Willamette Week, August 16, 2023 - Volume 49, Issue 40 - "The Death List"

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER

VOL. 49, ISSUE 40

Val Hoyle had a two-hour dinner with Rosa Cazares. 5

The High Desert Museum beseeched lawmakers for funding. 6

La Mota has registered seven locations in New Mexico 7

The sheriff warned jail guards that falsifying logbooks was a firing offense. 9

Multnomah County is considering what once seemed unthinkable: funding Bybee

Lakes Hope Center 10

Nearly a third of downtown Portland office space stands empty. 11

SteelWave turned Camera World into a bar, but it never opened. 17

The Sandy Hut is celebrating its 100th anniversary with a 40-foot-tall purple gorilla and a mechanical bull. 19

ON

This weekend will be one of the few times of the year Portland Japanese Garden illuminates its stone lanterns 19

You only have until the end of August to get a jawn at White Owl Social Club. 20

We Need Rent Money is based on the true story of roommates who invited the neighborhood drug dealer to move in. 21

Broadway Rose’s Cinderella wisely omits the original fairy tale’s scenes of blood spurting from the stepsisters’ feet 22

Vancouver plays Paris in Magenta Theater’s Amélie (The Musical) 23

One Portlander slept on the streets of Los Angeles for four nights to attend the final Twilight film’s premiere. 24

ALBERTA ROSE THEATRE

In these polarized times, it takes an extraordinary act to bring all of our readers together. Or, more precisely, extraordinary inaction. The city of Portland planting 30 saplings in a traffic median, then letting the contract to water the trees expire? That’ll do it. The trees died (“Whoops,” WW, Aug. 9). The Portland Bureau of Transportation said watering trees was outside its scope. Our readers were quick to point out that city bureaucrats used to have a contract with the nonprofit Friends of Trees—but let that expire, too. Here’s what else our readers had to say:

ACHY CANDYSTORE, VIA TWITTER: “Pretty apt metaphor for...everything happening in Portland.”

RICHARD ELLMYER, VIA WWEEK.COM: “What did PBOT management think was going to happen when the private contract to water these trees expired? Apparently thinking was not part of this equation, i.e., no water = dead trees. And so it goes.”

@AMBROWN, VIA TWITTER: “Apparently the city can’t even plant trees without making a plan to water them? City Hall is an absolute clown show and charter reform to force these bureaus to talk to one another and coordinate can’t come soon enough.”

AGGRESSIVE-EAST7663, VIA REDDIT: “I’ve been watching these trees slowly die all summer. I wonder how many other trees recently planted on PBOT property are being ignored? There’s a bunch of street trees in front of the community garden

on Southeast Market at 101st that were planted at the same time that haven’t been watered once this year either. At least a few of those trees have died as well. Is this a citywide issue, or is it more of an East Portland thing? It’s such a shame.”

CHRIS CARVALHO, VIA TWITTER: “This is PBOT, failing at the simplest things. Not only are they anti-car, they’re also anti-tree.”

RON, VIA WWEEK.COM: “Portland: The City That Refuses to Work is what the motto should be. City agencies don’t talk to each other and often refuse to. PBOT plants, but it’s not their job to water or tell the proper department that they planted things that need watering. I first realized this 30-plus years ago when I lived on Northeast Fremont/46th. The city spent a week repaving and improving Fremont. It was quite lovely. Sadly, it lasted two weeks before the city came in to tear up Fremont in order to hook homes into the sewer line. Both massive

Dr. Know

BY MARTY SMITH @martysmithxxx

Heading into this latest red flag alert, I’m wondering: Is there a reason you rarely hear of bigger cities burning, the way Phoenix/Talent did in 2020 and Lahaina did last week? Or, to be more specific, what are the odds of a major city fire happening here? —Uneasy

Weatherwatcher

The good news, Uneasy, is that official projections rate the likelihood of wildfire within Portland city limits as “low.” The bad news is that, until last week, the state of Hawaii was also using the word “low” to describe the risk from wildfire to its residents, and look where that got them.

Did Hawaii officials underestimate the likelihood of a catastrophic wildfire? Maybe. That said, genuinely unlikely events really do happen. (Only 17 people in human history have been killed by stingrays, but tell that to Steve Irwin.) The chances of urban wildfire in Portland may be low, but the prospect is scary enough for the city, county and state to take seriously.

Even if the worst does happen, though, we still won’t be talking about citywide immo-

projects had been planned for years and were done by two separate departments that never bothered to see if their plans conflicted with another department’s.

“The more things change the more they stay the same.”

THESHEDM, VIA REDDIT: “Oh gee, if only there was some org that could have helped keep these trees alive. Like if there was some sort of beloved local nonprofit that could have partnered with the city to help nurture trees like this with the help of local friendly volunteers that love trees. Certainly the city wouldn’t turn down such an opportunity…”

LISA LOVING, VIA WWEEK. COM: “I got a tree from Friends of Trees this spring and they literally harass me over it. They dropped off a free tree bag (cool!); multiple FOT people have been to my door nagging me about weeding around it; one crew even came, mansplained about tying up the tree too much, but then sunk four wooden stakes around it to tie it up some more and keep it growing straight. FOT on the job and each of those trees would be green and happy, whether anybody liked it or not.”

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR must include the author's street address and phone number for verification. Letters must be 250 or fewer words. Submit to: PO Box 10770, Portland, OR 97296

Email: mzusman@wweek.com

lation à la Lahaina or Phoenix, Ore. There’s a reason that big cities don’t burn completely off the map: Wildfire risk is pretty much confined to what we call the “wildland-urban interface,” the area where the fuel-rich wilderness comes into close proximity with structures, people and other stuff we’d rather didn’t catch on fire. Generally, the WUI is defined as any place where buildings are within 500 feet of hazardous vegetation (though in heavily forested areas, where more intense flames are possible, the figure can range up to 1.5 miles). In a small town, the WUI can easily include the entire city. Big cities like Portland, however, have large urban cores far from any wildlands—there’s just not enough fuel to turn the Rose City into Dresden, as much as Tucker Carlson might wish otherwise.

So what are we worried about? In a word (OK, two words), Forest Park. The park (and the adjoining Northwest hills) have plenty of fuel, steep slopes, difficult access for firefighting equipment, vulnerable infrastructure, and plenty of shitheads running around with lighters—all the ingredients for an urban wildfire nightmare.

Do we really need to worry? Projections from the Oregon Community Wildfire Protection plan suggest the likelihood of a 250-acre (or greater) wildfire in the Northwest hills over the next 20 years is something on the order of 1 in 500. I suppose those aren’t terrible odds. Still, if I knew my plane had a 1 in 500 chance of crashing, I probably wouldn’t get on it.

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

CITY ATTORNEY FACES ACCUSATIONS OF UNPROFESSIONAL BEHAVIOR TOWARD

WOMEN: In response to a records request, the Portland City Attorney’s Office has given WW emails and text messages containing complaints of unequal pay in the office and unprofessional behavior by City Attorney Robert Taylor. The records are heavily redacted and do not include the names of what appear to be at least two separate complainants. One is identified as a BIPOC woman with nearly 20 years experience as an attorney. Based on the circumstances outlined in the emails, she apparently worked with Taylor on ongoing litigation with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding police use of force on people with mental illness. She says Taylor interrupted a mediation session to address “gossip” after a federal attorney conveyed concerns that Taylor was “condescending and patronizing.” “Not only was Robert’s behavior extremely unprofessional and detrimental to the case and the ultimate resolution of the Settlement Agreement, but also bullying,” she wrote, before filing an HR complaint on Jan. 24. In a separate incident, a woman claims Taylor behaved so unprofessionally in a meeting with Portland Police Bureau brass that “several command level PPB staff present at the meeting checked in with me after the meeting to make sure I was okay, as did a paralegal and attorney.” Taylor later apologized. In separate unofficial complaints, Taylor was accused of being “sexist” in a text message and of telling a staff member that she was years away from a promotion because she was “unstable.” Taylor praised “the excellent team of legal professionals in the City Attorney’s Office,” in a statement to WW, but declined to discuss personnel matters there.

PERMITTING WAR BETWEEN RUBIO AND MAPPS DRAGS

ON: As WW has previously reported, City Commissioners Carmen Rubio and Mingus Mapps have been battling for weeks over how to best fix the city’s broken permitting system (“Fixer Upper,” Aug. 26). Mapps called the two commissioners’ plans “fundamentally incompatible.” Since then, allies have taken sides in the battle. Eleven business and industry groups backed Rubio’s plan in a letter sent earlier this month to the Portland City Council; four city bureau directors penned a letter supporting Mapps’ plan. On Aug. 3, Mapps co-wrote a letter with Commissioner Dan Ryan to Mayor Ted Wheeler, urging him to support an ongoing permitting project and to hold off on consolidating permits under one office until the city’s form of government changes in 2025. The day before, Rubio wrote to Mapps in an email that she was “completely caught off guard” by his alternative plan, and that she “would have greatly appreciated a courtesy reach out from you to convey your change of heart about working together, and that you had a plan in the works.” Mapps did not respond to a request for comment.

HOYLE DINED WITH LA MOTA CEO YEAR

BEFORE GRANT: U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle (D-Ore.), formerly commissioner of the state Bureau of Labor and Industries, told WW in an interview this spring that she “didn’t recall” whether she had met with La Mota CEO Rosa Cazares about a $554,000 grant that BOLI issued to a nonprofit co-founded by Cazares. Records newly obtained by WW show that Hoyle, alongside BOLI’s apprenticeship and training director, dined with Cazares at Portland City Grill for two hours on March 24, 2021. The topic of the meeting, according to the records, was “La Mota re: Cannabis Apprenticeship.” WW pressed Hoyle on the matter after learning the grant was awarded, with the labor commissioner’s blessing, to an inexperienced nonprofit led by Cazares, who, alongside her partner Aaron Mitchell, contributed $20,000 to Hoyle’s BOLI campaign in 2021, and then $5,800 to her congressional campaign last summer. (Hoyle returned all BOLI campaign contributions, including Mitchell’s, when she decided to run for Congress.) Hoyle spokeswoman Marissa Sandgren says that “to the best of her recollection, Rosa paid for the meal. [Hoyle] recalls that the meal was less than $50.” Sandgren noted that the meeting occurred well before WW ’s reports about La Mota’s tax liens, and the revelation that Secretary of State Shemia Fagan was moonlighting for the cannabis chain. “If we knew then what we know now,” Sandgren says, “that dinner wouldn’t have happened.”

