Willamette Week, July 19, 2023 - Volume 49, Issue 36 - "Best of Portland 2023"

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WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 49, ISSUE 36

Jesse Lee Calhoun tried to evade arrest by jumping into the Willamette River 6

Portland defeated the vampire squid 7

Gov. Tina Kotek gave Portland two months to aid chronic drug abusers. 8

David Beer is Oregon’s only Squeezebox Surgeon 15

Dancers at Magic Tavern covered their breasts in Bitter Yuck and deodorant as a precaution against sleazy customers. 17

Cascadia 9.0 is a video game that prepares players for the Big One. 19

A Kickstarter campaign raised more than $33,000 to fund bunny credenzas 20

Jeppson’s Malört has a Portland fan club. 25

Cramoisi Vineyard’s compost pile can grow as large as an RV. 25

The founder of classical music bar MendelssohnsPDX is a direct descendent of its titular composer. 33

AI suggests mythological forest beasts are living near the North Fork Nehalem River. 33

The founder of Portland’s 21ten Theatre company has played Abe Lincoln talking to a beaver. 36

Before becoming Oregon’s first Beat Poet Laureate, Mimi German was best known locally for sharing her poetry during City Council meetings. 40

Portland composer Saloli’s new album chronicles a day in the life of a bear in the Great Smoky Mountains 55

A Barbie Rave is coming to the Crystal Ballroom. 55

Makeup by @eunbicreates

ALBERTA ROSE THEATRE

The old theater axiom reminds us never to read the reviews. WW ignored that wisdom last week and examined 10 stories by national media outlets, which have assayed the struggles of Portland as cautionary tales for the good people of Dubuque. You’re welcome, Dubuque. Anyway, we found that the reporters escorted to Portland’s downtown fentanyl bazaar had some incisive observations (“Greetings From Portland,” July 12). Here’s what our readers had to say:

TIM DUY, VIA TWITTER: “Live by your press, die by your press.”

RIPPERDUCK, VIA WWEEK.

COM: “Big cities are becoming obsolete, in large measure because people who do the work to build and maintain the place can’t live where they work. That happened in San Francisco, New York and, to a growing extent, Portland. In the case of San Francisco and NYC, they were blue-collar, working-class towns that became gentrified and forced people that do actual productive labor out the door. One example was San Francisco’s Levi Strauss, which manufactured clothing in The City. The jobs paid well enough for workers to live where they worked. Now, all of LS manufacturing is done overseas, and the only LS workers living in S.F. are upper managers who make a lava flow of money compared to the people toiling in sweat shops producing the actual product. We don’t realize that long work commutes are a byproduct of failed cities…”

JIM LONGMIRE, VIA WWEEK. COM: “So I admit I didn’t spend much time reading this meta-opinion piece and haven’t really any complaints or criticism, but maybe a request: How about a meta-analysis of how stories told by the WW about Portland from 2005 to the present contributed to the town’s sad acceptance of its present state.”

NANCY ROMMELMANN, VIA TWITTER: “Fair piece. If you’re interested, I have 60 others.”

CORABORIALIS, VIA REDDIT: “Not one of these stories covered that our own cops are holding us hostage? By not showing up, by not doing their jobs, by not answering the phones, by not hiring, by not living here? The list goes on. But they will happily take news reporters to drug dens for videos. FFS, people—the police unions are literally killing us.”

CORRAN22, VIA REDDIT: “I read this story yesterday, and remain seriously pissed off about it (even with a 24-hour cool-off!). Those first three paragraphs make me livid—our police are understaffed, can’t respond at all to many crimes, yet they have the time to take out-of-state reporters on a tour of our most dystopian street corners and crime scenes? I really can’t even express how upsetting it is to read this. What the hell?

“I just want to add—despite my anger over the content of this story, I think Willamette Week is seriously awesome for writing it!”

BRUNO PARKS, VIA WWEEK.

COM: “What went wrong that allowed an open-air drug market to flourish in the heart of downtown?

“I can tell you. Measure 110 +

Dr. Know

BY MARTY SMITH @martysmithxxx

I’ve seen plenty of airliners flying overhead this past week, but not a single contrail. Did the government mind control program conclude successfully? Or has the singularity already occurred and the master AIs forgot to draw contrails?

—Bunker Man

When you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the willful ignorance and stupidity in today’s world, sometimes it helps to stop and appreciate all the stupidity from yesterday’s world that’s not around anymore. Think about it: When was the last time you ate a Tide Pod? Seen any good planking videos lately? Ever wonder what Justin Bieber’s up to these days?

I say this, Bunker, because your letter— touching as it does on one of the bigger conspiracy theories of the 2010s—has reminded me that, as shitty as it is that at this very moment there are actual adults who think Bill Gates invented COVID (though I can see how people might decide that the guy who brought Clippy into the world could be capable of anything), at least we haven’t heard much about chemtrails for a while.

harm reduction + new meth + fentanyl + soft-on-crime prosecutor + disempowered police + spectacular failure of elected leadership + weak local media + failure of business leaders to pressure local government + Mexican cartels + move away from detox/rehab/sobriety as public policy + reliance on the unscientific 12-step religious discipline as principal form of treatment + lack of rehab facilities.

“Did I miss anything?”

ANTELOPE ANTELOPE, VIA WWEEK.COM: “As someone who out of exhaustion and despair semi-abandoned Portland to live on the coast, I can say that when I do come back (every month or so), it really is looking better and better. Certainly much improved from its nadir of a year ago.

“It may not be apparent to those of you who live there every day. I walked downtown a couple times in the last month (weekend eve and daytime weekday), and it was really quite lovely. Lots of pedestrians and lots of tourists obviously enjoying this still very cozy and walkable downtown. Still the homeless and insane and addicts but fewer, and it seems that they have a sense they need to contain their mayhem.

“The city has a long way to go. [Rene] Gonzalez is a step in the right direction. May Portland continue to move from anarchic nihilism towards a sane middle ground.”

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: P.O. Box 10770, Portland, OR 97296

Email: mzusman@wweek.com

Ironically, it’s precisely the phenomenon you describe—sometimes planes leave contrails in their wake, sometimes they don’t—that inspired the whole theory that [choose your favorite nefarious entity] was using commercial jets to secretly spray Americans with [insert dangerous chemical here] in order to further the goal of [vague but unspeakably evil plan].

What gets me about this theory is that it assumes the perpetrators are smart enough to mastermind a conspiracy requiring hundreds of thousands of participants (and keep it a secret!), but not smart enough to just spray plain water from any non-poison-packing flights so the rubes won’t notice the inconsistency.

In real life, they’re spraying plain water every time. Jet exhaust—like a car’s tailpipe emissions, or your breath—contains water vapor. Sometimes, depending on ambient temperature and humidity, water vapor may condense into tiny droplets and make a visible cloud. Other times it may not. Apparently, atmospheric conditions in your neck of the woods last week favored “not.”

This, in a nutshell, is the reason that contrails are fickle. It’s the same reason that you can see people’s exhaled clouds of breath outside in winter but not in summer, and most people seem capable of accepting that at face value. (Though if you insist on blaming a secret, seasonal, outdoor-only fentanyl-smoking conspiracy, I suppose I can’t stop you.)

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

ON PROTECTIVE

COURT ERRED

ORDER STANDARD: The Oregon Court of Appeals on July 12 took the unusual step of admitting it had erred. At issue was an appeal by plaintiff Kim Bradley to overturn a 2022 Multnomah County Circuit Court’s rejection of her application to renew a Family Abuse Protection Act order against her ex-husband, John Bradley (“For More Than 30 Years, Kim Bradley Hid From Her Husband,” WW, Nov. 15, 2017). In its ruling in Kim Bradley’s favor, the Court of Appeals determined it had previously used an outdated standard to judge FAPA renewal applications. That standard required plaintiffs to prove “imminent danger,” which lawmakers in 2019 decided was unreasonable. “We agree that we misstated the renewal standard,” the court wrote. “We failed to take into account a recent legislative amendment to FAPA that indirectly affected that standard.” John Bradley’s attorney was unavailable for comment. He has a month to appeal the ruling. Kim Bradley hopes the ruling stands. “I’m pleased,” she says, “and especially pleased it’s going to help so many other people.”

PORTLAND CONSIDERS RESUMING

ENFORCEMENT OF NUISANCE CODE

AT DOWNTOWN CLUBS: Following community requests and discussions with bar and club owners in May, city officials are contemplating ways to begin enforcing a long-unused city statute designed to address nuisance complaints downtown, the Portland Police Bureau tells WW. The regulation, known as a “time, place and manner” ordinance, empowers a city liquor license team to review complaints and potentially restrict the hours that bars and nightclubs can operate—or require other interventions, like hiring security or installing additional noise insulation. But there’s a catch. “The process to restart doing them is in the works,” Police Bureau spokesman Kevin Allen told WW on June 24. “However, I have no timeline for when we might have the resources to start them back up.” The last recorded meeting of Portland’s liquor license team was in 2019. In 2020, officials within the city’s liquor licensing program noted recent changes, including “no police reports [and] no capacity on staff to focus on enforcement or to take on more administrative work,” according to a meeting agenda obtained by WW. So far, the mere threat of

MUSIC

PERFORMANCE & SIGNING

SATURDAY JULY 22ND AT 6PM

“White’s music is natural to the bone. She sings as easy as breathing and that’s a breath of fresh air indeed in bluegrass.”

— Folk Alley

PERFORMANCE & SIGNING

WEDNESDAY JULY 26TH AT 6PM

additional enforcement appears to be making a difference. “Within two weeks of the bar summit, a large bar brawl happened at a club,” Allen says. “The owners shut the club down for a week to reset their practices, and they haven’t had any serious issues since.”

ETHICS COMMISSION LAUNCHES

FAGAN PROBE: The Oregon Government Ethics Commission voted unanimously July 14 to pursue a full investigation into former Secretary of State Shemia Fagan’s contract with embattled cannabis duo Rosa Cazares and Aaron Mitchell. Among its findings, commission staff concluded there was reason to believe Fagan may have used her elected position for personal financial gain and that the $10,000-a-month consulting work would not have been made available to her had she not been in her elected position. Fagan resigned May 2, less than a week after WW reported on the contract. Fagan’s attorney, David Elkanich, denied in a letter submitted to the commission in June that his client had acted improperly or unethically. “If suspicion and innuendo are enough to find that Ms. Fagan violated ethics rules,” Elkanich wrote, “then OGEC would allow innuendo and optics alone to render suspect the private employment of hundreds of public officials across Oregon.”

FEDS SAY PAMPLIN BERRY FARM

STIFFED WORKERS: After an investigation into allegations of unpaid overtime, the U.S. Department of Labor found May 17 that a berry grower and processor owned by R.B. Pamplin Corp. had failed to properly compensate 43 workers, including some who worked up to 75 hours a week. The federal Labor Department ordered Columbia Empire Farms to pay workers $167,000 that they should have been paid earlier, as first reported by the Salem Statesman Journal. R.B. Pamplin Corp., the family-owned company of Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr., owns 24 Oregon newspapers, including the Portland Tribune

“The U.S. Department of Labor will protect the rights of vulnerable workers and hold employers accountable when they fail to pay them all their hard-earned wages, including overtime,” said the department’s Portland-based wage and hour director, Carrie Aguilar. Pamplin officials did not respond to a request for comment.

“Les Ailes is a force to be recokoned with. A cool, chilled and thoroughly dreamy listen.”

-- Folk Radio, UK

PARTYING AT AN OLD TOWN NIGHTCLUB

JESSE LEE CALHOUN

BY NIGEL JAQUISS and LUCAS MANFIELD 503-243-2122

Online sleuths have speculated for months that the deaths of six young women in the Portland metro area were connected. Over the weekend, WW learned that law enforcement officials indeed suspect a single man in four of those killings.

On July 17, WW revealed that Jesse Lee Calhoun, 38, is suspected by law enforcement of being Oregon’s first serial killer in more than a decade. That alone would be unusual, but WW also learned that Calhoun had been released from prison 11 months early, thanks to a 2021 conditional commutation of his sentence by Gov. Kate Brown.

Much remains unclear, including whether the time shaved off Calhoun’s sentence factored into the killings. Bodies of young women were discovered in the metro area beginning 19 months after Calhoun left state prison. Here is what we know of his history, and how it overlaps with the four women’s deaths:

JUNE 2004: Calhoun is first convicted of a felony, an assault in Baker County.

LATE 2018: Law enforcement in east Multnomah County begins to suspect Calhoun’s involvement in a series of car prowls and other property crimes. In a traffic stop, cops find him with meth, several guns, and more than 500 rounds of ammunition.

FEB. 13, 2019: A SWAT team executes a search warrant at Calhoun’s residence in Troutdale. During the search, Calhoun attacks and injures an officer and a police dog named Basco. He’s eventually subdued.

NOV. 18, 2019: Calhoun pleads guilty in four cases to burglary and car theft and is sentenced to 50 months in prison. (He had already served nine of those months in jail, and an additional 10 months were eventually knocked off his sentence due to good behavior.) The Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office calls Calhoun a “prolific thief and career criminal.”

JUNE 23, 2021: Gov. Brown issues a “conditional commutation” for 41 inmates that helped fight the 2020 Labor Day megafires, including Calhoun. During the pandemic, Brown began a process of granting mass commutations—early release to prisoners who were well behaved, nearing the end of their sentences, and particularly vulnerable to COVID-19.

In Oregon, the governor has broad latitude to either release prisoners early—that’s called conditional commutation—or pardon them outright, which entails both releasing them and scrubbing their criminal records. Brown made wide use of the governor’s clemency powers— far more so than her predecessors.

This commutation knocks the last 11 months off Calhoun’s sentence.

JULY 22, 2021: Calhoun is released from custody. He returns to Multnomah County. His last address is listed as Portland in a traffic ticket.

JUNE 30, 2022: Calhoun would have been released on this date had the governor not commuted his sentence, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections.

FEB. 19, 2023: The body of Kristin Smith is discovered in Southeast Portland. In the next three months, five more bodies of young women are discovered in the greater Portland metro

area. They include Charity Perry, found April 24 at Ainsworth State Park in east Multnomah County; Bridget Webster, found April 30 in Polk County; and Ashley Real, found May 7 in Clackamas County.

JUNE 1, 2023: The Oregonian reports the discovery of the bodies of six young women.

JUNE 4: The Portland Police Bureau issues a statement in response to widespread speculation, saying, “PPB has no reason to believe these 6 cases are connected.” (It is unclear whether the Police Bureau was deliberately withholding information or new information has emerged since then.)

JUNE 6: Law enforcement arrests Calhoun after he tries to escape by plunging into the Willamette River at a park in Milwaukie. Officers subdue him and initially book him into jail in Clackamas County (where one of the six women’s bodies was found) on a parole violation. They transfer him shortly thereafter to Multnomah County.

That same day, The Oregonian reports that three of the victims “shared similar circumstances and had frequented the same places in the months before their deaths, according to a source close to the investigations.” The story does not say whether law enforcement has identified a suspect.

JULY 3: The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office requests that Gov. Tina Kotek

revoke Calhoun’s commutation. She does.

JULY 6: Calhoun is transferred to Snake River Correctional Institution. (The lawyer who most recently represented Calhoun says he no longer does. It is unclear whether Calhoun now has an attorney.)

JULY 17, 9 AM: Gov. Kotek and the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office decline WW’s request for comment on Calhoun’s ties to multiple killings, citing the ongoing investigations.

JULY 17, 9:52 AM: The DA’s office issues a press release saying a “person of interest” has been linked to the deaths of four women, although the “cause and manner of death in each case remains undetermined by the Oregon State Medical Examiner.” The statement says the linked cases are the deaths of Kristin Smith, Charity Perry, Bridget Webster, and Ashley Real.

JULY 17, 10:07 AM: WW first identifies Calhoun as the suspected serial killer in a story published online.

Brown, who left office in January, reacts strongly to news of Calhoun’s arrest. “I’m absolutely horrified for the victims, their families, and all those who have experienced this loss,” she says in a statement to WW

Lee Vankipuram contributed reporting to this story.

GONE: The body of Charity Perry was discovered in the Columbia River Gorge on April 24.

MULTNOMAH COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE

JESSE LEE CALHOUN

Here’s a timeline for the man suspected in four deaths of young women around Portland.

KRISTIN SMITH CHARITY PERRY BRIDGET WEBSTER

PORTLAND VS. THE VAMPIRE SQUID

Goldman Sachs is great at making money. Stumptown stumped them.

ADDRESS: 2035 NW Front Ave.

YEAR BUILT: 2018

SQUARE FOOTAGE: 290,000

MARKET VALUE: $62.7 million

OWNERS: Goldman Sachs, Lincoln Property Co.

HOW LONG IT’S BEEN

EMPTY: It’s not, but the owners defaulted on the loan.

WHY THEY DEFAULTED: No one wants office space in Portland.

You remember Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank that former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi dubbed a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Well, Goldman jammed its blood funnel into Portland and came up dry.

The New York firm recently defaulted on a loan that it and a partner firm took in 2019 to buy Field Office, a hipster-magnet office complex on Northwest Front Avenue in the shadow of the Fremont Bridge. Instead of foreclosing, the lender is trying to sell the $73.8 million loan, almost certainly at a discount, to the highest bidder, according to a flyer for the sale obtained by WW

Real estate services firm CBRE Group is handling the sale.

“CBRE’s National Loan & Portfolio Sale Advisors have been retained as the exclusive advisor for the sale of a $73.8 million nonperforming senior loan secured by a Class ‘A,’ recently constructed office campus in Portland, Oregon,” the flyer says. “The lender is in the process of finalizing a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure with the borrower, affording investors the potential for an expedited path to title.”

A person familiar with the loan confirmed that the property in question is Field Office. An executive at Lincoln Properties declined to comment on the sale, as did a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs. An executive at CBRE didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

Bids for the loan are due Aug.

15, the flyer says.

The big winner in the Field Office debacle is a local developer named Tom Cody, founder of a firm called Project^. He built Field House in 2018. It cost him $108.4 million, and it was a bit of a gamble. For financing, he had to go all the way to Little Rock, Ark., where Bank of the Ozarks, a scrappy, aggressive lender, is based.

But Cody and his team g ot Field Office off the ground. Its two six-story towers rose, angular and blue, from old industrial land. One of them wrapped around the existing Dockside Saloon—preserving a bit of history and pancakes for the stevedores. It had all the eco things, including electric scooter charging stations and parking for 200 bicycles. The U.S. Green Building Council gave it a platinum rating.

Leasing was “somewhat slow,” according to the Portland Business Journal . Nonetheless, a buyer came knocking. It was a joint venture between Goldman and Lincoln Property Co., a Dallas-based real estate firm. They offered $118 million for Field Office, and Cody took it in April 2019, nine months before the U.S. recorded its first case of COVID-19.

It may have been the luckiest sale in the history of Portland real estate. By April 2020, most U.S. office workers were Zooming in from home, leaving their cubicles empty. A hybrid home-office model has persisted since then, slashing demand for office space. (Cody didn’t return a telephone call or email message seeking comment.)

Goldman and Lincoln stuck it out for a while, distributing brochures for Field Office touting its “striking and innovative” design, “iconic architecture” and views of the Cascades. But, in the end, the vampire squid gave up.

ANTHONY EFFINGER.

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.

MONEY PIT: Field Office’s owners defaulted on their loan.

Surprise Intervention

Kotek and Blumenauer tell local officials: Fix rampant drug use on Portland streets now.

BY NIGEL JAQUISS njaquiss@wweek.com

Gov. Tina Kotek and U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) are exasperated with the scale of untreated substance abuse on the streets of Portland, where both began their political careers.

A May letter newly obtained by WW expresses a rare level of frustration, as two of the state’s top elected officials exhorted Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler to do more to fix what they called a “crisis.”

After a meeting of about 40 political, health care and public safety officials that Blumenauer convened in late May, the governor and the congressman told Vega Pederson and Wheeler they wanted “a change in strategy.”

“ We urge that this response include designating one individual to lead the response to the addiction crisis across your respective enterprises,” they wrote, adding, “We do not have the luxury to have competing, duplicative, or uncoordinated efforts.”

And they set a deadline for progress: 60 days after naming a drug czar.

At the center of Kotek and Blumenauer’s ire is the rampant drug use on Portland streets, exacerbated by a sluggish, uncoordinated attempt to revive a sobering and detox center, missing from Portland since the end of 2019.

On June 5, Vega Pederson and Wheeler pointed fingers back at Salem and Washington, D.C. “We can attest to the rampant fentanyl and polysubstance drug use and overdoses that have decimated parts of our community over the past two years,” they wrote. “However, the cascade of problems we face emanate from decades of state and federal inaction and neglect.”

The local officials’ letter, which comes on the heels of both the county and city approv-

ing record budgets, cried poverty: “No single jurisdiction (including both City of Portland and Multnomah County) is adequately funded or staffed to address the rapidly evolving challenges we face.”

And it pushed Kotek and Blumenauer to “identify state funding to launch the first phase of implementation of the Behavioral Health Emergency Coordination Network.”

Politicians traffic in acronyms, but the request for funding for BHECN—think of it as a sobering and detox center for people too drunk or addled by narcotics to function—lays bare a growing tension among top officials and explains why first responders, emergency rooms, and the public are overwhelmed by chronic substance abusers.

Back in the 1990s, when methamphetamine was made in bathtubs and nobody in Oregon had heard of fentanyl, a Central Eastside “sobering center” where people could sleep off booze or narcotics served as many as 20,000 people a year, according to a consultant’s report.

First responders and the CHIERS wagon—a van that did nothing except pick up heavily intoxicated Portlanders—dropped them off at 444 NE Couch St.

For the past three and a half years, however—even as Oregon’s substance use disorder rates stayed among the nation’s highest—the sobering center served the same number: just about none.

That’s because, in the greatest explosion of drug overdoses in Oregon history, the city and the county have not figured out how to replace the sobering facility, which closed in early 2020.

Jason Renaud of the Mental Health Association of Portland says that’s a disgrace. “There’s a desperate need,” Renaud says, “and a total lack of urgency—if the will was there, we could open one in six weeks.”

stepped up,” he says, “but we have a problem with too many cooks in the kitchen.”

Again, BHECN is a case in point. The nonprofit Central City Concern operated the old sobering center under contract with the Portland Police Bureau. So Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office took the first crack at replacing it, first hiring a consultant to study the need. That led to a request for proposals last October to operate a new 50-bed sobering and detox center that would serve about 10,000 people a year.

No organization responded. So the county took over, hiring a consultant of its own.

A June Zoom call with interested parties left many participants scratching their heads because instead of sketching a vision that could, for instance, combine plentiful local funding with cheap office space, the county’s consultant described a seven-year procurement process. Blumenauer, among others, was hoping for something more concrete and urgent. “Excuse me, seven years?” he said. “What about now?”

Vega Pederson says critics misunderstand the county’s vision: It wants to procure services lasting for seven years, not take seven years to get services in place.

“Plans, funding and capital projects will happen much quicker than that,” she says. “The decision to stand up a seven-year procurement rather than a more standard five-year procurement will extend the eligibility of the partners who are identified and it will diminish the red tape of procurement.”

Although Vega Pederson has acknowledged her frustration with the Joint Office of Homeless Services’ dramatic underspending of Metro supportive housing services dollars ($43 million through the first three quarters of last year), she says using one-time money to launch BHECN isn’t a solution.

“ Voters didn’t pass the SHS measure to backfill state and federal responsibilities,” she says. “Voters expect those funds to pay for homeless services, and they expect other partners to do their part so we can collectively expand every part of the system.”

Indeed, she would prefer Blumenauer and Kotek to focus on bringing more resources to the county rather than telling her and Wheeler how to do their jobs.

“I was taken aback,” Vega Pederson says of the May letter. “Asking for a drug czar was jarring, especially because the mayor and I agree our governments work well together on that issue.” (Wheeler’s spokesman, Cody Bowman, says the mayor’s reaction to the letter was similar. Bowman adds the city is contributing $1.9 million in ongoing funding to the BHECN and Wheeler’s office co-chairs its executive committee.)

The frustration comes at a time when the Joint Office of Homeless Services budget for 2024 is $279 million—not counting $50.3 million in unanticipated receipts that the regional government Metro will soon pass along—and the city has untapped Medicaid funding available to help pay for Portland Street Response to address mental health crises.

