogby says the Dairy Queen on Broadway was on her father’s route, and he got to know the owner at the time, who told her father, by Zogby’s telling: “I’ve got my eye on you. You’re a man of integrity, and I’d like to sell the company and I’d like to give you this opportunity.”

So the Arters became Dairy Queen franchisees. Zogby remembers bagging french fries on her lunch break from Grant High School—that was the midday rush. Philip Arter, Zogby’s 75-yearold brother who lives in California and has a less romantic view of his parents’ DQ empire, corroborates this. In fact, the most popular students at Grant High School worked at his parents’ Dairy Queen on Broadway.

“It was the place to be, it was the thing to do,” Arter says. “By the time I’m out of college, the Dairy Queen is the last place you want to work. Everything changed.” (Arter remembers his father as a no-frills businessman who kept close tabs on his employees’ conduct.)

Zogby doesn’t recall when exactly her family bought the Division store, but she does remember it was one of their more successful operations because of its proximity to Franklin High School.

Theodora Arter died in 2016. Her husband had died 17 years earlier. They had already begun to sell off the Dairy Queens prior to their passing,

but had hung on to the Division store. It passed to Philip Arter and Zogby, who in turn gifted it to a couple who had managed it for many years.

That couple turned around and sold it for $480,000 to a newer wave of Dairy Queen franchisee: a limited liability company called Akum Investment Group that’s controlled by Mohanbir Grewal of Beaverton. At the time, Grewal was also a 7-Eleven franchisee. He now appears to own a handful of Dairy Queens across the state as well as a Burger King.

Grewal demolished the building two years after he bought it, city records show and, in recent years, has submitted applications for a new, updated Dairy Queen with expanded parking and a second story. Those permits are slowly inching forward, records show, but in the meantime, Grewal’s land, like other vacant properties in Portland, has become a dumping ground and an occasional respite for homeless Portlanders.

Various complaints in recent years report

moldy mattresses, bags of trash, and litter.

Grewal and his wife, Narinder Grewal, who’s also listed on business filings, did not respond to requests for comment, but the couple has submitted testimony to the Oregon Legislature in recent years, advocating for various bills aimed at protecting franchisees.

“Please pass this bill,” Narinder Grewal wrote in 2021 for House Bill 4152, which would have limited the ability of companies to break franchise agreements with franchisees. “Support this bill and need it desperately,” Mohanbir Grewal wrote.

SOPHIE PEEL.

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.

County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Rogers in a police report describing a Oct. 2, 2022, car chase involving Aaron Mitchell, co-owner of the La Mota cannabis dispensary chain, and his child’s 19-year-old nanny, Arlen Alva

On June 8, Alva was indicted by a Clackamas County grand jury on one felony charge and two misdemeanor charges. The District Attorney’s Office dropped its charges against Mitchell, who prosecutors say was a passenger in the 2021 Mercedes-Benz that Alva allegedly used to evade sheriff’s deputies at speeds reaching 100 miles per hour. Read the full story at wweek. com. SOPHIE PEEL.

“Mitchell told me the female was not driving the car. Mitchell wouldn’t tell me who the female was, and he acted surprised when I told him there was a female in the car with him.”

—Clackamas

STEVE SHOOK

License to Deal

Multnomah County courts routinely release a drug dealer back to the same downtown corner.

BY LUCAS MANFIELD lmanfield@wweek.com

The first time Portland police arrested William Stevenson for dealing hard drugs downtown, last August, he was riding a stolen moped through a homeless encampment with 13 grams of cocaine.

By the fifth time, frustrations boiled over. “Stevenson has been found with almost $10,000 in cash and drugs within the last month,” prosecutor Chidimma Mgbadigha wrote in March. Stevenson posted $100 bail and was released. Two months later, he was arrested again.

In nine months, police have arrested Stevenson six times for dealing and possession of hard drugs, often downtown near Washington Center, the boarded-up office complex at Southwest 4th Avenue and Washington Street. In that time, Stevenson has spent a total of nine nights in jail.

He is, according to the police squad that patrols downtown, cites drug users and arrests their dealers, among the most frequently caught pushers of opioids that have turned blocks of the city into a dystopia. Yet he is routinely released to ply his trade within hours of his arrest.

“He’s received the message that he can just keep doing this,” says Portland Bike Squad Officer Eli Arnold. “The public does not understand how hard it is to be held in jail.”

Oregon has decriminalized the possession of small amounts of hard drugs. That’s a decision some voters have come to regret—and elected officials have begun to claw back, recently criminalizing even tiny amounts of fentanyl.

As advocates for the new policy quickly point out, Oregon never legalized the selling of those drugs. Yet drug dealing is now done with such impunity on the streets of downtown Portland that it is possible to walk up and film the transactions.

WW talked to police, prosecutors and court

officials to understand how Stevenson has been allowed to continue flouting the law so openly and so frequently.

No one wants to claim responsibility, but Stevenson’s freedom to reoffend stems from years of choices made by elected officials. Reformers, including Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, successfully fought to reduce the use of bail, which they say is ineffective and discriminatory. The result was a new bail reform law passed last year that has allowed Stevenson to walk out of jail by paying less.

He regularly failed to appear in court, yet judges declined to set higher bail amounts requested by prosecutors. Meanwhile, DA’s office delays and a shortage of public defenders mean he has yet to face trial or accept a plea deal on any charges in Multnomah County.

Stevenson declined to discuss his case through his attorney. He has pleaded not guilty.

The fact that none of Stevenson’s alleged crimes was violent worked in his favor. Judges and court guidelines take into account whether defendants are a danger to the community when determining whether to hold them in jail and under what conditions.

But this policy has consequences, says Eric Pickard, the prosecutor recently assigned to Stevenson’s case. “Did he hurt anybody directly? No,” Pickard says. But, he points out, drug dealing has fueled property crimes like car theft and shoplifting, as well as deadly overdoses.

Pickard spent an afternoon with a WW reporter poring over Stevenson’s file and concluded that the decisions made by prosecutors and court officials were reasonable.

Still: “I can say this,” he added. “Something different should happen if he’s actually going to be deterred from continuing to do this.”

Stevenson, 26, grew up in Mississippi and arrived in Portland four years ago from Texas. He has told officials that he previously worked

in construction and as a dancer at strip clubs.

But sometime last year he was laid off from his carpentry job, court documents say, and began living on the streets, sometimes in a tent near Moda Center and sometimes staying at a Motel 6. Eventually, his attorney told a judge, he moved into his girlfriend’s apartment.

Meanwhile, he was feeding a cocaine and fentanyl habit, according to court documents. And he wasn’t just using these drugs, police say, he was selling them.

Last August, he was caught sitting on a stolen moped with a bag of cocaine. Two months later, he was spotted on TriMet security footage trading pinches of a substance for cash at a downtown bus stop—twice, on two consecutive days. Police chased him down and found more than $2,000 in cash in his pockets. “I don’t deal that much,” he told them. “Just trying to get by.”

In February, he was arrested, again, with cocaine and a gun. Prosecutors say he had blue-tipped bullets, designed to pierce body armor. The next month he was caught selling “blues”—fentanyl pills—outside Washington Center.

under what circumstances a defendant could be held in jail.

The first few times Stevenson was arrested for drug crimes, the guidelines determined he should be released due to, among many factors, his lack of criminal history. After Stevenson’s fourth arrest, in March, Circuit Judge Jenna Plank ordered him to report to supervision—a decision still a step below setting bail.

Drugs were “wreaking havoc” on his life, she noted. And despite the fact that Stevenson had so far racked up four failures to appear in court, he was “doing a good job of making all your court dates,” she said.

When Stevenson was caught a little over a week later with pills, powder and $400 at the drug market downtown, prosecutors were fed up. They asked Plank to set bail at $75,000. But Stevenson had finally been assigned a public defender, Katherine Stanford, who put up a vigorous defense. The request was unconstitutional, she said. “Consider his indigency,” she told Plank.

Plank settled on $1,000. Turning to Stevenson, she said: “I just want you to have a little skin in the game.”

His girlfriend paid the required one-tenth security, $100, and Stevenson walked out the door that afternoon.

Over the next three months, judges would set Stevenson’s bail between the amounts of $1,000 and $4,000—all over prosecutors’ objections that the amounts were too low.

Bail cannot be punitive. It is meant to motivate defendants, who are innocent until convicted, to appear in court. But by this measure, it was not effective. Stevenson failed to make two more court appearances in March. And although he has recently begun reliably making court appearances, presumably at the advice of his newly assigned attorney, he has continued to be arrested dealing drugs downtown. Five cases are still pending against him.

The Multnomah County Circuit Court’s chief criminal judge, Cheryl Albrecht, acknowledges to WW that aspects of Stevenson’s journey through the court system are “problematic.”

“He’s picking up a new case while he’s on release for three other cases,” she says. “People would consider that poor policy; that’s not what we want to see happen.”

But she doesn’t believe higher bail is necessarily the solution. “Bail is not the most effective way to get people to court,” she explains. “That’s why it’s come under fire.”

Stevenson has been open with law enforcement about his business practices. After being spotted approaching a black late-model car with a stack of bills, he told Officer Eli Arnold that he was purchasing counterfeit oxycodone pills from a “pair of Honduran men” for a little over a buck each and selling them for two.

He was arrested with $2,000 worth of those pills in his pockets. Arnold caught Stevenson dealing twice more near the same spot, once carrying $3,000 in cash.

Arnold came to this conclusion: “He’s stupid—and just not worried about getting in trouble.”

Each time Stevenson was caught by police, he was quickly released. His longest stint in jail was three days in February.

Part of the reason is Senate Bill 48, the 2021 bail reform act that required courts to adopt statewide guidelines last year determining

SB 48 eliminated the standardized “schedule” that tied predetermined bail amounts to specific charges, $5,000 for low-level felonies like Stevenson’s, and instead left it up to judges’ discretion. DA Schmidt, a reform-minded prosecutor, has lobbied for the change.

“I don’t believe how much money you have in your wallet should determine whether or not you get held in jail,” he tells WW, noting that the court, with input from his office, is reviewing and adjusting the new release guidelines. “We’re going to continue to make tweaks on the fly,” Schmidt added.

As Stevenson’s charges have piled up, so have the potential consequences.

In early May, Stevenson was indicted on charges of selling more than 100 grams of fentanyl, which is considered a “super, super substantial” amount. If convicted of this latest charge, he faces a mandatory sentence of nearly five years in prison.

“A judge cannot deviate from that,” Pickard notes.

HOT SPOT: Fentanyl can easily be purchased on the sidewalks around boarded-up Washington Center in downtown Portland.

BRIAN BURK

“He’s received the message that he can just keep doing this.”

Talking Union Blues

A union places its leader on leave amid a difficult time for labor.

BY NIGEL JAQUISS njaquiss@wweek.com

By a couple of key measures, the 2023 Oregon legislative session ended well for organized labor. The state budget includes substantial raises for public employees, and the Democratic majorities in both chambers studiously avoided curtailing the unlimited campaign contributions at the root of union power.

But behind the scenes, things are less rosy.

Earlier this month, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 75 placed its executive director, Stacy Chamberlain, on paid administrative leave from the $181,000 position she’s held since 2018. (Chamberlain would not comment.)

“The Oregon AFSCME Council Executive Committee received a formal complaint from Oregon AFSCME staff on Wednesday, June 14,” says union spokesman David Kreisman. He declined to give further details about the complaint, explaining, “As an employer, we take the issue of due process seriously and want to model the behavior we expect to see from our employers.” Nonetheless, WW has learned the letter takes issue with Chamberlain’s treatment of subordinates and her management style. For observers who recall how Chamberlain’s predecessors, Ken Allen and Cecil Tibbetts, each ran AFSCME for a dozen years without brooking opposition, Chamberlain’s suspension is an example of how unsettled things are as organized labor seeks to retain its power

amid changing organizational dynamics and hostility from the right.

Mary Botkin, a retired longtime AFSCME political director and lobbyist, says she was alarmed after speaking to Chamberlain about her suspension.

pressuring both membership and finances.

Unions in Oregon and across the country saw membership drop sharply post-Janus. Nationally, according to a June 23 report issued by the Freedom Foundation, an anti-union nonprofit, public sector unions have lost 734,000 members—about 10% of their total.