HOLVEY RECALL EFFORT RUNS HOT: As United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 555 continues its effort to recall state Rep. Paul Holvey (D-Eugene) over the failure of a union organizing bill for cannabis workers earlier this year, the rhetoric around the unusual campaign is heating up. (Holvey, a former union carpenter and the longest-serving Democrat in the House, is normally a darling of labor.) Last week, workers with the signature-gathering company United Petitioners of Oregon accused UFCW of “union busting” for asking them to work outside their union and refusing to bargain with them. UFCW spokesman Miles Eshaia denies the allegations and says his union supports the company and its desire to unionize signature gatherers. Meanwhile, UFCW president Dan Clay penned a letter to Holvey on Aug. 14 alleging a Holvey supporter “physically attacked” a recall signature gatherer on Aug. 10. “You have painted a picture of yourself as the victim of an undemocratic and sinister conspiracy,” Clay wrote. “And now that fantasy and its implications have finally been distilled into an assault upon a young person.” Clay says the signature gatherer recovered and is taking some time off. Rep. Holvey says he had no knowledge of or involvement in the alleged assault. “As the [Aug. 21] signature deadline draws near,” he adds, “the desperation of those pushing this reckless recall is showing.”

$252 Million

economies their institutions provide—and just how chintzy Oregon is.

Brian Ferriso, director of the Portland Art Museum, put Oregon in context: “On average, art museums across the country receive 2% of their annual operating budget from their state. The Portland Art Museum falls well below this average, receiving just 0.2% of its operating budget from the state of Oregon annually.”

Hot to Trot

In SEC filings, Churchill Downs describes how it’s winning big in Oregon.

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

Oregon lawmakers enjoyed a bounteous harvest of tax dollars in the session that concluded in late June, the result of a stronger-than-expected economy that will return more than $5 billion to taxpayers next year, thanks to the state’s unique “kicker” law. But lawmakers stiffed cultural organizations, large and small. How bad is it? On Aug. 15, Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland’s oldest professional theater company (founded in 1982) abruptly suspended its 2023-24 season, citing the failure of House Bill 2459, which “resulted in $250,000 not being awarded to us as part of the proposed recovery funding for the arts and cultural sector.”

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

In 2001, when Republicans controlled both chambers of the Legislature, lawmakers led by state Rep. Ben Westlund (R-Tumalo) and Sen. Lee Beyer (D-Springfield) established the Oregon Cultural Trust in recognition that “a state with a vibrant arts and cultural life attracts and retains educated people and progressive businesses.” They established three funding streams: tax credits, license plate sales and, most promising, the sale of 400 acres of surplus Department of Corrections land in East Salem.

“ We wanted to set up an endowment with the land sales,” Beyer says. “I told Westlund it wasn’t going to work—I didn’t think the executive branch or the Legislature would ever let go of anything.”

Records show the state has sold numerous parcels of land for development to blue-chip companies, including FedEx, Home Depot and Amazon totaling $33 million, but the Cultural Trust didn’t get a penny from those sales until the $3.3 million it’s due to get this year. Andrea Chiapella, a spokeswoman for the Department of Administrative Services, says the cost of preparing land for sale—building infrastructure, mitigating wetlands, etc.—consumed earlier revenues.

Christine Drazan served as chief of staff to Speaker of the House Mark Simmons (R-Elgin) in 2001 and ran the Cultural Advocacy Coalition from 2011 to 2018. “Oregonians all know about the Bottle Bill,” Drazan says. “The Oregon Cultural Trust was supposed to be an equivalent addition to our cultural life and celebrate everything about Oregon that’s unique. The Legislature made a promise about selling the land for an endowment.”

WHAT HAPPENED THIS SESSION?

State Rep. Rob Nosse (D-Portland), the chair of Salem’s cultural caucus, took a two-pronged approach in 2023 to help a sector that supporters say brings tourists to Oregon and uplifts the state’s residents. Nosse asked his colleagues to allocate $200 million in Oregon Lottery bonds to build an endowment for the Oregon Cultural Trust—fulfilling the promise lawmakers made in 2001—and asked for $50 million in “recovery funding” as well as $12 million in end-of-session capital construction bills. Nosse didn’t expect to get all $262 million, but he got only $5.6 million in recovery funds for venues and $4 million in capital funding.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

In testimony, arts leaders extolled the benefits to state and local

On a per capita basis, we rank 36th in the nation in state spending on the arts. “Oregon spends 48 cents per capita on the arts, whereas Minnesota, the national leader, spends $7.34,” testified Dana Whitelaw, executive director of the High Desert Museum in Bend.

Their pleas fell on deaf ears

WHAT’S NEXT?

Nosse says he and his colleagues in the cultural caucus will sharpen their pitch in next year’s short session—and, at a minimum, ask again for the balance of the requested $12 million in capital funding. Lawmakers funded that level of work in prior sessions, and Nosse says without a walkout time crunch it can happen again. “I’m hopeful,” he says. NIGEL JAQUISS.

Anybody who glanced at the Oregon secretary of state’s audit of the Oregon Racing Commission released Aug. 9 would find the same conclusion that WW reached in a cover story earlier this year (“Track Addicts,” May 17, 2023). The commission provides “limited oversight and transparency” and generates in state revenue only a fraction of 1 percent of the billions of dollars in bets it handles.

Not included in the audit: two facts gleaned from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings of Churchill Downs Inc., the largest internet betting company active in Oregon (it handled about

That’s the difference between what Oregon’s struggling arts groups requested from the Legislature this year—and how much they got.

HIGH AND DRY: Bend’s HIgh Desert Museum and other cultural institutions got shut out in the 2023 legislative session.

$2.5 billion in bets in 2022), that show what suckers Oregonians are. Churchill Downs, based in Louisville, Ky., runs the Kentucky Derby—but has found a sure thing in the online betting facilitated by Oregon state officials who ask for nearly nothing in return.

The business, which the company conducts in Oregon via its TwinSpires subsidiary, provides a far higher return on the company’s assets than its other businesses: horse racing and casinos. Internet betting provided about a 40% return on assets , four times the return on horse racing and nearly twice the return on casinos.

Of its three business segments, TwinSpires pays a far lower percentage of its revenues in “taxes and purses”—about 6% —than do Churchill Downs’ horse racing and casino businesses, which pay out an average of 30%.

“ TwinSpires is one of the largest and most profitable legal online horse racing wagering platforms in the U.S.,” the company boasted in its 2022 annual report. State Rep. David Gomberg (D-Otis), a leading critic of the Racing Commission, says the current setup is doubly troubling: “We’re incentivizing gambling, and Oregonians get next to nothing for it.” NIGEL JAQUISS.

FOLLOW-UP

On the Move

A lot has changed for cannabis moguls Rosa Cazares and Aaron Mitchell since March.

Their business relationship with Secretary of State Shemia Fagan led to her resignation, and is now the subject of three separate investigations—including a federal criminal probe. Their cozy relationship with top Democrats has disintegrated. They’ve been largely exiled from the cannabis industry they championed. They’ve moved to separate apartment buildings, a far cry from the mansion they rented together in the Northwest hills where they threw lavish political fundraisers. The couple’s nanny was indicted on criminal charges after driving Mitchell’s car last October in a high-speed police chase. They’ve been sued by a neighboring business and a landlord.

And as things have slowly fallen apart for the two, they’ve done two things that seem at odds.

First, they continue to accumulate tax liens. Three new liens filed in the past month and a half by the Internal Revenue Service and the Oregon Department of Revenue total more than $4.2 million.

Second, they continue to expand into New Mexico. The two now hold seven cannabis licenses in that state—including a giant warehouse that used to contain a furniture outlet store.

Here’s an update on the two’s persistent financial woes and simultaneous business expansion.

NEW TAX LIENS

As WW has previously reported, the feds and the state have

TRENDING

DELAY OF GAME

Less than half of criminal cases in Multnomah County Circuit Court are resolved in a timely manner.

Court cases across Oregon are taking longer and longer to resolve. This has a variety of consequences, including the fact that pretrial defendants are spending more time behind bars.

It’s a particularly acute problem in Multnomah County, according to Oregon Judicial Department reports reviewed by WW. Less than half of criminal cases in Multnomah County Circuit Court are resolved within state “timely disposition” goals. Those benchmarks measure the percentage of misdemeanor and felony cases that resolve within 90 days and 180 days, respectively.

The goal is 90%. For felonies, Multnomah County is at 48%, the lowest rate of any county in the state. For misdemeanors, the Multnomah County

issued more than $7 million in tax liens in recent years against Cazares, Mitchell and the companies they control.

In the past two months, three additional tax liens filed by the feds and the state add up to more than $4.2 million.

That’s significant because it shows that Cazares and Mitchell still aren’t paying much of their taxes, six months after WW first reported on the problem.

On Aug. 10, the IRS issued a $4 million lien against Mitchell. A breakdown of the lien: $1.8 million is for personal income tax for 2020, just over $1 million is for personal income tax in 2021, and the remaining amount is withholding taxes from 2020 and 2021 that were supposed to be transmitted to the feds from employees’ paychecks for things like Social Security and Medicaid.

Another federal lien issued to 503 Staffing LLC, one of Mitchell’s companies, on July 3 is for $46,670 from tax year 2022.

A lien issued by Oregon’s Department of Revenue on Aug. 3 to Mitchell and Cazares lists $201,308 in unpaid withholding and payroll taxes, among others.

NEW MEXICO EXPANSION

More than 20 of La Mota’s Oregon dispensaries are still operational. (At least two have shut down since WW’s March 29 cover story.)

La Mota now has seven licensed cannabis locations in New Mexico, according to the state’s cannabis database. Mitchell, according to public records, owns four of the seven properties. It appears only two of them are operational, however, according to monthly sales data published by the state.

Sales reflected on that database would suggest La Mota’s rollout in the Land of Enchantment has been rocky.

La Mota’s dispensary in Clovis, an all-black structure tucked between industrial buildings, sold only $3,160 in product in July, according to the database. Another location in Albuquerque sold $12,112,347 in July.

But just last week La Mota got a cannabis manufacturing license approved by the state. Its address is listed as the site of a giant former furniture store in Albuquerque.

Cazares and Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment. SOPHIE PEEL.

Oregon Judicial Department

rate is 37%—only Clatsop and Columbia do worse.

The goals were set in 2018 based on recommendations by the National Center for State Courts. “The intent is to encourage the fair disposition of cases at the earliest possible time,” the center says.

There are two major drivers of this trend, explains Multnomah County trial court administrator Barbara Marcille: the pandemic, when court proceedings slowed as everything transitioned online, and a reduction in misdemeanor filings.

“Those lower-level criminal cases typically resolve more quickly, and more are dismissed due to plea negotiations and diversion programs,” she tells WW. In other words, the court is dealing with a greater proportion of felony cases, which suck up more time, and leave fewer resources to mop up the misdemeanors.

But most misdemeanor cases resolved in 2022 were filed prior to 2021, she says. In short: The court is playing catch-up, and defendants are being forced to wait as a result. LUCAS MANFIELD.