Blumenauer says he left the May meeting about Portland’s streets with a clear understanding. “The consensus of all these experts we brought together is that money is not the problem,” he says. “The question is how we mobilize and utilize the resources we’ve got.”

For now, people who might otherwise go to a sobering and detox center crowd into hospital emergency rooms or stay on the streets. (About 22,000 people a year visit local hospital ERs for substance use disorders.)

A small ray of hope: With funding from CareOregon, the state’s largest Medicaid provider, and some city and county money, Providence Health and Legacy’s Unity Center are opening nine and eight sobering beds, respectively. But most observers see that as a stop-gap measure.

Blumenauer says he cannot recall another time in his 50 years in elected office when public funding has been so plentiful.

“The voters and the Legislature have really

But even at county headquarters, the push for urgency is growing. “When I talk to first responders, they say there’s nowhere to take people in crisis,” says the county’s newest commissioner, Julia Brim-Edwards. “Everything is taking such a long time, and there’s no plan.”

Vega Pederson promises she will change that and points to her newly passed budget, which includes a big boost in behavioral health spending and $2 million for BHECN, which she pledges will take a big step forward in September, when respondents have told the county which services they can provide.

“One of my top priorities when I took office in January was addressing the shortage of sobering services, as well as all other elements of our behavioral health system,” she says. “There are a lot of people willing to point fingers, but I am committed to getting things back on track.”

HAPPY NO MORE: U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer wants an urgent, coordinated response.

BLAKE BENARD

“Money is not the problem.”

—Earl Blumenauer

Back to the Future

A proposal to alter Portland’s charter reforms looks headed for a familiar ending.

BY SOPHIE PEEL speel@wweek.com

Portland voters sent two contradictory messages with their ballots last November.

They elected a City Council as centrist as any in recent memory. They also resoundingly approved a ballot measure intended to usher in the most progressive and diverse council possible come 2025.

The result: A majority of the city commissioners currently occupying council chambers are political opponents of the future council that voters have decreed will replace them in two years.

Now, two current council members—Rene Gonzalez and Dan Ryan—have proposed three significant changes to charter reforms approved in 2022. But, already hamstrung by a rocky rollout and one commissioner softening his stance toward the whole idea, the attempt to tweak charter reform looks less like trying to build a time machine and more like a bad sequel to a fight Portland voters already settled last year.

On Tuesday, the City Council discussed the three changes in an hourslong public work session. The conversation among commissioners, select testifiers and city staff was spirited and sometimes testy. Little was resolved.

But drafts of the three measure referrals, already written by the City Attorney’s Office, have been submitted for review by the City Council next Wednesday. Any that garner at least three votes will appear on the November ballot.

We tried to answer a few questions about how we got here and what happens next.

HOW WE GOT HERE

For more than a year, beginning in 2021, a group of Portland volunteers put together a ballot measure that would radically reshape how the city functions come 2025.

They settled on dramatic reforms: city bureaus run by a professional administrator, four geographic voting districts represented by three city councilors each elected by ranked-choice voting, and a mayor who would oversee the city administrator but have no vote on the council nor any veto powers.

Because a supermajority of the volunteer Charter Commission approved the measure, it flew directly to the November 2022 ballot with no City Council input.

It was not until the volunteer group had formed its plan that the City Council at the time—the same as now, save for Rene Gonzalez—took issue with it. Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who had formed a political action committee expressly to fight the charter reform measure, pledged to present an alternative plan. It went nowhere.

Before long, it was too late. Fifty-eight percent of voters approved the measure in November. And there was little public talk from city leaders about the transition to the new form of government—until earlier this month.

WHAT GONZALEZ AND RYAN PROPOSE

Last week, Gonzalez and Ryan decided to bring three proposals to their colleagues that would alter charter reform if referred to the November 2023 ballot and approved by voters. Behind the scenes, they drafted three changes: adopt a different form

of ranked-choice voting; shrink the size of the new City Council from 12 to eight members, electing them in alternating election cycles so the two positions in each district wouldn’t appear on the ballot at the same time; and give the future mayor veto powers.

Its rollout was rockier than either commissioner had hoped. The Oregonian first reported the proposed changes before Ryan and Gonzalez had shared drafts with their council colleagues, causing frustration at City Hall.

Since then, Commissioner Ryan has backed away from two of the three proposals, now saying he only has a “clear opinion” on the mayoral veto.

Still, Ryan defended the proposals in an interview with WW Among his top concerns, he cited the rising cost estimates of the government transition, including a likely renovation of City Hall, proposed $142,000 annual salaries for each of the 12 city councilors, and a spike in the budget for the city’s Small-Donor Elections program.

“ We have really high priorities for our city right now, and I don’t look at any of the budget as a drop of money,” Ryan tells WW regarding the city councilors’ increased salaries.

Commissioners’ offices have not received firm cost estimates for remodeling City Hall from the architecture firm hired to work up designs, and the city’s charter transition team, in conjunction with the City Budget Office, maintains that cost estimates of the transition haven’t risen, despite what Gonzalez and Ryan say. (The remodel of City Hall, says Office of Management and Finance spokeswoman Christine Llobregat, will happen regardless of whether there are 12 city councilors or only eight. An update cost estimate for the project is expected later this month.)

Gonzalez says the lack of numbers is galling. “It’s particularly frustrating because they won’t give us an estimate,” he says of the City Hall renovation that’s expected to take years. “Here we are in July, and we still don’t have that number. All that’s been made clear to us is that it’s going to be significant, and none of it was included in the original estimates given to voters.”

Critics of the 2022 charter reform measure called it an unprecedented government structure that was cobbled together from various other cities with no assurance the combination would work. But the same might be true of the alternative presented last week. Asked how his proposal would be any more predictable

than the one Portlanders passed last November, Ryan bristled at the question: “That’s not my point.”

Gonzalez listed a number of concerns with the current charter reform plan: rising costs, not enough qualified candidates to run for the 12 City Council seats, and the fact that incumbents will be hard to kick out because ranked-choice voting means they need only 25% of the vote to get elected.

“I’m uncertain as to what precise authority the City Council had to intervene with the Charter Commission once it was underway. But to the extent there were mistakes, the original appointment of a lot of advocates came back to bite that council,” Gonzalez says. “It feels like this is now or forever holding your peace.”

Critics say Gonzalez and Ryan are simply trying to keep the City Council more conservative by scaling back the overhaul. “It absolutely is a change that fundamentally shifts the reasons that people supported this measure around increasing representation,” says Jenny Lee, executive director of the Coalition of Communities of Color, which backed the 2022 charter reform measure.

Gonzalez says the council is plenty diverse, and questions why the volunteer reformers made diversity their top priority. “We have incredible representation of diversity under existing voting systems,” he says. “I’m not sure we should be designing a system with solely that in mind.”

WHY IT’S ALREADY A POLITICAL MESS

Commissioner Gonzalez has a number of hurdles to jump.

First, he must get at least three votes on the City Council to send his proposals to the November ballot. It’s not clear whether he has even Ryan’s support at this point. (And after Tuesday’s work session, Gonzalez may be less adamant himself.) Mayor Ted Wheeler appeared skeptical on Tuesday; Commissioner Carmen Rubio says she’s open to the mayoral veto but has concerns about the rest. Commissioner Mapps, who announced just two weeks ago that he will run for mayor in 2024, says he’s consulting the City Attorney’s Office to determine whether even casting a vote on Gonzalez’s changes might present a conflict of interest as a mayoral candidate.

If the proposed changes make it past a council vote, what they face on the other side could be even more formidable: a well-moneyed coalition of local and national progressive groups that bankrolled the “yes” campaign for the original charter reform measure.

“ We’re taking the effort very seriously,” the Coalition of Communities of Color’s Lee says. “We have a really robust campaign in terms of the number of endorsers as well as our fundraising. We are ready to pivot into whatever needs to be done.”

“What deserves some tweaking?

What really doesn’t make sense?”

It’s also unclear what group, if any, would run a campaign for the changes if they were placed on the ballot. The Portland Metro Chamber, formerly the Portland Business Alliance, which opposed the 2022 measure, declined to comment.

If the City Council approves any or all of the proposals, they would land on the November 2023 ballot in a special election. It’s hard to say who would vote on them. Turnout for special elections hovers around 25% to 30%, compared with general election turnout that’s closer to 75%.

Pollster John Horvick of DHM Research says the success of a new charter reform measure may hinge on marketing. “If it was given as a technical fix, the advocates for the charter reform were supportive or were neutral, it could pass,” Horvick says. “But if it’s seen as throwing out what voters decided just the last election, I don’t know how this plays out.”

Horvick says he cannot recall a previous example of City Council asking voters to revise something they voted for just one year before.

That being said, it appears Gonzalez is already looking at revising other programs and reforms recently passed by Portland voters. “We’ve had discussions about other ballot measures,” Gonzalez says. “What deserves some tweaking? What really doesn’t make sense?”

The two measures he’s eyeing in particular: the Portland Clean Energy Fund and the Police Accountability Commission.

MOTOYA NAKAMURA / MULTNOMAH COUNTY BLAKE BENARD

COMMISSIONER DAN RYAN

COMMISSIONER RENE GONZALEZ

ROOTING FOR THE UNDERDOG ISN’T EASY,

but it’s almost always interesting.

Consider the case of Adin Hill, a former Portland Winterhawk. The Canadian-born goaltender spent much of his career in a backup role, ricocheting between the National Hockey League and the minors, traded from team to team like an unwanted sports card. In 2022, Hill landed on the Vegas Golden Knights’ roster, starting in only 25 games during the regular season.

Practically nobody would have pegged him to become this year’s standout player in the NHL playoffs, but that’s what happened when injuries picked off the team’s other goalies. Hill rose to the occasion with a spectacular series of saves that made it impossible not to cheer him on as he helped lead the team to its first-ever Stanley Cup.

What does Hill’s story have to do with this year’s Best of Portland issue? Everything.

Sure, Hill’s journey took him across the ice of Veterans Memorial Coliseum. But it’s more than that. It’s that his comeback resonates with Rose City residents who’ve been told the bloom is off for more years than we care to count. Our annual celebration of underdogs, unrecognized efforts, overlooked places, and charming misfits is testament to the city’s enduring greatness, even in the face of adversity.

In addition to Hill’s miracle on ice (page 17), the long shots we

applaud in this issue include a 28-year-old director who became the youngest American recipient of a James Beard Award thanks to his YouTube short on a BIPOC cart pod (page 23); a no-tech hobby— paint-by-number—and the small business that’s riding its improbable resurgence (page 20); a bar dedicated to classical music that’s hosting opera karaoke (page 33); as well as the triumphant return of good ol’-fashioned pro wrestling without the dated stereotypes (page 33).

Perhaps there’s no better example of a dark horse, however, than Jeppson’s Malört, the spirit whose flavor is almost universally loathed. Yup, even the intensely bitter liquor has a Portland fan base that meets up weekly for shots and discussions about the booze’s merits (page 25).

As always, we’ve invited you to weigh in on your favorite local bars, restaurants, shops, events and people. Year after year, we have an enthusiastic response to our Readers’ Poll (page 42)—further proof that Portlanders are still passionate about this city.

While it may be tough at times to be Portland’s cheerleader, remember that you’re never on the sidelines alone. There’s a reason why we root for the underdog to begin with: The fight is just as thrilling as the win.

—Andi Prewitt, Arts & Culture Editor

BEST PEOPLE

higher than average unemployment. Hardman says being an example and providing a service for so many clients who are deaf is a dream come true.

“It’s humbling. It’s sad. It’s exciting,” Hardman says. “Not a lot of people get to say they love their jobs. But I love my job—I love it.” NIGEL JAQUISS.

Best Squeezebox Surgeon

Love it or hate it, the accordion has been a part of the global music scene for the better part of two centuries. And it’s because the instrument still has a regular presence in multiple musical genres—rock, folk, Tejano, jazz, classical and beyond—that David Beer has been able to build a career as the self-proclaimed “Squeezebox Surgeon.”

“I have always kind of loved accordions since I was younger,” he says, speaking from his repair shop in Southeast Portland. “I started to really like them a lot in my 20s. Even though I was going to punk shows in Minneapolis, I was also going to church basements and watching polka bands.”

A former pastry chef and chocolatier, Beer has played the accordion off and on for the past 40 years, taking lessons from the late Luigi Rangan and 3 Leg Torso’s Courtney Von Drehle after relocating to Portland in 1999. But when it was time to finally get out of the kitchen, he decided to learn how to fix his favorite instrument—first, at Wisconsin’s World of Accordions Museum and later in an intensive program at the Accordion Craft Academy in Castelfidardo, Italy.

Since setting up shop, Beer has become the only person in Oregon—and one of two in the Northwest—who can do this specialized work.

“There was another guy, Chuck Berger, who was around for a lot of years,” says Beer. “He died about two or three years ago, which is sad, but it also helped with my business a little bit, too.”

Best Ink

Cosette “Cozy” Hardman, 30, is pretty sure she’s one of a kind—the state’s only deaf tattoo artist.

Born profoundly deaf, Hardman got a cochlear implant at age 10. The operation allowed her to hear about 85% of normal.

“I didn’t really hear or know how to talk or hear until then,” she says. As a young girl, she learned American Sign Language and

depended on her other senses. “I feel like I would notice things happening before hearing people did and paid more attention to details,” she says. “And my sense of smell, it’s really good.”

At first, she recalls, everything—including her own words—was overwhelming.

“I kind of yelled, because I didn’t know how loud I was,” she says.

A couple of years after she first heard sounds, Hardman decided she wanted to be a tattoo artist. It was a career that would combine her love of drawing with the opportunity to create personal connections with clients through the life events or symbols that prompted them to get inked.

“It’s kind of being a therapist,” she says. “And they’re putting amazing art on people’s bodies and those people end up being so happy.”

Her path led from Salem, where she was born and raised, to Portland State University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture—a subject she chose because of an aptitude test rather than a burning desire to design buildings. After finishing her graduate studies in 2018, Hardman began looking for work in her field and sent out 200 letters to architecture firms. Only a few replied. None wanted to hire her.

“That was really rough,” she says. “And then COVID happened. I was like, ‘Wow, now I’m really not going to be able to find a job.’”

That led her back to ink.

“I always loved the idea of putting art on people’s bodies and making it permanent,” Hardman says. “I drew before I started writing. I love art and I would doodle in class growing up and I just knew that is my calling.”

The requirements to become a tattoo artist in Oregon are stiff: 360 hours of training at a licensed school and 50 completed tattoos. (A spokesperson for the licensing agency says it cannot comment on Hardman’s belief she is the only tattoo artist who is deaf, citing personal privacy rules.)

Now working at Grizzly Tattoo on North Williams Avenue, Hardman says about 75% of her clients are deaf. People travel from all over the state, she says, because tattoos are so personal and being able to talk to the artist—in sign language, if necessary—is so crucial.

“I’ve heard horror stories of deaf people getting the wrong tattoo because their tattooer would either be uncomfortable communicating with them or misunderstood them,” Hardman says.

Although cochlear implants and other technologies have presented new opportunities for people who are deaf, statistics show they disproportionately struggle in school and experience far

His workload has steadily increased, with locals dropping their accordions off for cleaning and tune-ups and musicians from as far as New York shipping their instruments across the country for repairs like patching air leaks and replacing cracked seals.

“ When Cirque du Soleil came through [recently], I got a call from somebody working for them who said their accordionist needed their accordion tuned,” Beer remembers, “which, normally for me, I would rather take a month to do it to make sure the tuning stays stable. But she needed it done in two weeks before they got here. It was tight, but it felt good to help keep the show going.”

Pivoting from baking to accordion repair does track logically as both jobs require strict attention to detail to achieve a successful result. But it still doesn’t explain what it was about this instrument that inspired Beer to make such a radical career change.

“It’s one of those sounds that I feel inside,” he says. “It’s a wind instrument, so you get a lot of expressiveness. I like that it’s portable. You don’t need other people to play with, but it also plays well with other people. Especially after going to Italy, I realized that in every other country but the U.S., the accordion is one of the primary instruments. It’s weird that it’s not like that here. The guitar kind of killed that, but it feels like it’s coming back.” ROBERT HAM.

Best NOLA-Transplanted Mardi Gras Krewe

As beautiful and amazing as Portland is, the City of Roses lacks a particular savoir faire, lagniappe, and even a certain bacchanalian dazzle, which, for the most part, seems to suit Portlanders just fine. Well, that’s true until Mardi Gras season, when Portland’s Mysti Krewe of Nimbus steps in to pump up the jams, throw all the beads and laissez les bons temps rouler.

Founded in 2010, Mysti Krewe (named for the misty Pacific Northwest atmosphere) has served as a subcommunity for Louisiana transplants and locals who simply love the culture. For 12 years, they have held a Mardi Gras ball and parade, bringing that trademark Carnival energy to the historically Black neighborhood around North Mississippi Avenue each season.

Bonus: The group operates a charitable wing called The Goode Werks Krewe, which raises funds for nonprofits in Oregon and Louisiana. Previous recipients have focused on everything from environmental issues to music education. BRIANNA WHEELER.

ALLISON BARR

Best Fiddler

On June 24, in the Idaho high desert town of Weiser, Luke Price was named America’s best oldtime fiddle player. It was the fifth time in the past 10 years that he took home to Portland the trophy as Grand Champion. Along with the hardware, the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest gave Price a belt buckle and a jean jacket—like a green Masters jacket by way of the Grand Ole Opry. “Do I have to put this on?” he asked sheepishly. Winning isn’t everything to Price, 37. It’s not really a thing at all—he attends the competition as a pretext for the afterparty, an all-night jam session held in a campground on a dusty patch of land called Stickerville for all the burrs.

“ Yeah, you compete in the contest and maybe you make some gas money to pay your way back,” he says. “But the reason you go to the contest is to stay up all night playing music and jamming. It’s just a hang. You stay up till about 4:30 every night playing, and then you get up and play in the contest the next day.”

He’s been playing “Dusty Miller” and “Billy in the Low Ground” since the age of 6. He won his first contest at 12. His childhood was in Boise, his education at Berklee College of Music. In 2010, Price moved to Portland, settling in the Roseway neighborhood with his wife, Rachael; when he’s not on the road, he teaches music at Lewis & Clark College.

To be technical about it, his genre is called Texas-style oldtime music, although most listeners associate the tunes with Ken Burns documentaries and think of it simply as hoedown music. Which means, in a way, that Price is a virtuoso at partying.

“My main thing is trying to get into a solid groove,” he says. “That’s what’s most fun. And I tend to go out on the edge a little bit as far as improvisation.”

So where can you hear him? Luke and Rachael Price have a soul band called Love, Dean; they have a Sept. 21 gig at Mississippi Studios. His side project, LP and The Old Fashioneds, features his fiddling, and can be found every third Friday of the month at the Alberta Street Pub. What a hoot it is getting old. AARON MESH.

Best Former Winterhawk

the San Jose Sharks to the Knights. But he played well for Vegas as a backup, then made the most of it—to say the least—when he started in Game 3 of the conference semifinals. Hill wrapped up the postseason with an 11-4 record and introduced himself to the national TV audience with a spectacularly implausible stick save against Panthers forward Nick Cousins in Game 1 of that series.

That looked pretty familiar to longtime Winterhawks associate coach Kyle Gustafson.

“He had so many of those,” says Gustafson, who returned to Portland last year after a season with the Vancouver Canucks. “You think the puck’s in the back of the net and then all of a sudden, he keeps it out.”

The Adin Hill who first came to Portland as an underage training camp invite in 2011 was nowhere near the 6-foot-6, 202-pound goaltender he is today.

“He was probably about 5-foot-2,” Gustafson says. “But what I remember about him is he was a rink rat—the kind of player who always stayed after practice for more work.”

Gustafson also remembers him not allowing a single goal in two consecutive Neely Cups (the team’s internal preseason tournament) and uncomplainingly standing in net (as the Hawks’ third-string goalie for a power-play drill with no defenders) getting buzzed in the head with pucks. He eventually joined the Hawks for part of the 2013-14 season; by the 2015-16 campaign, the more physically mature Hill was not only the team’s No. 1 goalie, but appeared in an astounding 65 of 72 games.

“He just had this battle component about him that he wasn’t going to give up a goal,” Gustafson says. “He battled in the rebound game at the end of practice, when there was no one watching, as much as he battled in an in-game playoff situation.”

A journeyman no more, Hill finished third in the voting for the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player in the Stanley Cup playoffs (behind two of his Vegas teammates). On June 30, the Knights signed him to a two-year, $9.8 million contract extension. JASON COHEN.

Best Literary Twist

As the hyperkinetic dancer for Hazel, a sometimes overlooked yet integral component of Portland’s ’90s indie music heroes, Fred Nemo was a madly gyrating enigma. Even during the height of his star turn tripping the light fantastic—“the tall, wild-eyed Fred Nemo, dancing at center stage in sporadic twitches and poses,” wrote The New York Times’ Jon Pareles—the leaping legend seethed insularity.

However, Nemo regularly collaborated with Los Angeles singer-songwriter-polymath Tara Jane O’Neil, spent years managing the accounts of ’70s underground paper The Portland Scribe, and became a lead plaintiff in the landmark Critical Mass lawsuit against the city of Portland after police kept participants from distributing flyers without a permit. And, since 2015, he’s served as Black Hat Books’ owner, operator and curator of what is perhaps the city’s most quixotic repository.

“A number of striking differences make this shop not like every other,” Nemo explains. “Underserved racial minority literature—African American, Native American, Hispanic— [represents] about half of what’s here. There’s a robust African section, East Asian section, Middle East, Judaica, Caribbean, Eastern European, Russian, feminist.”

Two shelves of true crime are broken down into nine groupings. African American literature, including the permanent archive of 5,000 titles viewable upon request, has 30 classifications.

“ We subcategorize promiscuously,” Nemo says.

“The building lifted 30 inches,” he recalls. “It was originally two stories. I think the top floor caught fire in the 1950s, and instead of restoration, they put on a new roof and turned it into a bungalow. This used to be the basement, but 6-foot-4 ceilings work better in a wine bar—those low velvet divans—than bookshop. So, for $12K,” Nemo smiles, “I made the house dance.” JAY HORTON.

BEST ANIMALS

Best Newspaper (Feline Division)

Anybody who says newspapers are dying hasn’t looked closely at the telephone poles in the Buckman neighborhood. That’s where devoted readers find new, laminated editions of the SE Taylor Street Cat News, the monthly newspaper of record for the feline activities from Southeast 14th Avenue to César E. Chávez Boulevard. The Cat News, one page and cartoon-illustrated, chronicles such hyperlocal issues as “Squirrels—Are They Stupid?” and the arrival of Freddy, an orange tom who is seeking summer romance.

It is on its fourth edition, edited by a neighborhood resident who goes by the nom de plume Swamp Cat.

“A lot of the stories I gather from cats throughout the neighborhood,” says Swamp Cat, who is 28 in human years. “I do all the translations myself.”

Swamp Cat lives in a three-cat household herself; her most reliable sources are Tilda, the Baboo, and Big Fat Ted. (All get bylines.) Since its April debut, the Cat News has developed a loyal readership, online and on-pole. Like all media, it has seen the most success with its coverage of violent street conditions.

“Residents on 28th have recently reported multiple incidents between the Buckman Big Boyz and the Sunnyside Skullz,” a June cover story begins. “Tensions between the two cat gangs escalate annually with the arrival of summer and the search for perfect Sit Spots.” AARON MESH.

BEST IDEAS

Best United Front

Only one strip club in the country is unionized: Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in North Hollywood, Calif. But the second is poised to be Portland’s own Magic Tavern at Northwest 24th Avenue and Nicolai Street.

Most of the 33 strippers at Magic Tavern have been on strike since April 4 due to “dangerous working conditions and a lack of professionalism,” according to a petition signed by more than 2,000 people. On June 6, the dancers announced they were unionizing with Actors’ Equity Association, the 110-year-old labor union for actors and stage managers.