In Oregon, AFSCME Council 75 lost 12.4% in the first year after Janus, according to filings with the federal Department of Labor. Since that initial drop, AFSCME has held steady, offsetting losses with organizing drives at nonprofits such as Lines for Life and Outside In.

Kreisman says Janus had nothing to do with AFSCME selling its Portland building. With its recent organizing successes in the metro area, filings show, the union is actually faring somewhat better than its larger ally, SEIU Local 503.

That union, which represents a variety of public sector and home health care workers, has seen bigger losses, dropping from 58,384 members in 2017, the last year before Janus, to 45,038 in 2022, according to federal filings—a decline of about 23%.

SEIU 503 executive director Melissa Unger notes the decline happened in the first year and that membership has held steady since then.

“Our numbers fluctuate,” Unger says, “but the reality is, we are out there every day fighting for fair contracts, and our members are highly engaged.” (An early June rally in Salem was the group’s largest ever, she points out, and her members will be back in the capital picketing June 28 to express displeasure with the size of raises they got from lawmakers.)

Like AFSCME, SEIU is also selling real estate—in its case, the headquarters building it has owned in the capital since 1990 at 1730 Commercial Street SE.

“ We’ve outgrown it,” Unger says. Although the Janus decision did hurt, she says, SEIU has added tens of thousands of home health care workers in the past 20 years. And unlike AFSMCE, SEIU also bought a new building.

“I called the national and said, ‘Council 75 is circling the drain,’” Botkin says. “Somebody needs to get out here.”

Another reason Chamberlain’s troops are restless: On June 15, AFSCME employees vacated the union’s Portland headquarters at 6025 E Burnside St. The bright green building (AFSCME’s trademark color) served as a citadel of labor since its purchase in 2005. But now, like many Portlanders, AFSCME is without a home of its own. For some, it’s a sign of poor management that AFSCME sold its building without securing a new location. (It got $1.775 million for the property, which was debt-free.)

“I think people are concerned about where AFSCME goes from here and how do they maintain their identity,” Botkin says.

Kreisman says the union outgrew its longtime headquarters and couldn’t find a suitable

replacement: “Ultimately, we decided to lease space from SEIU 503 for the next 18 months, while we continue our search for a permanent space we can call our own.”

The loss of its director and its building in the same month is a bitter pill for the state’s third-largest public employee union, trailing only its new landlord, Service Employees International Union, and the Oregon Education Association.

Chamberlain’s difficulties are noteworthy, not just because of her position in labor circles—she’s the first woman to lead Oregon AFSCME and the daughter of former Portland firefighters’ union and statewide AFL-CIO boss Tom Chamberlain—but because it comes at a delicate time for labor.

AFSCME represents a wide range of workers, from prison corrections officers to Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Control Commission employees to frontline workers at many metro-area nonprofits.

It has a big presence locally—it is the largest union at Oregon Health & Science University, Multnomah County and the city of Portland— but its statewide numbers have slipped since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME. In that case, the court found that public employee unions could no longer compel employees to pay dues.

That gave members who didn’t like unions’ progressive politics permission to stop paying,

Unger says she knows the forces that took the Janus case to the Supreme Court will continue to look for ways to weaken organized labor. “We continue to adjust and learn,” she says.

Jason Dudash, the Northwest director for the Freedom Foundation, says declines in membership reflect a diversity of thought and interests among union members.

“The Janus decision gave public employees a choice,” Dudash says. “Thousands of Oregonians are choosing to opt out of union membership because union leaders are wildly out of touch with their working members.”

One bonus for unions: Despite more than a decade of talk about campaign finance reform and Gov. Tina Kotek’s pledge to lead the charge, it stalled in Salem this session.

The ability to write big checks and mobilize members keeps public employee unions influential in Oregon. Post-Janus, both AFSCME and SEIU have contributed heavily to Democratic candidates, including Kotek.

Ung er wants limits on large individual donors while allowing small-donor political action committees to maintain their activity. She notes that Phil Knight wrote a $2 million check to a legislative PAC just last month and gave far more last year. Unger says individual megadonors are completely different from union members who write modest checks.

“ We’re 11,000 people giving small contributions to our PAC,” Unger says. “We want to keep those small donors engaged.”

NO PICNIC: Local unions’ annual Labor Day picnic didn’t survive COVID-19.

WESLEY LAPOINTE

“I called the national and said, ‘Council 75 is circling the drain.’”

See five of these bands live this Friday at Star Theater! Get your tix to our Best New Bands Showcase.

Best

New Bands

Meet the local artists who are reshaping Portland’s music scene.

In 1981, Suzuki introduced the Omnichord, a pale, pear-shaped electronic instrument that, in the wrong hands, can sound a little like a malfunctioning robot. It’s regarded as a kitschy artifact, one that would be rejected by most pawn shops along 122nd Avenue.

Early this year, the Portland indie poppunk ensemble NONBINARY GIRLFRIEND used the Omnichord to bring a cascading grace to an album about identity, sexual violence and the often underestimated power of kindness. That record propelled NONBINARY GIRLFRIEND (see page 13) to the top of WW ’s 2023 Best New Bands poll—and their innovative flair embodies the spirit of this year’s winners.

A music scene still rattled by the pandemic demands constant reinvention, not only to survive, but to seize the attention of 21st century audiences for whom the word “monoculture” has no meaning. Sometimes that means performing under a bridge, writing songs via email, or telling genre conventions to fuck off and embracing your role

as a shoegazer with a touch of trip-hop.

For 19 years, WW has polled the people who care most passionately about local music about which acts lifted them off the floor of the club and into musical nirvana. Over the years, winners have included artists and groups that skyrocketed to national fame— including Aminé and Dolphin Midwives—and others you’ve never heard of. (But we still have their early stuff.)

This year, we partnered with MusicPortland, a grassroots nonprofit with a mission to cultivate a sustainable, equitable and thriving music economy in Oregon. With its help in tracking people down, we asked creatives, music insiders and well-informed clubgoers to nominate their five favorite groups.

We received votes for more than 100 different bands. Consensus was elusive, with the winners each commanding a narrow share of the final vote tally—which means our city is overflowing with new music. Not a bad problem to have.

Nothing inflames a debate like adding the word “best” to the bonfire. Art is subjective, and even a poll as wide-reaching as Best New Bands is just an amplification of personal perspectives, however well informed each voter is.

How do you compare the propulsive noise rock of Kill Michael (page 16) to the Brandi Carlile-inspired introspection of Haley Johnsen (page 16)? You can’t. But you can listen to them both at the Best New Bands Showcase, which begins at 8:30 pm Friday, June 30, at the Star Theater. The show will also feature Ghost Feet, Twingle, and Roman Norfleet and Be Present Art Group.

We hope you will see the following pages not as the last word in a debate, but the first word in a conversation. (Or at least the snippets of conversation you can overhear between sets.) The bands you will read about, and the music you can hear at wweek.com, have helped define the sound of the city for the past year. And by next year, they will likely have inspired a new generation of bands to redefine it.

—Bennett Campbell Ferguson, Assistant Arts & Culture Editor

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICK HANGLAND-SKILL

Nonbinary Girlfriend

The Anaïs-fronted ensemble fearlessly confronts oppression and champions kindness.

BY BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON @thobennett

If you demand that your favorite bands dabble in hazy symbolism, you’re probably not a fan of NONBINARY GIRLFRIEND, the indie pop-punk group that has transfixed Portland concertgoers with their emotional directness.

“Some artists I know are talking metaphorically with a lot of their songs,” says Anaïs, the vocalist, guitarist and Omnichord virtuoso who leads the ensemble. “A lot of the time, I can be more straightforward because I am neurodivergent, and it just makes more sense to me. And I think it makes sense to other people who see the world a little more like me.”

In the title track of NONBINARY GIRLFRIEND’s debut album, Big and Kind, Anaïs sings with tornadolike force that underscores the song’s core philosophy: that kindness and smallness are never the same thing.

The road to that revelation was long, and it started with a surprising origin tale. “I actually got the band together to impress someone,” Anaïs says. That someone was Community and GLOW actor Alison Brie, who co-wrote and starred in the Amazon film Somebody I Used to Know—“a Jeff Bezos original,” Anaïs jokes— which featured characters based on Anaïs’ now-dissolved band Cry Babe.

Anaïs became friendly with Brie and scored a small role in the film. “They were like, ‘Oh, maybe we could come to a show that you’re playing around Halloween,’” Anaïs recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh my God! Alison Brie and her husband Dave Franco might come to my show. I need a band!’”

Brie and Franco never came to a show, but Anaïs did form NONBINARY GIRLFRIEND—and sought to capture the essence of their own identity in the group’s now-iconic name.

“I named the band NONBINARY GIRLFRIEND because that’s how I feel,” says Anaïs, who uses they/them pronouns. “I do still sometimes identify with the term ‘girlfriend’—but never ‘woman’ and never ‘girl,’ ew, don’t like those—because I have been socialized in my life with people assuming my gender as female. I am still a part of the female struggle in this way I’m not allowed to opt out of because of the way that I look.”

NONBINARY GIRLFRIEND’s music is part of that struggle— perhaps especially “Body” a seven-minute song and accompanying music video in which Anaïs is encircled menacingly by the hands of unseen figures. Anaïs describes performing the song as “like I’m breaking my heart open every time I play it.”

Anaïs doesn’t specifically discuss the inspiration for “Body,” but does say, “I could go on just about the pervasive issue of sexual violence against AFAB [assigned female at birth] people. It is disgusting, it is persistent, it has changed my life for the worse forever. My brain will never go back to the way it was before that harm was done to me.”

They add, “That is a huge part of my music—talking about that. I feel like when we get eyes on systemic issues like that…it just empowers people to be able to address it more in their inner circles, where it’s the most insidious and the most hard to call

out sometimes.”

NONBINARY GIRLFRIEND’s music is ruthlessly open in its portrayals of oppression and despair (the stabbing drumbeats and bellowed lyrics—“This has been the worst moment of my life so far”— of “Worst Day,” for instance, have the visceral force of a medieval lament). Yet it is also driven by a desire to nourish, as fans of the profoundly empowering “Big and Kind” can attest. (It’s likely helping listeners through painful experiences the way artists like Mitski and Girlpool once did for Anaïs.)

“I’ll be honest, I was on mushrooms, and I had this breakthrough idea and I wrote it down,” Anaïs says. “I literally wrote the lyrics to the song: ‘Being kind is not the same as being small. Many times kindness requires you to be big and tall.’”

Anaïs describes being “taught to shrink myself, and that that was kindness. And I wasn’t taught that it is kind to share your boundaries with people. That’s not you being mean to them. That’s telling them how it is appropriate to interact with you so that ultimately you can strengthen your relationship and be better friends, have more genuine intimacy.”

The feeling of intimacy—of truths shared, of souls bared—is the heart of NONBINARY GIRLFRIEND (which also features guitarist Oak Alger, drummer Eric Ambrosius and bassist Sei Harris). As is Anaïs’ candor, not only about who they are as an artist, but as a human being.

“There were times, early on, when I felt like I kind of had to pigeonhole myself into this idea of what nonbinary people are,” Anaïs says. “I had to always be androgynous, and I didn’t want to wear dresses or skirts or anything that was flamboyant at all really.”

And now? “Now I feel like I’m at a really beautiful place with myself, where I feel like I can accept all the parts of me that are coming up,” Anaïs says. “And if I want to have a necklace, have accessories and just be big and take up space visually, now I’m finally comfortable enough with myself to do that.”

8.2%

LISTED ON OF BALLOTS.

“I’m also a huge fan of Nonbinary Girlfriend, who I had the pleasure to share a bill with recently. Anaïs’ vocals and songwriting are so powerful and emotive, and I love the presence they bring onstage.”

—Caroline Jackson, Pool Boys

Foamboy

Experimentation has made Katy Ohsiek and Wil Bakula masters of jazz post-pop.

BY ROBERT HAM

In a post-pandemic world, it’s difficult to catch band members in the same place at the same time. Day jobs and family responsibilities must be respected alongside pickup gigs, side hustles, and rare bouts of downtime.

For instance, when I was finally able to nail down an interview with Katy Ohsiek and Wil Bakula—the creative core of jazz post-pop ensemble foamboy—it was only possible in a narrow window of time and through a smartphone call merged from their respective homes.