The founders of La Mota face new tax liens totaling more than $4 million as they expand into New Mexico.

PERCENTAGE OF CRIMINAL CASES IN MULTNOMAH COUNTY RESOLVED WITHIN STATE-MANDATED TIME FRAMES Source:

Cell Death

Multnomah County’s dysfunctional jails have turned deadly.

BY LUCAS MANFIELD lmanfield@wweek.com

On the afternoon of Aug. 1, Multnomah County Corrections Deputy Kirk Evanoff was making his rounds on the seventh floor of Portland’s maximum-security downtown jail.

He’d been working more than 14 hours, the tail end of a double shift. Thanks to short-staffing, he was responsible for checking on 64 cells, double the typical number.

Some time that afternoon, he peered through the window of Cell 26. Clemente Pineda was lying facedown on the floor near the door.

This wasn’t remarkable to Evanoff, even though the 36-year-old Pineda had been that way since lunch. As Evanoff later told WW, inmates often appear incapacitated due to the powerful drugs smuggled in to the jail.

Evanoff asked Pineda if he wanted meds. Pineda didn’t respond, Evanoff says, so he and the accompanying health care aide moved on. At no time while Pineda was facedown on the floor during Evanoff’s shift that afternoon did the inmate receive medical care, the deputy tells WW

Shortly before Evanoff’s shift ended, he wrote a note describing Pineda’s state. “[He] was unresponsive during medpass but is most definitely breathing,” it said.

Around an hour after Evanoff’s shift ended, Pineda stopped breathing. Jail employees rushed to resuscitate him, but it was too late. Pineda’s was the sixth death of an inmate in Multnomah County jails since May.

On Aug. 11, Evanoff was fired. The county offered no explanation, Evanoff says, but he believes he was made a scapegoat. “I followed policy,” he tells WW. “He showed no signs of distress and was breathing.”

In the days following Pineda’s death, Evanoff’s log message was circulated by jail staff shocked by the circumstances of the death. His documentation undermined the official story.

The county had said in a press release that Pineda was “found unresponsive in their cell” at around 4:15 and “corrections deputies immediately began lifesaving measures.” But Evanoff’s note implied that jail staff were aware of his condition far earlier.

Sheriff Nicole Morrisey O’Donnell declined an interview with WW. “The death of Clemente Pineda is an active and ongoing investigation, and we cannot comment further,” a spokesman for her office said.

There will be explanations, eventually. O’Donnell has called in state and federal agencies to help figure out what went wrong. But it will be months, if not years, before the public learns what they find.

The quick firing of Evanoff prior to completion of an investigation is likely an attempt to shield the county from liability. Whether or not

JORDAN HUNDELT

PHOTO BY

BUCK STOPS HERE: Sheriff Nicole Morrisey O’Donnell, sworn in January, is confronting a crisis in her jails.

staff is ultimately found negligent, imposing discipline helps protect the county from claims it violated inmates’ civil rights.

“That’s the jail covering their ass,” explains Matthew Kaplan, a litigator with experience filing wrongful death lawsuits against county jails.

On the other hand, it could provide prospective litigants with powerful ammunition. “[Evanoff] might be a great witness,” Kaplan says. “He’s a disgruntled employee saying, ‘I just do it how they train me.’”

That’s certainly what he’s saying in the days after his firing—and his account fits into a larger picture of a county jail system where dysfunction has turned deadly.

Internal documents and WW interviews with current and former staff reveal the jails’ struggles to adapt to a series of interconnected crises: the influx of the deadly new drug fentanyl, the increasing severity of inmates’ mental illnesses, and a staffing crisis that some say has made the jail more dangerous.

In recent weeks, the sheriff has gone on a publicity tour touting recent changes, including an aggressive new strip search policy.

But not all of her appearances have been publicized. Earlier this month, WW has learned, Sheriff O’Donnell showed up at staff meetings with a stern warning: Falsify jail logbooks and you will get fired. It’s believed to be a response to suspicions that deputies failed to follow protocol prior to one of the deaths, then forged their logs to suggest they had.

Whether this crackdown will be enough to stop the death toll from rising further remains to be seen.

“These deaths are devastating,” County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson tells WW, “and something that has to change immediately.”

But to know what to change, one must first know what went wrong.

The county has acknowledged, under questioning from WW, that two of the deaths this year were suicides. In both cases, the men had shown signs of mental illness.

This isn’t uncommon: 32% to 80% of inmates in Multnomah County jails are believed to have a mental illness, according to a 2018 report by Disability Rights Oregon.

But it raises the question of whether the men

received appropriate care.

Donovan Wood, 26, who died in May, had threatened to slit his throat prior to his arrest, his sister indicated to police.

In December, the county converted Dorm 15 in the eastside Inverness Jail to house mentally ill inmates. Wood was transferred to that dorm shortly before his death, according to jail records. And it’s likely there that Wood suffocated himself with a plastic bag during the night.

There’s no indication yet that jail staffers made any mistakes in their treatment of Wood. But the county auditor pointed to a systemic issue with the county’s specialty housing for inmates with mental illness in a report released early last year: While the county added housing, it didn’t budget for more specialized staff. (A spokesman says there’s a “mental health team” of one sergeant and one deputy that spend time at both jails, including Dorm 15.)

The second suicide occurred six weeks later, in the downtown jail. Martin Franklin was found hanging by a bed sheet the morning of June 16.

Like Wood, Franklin had a history of mental illness. He’d been given a psychological evaluation following concerns that he wasn’t capable of defending himself at trial. A person familiar with the situation says Franklin had complained about not being let out of his cell for routine time in a common area.

There are widely held suspicions that Franklin was not adequately supervised overnight prior to the discovery of his body, multiple people close to the jail tell WW

Whether this is true will be easy for jail administrators to check. “They’re going to have video of guards doing their rounds—or not,” Kaplan the lawyer says. “It should line up with the logbook.”

If the video exists, prosecutors will see it. The investigation into Franklin’s death has already been sent to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office to review for possible criminal charges, DA spokeswoman Liz Merah tells WW

Both the locking of Franklin in a cell and the temptation to cut corners on checking that cell would seem to have a common cause: short-staffing. In fiscal year 2020, the sheriff’s office had 11 job vacancies. Two years later, in 2022, there were 44. The county is “aggressively hiring corrections deputies,” a spokeswoman

says, but as of earlier this month there were still 30 empty positions.

Meanwhile, mandatory overtime has skyrocketed and morale has plummeted. “People are complaining that they’re getting hit with overtime four days a week,” Evanoff says. “They’re tired and yawning and just look so lethargic.”

Some of the remaining deaths may be drug-related, the sheriff says. It is not clear which ones. But Evanoff assumes Pineda died of an overdose.

Another likely drug-related death is that of Josiah Pierce, who died July 19. The county has not released the cause, but he was hospitalized the day before after behaving erratically, according to jail records obtained by WW and people familiar with the matter.

Over the past few years, the arrival of the uber-powerful opioid fentanyl has worsened conditions inside the jail. Inmates are detoxing in their cells. Others smuggle the drug in and overdose.

The smuggling problem was exacerbated by the jail’s phasing out of strip searches in the past few years, multiple people familiar with the situation tell WW. Instead, inmates were patted down and scanned by X-ray machines, which were installed in late 2019 and the sheriff now says aren’t capable of detecting fentanyl.

Staff has been complaining for years about the technology’s ineffectiveness and insufficient training in how to use it, several people tell WW

On Aug. 1, the jail finally took action. It distributed a policy memo saying all new inmates would be strip searched. It subsequently expanded the policy to include all inmates transferred between the county’s two jails.

The sheriff recently outlined her plans on a walk-through of the jails with county commissioners.

Commissioner Susheela Jayapal says the new strategy is a trade-off. On one hand, she says, strip searches are “an inherent violation of privacy.” On the other hand, she was told there’s no other way to detect the small amounts of fentanyl that can cause a fatal overdose.

Meanwhile, the lack of transparency from the sheriff’s office leaves survivors in torment.

Like Allen Walker’s family, who learned from a phone call May 15 that he’d died of internal bleeding from his stomach two days before in Portland’s downtown jail.

Walker had struggled with fentanyl addiction, but he’d never previously had stomach issues, his sister, Angela Gilgan, tells WW “ What do you mean?” Gilgan recalls saying in disbelief. “He was only 31.”

Unlike after every other death so far this year, the county offered an immediate explanation: He died of natural causes, according to a preliminary analysis by the medical examiner that ruled out “foul play, overdose or suicide,” a jail spokesman told WW at the time.

But a recent incident has left Gilgan suspicious that the jail neglected her brother.

Last month, Gilgan says, a customer came into her sister’s pawn shop with a disturbing story about an inmate who had died in a Portland jail. He’d been screaming for help, and it never came.

It left Gilgan wondering. “Maybe he did ask for help,” she says, “and they just ignored it.”

Rooms for Five

Given a huge check, the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners faces unprecedented scrutiny on finally spending it.

BY NIGEL JAQUISS njaquiss@wweek.com

It’s a new era for the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners—which, because of the enormous funding it has to spend on homeless services, has become the most-watched five-member group in Portland since the last time the Blazers were any good.

One obvious difference: The days when Chair Deborah Kafoury dictated every detail of how the county operated are over.

“It’s a real change,” Commissioner Susheela Jayapal tells WW “Deborah had many strengths. Sharing power was not one of them.”

On Aug. 10, hours before the five-member board sat down to discuss how to spend $50 million of unanticipated revenue from Metro’s supportive house services measure, Commission-

er Julia Brim-Edwards publicly released a wish list not only for that money, but for another $71.8 million the county and Metro are currently dickering over that remains unspent from 2023.

Among other ideas, Brim-Edwards wants an infusion of $6 million or $7 million for the Bybee Lakes Hope Center, a homeless shelter in the former Wapato Jail. (That in itself is remarkable: Kafoury pushed the county to sell the never-used jail for a fraction of its cost and would not consider supporting any county services at the North Portland building. Today, at least three commissioners support funding Bybee Lakes.)

Commissioner Jayapal suggested helping Albina Vision Trust purchase the Paramount, a 66unit naturally affordable apartment building at 253 N Broadway. (Jayapal didn’t propose a specific dollar amount, but the nonprofit

previously requested $2.8 million in gap funding.)

Commissioner Lori Stegmann asked for $11.5 million to buy the Sheraton Four Points Hotel at 1919 NE 181st Ave. for the Rockwood Community Development Corporation.

And Commissioner Sharon Meieran repeated her call for a $25 million down payment on the sprawling 241-unit Crowne Plaza Hotel at 1441 NE 2nd Ave., located in the Lloyd District between the Hooper Detoxification Stabilization Center and Legacy’s Unity Center for Behavioral Health.

“This should be a no-brainer: acting at a scale that will make a difference,” Meieran said. “Do we or do we not have a desperate need for recovery housing?”