Prior to 2023, 10 former Portland Winterhawks played for teams that won the Stanley Cup, including Mark Messier (who played all of seven games here as a teenager), Andrew Ference and, most recently, Braydon Coburn (with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2020). But no Hawks alum has won the Stanley Cup quite as spectacularly as goaltender Adin Hill, or been as unlikely a candidate to do so. Hill, who played for Portland’s junior hockey team from 2014 to 2016, became the Winterhawks’ 11th player to win a National Hockey League Stanley Cup when he helped lead the Vegas Golden Knights over the Florida Panthers in the 2023 final.

Originally taken by the Arizona Coyotes in the third round of the 2015 NHL draft, the 27-year-old Canadian native started the season with tags like “journeyman” and “career backup” attached to his name, having spent more of 2016 to 2020 in the minor leagues than the NHL before going from the Coyotes to

Fascinated by ethically ambiguous black hats—from Richard Boone’s Old West mercenary Paladin to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, the inventory isn’t meant to discredit the white Western canon (here filed under “Bad Boys”) so much as champion dissidents of every stripe. The grand majority of this stock, after all, comes from Nemo’s personal collection of some 40,000 titles.

“It never occurred to me to have a bookshop until, driving down [Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard] one day, I saw a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of this ugly-ass ex-wine bar named Alu. This was 2011, during the absolute nadir of local real estate, and I had a house full of books—like, too full, the kind of house where hoarders need to cut little paths through each room.”

The Black Hat space does catch the eye, all the more so after a small structural elevation to maximize floor space lent the graying, rusticated edifice a familiar bearing—imperious, austere, somewhat ridiculous, and thoroughly captivating.

“ We’re fighting for basic safety and respect in the workplace, just like any other industry expects,” says Nyx, a dancer on strike. When Equity president Kate Shindle first heard about the issues that compelled the strippers to strike, she audibly gasped. Insufficient club security and cameras. Failure to provide dancers with contracts upon hiring. Safety issues, such as a wobbly pole, uneven stage flooring, and a mysterious gas smell near the kitchen. Retaliation for bringing up workplace concerns. Management naming an official group chat for dancers “Anus Tarts.” The list goes on.

Owner Benjamin Donohue had no comment about the strike. The club remains open with nonstriking dancers onstage. Another grievance not formally listed in the petition, but one that cuts to the heart of the dancers’ concerns, has to do with a pet product called Bitter Yuck.

In the absence of sufficient security, Magic Tavern dancers developed safety tactics like swiping their breasts with deodorant or Bitter Yuck, a no-chew spray meant to prevent dogs and cats from gnawing on furniture and plants.

Turns out, it’s also great for deterring sleazy strip club customers.

“Imagine if you told a dancer, ‘If someone licks your nipple, go tell security and we’ll get them thrown out,’” a dancer named Daphne says. “That would be so much better than, ‘You should

COURTESY PORTLAND WINTERHAWKS

put some deodorant on your boobs.’”

All three dancers interviewed—stage names Nyx, Creature and Daphne—are still eager to work at Magic Tavern again. “Both those stages are absolutely gorgeous, and the community we built was incredible,” Creature says. “That club has so much potential.”

Magic Tavern opened in November 2022. The strippers say management was going for a punk, “Old Portland” vibe. They praised the variety of body types and skin colors in their Magic Tavern community, while acknowledging that most of the club’s Black dancers have been less visible during the strike because they would have a harder time getting hired or picking up primo shifts elsewhere. Racism in their industry sparked the 2020 PDX Stripper Strike.

The Magic Tavern strippers plan to picket again July 21. “The clubs don’t keep us safe,” Daphne says. “We keep each other safe.” RACHEL SASLOW.

Best Taxidermy

Gould explains. “It’s usually a bunch of old guys. To have young women in my age group sign up for my classes was mind blowing.” RACHEL PINSKY.

Best Playdates

After taking leave from work due to family medical needs, Geneva Bennett began reflecting on her life and how she wanted the rest of it to go. That internal existential discussion led her two years ago to create something incredibly joyful: We Play in Trees, an event-planning platform that encourages adults to incorporate recreation into their routines.

“I asked myself what kind of work and activities brought me joy? What was I doing and where was I when I felt the most alive?” Bennett explains. “I think experiencing a collective pause of sorts helped me settle a bit into pausing parts of my own life and asking myself some extremely important and extremely tough questions. I wanted to look back on my life and know that I chose it on purpose.”

Having always enjoyed being active, Bennett was drawn to the possibilities that playgrounds provide, including the freedom to try things out and experiment with no pressure.

“The connection to ourselves that happens when we move our bodies and having that movement be fueled by curiosity, wonder, joy and fun strums the chords of our spirit directly,” she says. “It awakens the parts of us that we have forgotten existed, forgotten how to listen to. Playing can look like anything, but the act of it is incredibly powerful and magnetic.”

We Play in Trees’ first event was a skate session at Oaks Park Roller Rink in January 2022. Since then, Bennett has launched a wide variety of other playful monthly events, including an introduction to rock climbing, a silent disco, a painting class and plant identification walks. Individuals can also sign up for one-on-one or small-group Recess Sessions, and the website is advertising a four-day retreat at a yet-to-be-named location in summer 2024.

laptop to crouch). After that, it’s a quest for water, warmth and a place to poop (hint: You have to construct a two-bucket toilet system).

If our performance in Cascadia 9.0 is any indication, we’re toast when the Cascadia subduction zone does its full rip. We played the game three times before getting past level one, where the player’s job is to get underneath something when the house starts to shake, then turn off the gas. After three gas explosions, we figured it out. Our teenage kids would do better (we hope).

ANTHONY EFFINGER.

Best Furniture for Rabbits

“There’s this weird notion that we’re serial killers or something, but we love animals and we want to give them a second life,” says Dakotah Rose Gould, an Iowa native who teaches taxidermy workshops at Paxton Gate, the Portland natural history and home goods curiosities outlet on Northwest 23rd Avenue.

In January 2020, Gould began instructing at the shop, which is known not just for its taxidermied animals, but also for its collection of mounted insects, skulls, carnivorous plants and crystals. The practice of taxidermy, of course, is putting the skin of an animal on a form to make it lifelike. Gould compares it to dressing a mannequin at a department store. Though some use this art to anthropomorphize wildlife or create horror film-inspired tableaus, Gould’s style is straightforward. She aims to re-create what the animals looked like when they were alive.

In line with this respect for each creature’s life, she gathers her materials thoughtfully. Most of the skins come from animals that have died naturally at sanctuaries, zoos and ranches, or whose carcasses were recovered by abatement businesses. She also sources rabbits from a company that sells their meat to zoos for food.

Gould didn’t set out to be a taxidermist. Her stepfather who raised her was Indigenous, so she grew up among shaped skins, and later found herself walking in the woods, collecting bones and forming them into jewelry and art pieces.

“I don’t really know how I got into this,” Gould says. “I can’t pinpoint a time when I said, ‘I’m going to do this.’”

Her career interests varied from veterinarian to artist to tattoo artist. Then eight years ago, she took her first taxidermy class. Gould has been forming skins ever since.

“It’s a skill like anything else,” Gould says. “It takes time and practice. You won’t master it in a few classes. I still think I suck. Be patient with the process and take time to build skills.”

This fall, Gould is teaching four hands-on workshops. Each is 6 ½ hours long (with a 30-minute break) and costs $425 or $575 per person, depending on your choice of animal: full pigeon, jackalope on a plaque, or coyote shoulder mount. All materials and tools are provided, though students can bring in driftwood, glass domes, or other items to mount to their stuffed creatures.

So what’s the typical demographic makeup of a taxidermy class? An eclectic mix of mostly women in their 20s and 30s enrolled in her last series of workshops—everyone from roller derby players to moms to teachers, a surprising roster.

“It wasn’t what I expected because I’m out in the Midwest with 40-to-60-year-old-men who are hunters and trappers,”

“I hope that people discover a remembering in their hearts, a recognition in their spirit of their own beauty and worthiness, the connectedness, and feeling alive,” Bennett says. “The feeling in their bodies of joy is worth listening to, worth honoring and worth letting lead them.” SARA GIZA.

Best Earthquake Preparedness

The unruly piles of hay were the literal last straw.

That’s not to suggest that Jeni Nguyen, bunny mother of two, would ever have given up Betty and Elvis because their diet of dried grass created a never-ending mess inside her modestly sized Portland home. But feathery strand-strewn floors did prompt her to create a hutch that contained all of that hay, which was the first step toward the launch of Bink Rabbit Goods

“Hay is the bane of every bunny person’s existence,” Nguyen says. “It was a product to solve my own problems, and I was like, well, if I’m experiencing this, I can’t be the only person. And the more I dug into it, the more I realized, OK, pet bunnies, even though they’re not as popular as cats and dogs, they are quite popular, and nobody’s making stuff for them.”

Or at least, she adds, there wasn’t much in the way of supplies for rabbit owners in her demographic: working adults. Nguyen says most of the items on the market are geared toward children despite the fact that these animals can be challenging to care for and do not make good starter pets.

You’d never confuse Bink’s credenza for a kids’ product. In fact, the sleek, stylish piece wouldn’t be out of place on the cover of a Scandinavian-themed issue of Architectural Digest. That sophisticated aesthetic is no accident—Nguyen is a designer—and she wanted a showpiece for the living room that would blend in with her modernist décor.

Perhaps you read the terrifying 2010 story in WW predicting an earthquake that would hit Portland with “a strength, duration and destruction never before experienced in the developed Western world.” Or maybe you caught the equally scary piece in The New Yorker titled “The Really Big One,” that quoted a Federal Emergency Management Agency guy saying that “everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

Both stories said the quake could come as soon as RIGHT NOW.

If you feel hopeless, there’s something you can do: Play a video game. Not any video game. One called Cascadia 9.0, which simulates what’s going to happen when the North American tectonic plate snaps westward along an approximately 700-mile fault line following years of built-up pressure caused by the Juan de Fuca plate slowly wedging its way under it.

A team at Lewis & Clark College developed the game to clue in young adults to the inevitable catastrophe that somehow still seems so abstract as to be meaningless. Players find themselves in a destroyed city looking for their dog, Tsu (short for Tsunami). Think of it as The Last of Us, but without zombies. Water is tainted, gas lines are leaking, aftershocks roil the wreckage.

Good times, for sure. But a massive earthquake is far more likely than a zombie apocalypse, so why not learn something useful while you’re gaming? When the big one hits, you have to find something to hide under (hold down the “C” key on your

The cabinet, which she initially built herself in the garage as an experiment, freed up her spare bedroom, which the bunnies and their accoutrements—from the feeder to a large pen—had commandeered. That’s because it’s an all-in-one unit: The credenza not only features a chew-proof slatted metal shelf that holds hay; it also accommodates (and conceals) a litter box on one side and acts as a den where free-roaming house rabbits can chill on the other. Nguyen’s bunnies took to the prototype immediately.

“They just knew that this was their space,” she says. “What they love about it, kind of like a kennel to a dog, they know that this is their little zone.”

The instant benefit was, of course, a tidier setup. But a somewhat surprising positive side effect developed over time: a stronger bond between rabbits and owner. Prior to her invention, Nguyen was relegated to that spare bedroom if she wanted to spend time with Betty and Elvis—typically sitting or lying on the floor to encourage interaction with the two rescues. Once they were all regularly spending time in the main living area, they simply got more exposure to Nguyen and her partner, which built up trust.

After her hay hardship came to an end, Nguyen had no intention of turning her idea into a business. But as with so many other people who began reevaluating their priorities during the pandemic, Nguyen took a hard look at what she wanted to pursue, decided to put her career on hold, and then followed her passion. Bink’s Kickstarter campaign went live in 2022, which had a fundraising target of $12,000. That goal was crushed by a

COURTESY PAXTON GATE

COURTESY CASCADIA 9.0

COURTESY BINK RABBIT GOODS

wave of more than $33,000 in contributions from like-minded bunny parents.

Since then, the credenza has been fine-tuned: A metal screen that was fixed in place on the prototype can now be removed for easier cleaning, and a groove near the sliding doors has been sealed to prevent accidents from seeping into what was a tough-to-wipe-down spot. Nguyen also consulted with a vet to ensure the materials used to construct each piece were safe (certain woods like pine and cedar are toxic to rabbits). The resulting product is made of sustainably sourced Baltic birch, which is finished with a waterproof hard wax blend of vegetable oils.

Those high-quality parts mean that the price tags for the original credenza as well as a newer, slightly smaller bench are not cheap: We’re talking Dania Furniture figures, not Ikea. But the hutches are also built to last with rabbit safety top of mind.

“It was just really important to me because I’m making these for my own bunnies,” Nguyen explains. “I could cut corners and make them a lot cheaper, but I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable letting my bunnies use that, so I wouldn’t want to offer that to other people, either.”

Which raises another question: Given the potential of the furniture’s versatility, has she thought about marketing to parents of pets other than rabbits?

“I mean, a lot of folks have said, ‘Oh, I would love this for my dog. I would love this for my cat,’” says Nguyen. “Maybe it will go in that direction, but right now I’m sticking to bunnies. There’s all these squirrels. I just want to chase the bunny squirrel right now.” ANDI PREWITT.

Best Pandemic Hobby to Continue Post-Pandemic

It was mid-March 2020, the state of Oregon had just gone into pandemic lockdown mode, and Rachel Austen was afraid that the unfolding crisis would force her to let go of the only employee at her 4-year-old paintby-number kit company, Elle Crée

“ We were working in my home studio,” Austen says. “I just looked at her and was like, ‘Chrissy, I have no idea what’s going to happen here. We will make kits and ship them until there’s no more orders.’”

There was little to be optimistic about. After all, no one would’ve anticipated a mass uptick in leisurely pursuits—particularly one as niche as filling in pre-marked shapes on a canvas with paint—while the world grappled with a deadly new virus. But Elle Crée’s grim outlook quickly reversed.

Austen received a text message from a producer for KPTV’s morning lifestyle program More Good Day Oregon, which had shot footage for a profile of the business a few months before. The showrunners had decided to bump up the segment’s air date. Elle Crée would get its 15 minutes of (local) fame on day one of Oregon’s official quarantine. And there must’ve been plenty of eyeballs glued to TV sets, because the result was an immediate influx of orders.

“At the time, I was like, this is amazing! What a gift! I can’t believe the timing of this has worked out,” Austen recalls. “I can employ Chrissy for longer!”

That period was the beginning of a nationwide hobby boom as people stuck at home with more time on their hands began baking, building, bird watching or picking notes on bass guitars as a form of self-therapy. Turns out, more than a few of those hobbyists also wound up engaged with paint-by-number. The tsunami of orders in the first few months overwhelmed Austen’s small crew—she ended up pausing wholesale requests for about six weeks. But the demand also allowed Elle Crée to grow to six employees and move out of Austen’s house and into a Milwaukie business park.

Not that Austen predicted any sort of boost in popularity for paint-by-

number kits when she founded the company. In fact, when she initially launched Elle Crée as a way to turn her illustrations into a product that could spur creativity in others, Austen soon discovered the concept hardly resonated with most.

“Paint-by-number just wasn’t on people’s radar,” she explains. “So mostly the comments I would get went something like, ‘Oh, paint-bynumber! I remember that from when I was a kid.’ That was the reference point. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, paint-by-number! Everybody’s doing it!’”

After “reverse-engineering” the market research, as Austen puts it, attending craft bazaars and wholesale trade shows in order to observe what prospective customers were drawn to and what wasn’t quite clicking, Elle Crée canvases and miniature paint pots began landing in independent gift shops across the Pacific Northwest. Online sales also grew. In 2019, she snagged her first national brand buy with Blick Art Materials. And later this year, kits are headed to store shelves that belong to an even bigger name: Barnes & Noble.

When making brush strokes on one of Elle Crée’s landscapes, still-life settings, or portraits (there is a historical figure line that includes everyone from RBG to Frida Kahlo to Michelle Obama fringed in peonies), you can do so with the confidence of knowing that the canvas and paint are both made in the U.S. (Austen says most kits are manufactured overseas), and environmental stewardship is a company priority. For instance, the only element besides the artwork itself that can’t be tossed into your curbside bin of cardboard and plastics is the paint canisters, so Austen created a program where customers who return them receive a coupon on their next purchase.

“It was really important to me that I wasn’t adding to the waste problem,” she says, “that I was creating a product that was sustainable, and essentially the components could be recycled or were intended to be loved and cherished and displayed for years to come.”

As for the continued interest in paint-by-number, even as we emerge from the pandemic and our obsession with everything from sourdough starters to wood-whittling begin to fade, Austen chalks it up to simple stress relief.

“There’s a lot of research around art therapy and how experiencing creativity can kind of help with mental reset in terms of just allowing a sense of calm,” she says. “It kind of blocks out all the other noise. At the same time, I feel like I’m processing things in the background.”

And if you’re really looking to zone out, paint-by-number might just be the ultimate meditative activity, beating out coloring since there is one less decision to be made on the part of the participant. The hues are already chosen for you.

For anyone who hasn’t yet dipped their brush into the world of paintby-number but is curious, Austen does have some advice: Become absorbed with the activity itself and just chill.

“I would say not to be intimidated by it,” she says. “It’s one of the hobbies that has the smallest barrier to entry because everyone has held a paintbrush at some point and everyone generally understands the concept. So it’s really about giving yourself the time and space to slowly create something and enjoy the process.” ANDI PREWITT.

Best Gendered Fluidity

Well before Danielle Elowe launched her plumbing repair and remodel business, back when the ex-barista wasn’t sure she’d even stick with the trade, “I spent my entire apprenticeship trying to think of what I would hypothetically call this company I had no intention of starting. Finally, in the last year…Waterworks! It’d be a funny little double entendre for people Googling a plumber, thinking Waterworks seems like a totally normal name, to then see my van pull up with this crying eye logo.”

Both the moniker and Patrick Nagel-style graphic of a single tear below an arched brow—“a throwback to the classic ’80s nail salon artwork I so love,” she adds—weren’t originally meant to signify much more than memorable branding, but Elowe came to embrace the “cheeky nod to supposedly hysterical girls. I mean, the job can be frustrating enough to give anyone what my colleagues refer to as the ‘plumbing sweats.’ There’s definitely crying in plumbing.”

With women representing approximately 3% of American plumbers, convincing prospective clients of her readiness remains a challenge. (Where male contractors are often forced to soften a reflexively gruff approach, she’s found that rattling off arcane technical lingo best reassures customers.) Nonetheless, Elowe continues to swim against the current with the hope of dissolving even the most pervasive stereotypes.

“Nobody needs to see plumber’s crack,” she sighs, “but try keeping your pants up after squatting in strange positions tucked up under cabinetry for most of the day. We’re a very subterranean breed of construction worker, and sometimes you reach back and find your underwear sticking halfway out of your pants. My remedy? Wear clothes that fit, get a Velcro mechanics belt without any metal, and just lean into the overalls style. Go full Mario, and we can put the reputation to rest, once and for all.”

JAY HORTON.

BIGFOOT ADVENTURE CRUISE

BEST EATS

Best Secret Supper Club

Psst. You can keep a secret, can’t you? Then you should know about the Portland Secret Dining Society. What’s so secret about it? Well, the location, menu and wine pairings are kept hush-hush until the week of the event. PSDS was created as a quarterly, seasonally themed dinner series founded by hospitality industry vets Remington Lee and chef Tara Lynch, who were looking to do something a bit closer to home—quite literally, as Lee’s husband and kids were the runners and bussers during my experience in June. My summertime meal took place at a long outdoor table on a family farm overlooking the Clackamas River and facing Mount Hood. These days, sharing a meal with strangers might feel old fashioned, but Lee’s hospitality is contagious. Her tableside production included everything from sabering open a bottle of 2015 Argyle Blanc de Blanc that she had squirreled away for the occasion to noting that “being the center of attention” is part of why she enjoys hosting these events so much. Lynch’s food is crowdpleasing and versatile—she served both elote-style “corn ribs” and lime icebox pie—without coming off as too rustic. Tickets to two autumn harvest dinners are available now, starting at $175 per person, which includes wine pairings. ALEXANDER BASEK.

Best Spice

The genius idea to add Indian spices to fresh salsas naturally came from a health physicist and an engineer.

Rupinder Kaur and Sukhdev Singh started with a craving for Indian street food, and began adding spices like tamarind, cumin and coriander to fresh salsas for friends and family. The response was always, “Why don’t you sell it?” Kaur says.

And during the pandemic, when both experienced job losses, the couple decided the answer was, “Why not?” In 2021, they both leapt into their 2-year-old company, Khalsa Salsa, full time. They’re currently up to four flavors: classic, mango habanero, black bean and cilantro mint.

“ We wanted to keep the salsa as it is: chunky tomato and onion,” Kaur says. “We wanted to add Indian street flavors, spices that are most commonly in Indian snack food. They’re authentic Mexican salsas, to not take away from the salsa itself.”

The products have won multiple awards, and are also winning a growing market share around Portland. And the couple is not done yet: Just in time for tomato season, they’re launching a shelf-stable version of their salsa flavors, so you can make your own fusion dips in just minutes with the fresh veg of your choice.

Khalsa Salsa is available at farmers markets, Market of Choice, some New Seasons Markets in the Beaverton area, and on the business’s website. ANDREA DAMEWOOD.

PROCEEDS BENEFIT ALBERTINA KERR: A local nonprofit offering inpatient crisis psychiatric children’s mental health care and programs for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, empowering them to lead self-determined lives.

COURTESY KHALSA SALSA

Best Trending Food

As a child, the height of frozen dinner sophistication was a Marie Callender’s turkey pot pie, fresh out of the oven in my own personal-sized tin pan.

But that was the early ’90s. Nowadays, there are tastier, less-processed options for everything, including frozen pot pies. They’re not well advertised, but you-bake pot pies are having a moment in Portland thanks to a handful of bakeries that stock them, and they’re a million times better than anything Mrs. Callender ever cooked up.

Grand Central Bakery’s freezers hold individually sized pot pies. Savory and plump with filling, they make a solid solo dinner come fall and winter since they’re a seasonal item. Throw in some frozen chocolate chip cookies and you’ve got yourself a date.

Crema Coffee + Bakery, famous for its massive croissants and delectable chocolate espresso bread, also has pot pies, both veggie and chicken. You can get the small size ($15), but I recommend dishing out $27 for the large: The crust-to-filling ratio evens out for perfect pastry-to-stew bites.

But the absolute best pot pie in the game is, naturally, at Lauretta Jean’s. The city’s best pie shop uses that flaky crust to create individual veggie and chicken pot pies for $8 to $8.50 each, depending on whether you want meat. While Lauretta Jean’s could have rested on its crusty laurels, the filling is perfect: herby with large chunks of poultry and veg. Next time you’re in for a slice, grab a couple to go for a busy weeknight. Future you will be grateful. ANDREA DAMEWOOD.

Best Meals Not on Wheels

Walking into The Diner feels like you’ve entered any old ordinary bustling breakfast and lunch joint, but it’s actually a social experiment created by Meals on Wheels People, a nonprofit founded by three women in 1969 to provide hot meals to senior citizens. The organization’s Multnomah Village kitchen churns out 7,300 nutritious meals four days a week for anyone over the age of 60 in Multnomah, Washington and Clark counties. Traditionally, they’re distributed to community centers or delivered to homebound participants. However, Meals on Wheels more recently recognized that its clients needed more options.

“ We knew that social isolation was a problem five years ago,” says Janice Butzke, operations manager for Meals on Wheels People.

By opening The Diner on East Mill Plain Boulevard in Vancouver, Wash., four years ago, the nonprofit created a space where people could eat healthy meals in a casual yet stylish environment (sterile nursing home vibes are nowhere to be found in the retro dining room with lime green accents). The organization also aimed to draw a diverse clientele to the restaurant—not just seniors. The operation additionally gives Meals on Wheels participants more flexibility in terms of when they can get their food (The Diner is open 8 am to 3 pm Wednesday through Sunday) and what they can order (breakfast, lunch and dessert menus offer items like avocado toast, a classic burger made with locally sourced beef hugged by a brioche bun, and coconut cream pie).

Staff at The Diner are Meals on Wheels employees with the same benefits, and their income isn’t based on gratuities; however, patrons can donate to the nonprofit on the tip line of their check. The organization is looking to use the restaurant as a model and expand its service area, especially to parts of rural Clark County, where people 60 and older have limited opportunities for social interaction. RACHEL PINSKY.