This is the new normal for foamboy. Though the project has its roots in a musical collective that the pair started in Salem while attending Willamette University, the band truly began during the pandemic. By that point, Ohsiek was in grad school in Corvallis and Bakula had relocated to Portland.

“ We weren’t really seeing each other,” Ohsiek says. “Most of [My Sober Daydream, foamboy’s 2021 debut] got written via email.”

The situation has improved tremendously since those early days. Ohsiek finally made their way to Portland and foamboy is now a proper band, with the addition of five instrumentalists who fleshed out the music onstage and helped record the group’s forthcoming LP. Given their dynamic live shows and pitch-perfect recordings, it’s no wonder they’ve been named one of Portland’s Best New Bands by a jury of their peers. Getting to that point was possible due to a process of elimination. When Ohsiek and Bakula first started writing together under the name Chromatic Colors, no genre was out of bounds for them.

“It was very much whatever we wanted to do,” Bakula says. “Jazz to pop to Latin to indie to rock.” But as the membership of that early ensemble was winnowed down to just he and Ohsiek, the music grew more cohesive.

“Instead of writing a bunch of stuff and saying yes to everything, I continued to write but then edited,” Bakula remembers. “It was kicking everything to the wind if it didn’t work or if it felt slightly off. Like, ‘Nope, doesn’t work. Next idea.’”

Inspired by vintage R&B, disco-pop groups like the Whispers (and modern jazz-adjacent artists like Erykah Badu and Robert Glasper), foamboy started trucking in sleek, sensual grooves perfect for dance floor trances or bedroom intimacy. Ohsiek slips their voice through each track like a sheet of form-fitting satin.

But dusting each track like a thin layer of ash are lyrics of personal anguish and discontent. When writing Sober, Ohsiek felt isolated from their creative partner and the world during the pandemic. Their torment comes through on the otherwise sultry “Hate Me Too” (“If I were you, I’d hate me too,” they sing) and opening track “Better” (“Fucking crawl out of your sheets/ You got to get up today”).

“My lyrical style is very much what’s going on right now,” Ohsiek says. “Since I started writing songs when I was 16, it’s been an important element of my emotional catharsis and process. At

that time, Wil and I weren’t living in the same town, and I was trying to find my career. I didn’t intend to tackle any big issues. It just tends to happen.”

According to Ohsiek, foamboy’s next album tells more of a story—and not a pleasant one: “It’s all about a horrible relationship I was in in grad school. Will-they-won’t-they weirdness that lasted for two years and then a shitty breakup.” They’ve set that table with the first single from the record, “Song About You,” in which Ohsiek jumps octaves to match the highs and lows of a tempestuous romance while the rest of foamboy burbles underneath like an outtake from Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters As foamboy looks to take the next big steps toward growing a global fan base, they are faced with the rickety state of the independent music industry and how to move forward without upending their daily lives.

“ We’re in that weird zone of really wanting to tour and hoping that it can happen,” Ohsiek says. “We went to South by Southwest this year and it was so frickin’ fun. We just want to play and share our band with as many people as possible.”

6.56%

“Super-high-quality, sublime, often otherworldly local music.”

—Scott McLean, Holocene co-owner

Ghost Feet

The dark wave shoegazers open up about songwriting, influence and sound.

BY MICHELLE KICHERER IG: @MichelleKicherer

When Ghost Feet’s upcoming single “November 2” got accepted to PDX Pop Now!’s 20th anniversary compilation (out this August), it felt like fate. It was a song with a lot of significance, the lyrics for which vocalist and keys player Jessie Branch says came quicker than any other she’d ever written.

“I mean, in like two minutes,” she says, explaining that it was one of those songs that “fell together super quick” with guitarists and recording engineers Rachel Dubuc and Nuri Erdal.

The story of “November 2” begins in the fall of 2021, with Dubuc and Erdal tinkering away in a studio they rented. This was before bassist Ryan Scott and drummer Benjamin Tyler joined the band, when it was what Branch calls “the core trio.” The trio was sitting in a dark studio room, and Branch’s ears perked up.

“I heard the guitars and drums and bass, and I was like, oh, my God! I could write to this so fast. And I wrote it in like two minutes,” she says.

6.56%

Songwriting speed aside, Branch explains that, lyrically, it was one of her favorite songs: “For me, it really tells a story of being in bad relationships. You know the classic tale of just feeling like I was dealing with this situation where I felt like I couldn’t escape a person and it was starting to affect my inner thoughts.”

The chorus chants, “I don’t want to be inside my mind,” capturing a feeling that “sometimes you are just like so stuck in your own head, and you cannot get out of it, as hard as you try,” Branch says. But the song takes an empowering shift, lyrically and sonically, charging toward a new realization, a new freedom.

“A person can rewrite their own reality with their actions, just like someone else could rewrite your reality and just change the way that you interact with the world by basically not allowing you to move on, or not allowing you to live your life,” Branch says.

“I would say a lot of our themes are pretty ethereal; stuff about life and death and just the nature of existing in the world and stuff,” Dubuc chimes in. “But then there are definitely songs that are more specific, like about, you know, addiction and relationships.”

The song “Speak” is about sisterhood and important female friendships; forthcoming single “Sun Look Down” is about the frustrations of addiction and how substances can cause you to lose touch with the world around you. Now three years sober, Branch says she wrote that song during a time when she was still using.

“ You start to feel like you’re sort of becoming like an empty shell, with no passions, no drive, and you’re not engaged with your life,” she says. “This song is just about feeling so high that you’re not, like, connecting to the world at all, and you’re sort of just floating around.”

Like other songs in their catalog, “Sun Look Down” sonically undulates to bring the listener into the story, intensifying at the song’s climactic breaking point. Branch explains how she vocally “goes off” in that moment to match the intense frustration that often comes with addiction: “It’s like, why can’t I stop doing this? I don’t want to do this.”

Ghost Feet’s sound is shaped by what Branch calls Dubuc and Erdal’s “producers’ ears.” “When they’re throwing in a sonic element or texture or layer that just adds to the whole ambient nature of our music,” she says, clarifying, “Not that we’re an ambient band, but there is a certain layer of, you know, wavy textures in the songs.”

As an engineer herself, Dubuc is inspired by rulebreakers like Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. At a Ghost Feet show, you won’t hear much banter, but you’ll hear a steady stream of one song rolling into the next, taking listeners from shoegaze to trip-hop, from synthwave to psych rock, each sound wound together in story.

Chiming in with some producer talk, Erdal, who is also a recording engineer, says, “We’re trying to have a really cool, cohesive show where there are levels and dynamics, where songs stitch together, and it’s super vibey.”

“I love the dynamic songwriting and sonic exploration from Ghost Feet and Sit Pretty. I’m a sucker for trip-hop and shoegaze, and they both scratch the itch.”

—Aaron Bergeson, composer, producer and sonic artist

Kill Michael

BY DANIEL BROMFIELD @bromf3

Who is Michael, and why does he need to be killed?

The question has followed Portland noise-rock band Kill Michael since the first Instagram posts they made following their 2018 inception. According to frontman Zoë Tricoché, “one day someone will know” the answer.

But for now, read “Michael” as any presence in your life that needs to be eliminated—maybe an ex, maybe a toxic friend or family member, or maybe something bigger, broader and more socially pervasive.

The band takes aim at no shortage of Michaels on their bracing new album, Ugly Truth of Building, which establishes them as one of Portland’s gnarliest and most politically outspoken rock bands. The band’s sludge-punk squall was already formidable on their 2020 album, 60:40, but Ugly Truth of Building is a clear level-up—louder, heavier, denser, sludgier, angrier and more

experimental.

“ We want to sound heavy, we want to get emotional and gritty, and we want to get to the rawness of everything,” says Tricoché of the band’s approach to making Ugly Truth of Building

Tricoché attributes this new infusion of power and energy to the band’s latest lineup—Tricoché on vocals and guitar, Myra Tibray on guitar and synth, Jarl Branum on bass, and Sam Spiders on drums. In earlier incarnations of the band, Tricoché, who identifies as trans and mixed, believes his bandmates “didn’t understand the subject matter I was talking about.”

Tricoché describes the present lineup as much more sympathetic. “Everyone in Kill Michael is queer and culturally mixed, which is really cool,” he says. “We can actually write together now and get these themes down and get these meanings in line.”

On Ugly Truth of Building, these themes include gentrification (“Brooklyn”), imperialism (“Tu Quieres Todo”), revolution (“Violence”) and the artist’s own mental health struggles (“Leaving”).

Tricoché delivers these themes in a voice that alternates deftly between a doom-metal shriek and a suave goth-rock croon. Recording these vocal takes is the most taxing part of recording for Tricoché—and not just because of the volume at which he screams.

“The fun part is the instruments,” Tricoché says. “And the second that it’s time for vocals, I’m freaking out—how I going to vocalize these intense themes and these words? With instruments, we’re all working together, it’s getting done quick. With vocals, it’s like, I need like a month, guys.”

But Tricoché isn’t the only voice on the album—two of its 10 tracks feature spoken-word guest performances. On “Boriken,” Tricoché enlisted his cousin to sing the praises of Puerto Rico, the “greatest country in the world,” albeit one whose history has been defined by colonialism and imperialism for more than half a millennium.

“I wanted to vocally highlight the things we’re passionate about,” Tricoché says. “The original recording [my cousin sent me] was like six minutes longer. He was going off about everything on the island—like, he had listed every single beach.”

Puerto Rico’s history of colonial violence is implied in “Boriken” rather than explained straight out, with the cousin’s description of the island’s natural beauty contrasting with the trauma of its painful history. Poet-activist Kesaia Fifita’s performance on “I Pray for Violence” is much more direct, combining revolutionary rhetoric with Old Testament imagery over a beat that buckles like the death throes of a collapsing skyscraper.

“ When we were recording it, my jaw dropped,” Tricoché says. “I was like: That’s heavy. That’s raw. And it’s exactly what needs to be said.”

In Kill Michael’s book, that’s the highest praise possible.

Since 2018, the group has been one of Portland’s gnarliest and most politically outspoken rock bands.

4.92%

“One of the greatest powers of music is to do things to large groups of people that words can’t do. I love [Kill Michael] for that, and for other hidden reasons.”

—Bim Ditson, Help

4.92%

Twingle

For singer-songwriter Anna Sabatino, the pandemic became a creative opportunity.

BY SARA GIZA

Like most bands, Twingle had to hit pause during the pandemic after playing only one show together. While it was a setback, songwriter Anna Sabatino (vocals, guitar, piano) didn’t slow down. As a music teacher, her dedication to the art form has never wavered, and the temporary absence of live shows allowed her to dive deeper into songwriting (she continues to teach banjo, guitar, mandolin, piano, ukulele and voice at her studio in St. Johns).

Twingle, an art rock ensemble that includes Alex Radakovich (drums), Eric Sabatino (bass), Jessica Sylvia (backup vocals, percussion) and Nathan Weber (guitar, piano, synth and backup vocals), enjoys surprising listeners with their unique sound, which blends the unexpected with the familiar.

“The line between traditional and untraditional is where I like to live, experiment and push in my songwriting,” Anna Sabatino says.

During lockdown, Twingle continued producing songs and recording, driven by the collaboration between the Sabatinos, who are married. “Eric and I lived together and went into recording mode for songs I had written in college about women

writers around the world in the 20th century and then a couple of new songs I wrote during that time,” Anna Sabatino says. With Thomas Hoganson producing, Eric Sabatino played bass, and the trio found that they worked well together. Having Radakovich and Sylvia on board rounded the band out, and since then, they’ve been playing around Portland with their latest addition, Weber.

“I surround myself with bandmates who encourage me, who champion this band to anyone who will hear it,” Anna Sabatino says. “It means a lot when they care, and it puts a fire in me to keep going because I don’t want to take their support for granted. I love my bandmates so much. They make it fun and totally worth it.”

For Anna Sabatino, life is best lived by blending surprises with comfort as a baseline. “It’s where I like to experiment and push in my songwriting,” she says, adding, “My background is in old-timey folk and bluegrass, which is where I think the familiar vibe comes from. I’ve held on to my roots, but I wanted my songs to have a more untraditional approach. I love ’60s psychedelia and experimental acts like Broadcast, François Hardy, Margo Guryan, Cate Le Bon, Heart, Dionne Warwick, Paul Simon and Pink Floyd.”