The truth is that the county could make all of those expenditures today and still have $70 million or so left over.

REGAL RECOVERY: The Crowne Plaza property includes two commercial kitchens, lots of common space and three vacant blocks.

pink martini

Vega Pederson, who served six years on the board before moving up to the chair’s job in January, acknowledged that giving her colleagues an opportunity to publicly recite their wish lists put her in a tricky position.

“Having a conversation of this type is unique in my experience,” she said last week.

And it is no accident that the biggest items on the commissioners’ wish lists are existing rooms that can immediately house people—in some cases, at a fraction of what the city’s Housing Bureau has historically spent on constructing subsidized housing.

“People are talking about tangible improvement,” Jayapal says. “They want to see an impact on unsheltered homelessness.”

All the talk of buying bricks and mortar made Vega Pederson uneasy, perhaps a legacy of the county’s ill-fated decision to construct the Wapato Jail in 2003 without having the money to operate it.

“Capital investment implies ongoing costs,” she said.

That’s prudent, but it ignores the stream of cash—more than $100 million a year—flowing from the homeless services measure voters passed in 2020 (the Joint Office of Homeless Services’ budget is $282 million this year). It also ignores the possibility of Medicaid funding for some of the services the county would provide in new buildings.

operating officer, Serena Cruz, has been negotiating with Metro on how to spend the $71.8 million that Metro says remains unspent from 2023 (“Scrooged,” WW, July 26).

There’s clear consensus on the board that the county needs to open a sobering center, pay contractors better, build capacity at nonprofits, and continue to provide rental assistance and take other measures to prevent even more people from becoming homeless. Tangible spending on the unsheltered who are already on the streets is less clear.

The biggest single line item Metro and the county have agreed on for last year’s money? Not spending it. Metro will allow the county to put $16 million into reserves—i.e., savings.

That is not an isolated suggestion. At last week’s board briefing for the $50 million of recently discovered Metro supportive housing services revenue from 2021, Joint Office of Homeless Service staff made a similar suggestion: “increase stabilization reserves to 15%” from the current 10%. In other words, spend even less money.

“How much do we really need to have [in reserve]?” Stegmann asked, noting that the 2020 ballot measure gave the county a finite time to reduce homelessness: “It’s a short time window of 10 years.”

THE BIG SUMMER SALE

Vega Pederson is under pressure. Her colleagues’ collective clamor to spend surplus county dollars on properties with urgency came in the same week Gov. Tina Kotek announced a “task force” to tackle homelessness and public safety—an obvious slap at Vega Pederson and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler. Metro is also ratcheting up its oversight of county spending. All of that means Vega Pederson faces unprecedented scrutiny and demands for Multnomah County to move with dispatch.

Last month, Vega Pederson botched the rollout of tinfoil and straws for fentanyl users, as WW first reported. Last week, The Oregonian chronicled the county’s failure to provide basic services at a new safe rest village in inner Southeast Portland.

But those stories mask the larger issue: The county has simply failed to spend the money voters have sent its way. Behind the scenes, Vega Pederson’s chief

Vega Pederson was mostly in listening mode last week. Unlike her colleagues, she did not bring a wish list, and while she asked questions, she kept her cards close to her vest.

The opportunity for her is to share the authority, the workload, and even the blame by incorporating the suggestions others made. She can lead the parade, or risk getting run over.

“I think there’s a fair amount of trepidation on the chair’s part,” Jayapal says. “There’s risk involved in being open and transparent in public.”

County spokeswoman Julie Sullivan-Springhetti says Vega Pederson is gathering data and considering her colleagues’ wish lists.

“She and her staff are evaluating the information around the bricks-and-mortar options and Bybee Lakes,” Sullivan-Springhetti says. “She’ll comment when the analysis is complete.”

The board expects to vote on allocating the surplus money in late August.

“There’s risk involved in being open and transparent in public.”

THE LIST

By Anthony Effinger

Here’s a scary number: Nearly a third of Portland’s downtown office space stands empty.

The skyline along the Willamette is a ghost town of sky scrapers, filled with buildings that are in trouble because they have too few tenants. Or they have loans that are coming due and can’t refinance. In far too many cases, it’s both.

Such grim circumstances are outlined in some harrowing documents being passed among Portland commercial property owners these days. The spreadsheets are known as “death lists” because they describe buildings that don’t make economic sense any more. They have too much debt and not enough income from rent to cover it.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 14

Empty and unwanted, the iconic buildings of Portland’s skyline are in trouble.

The death lists include phrases like: “deed in lieu of foreclosure” (meaning the owner voluntarily gives the property to the bank); “expected to go back to the bank”; or on a “watchlist” because the loan matures soon.

To a real estate professional, such terms are tantamount to seeing words like “stomach cancer” or “genital herpes” in an email from your doctor. No one wants to be on such a list. But the ones being passed around town contain more than three dozen buildings, some of them really large.

So we made a list of our own.

WW got hold of a copy of one death list and spent hours at the county recorder’s office looking through addresses for bad loans, foreclosures, opaque transfers and liens. We made neat stacks of paper on our office floor and coded them to names on a Google Sheet that tracks owners, prices paid, and market values. We traced ownership through endless lists of nested limited liability companies, which property owners use to cloak their holdings. We called and emailed dozens of owners from Florida to Los Angeles—and heard little back.

From that we created a map showing properties where we could document anything that smelled like distress: something as mild as a lien or as catastrophic as a foreclosure. The upshot: We found 16 properties that have a documented problem now.

tenants. You’re not going to book another major employer into this city for a decade.”

Statistics support Ames, to a point. Downtown Portland’s office vacancy rate, including space available for sublet, was 31.5% in the second quarter of the year, according to Colliers, a Toronto-based firm that tracks global real estate. That’s a fraction better than hard-hit San Francisco (31.9%), and worse than Seattle (27.9%), Los Angeles (30.9%), Salt Lake City (19.9%) and Denver (23.4%).

“The Portland office market continues to face a bleak outlook at the midway point of 2023,” analysts at Colliers wrote. “Over the next two quarters, more than 500,000 square feet of leased space is set to expire marketwide. Should these tenants maintain office space following the expiration of their leases, they will likely look to downsize their real estate footprints.”

Ames, 83, says he’s never seen Portland so empty and foreclosed. “I’ve been in this business for 50 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Ames says.

At 31.5%, Portland’s vacancy rate is higher now than it’s been since anyone started keeping reliable records. Even in 2010, after the Great Recession weeded out lots of tenants, the downtown vacancy rate stayed below 15%, Colliers says.

Just like in the movies, lurid scenes play out on the courthouse steps. Last Friday morning, one of Portland’s most iconic buildings, Jackson Tower, went to auction. The 12-story landmark, built in 1912, overlooks Pioneer Courthouse Square and has a Roman-numeral clock tower. A California-based LLC bought it for $13.5 million in 2008 and still owed $10.7 million to JPMorgan Chase, according to court filings.

At 10 am, a representative for the trustee read out the auction notice to a reporter and a photographer. No one else showed up. When neither of the journalists bid, a lawyer for the lender offered $7.5 million, using the debt on the building, which totaled $10.7 million. That’s called a “credit bid,” and it’s a bit like taking your brother to prom. No one wants to do it.

The loss of tenants is hurting older buildings like Jackson Tower most. Companies looking for space can get good deals on plush buildings that broke ground before the world changed. Law firm Davis Wright Tremaine is leaving its old digs in the Wells Fargo Tower for Block 216, a new spire that has both office space and Ritz-Carlton residences (that commute could bring a new meaning to working from home).

But some brand-new buildings are cratering, too. The owners of Field Office, a 290,375-square-foot office complex near the Willamette River with all the tech-bro amenities (roof deck, scooter charging), defaulted on their $73.8 million loan after they couldn’t find enough tenants. The lender is auctioning the loan to the highest bidder. Offers were due this week.

Because Portland has no sales tax, local governments rely more heavily on income tax and property tax to pay for things like schools and homeless shelters. And taxes paid by downtown property owners account for about 15% of Multnomah County’s property tax, according to consulting firm ECONorthwest.

It’s no secret that there are troubled buildings all over Portland. They’re all over America, thanks to the pandemic, when companies figured out that employees could work from home in a pinch. Those workers have been slow to come back—slower in Portland than in most cities, by several measures—and many companies aren’t renewing office leases.

In a case of very bad timing, many real estate loans made during the last boom, when interest rates were low, are coming due now. Owners must refinance, but their buildings are worth far less, and interest rates are much, much higher. That’s a deadly pair of pincers. Many owners are choosing to walk away, giving buildings back to the banks that financed them. An LLC controlled by Bank of America, for example, took over the Crossing at First in May—a gleaming 191,000-square-foot campus near Duniway Park that was remodeled in 2017.

“A slug of loans is all coming due at the same time,” says real estate lawyer Dean Alterman. “The people I’m dealing with can still get financing, but they have to look harder for it.”

The question—and it’s a contentious one—is whether Portland is worse than any place else because of blight. Plywood that went up during the 2020 protests still obscures some downtown storefronts. Homeless camps that took root during the pandemic are only now being removed. On some downtown blocks, you’re just as likely to see someone smoking fentanyl as sipping a Frappucino.

Bob Ames, former president of First Interstate Bank and a longtime investor in commercial property, thinks Portland is suffering more than most. “The problem with downtown Portland is that you don’t want to be in downtown Portland,” he says. “We’ve driven a lot of capital out of here, and a lot of

Given that those taxes are levied based on the value of the buildings, if values fall far enough, so will tax revenues.

We won’t know how bad the hit is until the county assessor’s office releases the next round of market values at the end of the year, says Michael Wilkerson, director of analytics at ECONorthwest. Because property tax increases are capped in Oregon and have been for decades, the assessed value of buildings—the value that determines an owner’s tax—lags the market value. In good times, it lags a lot.

“The vast majority of properties in the central city have real market values that are much higher than assessed values, so drops of 50% or more would generally be required in order to impact property tax revenue,” Wilkerson says. He’s not sure that will happen. He sees some green shoots: “We have many examples of central city neighborhoods with a mix of residential and commercial uses that are thriving.”

The 16 properties with documented distress are listed on the map that follows on page 12. We’ve done short profiles of three we think are emblematic. One, the Commonwealth, is historic, and the owners took maybe the biggest haircut (Wall Street’s favorite term for a loss) in town. Another, Aspect on Sixth, got an expensive face-lift at exactly the wrong time. The final one, Montgomery Park, is enormous and appears to be teetering.

Almost everyone we talked to said the worst is yet to come for Portland real estate. “The dam is breaking,” said one property owner who declined to be named.

If that’s the case, the Death List will grow, and our map will bleed more red.

Continued on page 15

ON THE BLOCK: Jackson Tower is auctioned on Aug. 11.