Best James Beard Award Winner

Have you heard the one about the award-winning show that tells it like it is about the restaurant business while centering immigrant and BIPOC characters?

No, not The Bear. Rather, it’s Restaurant Takeover ft. Matta, a YouTube short from Portland’s All the Homies Network that took home a James Beard Award in the Reality or Competition Visual Media category in June.

The documentary, which explores themes of identity, family history, and food itself as storytelling, features Matta food truck owners Richard and Sophia Lê on a night they popped up with a multicourse meal at the Multnomah Whiskey Library. It was an underdog winner over two bigger, richer national entities—Bravo’s Top Chef and Bon Appétit. That made its 28-year-old director, Mike Truong, both the youngest-ever American recipient of the prestigious food award as well as the first born-andraised Portlander to win one—an especially meaningful achievement given that James Beard himself was from here.

But there was even more important ground being broken.

“Understand that you can look like any of us up here and know that your story matters and your voice deserves to be heard,” Truong said

in his acceptance speech.

“Us” being the All the Homies Network, a collective of BIPOC Portland chefs and filmmakers that, in addition to Richard and Sophia Lê, also includes Deadstock Coffee’s Ian Williams, Portland Cà Phê’s Kim Dam, Geraldine and Ethan Leung of Baon Kainan, and Lisa Nguyen of HeyDay PDX. Truong, who went to Benson Polytechnic High School and Oregon State University before briefly working in kitchens himself, started All the Homies just last year, though he’s been making videos—and submitting them to the James Beard Awards—since he was 18.

All the homies in All the Homies made it to Chicago for the awards ceremony, along with three additional crew members; they had to buy 10 of those 11 tickets, pay their own travel expenses, and take time off from their extremely hands-on businesses to do it. When the win was announced, the raucous celebration lit up the room, startling even the ceremony’s droll host, Peter Sagal of National Public Radio’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!

“People came up to us and said, ‘Wow, that was such an amazing moment of how we embraced each other on the stage,’” Truong says. “We were like little kids in the candy store, jumping around and yelling. And that’s because it was so new to us. You could tell the other people who have won [in] previous years. They thanked their publicists and just walked off because it was so normal for them.”

The win for All the Homies was also a win for Portland, one that stands in stark contrast to both the past few years of national media coverage and the city’s own self-image.

“I think it was important for us to win because it showed that the city is not that bad at all,” Truong says. “It’s actually something that is beautiful and amazing within the small communities and the pockets of Portland that people don’t really notice. Even though people say the city is very white—which is true—we’re all BIPOC individuals. People don’t understand the amount of community we have here.” JASON COHEN.

Best Rolling Boil

However many food trucks around town promise down-home authenticity, Bayou Bros Cajun Boils owner-operator Kenny Crowell believes his specially designed cart, located in Oregon City, is still the only mobile kitchen licensed by the state to cook seafood live, as the Cajun gods demand. If anything, Crowell’s locally caught Dungeness and Gulf Coast crawfish, can be a bit too live.

“A lot of different things can happen,” explains Kenny’s wife, Heather. “First time doing crabs at this pop-up, my sister-in-law’s cutting the rubber bands off their [pincers] when the crabs get loose. All of a sudden, one of them has picked up the knife, and he’s holding it in his claw while running away.”

A love of food runs deep for the Crowells. Although Portland émigré Heather began dating Louisianan Kenny when both lived near Dallas, they were eager to trade the “big chain restaurant”-dominated Texas suburbs for a more hospitable food culture, and soon moved to Portland to start a family.

Adopted as a baby, Kenny Crowell first met his half-brother as an adult after he took a DNA test. When his newly discovered sibling eventually traveled to Portland for a visit, the two began trading recipes almost immediately. At some point during the round-the-clock culinary frenzy, the idea for Bayou Bros was born, and Kenny dove headlong into replicating the magical flavors of his Louisiana youth, however fierce the opposition from man and nature.

Crowell swears by the necessity of infused seasoning in fresh boils, but that meant arranging special permits to import the invasive red swamp crayfish, wheedling the befuddled health inspector for approval, designing a food cart able to meet his needs while satisfying municipal oversight, and driving the cart he found in Texas some 2,000 miles back to Oregon during a midpandemic ice storm.

“Pretty good trip, actually,” Crowell recalls, “until the rear end gives out near Sisters. When the tow truck does come, they can’t let us ride along because of COVID, and we end up stranded on the side of the road in the high desert.”

Undaunted, the Crowells have kept the Bayou Bros dream rolling along, and as much as he’d enjoy owning a traditional restaurant, Kenny Crowell appreciates having a movable boil.

“I’d love to get some place where you can sit and have beverages, but I’d always want the cart to be mobile,” he says. “Everywhere we go, we find people who’ve never even heard of some of what we serve, and if I can help them try my food and experience our culture, that’s why I’m here.” JAY HORTON.

Best Grape Variety Revival

Even if you’re familiar with wine varietals like aglianico and zinfandel, you may have never heard of gouais blanc. Though it’s the parent grape of more than 80 well-known types, including gamay, riesling and chardonnay, only around 20 acres grow gouais blanc worldwide.

And none of those vineyards was located in the U.S.—until now. Mark and Pattie Björnson of Salem’s Björnson Vineyard planted the nation’s first commercially grown gouais blanc nearly four years ago in the winery’s Pamar Vineyard, located in the Van Duzer Corridor. This is the first year the public gets to taste the fruits of their labor, but bringing gouais blanc to the market was no easy task.

“ Years ago, when they started sequencing the DNA of grapevines, I first heard of gouais blanc as one of the parents of chardonnay, the other being pinot,” says Mark Björnson. “We were curious to taste gouais blanc but found that it was unavailable in the U.S. and difficult to get even in Europe. Foundation Plant Services at UC Davis had some vines, so we got the cuttings from them, had them grafted and planted almost a half an acre.”

Gouais blanc was grown in medieval France to make a simple white table wine. At the time, the chief selling point of the grape was that it grew abundantly and made a consistent, if rather uncomplex, expression of wine. While chardonnay and pinot noir were considered the wine of the aristocracy, gouais blanc was the wine of the common people.

“It is easy to see why the peasants liked it. It grows vigorously and produces lots of big clusters,” Björnson says. Gouais blanc’s ubiquity also led to its falling out of favor. The nobility felt that if everyone was growing the “low” wine of peasants, it couldn’t possibly be good. In 1732, gouais was even banned by a French parliament.

Back in Oregon, the Björnsons now have their first 60 cases of a 2022 vintage for sale at their tasting room and online. It’s reminiscent of a young white wine you’d find in Austria or Switzerland—and it’s quite young, bottled only in March of this year. The wine itself is better than the pedestrian reputation of the grape from centuries ago, with high acid; notes of green apples, lemon and pear; and a wet stone minerality, making it a good pairing with oysters or ripe cheese. Cheers to the Björnsons for bringing gouais blanc back from the brink and to the slopes of Oregon wine country. ALEXANDER BASEK.

Best Bad Booze Club

Depending on whom you ask, Jeppson’s Malört tastes like gasoline, day-old Coke filtered through a used ashtray, the inner rind of a particularly bitter unripe grapefruit peel, or any combination of the above. Those with a particularly refined palate and a large degree of charity may also identify notes of camphor, wormwood or licorice. In its native habitat—dinky dive bars with décor that hasn’t been updated or cleaned since the 1930s, when the liquor was introduced by the Chicago company—Malört has historically been used as a prank shot to welcome out-of-towners to the Windy City or given out for free by the bartender to quieten

weepy, financially challenged barflies hovering between the bar, bathroom and back door.

In the Rose City, this acrid alcohol has developed a cultlike following of adherents who convene weekly to share a shot or two or three at a rotating list of watering holes, known as Malört Mostly Mondays. Forgoing the traditional fight-your-dad vibe that most Malört-fueled gatherings devolve into, the most recent convening saw a brainstorming session about potential alcohol pairings and discussions about everything from the lipophilic nature of the bioactive ingredients in wormwood to culinary contexts in which Malört could be enjoyed—all of which took place in the comfort of a lush back patio at a former strip club in St. Johns.

Malört Mostly Mondays is scheduled to take place 7 to 8:30 pm(ish) weekly (usually on Mondays, but not always) through October. The next meetup is July 28 at Pinky’s Pizza, where you can come see if you’re one of the seven out of every thousand people who actually like Malört. ANDI O’ROURKE.

Best Compost Pile

When Cramoisi Vineyard co-owner Sofia Torres McKay describes the maintenance of the winery’s compost pile, you’d be forgiven for assuming she was talking about raising one of her own children.

“It’s like we do everything we can in the beginning to prepare it, and then it grows up into a teenager, into adulthood,” she says. “It kind of makes its own independence and makes its own magic.”

If the nurturing description for a mound of dirt sounds unusual, well, that’s because Cramoisi’s mound of dirt is rather abnormal. Oh, and don’t call it dirt. Torres McKay and her husband and vineyard co-owner, Ryan McKay, have some pretty strong opinions about soil—“something that is healthy, that is alive,” she says—and how that is very much not dirt for a good reason: The ground where their wine grapes grow is where quality control begins. And to cultivate the land with care, the two turn to their compost heap, which can get as large as an RV and is monitored not quite as attentively as a child, but at least as closely as the vines that produce Cramoisi’s precious fruit.

The pile’s massive size can be attributed to the vineyard itself: the overall volume of winter pruning wood from 13,000 vines. Those cuttings are ground into a fine sawdust that’s mixed with manure from an area dairy farm. Worms then get to work breaking down the waste.

Rather than turning the mixture with a tractor to assist with aeration and oxygen supply, Torres McKay inserts large corrugated tubes into the stack (“it looks like a cake with candles,” she says), which allow it to get rainwater and air, speeding up decomposition. Torres McKay also takes the temperature of the compost regularly to make sure that it’s warm enough to kill off any potential weed seeds or pathogens.

The resulting blend, teeming with healthy organisms, is deposited by hand to each plant, allowing Cramoisi to eschew pesticides and herbicides, which is not only beneficial to the environment but also the vineyard workers.

“ When the people are happy, when you practice healthy

MICK HANGLAND-SKILL

PILED HIGH: Sofia Torres McKay stands next to her compost pile at Cramoisi Vineyard.

practices and you don’t put poison—you don’t put any chemicals that may go into their hands, their bodies—it’s important,” Torres McKay explains. “We believe that we have to take care of other people to be 100% sustainable.”

Their methods produce one other not so insignificant bonus: great-tasting wine.

“It’s a little more elegant. It stays longer on your palate. It’s more playful,” Torres McKay says. “Maybe I’m getting a little bit crazy, but I just want to talk about how it’s a live organism. And the happier the environment is for that live organism, the better it will taste.” ANDI PREWITT.

BEST PLACES

Best Collectibles Store on Wheels

Portland’s first and only combination train and toy store sits across from OMSI in Southeast Portland. Billing itself as “the world’s only collectibles store on 16 wheels,” Portland Pop! Train is a one-stop (whistle-stop?) destination for toys and collectibles made by Funko as well as action figures and die-cast cars from Mattel, Lego and Disney. Funko collectibles make up the largest part of the inventory, and the shop stocks the really deep cuts, from figurines of characters in Star Wars, Yellowstone and Stranger Things to rare items like Funko Sodas. The store itself is made up of two renovated midcentury train cars from the Milwaukee East line, now covered with colorful murals on the outside. The train itself is stationary—the tracks it sits on don’t lead anywhere—but the store is chockablock with collectibles waiting to be liberated by enthusiastic collectors. Portland Pop! Train hosts “Pop Swaps” on the second Sunday of every month, free for all ages to attend to trade and sell collectibles. ALEXANDER BASEK.

Best Lobby

the complexity of lines. You’ll find everything from a large black line on a red backdrop to a stained-glass window to the likeness of river trails expressed through recycled silver.

Curator Sima Familant says this exhibit shows the different ways that lines can be used, whether it’s the literal lines in a piece or what they represent. All of the featured pieces in The Lobby, both past and present, come from building owner Molly McCabe’s private collection, which she has been developing for 12 years.

“I have this collection that I thought was such a shame, it’s in a warehouse,” McCabe says. “I really believe art is created to be shared, so my art dealer and I came up with this idea for The Lobby when we built the building. Every piece has some kind of story behind it, and I like being able to share that with the community.”

JAKE MOORE.

Best Church of Crafts

For more than 100 years, a quaint building at the intersection of Northeast Sumner Street and 23rd Avenue served as a church. First, it housed the Norwegian Danish Congregational Church. Then came the Mennonite Church. That was followed by the Portland Korean Church. Then came the Fellowship Church of God.

And then, in 2004, no more churches came. For over 15 years, a local couple operated it as a one-floor sleepy event space with a cottage rental out back and a bedroom in the basement. But it begged for a higher purpose.

That’s when Matt and Yuka Hollingsworth, a former Nike executive and a fashion industry illustrator, respectively, came along. In 2021, the couple purchased the property and spent two years patching it up. The result: Mildred Hall, a bright, beautifully finished event space that has studios available for art workshops, a larger room with handsome exposed ceiling beams to accommodate gatherings like a wedding ceremony, and a beautiful outdoor garden that can seat 80.

Matt Hollingsworth says they’ve hosted 20 weddings since April 2022. The couple was only seeking a creative studio, but when they found the building, Matt says he “instantly saw all the opportunities.”

All of the Hollingsworths’ renovations even won them a DeMuro Award in 2022, which recognizes efforts to promote historic preservation.

Now the former church hosts creative workshops ranging from cooking to felting to ceramic firing. Local chefs cook for dozens seated in the garden, and the Hollingsworths occasionally screen movies outdoors too—they recently showed The Goonies

Activities currently on the schedule include a twoday punch needle craft seminar for kids ($120), paper collage classes with your choice of animals or still life as the subject ($160), and a dumpling and cold sesame noodle workshop with local chef Holly Ong ($75, but the next one in August is sold out).

It’s impossible to miss the Ellen Browning Building. The 34,000-square-foot luxury retirement community on Southeast Division Street, which opened in 2022, stands four stories tall and has walls that resemble a corrugated aluminum sheet. Individual square units are stacked on top of one another, sloping away from the street.

If the exterior weren’t interesting enough, as you walk into the main entrance you find yourself inside an art gallery called The Lobby—a secret to most anyone who doesn’t live in or visit someone who resides at the Ellen Browning. Yes, it’s open to the public—10 am to 2 pm Tuesday through Saturday. The displayed art changes every four to six months.

The current exhibit is called Between Two Points, which features nine works by a variety of artists, including world-renowned architect Maya Lin, groundbreaking Cuban American painter Carmen Herrera, and French conceptual sculptor and painter Daniel Buren. All of the pieces, despite the different approaches of their creators, make a statement about

“It’s going to be the year of learning,” Matt Hollingsworth says of the wedding season. “This is our first time running our own business. We want to make it rad for our clients.” SOPHIE PEEL.

Best Staycation Neighborhood

Whether you’re a tourist or a local, an ideal Portland weekend in 2023 would probably include a visit to Gregory Gourdet’s restaurant Kann. You can also stay just blocks away, as the Central Eastside has become something of a miniature hotel hub.

There’s the Icelandic upscale hostel spinoff Kex Portland at Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Couch Street, which first opened in 2019. Six blocks south and one block over, there’s Hotel Grand Stark (a name that also tells you its location), which has been around about as long as COVID-19 vaccinations (it opened in May 2021). And then there’s the OG bou-

MARIO

GALLUCCI/THE LOBBY

tique motor lodge Jupiter—recently renovated and reopened as Jupiter Original after serving as a homeless shelter during the pandemic—as well as its more upscale younger sibling Jupiter Next.

Between them, there are around a half-dozen drinking and dining options. Kex has both a classic hotel lobby bar in Pacific Standard as well as the rooftop Sunset Room, both from former Clyde Common mainstays Jeffrey Morgenthaler and Benjamin “Banjo” Amberg. The Grand Stark recently partnered with Olympia Provisions on Cafe Amari/Grand Amari (an all-day space that becomes a more elaborate Italian restaurant by night) and Little Bitter Bar (which has the sort of cocktails you’d expect from all those names).

Meanwhile, up East Burnside Street, Hey Love continues to thrive at Next, and you can still grab a drink or see a show at the Jupiter campus’s Doug Fir Lounge until at least Sept. 29 (the longtime music venue is moving to the former Le Bistro Montage building on Southeast Morrison Street; a new tenant has yet to be announced). All of which means that if you can’t get a reservation at Kann (spoiler alert: You probably Kann’t), there’s no need to stray far from your hotel. JASON COHEN.

Best Second Coming

While Portland has no shortage of deconsecrated temples-turned-breweries and -playhouses, the resulting spaces too often embrace the worst qualities of their former use in order to showcase a stilted fussiness like so much stained glass. (Most concerts, all that separates The Old Church from an old church are the hours of operation and overpriced Chablis.) Even during its darkest hours, when moonlighting as an overburdened resource for a blighted community or rudderless dormitory for mismatched creatives, the bustling site at Northeast Alberta Street and Mallory Avenue was never so easily defined. And, somehow, newly re-rebranded as a comfortably luxe, all-inclusive performance hall, the latest incarnation of Alberta Abbey has found itself at last.

“This isn’t like any other venue space,” says Alberta Abbey Foundation board member and University of Oregon art professor Brian Gillis. “It’s really trying to be for everybody, and you’ll

see that in the programming—everyone from the Jerry Garcia Band to Alonzo Chadwick to 20-year-olds rapping at drop-in cyphers. We’re in the process of developing a curriculum to teach music and lighting and stage design. We’re starting to get grants and make money off of shows. The concept has been proven. It’s a nonprofit foundation in place to serve BIPOC/underrepresented groups and be a resource for the community, and that’s what so exciting—our mission’s shaped by the concerns of the day.”

In all honesty, Alberta Abbey has long been driven by both its commitment to egalitarian principles and a certain flair for showmanship. Originally founded as a sort of Jazz Age megachurch by merging progressive congregations who commissioned construction plans from the ecclesiastical architect behind Hollywood’s holiest landmarks, only the lavish basement had been completed when the Depression forced building to halt. Over the following two decades, parishioners held all services within the cavernous art deco ballroom until a proper church was finally finished.

Those subterranean hardwoods and 25-foot ceilings were repurposed in the 1980s as a full-court gym, where a young Damon and Salim Stoudamire prepped for NBA careers. Then, in the 2000s, the space became an impromptu shelter for the unhoused and recently incarcerated. These days, Third Rail Repertory Theatre uses the former Sunday school classrooms for offices, and visual artists forge studios from the two-story tower, while the restored ballroom occasionally hosts dance nights.

“ We keep finding these secret hallways and interesting little places,” Gillis marvels. “At the back of the stage, there’s a hallway leading to this Jacuzzi-size tin box set 10 feet up behind a window facing the theater for baptisms that the whole congregation could see.”

Though the plumbing has been disabled, it’s still regularly used by various acts and exhibitions.

“ With the shows we’ve been putting on, all sorts of crazy things happen—light, sculpture, dancers were all up there last Halloween as part of their performance. I can only imagine how much fun kids would’ve had running around this space during after-school programs. There’s just so much cool stuff!”

JAY HORTON.

Best Victorian’s Secret

Nobody just runs across the Victorian Belle

A block off North Interstate Avenue in the middle of Kenton, sightlines to the lovingly restored 1885 three-story Queen Anne mansion have been sufficiently obscured, so even neighboring houses wouldn’t suspect a secret garden of manicured civility lies next door, save for the steady stream of vehicles (rented limos, personalized hearses, vintage coupes, homemade tandem bikes) that don’t quite match the surrounding blue-collar industrial area.

“People don’t often walk onto the property from the neighborhood,” agrees event coordinator Diana Kaeser. “We have so much light shrubbery, no one would ever expect this expansive event venue. The size of the place always takes you by surprise. It’s a kind of hidden gem.”

Unlike most impeccably maintained bastions of 19th century privilege, though, invitations to the public are readily available thanks to the events produced there by discrete companies representing a wide range of interests and private parties.

“ We tend to attract people who want a Victorian vibe for their events,” Kaeser says. “Couples looking for unique layouts or color palettes or asymmetrical ceremonies choose the Belle for those darker-themed October weddings. We get a lot of the spooky vintage ‘till death do us part’ themes, which we absolutely love.”

Conversely, for all of her near-obsessive attention to replicating every last detail of the estate’s finest hours, Belle owner Karla Pearlstein’s portfolio displays no particular attachment to the Victorian era. Whether imagineering Jazz Age splendor for the dilapidated Mediterranean Revival manse she’s currently healing in Laurelhurst, or keeping her own 110-year-old Nob Hill brick firehouse residence flash-frozen in its second youth like a fire pole suspended in plexiglass, the local restoration doyenne’s vision requires each passion project be understood within the context of its age.

Still, she readily includes old features that feel misplaced and anachronistic (like the Belle’s oddly nautical tube intercom), while commissioning distinctly new David Schlicker stained-glass pieces to supplement the Povey Brothers’ originals. Most notably, in sharp contrast to the traditional great

I am a businessman who has been working in Portland for several decades. I have read WW off and on during that time but dismissed it for years as being too jaundiced politically to be

taken seriously.

That changed in 2004 with the Goldschmidt articles reported by Nigel Jaquiss. [Jaquiss won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2005 for his work revealing that Neil Goldschmidt, the former Portland mayor, U.S. transportation secretary and Oregon governor, had raped an underage girl for several years while he was mayor. —Ed.] In my business, commercial real estate brokerage, we hear lots of rumors about sordid affairs, corruption, collusion, theft and all manner of malfeasance. The Goldschmidt story was known around town,

but never unveiled. When WW broke the story about the massive cover-up by The Oregonian, Goldschmidt’s donors, the body politic and, sadly, the victim who was betrayed by her own parents, it finally shed overdue light on all of what we had heard for years.

The “fourth estate” is essentially the only institution we citizens have to tell us the truth. We cannot rely on the clergy, government or private enterprise to police themselves. The proverb “the pen is mightier than the sword” is not hackneyed. The press Is a powerful weapon. We are witnessing just how powerful

it is as we watch WW peel back the onion of La Mota and bring the mighty to their knees. It is a mighty weapon that is often mostly misused by one side or the other to promote their own political dogma or doctrine.

WW has proven it can work independently of influence from other institutions and seek out the truth and motivations behind the headlines we are fed every day. Indeed, its influence may be the building block to return this city to the place we had become accustomed to for years.

As long as WW continues on this path, I urge people to become supporters as I have done.

Friends of Willamette Week are readers who support independent local journalism. Here’s Stu Peterson’s story about why he became a reader and a Friend.

Image Credit: Royal BC Museum

house-turned-betrothal space, she feels compelled to open doors for a diverse array of niche productions catering to all manner of tastes.

“On the public front, a Preservation Artisans Guild [rep] brought thousands of lace pieces for this really detailed presentation on historic styles specific to the era,” Kaeser says. “We have a regular high tea. Each month, Lacy Knightly [stages] high-quality burlesque. Typically, the first Tuesday of every month, Sword & Veil produces these immersive dark art experiences. People come dressed in costumes for tarot readings and different festivities in the various rooms, and they immerse themselves in these kind of…unique dance performances around the property.”

Comparisons to Eyes Wide Shut were neither confirmed nor denied.

“For the deeper dark arts,” she says, laughing, “we try to be as accepting as possible.” JAY HORTON.

BEST SOUNDS

Best David Bowie-Themed Bicycle Ride

Pedalpalooza is a Portland institution, and this summer’s schedule is jam-packed with community rides catering to seemingly every demographic. Portlander Matthew Mathis has taken it upon himself to host an afternoon ride for fans of David Bowie dance remixes followed by a dance party in his spacious backyard, which took place July 8 on Bowie’s half-birthday.

Part of Mathis’ motivation behind hosting the Bowie Deep Dance Cuts Ride is to bring back a bit of the spirit of the now officially discontinued Bowie vs. Prince Rides but with no competitive element.

“They always struck me as needlessly competitive,” he says, “and I feel strongly that tributes should focus on a sole artist’s work.”

Mathis describes himself as the biggest Bowie fan he knows. He has created several hours worth of dance remixes over the years and served as DJ of the backyard banger himself.

“I’ve collected and listened intently to well over 95% of his songs,” adds Mathis. “I’ve read many books on him, and even got to work with him for an hour in 1995 when I’d invited him to where I was employed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.”