Currently, the band is looking forward to releasing their debut album, Future Caviar, as well as a music video they made with Jeff Tuyay of Dimwit. And Anna Sabatino is grateful for everyone who helped nominate Twingle for Best New Bands.

“Being a part of this showcase was on a bucket list of mine, and I really didn’t expect to get nominated at this point,” she says, adding, “It’s affirming to be acknowledged, particularly with it being harder to get people out to shows since the pandemic.”

“I love Twingle for their psychedelic grooves and catchy guitar riffs.”

—Monica Metzler, Pool Boys

Jonny’s Day Out

If you click on the Bandcamp page for Jonny’s Day Out, the first thing you’ll see is someone in a bunny mask, cradling a real rabbit as tenderly as if it were a newborn. It’s a disconcerting and weirdly nostalgic image, a warped Madonna and child, and it might prepare listeners for something much gnarlier than what you’ll hear on the band’s three releases—something more like Mr. Bungle’s thrash-metal classic The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny than the tender ambient rock sketches that populate the group’s Bandcamp.

Jonny’s Day Out came out of a collaboration between singer-guitarist Avery Haines and multi-instrumentalist Eli Goldberg, who records ambient music at Ann Annie.

The two made the album The House on the Hill together in 2021 and embarked on a small co-headlining tour.

“The tour itself was super fun, but it just wasn’t reflective of either of our music together, so it became a new band,” says Haines.

After adding drummer Will Dowden, bassist Blu Midyett, and trumpet and keyboard player Jude Abare, the duo leaned into a sound that combined Haines’ folk rock and Goldberg’s soundscapes. While some of their songs (like “I Missed the Bus, Man”) descend from the sound of The House on the Hill, others (like “Intro Credits”) are ambient reveries that will appeal to anyone who knows the name Kranky Records.

“I remember when Eli was first teaching us how to play ambient music, basically,” says Haines. “It’s so hard to go as slow as you need to be, to be as patient as it needs to be. And [Eli] had made us sit in silence

for 15 minutes and just stare, and he was like, that’s what 15 minutes feels like.”

Their debut EP, Please excuse our mess, was recorded by Graham Jonson, the onetime lo-fi hip-hop beatmaker who’s recently blossomed into something of a pop auteur under the name quickly, quickly.

It was Jonson who owned the bunny mask that would become a trademark of their sound. The actual rabbit is Louie, owned by Haines’ mom, immortalized on the Please excuse our mess track “Louie’s Banquet.” The thematic connection was immediately obvious to the band.

“Louie became a symbol of Jonny’s Day Out,” Haines says, “and this insane, absurd costume was just sitting there the whole time we were recording. Full circle.”

DANIEL BROMFIELD.

4.9%

Haley Johnsen

Although Haley Johnsen has been singing since she was 3 years old, it took her years, as a self-described “shy” person, to feel comfortable sharing her gift with others.

“ What makes me unique is that I started this whole journey backwards,” Johnsen says. “Having never really performed or written much music, I found myself in the top 24 of American Idol back in 2012. It’s incredibly strange coming off a show like that and then coming home and trying to figure out who you are and what you want to say.”

On Idol, Johnsen performed “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” by Bobby Vee and “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by Eurythmics. These days, though, her inspirations are Brandi Carlile, Grace Potter, and Annie Lennox. Johnsen says she enjoys “exploring new sounds in produc-

4.9%

Small Million

Ryan Linder and Malachi Graham, the creative forces behind Small Million, first crossed paths in a manner generally reserved for rom-com meet cutes. Both were with their respective friend groups at a sparsely attended Holocene dance night in 2015. The two factions eventually started intermingling.

“Everyone was talking to each other,” Linder remembers, “and it was like, ‘Oh, she makes music, he makes music. You guys should make music!’ And you’re like, ‘Sure, sure, sure.’” The nameless friend’s instincts proved correct, however, as the two were soon collaborating, molding Graham’s more folk-country influences into Linder’s electronic soundscapes.

The give-and-take of their respective sounds has made for some of the most exciting future pop music to come out of Portland in years. First EP Before the Fall mixes glistening downtempo rhythms with the substantial twang of Graham’s singing like a bright pink, sequined Nudie suit. Forthcoming album Passenger (out this September via Tender Loving Empire) adds in the overwhelming colors of shoegaze rock and musicians like drummer Ben Tyler and bassist Kale Chesney into an already heady mix. Warming it all from within is the strong creative partnership that Graham and Linder have built along the way.

“It came slowly,” Graham says. “We’re both very driven weirdos, and it’s through the process of writing and making music together that our friendship grew.” ROBERT HAM.

tion or writing about a subject I’ve been afraid to explore. I’m a genre bender and have explored the realms of alt pop, rock and Americana. I’ve never been one to want to be placed into one box. One thing I know for sure is that my voice is what ties it all together.”

Ever an adventurer, Johnsen went from recording her acoustic album London Sessions at Abbey Road Studios in 2019 to writing the title track of her recent album Goner in an unlikely location: a trailer in Seaview, Wash., where she sequestered herself after suffering a creative rut during the pandemic. Still, she loves sharing who she is while onstage.

“For someone who grew up incredibly shy, I feel safe to take up space onstage and share the most vulnerable sides of myself,” Johnsen says. “I want people to walk away from my shows feeling uplifted and inspired.”

SARA GIZA.

3.28%

Descending Pharaohs

Holding up the black-and-white collage that he made for the cover of Descending Pharaohs’ first full-length, multi-instrumentalist Theo Khoury says: “It’s labor of love. It doesn’t make any practical sense. There’s so much work that we put in, but we love the shit out of it.” He might as well be talking about his band.

This passion project of Khoury and guitarist Ricardo Esway started early in the pandemic with the two getting to know one another over socially distanced beers. Once vaccinated, rehearsals commenced with the men mixing elements of psychedelia, post-punk, jazz and Middle Eastern sounds.

“I think what we share is, we’re both diggers,” Khoury says. “We’ve had our heads in records and scenes for years and have an almost nerdy appreciation for foreign scales.”

Descending Pharaohs has since been commanding stages around Portland, using their hypnotic music and a backdrop of trippy visuals to overwhelm the senses of anyone within their blast radius. Up next is their LP Ritual of Light, which will hopefully be available at the end of 2023, and a continued evolution of their collective sound. “Every time one of us has an idea,” Esway says, “it mutates almost instantly.” ROBERT HAM.

3.28%

Roman Norfleet and Be Present Art Group

At the crossroads of self-consciousness and spirituality lies the sonic experience of Roman Norfleet and Be Present Art Group’s self-titled debut album. The opening track, “Brothers Gathering,” shrewdly casts off all expectations in a tranquil wash of chimes and bells.

The six-track debut EP creation by Norfleet introduces him with all the organic splendor of the drum gatherings at Malcolm X Park in D.C. that the album’s improvisational jazz embraces. “Our foundation is improvisation and being in the now moment,” Norfleet says. “Improv is very important to me when I think of the Afro community, especially here in America. Improv has always been a big part of our experience.”

Born the son of the Rev. Robert Norfleet and Mose Ella in Lockport, Ill., he was imbued with what he describes as “a spiritual seed,” which would later sprout several branches after a crisis of faith unleashed the spiritual seeker in him. “That led me to many realizations and many different spiritual paths, and

meeting many different beings,” Norfleet explains.

That path carried Norfleet from his religious roots in the Baptist church to Los Angeles, where he studied the Hindu/ Vedic philosophies of jazz composer Alice Coltrane, also known as Swamini Turiyasangitanada. It is arguably Norfleet’s spirituality that has made him who he is today: a versatile and visionary artist (as well as a self-described healer and mystic) who seeks to show how the unbound spirit can challenge the complacency of the status quo by “being in the now moment.”

RAY GILL JR.

GET BUSY

WATCH: Drunk Herstory

Have a blast revisiting the past with a lineup of Portland’s most intoxicated drag performers. Shandi Evans and Dahlia Hearts host this sketch performance that tells the stories (albeit sloppily) of the LGBTQ+ community. Consider Drunk Herstory a primer on all of the events that were omitted from your high school curriculum—from the Stonewall riots to the AIDS crisis to the drag ball subculture that originated in New York City. Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., 503719-6055, albertarosetheatre.com. 7 pm Thursday, June 29. $25 in advance, $30 at the door. 18+.

WATCH: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

While most local theater companies take the summer off, Tigard’s Broadway Rose makes sure playgoers have a darkened theater to duck into for some live entertainment when the heat becomes unbearable. Its midsummer show is this Andrew Lloyd Webber classic, which follows Joseph and his colorful coat as he journeys through ancient Egypt, using his gift of dream interpretation to rise through the ranks of slave to the pharaoh’s righthand man. Deb Fennell Auditorium, 9000 SW Durham Road, Tigard, 503-620-5262, broadwayrose.org. 7:30 pm Thursday-Friday, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturday-Sunday, June 29-July 23. $20-$54.

LISTEN: Salute 2 Soul

Fans of soul music won’t want to miss Portland’s own Ronnie Wright bringing his stirring singer-songwriter talents to the stage with vocal phenom Alonzo Chadwick of Zoulful Music and hip-hop

artist Vursatyl. This is a rare opportunity to listen to the trio blend soul, funk, R&B and gospel, which will bring Alberta Abbey’s salute to Black Music Month to a close. Bonus: VIP tickets include a dinner of Creole-Cajun barbecue. Alberta Abbey, 126 NE Alberta St., albertaabbey.org. 8:3011:30 pm Friday, June 30. $25 general admission, $30 reserve, $50 VIP with dinner.

DANCE: Bollywood Disco Party

No one genre of music defined Bollywood films throughout the years—soundtracks tended to shift with whatever was popular as the eras evolved. For a moment, that included disco. If you’re an unapologetic fan of four-on-the-floor beats, then put on your metallic flared jumpsuit, sequined-embroidered sari or both for this themed dance night at the Crystal Ballroom hosted by DJ Prashant. Featured performers include duo Izohnny, known as the “Goliaths of Glam,” and the Jai Ho! troupe. McMenamins Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 503-225-0047, crystalballroompdx.com. 9 pm Friday, June 30. $12 group tickets, $16 individual in advance, $20 at the door. 21+.

GO: Women’s Soccer Book Signing

In advance of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, soccer fans can meet some former players in person at two book-signing events held at The Sports Bra and Fanladen, the Rose City Riveters and Timbers Army headquarters. Gwendolyn Oxenham, Susie Petruccelli and Kelcey Ervick all played Division I college soccer and have since become authors—two of them have published books recounting their time on the pitch while the third examined the history of the sport. Powell’s will provide

copies for purchase and signing at both venues. The Sports Bra, 2512 NE Broadway, 503-327-8401, thesportsbrapdx. com. 2-4 pm Friday, June 30. Fanladen, 1633 SW Alder St., 107ist.org. 5-6:30 pm Saturday, July 1.

DRINK: Portland Craft Beer Festival

Not all big beer fests are dead. The Portland Craft Beer Festival returns to The Fields Park during its typical pre-July 4 weekend slot. And perhaps that’s what makes it so popular during a time when would-be attendees seem to be giving up on other large-scale events: The outer Pearl District greenspace has a picturesque view of the Fremont Bridge over the Willamette, and this is a chill entertainment option for folks who stick around town during Independence Day and want to avoid the hoards at the Waterfront Blues Festival. You can expect a lineup of flagships, seasonals and one-offs, as well as food trucks and local snack vendors. As always, Friday and Saturday are for the 21-and-older crowd, but Sunday is Family Day, which includes a Children’s Market and an appearance by the Voodoo Doughnut truck. The Fields Park, 1099 NW Overton St., portlandcraftbeerfestival.com.

Noon-10 pm Friday-Saturday and noon-6 pm Sunday, June 30-July 2. $35.70. 21+ Friday-Saturday.