MICHAEL RAINES

APANO

BLUE SKY GALLERY

COOLEY GALLERY AT REED COLLEGE

ILY2

JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART AT PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

HOFFMAN GALLERY AT LEWIS & CLARK COLLEGE

OREGON

JEWISH MUSEUM AND CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION

OREGON CONTEMPORARY

PACIFIC NORTHWEST COLLEGE OF ART WILLAMETTE UNIVERSITY

PATRICIA RESER CENTER FOR THE ARTS

PARALLAX ART CENTER

PORTLAND ART MUSEUM

PORTLAND INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY

ART

PORTLAND JAPANESE GARDEN

THE SCHNITZER COLLECTION

SE COOPER CONTEMPORARY

STELO ARTS

NORTHWEST / PEARL DISTRICT

1 BLUE SKY GALLERY

122 NW 8TH AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97209

WED–SUN, 12–5 PM

Richard Mosse: Occidental, Aug 24 – Oct 21

Photographs of domesticated plants in homes, workplaces, and public spaces in the Brazilian city, Belém do Pará, show how nature is both a focus for human desire and well-being, but also dangerous and in need of mastering.

2 ILY2

925 NW FLANDERS ST, PORTLAND, OR 97209

WED–SAT, 11 AM–6 PM

Amanda Ross-Ho: ICE TIME, Aug 24  –  Oct 28

Made in response to research triggered by an encounter with a place and its materials and textures, Ross-Ho’s new works explore the architectures of memory and physical space.

3 OREGON JEWISH MUSEUM AND CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION

724 NW DAVIS ST, PORTLAND, OR 97209

WED–SUN, 11 AM–4 PM

Yishai Jusidman: Prussian Blue, Aug 24 – Nov 26

A reflection on history through cyanotypes and paintings of WWII sites rendered exclusively in one of the earliest artificially developed pigments used by European painters: Prussian Blue.

4 PACIFIC NORTHWEST COLLEGE OF ART

511 NW BROADWAY, PORTLAND, OR 97209

MON–SAT, 10 AM–4 PM

Assembly, Aug 24 – Oct 7

A group exhibition across three venues, Assembly explores, among other values, ideas of identity, representation, inclusion, citizenship, labor, landscape, cityscape, ecology, trade, regionalism and globalism, at a time when the very meanings of these terms are shifting.

Rodrigo Valenzuela: Garabatos, Aug 24 – Oct 7

A new series of black and white photographs inspired by the artist’s investigation of Latin America’s music scene and its attendant subcultures in the authoritarian aftermath of Operation Condor.

5 PARALLAX ART CENTER

516 NW 14TH AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97209 MON–SAT, 10 AM–5 PM Assembly, Aug 24 – Oct 14

A group exhibition across three venues, Assembly explores, among other values, ideas of identity, representation, inclusion, citizenship, labor, landscape, cityscape, ecology, trade, regionalism and globalism, at a time when the very meanings of these terms are shifting.

6 STELO ARTS

412 NW 8TH AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97209 THURS–SUN, 12–5 PM, AND BY APPT Assembly, Aug 24 – Oct 8

A group exhibition across three venues, Assembly explores, among other values, ideas of identity, representation, inclusion, citizenship, labor, landscape, cityscape, ecology, trade, regionalism and globalism, at a time when the very meanings of these terms are shifting.

7 THE SCHNITZER COLLECTION

3033 NW YEON AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97210 PLEASE CHECK WEBSITE FOR PUBLIC HOURS: SCHNITZERCOLLECTION.ORG

We Are the Revolution: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, Aug 26 – Dec 1

A living history of social expression through art in diverse media, this exhibition explores the ways in which the art of the past meets and affects the art of the present.

NORTHEAST

8 OREGON CONTEMPORARY

8371 N INTERSTATE AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97217 FRI–SUN, 12–5 PM

Sam Hamilton / Sam Tam Ham: Te Moana Meridian, Aug 25 – Oct 8

This five-channel video installation proposes that the United Nations General Assembly elect a new “center of the world” in the South Pacific, radically reframing the dynamics of global power.

Tavares Strachan: One Hundred More Fires, Aug 25 – Oct 8

Tavares Strachan’s large-scale neon sculpture One Hundred More Fires (2023) literally brings the forgotten history of Cuban revolutionary Camilo Cienfuegos’ story back into the light.

9

PORTLAND INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

15 NE HANCOCK ST, PORTLAND, OR 97212

THU & FRI, 12–6 PM SAT & SUN, 12–4 PM

Seba Calfuqeo: Alka domo & Flowing Like Waterfalls, Aug 24 – Sept 24

In a performance and video installation, Seba Calfuqeo recontextualizes a story about a legendary revolutionary who led an indigenous army in an uprising against the Spanish conquistadors.

SOUTHWEST

10

12 PORTLAND JAPANESE GARDEN

611 SW KINGSTON AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97205

WED–MON, 10 AM–4 PM

Bosco Sodi: Baku, Aug 24 – Sept 11

Bosco Sodi’s single-channel video Baku (2012) documents the meditative care of the gardener at a temple in the sacred city of Kyoto, Japan, engaging the viewer in a state of contemplation on the cyclical nature of life.

BEAVERTON

13

PATRICIA RESER CENTER FOR THE ARTS

12625 SW CRESCENT ST, BEAVERTON, OR 97005

WED–SAT, 12–6 PM

Malia Jensen: Endless Pigeons, Aug 12 – Oct 21 Comprised of eight oversized pigeons rising one atop the other and installed outside, this sculpture is the realization of a maquette the artist made while living in New York, echoing Constantin Brancusi’s iconic Endless Column

Jorge Tacla: Stagings/Escenarios, Aug 12 – Oct 21 An HD video installation paired with a twenty-sixfoot painting installed like a public billboard examine destroyed architectures in the aftermath of violence and unrest.

SOUTHEAST

14 COOLEY

GALLERY AT REED COLLEGE

3203 SE WOODSTOCK BLVD, PORTLAND, OR 97202

THU–SUN, 12–5 PM

Jesse Murry: Rising, Aug 24  – Dec 3

Rising, curated by painter Lisa Yuskavage and critic Jarrett Earnest, brings together powerful paintings by the late Black artist, poet and essayist Jesse Murry.

15 CENTER

FOR NATIVE ARTS AND CULTURES

800 SE 10TH AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97214 FRIDAYS, 4–7 PM

HOFFMAN GALLERY AT LEWIS & CLARK COLLEGE

615 SW PALATINE HILL RD, PORTLAND, OR 97219

DAILY, 11 AM–4 PM

Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre, Aug 24 – Dec 15

The immersive film Broken Spectre by artist Richard Mosse is arguably the most powerful artistic response to date to the devastating and ongoing impact of deforestation in the Amazon.

11 JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART AT PORTLAND STATE UNVIVERSITY

1855 SW BROADWAY, PORTLAND, OR 97201

TUE–WED, 11 AM–5 PM / THU, 11 AM–7 PM / FRI–SAT, 11 AM–5 PM

A Question of Hu: The Narrative Art of Hung Liu, Aug 22– Dec 2

Drawn from the collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, this exhibition of paintings, tapestries and prints by the late pioneering artist Hung Liu provides an expanded view of citizenship in an era of seismic change.

Marie Watt: Chords to Other Chords (Relative), Aug 24 – Oct 15

Portland-based artist and Seneca Nation member Marie Watt’s monumental sculpture fabricated in neon serves as an affirmation of the land and the Indigenous people who are ephemeral monuments to this territory.

16 SE COOPER CONTEMPORARY

6901 SE 110TH AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97266

2 INDIVIDUALS AT A TIME; BY APPOINTMENT

Malcolm Peacock: next in line at the peak of the valley, his spine bent forward as he surrendered to his choices, Aug 25 – Oct 15 An intimate multi-media installation, Peacock’s work creates a space where all individuals of the public can exist without the physical presence of surveillance.

17 BILLBOARD

EASTBANK COMMERCE CENTER

1001 SE WATER AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97214

Peter Gronquist: SKY LINE, Opens Aug 24

PATRICIA RESER CENTER FOR THE ARTS

Malia Jensen: Endless Pigeons

THE SCHNITZER COLLECTION

We Are the Revolution: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation ©

OREGON CONTEMPORARY

Sam

HOFFMAN GALLERY AT LEWIS & CLARK COLLEGE Richard

PORTLAND INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

CENTER FOR NATIVE ARTS AND CULTURES

Jorge Tacla: Stagings/Escenarios

Hamilton / Sam Tam Ham: Te Moana Meridian

Tavares Strachan: One Hundred More Fires

Marie Watt: Chords to Other Chords (Relative)

Seba Calfuqeo: Alka domo & Flowing Like Waterfalls

COOLEY GALLERY AT REED COLLEGE Jesse Murry: Rising

Bosco

Mosse: Broken Spectre

Hank Willis Thomas

PUBLIC ART, ALL SITES

Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen: more missives, Aug 24 –(per site) more missives was first envisioned as a series of experimental publications in brick form distributed across the various venues of the biennial. Approaching the brick as a form of public speech and a weapon of the people, Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen created these heavy rectangles for fun, for contemplation, and for future use. Each brick is inscribed with text or otherwise carries a message, and they will be a recurring form, carefully placed at the various venues.

AFFILIATED EXHIBITIONS APANO

C45 CO-SPONSORED SPECIAL EDITION. AVAILABLE TO PICK UP IN OCTOBER —STAY TUNED!