One of the reasons for Bowie’s enduring appeal, Mathis says, was his ability to forge meaningful connections with the public.

“It seems every person he ever met liked him and thought of him as extremely intelligent, creative and gracious,” Mathis says. “He was indeed about the most observant and absorbent antenna of a person I’ve ever met and yet quite perfectly normal and other-regarding.” ANDI O’ROURKE.

Best Slice of Appalachia in the Pacific Northwest

lusty and, at times, full of heartbreak, always with more than a hint of Southern drawl. And that washboard she plays is a helluva thing—hats off to whomever came up with that clangy, recycled rhythmic genius of an idea. Hubby Mister Baker is nimble on the lap steel and provides woodsy harmonies. It all adds up to a muggy, moving sound of hardship stuff, Lord stuff, and lots of eerie stuff. They play all over the Portland area, where you can pretend your swanky IPA is a glass of moonshine. LIBBY MOLYNEAUX.

Best $10 Group Therapy

from its beginnings in Olympia, Wash., and Washington, D.C.. to its lasting impact on new generations of artists, like U.K. trio Big Joanie, Russian activist ensemble Pussy Riot, and L.A. teen punks The Linda Lindas.

Along the way, the podcast touches on the importance of zines—self-produced publications like Chainsaw and Gunk that explored sexism, domestic abuse, gender dysphoria, and other issues often reflected in the lyrics of the artists associated with riot grrrl—while also providing some crucial criticisms of the movement.

“ We’re keeping these two ideas in your mind at the same time,” says Julie Sabatier, one of the producers of Starting a Riot. “On the one hand, riot grrrl changed everything about music and culture. It was this huge shift that happened whether you’re aware of it or not. Then on the other hand, it was a product of its time and place, and it was not as inclusive as it could have been for people of color and queer people, specifically.”

Guiding listeners through each episode is Fabi Reyna, an artist and founder of She Shreds, a media company devoted to covering women and gender-nonconforming guitarists. She is the ideal host. Reyna works her history as a music-obsessed teen from Texas who found liberation through the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls into the podcast and draws out key insights about riot grrrl through her interviews with Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail, Team Dresch’s Kaia Wilson, and many others.

“Hearing [Fabi’s] personal story and how it intersected with riot grrrl even a generation later was so fascinating to me,” Sabatier says, “and was very eye-opening to the ripple effects of the movement itself. Yes, it’s a genre of music, but it’s also so much bigger than that.” ROBERT HAM.

No matter the weather, Mojo Holler brings the swamp. The husband-and-wife duo have been making their particular brand of folk-roots music since 2012. They sing about Mississippi boat queens, trains, juke joints, church bells—all things backwoods— with devotion, delicacy and a knack for taking you places where there’s a dog under the porch and the moon shimmers behind the cottonwood trees. (Full disclosure: This writer wouldn’t know a cottonwood tree if it fell on her.) Singer Missi Hasting made the move to Portland from Austin in 2011, but remains true to her East Tennessee upbringing with a voice that’s robust, raspy,

Do you have trouble finding the right words when it comes to expressing your feelings? Does it help if you’re in a room with others who also brighten up when combining voices with total strangers? The words you’re looking for are right there on screen at the Low Bar Chorale singalongs, which happen regularly at Revolution Hall’s Show Bar on Tuesdays, the saddest day of the week, when we could all use some communal joy. After an evening of singing your heart out, you feel—what’s the word?— good. You’ve given your lungs, larynx and vocal cords a healthy workout. And polished pipes are not required. Harmony-meister Ben Landsverk’s good cheer, encouragement and apparent love for helping others will leave you walking on air for days. It’s proof that the power of singing “Tiny Dancer” with strangers is not to be underestimated. Even better: A session costs only $10 (not including the service charge), and this therapist’s office comes with a full bar. LIBBY MOLYNEAUX.

Best Recounting of a Riot

Best Composer

In 2017, artist and former music journalist Mike Long started putting note cards up on bulletin boards around Portland offering to write a song about anyone for the bargain-basement price of $2. A few days later, he got responses from bemused inquirers asking for tunes about themselves. Those satisfied customers started sharing their personal tunes online, and pretty soon Long was fielding more and more requests. Tiny Anthems was born.

Long ’s rates have been upped considerably in the ensuing years (between $300 and $800), and he is a little more selective about whose requests he accepts, but otherwise not much else has changed. His finished songs are charming and quirky and, naturally, rich with details about the chosen subject.

“The process has only deepened and become more interesting to me,” Long says. “The more stories I tell, the more I feel compelled by it.” ROBERT HAM.

Best Sex Talk

Annette Benedetti isn’t a sex therapist. Nor does she claim to be. But listening to her podcast, Locker Room Talk & Shots, sure as hell feels like you’ve just had a breakthrough therapy session, or a meeting of the minds (aka cocktails with the girlies): You do be realizing things. Especially as a woman or, as Benedetti puts it, a “vulva owner.”

Whether you’re curious about increasing your libido, “How to Dominate Your Dude,” trans sex, “What Queer Women REALLY Want in Bed,” kinks, or “The Truth About Dick Size,” this podcast is definitely not just for vulva owners, even though it may have started that way.

Locker Room Talk & Shots launched just after the Trump era— hence its name—in February 2021. Benedetti says she was frustrated by the fact that men could get away with talking so openly and crassly about sex with women, in a way that was obviously predatory, and still excel in their career to the point of becoming president.

“I felt like the only answer to this problem, the discrepancy between the two realities, is for women to start talking about sex openly and sharing our sex stories,” Benedetti says.

For all the energy that continues to be expended tracking the history of popular music, it’s disappointing to learn how little of it has been devoted to riot grrrl, the punk subgenre and feminist art movement born in the ’90s that soon spread globally via the music of Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, and Bratmobile. That’s what makes the arrival of the new podcast Starting a Riot so very welcome.

Co-produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and She Shreds Media, the six-episode series looks at the full scope of riot grrrl,

In addition to the podcast’s, erm, spicier topics—Locker Room Talk & Shots starts conversations about issues like “Sex After Sexual Assault,” which was an episode that was released this past April, Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

Benedetti herself is a survivor of childhood rape, which is something she talks about candidly on her podcast. But that wasn’t always the case. Benedetti, now 49, says she couldn’t even say the word rape, or acknowledge that she was raped, until she was 40 years old.

COURTESY HARLAN SCARISON

COURTESY OPB

JENNIE BAKER PHOTOGRAPHY

3RIVER FLOATS on the

When the weather heats up your thoughts might turn to getting out on the water. River tubing is a perfect way to relax and stay cool, it’s fun for the whole family and you can enjoy being in nature while floating along. But two things no one wants while enjoying the river – crowds and traffic.

The Lower Clackamas River is known for its summer fun and floating because of its close proximity to Portland. However because of this, recreation sites along the river become extremely crowded on hot summer days. One of the most popular stretches is from Barton Park to Carver Park, which can experience long wait lines and a full parking lot.

So try one of these alternative floats for more time on the water and less time stuck in the car.

Wondering what else you can do this summer in Mt. Hood Territory? Check out omht.us/summer for trip ideas, upcoming events and places to stay.

Clackamas

Lower

Milo McIver Boat Ramp to Barton Park

Distance: 6.3 miles

Time: Estimated 3-4 hours

Cost: $5 day-use permit (Milo McIver) + $8 day-use permit (Barton Park)

Restrooms at both parks

Less than a 15 minute drive from Barton Park, Milo McIver State Park is open 7am – 9pm in the summer and is a great alternative route from the busy Barton to Carver float. Start at the lower Milo McIver boat ramp and meander down the Clackamas as you pass towering Douglas firs. Make sure to keep an eye out for eagles and osprey.

Upper Milo

McIver to Lower Milo McIver

Distance: 2.29 Miles

Time: Estimated 1.5 hours

Cost: $5 day-use permit at Milo McIver State Park

Multiple restrooms throughout the park

Located entirely in Milo McIver State Park, this float starts off with a class II+ rapid, but after that, t’s a relaxing float. It’s a popular route for those staying in the park overnight or visitors wanting to do several laps in a day. Please note this can be an advanced float as the first rapid can be challenging for tubers. Recommended floating season is from July through September when the river is calmer.

Carver Park to Riverside Park

Distance: 4.93 miles

Time: Estimated 2-3 hours

Cost: $8 day-use permit (Carver Park)

Restrooms at both parks

Enjoy great views as you pass by farms and watch as the land transitions from rural to urban at the bottom of the Clackamas River watershed. There is no parking fee for Riverside Park, and the drive from Riverside to Carver Park is a short 12 minutes.

What To Bring Tubing

Whether you’re heading out for a short float or a full day, there are a few things you won’t want to forget. Luke Spencer, owner of Clackamas River Outfitters, suggests these items for your next float. And if you need any of these, visit their retail location in Estacada before hitting the water.

• Personal Floatation Device

• Inner tube or raft

• Paddle (if using a raft)

• Whistle

• Drinking water

• Sunscreen

• Sun hat

• Sun glasses

What You “Otter” Do

When on the water you “otter” be mindful of other groups tubing, and be sure to keep any trash with you so it can be disposed of properly at the end of your trip. And before heading out, you “otter” make sure you have a plan for a shuttle or second vehicle to get back to where you left your car.

• Snacks

• Dry bag

• First aid kit

• Trash bag

“My story is so common. So many women and people with vulvas have been sexually assaulted,” Benedetti says. “And on top of the prevalence of that is the shame that we experience within, you know, just having sex.”

Navigating the shame our culture places on sex, let alone as someone who has experienced sexual assault, while simultaneously attempting to heal one’s relationship with sex and learn how to engage in pleasurable sex is a dichotomy that is so rarely discussed publicly.

“Because how could I possibly be a survivor but still also really love sex, right?” Benedetti jokes (sort of).

For the self-proclaimed “not-your-pencil-skirt podcast host,” diving headfirst into topics that some may deem uncomfortable—from BDSM to spanking to sex toys—has played a huge role in owning her sexuality and erasing that shame.

“I literally knew nothing when I started this,” says Benedetti, whose podcast, now in the top 10% of downloads on database Listen Notes, has grown from hosting her friends to experts, authors and therapists. “My mind’s been blown,” she adds.

And for any prospective new listeners who may be overwhelmed by the language or subject matter, Benedetti wants to encourage you to push through. Give it a minute, get into the conversation, and try to learn and grow without judgment. Who knows? Maybe you, too, can learn how to have 365 orgasms in 365 days. (Yes, she did that, and yes, she deserves some sort of award.)

Because with every quiet download; every cisgender, heterosexual male (the podcast’s secret top demographic) reaching out to thank her; every person becoming just a little bit more comfortable and confident in their sexuality—Locker Room Talk & Shots is, as it claims, fighting the patriarchy, one orgasm at a time. SHANNON DAEHNKE.

Best High Notes

As MendelssohnsPDX celebrates its first anniversary this July, Portland’s only classical music-themed nightspot has managed to cultivate a loyal following among the orchestral set while neatly countering just about every newcomer’s expectations. Patrons largely ignore the house wine list and instead knock back cutely named trad cocktails, an eclectic playlist veers more toward jazz and folk than string quartets, and the narrow passageway leading performers to the elevated stage rather blatantly disproves the one thing Americans feel they know about the bar’s most popular weekly attraction: More often than not, Operaoke’s over when the thin fellow sings.

“ We always felt minimalism that accentuates surroundings would set the right atmosphere,” says Mendelssohn’s founder Lisa Lipton, executive director of the Newport Symphony and direct descendant of her bar’s titular composer. “In a spirited bar, that manifests as gold tones, whiskey-based drinks and antiquities indicative of music.”

Cabinets above the bar formerly holding the top-shelf liquors of past tenant Sidecar 11 now display a motley assemblage of those instruments—a metallic marching band clarinet, a pair of Wagner tubas donated by a local composer.

“They ’re all functional instruments that you can take off the wall and play, and that actually happens on brass nights,” Lipton says. “Maybe you’ve played in middle school or high school. Even if you don’t know how, we could teach you a thing or two. Most people are just excited to share whatever classical music means to them. We’re all pretty accepting.”

However cordial and welcoming the regulars may be, Operaoke remains a daunting proposition, and not just because architectural constraints forced Lipton to erect Mendelssohn’s stage 8 feet off the ground. Begun as something of a lark last autumn, the event has steadily grown in popularity, and each week now sees the cream of area musical theater professionals, golden-throated grad students, touring companies, and local luminaries of all stripes—Zachariah Galatis, the Oregon Symphony’s solo piccolo, lilted Sondheim during our visit—test their pipes with live accompaniment from ever-forgiving pianist Colin Shepard.

“ We want to provide a space where you can sing without stress,” Shepard explains, “and, for the most part, people [choose] their very favorite arias: Mozart, Verdi, ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ from Puccini, audience pleasers, the really beautiful stuff. Rarely do they need to run through something crazy, but I take it as a challenge. I can sight read most everything. On opera night, people usually do opera, but if you’re feeling ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ come down here and kill it!” JAY HORTON.

Best Use of AI

When it comes to holiday cards, the Brooks family goes big. Like, “inventing a ’70s nature cult big”—dressing up for a photo and including a QR code to jokingly suggest that converts donate.

But last year, Rob Brooks ran out of card time, and the creative director at Lake Oswego’s Fort West marketing agency had to scratch that itch the week after Christmas. To create a new kind of family memento, he gave artificial intelligence a whirl for the first time.

“I don’t even drink anymore, and it was as if I was hungover because I was up all night messing with it,” Brooks says of his debut experience with the generative art program Midjourney.

The result was a series of locally viral images that portrayed Brooks, his wife Monica and their then-3-year-old twins Julian and Asher alongside mythological forest beasts—a creature gallery inspired by Where the Wild Things Are and Guillermo del Toro movies.

The photos landed on Instagram instead of friends’ refrigerators, but the response was surprising. The family wound up on

the local news, and Brooks wrote a LinkedIn essay about AI that’s been read more than 100,000 times. He received invitations to collaborate from Intel’s marketing team and a former Simpsons artist.

Most strikingly, reality blurred for many of the beholders. Brooks estimates he probably received 100 messages asking some version of “Hey, where can I take my kids to see these sculptures?”

While those parents may be slightly disappointed to visit Portland’s Marshall Park or the North Fork Nehalem River—the sites of the photos—and not find any blue Sasquatches or bipedal fish emissaries, viewers likely also didn’t comprehend the pre- and post-production that contributed to the images’ believability.

With Midjourney, Brooks could scrape every fiber of the internet to generate creatures, giving the bot commands about movie references and cryptozoology to shape the design. But once a mythological beast was in progress, Brooks would venture into nature with his kids and Sony DSLR to shoot photos in ideal lighting.

Then, he spent hours in Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom trying to match the creature design and presentation with the setting’s ambience—the deal-sealer often being how the textured scales and fur mesh credibly with the wet shadows of Oregon’s wintertime woods.

The undertaking pushed Brooks into a position of thinking and speaking often about AI, ironically perhaps, because he says it was “only 10% of the process for my own project but 80% of the reason it gained so much attention.” Most crucially, Brooks hopes to preserve human skill and ingenuity around the technology. “ While craft evolves, it’s really important that we evolve with it and figure out how to not make it replace people but enhance us.”

While Brooks found the initial online response overwhelming enough to simply let the photos be, he says his family may “meet” a new set of creatures in the summer sunlight.

Certainly, these images are evoking childlike wonder from adults. Whether they can capture actual children’s imaginations is a tougher ask—at least as far as the two kids in Brooks’ photos are concerned.

“My [twins] look at the screen and are like, “OK, I want to play with my truck.” CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER.

Best Body Slams

Once a month, a mostly abandoned-looking Eagles lodge just off of North Lombard Street transforms into a raucous arena filled with screaming pro wrestling fans, cheering on stars like The Unbelievable Jaiden, “La Bruja” Abigail Warren and The Homicidal Artist Drexl.

Portland wrestling is back, and this time it’s queerer and more

PHOTOS COURTESY @ROBB_BLAH_BLAH

diverse than ever.

The city was a historic wrestling foothold starting in 1925, says Portlander Brian Bell, who hosts the podcast LGBT in the Ring and writes about LGBTQ pro wrestling for the news website Outsports. That year, Herb Owen founded Pacific Northwest Wrestling, which eventually developed into a locally televised force, featuring talent that included “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Jesse “The Body” Ventura.

But after the program was canceled in 1991, the joke was that the Pacific Northwest was a black hole for wrestling, Bell says. In the past decade or so, however, two local promoters, DOA Pro Wrestling and Prestige Wrestling, have held monthly events, and the scene is rebuilding.

This time around, the rules are: no homophobia, no transphobia, no racism and no sexism. The performers are trans, cisgender, nonbinary, and a whole lot of fun to watch.

“Expect to be around a couple hundred loud and rowdy people who are there for what they are presenting,” Bell says. “Pro wrestling has been demystified; everyone knows it’s predetermined. Because of the artistic nature of it, people suspend their disbelief. It’s like going to the movies, except you’re encouraged to scream.”

Now that local pro wrestling has grown more inclusive, Bell says wrestlers’ characters may incorporate their identities directly, while others may have a completely different persona not tied to who they are at all.

“That’s the beautiful thing about it: As the number of people involved in pro wrestling has grown, so, too, has the form of expression,” they say. “I’ve been to DOA shows where there are matches between two queer men and crowds are shouting for them to make out with each other. Historically in pro wrestling, that would be something people would have been very against and booed.”

Now, Bell says, you’ll see matches between genders and nonbinary wrestlers. And there are still plenty of old-school pro wrestling personalities like the tag-teaming, Pit Viper sunglasses-wearing Hammer Brothers. A recent DOA event featured longtime independent wrestler Big Ugly on one card and his daughter, “La Bruja” Abigail Warren, who is a trans woman, on another.

“It’s now very accepting not just for LGBTQ people but marginalized people,” they say. “It’s expanding the idea of what a pro wrestling match can be.” ANDREA DAMEWOOD.

Best Wheels

Sure Portland’s bike culture is cool, but have you seen our sickass vans?

We’re not talking about those $100,000 fancy-pants #vanlife Mercedes you see hogging the left lane, but like vaaaaaaannnns, man. Those vans that make you wanna crack open a cold one, hit the road, shag on the shag carpet in the back, and just live the easy life. We’re talking custom paint jobs, swivel captain’s chairs and big ol’ bubble submarine windows.

In the ’60s and ’70s, you could buy vans with custom options like that, says Nick Schlabach, a member of Portland’s Rolling Death Van Club. “They weren’t work vans,” he says. “They were made to haul around motorcycles and women.”

Nowadays, Portland vanners often buy up vintage work vans to customize themselves. Schlabach, for example, has a 1974 Chevy G10, formerly of the Portland Public Schools fleet, which he’s painted Spanish gold, painted “Spanish Fly” in large letters on one side, with the image of an inebriated fly. Instead of a sliding door, he installed a gullwing blast door, and a pair of amorous flies are painted inside the gas tank opening.

“It’s kind of trying to recapture the romanticism of the good parts of the late ’60s, early ’70s with vans,” he says. “You can sleep wherever you park, party in it all day long, hang out. You can get in it, point it in a direction and say I’m going to drive to fucking nowhere today.”

Schlabach, 37, is one of about 15 members of the Rolling Death Van Club, one of several exclusive van-focused groups in Portland. There’s also the Cosmic Wheelers Van Club and the Grim Creepers, which specializes in 4x4 vans. Not just anyone with a van can join: You’ve gotta be approved by the gang in order to hang. There are more generalized clubs, including the NorthWest Van Council, founded in 1977, that are open to anyone with a vintage van.

“ We are the 2% that ruins it for all the traditional vanners by doing hot rod shit, doing burnouts, listening to Black Sabbath, drinking and partying and playing music late into the night,”

Schlabach says.

Of course, club or no, Portland is replete with sweet vans that are almost like landmarks for their neighborhoods: Hawthorne is haunted by both a Charlie Brown van and one with the Wu-Tang Clan symbol on the side; North Portland has The Crawdaddy; while The Brick Van, complete with a second-story loft, lives in Milwaukie. (This author chronicles cool vans on Instagram at @portland_vans.)

One of the best times to see all of the area’s finest will be at the Rolling Death Van Club’s annual Show and Shine next month. Set to run from 11:11 am to 4:20 pm on Aug. 26 at Level Brewing’s flagship, admission is free for anyone who wants to show off their van as well as for those who want to check it all out.

Of vanning, Schlabach says: “It’s a really cool way to express yourself in a really dumb way. Frogs, especially male frogs, will sit in a drainage tube, and ribbit in the tube so they ribbit louder than all the other frogs out there. That is what a van is: It’s an echo chamber for your personality, for your style, for everything you wanna reflect to everyone else. It’s a tube you can have sex in.”

He then paused, and thought about his van, Spanish Fly, and added, “It’s like putting horny goat weed on the side of a van. It’s like gas station boner pills, which, now that I think about it, doesn’t reflect my personality a ton, but it’s funny. It’s in the spirit.” ANDREA DAMEWOOD.

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL RAINES

VAN LIFE: Scenes from Portland’s Rolling Death Van Club meet-up.

Best Birder

In the last year and a half, one local bird watcher has taken the city by storm. Portlander Eric Carlson—also known by his birding alias and pen name, Seymore Gulls—has gained renown for his bird-watching social media accounts and bird-watching walks.

Carlson is the author of Neighborhood Birding 101, a guide for beginners and casual practitioners, and he has two more books on the way this September: Backyard Birds West and Backyard Birds East. He first started bird watching more than 10 years ago when he and a close friend were looking for a new hobby.

“One of the things was, ‘Let’s go pick up bird watching,’” Carlson says. “And then I got super into it because of the Pokémon aspect, like ‘Gotta catch ’em all.’”

Over the next couple of years, Carlson’s interest in bird watching waxed and waned as he looked for groups to join but struggled to find one that he enjoyed. Eventually, while working as a kayaking guide and pointing out cool birds to clients, he realized he could create the kind of group he was looking for.

“ You don’t have to know everything to be a good guide,” Carlson says. “You just have to be excited about something and help people have a good experience.”

Then, when COVID-19 prompted many people to pick up a new hobby to stay occupied during lockdown, Carlson actually noticed that more young people began to get interested in bird watching, and he wanted to help make the activity more accessible.

“During COVID, everybody got into birding,” Carlson says. “After the big, ‘The whole world’s falling apart, what do I do?’ I started making infographics.”

He began posting that data on social media to help others identify local birds. Simple and straightforward, the graphics include text about and lines pointing to distinguishing features on bird photos, roughly half of which Carlson took himself.

After finding some success, Carlson expanded to TikTok in January 2022, and a video of a Florida scrub jay touching down on his head went viral. His account blew up and now boasts more than 50,000 followers.

“I went to Florida specifically for this thing called a Florida scrub jay and it landed on my head,” Carlson says. “People loved it. That’s when my TikTok blew up.” JAKE MOORE.

Best Rising Theater Company

Everybody knows Ted Rooney—but for many different reasons. Portland playgoers know him from roles at Artists Rep, Profile Theatre and beyond. Insomniacs know him from a sleep aid commercial, where he played Abraham Lincoln and talked to a beaver. Gilmore Girls die-hards know him as Morey Dell, the ultra-chill husband of Babette (Rooney’s fellow Portland native Sally Struthers).

Yet after spending much of his career center stage and in front of the camera, Rooney is at his most passionate when he describes his work as the artistic director of 21ten Theatre, a nonprofit company based in Southeast Portland.

“Basically, I realized everything I’d done up to this point in my life was about getting ready for this,” Rooney says. “It’s a weird thing—my voice is quavering because I get emotional when I talk about this. I’m all in, man.”

In 2021, 21ten took over the former location of the Shoebox Theater. Rooney and co-founder Brooke Totman started teaching acting classes there, and 21ten grew into a formidable company, beginning with its 2022 production of Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’ Matt & Ben (a satirical peek behind the scenes of Good Will Hunting).

Since then, Rooney has helmed multiple plays at 21ten, including Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild. And this fall, a to-be-announced comedy will grace the theater’s stage, allowing Rooney to continue working within the intimate, 40-seat blackbox space at 21ten that he adores.