LISTEN: Waterfront Blues Festival 2023

Portland’s longest-running music event returns to Tom McCall Waterfront Park, packing the space with four stages and thousands of people during the first four days of July. This year’s Blues Festival headliners include the likes of Buddy

Guy, The Mavericks, Los Lonely Boys and Shemekia Copeland, along with more than 100 other artists. New this year, organizers have partnered with Knot Springs, which will kick off each day with Wellness on the Waterfront. Sessions include everything from cardio dance to yoga to meditation with movement. And if you’d prefer to steer clear of the crowds in the park, hop aboard one of the Portland Spirit ’s Blues Cruises. The whole thing culminates with a fireworks show set to a soundtrack of blues, soul and funk. Tom McCall Waterfront Park, 98 SW Naito Parkway, 800323-0634, waterfrontbluesfest.com. 11 am-10:30 pm Friday-Tuesday, July 1-4. $50-$1,400.

LISTEN: Candlelight: A Tribute to Beyoncé

Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour will, sadly, not be stopping in Portland. The next best thing to seeing the singer in person, however, might just be this candlelight concert, featuring the Listeso String Quartet. You’ll hear a variety of songs, from “Love on Top” to “Halo” to “Single Ladies” as well as collaborations with her hubby Jay Z and Destiny’s Child classics. Dozens of flickering wicks will create a warm and intimate atmosphere that Queen Bey would most certainly approve of. Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., 503719-6055, albertarosetheatre.com. 6:30 and 9 pm Saturday July 1. $40-$60.

COLOR-COATED: Broadway Rose’s midsummer show, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, runs through late July.

Hot Plates

FOOD & DRINK

1. TUSK

Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com

2448 E Burnside St., 503-894-8082, tuskpdx.com. 5-9 pm

Monday-Thursday, 5-10 pm Friday, 10 am-2 pm and 5-10 pm Saturday, 10 am-2 pm Sunday. At long last, brunch is making a comeback after the pandemic wiped out the weekend tradition. Our favorite chickpea palace, Tusk, is the latest to reintroduce the midday meal. Diners with a sweet tooth will want to order pastry chef Tara Lewis’ baharat roll frosted with pistachio farmer cheese or the cardamom doughnut with tahini pastry cream and rhubarb jam. Brunchgoers who require sunny yolks with their mimosas should look to the shakshuka verde or lamb poutine, which can be topped with an egg, of course.

2. STACKED SANDWICH SHOP

2175 NW Raleigh St., 971-279-2731, stackedsandwichshop.com. 11 am-7 pm Tuesday-Saturday.

Among the many pandemic-related closures, the loss of Stacked was painful. Now, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, chef Gabriel Pascuzzi has revived the shop with a slimmed-down menu of old favorites and new creations that feels faithful to the original. Your go-to order should be the famous oxtail French dip, once considered one of Portland’s iconic dishes. At the moment, Stacked makes only about 25 a day, so we recommend placing an order online in advance.

3. HIGGINS PIGGINS

On the Oregon Historical Society terrace at 1200 SW Park Ave., 503-2229070, higginspiggins.com.

One of downtown’s most charming pandemic patios is back open for the summer season. Higgins Piggins returned to the South Park Blocks in early June, and this year’s iteration pays tribute to Venice’s backstreet locals bars known as bacari: cozy, simple inns that typically serve wine and small plates built around seasonal ingredients. At Piggins, you can expect a Pacific Northwest take, with a menu that includes artisan cheeses, charcuterie, salads and cicchetti—snacks like tea service-sized sandwiches.

4. JANKEN

250 NW 13th Ave., 503-841-6406, jankenrestaurant.com. 5-11 pm Tuesday-Thursday, 5 pm-midnight Friday, 4 pm-midnight Saturday, 4-10 pm Sunday.

At this stage of Portland’s evolution as a food-loving city, Janken may be just the right tonic. Whether intended or not, the symbolism of the dining room’s striking faux cherry tree in full bloom suggests renewal and an emergence from our extended COVID winter. That opulence extends to the menu, where you’ll find prices ranging from high to silly, but portions tend to be generous. Begin with one or more of the nontraditional maki, like a soft-shell crab roll, then move on to top-grade A5 wagyu you cook yourself on a hot stone. For those truly splurging, there is $229 Imperial Gold osetra roe.

5. RINGSIDE STEAKHOUSE

Chelo, Goodbye, Chelo!

BY ANDREA DAMEWOOD

The logo for Luna Contreras’ pop-up Chelo features a fluffy-tailed fox, and that suits one of Portland’s most spritelike chefs perfectly.

on Mondays through Wednesdays, turning out fat little gorditas, seasonal veg, complex mole, and a dessert menu worth the trip alone. But, Contreras tells WW, it’s time to move on to the next big thing.

2165 W Burnside St., 503-223-1513, ringsidesteakhouse.com. 4:30-9 pm

Monday-Thursday, 4-9:30 pm Friday-Saturday, 4-9 pm Sunday.

A few good things emerged during the pandemic. One of the greatest was the addition of a patio at Portland’s premier steakhouse, which is making its summer return. It’s not easy to imagine carving into one of RingSide’s dry-aged rib-eyes while sitting in the parking lot, but the meat palace’s grand canopy is dressed to the nines with faux-wood flooring and vibrant emerald plants. A handful of new seasonal sides complement all of that greenery: English peas with ricotta dumplings, grilled Washington asparagus with black truffle egg sauce, and roasted heirloom carrots in a zhoug salsa verde.

Contreras’ cooking has made appearances all over the city— at Nightingale, for a bit behind the scenes at Janken, on Netflix’s Snack vs. Chef, and in bottles of her signature hot sauces available at better markets. She’s received acclaim at every turn.

Sometimes, Contreras flits about so quickly it can be hard to catch her. But from now until mid-August, you can find her playful, vegetable-forward take on traditional Mexican street foods inside Dame restaurant on Northeast Killingsworth Street.

Since the start of the year, Chelo has occupied Dame

“I’m not as young anymore, and it’s been cool cooking and stuff, but it can be a lot doing it every night, along with doing the other stuff I like to do,” she says.

Up next? A brunch and bakery spot five days a week that will retain the name Chelo in the location Lokanta will soon vacate at Southeast 26th Avenue and Clinton Street. The concept is a Mexican twist on San Francisco’s legendary Tartine—fresh baked breads and quiches, along with conchas, bollos and tres leches cake. Evenings will feature Libre, a new project from the owners of Southeast Division’s Mestizo and Contreras’ current collaborator at

The Chelo pop-up at Dame will soon come to an end, but chef Luna Contreras has much more in store for hungry Portlanders.

THOMAS TEAL

CHEF’S TABLE: Luna Contreras operates Chelo, a pop-up inside Dame restaurant.

Editor: Andi Prewitt

The results have been mixed.

“It puts me in an emotional situation,” she says. “If I hadn’t started hormone replacement therapy, I don’t think I’d be cooking as freely and happily. The cooking has improved and opened up a lot of advocacy and community.”

Still, articles and social media posts draw hate from transphobes and bigots. And while anyone who has eaten Contreras’ amazing food wonders why she hasn’t opened a permanent spot of her own, finding funding as a trans woman hasn’t been easy, she says.

“I think I would have had a space by now; it’s honestly a big reason why, I think,” Contreras says.

So, in the meantime, there will be another iteration of Chelo, and more evolution of Contreras’ cooking style.

Before summer is over, don’t miss out on a few items that likely might not make it over to a smaller-plate version of Chelo, including the incredible chuleta de puerco, a bone-in pork chop, served with hot housemade tortillas along with greens, a super-tasty fire-roasted tomato salsa quemada and brothy beans, cooked to perfection.

Buzz List

1. DIRTY PRETTY

638 E Burnside St., 503-841-5253, dirtyprettypdx.com. 4 pm-1 am Sunday-Thursday, 4 pm-2 am Friday-Saturday.

With the opening of Dirty Pretty, the third bar in the Pink Rabbit and Fools and Horses family, it feels like owner Collin Nicholas and chef Alex Wong have created a brand. Each property has a distinct theme, but the core feeling and elements of flair unite the trio. Cocktails by beverage director Ben Purvis are fun and extravagant. Guava Wars, for instance, drinks like a tropical smoothie, while the Jungle Juice with Jamaican rum and pinot noir tastes like something that has the potential to make one act very, very sassy.

2. TORO MEXICAN KITCHEN

1355 NW Everett St., Suite 120, 503-673-2724, toropdx.com. 4-10 pm Sunday-Thursday, 4-11 pm Friday-Saturday.

The former Tilt space in the Pearl District is empty no more. Toro, a Mexican eatery operated by the ever-expanding Urban Restaurant Group (Bartini, Brix, Swine), has transformed the dark, industrial-themed space into an airy cantina. The initial food offerings we’ve sampled have all been satisfying—but the delightful surprise was the lengthy cocktail list. Early favorites were the sunny Passionfruit (vodka, passion fruit puree, pineapple juice and a Tajín rim) and Ocean (vodka, lemongrass and basil syrup, cucumber), which is a shade of turquoise so alluring you’ll wish you could swim in it.

3. GRAPE APE

77 SE Yamhill St., 503-261-3467, grapeape.wine. 11 am-bedtime Tuesday-Sunday.

Sorry to break it to fans of the ’70s Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the same name, but you won’t find a 40-foot purple primate at this new Central Eastside bar. However, much of the décor is from that era, and the lineup of fine natural wines should soften the blow. The curated list highlights selections from low-intervention labels, including Oregon’s Hooray for You chardonnay, California producer Populis’ sauvignon blanc and a Pierre-Olivier Bonhomme gamay from France. Pair one with marinated white beans and mayo on toast or a jamon baguette and pretend you’ve made an escape to Paris for the afternoon.

4. ZULA

1514 NW 23rd Ave., 503-477-4235, zulapdx.com. 11:30 am-9 pm Wednesday-Sunday.

up-and-coming

superstar Gabriella Martinez.

Contreras says she’ll take what’s been a smash for Chelo at Dame and make those dishes more “snackified.” That will include the tlayuda—a giant tortilla baked with scratch-made pork albondigas, squash, cherry tomatoes, kale, black beans and queso covered with fanned-out slices of bright green avocado; a traditional Oaxacan answer to pizza. Things like the tomalitos, little poblano tamales stuffed with crab and Gorgonzola, topped with trout roe and pepitas, would also translate well.

Contreras moved to Portland five years ago from the Bay Area, where she racked up accolades for her cooking at spots such as Mamacita and Padrecito. Since moving here, Contreras has started hormone replacement therapy and been a staunch ally of trans youth and immigrants.

Also, Chelo’s desserts, made alongside Martinez, are some of the best I’ve eaten in a long while. The pastel de chocolate is a slice of cake heaven, spiced with cinnamon and not too sweet, paired with a cocoa crumble and a sweet little scoop of dulce de leche ice cream. Similarly, a slice of usually meh carrot cake is also moist, spiced to the gods, and elevated by both a cream cheese mousse and a seasonal ginger-rhubarb compote. And the famous paletas are there—it’s always wise to get a frozen mango mascarpone popsicle for the road.

As for the future, Contreras says she’s been in talks to appear on another reality TV cooking show. She won’t be on next season, but if she’s free for the following one, she’ll go. Perhaps by next spring, she’ll have a better handle on a permanent spot.

“I can’t say it’s been easy the last few years; it’s been rough. But it’s been OK too,” Contreras says. “I’ve gotten to try a lot of new things and build a community. Finally, this year, I feel like I’m better financially; I felt like I had to hustle a lot before. This year, I have more work-life balance.”

We now know what Rotigo’s reimagining looks like: Roasted chicken is out and Mediterranean cuisine is the focus. We’re still swooning over the filo and feta roll, served hot with honey drizzle, and the fire-roasted eggplant. But don’t overlook the brightly colored collection of cocktails that will transport you to the coast of Israel. Not only are they named after neighborhoods in Tel Aviv, where Zula owner Tal Tubitski once lived; the concoctions are made with ingredients from the region. The tequila-pomegranate blend of the Levontin, or the Montefiore, made with date-infused rye whiskey, were our first picks.

5. THE SHAKU BAR

3448 NE Sandy Blvd., 971-346-2063, theshakubar.com. 4 pm-midnight

Tuesday-Thursday, 4 pm-1 am Friday-Saturday, 3-10 pm every other Sunday. This year-old spot proves that good things come in small packages. The closet-sized bar serves cocktails with big flavors, like the Princess Peach, which is a refreshing mix of local Aria gin, Aperol, St-Germain and lemon juice topped with a half-centimeter of creamy-white Fee Foam (Google it!). We’re definitely coming back for a Kvothe the Bloodless—pickle juice, hot sauce, lime and a secret sauce. Shaku calls it a bloody mary “without the blood.”