Orchard Community News

18 NINE GALLERY

122 NW 8TH AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97209 WED–SAT, 12–5 PM

Pour the Water as I Leave: Installation, Vol II: Film in Progress, Aug 3 – Sept 2

19 HELEN’S COSTUMES

7706 SE YAMHILL ST, PORTLAND, OR 97215 SAT–SUN, 1–4 PM & BY APPOINTMENT

Aftercare: Taravat Talepasand–Terry Powers, Aug 27 – Sept 30

20 WELL WELL

PROJECTS

8371 N INTERSTATE AVE #1, PORTLAND, OR 97217

SAT & SUN, 12–5 PM

Fuel Ladder Collective: Holding Fire, Sept 2–24

21 PORTLAND ART MUSEUM

1219 SW PARK AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97205

WED–SUN, 10 AM–5 PM

Black Artists of Oregon, Sept 9, 2023 – Mar 17, 2024

22 THE VERDANCY PROJECT

TROUTDALE, OR BY APPOINTMENT, 10–4 PM ON SELECT DAYS

Terra Incognita, Aug 19 – 20, Aug 26 – 27

23 ADAMS AND OLLMAN

418 NW 8TH AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97209

WED–SAT, 11 AM–4 PM

Paul Swenbeck: Cross Quarters Merry Meet, Aug 5 – Sept 16

24 ELIZABETH LEACH GALLERY

417 NW 9TH AVE, PORTLAND OR 97209

TUES–SAT, 10:30 AM–5:30 PM

Peter Gronquist: Manifest; and Wanted: Ed Bereal for “Still Disturbing the Peace”, Aug 3 – Sept 2

25 NATIONALE

15 SE 22ND AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97214

THURS–MON, 12–6 PM

Laura Camila Medina: Mi Reflejo; and Dennis Foster: Wake Up New, Through Sept 2

26 PDX CONTEMPORARY

1825 B NW VAUGHN, PORTLAND, OR 97209

TUES–SAT, 10–5

You belong among the wildflowers, July 8 – Aug 26

27 THE BLACK GALLERY

916 NW FLANDERS, PORTLAND, OR 97209 BY APPOINTMENT

28 RUSSO LEE GALLERY

805 NW 21ST AVE, PORTLAND OR 97209

TUES–FRI, 11 AM–5:30 PM

SAT, 11 AM–5 PM

Willie Little: I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got, Aug 3 – Sept 2

29 BLACKFISH GALLERY

938 NW EVERETT ST, PORTLAND OR 97209

TUES–SAT, 11 AM–5 PM

Aaron Johnson: Points of Interest, Aug 1 – Sept 2

30 DIRECTOR PARK LIVE PAINT OFF

815 SW PARK AVE, PORTLAND, OR 97205

AUG 24–25, 11 AM–7 PM;

AWARDS PRESENTED AT 11:30 AM SUNDAY, AUG 26 Visit www.jordanschnitzer.org/funded-programs/#paint for more info

THANKS TO OUR 2023 LEAD SPONSORS AND PARTNERS

COLAB Architecture & Urban Design

First Republic Bank | JP Morgan

Framers Inventory

Green Gables

Henneberry Eddy Jackson Foundation

Lehman Foundation

McGeady Family Foundation

Northern Trust

Papa Haydn

Portland Art Musuem

Portland State University Foundation

Swigert Foundation

Reser Family Foundation

Travel Portland Upfor Gallery

ZGF Architects

Canopy Hotel

Devil’s Food Catering

ILY2

Kann

Mullowney Printing

Omnivore

Skanska Stoller Family Estate

Ed Cauduro Fund at OCF

Dobson Asset Management

Cristin Tierney Gallery

Sarah Miller Meigs

The Hampton Family Foundation

MONTGOMERY PARK

ADDRESS: 2701 NW Vaughn St. OWNER: LLC controlled by Unico Properties

MARKET VALUE: $187.3 million

SITUATION: Market value is 27% less than last sales price ($255 million); liens.

See above right for more information.

MAKE ADDRESS: 2151 NW Savier St.

OWNER: Cred Slabtown II LLC

MARKET VALUE: $42.2 million

SITUATION: Turned over to lender in lieu of foreclosure

BUILDING: Montgomery Park

ADDRESS: 2701 NW Vaughn St.

YEAR BUILT: 1921

SQUARE FOOTAGE: 745,000

OWNER: LLC controlled by Unico Properties

SITUATION: Market value is 27% less than last sales price ($255 million); liens.

Back in the day, Montgomery Park was a Montgomery Ward department store and catalog warehouse. It was the biggest building in the city when it was built. The retailer cleared out in 1985 when Bill and Sam Naito bought the place and turned it into offices and a convention center. It’s been an office complex ever since.

Seattle-based Unico bought Montgomery Park for $255 million in April 2019. Back then, interest rates were low, and tech companies were migrating from downtown San Francisco to downtown Portland to take advantage of lower rents and the haute-hipster lifestyle.

But COVID-19 arrived, and tech firms

were among the first to send workers home indefinitely. The market for Portland real estate dried up. Now, Montgomery Park has a market value of $187,281,980, according to county records, down 27% from what Unico paid.

So far, there’s no sign that Unico, which owns 17 properties in Portland, is going to default. It’s up to date on its taxes, having paid $1.8 million in 2022. But there are signs of distress. As first reported by the Portland Business Journal, Turner Construction filed a construction lien against Montgomery Park in June, claiming it’s owed $2.1 million for building improvements. A subcontractor, Culver Glass Co., filed a lien for $167,407.50.

Turner’s lien says Unico planned to pay the construction company $89.9 million for a 2022 project called “Unico-Montgomery Park Building Repositioning.” Contractors file liens when they are having trouble getting paid. It’s something of a last resort because no one wants to piss off a client. Unico declined to comment on the matter, as did Turner. Neither Culver Glass nor Turner didn’t return a call seeking comment.

OFFICE SPACE

Of the 40 properties on “death lists,” WW confirmed via public records that these 16 were in distress. Here’s where they are located, and what kind of trouble they’re in.

FIELD OFFICE

ADDRESS: 2035 NW Front Ave.

OWNERS: LLC controlled by Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property MARKET VALUE: $62.7 million

SITUATION: Defaulted, loan going to auction

MASON EHRMAN BUILDING & ANNEX ADDRESS: 208 & 234 NW 5th Ave.

OWNER: PFP 6 Mason Ehrman LLC

MARKET VALUE: $7.1 million

SITUATION: Foreclosed

HISTORIC BANK BLOCK

ADDRESS: 309 SW 6th Ave.

OWNER: BDS IV OR Historic Bk Block LLC

MARKET VALUE: $27.1 million

SITUATION: Turned over to lender in lieu of foreclosure

6

COMMONWEALTH BUILDING

ADDRESS: 421 SW 6th Ave.

OWNER: Affiliate of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.

MARKET VALUE: $73.9 million

SITUATION: Auctioned for $15 million on July 18.

See page 17 for more information.

7

ASPECT ON SIXTH

ADDRESS: 400 SW 6th Ave.

OWNER: REEP-OFC Aspect OR LLC

MARKET VALUE: $52.6 million

SITUATION: Transferred in November for $35.7 million, little more than half of what developers SteelWave and Barings paid in 2017.

See page 17 for more information.

8

J.K. GILL BUILDING

ADDRESS: 408 SW 5th Ave.

OWNER: LLC controlled by Urban Renaissance Group

MARKET VALUE: $7 million

SITUATION: In receivership

9

GREEK CUSINA (CLOSED)

ADDRESS: 418 SW Washington St.

OWNER: CPIF PDX LLC

MARKET VALUE: $3.2 million

SITUATION: Market value is 46% below last sales price ($6.1 million); lien.

10

HAMILTON BUILDING

ADDRESS: 529 SW 3rd Ave.

OWNER: Affiliate of Manchester Capital Management

MARKET VALUE: $7.4 million

SITUATION: In receivership

11

LOYALTY BUILDING

ADDRESS: 317 SW Alder St.

OWNER: Affiliate of Manchester Capital Management

MARKET VALUE: $15.9 million

SITUATION: In receivership

12

JACKSON TOWER

ADDRESS: 800-818 SW Broadway

OWNER: CRP Properties Inc., an affiliate of JPMorgan Chase

MARKET VALUE: $12.3 million

SITUATION: Defaulted, sold at auction for $7.5 million to creditor

13

SIXTH + MAIN

ADDRESS: 1050 SW 6th Ave.

OWNER: LLC controlled by Unico Properties

MARKET VALUE: $73.9 million

SITUATION: Market value is 13% less than last sales price ($85.1 million); lien.

14

HARRISON SQUARE

ADDRESS: 1800 SW 1st Ave.

OWNER: LC Harrison Square Owner LP

MARKET VALUE: $26.8 million

SITUATION: Market value is 49% less than last sales price ($52.8 million); loan modified.

15

THE CROSSING AT FIRST

ADDRESS: 2501-2525 SW 1st Ave.

OWNER: Pipco-on-the-Hudson Inc.

MARKET VALUE: $55.9 million

SITUATION: Defaulted, sold at auction 16

WATERMARK I & II

ADDRESS: 4380 S Macadam Ave.

OWNER: Clarity Ventures RF Portland

MARKET VALUE: $42.6 million

SITUATION: Market value is 26% less than last sales price ($57.5 million); loan extended.

BUILDING: Commonwealth Building

ADDRESS: 421 SW 6th Ave.

YEAR BUILT: 1948

SQUARE FOOTAGE: 219,742

OWNER: Commonwealth Property Owner LLC

SITUATION: Auctioned for $15 million on July 18

Another interesting thing about the death lists being passed around town is that none of Portland’s old-line real estate families is on them. There are no Menashes, no Goodmans. No Ameses. That may be because they’ve owned their properties for years and have no debt on them. Bob Ames, for one, says he owns his buildings outright.

“I’m laughing because I don’t have any debt,” Ames says. Most of the people in trouble are from out of town, and they often bought during the bubble years from 2014—when Portland rebounded from the last crash—to 2020. And they often used a lot of borrowed money, which was cheap at the time.

Case in point is the 14-story Commonwealth Building. Completed in 1948, it was designed by Pietro Belluschi, the Italian-born architect who became dean of the MIT School of Architecture & Planning and helped design New York’s Pan Am Building. Commonwealth put Portland on the architectural map because it was one of the first sealed, air-conditioned skyscrapers ever built. It was placed on the National Registry of Historic Places in 1976.

KBS Growth & Income REIT, based in Newport Beach, Calif., bought the Commonwealth from Unico (see above) for $69 mil-

lion in June 2016. At the time, Commonwealth had 25 tenants and occupancy of 94%, bringing in $4.8 million a year, according to filings with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. On average, tenants had about four years left on their leases.

KBS refinanced in 2018, taking an adjustable-rate loan of $51.4 million on the property from Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Then, the pandemic and the protests hit, and tenants decamped. KBS found itself upside down. Loans were coming due, and the building was worth less than the loan amount, KBS said. Worse yet, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to quell inflation, sending KBS’s adjustable mortgage to 10.66%, according to SEC filings.

KBS blamed Stumptown. “Given the depressed office rental rates and the continued social unrest and increased crime in downtown Portland where the property is located, the company does not anticipate any near-term recovery in value,” KBS chief financial officer Jeffrey K. Waldvogel said in a regulatory filing Feb. 16.

By March of this year, KBS figured the Commonwealth was worth less than half of the $47.8 million that it still owed MetLife. Like many real estate investors in this situation, KBS stopped making its payments and sent the keys to Commonwealth to MetLife, which sold it at auction to a MetLife affiliate, KBS said, likely meaning there was no other interested buyer, on July 18.

The auction price was just $15 million, according to Multnomah County records. That’s little more than a fifth of what KBS paid for a prized architectural property just seven years ago. And it gets worse. Commonwealth helped sink KBS entirely. In May, its shareholders approved a plan to liquidate, selling assets, paying debts, and closing the company.

BUILDING: Aspect on Sixth ADDRESS: 400 SW 6th Ave.