“On a small stage, it’s more filmic,” he says. “You can see the thoughts of the actors.” BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON.

Best Haunting

You get the urge for a midnight mousse, so you amble down to the Pix-O-Matic all-night dessert vending machines. You’re inserting a credit card when you get the feeling that somebody’s watching. There, behind wooden slats: Seven grinning skeletons

are seated around a picnic table, surrounded by empty bottles of Champagne. One ghoul wears a Russian fur hat with a “Moscow Mitch” campaign button. Dance pop plays overhead. It looks like the afterparty to the Last Supper.

The year-round tableau started as a Halloween display, says Pix-O-Matic founder and pastry chef Cheryl Wakerhauser.

“They got off their shift on Halloween in 2020 and they haven’t left yet,” she says. “I keep telling them to go home.”

Wakerhauser, who has mostly physically recovered from a dog mauling that made headlines in April, says she delights in adding unexpected treats to the 24-hour vending machines: Dinosaur nightlights. Cat-stripe socks. Macarons for dogs. She says the skeleton party is just another surprise: “You walk up, you’re not expecting to see that and you just start laughing.” AARON MESH.

BEST CANNABIS

Best Edibles Made by an Actual Weed Icon

Take, for instance, the Oregon Cannabis Association’s Summer Fair or Oregon Leaf’s annual awards ceremony. These events were hugely successful, not just by promoter standards, but communitywise as well, and in an era defined by empty office buildings and their desolate parking lots, The Redd shows us what is possible when even the most straightforward patch of pavement is transformed into a celebration station. Take note, struggling brick-and-mortars: The Redd is evidence that, if you give the stoners a chance, they will turn your real estate into moneymaking party pods that, against all odds, are remarkably respectful and chill (because, weed). BRIANNA

WHEELER.

Best Handmade Alternative to Rolling Papers

Laurie Wolf was already a weed legend well before launching Laurie + Mary Jane, one of Oregon’s most popular cannabis edibles companies. Wolf spent years as a recipe writer for legacy cannabis publications like High Times and Dope, has published multiple cannabis lifestyle books, and even blessed the city with a foodie guide that features a whole chapter on brunch. And as if all those laurels weren’t enough, she launched her own line of edibles, Laurie + Mary Jane, with her daughter-in-law Mary, in 2014.

Laurie + Mary Jane’s edibles stand apart from most of their shelfmates for a very simple reason: Rather than cutting corners by using cheapo isolates, the company makes products with full-spectrum coconut oil. That means these edibles are true culinary treasures that taste like they came from a bakery— something both pothead foodies and cheap-high chasers can appreciate. BRIANNA WHEELER.

Best Consumption-Friendly Event Space

It’s not so much that The Redd on Salmon Street is some utopian event space that overtly sanctions on-premises cannabis use. Yet at any given weed-themed occurrence at the Buckman neighborhood venue, doinks smolder freely, dab rigs are used as centerpieces, and there are bong rips from various corners.

The Redd is really just a large, minimally renovated industrial building with a big-ass parking lot. Here’s the thing, though: As the most visible and accessible place celebrating cannabis, it sets a cool new standard for what urban lots and vast warehouses can be (aside from cart pods and storage facilities).

Cannathusiasts who prefer doinks to dabs and spliffs to bong hits already know that traditional papers, blunt wraps and novelty metallics are hardly required equipment for rolling one up. In fact, founder of Royal Rose PDX Ciara Waters knows that the best rolling papers aren’t actually papers at all; they are the petals of the city’s signature blossom, a rose.

Rose petal rolling papers aren’t a new concept. In fact, many traditional spliff smokers who roll their cannabis up with therapeutic or uplifting botanical blends are well aware that flower petal papers are an opulent yet accessible way to level up their cannabis.

“I wanted to create a product reflecting my love of this city,” Waters says. “I never really liked the other rolling papers, and I needed a better, healthier alternative—something that would add a little color and smells good, too.”

Anyone who’s ever had an especially paper-heavy drag on a pre-roll can relate: The dry inhale of a Zig-Zag simply does not compare to the silky-sweet perfume that rose petal rolling paper offers.

What makes Waters’ rolling papers particularly exceptional is the intention behind their creation. More than just a handful of garden petals hastily dried, Royal Rose wraps are organic, food-grade, and meticulously hand-pressed to create fragrant roll-ups in colors familiar to anyone who’s frequented any of our city’s many rose gardens. Stoners and rose enthusiasts alike may recognize the delicate yellow petals of the Ray (of Sunshine) wrap, or the moody violet layers of Purple Passion. Even the sensual crimson hue of Mad Love and the rainbow of canary, pink and red in Sunrise are reminiscent of the bold, vibrant blossoms that decorate our curbsides and park blocks.

Royal Rose offers more than a curated collection of carefully cured roses; customers can also find an all-natural therapeutic rose oil that’s formulated to reduce pain and inflammation, soothe irritated skin, slow signs of aging and more. Other featured products include an herbal smoking blend that can be rolled with or without cannabis as well as rose petals that can be added to tea, water or a bath. No matter what you end up buying, though, the purchase will support Waters’ community-minded goals.

“It is important for me to have a sustainable business that is not going to create more garbage,” she says. “Everything about my business is eco-friendly. The material used in production is recyclable, reusable, biodegradable and compostable.”

Despite the delicate nature of rose petal papers, Waters describes her wraps as both long lasting and durable.

“Most people ask if they have to keep it in the fridge. The answer is no,” she explains. “There is no shelf life because pressed petals last forever.” BRIANNA WHEELER.

COURTESY LAURIE+MARY JANE

COURTESY ROYAL ROSE PDX

BEST STYLE

Best Hat

“ When we’re working with these smaller nonprofits…$1,000, $5,000 or $10,000 to them is a really big deal.”

Adding to the good vibes: The entire CAMP line is Climate Neutral Certified. The sunglass frames, for example, are made of plant-based bioplastic, a material that comes from sources like algae, sugarcane, or used cooking oil. LEE VANKIPURAM.

BEST WORDS

Best Film Book Library

Alison Hallett could only recommend Mark Harris’ book Pictures at a Revolution—about the seismic shifts in late-’60s Hollywood—so many times before a bigger idea sparked.

“

What if I made it possible for people to read that book?” says the Hollywood Theatre’s education director. “What if I made it possible for people to read all the books?”

The happy hunger for context found in Harris’ pages is mirrored in Movie Madness’ new library—two shelves of film books adjacent to the iconic video store’s checkout counter. Accountholders can check out material from the approximately 150-title catalog for free and keep the books for up to 21 days.

There is something undeniably romantic about clutching a stylish sun hat as you travel, the promise of vacation at your fingertips. But what’s even better? Being able to smash that sucker into your suitcase and not worry about losing it at the airport.

Milliner Dayna Pinkham spent a decade crafting a packable travel hat for customers at her downtown boutique and workshop. The result of all that smashing, pinching, rolling and cutting is the Pinkham Traveler, a waxed-straw hat that folds so flat it comes packaged in an oversized envelope.

Last year, the Traveler won the prestigious and internationally recognized Red Dot Design Award, alongside a variety of products, such as a Maxi-Cosi stroller, a Breville espresso machine and a Ferrari.

“It’s the ultimate,” Pinkham says. “Whoever thought a hatmaker could achieve global recognition?”

The Traveler comes in nine colors and retails for $295. Customers can buy it off the shelf at Pinkham Millinery on Southwest Washington Street near 10th Avenue (make sure to pet the shop greeter Sam, a sweet beagle mix), or you can customize it online.

Pinkham has a tall stack of Traveler prototypes in her store. All those misses led her to figure out how to make the hat collapse down, origami-style, the same way each time, and pop up into its full shape right out of the envelope.

Up next, Pinkham, 65, is hoping to teach new milliners the craft as she redirects her focus to custom and couture hats again.

“I don’t believe I’ve yet made my favorite hat,” she says. “That propels me forward.” RACHEL SASLOW.

Best Campout Accessory

Not everybody sees the world through rose-colored glasses. Some people prefer lenses the crystal blue of Crater Lake, or the rusty red of Utah’s Delicate Arch. Anyway, that’s what Taylor Murray is betting.

Murray is creative director for Shwood Eyewear, which this April launched what it calls “the capsule collection” of CAMP sunglasses. The four frames, each $79, are themed around four national parks: Arches, Crater Lake, Glacier and Joshua Tree. The company donates 5% of proceeds from each sale to environmental nonprofits—the money from the blue frames goes to Friends of Crater Lake, for example.

“It’s really about the parks, the customers who visit the park, and the connection there,” Murray says.

Before the library ’s debut in March, Hallett seeded it with books by local authors, like former Oregonian film critic Shawn Levy and Melissa Maerz, who wrote 2020’s Alright Alright Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. But the rest were community donated, including recently a few dozen texts from the estate of late Portland film archivist Dennis Nyback. (The library is still accepting donations.)

In a small but mighty collection (relative to the store’s 90,000-plus movies) of oral histories, film theory tomes and coffee-table beauties, the most-borrowed book is Lynch on Lynch, suggesting the intensity of cinephilia in the air at Movie Madness.

Given that enthusiasm, Hallett says, the mission of the library naturally mirrors that of the store turned nonprofit: “Encourage people to geek out about movies.” CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER.

Best Cowboy Poet

Tom Swearingen didn’t really consider himself a poet when the St. Paul Rodeo—long deemed one of the finest in the sport—came calling in 2013, looking not just for a poet but a cowboy poet to perform at the Marion County event. The lifelong Oregonian didn’t really know how to react to the request.

“They said, ‘I understand you’re a poet,’” he recounts. “And I said, ‘Well, barely.’”

Since then, Swearingen has released three albums and an entire book of verses, all of which have been nominated for or won International Western Music Association awards. On top of all that, he was named the organization’s Male Poet of the Year in 2019 and 2022, high honors for someone who never thought himself much of a wordsmith.

Cowboy poetry has a long history, starting over 100 years ago during long cattle drives. As ranchers and cowboys spent days guiding livestock across wide swaths of land, they would make up songs and poems to keep their minds occupied. Even as large cattle drives began to disappear, the art form continued on as a way to remember a part of America’s past.

Swearingen had always appreciated these poems and the bits of American history and culture within—he first discovered the genre by watching poets like Baxter Black and Waddie Mitchell perform on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in the mid-’80s. But writing poems was never something he planned to

COURTESY PINKHAM TRAVELER

try himself.

“I did not wake up one day and say I am going to be a cowboy poet,” Swearingen says. “I wrote about a friend and then it struck a nerve with some folks.”

Nearly 15 years ago, that close companion, who had spent much of his life ranching, suddenly died, and Swearingen decided to share his thoughts through cowboy poetry.

“It was really well received,” he says. “Some of [the] family and friends were like, ‘I didn’t know you were a poet.’” When Swearingen told them he wasn’t, their reply was simple: “Well, what was that?”

For his own enjoyment, Swearingen continued to write poems about his experiences and thoughts when word spread about his small performance to a saddlemaker at the St. Paul Rodeo, and the rest snowballed from there. Swearingen agreed to perform and his poetry began to take off. Two days after the rodeo, he got another call from someone looking for a cowboy poet.

He continued booking appearances before the pandemic put a halt to all of that, but COVID didn’t pause his work entirely. During the suspension of live shows in 2020, Swearingen compiled a collection of nearly 50 of his most popular works and released a book. Now, he’s back to performing regularly, with events scheduled in September and October at Wine Down Ranch in Prineville, The Dalles’ Granada Theatre, and Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Wash.

“I don’t want to say it’s easy to write cowboy poetry...it’s tempting to turn that into easy poetry,” Swearingen says. “But I’m writing about lives. I’ve written about friends that I’ve lost or horses that I’ve lost. More meaningful things.” JAKE MOORE.

Best Beat Poet

The state of Oregon has had six poets laureate since 2006, when new funds became available to reinstate the position. That person is appointed by and serves “at the pleasure of the Governor.” Now, we also have our first Beat Poet Laureate, selected by the nonprofit National Beat Poetry Foundation…and definitely not serving at the pleasure of elected officials. St. Johns resident and community activist Mimi German is perhaps best known locally for sharing her poetry during City Council public testimony periods, where it wasn’t always welcome (particularly by Commissioner Chloe Eudaly).

But to German, who also works with and advocates for members of Portland’s houseless community, it was a form of protest, if not revolution—firmly in the Beat tradition.

“I’m an out-of-the-box poet, as I think people were in the ’50s and ’60s: Kerouac and the whole scene, Burroughs, Cassady, Ginsberg,” she says, “writing poetry against the state, against the system, in order to have what’s really important heard. For me, poetry is really about what is happening on the street level—what’s happening in local government, what’s happening for people who are suffering in the state and in the country. And I think that the people at the National Beat Poetry Foundation felt that in the work.”

The Beat Poet Laureate honors began in 2015 and include poets at the state, national and international levels. There are also several lifetime laureates, including musician David Amram (a peer and collaborator of Kerouac’s), Jami Cassady Ratto (Neal Cassady’s daughter), and Johnny Depp. Nominations can be made by anybody but typically come from within the community (“in order to be considered to be a Beat Poet Laureate, you must show interest in our group and social media pages,” according to the foundation’s website), with a committee of seven anonymous people, as well as past and present laureates, also participating in the selection process.

German’s first anthology, Beneath the Gravel Weight of Stars, came out in 2022, while her second, Where Grasses Bend—written over the past three years of protest, pandemic and rural isolation—is due out in September. She’s also co-editing an anthology that will feature the work of both housed and houseless poets.

“ Whether you call it political art or political poetry, if it’s about the people, I feel that’s just really important,” German says. “To help somebody understand what it is that we are experiencing, I think that’s part of the job of an artist…if there is a job. Like, what is this ship that we are on? How do we understand that? And so we go to art. We go to music. We go to the poets.” JASON COHEN.

Year after year, we trust you all to use your arsenal of knowledge to help us nail down the establishments—and more—that are near and dear to the city.

This year, you did not disappoint and channeled the energy of a city with so much to offer into our annual poll. We received hundreds of thousands of votes from people passionate about Portland, who care deeply about their local food, businesses and services. In this section, you’ll find more than a guidebook to the place we all call home. Rather, our Best ofPortland Readers’ Poll is a celebration of us, and of you, and of the best people, places, foods, goods and services that make Portland what it is. Special thanks to our sponsor, New Seasons Market. Anyone shopping their aisles knows they care deeply about supporting local.

BEST OF PORTLAND READERS’ POLL 2023

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

BEST ART GALLERY

First Place: Portland Art Museum

SECOND PLACE: Alberta Street Gallery

RUNNER-UP: Nucleus Portland

BEST BAND/MUSICAL GROUP

First Place: Pink Martini

SECOND PLACE: Y La Bamba

RUNNER-UP: The Dandy Warhols

BEST BIKE EVENT

First Place: Portland World Naked Bike Ride

SECOND PLACE: Pedalpolooza

RUNNER-UP: Portland Sunday Parkways Presented by Kaiser Permanente

BEST COMEDY CLUB

First Place: Helium Comedy Club

SECOND PLACE: Funhouse Lounge

RUNNER-UP: Kickstand Comedy in the Park

BEST DATE NIGHT ACTIVITY

First Place: Hollywood Theatre

SECOND PLACE: Sinferno Cabaret

RUNNER-UP: DIY BAR

BEST KARAOKE

First Place: Alibi Bar & Grill

SECOND PLACE: Devils Point Stripparaoke

RUNNER-UP: Baby Ketten Klub

BEST MOVIE THEATER

First Place: Hollywood Theatre

SECOND PLACE: McMenamins Bagdad Theater & Pub

RUNNER-UP: Laurelhurst Theater

BEST MUSEUM

First Place: OMSI

SECOND PLACE: Portland Art Museum

RUNNER-UP: The Freakybuttrue Peculiarium and Museum

BEST MUSIC FESTIVAL

First Place: Waterfront Blues Festival

SECOND PLACE: Pickathon

RUNNER-UP: PDX Jazz Festival

BEST MUSIC VENUE

First Place: Revolution Hall

SECOND PLACE: Doug Fir Lounge

RUNNER-UP: Mississippi Studios

BEST NEIGHBORHOOD EVENT

First Place: Portland Farmers Market at PSU

SECOND PLACE: Mississippi Street Fair

RUNNER-UP: Last Thursday on Alberta Street

BEST OUTDOOR EVENT

First Place: Portland Pride

Waterfront Festival and Parade

SECOND PLACE: Portland Saturday Farmers Market

RUNNER-UP: Waterfront Blues Festival

BEST PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

First Place: Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

SECOND PLACE: Keller Auditorium

RUNNER-UP: Portland Center Stage

BEST PLACE TO DANCE

First Place: The Coffin Club

SECOND PLACE: The Goodfoot

RUNNER-UP: McMenamins Crystal Ballroom

BEST RADIO STATION

First Place: Oregon Public

Broadcasting

SECOND PLACE: Shady Pines Radio

RUNNER-UP: KBOO

BEST STRIP CLUB

First Place: Devils Point

SECOND PLACE: Kit Kat Club

RUNNER-UP: Mary’s Club

BEST THEATER COMPANY

First Place: Portland Center Stage

SECOND PLACE: Artists Repertory Theatre

RUNNER-UP: Funhouse Lounge

BEST TRIVIA NIGHT

First Place: Untapped Trivia

SECOND PLACE: Stumptown Trivia & Bingo

RUNNER-UP: Bridgetown Trivia

BEST VISUAL ARTIST

First Place: Mike Bennett

SECOND PLACE: Saint Sasha

RUNNER-UP: Henk

Pender

PEOPLE

BEST BLAZER

First Place: Damian Lillard

SECOND PLACE: Anfernee Simons

RUNNER-UP: Shaedon Sharpe

BEST COMEDIAN

First Place: Nariko Ott

SECOND PLACE: Maggie Magnolia

RUNNER-UP: Adam Pasi

BEST DJ

First Place: DJ Wicked

SECOND PLACE: DJ Aurora

RUNNER-UP: Phoenix Rising

BEST LOCAL CELEBRITY

First Place: Darcelle XV

SECOND PLACE: The Unipiper

RUNNER-UP: John “Elvis” Schroder

BEST LOCAL INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT

First Place: @wtfportland

SECOND PLACE: @sloppyjopdx

RUNNER-UP: @lewis.clark.explorer.cats

BEST MASCOT

First Place: Dillon the Pickle

SECOND PLACE: Timber Joey

RUNNER-UP: Sasquatch

BEST POLITICAL FIGURE

First Place: Ron Wyden

SECOND PLACE: Tina Kotek

RUNNER-UP: Jo Ann Hardesty

BEST STRIPPER

First Place: Kiwi Salad

SECOND PLACE: Phoenix Rising

RUNNER-UP: Kat Van Dayum

BEST THORN

First Place: Christine Sinclair

SECOND PLACE: Bella Bixby

RUNNER-UP: Sophia Smith

BEST TIMBER

First Place: Diego Chará

SECOND PLACE: Yimmi Chará

RUNNER-UP: Dairon Asprilla

CANNABIS

BEST BUDTENDER

First Place: Sabrina at Nectar

SECOND PLACE: Jack at TJ’s on Powell

RUNNER-UP: Serge at Mongoose Cannabis Co.

BEST CBD STORE

First Place: Home Grown

Apothecary & Dispensary

SECOND PLACE: East Fork Cultivars

RUNNER-UP: MindRite

BEST CANNABIS

DELIVERY SERVICE

First Place: Kush Cart

SECOND PLACE: Dutchie

RUNNER-UP: Potland

BEST CANNABIS FARM

First Place: Meraki Gardens

SECOND PLACE: East Fork Cultivars

RUNNER-UP: Utokia

BEST CANNABIS STRAIN

First Place: Blue Dream

SECOND PLACE: Mac Daddy

RUNNER-UP: Super Boof

BEST CANNABISINFUSED PRODUCT

First Place: Wyld Gummies

SECOND PLACE: Mule Extracts Infused Pre-Roll

RUNNER-UP: Luminous Botanicals

BEST DAB

First Place: Higher Cultures

SECOND PLACE: Mule Extracts

RUNNER-UP: Verdant Leaf Live Rosin

BEST DISPENSARY

First Place: Electric Lettuce

SECOND PLACE: Nectar Markets

RUNNER-UP: Home Grown Apothecary & Dispensary

BEST EDIBLE PRODUCT

First Place: Wyld Gummies

SECOND PLACE: Drops Gummies

RUNNER-UP: Grön Chocolate

BEST ORGANIC SELECTION

First Place: Home Grown Apothecary & Dispensary

SECOND PLACE: Nectar Cannabis

RUNNER-UP: Meraki Gardens

BEST TINCTURE

First Place: Mule Extracts

Raspberry Lemonade 1:1 CBG Muleshine

SECOND PLACE: Luminous Botanicals

RUNNER-UP: Peak Extracts Tinctures

BEST TOPICAL

First Place: High Desert Pure

SECOND PLACE: Luminous Botanicals

RUNNER-UP: Empower

DRINK

BEST BARTENDER

First Place: Xander Almeida at Star Theater

SECOND PLACE: Ember Creeps at Mary’s Club

RUNNER-UP: Courtney Bree at Devils Point

BEST BEER SELECTION ON TAP

First Place: Belmont Station

SECOND PLACE: John’s Marketplace

RUNNER-UP: Loyal Legion

BEST BLOODY MARY

First Place: Jam On Hawthorne

SECOND PLACE: Space Room Lounge

RUNNER-UP: Broder Nord

BEST BREWERY

First Place: Breakside Brewery

SECOND PLACE: Baerlic Brewing

RUNNER-UP: Great Notion

BEST CIDERY

First Place: Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider

SECOND PLACE: Portland Cider House

RUNNER-UP: 2 Towns Ciderhouse

BEST COCKTAIL BAR

First Place: Victoria Bar

SECOND PLACE: Hale Pele

BEST COFFEE

First Place: Coava Coffee

Roasters

SECOND PLACE: Deadstock Coffee

Roasters

RUNNER-UP: Nossa Familia

Coffee

BEST DISTILLERY

First Place: Freeland Spirits

SECOND PLACE: Wild Roots Spirits

RUNNER-UP: Straightaway Cocktails

BEST DIVE BAR

First Place: Reel M Inn

SECOND PLACE: Sandy Hut

RUNNER-UP: My Father’s Place

BEST HAPPY HOUR

First Place: Gold Dust

Meridian

SECOND PLACE: Aalto Lounge

RUNNER-UP: Dante’s

BEST KOMBUCHA

First Place: Brew Dr.

Kombucha

SECOND PLACE: Happy Mountain

Kombucha

RUNNER-UP: Lion Heart

Kombucha

BEST LGBTQIA+ BAR

First Place: The Sports Bra

SECOND PLACE: Crush Bar

RUNNER-UP: Escape Bar & Grill

BEST SMOOTHIE/ JUICE BAR

First Place: Kure

Superfood Cafe

SECOND PLACE: Moberi

RUNNER-UP: Best Friend Juice Bar & Cafe

BEST SPORTS BAR

First Place: The Sports Bra

SECOND PLACE: Rialto Poolroom

RUNNER-UP: Tom’s Bar

BEST TEA SHOP

First Place: Tea Chai Te

SECOND PLACE: Smith Teamaker

RUNNER-UP: The Tao of Tea

BEST WINE BAR

First Place: Division Wines

SECOND PLACE: Les Caves & Le Clos

RUNNER-UP: Bar Norman

BEST WINERY

First Place: Stoller Family Estate

SECOND PLACE: Willamette Valley

Vineyards

RUNNER-UP: Landmass Wines

FOOD

BEST BAGEL

First Place: Henry Higgins

Boiled Bagels

SECOND PLACE: Spielman Bagels and Coffee Roasters

RUNNER-UP: Ben & Esther’s Vegan Delicatessen

Go Groovy or Go Home

For fine antique and custom jewelry, or for repair work, come visit us, or shop online at Maloys.com. We also buy.