Chelo,

pastry

EAT: Chelo is located inside Dame, 2930 NE Killingsworth St., chelopdx.com. 5-9 pm Monday-Wednesday.

Bookworm

Portland author Patrick deWitt’s latest work, The Librarianist, isn’t the perfect novel, but eccentric characters and engaging language make it a page-turner.

BY ERIC VANDERWALL

“He was a retired librarian, seventy-one years of age, and not unhappy.”

Meet Bob Comet, the principal character in Portland author Patrick deWitt’s new novel, The Librarianist (Ecco Press, 352 pages, $30). The book opens in autumn 2005 when Bob, a reclusive man who has lived in the same mint-colored house in Northeast Portland since childhood, begins volunteering at a senior center. After he discovers the past he and a resident share, the narrative moves back to the years 1942 through 1960, when Bob’s calling as a librarianist began.

That term for the profession was coined by the embittered librarian at Bob’s high school, who counsels the adolescent against “a job whose usefulness has gone away” because “the language-based life of the mind” is a thing of the past. Bob nevertheless persists, “clerking under the dread thumb of Miss Ogilvie” at a branch in Northwest after his graduation from Portland State University. Two library regulars become Bob’s first friends, but the relationships last only a few years, after which begins the solitude that stretches unbroken until his seventh decade.

that something is. When the narrative returns to 2005-2006, Bob makes a kind of peace with his past and, in the final scene, rediscovers something of the Bob who once took a turn as itinerant thespian assistant 60 years earlier.

DeWitt’s newest novel, like The Sisters Brothers, resembles a picaresque, albeit one in which the main character travels little. It is an episodic work in which characters and

places with zany names—Chance and Chicky Bitsch, Les More, the Finer Diner—process past the reader, usually lingering for only a chapter or two. A man wearing a “self-made cape,” a paramedic eating a sandwich while assisting the injured, an elfin elderly man hiding among hothouse plants—these and other outlandish characters are amusing and vivid, but there is a sense that the whole is less than the sum of

its parts; that the book’s scenes remain scenes without creating a larger pattern.

In spite of the book’s title and its main character’s bibliophilia, its engagement with other books seems limited. Bob chooses to read Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Gogol’s “The Overcoat” at the senior center, and his recommendation of Crime and Punishment as a young librarian suggests something of his imagination. But those three instances constitute the entirety of The Librarianist’s literary references, a missed opportunity in creating and revealing the character of one whose chief activity in life is reading.

The Librarianist is not without its delights, mostly evocative and original phrases and lines. One of the senior center residents has “unhealthy habits and gargantuan appetites” that have run “unchecked across the length of several decades.” Actresses Ida and June travel with 23 pieces of luggage that are “imposing in scope and confusing to consider.” Fittingly, the passages about Bob reticently hint at unexpressed emotion. Bob’s house is “the location of his life, the place where he passed through time, passed through rooms.” During one of his volunteering visits, he senses “evidence of an odd-shaped fate running through the day.” When Bob finds himself alone and friendless while still a young man, he gains an “understanding of the perilous vastness all around him.”

Then the narrative moves back to a four-day period in 1945 when an 11-year-old Bob runs away from home. He falls in with thespian sisters Ida and June and their dogs, Buddy and Pal, traveling with them to the fictional Oregon Coast town of Mansfield. Bob assists in their rehearsals at the Hotel Elba, an establishment that to Bob appears “handsome but hungry-looking.” On his fourth day away from home, the ends of both Bob’s adventure and World War II coincide. As the sheriff begins to drive Bob back to Portland, the boy feels that “something of the moment had upset his heart,” although he is unable to articulate what

The Librarianist, despite some weaknesses, offers an entertaining menagerie of strange characters and numerous apt and evocative phrases. And the divergent possibilities in the novel’s ambiguous ending scene give readers two very different stories to ponder after the final word.

The Librarianist, despite some weaknesses, offers an entertaining menagerie of strange characters and numerous apt and evocative phrases.

PATRICK DEWITT

GUSTAVO DEWIT / HARPER COLLINS

HARPER COLLINS

SHOWS OF THE WEEK

WHAT TO SEE AND WHAT TO HEAR

BY DANIEL BROMFIELD @bromf3

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28:

Loving Well

Portland Center Stage’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers a beguiling vision of inclusivity.

BY LINDA FERGUSON

This summer, London’s Globe theater is presenting A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a controversial warning about the play’s “language of misogyny and racism.”

The advisory has a point. Shakespeare’s 400-year-old masterpiece of comic romance is cringey in places, especially when a daughter is required to obey her father or die and another character makes a crack about the daughter’s dark coloring, saying, “Away, you Ethiop.”

Portland Center Stage’s production of the play, as directed by Marissa Wolf, requires no such warning, though. Instead, the company nimbly makes merry with the offensive bits by employing a delightfully diverse cast.

In Shakespeare’s script, the male Duke Theseus can make modern audiences squirm as he lasciviously licks his chops over winning his Amazon bride, Hippolyta, in battle. In Wolf’s production, Theseus’ pronouns are still he/him, but he’s played by the female actor and drag king Jennifer Lanier. And his war prize (Lauren Bloom Hanover) glares at the duke in a way that tells us she can take care of herself.

Like Shakespeare’s poetic lines themselves, the performers in this fresh, inclusive show—binary and cis, LGBTQ and straight, persons of color and white—work together to weave a magic that transcends the script’s 16th century prejudices…and today’s.

The play begins in Athens, where the awful father of Hermia (Nicole Marie Green) is wielding his patriarchal power by ordering her to marry Demetrius (Jesse Weil)—no matter that she loves another man, Lysander (Treasure Lunan). Lysander and Hermia escape into the woods, followed by the spurned Demetrius and Helena (Tyler Andrew Jones), the woman who loves him.

Also in the forest are a warring fairy king and queen, the fairy servant Puck (Ken Yoshikawa), and some goofy artisans who are rehearsing a play. When the fairies anoint first Lysander and then Demetrius with a potion that makes them both fall in love with Helena, mayhem ensues.

For over two hours, the play serves a giddy brew of comic confusion as actors, playing multiple roles, stumble, whoosh, and twinkle through a forest of magically moonlit trees. One moment Green is the spitfire Hermia and the next she’s the trembling worker and amateur actor who portrays the reluctant lion in the play within the play. Also

of note is Andrés Alcalá, who portrays Hermia’s blustering father in a gray suit and then embodies a comic sweetness as one of the fairy queen’s attendants, dressed in pink polka-dotted jeans and wafting his arms as if they were being lifted by a warm breeze.

Sarita Fellows’ clever costume designs facilitate the constant quick changes, allowing actors to exit as one character and return as another in a breath. The costumes also help the audience keep track of who’s who in the midst of the chaos, with the main Athenian characters wearing long robes they can easily doff to transform into fairies or “rude mechanicals.”

Jones is particularly hilarious as Helena—the “sweet lady”—who crosses her arms and stomps around the stage in a self-pitying huff. Likewise, Lunan, with a warm and elastic voice, turns Lysander’s love talk, including a simple “amen,” into humorous expressions of eroticism.

Movement, though, is the real star of Wolf’s production, which is often balletic. Yoshikawa’s aggressively mischievous Puck is constantly in motion, whether he’s skipping, leaping, or jabbing the air with a pointed finger. Similarly, Andy Perkins, as the endearing doofus Bottom, tiptoes, prances and struts with a congenial, outsized sense of confidence. Music helps keep all these comings and goings fluid, as an irresistible beat sweeps the madcap characters on and off the stage and chimes softly sound whenever someone is anointed with the love potion.

Once all the conflicts are resolved, everyone from the queen of the fairies to Bottom dances together in the forest. Unlike traditional stagings of Midsummer, each character enjoys a brief solo dance as the other characters cheer them on. It’s the best of both worlds, where diverse individuals can dance together and also be seen and celebrated for their differences. After years of increasing divisiveness and violence in our society—and the threat of more to come—this dream reawakens our communal longing for a green and joyful world.

SEE IT: A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays at Portland Center Stage at the Armory, 128 NW 11th Ave., 503-4453700, boxoffice@pcs.org. 7:30 pm Wednesday-Saturday, 2 pm Thursday and Saturday, through July 2. $25-$93. 16+.

Justin Broadrick has occupied heavy metal’s lunatic fringe ever since he was a teen helping Napalm Death craft their 28-song grindcore classic Scum—and with great techno as JK Flesh and shoegaze as Jesu under his belt, he’s got his unwholesome feelers in just about every genre. Yet his best-known project remains Godflesh, his pioneering industrial metal duo with B.C. Green, which is producing some of its best work ever three decades after first deciding to fuse heavy metal with drum machines. Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 SE 39th Ave. 8 pm. $25-$35. All ages.

THURSDAY, JUNE 29:

Rhododendron is one of the weirdest and heaviest young rock bands in Portland—they’re the one with a song called “Ornimegalonyx” and another one that starts out sounding like 19th century drawing room music and ends in a cascade of screams and crushing guitars. The idea that prog and punk are somehow opposed never got in Rhododendron’s heads, and in a do-it-yourself indie-rock milieu that too often praises amateurism at the expense of ambition, it’s great to see a band so gnarly and rigorous. McMenamins Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St. 8 pm. $8-$10. All ages.

SATURDAY-TUESDAY, JULY 1-4:

The reason people age out of going to festivals in their 20s is because they realize the average midsize folk and blues festival is way more interesting (and cheaper) than most market-tested cookie-cutter Coachella clones. Instead of seeing Odesza for the fourth time, why not hit up the Waterfront Blues Festival where some of the world’s most interesting and exploratory music—not just blues, but jazz, zydeco, bluegrass and folk from around the world—can be found around nearly every corner? 11 am-10:30 pm. $50 single day, $140 and up for all 4 days. All ages.

TAMERA LYN/COURTESY OF PORTLAND CENTER STAGE

Stories of Vietnam

How a Portland translator brought new life to the legendary Bảo Ninh’s short story collection Hà Nôi at Midnight.

BY MICHELLE KICHERER @MichelleKicherer

Sitting in Pho Van 82, a Vietnamese restaurant where warm-toned lanterns hang from high, skylit ceilings, Portland writer and translator Cab Tran ponders whether his surroundings remind him of Vietnam. Looking around and nodding thoughtfully, he decides they do, but adds that Vietnam would be much more humid.

Over cơm and pho, Tran discusses Hà Nôi at Midnight (Texas Tech University Press, 216 pages, $29.95), the newly translated short story collection by one of Vietnam’s most renowned writers, Bảo Ninh. Until 2006, Ninh’s 1991 novel

The Sorrow of War was banned in Vietnam for its critical portrayal of the North Vietnamese army, as told through the lens of a soldier tasked with finding the bodies of his comrades.

The groundbreaking book earned Ninh international acclaim and the admiration of readers whom Tran calls “Bảo Ninh fanboys.” And in his early 20s, Tran became one of them.

“Sorrow of War was way more psychologically complex than anything I’d read of Vietnamese literature in translation,” Tran tells WW. He describes other Vietnamese work in translation he’d read from that time as “flowery and romanticized” and full of propaganda that bolstered Communist ideals.

“ Whereas with Bảo Ninh it was something different,” Tran says. The storytelling was personal and complex; it forced readers to look at the true effects of the war.

After a 30-year silence, Bảo Ninh granted permission for 12 of his stories to be translated, 10 of which are appearing in English for the first time. It was no easy task. “The process of translation requires a lot more than just knowing the equivalent of one word to another,” Tran says.

more proficient in the English language to shape it into something that a native English speaker would read.” After translating the original text, Ha, whose first language was Vietnamese, sent the manuscript over to Tran.

“The language is very idiomatic; there are a lot of sayings for things. People talk almost in proverbs,” Tran says. He adjusted some of the more proverbial phrases into language that would flow for English readers.