YEAR BUILT: 1961

SQUARE FOOTAGE: 221,232

OWNER: REEP-OFC Aspect OR LLC

SITUATION: Transferred to lender in November for $35.7 million, little more than half of what developers SteelWave and Barings paid in 2017.

Most Portlanders probably know Aspect on Sixth as the Camera World building because of the photography store on the first floor, which closed in 2016.

The building is a shape-shifter, and it’s been in trouble before.

First National Bank of Oregon bought the lot in 1957 and put up a five-story headquarters. First National (now part of Wells Fargo) moved out and sold the building to Schnitzer Investment Co. in 1972. Four years later, Schnitzer sold to First Farwest Life Insurance.

Farwest sold in 1987 but remained a tenant, and when the insurer became insolvent, it took its old headquarters down with it. The owner couldn’t pay the mortgage, and the building ended up in the hands of John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance in 1990.

Two years later, the building got a major face-lift. Investors added five new floors on top and clad the building in aluminum and stainless steel to make it look more modern.

In November 2017, SteelWave, a California-based developer, teamed up with Barings, a subsidiary of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, to buy the building for $68 million. SteelWave spent millions more on renovation, upgrading the fitness center with something called “Moonshadow” glass that let gym users look into the lobby, but not vice versa.

SteelWave turned the Camera World into a bar and suspended a cube made of four flat panel screens that translate bar noise into colors and shapes, according to an account of the remodel by R&H Construction, the company that did all the work.

R&H says it rushed to get the building—by then called Aspect on Sixth—done by the spring of 2019. SteelWave and Barings scored in January 2020 when payments company Block, formerly called Square (for the little white boxes you swipe your credit card through at the coffee shop), signed a lease for the top three floors: 64,110 square feet.

John Ockerbloom, head of U.S. real estate at Barings, said the lease validated the business plan to “create a highly amenitized, lifestyle work environment that is attractive to today’s leading technology and creative companies.”

That same month, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first case of COVID-19 in the U.S., just up Interstate 5 in Washington state.

It’s unclear from the paper trail what happened to Aspect. SteelWave and Barings didn’t return messages seeking comment. But records show that New York Life, the insurance company, often partners with SteelWave on projects, providing financing. Insurance companies like real estate because, usually, it throws off predictable revenue in the form of rent.

Roger Braxton, a vice president at New York Life, filed a document with Multnomah County showing that the company transferred a loan on Aspect to an LLC with the same address as New York Life on Nov. 9, 2022. The county’s website shows a sale around the same date for $35.7 million, little more than half of what SteelWave and Barings paid for Aspect just four years ago.

Someone lost money on the deal, likely SteelWave, Barings, and maybe New York Life. As the Death List shows, whoever that someone is, they’re not alone.

BRIAN BURK

BRIAN BURK

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.

PEDAL POWER

Thousands of people hopped on their bike saddles in downtown Portland for the 2023 Providence Bridge Pedal on Sunday, Aug. 13. There were multiple routes, but the main ride is 20 miles and winds across seven bridges, including the Fremont, which turns 50 this year and is normally inaccessible to both cyclists and pedestrians. Participants, who all had start times well before noon, fared better in terms of comfortable temperatures than their counterparts looking to get in some miles this week during Pedalpalooza. As Portland braced for its second 100-degree day, some volunteers who lead rides during the mobile festival canceled those outings due to the heat.

Photos by Blake Benard On Instagram: @blakebenard

GET BUSY

DRINK: Sandy Hut 100th Anniversary Celebration

In 2015, this old joint known for its superior day drinking atmosphere and the occasional argument that escalates to fisticuffs was purchased by Marcus Archambeault and Warren Boothby, the duo behind other classic Portland dive bar revivals like Vern and Holman’s. In celebration of the Sandy Hut’s rich history and bright future, they’ve gone all out for its 100th anniversary, which culminates Saturday in an epic block party with cheap beer, a mechanical bull, a 40-foot-tall purple gorilla, and a live set from Grammy Award-winning metal band High on Fire (unfortunately, the original headliner, Red Fang, couldn’t make it). If the block party doesn’t fit your schedule, or you simply just want to prolong the celebratory drinking, there is a series of concerts at the bar leading up to the grand finale. Sandy Hut, 1430 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-235-7972. Various times

Wednesday-Friday, 4-10 pm Saturday block party, Aug. 16-19. $20 admission to the block party. 21+.

WATCH: Pacific Northwest Multicultural Readers Series & Film

Festival

Film buffs, writers, aspiring actors and directors, and community activists will all find something of interest at this four-day event celebrating the diverse and vibrant stories of artists of color. You can expect wall-to-wall readings, screenings, master classes and panel discussions addressing the issues of the day that shape theater, television and film. Celebrities and special guests will attend, including festival cochair, director and actor Javon Johnson (Tyler Perry’s The Oval ), festival co-chair, playwright and director Bobby Yan (Stalker, K-Love), and Rose Bianco (Minx, Cobra Kai ). DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel, 1000 NE

Multnomah St., 503-235-8079, pnmcfestival.org. Registration begins at 9 pm Thursday-Saturday, 10 am Sunday brunch, Aug. 17-20. $140 for Readers Series or Film Festival, $300 all access, $750 full festival.

LEARN: Asian American Pacific Peoples Community Science Night

OMSI’s Community Science Night is the perfect way to have fun while learning something new. Watch incredible demos, participate in cool science experiments, watch cultural entertainment, and shop at a miniature village of Asian American and Pacific Islander vendor booths. On top of all of that, you’ll also have access to OMSI’s current exhibits like Orcas: Our Shared Future and Creatividad Silvestre | Wild Creativity, a hands-on display that illustrates how animals and nature work symbiotically. OMSI, 1945 SE Water Ave., 503-797-4000, omsi.edu. 6-9 pm Friday, Aug. 18. $10 adults, $8 youth and seniors.

DRINK: 2023 Brews for New Avenues

Get ready for a bidding war. Considered the largest rare beer auction in the world, Brews for New Avenues also raises money for New Avenues for Youth, which serves kids who are at risk for homelessness (since 2012, the event has funneled nearly $2 million to the organization). To further those efforts, you can make offers on hard-to-find beers donated by producers from around the globe, from Brasserie Cantillon to Moksa Brewing to Bofkont. This year’s guest brewers are 3 Fonteinen of Belgium and Portland’s own Ruse Brewing. Fans of gueuze should spring for tickets to a Friday social spotlighting the lambic, which will be served with oysters and other appetizers. Redd East Event Space, 831 SE Salmon St., newavenues.

org. 3-6 pm Oyster & Gueuze Social Friday, 1-4 pm VIP and 4-8 pm general admission Saturday, Aug. 18-19. $20 general admission, $100 for the Social, $150 VIP. 21+.

GO: Multnomah Days 2023

Multnomah Village has always felt like it exists somewhere other than Portland thanks to its quaint downtown. The streets get even more charming during Multnomah Days, an open-air festival that closes down Capitol Highway for only one day, however, making the name of this event a wee bit deceptive. Returning in 2023 after a three-year pandemic hiatus is the Community Parade, which will start at 10 am. After that, you can browse through 120plus vendor booths, listen to live music on two stages, drop your child at the Kids Zone, or fuel up with fare from one of the many food carts. Multnomah Village, Capitol Highway between the bridge/Garden Home Road and Southwest 31st Avenue, multnomahvillage.org/multnomahdays. 9 am-6 pm Saturday, Aug. 19. Free.

EAT: Garlic Festival

If you didn’t get enough of the pungent bulbs at last weekend’s Elephant Garlic Festival in North Plains, then as luck would have it, another small Oregon town happens to be hosting an allium party. Head to Clatskanie for thousands of heads of garlic representing all 11 horticultural varieties (who knew?) as well as dozens of unique strains. We don’t know whether there will be garlic ice cream like they had in North Plains, but garlic cocktails are advertised. Copes Park, 11 Lillich St., Clatskanie, clatskaniefarmersmarket.com. 10 am-4pm Saturday, Aug. 19. Free.

DRINK: Gigantic Brewing

Kölsch Party

Consider this Oktoberfest Lite. Gigantic’s

Kölsch Party offers beer enthusiasts a special opportunity to indulge in a variety of exceptional titular beers (rather than märzens) crafted by the Portland brewery and its esteemed industry friends. The Bavarian vibes will really kick in when Festival Brass starts playing German tunes and the Kölschtastic Beer Sausages by Otto’s hit the grill. If you’re feeling really daring, hit up Inkbus for a custom Gigantic tattoo in the afternoon (preferably not after too many beers). Gigantic Brewing, 5224 SE 26th Ave., giganticbrewing.com. Noon-9 pm Saturday, Aug. 19. $4 for a Kölsch party glass. 21+.

GO: O-Bon, The Spirit Festival

Not unlike Dia de los Muertos, O-Bon in Japan is believed to be the time of year when the spirits of ancestors are reunited with their families. Portland Japanese Garden is hosting its version of the Buddhist festival honoring the souls of the departed, which are said to be guided back to the spirit world after their visit by candles and lanterns. Because of that tradition, this is one of the few times of the year when you can see the stone lanterns illuminated in the garden, which will also feature chanting of the Lotus Sūtra by reverend Zuigaku Kodachi and floating lanterns. Portland Japanese Garden, 611 SW Kingston Ave., 503-223-1321, japanesegarden.org. 7-9 pm Saturday-Sunday, Aug. 19-20. Members only. Sold out. Visit the website to join the waitlist.

NEEDS MORE GARLIC: Head to Clatskanie for all things allium this week, including pungent cocktails.

COURTESY CLATSKANIE GARLIC FESTIVAL

FOOD & DRINK

Editor: Andi Prewitt Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com

Hot Plates

1. SMOKEHOUSE

CHICKEN AND GUNS

55660 NW Wilson River Highway, Gales Creek, 503-359-9452, smokehousecng.com.

9 am-9 pm Friday-Sunday.

When a beloved food cart finally goes brick-and-mortar, the opening is usually surrounded by a great deal of fanfare and a Christmaslike countdown clock. Not so for Chicken and Guns. The Cartopia pod staple very quietly launched its first full-service restaurant this past spring, and did so in Gales Creek—miles away from any of its regulars. The trek to the roadhouse-style diner is worth it. You’ll, of course, find the cart’s famed wood-fired birds and crispy potatoes (the guns), but also an expanded menu that includes burgers, locally grown vegetable-based sides and weekend brunch.

2. CHAAT WALLAH

7157 NE Prescott St., 971-340-8635, chaatwallah.com. 3-9 pm Monday-Friday, noon-9 pm Saturday-Sunday.

Deepak Saxena’s food cart has found a new home outside Upright Brewing’s second location in the Cully neighborhood. Chaat Wallah began operating out of 503 Distilling’s lounge inside the Iron Fireman Collective building, but that arrangement only lasted a few months. Thankfully, the business reemerged and is now offering a killer happy hour deal: $2 off all sandwiches and $1 discounts on Upright beer from 3 to 6 pm Monday through Thursday. Now you have a tough decision to make: masala pulled pork, tandoori tuna salad or lamb smash burger?