BEST BAKERY

First Place: Grand Central Bakery

SECOND PLACE: Shoofly

Vegan Bakery and Cafe

RUNNER-UP: Tabor Bread

BEST BARBECUE

First Place: Matt’s BBQ

SECOND PLACE: Podnah’s BBQ

RUNNER-UP: Homegrown Smoker

BEST BRUNCH SPOT

First Place: Jam On Hawthorne

SECOND PLACE: Screen Door

RUNNER-UP: Broder Cafe

BEST BURGER

First Place: Killer Burger

SECOND PLACE: PDX Sliders

RUNNER-UP: Tulip Shop Tavern

BEST CATERING SERVICE

First Place: Elephants Delicatessen

SECOND PLACE: Vibrant Table Catering & Events

RUNNER-UP: Devil’s Food Catering

BEST CHINESE

RESTAURANT

First Place: Duck House Chinese Restaurant

SECOND PLACE: Shandong Restaurant

RUNNER-UP: Master Kong

BEST DELI

First Place: Elephants Delicatessen

SECOND PLACE: Ben & Esther’s Vegan Delicatessen

RUNNER-UP: East Side Deli

BEST DONUT

First Place: Doe Donuts

SECOND PLACE: Pip’s Original Doughnuts & Chai

RUNNER-UP: Blue Star Donuts

BEST ETHIOPIAN RESTAURANT

First Place: Queen of Sheba

SECOND PLACE: Bete-Lukas

RUNNER-UP: Enat Kitchen Restaurant

BEST FAMILYFRIENDLY RESTAURANT

First Place: Fire on the Mountain Buffalo Wings

SECOND PLACE: Breakside Brewery

RUNNERS-UP: Hopworks Urban Brewery/ Cafe Yumm

BEST FOOD CART

First Place: Matt’s BBQ

SECOND PLACE: Bing Mi Food Cart

RUNNER-UP: Le Bistro Montage Ala Cart

BEST FRENCH RESTAURANT

First Place: Petite Provence

Boulangerie & Patisserie

SECOND PLACE: Le Pigeon

RUNNER-UP: Canard

BEST GLUTEN-FREE RESTAURANT

First Place: Harlow

SECOND PLACE: kann

RUNNER-UP: New Cascadia

BEST ICE CREAM

First Place: Salt & Straw

SECOND PLACE: Fifty Licks Ice Cream

RUNNER-UP: Kate’s Ice Cream

“A novel premise for a book and delivered with impeccable prose and timing….Zeb Beck is a fine author with a cracking sense of humor, and the sardonic cynicism of his anti-hero sizzles with every exchange.”

--The Village Voice

BEST INDIAN RESTAURANT

First Place: Bollywood Theater

SECOND PLACE: Swagat

RUNNER-UP: The Sudra

BEST LATE-NIGHT MENU

First Place: Luc Lac Vietnamese

Kitchen

SECOND PLACE: The Sweet Hereafter

RUNNER-UP: My Father’s Place

BEST MEDITERRANEAN RESTAURANT

First Place: Nicholas Restaurant – Lebanese & Mediterranean

Cuisine

SECOND PLACE: Shalom Y’all

RUNNER-UP: Ya Hala Lebanese Cuisine

BEST MEXICAN RESTAURANT

First Place: ¿Por Que No?

SECOND PLACE: Mis Tacones

RUNNER-UP: La Bonita

BEST PIZZA

First Place: Apizza Scholls

SECOND PLACE: Baby Doll Pizza

RUNNER-UP: Ranch Pizza

BEST RAMEN

First Place: AFURI IZAKAYA

SECOND PLACE: Kayo’s Ramen Bar

RUNNER-UP: Boxer

BEST SANDWICH SHOP

First Place: Lardo

SECOND PLACE: Taste Tickler

RUNNER-UP: East Side Deli

BEST SUSHI

First Place: Bamboo Sushi

SECOND PLACE: Yama Sushi & Izakaya

RUNNER-UP: Miyamoto

BEST TACO

First Place: ¿Por Que No?

SECOND PLACE: Matt’s BBQ Tacos

RUNNER-UP: Tight Tacos

BEST THAI RESTAURANT

First Place: Paadee

SECOND PLACE: Thai Peacock Restaurant

RUNNER-UP: Kati Portland

BEST VEGETARIAN/ VEGAN RESTAURANT

First Place: Harlow

SECOND PLACE: Fermenter/Cafe Yumm

RUNNER-UP: Blossoming Lotus Cafe

BEST VIETNAMESE RESTAURANT

First Place: Luc Lac Vietnamese Kitchen

SECOND PLACE: Mama Dut

RUNNER-UP: Pho Van

BEST WINGS

First Place: Fire on the Mountain

SECOND PLACE: Hat Yai

RUNNER-UP: FRYBABY

GOODS & SERVICES

BEST ACCOUNTANT

First Place: Artemis Tax

SECOND PLACE: Kelli Loo CPA

RUNNER-UP: Four Reasons, LLC

BEST AUTO DEALERSHIP

First Place: Subaru of Portland

SECOND PLACE: Toyota of Portland

RUNNER-UP: CarMax

BEST BANK/CREDIT UNION

First Place: OnPoint Community Credit Union

SECOND PLACE: Advantis Credit Union

RUNNER-UP: Rivermark Community

Credit Union

BEST BIKE SHOP

First Place: Community Cycling Center

SECOND PLACE: Sellwood Cycle Repair

RUNNER-UP: Metropolis Cycle Repair

BEST BOOKSTORE

First Place: Powell’s Books

SECOND PLACE: Third Eye Books

RUNNER-UP: Broadway Books

BEST BOTTLE SHOP

First Place: John’s Marketplace

SECOND PLACE: Belmont Station

RUNNER-UP: The Portland Bottle Shop | Sandwiches, Wine & Beer

BEST CHILDREN’S STORE

First Place: Thinker Toys

SECOND PLACE: Beanstalk Children’s Resale Clothing

RUNNER-UP: Hammer and Jacks

BEST CLOTHING BOUTIQUE

First Place: Paloma Clothing

SECOND PLACE: Sloan

RUNNER-UP: Wild Cactus Boutique

BEST CLOTHING RESALE STORE

First Place: Here We Go Again Resale

SECOND PLACE: Alien Mermaid Cove

RUNNER-UP: Consign Couture

BEST EYEWEAR SHOP

First Place: Eyes On Broadway

SECOND PLACE: Warby Parker

RUNNER-UP: Myoptic Optometry, Burnside

BEST FLORIST

First Place: Sammy’s Flowers

SECOND PLACE: Solabee Flowers & Botanicals

RUNNER-UP: Sellwood Flower Company

BEST GARDEN SUPPLY/ NURSERY

First Place: Portland Nursery

SECOND PLACE: Cornell Farm

RUNNER-UP: Garden Fever

BEST GROCERY STORE

First Place: New Seasons

SECOND PLACE: Trader Joe’s

RUNNER-UP: People’s Food Co-op

BEST HARDWARE STORE

First Place: Ace Hardware

SECOND PLACE: Parkrose Hardware

RUNNER-UP: Division Do it Best Hardware

BEST HOME GOODS STORE

First Place: Paxton Gate

SECOND PLACE: ECOVIBE

RUNNER-UP: Urbanite

BEST JEWELRY SHOP

First Place: Betsy & Iya

SECOND PLACE: Sarah J. Handmade

RUNNER-UP: Paxton Gate

BEST MORTGAGE BROKER

First Place: Guild Mortgage Company

SECOND PLACE: Do Good Mortgage

RUNNER-UP: Risse Davis American Pacific Mortgage

BEST PET CARE

First Place: DoveLewis Veterinary Emergency & Specialty Hospital

SECOND PLACE: Pets on Broadway

RUNNER-UP: Northwest Neighborhood Veterinary Hospital

BEST PET SUPPLY STORE

First Place: Mud Bay

SECOND PLACE: Pets on Broadway

RUNNER-UP: Fang! Pet & Garden Supply

BEST PHONE REPAIR

First Place: iChihuahua Repair –iPhone & iPad

SECOND PLACE: The Fix Hut

RUNNER-UP: uBreakiFix

BEST PLANT SHOP

First Place: Portland Nursery

SECOND PLACE: Arium Botanicals

RUNNER-UP: SymbiOp Garden Shop

BEST REAL ESTATE AGENT

First Place: Laura Wood & Laurie

Gilmer, Bright Space Real Estate

SECOND PLACE: Rachel Smith, Works Real Estate

RUNNER-UP: Ellie Gartland, Stellar Realty NW

BEST REAL ESTATE COMPANY

First Place: Living Room Realty

SECOND PLACE: Think Real Estate

RUNNER-UP: Works Real Estate

BEST RECORD STORE

First Place: Music Millennium

SECOND PLACE: Mississippi Records

RUNNER-UP: 2nd Avenue Records

BEST RUNNING STORE

First Place: Portland Running Company

SECOND PLACE: Foot Traffic

RUNNER-UP: Nike Company Store

BEST SEX POSITIVE SHOP

First Place: She Bop

SECOND PLACE: Fantasy

RUNNER-UP: Spartacus Leathers

BEST SHOE STORE

First Place: Shoe Mill

SECOND PLACE: Foot Traffic

RUNNER-UP: Clogs-N-More

BEST SPORTS STORE/OUTFITTER

First Place: Next Adventure

SECOND PLACE: REI

RUNNER-UP: Foster Outdoor

BEST TATTOO SHOP

First Place: Atlas Tattoo Studio

SECOND PLACE: Wonderland Tattoos

RUNNER-UP: Lombard Street Tattoo

BEST THRIFT STORE

First Place: Village Merchants

SECOND PLACE: Goodwill Industries

RUNNER-UP: Here We Go Again Resale

BEST VETERINARY PRACTICE

First Place: DoveLewis Veterinary Emergency & Specialty Hospital

SECOND PLACE: Kenton Animal Hospital

RUNNER-UP: Fremont Veterinary Clinic

BEST VINTAGE STORE

First Place: Urbanite

SECOND PLACE: Kenton Antiques & Collectibles

RUNNER-UP: Mixtape Vintage PDX

HEALTH & WELLNESS

BEST ACUPUNCTURE

First Place: Christine Knight, LAc

SECOND PLACE: Zen Space Alberta, Acupuncture + Massage + Chiropractic

RUNNER-UP: The Mend PDX, Acupuncture and Holistic Medicine

BEST BARBERSHOP

First Place: Rudy’s Barbershop

SECOND PLACE: Slabtown Barbershop

RUNNER-UP: Troublemaker Barber and Ale Social Club

BEST CHIROPRACTOR

First Place: North Portland

Wellness Center

SECOND PLACE: Zen Space, Acupuncture + Massage + Chiropractic

RUNNER-UP: Momentum Chiropractic + Sports Medicine

BEST DENTIST

First Place: Atlas Dental

SECOND PLACE: Bling Dental

RUNNER-UP: Timber Dental

BEST ESTHETICIAN

First Place: Sarah Inloes-Wilde @ Take It Off Tattoo Removal and Alt Spa

SECOND PLACE: Root Whole Body

RUNNER-UP: Ritual Beauty Bar

BEST GYM

First Place: Lloyd Athletic Club

SECOND PLACE: Vive Fitness

RUNNER-UP: Revel Indoor Cycling

BEST HAIR REMOVAL

First Place: Urban Waxx

SECOND PLACE: Sugar Me

RUNNER-UP: Alix Waxes

BEST HAIR SALON

First Place: Urban Colorz

SECOND PLACE: Dye Dye My Darling Salon PDX

RUNNER-UP: Ginger & Maude

BEST HAIR STYLIST

First Place: Haircraft by Jo

SECOND PLACE: Allie Martinez

Hairstylist

RUNNER-UP: Dinah Ritchey Hairstylist

BEST MASSAGE

First Place: Root Whole Body

SECOND PLACE: Blooming Moon

Wellness Spa

RUNNER-UP: Zen Space Alberta, Acupuncture + Massage + Chiropractic

BEST NAIL SALON

First Place: Nail Church

SECOND PLACE: Plumeria Nails & Spa

RUNNER-UP: Alberta Nails Spa

BEST NATURAL OR ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE CLINIC

First Place: North Portland Wellness Center

SECOND PLACE: Root Whole Body

RUNNER-UP: Kwan Yin Healing Arts Center

BEST PEDIATRICIAN

First Place: Metropolitan Pediatrics

SECOND PLACE: Sellwood Medical Clinic

RUNNER-UP: Brave Care Primary & Urgent Care for Kids

BEST PHYSICAL THERAPY CLINIC

First Place: Bridgetown Physical Therapy

SECOND PLACE: Therapydia

RUNNER-UP: Therapeutic Associates

Advantage Physical Therapy

BEST PILATES STUDIO

First Place: MegaBurn Fitness

SECOND PLACE: Rose City Fitness

RUNNER-UP: Begin Pilates & Yoga

BEST YOGA STUDIO

First Place: Firelight Yoga

SECOND PLACE: YogaSix

RUNNER-UP: Jewel Yoga

GET BUSY

GO: OMSI After Dark: Making Waves

Enjoy a night at the museum and dive into the wonders of the oceanic ecosystem at OMSI’s latest edition of its after-hours, adults-only event. There will be multiple science demonstrations about everything from sea foam bubbles to floating wind energy turbines to the symbiotic relationship between algae, coral and sea anemones. Attendees also receive access to the venue’s current featured exhibit, Orcas: Our Shared Future. Be sure to take plenty of recess breaks during your evening of learning by stopping by the food and beverage vendor booths helmed by popular brands like Fort George Brewery, 2 Towns Ciderhouse and Werner Gourmet Meat Snacks. OMSI, 1945 SE Water Ave., 503797-4000, omsi.edu. 6-10 pm Wednesday, July 26. $25. 21+.

EAT & DRINK: Ilani Tacos, Tequila & Taps Festival

Ilani may have 100,000 square feet of gaming space, but the marquee attraction has really become its series of foodand-drink focused events, which typically include a lineup of solid (and often celebrity) chefs. Joining the lineup is the casino-resort’s first-ever Tacos, Tequila & Taps Festival, which kicks off Thursday with a tribute to Mexican street classics in the form of an Omakase Taco Dinner with drink pairings in the venue’s sports bar. The following evening, the party moves to ilani’s garage rooftop, where there will be more tastings and a dance party featuring music by Los Chicos del 512, a Selena tribute band. The main event takes place

Saturday, where you can watch some of the nation’s top taqueros in action before you press your luck back on the gaming floor since tickets include $10 in promo play. Ilani Casino Resort, 1 Cowlitz Way, Ridgefield, Wash., 877-464-5264, ilaniresort.com. Multiple times Thursday-Saturday, July 20-22. $20-$74.

LAUGH: The 5th Annual Portland Sketch Comedy Festival

The latest version of the Portland Sketch Comedy Festival will take place at The Siren’s new home on North Mississippi Avenue following its move from Old Town in February. If you haven’t visited the new venue, this event is a good excuse to get out there since sketch fest founders Ted Douglass and Shelley McLendon are known for bringing top talent to town, including troupes like The Groundlings (Los Angeles), Kasper Hauser (San Francisco), and The Defiant Thomas Brothers (Chicago). You can also expect some of the best sketch performers in Portland to take the stage during the fest’s three-day run. The Siren Theater, 3913 N Mississippi Ave., sirentheater.com. 7:30 pm Thursday and 7 pm Friday-Saturday, July 20-22. $15 for a single show, $40 for Friday and Saturday evening passes, $90 for a festival pass.

WATCH: T.O.A.S.T.: Twilight One Act Summer Theater

Twilight Theater Company is producing its first one-act play festival, which will see the ambitious staging of a dozen plays with 12 different directors over the course of three days. There will be some dra-

ma, a lot of comedy and a wide range of plotlines—some are inspired by Shakespeare classics, others examine the world of standup, and several are very meta by reflecting on the experience of creating a play. Can’t decide which one to see? Spring for a festival pass and hunker down for a weekend of theater. Twilight Theater Company 7515 N Brandon Ave., twilighttheatercompany.org. 7 pm Friday and 1 pm Saturday-Sunday, July 21-23. $15 per show, $150 for a festival pass.

WATCH: Downward Facing

Fuse Theatre Ensemble’s inaugural Atelier Festival showcases emerging Portland artists and their new works, like this fully staged production written by Mishelle Apalategui. Downward Facing depicts the struggles of people who have nowhere to go while tackling relevant themes, from gentrification to chosen family to pregnancy. If it sounds a bit heavy for summer entertainment, just remember that every Barbie movie needs to be balanced out by an Oppenheimer The BackDoor Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd., fusetheatreensemble.com, 7:30 pm Friday-Sunday, July 21-30. Donations accepted.

GO: Biscuit’s Birthday Bash

If you listen to 94.7 FM in the morning, then you know that DJ Greg Glover has a sidekick, just like most radio hosts. However, unlike most radio hosts, his assistant can only speak in barks, but that doesn’t seem to hurt the ratings. Biscuit, Glover’s dog, is turning 12 this month, and since he’s locally famous, the pooch naturally gets a public birthday party in

Bantam Tavern’s beer and cocktail garden. Fur babies are welcome as there will be pupcakes for the canines as well as a dessert that humans would find palatable. The event will double as a benefit for local nonprofit animal rescue Stumptown Strays, so donations are encouraged. Bantam Tavern, 922 NW 21st Ave., 503-2749032, bantamtavern.com. Noon Saturday, July 22.

EAT & DRINK: Dinner in the Vines

After several years of living in a world where communal dining was prohibited, it seems the practice is now back and more popular than ever, with elaborately decorated long tables popping up in farms, orchards and fields across the state. This one takes place at Johan Vineyards in partnership with its Southern Oregon sister property Cowhorn Vineyard & Garden, two wineries dedicated to biodynamic practices. Cowhorn chef Tim Payne designed the five-course meal featuring grass-fed lamb and produce grown on the premises. Each dish will be paired with the estates’ acclaimed wines. Johan Vineyards, 4285 N Pacific Highway W, Rickreall, 503-623-8642, johanvineyards. com/upcoming-events. 6:30 pm Saturday, July 22. $150.

THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE: Communal dining is back in a big way. Johan Vineyards is getting in on the trend by hosting a meal at its Rickreall vineyard.

FOOD & DRINK

Buzz List

WHERE TO DRINK THIS WEEK.

1. BREAKSIDE BREWERY

BEAVERTON

12675 SW 1st St., Beaverton, breakside.com. 11 am-10 pm daily.

Just when the patient beer fans in Beaverton were beginning to give up hope that Breakside would ever actually open a long-planned taproom in Old Town, the company suddenly announced June 11 that the facility was ready for eager drinkers. The outpost isn’t complete, but you can now enjoy a roughly 150-seat beer garden and suds poured from Breakside’s retro Winnebeergo, which will serve as the temporary outdoor bar until the 80-seat interior is completed. Order a classic like Wanderlust or the refreshing Mexican Lager (especially when temps top 90 degrees) and raise a glass to this powerhouse brand’s latest expansion.

2. TOCAYO AT PALOMAR

959 SE Division St., #100, 971-357-8020, barpalomar. com. 2 pm-sunset Saturday-Sunday. 21+.

Palomar is the latest spot to get in on the “restaurant within a restaurant” trend by turning its rooftop bar into a pop-up taqueria. Tocayo, which is the Spanish term for two people who have the same name, is a nod to owner Ricky Gomez and chef Ricky Bella, who combine their love of Cuban cocktail and Mexican drink cultures in this project. Expect plenty of fruit flavors in everything from a mule with roasted coconut water to a frozen guava margarita to a pineapple-infused gin and tonic, so if a south-of-the-border vacation isn’t in the budget this summer—escape with a drink instead.

3. 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.

4. JOHN’S MARKETPLACE – HALL

3700 SW Hall Blvd., Beaverton, 503-747-2739, johnsmarketplace.com. 11 am-8 pm

Sunday-Wednesday, 11 am-9 pm

Thursday-Saturday.

Formerly parched downtown Beaverton has been swimming in beer for the past few years. The area has outlets for two breweries as well as a handful of beer bars. Joining the perennial beerfest is John’s Marketplace, which opened its third location on the edge of Old Town in April. Most everyone is here for a pint paired with the well-charred, quarter-pound smash burgers, including beer nerds sporting branded swag and moms clad in Lululemon with children in tow. Join them under the beer banners in the taproom before perusing the bottle shop for something special to take home.

5. DIRTY PRETTY

SHOW REVIEW

Top 5

Hot Plates

WHERE TO EAT THIS WEEK.

1. CÂCHE CÂCHE

638 E Burnside St., 503-841-5253, dirtyprettypdx.com.

1015 SE Stark St. 5-10 pm

Sunday.

Wednesday-Saturday, 1-8 pm

Câche Câche, a raw seafood bar from Kurt Huffman’s ChefStable and St. Jack chef John Denison, is Portland’s newest and neatest oceanic idyll. The new place is aptly named after the French term for “hide-and-seek” since it’s hard to find and there is no phone number or website. The search is worth it for the lobster roll alone, though, which might cause a Mainer’s eyes to grow misty. Three ounces of meat are lightly dressed with a tarragon-infused aioli and then stuffed into a cuboid cut from a crustless Dos Hermanos Pullman loaf. Everyone must order this; sharing is a bad idea.

2. TUSK

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.

3. CHELO

Located inside Dame, 2930 NE Killingsworth St., chelopdx.com. 5-9 pm Monday-Wednesday.

Chef Luna Contreras’ cooking has made appearances all over the city, and 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. Order a few items that likely won’t carry over to a smaller-plate version of Chelo that will open in a new location later this year, like the incredible chuleta de puerco, a bone-in pork chop, served with hot housemade tortillas, a super-tasty fire-roasted tomato salsa quemada and brothy beans, cooked to perfection.

4. HIGGINS PIGGINS

On the Oregon Historical Society terrace at 1200 SW Park Ave., 503-222-9070, 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.

5. STACKED SANDWICH SHOP

NORA BROWN AND STEPHANIE COLEMAN AT ALBERTA ABBEY

BY ROBERT HAM

Bluegrass and other old-timey music has long been overrun by bros using it as a platform to show off their virtuosic command of their instruments. Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman eschew that trend in their work, returning the music instead to its roots as a source for social uplift and spiritual connection.

The Brooklyn duo’s performance at Alberta Abbey was generous. They took pains to listen closely to one another and played with care. Brown’s guitar chords and finger-picked melodies were kept spare and simple, and Coleman’s short fiddle solos were more about texture than flair.

Between songs, as they carefully tuned, they shared as much information as possible about the origins of the material in their set. Most of the songs, they said, were handed down to them by other musicians (Coleman says one was sent to her years ago to her America OnLine email address). Others they discovered in more modern realms, such as studio albums (or, in one case, on a favorite YouTube channel).

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 could make one act very, very sassy.

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.

The pair’s generosity extended to a series of guests that they welcomed onstage throughout the night. And they made room for some fantastic local players they had only recently met at a weeklong roots music conference in Washington state.

During one such moment, Brown hilariously struggled to find her place onstage when she and Coleman were joined by a second guitarist and a standup bassist. Brown ducked behind Coleman, only squeezing herself into the mix when it came time to sing harmonies on the chorus. What better way to remove any semblance of pretension from the proceedings than by making oneself look like a fool in front of a room full of peers and fans?

COURTESY NORA BROWN AND STEPHANIE COLEMAN

SHOWS OF THE WEEK

WHAT TO SEE AND WHAT TO HEAR

BY DANIEL BROMFIELD @bromf3

FRIDAY, JULY 21:

Into the Great Wide Open

Portland pianist Saloli’s latest album beckons listeners into the Great Smoky Mountains.

BY DANIEL BROMFIELD @bromf3

Canyon, Portland pianist and composer Mary Sutton’s new album as Saloli, is so vast and majestic-sounding that the fact that it was made with a single synthesizer from the ’80s might take some time to process.

It’s not the only constraint Sutton placed on herself while recording. Every track was recorded live in the studio, and she chose to use only a single delay pedal for effects.

“I thought, what’s a way I can express the effect the delay is having?” Sutton says. “And I just thought, where would an echo be? In a canyon.”

Slowly but surely, Sutton built a story around these eight pieces: a day in the life of a bear in the Great Smoky Mountains. The cover of the record, which was released earlier this month through the long-running indie label Kranky, features artwork of an American black bear by her father, Jerry Sutton, a Cherokee painter and flutemaker.

“As my dad tells it, he was motivated to make the painting in the first place because the bear in Cherokee teachings is the human’s closest relative,” says Sutton. “I read some stories about people who would go and live amongst the bears, or they would turn into bears and live the bear’s life. The bear’s life is sort of the easy life: plentiful food, they can eat fish, they can eat berries.”