“ We had to make some decisions on when to keep the proverbs and when to find an equivalent [English] phrasing,” he adds, further explaining that the language would have otherwise felt “too cryptic.” Ha and Tran decided to keep Bảo Ninh’s fragmentary style and the way he shifts between first person and third person narration in the text, which they describe as “the hallmark of his prose.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer) refers to Bảo Ninh as one of Vietnam’s most important postwar writers, saying that with this collection Ninh looks to “the more private language of suffering, reflection, and bittersweet experience” that “illuminate the interior landscape of a postwar country.”

At the very start of the pandemic, Tran was contacted by Quan Manh Ha, a professor at the University of Montana who remembered Tran’s love and respect for Sorrow of War all those years ago. Ha had just obtained the rights to Ninh’s story collection and asked if Tran would like to be involved in the translation process.

“I said, well yes, let’s do it!” Tran says with a “how could I not?” expression.

Tran explains that there are typically two translators involved: “One person who translates from the original language into a very raw version of English, then a second person who is

The 12 stories in Hà Nôi are deeply personal, exploring ways in which war can shift relationships, to each other and to ourselves. “The Secret of the River” tells the heartbreaking story of how floodwaters dismantled a family; “Beloved Son” is about a mother writing to a son who will not return home; in “An Unnamed Star,” a railroad signalman with dementia waits for a train that won’t come.

Each story, shifting through time and tense, brings readers into a new and unforgettable lived experience. Perhaps by introducing this new collection, Tran and Ha can help usher in a new generation of Bảo Ninh fanboys.

“The process of translation requires a lot more than just knowing the equivalent of one word to another.”

TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY PRESS

SHOW REVIEW

THE WARM UP AT STAGE 722

BY ROBERT HAM

The organizers of The Warm Up, a showcase for hip-hop and Afrobeat held for the first time last week at Stage 722, made a point of emphasizing to me all the hard work that went into getting this event off the ground. According to Kahlil Khalil, one of the organizers who dreamed up this party, it took months of planning and apparently some negotiation with the city to get it rolling. There was an audible tone of relief in his voice as he spoke, encouraged by the bodies making their way into the performance space.

To be fair, there were no more than 100 people in attendance this past Friday night—par for the course for a new event trying to get attention in a city with few media outlets willing to promote it. But if the empty space at 722 bothered any of the performers, they didn’t let it show. Each one commanded the stage as if it were a sold-out arena, pulling reserves of energy and enthusiasm from the audience.

At the risk of playing favorites, the MVP of the night was Mighty, an MC whose song “Game Winner” has been used to open up Blazers home games for the past two seasons. Joined on stage by a live drummer, he kept up a torrid pace, pausing only to tell a brief story or drop a rapid fire a cappella freestyle.

Kahlil Khalil went one step further, bringing a full band along to add an extra psych-funk spark to his laconic mix of lyrical consciousness and bombast. Swiggle Mandela, meanwhile, ceded a good chunk of his opening set to other voices and bodies, handing the mic off to friends like Jasey Cordeta and G.Swendsen. It was a typically gregarious move for the local hip-hop community, which always goes out their way to celebrate their own.

Deathtrap (1982)

Sidney Lumet’s directorial versatility is legendary. But if you had to pin down a storytelling specialization, it might be characters straining to define and discover their moral codes. See 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and The Verdict, among others.

So by contrast, what a hoot for Lumet to dabble among characters with no discernible morality, playing dress-up in a genre known for its artifice. That’s the thriller comedy Deathtrap

Playwright Sidney Bruhl (Michael Caine) has just suffered yet another Broadway flop and faces a brandy-soaked early retirement in his Long Island home, adorned with the weapons from his more lucrative murder mystery productions. What should arrive in the mail? A perfect script authored by a former student (Christopher Reeve).

Upon reading, the murder-obsessed Sidney begins hatching a scheme to draw in his would-be protégé as either a partner or a victim (Mrs. Bruhl, played by Dyan Cannon, is unsure which).

Often, Lumet shoots his adaptation of Ira Levin’s play like a theater production, with characters gesticulating and monologuing across every corner of Sydney’s estate-slash-armory. But when the tension nears a breaking point—we can only take so much body disposal, trick handcuffs and possibly loaded revolvers—Lumet opts for bracing closeups that insist on palpable fear.

This visual language wrenches Deathtrap out of being a dainty meta-mystery, shining brightest when Reeve hisses with a malice that would make Superman wince. Meanwhile, Caine and Cannon undulate skillfully between playing believably desperate and navigating the kind of manic plot gizmos that presage Clue (1985) three years later. Hollywood, July 2.

ALSO PLAYING:

Cinema 21: Dr. Strangelove (1964), July 1. Cinemagic: King Kong (2005), June 29. Hollywood: Rear Window (1954), July 1-July 2. Aliens (1986), July 1-July 2. Super Fly (1972), July 3. TC 2000 (1993), July 3.

MOVIES

Improbable Cause

screener

Old-Growth Murder revisits an unsolved 1987 killing of a French bicyclist on the Oregon Coast.

BY WILLIAM SCHWARTZ

Alain Malessard was a cheerful young Frenchman who’d saved up for his dream to bicycle all over America. But after completing the Canadian half of his tour, he died shortly after entering the United States (during Thanksgiving weekend in 1987, at the Neskowin Creek Campground on the Northern Oregon Coast).

Filmmaker Tom Olsen Jr. first learned of Malessard’s death through a story in The Oregonian pleading for someone to investigate the murder. In his subsequent 10 years of research, Olsen didn’t find much in the way of useful DNA evidence, but he did direct Old-Growth Murder, a documentary about Malessard currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

At first glance, Malessard’s murder just seemed to be another story of indifferent police work. But Olsen’s investigation led him to a more complex narrative connected to Darelle “Dino” Butler, a Portland-born Native American activist who was acquitted after the 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota that left two FBI agents and another man dead.

Butler was also accused of murdering Donald Pier, a dealer of Native American artifacts and a rumored grave robber (in this case, Butler was again acquitted). Olsen says Butler’s story could have been a documentary in and of itself—except that the relevant law enforcement officials were even less cooperative than they were regarding Malessard.

With the murder of Malessard, police had yet another chance to tie Butler to a crime. The only problem was, Butler had no reason to kill Malessard. No one did. By all accounts, he was a friendly man, and the autopsy suggests he was taken by surprise with a blow to the

back of the head from a mysterious, as yet unidentified implement. In a typical true crime story, this is the part where someone discovers critical, previously unseen evidence, but Olsen’s attempts to verify existing evidence create more questions than answers. Yes, he learns that the crime scene was tampered with, but why? Police didn’t take timely photos of the crime scene; did they reorganize the campsite’s clutter? Or was it the culprit trying to cover their tracks?

Old-Growth Murder is firmly planted in history, but the story it tells of Oregon’s not too distant past raises uncomfortable questions about whether policing in this state, or anywhere, for that matter, has improved. After all, it’s troubling and unsurprising that the investigation focused on fern harvesters who happened to be nearby, and also happened to be predominantly Native American.

Ultimately, the film leaves viewers with the impression that murder is oftentimes just a cruel stroke of nonsense—especially when Malessard’s parents visit the land that killed their son, and Robert Thompson, the Oregon State Police investigator for Malessard’s case, explains the failures of the investigation (and wonders how modern technology might have affected the outcome).

A year after Old-Growth Murder’s premiere, there still haven’t been any new developments in the case. The film suggests that is unlikely to change. Today, all that is left of Malesaard are unanswered questions and a memorial at Neskowin Creek Campground.

SEE IT: Old-Growth Murder, not rated, streams on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ANCHOR PICTURES

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

NO HARD FEELINGS

The raunchy midbudget summer comedy is back and better than ever. The premise behind No Hard Feelings is as simple as it is morally ambiguous: Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence) is a lifelong resident of a vacation town in New York who’s struggling to pay the rising property taxes on the house her mom left her. While trolling Craigslist, she stumbles on an ad posted by parents of a 19-year-old boy who are looking for a young girl to “date” (emphasis on the quotation marks) their socially awkward offspring. If she can bring their son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), out of his shell before he heads to Princeton in the fall, Maddy gets a used Buick Regal. Lawrence stuns with her hilarity—between a full-frontal nude fight scene, using a stuffed lobster plush as a cum rag and squeezing in a Chinese-finger-trap-on-a-dick gag, her physical comedy skills are on par with predecessors like Steve Martin and Jim Carrey. Lawrence is perhaps one of the few bona fide female stars with the chops to usher in the renaissance of Superbad-style comedies, and Feldman offers a hilariously uncomfortable performance that pairs beautifully with hers. All in all, No Hard Feelings is the antithesis of family friendly, but perfectly treads the line between risqué and offensive. One minute you’re laughing to the point of tears, the next you’re asking yourself, “Am I a bad person?” R. ALEX BARR. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Vancouver Plaza.

PAST LIVES

As Nora (Greta Lee) is about to share a first kiss with her future husband, Arthur (John Magaro), she explains the Korean phrase in-yun—fate’s hand in human connection and reconnection. Intentionally or not, she’s referring just as much to Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), her best friend and crush from before she immigrated from Seoul to Canada. Ever since, Hae Sung has reappeared to Nora like a 12-year comet, and in director Celine Song’s Past Lives, Hae Sung visits Nora in present-day Brooklyn. Both unambiguous romance and genre experiment, Past Lives sustains itself on love’s textures and musings: endless gazes, mirrorlike skyscrapers, a twinkling synth score (by Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen) and a vibrant but melancholy obsession with New York City. Gorgeous 30-somethings who can’t keep guileless

vulnerability off their faces, these characters aren’t looking to blow up their lives for the sake of movie contrivances, but through every private conversation, they’re drawn to discussing the same narrative possibilities on the audience’s minds. Who is the right lover in a story sense? Even Arthur wonders. Are in-yun and Nora’s brief, almost multiversal encounters with Hae Sung potent enough to alter the years in between? And when she glimpses the past in his kind, mournful eyes, is she dreaming or seeing? PG-13. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Cinema 21, Hollywood.

EXTRACTION 2

Chris Hemsworth returns as black ops mercenary Tyler Rake in Extraction 2, a relentless action sequel that surpasses its predecessor. After Rake awakens in a hospital due to his injuries from the previous film, he sets out to rescue his exwife’s sister and her children from a prison in the country of Georgia. But things go sideways, and Rake and the group must outrun a baddie determined to avenge his murdered brother. Sam Hargrave returns to the director’s chair and ups his game in staging the action; the fight choreography, explosions and camerawork are the real stars of Extraction 2, though Hemsworth and the other cast members do what they can with their stock characters. Some of the scenes feel more like Call of Duty multi-

player matches than film set pieces, but for the most part, they remain exciting. An extended chase involving a train is especially impressive as Hargrave opts for long takes, with the camera moving in and out of the railcars. Extraction 2 doesn’t quite match the quality of the John Wick and The Raid franchises, but it does an admirable job of trying to emulate them. R. DANIEL RESTER. Netflix.

FALCON LAKE

No, of course 13-year-old Bastien (Joseph Engel) doesn’t want to watch anime with his kid brother all summer, he protests when chided by 16-year-old Chloé (Sara Montpetit), the family friend with whom he’s sharing a lakeside cabin in Quebec. Instead, they swim, try terrible wine, and question each other’s fears.

Falcon Lake observes Bastien and Chloé’s age difference carefully, exploring how one adolescent’s puppy love is another’s safety net—how the messiness of teenage sexuality, intimacy and friendship bunk together in a cramped bedroom and a sliver of time. Shot on 16 mm and directed by Charlotte Le Bon (an actor best known to Americans for The Walk and The Hundred-Foot Journey), Falcon Lake is summer-loving in the vein of Call Me By Your Name, both innocent and daringly amorous, as every Bastien and Chloé interaction—each bike ride, prank and outfit change—is charged, taken personally and riddled with perspective gaps. Strangely, though, hovering around this enthralling coming-of-age snapshot is an obsession with ghosts (allegedly in the lake and in characters’ imaginations) that never connects to Falcon Lake ’s best qualities. There’s an argument that departing childhood is a kind of death, but who needs the metaphor? The core of Falcon Lake is blistering, awakening life. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On demand.

MAGGIE MOORE(S)

A madcap murder plot with a deadpan attitude, Maggie Moore(s) assigns a widowed sheriff (Jon Hamm) to the case of two identically named women killed in the same New Mexico town. Maybe the first Maggie Moore’s demise was a mistake, the sheriff speculates, or the second is merely a distraction. Meanwhile, the audience knows the answer—a curious, confident story structure orchestrated by actor-turned-director John Slattery (Hamm’s Mad Men compatriot). At its best, Maggie Moore(s) draws on Fargo; at its most ridiculous, it’s more like I, Tonya, foregrounding desperate, mustachioed yokels who hire the wrong people for dirty jobs. While it would be easy for Hamm to sleepwalk through a strong-jawed cop part, the sheriff’s relationship with Rita (Tina Fey), the neighbor of one suspect, makes for affecting character scaffolding. Another pair of old TV colleagues (30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), Hamm and Fey complicate their chemistry by smartly employing their star qualities—her sharp self-deprecation, his proud staunchness—as wedges. There’s only one Fargo, but thanks to the actors, the desert edition isn’t half bad. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On demand.

ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED

Fans, tabloids and critics always had plenty to say about Rock Hudson: how dreamy, how marble-cut, how bankable, how tragic. But making more genuine, empathetic meaning from the ’50s matinee idol turned posthumous LGBTQ symbol is an elusive task for director Stephen Kijak’s HBO documentary. What little we know for certain is that Hudson possessed abiding self-belief—his beauty was his destiny—and slipped into a star-making Hollywood ma-

chine that polished and packaged him as a towering ladies’ man, best known for films like Giant and Pillow Talk. With little introspection from Hudson to go on, the film’s forte is the many frank interviews with Hudson’s totally over it former buddies and boyfriends. Many come to the mundane yet intriguing conclusion that before his zeitgeist-shifting battle with AIDS, Hudson appeared fairly comfortable in his double life—jet setting, pool partying, fooling around. Even so, there are brief characterizations of Hudson in the film’s title sequence that never reappear, as if irreconcilable within the complex narratives of his public versus private ambivalence and the ways he both spoke through and hid within his work. The movie industry clearly forced a mask on Hudson, but this documentary presents a man who committed to cipherhood too long ago to conceive of any other way. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Max.

ASTEROID CITY

1950s movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) are bonded because they’re both “catastrophically wounded people”; we know because Midge tells us so. Why so literal? Because they’re in a film directed by Wes Anderson, whose movies have grown so maniacally precise that they seem more suited to a museum than a multiplex. The Anderson who chronicled Schwartzman’s mad romantic pursuit of Olivia Williams in Rushmore has been replaced by an automatonlike auteur so fastidious that he frames Asteroid City as a film within a play within a television broadcast hosted by Bryan Cranston. There are flashes of fun in this nested narrative—including a bobble-eyed alien’s visit to the titular desert town—but only Anderson lovers with the constitution of devout Catholics will make it through without losing their faith (lines like “You see that wonderful crackly patch right out there, between the dead cactuses and the dried-up river bed?” are so Andersonian that they may as well be in Latin). Anderson has preached solely to his choir of fans before; his twee oceanic epic The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou was certainly not for normies. But that film let its emotions rough up its images, most memorably when a son was mortally wounded and his father remembered his first glimpse of him in a daggerlike burst of memory. Death haunts Asteroid City, but not enough to disturb its stoic actors, who all speak in the same mopey monotone as Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson’s best film) whether they’re talking about religion, science, politics or pancakes. Hence the unspoken but obvious motto of Asteroid City : for the fans, by the fans. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Vancouver Mall.

by Jack Kent

JONESIN’ BY MATT JONES

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Visionary author Peter McWilliams wrote, "One of the most enjoyable aspects of solitude is doing what you want when you want to do it, with the absolute freedom to change what you're doing at will. Solitude removes all the ‘negotiating’ we need to do when we're with others." I’ll add a caveat: Some of us have more to learn about enjoying solitude. We may experience it as a loss or deprivation. But here’s the good news, Aries: In the coming weeks, you will be extra inspired to cultivate the benefits that come from being alone.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The 18th-century French engineer Étienne Bottineau invented nauscopy, the art of detecting sailing ships at a great distance, well beyond the horizon. This was before the invention of radar. Bottineau said his skill was not rooted in sorcery or luck, but from his careful study of changes in the atmosphere, wind, and sea. Did you guess that Bottineau was a Taurus? Your tribe has a special capacity for arriving at seemingly magical understandings by harnessing your sensitivity to natural signals. Your intuition thrives as you closely observe the practical details of how the world works. This superpower will be at a peak in the coming weeks.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): According to a Welsh proverb, “Three fears weaken the heart: fear of the truth; fear of the devil; fear of poverty.” I suspect the first of those three is most likely to worm its way into your awareness during the coming weeks. So let’s see what we can do to diminish its power over you. Here’s one possibility: Believe me when I tell you that even if the truth’s arrival is initially disturbing or disruptive, it will ultimately be healing and liberating. It should be welcomed, not feared.

ACROSS

1. Haydn's nickname

5. The Big ___ ("Chantilly Lace" singer)

11. Drain of energy

14. River that passes by Essen, Germany

15. European country, to its residents

16. Boxing victory, for short

17. Nucleus locale

18. Aggressive handshaker's quality

20. Isle of ___ (Irish Sea land)

21. Nuts

22. 15-Across's capital, to us

23. Frankincense, e.g.

25. Amorphous (or creepy U.K. TV character Mr. ___... yeah, go look it up)

27. ___ Bell (Anne Bronte pseudonym)

28. Protagonist in "Racing Stripes," e.g.

31. Nondiscrimination hiring letters

32. Sudden good fortune, for example

35. Prefix with "allergenic"

36. A complete buzzkill

37. "Buyer beware" phrase

41. Shade enhanced by a diet of shrimp

44. Musical tool

47. "All good, thanks"

48. 1980s TV character

Brewster

49. Home of the world's tallest building for about six years

51. Like Rembrandt

52. "Alice's Restaurant"

singer Guthrie

53. Pop-up breakfast food?

56. Director Ang

58. Betty White's character on "The Golden Girls"

61. Indian restaurant basketful

62. "Another Green World" composer Brian

63. School poster paper

64. Celtic great Larry

65. Tax form ID

66. "Why am I included in this?"

67. A&E component DOWN

1. Baby buggy, to Brits

2. Absolute sovereignty

3. Espionage device, predigital era

4. Triceps spot

5. Yellowstone grazers

6. Palindromic name

7. Gearshift position

8. Bit of strategy

9. One at Oktoberfest

10. Dryer at a car wash, sometimes

11. Flash light?

12. "Kimberly ___" (2023

Best Musical Tony winner)

13. Olive's guy

19. Miracle-___ (plant food brand)

21. Charles, now

24. "___ Flubber" (movie sequel)

25. Carried along, colloquially

26. Fond du ___, Wisconsin

27. Koln complaint

©2023 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.

28. Goes fast

29. ___ Trinket (Elizabeth Banks, in "The Hunger Games")

30. Straightforward

33. As a friend, in Paris

34. Completely broken

38. Author Upton

39. German Y.A. fantasy series adapted into a 2008 movie

40. Blue, in jigsaw puzzles, often

42. Two Truths and a ___ (icebreaker game)

43. Orchestral work

44. Disconcerting looks

45. Producer Spelling and others

46. Subject of the article "How Tom Hanks Made Us Cry Over a Volleyball"

50. "The Raven" author

51. Ram maker

53. City northeast of Reno

54. Chutzpah

55. Eat away (at)

57. Remnants

59. On the double

60. "Boo-___!"

61. Hawks' and Bucks' org.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Hexes nullified! Jinxes abolished! Demons banished! Adversaries outwitted! Liabilities diminished! Bad habits replaced with good habits! These are some of the glorious developments possible for you in the coming months, Cancerian. Am I exaggerating? Maybe a little. But if so, not much. In my vision of your future, you will be the embodiment of a lucky charm and a repository of blessed mojo. You are embarking on a phase when it will make logical sense to be an optimist. Can you sweep all the dross and mess out of your sphere? No, but I bet you can do at least 80 percent.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In the book Curious Facts in the History of Insects, Frank Cowan tells a perhaps legendary story about how mayors were selected in the medieval Swedish town of Hurdenburg. The candidates would set their chins on a table with their long beards spread out in front of them. A louse, a tiny parasitic insect, would be put in the middle of the table. Whichever beard the creature crawled to and chose as its new landing spot would reveal the man who would become the town’s new leader. I beg you not to do anything like this, Leo. The decisions you and your allies make should be grounded in good evidence and sound reason, not blind chance. And please avoid parasitical influences completely.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): I rebel against the gurus and teachers who tell us our stories are delusional indulgences that interfere with our enlightenment. I reject their insistence that our personal tales are distractions from our spiritual work. Virgo author A. S. Byatt speaks for me: “Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.” I love and honor the stories of my own destiny, and I encourage you to love and honor yours. Having said that, I will let you know that now is an excellent time to jettison the stories that feel demoralizing and draining—even as you celebrate the stories that embody your genuine beauty. For extra credit: Tell the soulful stories of your life to anyone who is receptive.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In the Mayan calendar, each of the 20 day names is associated with a natural phenomenon. The day called Kawak is paired with rainstorms. Ik’ is connected with wind and breath. Kab’an is earth, Manik’ is deer, and Chikchan is the snake. Now would be a great

time for you to engage in an imaginative exercise inspired by the Mayans. Why? Because this is an ideal phase of your cycle to break up your routine, to reinvent the regular rhythm, to introduce innovations in how you experience the flow of the time. Just for fun, why not give each of the next 14 days a playful nickname or descriptor? This Friday could be Crescent Moon, for example. Saturday might be Wonderment, Sunday can be Dazzle Sweet, and Monday Good Darkness.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): From 998 till 1030, Scorpio-born leader Mahmud Ghaznavi ruled the vast Ghaznavid empire, which stretched from current-day Iran to central Asia and northwestern India. Like so many of history’s strong men, he was obsessed with military conquest. Unlike many others, though, he treasured culture and learning. You’ve heard of poet laureates? He had 400 of them. According to some tales, he rewarded one wordsmith with a mouthful of pearls. In accordance with astrological omens, I encourage you to be more like the Mahmud who loved beauty and art and less like the Mahmud who enjoyed fighting. The coming weeks will be a favorable time to fill your world with grace and elegance and magnificence.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): About 1,740 years ago, before she became a Catholic saint, Margaret of Antioch got swallowed whole by Satan, who was disguised as a dragon. Or so the old story goes. But Margaret was undaunted. There in the beast’s innards, Margaret calmly made the sign of the cross over and over with her right hand. Meanwhile, the wooden cross in her left hand magically swelled to an enormous size that ruptured the beast, enabling her to escape. After that, because of her triumph, expectant mothers and women in labor regarded Margaret as their patron saint. Your upcoming test won’t be anywhere near as demanding as hers, Sagittarius, but I bet you will ace it—and ultimately garner sweet rewards.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn-born Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was an astronomer and mathematician who was an instrumental innovator in the Scientific Revolution. Among his many breakthrough accomplishments were his insights about the laws of planetary motion. Books he wrote were crucial forerunners of Isaac Newton's theories about gravitation. But here’s an unexpected twist: Kepler was also a practicing astrologer who interpreted the charts of many people, including three emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. In the spirit of Kepler's ability to bridge seemingly opposing perspectives, Capricorn, I invite you to be a paragon of mediation and conciliation in the coming weeks. Always be looking for ways to heal splits and forge connections. Assume you have an extraordinary power to blend elements that no one can else can.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Dear Restless Runaway: During the next 10 months, life will offer you these invitations: 1. Identify the land that excites you and stabilizes you. 2. Spend lots of relaxing time on that land. 3. Define the exact nature of the niche or situation where your talents and desires will be most gracefully expressed.

4. Take steps to create or gather the family you want. 5. Take steps to create or gather the community you want.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): I’d love you to be a deep-feeling, free-thinker in the coming weeks. I will cheer you on if you nurture your emotional intelligence as you liberate yourself from outmoded beliefs and opinions. Celebrate your precious sensitivity, dear Pisces, even as you use your fine mind to reevaluate your vision of what the future holds. It’s a perfect time to glory in rich sentiments and exult in creative ideas.

Homework: Find a way to sing as loudly and passionately as possible sometime soon. Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com

"Another Steak Out"--they all make the cut.