The Great Smoky Mountains are significant to Sutton for another reason: The region was the Cherokee homeland before the forced displacement of nearly 60,000 people in the mid-19th century. Many of those who survived what has come to be known as the “Trail of Tears” ended up in modern-day Oklahoma.

Sutton describes a bike ride from the Smoky Mountains to Oklahoma, which many young Cherokees attempt: “It’s pretty intense, because the people who are based in Oklahoma see how beautiful the homeland is.”

Sutton’s parents met in the Cherokee stronghold of Tahlequah in eastern Oklahoma, but Sutton herself was born in Dallas. Interested in piano since second grade, Sutton attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, hoping to become a piano virtuoso. Yet she quickly soured on the conventions and culture surrounding

classical music, particularly after a depressing gig working as an usher at the respected Boston Symphony.

“I thought the people who went there would be the most into it, and that wasn’t the case,” she says. “It was just a place people would come with their minks and their diamonds just to socialize and then complain about the music to me.”

Sutton began looking beyond the classical world for musical inspiration. After moving to Portland in 2007, she got a gig playing New Age synth at Common Ground Wellness Cooperative, where she began exploring a more spare and ambient sound than the technical style she’d pursued as a classical pianist.

“My expectation of myself was to play piano virtuosically, but nobody expected that of me but me,” she says. “I didn’t really feel like I could just play a simple or sparse melody and have it feel like I had done something.”

Stripping her sound back opened up the creative floodgates for Sutton. She’s released four albums as Saloli since 2018. Two—2021’s The Island and last year’s Ghosts—were recorded on solo piano.

Canyon, like Sutton’s 2018 debut, The Deep End, was recorded entirely with a Sequential Circuits Multi-Trak synth. A friend recommended this particular synth to Sutton based on its pianolike qualities.

“It only has one knob, meaning in order to change any parameters, you use the same knob for every parameter,” she says. “It was good for me because that’s kind of how I’m used to playing anyways. You’re not changing the sound as you play [on piano].”

Sutton’s way of working may seem austere to an outsider: using only one instrument per album, recording live and solo, largely eschewing the worlds of soundscaping and effects available through synths and their accompanying pedals. Yet everything Sutton does ties back to her practice as a pianist.

“It’s not like I’m deciding to limit myself that way,” she says. “It’s just how I do it.”

SEE IT: Saloli performs an album release show, with support from Patricia Wolf and Lou Trove, at Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 503-239-7639, holocene.org. 5 pm Saturday, July 22. $12. 21+.

Plan to do “Barbenheimer” this year? A popular meme suggests anyone attempting the grueling double feature of Christopher Nolan’s grim biographical epic Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s bubbly Barbie movie start with Oppenheimer in the morning, then brunch, then Barbie, then dinner, drinks, club. And where better to complete the “club” part of the checklist than at the Crystal Ballroom’s actual Barbie Rave, to be held on the very same day Barbie and its competitor come out in theaters? Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St. 8 pm. $15-$30. 21+.

SUNDAY, JULY 23:

Twenty-four years old and a pro since seventh grade, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram has brought old-school electric blues far beyond the nostalgia-circuit audiences lesser guitarists are content to court. He’s racked up accolades from vets like Buddy Guy and the Rolling Stones, but he’s also done a Tiny Desk show with Rakim, toured with Vampire Weekend, and communed with other young guitarists like Eric Gales and Jontavious Willis who are as ecstatic about bringing this deep-rooted American music into Gen Z. Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 SE 39th Ave. 8 pm. $27.50. All ages.

TUESDAY, JULY 23:

Paramore was arguably the best of the mall-punk bands that composed guitar-rock’s last big chart moment, and they’re certainly the one whose flame continues to burn the brightest. Like compatriots Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco, they’ve become a pop band, but they’ve done so on frontwoman Hayley Williams’ own terms, and she seems less a relic of a bygone era of rock than a peer of forward-thinking pop stars like Robyn and Christine and the Queens who make music listeners can cry and dance to. Veterans Memorial Coliseum, 300 N Ramsay Way. 7 pm. $140 and up. All ages.

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

The Hustler (1961)

Paul Newman could never take off his good looks (and don’t we all feel sorry for him). But the American acting icon shaped his career with roles that complicated his beauty with booze, fury, and soul-curdling ambition.

The simultaneous launch and subversion of Newman’s stardom began with The Hustler. Here, he plays “Fast Eddie” Felson, a nomadic pool shark who knows all the angles, but lacks what his eventual underwriter and handler Bert (George C. Scott) calls “character.” When Eddie squanders a 25-hour, high-stakes pool marathon against Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), he’s left to essentially rebuild his life out of a bus terminal locker with the help of an equally volatile stranger (Piper Laurie).

Lest all that seem like the stuff of an inspirational sports drama, Robert Rossen’s classic is a shadowy character study about the athlete as a commodity, the expiration of vagrant love, and the attritional battle between man and his impulses.

By the time Newman won his lone, long-sought Oscar in 1986 for reprising Felson in The Color of Money, he’d layered a cool, world-weary wisdom onto the aged character. But in The Hustler, Eddie is on fire, learning every last thing the hard way. Cinema 21, July 22.

ALSO PLAYING:

5th Avenue: Minari (2020), July 21-23. Clinton: The Battle of Algiers (1966), July 20. Altered States (1980), July 21. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), July 24. Hollywood: Ninja III: The Domination (1984), July 21. Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972), July 22 and 26. Living Room: The Silence of the Lambs (1991), July 20. Blazing Saddles (1974), July 23 and 25.

MOVIES/PODCASTS

Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Contact: bennett@wweek.com

Marvel Man

Bryan Stratton, co-host of the podcast Marvel by the Month, explains his quest to read every single Marvel comic.

BY BENNETT CAMPBELLFERGUSON @thobennett

On Halloween 1986, a 10-year-old Vermont boy named Bryan Stratton donned a Dracula costume and made his way to a store called the Comics Outpost. There, he found something that would change his life: a Marvel Transformers comic book.

“That was my gateway drug into reading comics,” Stratton, who now lives in Portland, tells WW. “I dove headfirst into Marvel.”

Stratton didn’t just become a die-hard fan of Marvel superheroes like Captain America, Iron Man and the Wasp. He ultimately co-founded Marvel by the Month, a podcast where he and co-hosts Robb Milne and Jamie Wenger read and discuss every single Marvel comic in the company’s 60-year-plus history.

“It’s great doing a podcast like this in Portland, which is basically the center of the North American comics universe,” Stratton says. “We’ve been very spoiled and really well supported.”

Those waiting for the trio to be driven into a Wolverine-style berserker rage by their grand task will have to keep waiting. The podcast recently released its 200th episode, which features two special guests: Portland-based Marvel legends Matt Fraction (Hawkeye) and Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man).

In the wake of that milestone, WW spoke to Stratton about his journey through Marvel’s turbulent history—and why the myth of the superhero is more seductive than ever.

WW: A lot of times, I walk around thinking, “I’m a pretty good Marvel fan, I know a lot of shit,” but I couldn’t tell you what was going on with Marvel in September 1973. How did you come up with the month-by-month format?

Bryan Stratton: Robb has been one of my very best friends for the last 10 or 15 years. We started a little digital marketing agency together…and it was around that time that Marvel released their Marvel Unlimited app. It had 12,000 comics, and now it’s over 30,000. It became possible to read every Marvel comic, and that’s the kind of challenge that appeals to my OCD brain.

Do you have a favorite story you’ve talked about on the podcast about Marvel’s corporate intrigue?

One of the things that’s really interesting about Marvel is how they were ready to shut the door on the place when Fantastic Four #1 came out. They’d made a bunch of bad business decisions and overcommitted themselves.

There’s a real [sense of], “Well, let’s give this a shot, and if it doesn’t work, no one’s expecting it to.” You can literally see [legendary Fantastic Four artist Jack] Kirby rolling up his sleeves and sitting down at the drawing board and saying, “You need a universe of characters? I’ll give you a universe of characters.”

I’ve always thought that Marvel has the better characters, but DC Comics has the better stories, including graphic novels like Watchmen and Kingdom Come

A friend of ours, Douglas Wolk, wrote a book called All of the Marvels and won an Eisner Award for it. He says in the first chapter that Marvel is this wild experiment in narrative storytelling, where you have 60 years, hundreds of creators—if not thousands—and millions of pages, all telling what is supposed to be one coherent story.

It’s like, “Why would we just want to sell someone a graphic novel, a fancy six-issue Spider-Man series, when we could get them hooked on reading Spider-Man and then they want to read all the Spider-Man titles?” Sometimes they push that too hard, and they start thinking about continuity as being the most important thing—which I don’t think it is.

Do you think that superheroes resonate more than ever right now because the pandemic and social media have divided and isolated us? In a sense, we’re all wearing masks, and not just literally.

If you’re at a point where you feel hopeless about the state of the world…there is something really appealing about an individual having an ability that allows them to be a corrective to whatever social anxieties you’re suffering from.

Is there a Marvel character who best embodies your fears for the direction the world is going or your hopes for where it could go?

One character who has been really fascinating to me is Captain America. Right now, with where we’re at in the podcast, it’s the end of Vietnam and Watergate is kicking into high gear—and having a guy running around with an American flag on his chest was maybe not something that the college-age readers of Marvel comics were super interested in.

But a writer named Steve Englehart—who was not too far out of college himself—took the book over and started doing some really interesting things with it, and having [Captain America] struggle with, what does it mean to be the symbol of America in times like these? You can get some really good stories out of that.

LISTEN: New episodes of Marvel by the Month stream at marvelbythemonth.com.

PODCASTERS, ASSEMBLE: Bryan Stratton, Robb Milne and Jamie Wenger.

THE LESSON

“Good writers borrow; great writers steal.” Richard E. Grant (playing fictitious literary dynamo J.M. Sinclair) delivers that line with a domineering grin that all but proves the sentiment, passing off a cliché as wisdom and telegraphing where veteran British TV director Alice Troughton’s film will venture. It’s a pleasure to watch Grant overdo it through the watchful eyes of Liam (Daryl McCormack), an aspiring author who is obsessed with Sinclair’s prose and journeys to his idol’s country manor to tutor his son (it’s Oxford or bust). Across from Grant’s sometimes campy inhumanity, McCormack acts carefully, offering shades of Tom Ripley’s shifty confidence as Liam fulfills the awkward yet advantageous position of a trusted servant. Julie Delpy also excels as the icy but pervious queen of the house (which has grounds eerily patrolled by muskrats and self-piloted lawn mowers). The characters verbally spar through tense dinners and writing debriefs, while Sinclair battles with the third act of his mysterious comeback novel. He’s discovering, as this film does, that endings can be conspicuously difficult. The Lesson downshifts to belligerently throwing its cards on the table by the end, but the slippery journey there shouldn’t be written off. Beware meeting your heroes—and, especially, freelancing for them. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Fox Tower, Living Room.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE

Danger is a drug—and in his third Mission: Impossible film, director Christopher McQuarrie simultaneously shoves it up your nostrils and stabs it into your veins. As usual, daredevil secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is chasing after an explosive MacGuffin that he must protect from a doomsday-loving maniac (Esai Morales, in this case) lest the world go boom. Rather than vary the formula, McQuarrie simply refurbishes it (brilliantly) with fresh flourishes of suspense. You’ve seen Ethan race against the clock, but you’ve never seen him rushing through an airport in Abu Dhabi during a countdown to a nuclear explosion. You’ve seen him in one-on-one fights, but never with a demented French swordswoman (Pom Klementieff) in a terrifyingly cramped alley in Venice. You’ve seen him battle his adversaries on trains, but never run through one as it tumbles into…oh, just see the movie already, will you? Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t just cinema. It’s the essence of everything cinema was made for—not just triumphantly tense violence, but delicious glamour and sex appeal (a nighttime negotiation with Alanna Mitsopolis, a broker played with a lascivious grin by Vanessa Kirby, is nearly erotic enough to deserve an NC-17 rating). And while the apparent death of a main character strikes a sour note—these films work best when they’re disposable and delightful, not tragic and ruthless—I’m hopeful that it’s a red herring designed to goose our sympathies before Part Two arrives next year. It wouldn’t be the first time that a Mission: Impossible movie has manipulated its audience to irresistibly grand effect. PG-13.

BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Eastport, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, St. Johns, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.

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, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Living Room.

RUBY GILLMAN:

TEENAGE KRAKEN

Like The Bad Guys before it, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken returns DreamWorks to its early ’00s roots of copying whatever Disney had come up with (the film could be described either as a nautical-themed Turning Red or a gender-swapped Luca). The story follows the Gillmans, a nuclear family of sea monsters who, despite having blue skin and no bones, have lived as ordinary humans without being detected for 15 years. However, when eldest daughter Ruby (Lana Condor) begins to chafe against the convictions of her mother (Toni Collette), she ends up discovering her own fantastical superpowers and meeting her oceanic royal grandmother (Jane Fonda). Ruby Gillman suffers from an overabundance of plotlines and character arcs that make the second act feel disjointed and clumsy, but there’s enough charm and personality that you’re never quite bored with the proceedings. The animation employs a retro, rubber-hose style that brings physicality to the invertebrate Gillmans and the movie’s goofy slapstick. Condor is perfect as Ruby—earnest and shy, but kind and determined when she needs to be—and there’s a lot of fun to be had in the supporting performances, including Sam Richardson as a goofy uncle and Annie Murphy as a mean-girl mermaid. Ruby Gillman doesn’t quite break new ground in the “powers as a metaphor for puberty” subgenre of sci-fi/fantasy, but it’s beautiful and exuberant enough to make for a fun and heartwarming trip under the sea.

PG. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. City Center, Clackamas, Division, Oak Grove, Wunderland Beaverton, Wunderland Milwaukie.

JOY RIDE

In a seeming attempt to reflect the diverse array of untold Asian narratives—a shared pressure among many Asian American artists— Joy Ride accomplishes the opposite, offering a rushed 90 minutes overcrowded by underdeveloped characters and plot turns. Adopted Chinese American Audrey (Ashley Park) travels to her birth country for the first time, along with two eccentric best friends, Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a Chinese soap opera actor hiding her sexual past from her God-fearing virgin fiancé, and Lolo (Sherry Cola), a fledgling artist who makes playground models resembling genitalia to “get the conversation going” (Lolo also brings along her BTS-obsessed cousin, played by a wide-eyed, scene-stealing Sabrina Wu). Audrey’s business trip to China quickly turns into a cross-continental search for her birth mother, and the film sharply illustrates certain minority challenges—internalized shame, dissonance between internal and external perceptions of self. Yet its efforts to provide a comprehensive cultural education (the work of not one, but many, many more representative films) result in stilted dialogue and a hasty denouement. The comedy’s saving grace lies in its effectively over-the-top humor; filled with riotous bits and clever one-liners, Joy Ride promises to leave the audience feeling lighter than before they entered the theater. And, sometimes, that’s all we need from a movie. R. ROSE WONG. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Progress Ridge, Vancouver Plaza.

QUICKSAND

A bickering couple on the brink of divorce gets stuck in a muddy hole in the forests of Colombia in Quicksand. Carolina Gaitan and Allan Hawco play the two characters, Sofia and Josh, who are health care professionals who have journeyed to the country to assist a friend. After going on a hike and winding up in an area they were warned about, Sofia and Josh end up in a fight for their lives. The two have to put aside their differences in order to survive the ordeal, but Matt Pitts’ screenplay never rings true as it jumps from scene to scene. Quicksand could have worked as a survival scenario crossed with a therapy session, but the couple’s conflict feels underwritten and their inept decision making makes it hard to root for them. Director Andres Beltran tries to overcome the thin screenplay by overselling many scenes with music and style; many sequences are well shot, but the messy editing often betrays the images. Quicksand does provide some minor enjoyment with unintentional laughs (some involving a snake), but most of the time the film is alternately boring and annoying. NR. DANIEL RESTER. Shudder.

by Jack Kent

JONESIN’

BY MATT JONES

"Make Me One With Everything"--it's a lot to include.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Your deep psyche will soon well up with extra creativity and fertility. I hope you will eagerly tap into these gifts. You should assume that you will be more imaginative and ingenious than usual. You will have an enhanced ability to solve problems with vigor and flair. In what areas of your life would you love to gently erupt with a burst of reinvention? Which of your habits might benefit from being cheerfully disrupted? Give yourself permission to change whatever bores you.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): My teacher Paul Foster Case said the color yellow is midway between warm, exciting red and cool, calming blue. “Yellow has an equilibrating influence,” he wrote. “It stimulates the finer functions of the brain, is of assistance in developing alertness and discrimination, and helps to establish emotional balance.” According to my astrological analysis, Taurus, you should emphasize this hue in the coming days. If you call on yellow to help strengthen the qualities Case describes, you will place yourself in sweet alignment with cosmic rhythms.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Because I enjoy joking with you, I am slightly tempted right now to give you one of the following nicknames: Fidgety, Twitch, Jittery, Quivers, or Shakes. But I will take a more serious tack. Let’s instead see if we can influence you to slow down, stabilize your rhythm, get really steady and secure, and stand strong in your foundational power spot. Would you consider adopting any of the following nicknames? Anchor, Unshakeable, Sturdy, Rock Solid, Staunch, Steadfast, Resolute.

of his failures motivated him. It drove him to improve his writing and churn out even more articles. It fueled his search for a wider array of publications that might host his work. During the fourth year of this approach, luck and fate turned in his favor. Within the next eight months, 12 of his pieces appeared in print. My muses tell me, Libra, that you need to hear this story right now.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): The cartoon character Bart Simpson is one of the stars of *The Simpsons* animated TV show. According to him, “Life is a paradox. You're damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” While that principle may sometimes be true, I believe you will be exempt from it in the coming weeks. In fact, I suspect you will be as free as it’s possible for a human to be of grueling contradictions, frustrating oppositions, clashing truths, and paralyzing contraries. There’s a good chance you will also outwit and avoid annoying incongruities and silly arguments. Congratulations in advance, Scorpio! Take full advantage of this phase of simple clarity.

ACROSS

1. Unfreeze

5. Late-week exclamation

9. Faucet issue

13. Revolutionary War spy

Nathan

14. Exasperate

16. Munich article

17. Letters on egg cartons

18. 1960s art-rock group Procol ___

19. "Johnny's Theme" composer Paul

20. More petty golf assistant?

23. Temperature tester

24. Nightstand topper

25. Intrusively forward

28. ___ kwon do

30. Casino game

34. Sugar bowl invader

35. Text messages for the public, e.g.

38. ___ occasion

39. Devices to watch movies like "Rambo" and "Rocky"?

42. Lose energy

43. Indian cheese

44. "What ___ you suggesting?"

45. Song of lament

47. It may be shared by coworkers

48. ___ Ring (2022 George

R.R. Martin-involved RPG)

50. Autobahn auto

52. Took down

53. Equipment in an unruly

hybrid of "Dancing with the Stars" and "Hockey Night in Canada"?

60. Result of dividing by 2

61. Overseas money

62. Skeleton segment

63. Moisturizer additive

64. Have ___ at the table

65. Divisible by 2

66. Tick relative

67. Some Morse code

68. Oboe player's need

DOWN

1. "As a result ..."

2. Greasy spoon dish

3. "M*A*S*H" star Alan

4. Opulence

5. State-straddling lake

6. Nibble away at

7. As to

8. Like some naughty words, length-wise

9. High-grossing 2016 comic book adaptation

10. Cheese protector

11. Like a starless sky

12. Carrot cohort, in the frozen food section

15. Exercise spot with a song written about it

21. Faithful

22. Sound booster

25. Command after "copy"

26. No later than

27. Look fixedly

28. Jack Black/Kyle Gass duo

©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.

29. Olympics venue

31. Work out dough

32. ___ nous (just between us)

33. Nevada senator Jacky who used to be a computer programmer

36. Prune trees

37. MS submitter's enclosure

40. Court charge

41. Emmy winner Goldstein

46. "Westworld" actor Brynner

49. Stoller's partner in songwriting

51. "The Sopranos" actress ___ de Matteo

52. Short staffers?

53. Tourist-heavy Indonesian island

54. Bunches

55. Layered cookie

56. Castle protection

57. Cabot ___ ("Murder, She Wrote" setting)

58. Bendy joint

59. Transmit

60. Black Forest ___

CANCER (June 21-July 22): The sometimes overly clever author Oscar Wilde said, "When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." I reject that warped view of reality and assure you it will have no bearing on your life in the coming weeks. If you formulate your prayers with care and discernment, they will lead you to rewards, not problems. Maybe not the *exact* rewards you imagined, but still close to your hopes and helpful in the next chapter of your life story. (PS: No sloppy, lazy, careless prayers, please. Be precise and clear.)

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Leo theologian Bernard McGinn defines mysticism as "the consciousness of the immediate presence of God." In other words, people having a mystic experience are filled with a visceral sensation of the divine intelligence. It's not just an idea or concept; it's a deeply felt communion infused with intimate tenderness. You Leos will be more likely than usual to have such contact in the coming weeks—if you want it. If you don't want it, or don't believe it's real, or don't think it's possible, well, then, you can of course resist it. But why not give it a whirl? There’s nothing to lose, and it could be fun.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Here's a parable for you. Once upon a time, there was a woman who could read the future in the night sky. She regarded the planets and stars as her divine informants. On one moonless evening, she took a walk down a dirt road near her home. It was so dark she could barely see two feet ahead of her. Oops! She should have brought a flashlight. Lost in wonder, she gazed up at the heavenly bodies, watching and listening for revelations they might have for her. Then one of the lights, the planet Saturn, whispered, "Stop and look down, friend." The woman turned her eyes from the sky to the ground just in time to find she was two strides away from stepping into a deep, muddy hole. What’s the moral of the tale? Here are some possibilities. 1. Sometimes the heights provide useful information about the depths. 2. Soaring visions may help you tune in to practical details. 3. To become aware of important facts you’ve overlooked in your daily rhythm, consult your higher mind.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): A Libran writer I know received many rejection notices when he launched his career. I was amazed at how undaunted he was. In fact, he was the opposite of undaunted. He taped copies of his rejection notices to his bedroom wall. Seeing the evidence

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The dragon has appeared in the myths and legends of many cultures. Europe, China, and Mesoamerica are just a few places where the fire-breathing flying reptiles have fascinated the human imagination. In some traditions, they are dangerous and predatory. In China, though, they have been harbingers of good fortune and symbols of great power. Emperors claimed the dragon as their special emblem. In assigning the dragon to be your soul creature, Sagittarius, I am drawing from Chinese lore. What would you like to accomplish that would benefit from you having access to fierce, dynamic, indomitable energy? Call on the dragon for help and power.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): "There is a world of people who will love you for who you are," writes author Cheryl Strayed. "A whole, vibrant, fuckedup, happy, conflicted, joyous, and depressed mass of people." In the coming months, one of your prime tasks is to specialize in communing with these folks. Make it your intention to surround yourself more and more with interesting, imperfect, ever-changing life-lovers who appreciate you for exactly who you are—and who inspire you to grow more and more into the full idiosyncratic glory of your authentic self.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): What psychic or prophet is most popular with a-list celebrities? I can assure you it’s not me. Few of my millions of readers are world-famous. What about the planet’s most scientifically accurate astrologer? Who might that be? It ain’t me. I don’t regard astrology as a science, and I mistrust those who say it is. In my view, astrology is a mythopoetic language and psychospiritual system that nurtures our souls and helps liberate us from our conditioning. We shouldn’t try to get “scientifically accurate” information from it. Now I encourage you to do what I just did, Aquarius. Have fun telling people who you are not, what you don’t believe in, and which goals you aren’t interested in pursuing.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): To come up with your astrological reports, I study the positions of the sun, moon, and planets in relation to your sign. That's the technical part of the work, the framework within which I unleash my intuition and imagination. To augment this work, I meditate and pray, asking higher powers to guide me in providing useful information for you. I often consult books written by my favorite astrology writers. (Currently reading Steven Forrest’s *The Elements Series*.) I also ask my deep mind to slip me info that might not be accounted for by traditional factors. How about you, Pisces? How do you do the work that you love and care about? Now is a good time to take inventory and make necessary adjustments.

Homework: Is there anyone you love that you could or should love better? Newsletter. FreeWillAstrology.com