3. WHITE PEPPER BURGER THURSDAY

7505 NE Glisan St., whitepepperpdx.com/ burger-thursday. 5-9 pm Thursday.

Moving On

BY NEIL FERGUSON

The journey of Papi Sal’s started when John Hatch and his partner Jess Mummery opened their food cart in 2021 at the fledgling pod on Southeast 82nd Avenue known as CORE. Portlanders quickly got hooked on his “jawns,” lovingly named after the Philadelphia vernacular for “anything,” but in this case used to classify Hatch’s distinctive hoagies. Though the jawns—which answer the question of what happens when Philly and Puerto Rico come together in the form of a sandwich in Portland—caught on to the point where the cart saw steady business, a stable location was elusive. Issues ranging from landlords and business partners not working out to ingredient shortages to ever-changing food costs led Papi Sal’s to bounce around town from CORE to Hawthorne to the Great Notion Brewing pop-up on Southeast Division Street before landing at White Owl Social Club in what is technically its first brick-and-mortar space. Since this past winter, Papi Sal’s has been pumping out some of Portland’s best bar food from inside the Southeast Portland lounge. But come the end of August, Hatch and Mummery will depart that space and move to a yet-to-be-named

location, where they will continue to develop their concept and find their footing.

“[ White Owl] was always going to be a trial run based on a nine-month lease,” Hatch says. “It went well, but it wasn’t the best fit for either party. At this point, Papi Sal’s is an ever-evolving, multifaceted food business that will hop on the opportunity that we think is best at the time.”

The start date at the new location is slated for October.

“ We are doing a different menu with new and old stuff. More bar snacks. Less on-menu sandwiches and more sandwich specials. Happy hour! A cheesesteak window out of the kitchen directly to the street,” Hatch says, offering a glimpse at what we can expect.

This is exciting news for the jawn-loving masses, who will get to partake in staples like The Jawn (tender and flavorful pernil-style pork with broccoli rabe, $15), the standout Tender Jawn (spicy “long hots,” golden chicken tenders, sofrito and provolone; $15), and the Vegan Cheese Chopped Jawn ($16), a riff on the beefy bodega classic.

Luckily, its tenure at White Owl has not been in vain as Papi Sal’s has grown in recognition while also evolving to a new culinary

level. The tropical-leaning cocktail menu that showcases frozen tequila and rum drinks has been a complementary quencher. The Puerto Rican-influenced menu regularly sees Hatch putting his just-spicy-enough, salsalike sofrito or salsa criolla (sometimes both!) on pretty much every dish.

“Our concept is a conglomerate of food diasporas together, but it’s cool knowing we opened people’s eyes to Puerto Rican and Philly food culture,” Hatch says.

He has also been able to refine his menu with dishes like tostone nachos—a true trip to the island with the proper level of starchy goodness and zip from the peppers—a sofrito Caesar, stuffed avocado, pizza empanadillas, and the new mallorca sandwiches (camarones and carne guisada with sweet fried plantains). Not to mention rice and meat platters for those who are thinking outside the bun.

“ We are really excited about some of the new things we have gotten to do at White Owl,” Hatch says. “We are excited to take some of those with us to the [new location]. We are definitely Rocky Balboa-ing this jawn—improvising and rolling with the punches.”

Papi Sal’s sandwiches and creative specials definitely punch above their weight, and the warm reception they’ve received at each location has only motivated Hatch to get better.

“I can say that we’re stoked about where the food has gone in terms of quality and other little nuances,” he adds. “It’s difficult to combine cultures. Heck, it’s difficult being a person of different backgrounds and cultures and influences and upbringing. Sorting it out has been a journey of identity for myself. We’re excited to bring our new menu to wherever we go.”

EAT: Papi Sal’s at White Owl Social Club, 1305 SE 8th Ave., 720-708-9152, papisalspdx. com. 4-10 pm Tuesday-Thursday and Sunday, 4 pm-1 am Friday-Saturday, through the end of the month.

Most of the week, the kitchen at this 10-year-old Northeast Portland catering company is a quiet prep space by day, while some evenings its tasting room hosts weddings and corporate dinners. But on Thursday nights, White Pepper transforms into a neighborhood hangout serving burgers. We’ve sampled them all, and the standout of the bunch is the Classic Burger. The stack is everything you want a Big Mac to be but never is: two housemade patties, American cheese, iceberg lettuce, mustard and mayo with ketchup on the side. No one element stands out; it’s just a harmonious combination that makes for the perfect summer meal.

4. DOLLY OLIVE

527 SW 12th Ave., 503-719-6921, dollyolivepdx.com. 11 am-3 pm and 5-9 pm Sunday-Thursday, 11 am-3 pm and 5-10 pm Friday-Saturday.

This month, The Wall Street Journal declared we’re “becoming a nation of early birds,” and it’s hard to argue with that point since Portland’s nightlife has never really rebounded from the pandemic. If we are all turning in earlier these days, might as well make the most of lunch, a meal that’s never been as leisurely as brunch nor as elegant as dinner, yet you can apply both of those adjectives to the midday meal experience at downtown’s Dolly Olive. Lunch service began in May and includes items that would suit just about anyone’s tastes, from a farro salad to a slow-roasted rosemary prosciutto-and-Gruyère panini to a crispy chicken confit. You can even pretend you’re at a fancy dinner and order a salted caramel cannoli for dessert—a move we highly recommend.

5. CÂCHE CÂCHE

1015 SE Stark St. 5-10 pm Wednesday-Saturday, 1-8 pm Sunday.

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-andseek” 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.

SANDWICH HERO: Papi Sal’s will keep making its signature jawns at its new, yet-to-be-named location.

Papi Sal’s will once again relocate, but you still have a few weeks left to order a jawn at White Owl.

POTLANDER

Magical Mystery Tour

The low-budget, Oregon-made

stoner comedy

We Need Rent Money makes its Portland debut this weekend.

BY BRIANNA WHEELER

“It’s amazing how I came up with the concept.” says Blake Laitner, the Eugene-based co-writer and director of indie stoner flick We Need Rent Money making its Portland debut Saturday, Aug. 19, at 5th Avenue Cinema. “I came to the conclusion that I’m not going to get a million people to stream my movie, so I’m like, all right, let’s do a 420 Tour.”

It’s hard to tell if Laitner is being authentically self-congratulatory or if he’s poking fun at himself. He speaks with the extra-crispy vocal fry West Coast super stoners are known for—drawn out and turned up to a comical degree. It’s a far-off comparison, but the vocal performance reminds me of another midnight movie director whose own charmingly delusional, over-the-top persona overshadows his work: Tommy Wiseau.

It’s a compliment that Laitner’s uber-stoner character charisma is what’s required to propel the 420 Tour, whose first stop is in Portland thanks to the support of Ascend Recreational Cannabis Dispensary. After that, he hopes to make stops in every state that has legalized recreational weed and screen the low-budget feature that follows a trio of burnouts as they scramble to, you guessed it, make rent.

High-femme stoners with in-home libraries, executive potheads juggling gigs, contracts and high-falutin’ responsibilities, and low-dose parents hoping for some artistic reprieve probably won’t find many cannathusiast touchstones in We Need Rent Money, but film-hobbyist bros clinging to big Hollywood dreams despite their creative shortcomings certainly might.

“It is based on a true story,” Laitner laughs. “My buddy that I wrote it with, Sampson Ray [Simon], told me a story where he and his roommates couldn’t pay rent, so they decided to have the neighborhood drug dealer move in the house to help.”

The movie’s premise allows for all manner of tomfoolery, which means it comes off as the kind of project a group of friends made after one of them confessed their filmmaking dreams during a particularly debilitating blunt rotation. Sure, the dialogue is trite, and yeah, the performances are OK. The production quality is flimsy AF, but, for a select few, therein may lie its ephemeral charm. Not unlike Wiseau’s The Room, We Need Rent Money is a clarion call to any half-baked daydreamer with a filmmaking goal. It’s almost as if the subplot to this film is simply that anyone with the will can write and make a movie, take that movie to festivals, and sell that movie to a streaming service. You do not need expensive equipment, or extravagant locations, or frankly, hardly any acting, writing,

sound production, or directorial experience at all. And if you believe you are amazing, you might even be able to tour through Portland.

“It can inspire your readers to go out and do something and accomplish something,” Laitner says in a flash of self-awareness. “Maybe not this quality. I mean, you have to actually rent a lens that you can’t afford to buy, but anybody can get out with a camera.”

I attempt to commiserate, but Laitner then nonchalantly cuts me off to deliver an unprompted, Oscar-worthy “thank

you” speech to his cast and crew. I get it, and I want to let him indulge in the fantasy, so I mute myself, take an offensively loud bong hit, and act the appreciative audience member.

SEE IT: We Need Rent Money screens at 5th Avenue Cinema, 510 SW Hall St., 503-725-3551, weneedrentmoney.com. 6:30 pm Saturday, Aug. 19. Get your tickets for both the screening and a $300 dispensary gift card raffle at the door day of or in advance at Ascend Recreational Cannabis Dispensary, 13826 NE Sandy Blvd., 971-2794769, pdxascend.com. $10.

SHOWS OF THE WEEK

WHAT TO SEE AND WHAT TO HEAR

BY DANIEL BROMFIELD @bromf3

WEDNESDAY, AUG. 16:

If the 2010s will be remembered in the annals of American underground rock for emo and psych rock, the 2020s is starting to look like a fertile time for shoegaze. Though the genre has long been associated with wallflower Brits, a fearsome American contingent of pedal-enamored bands is popping up, and McMenamins Mission Theater is showcasing a glut of them: Atlanta’s Sword II , New York’s Hotline TNT, Oakland’s Toner, Philadelphia’s They Are Gutting a Body of Water, and Tacoma’s Enumclaw McMenamins Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St. 7 pm. $22. All ages.

WEDNESDAY-THURSDAY, AUG. 16-24:

Words and Pictures

Broadway Rose’s Cinderella is a visual banquet with a message.

True West is bringing back its summer PDX Live concert series in Pioneer Courthouse Square. The series has already seen performances from 30-year-old Alex G, one of the best songwriters of his generation, and 76-year-old punk poet Patti Smith, one of the best songwriters of hers. This Wednesday, cult-fave pop duo Tegan & Sara grace the stage, followed by Greensky Bluegrass on Thursday, Japanese Breakfast with Built to Spill on Friday, The Flaming Lips on Tuesday, and Fleet Foxes on Thursday the 24th. Pioneer Courthouse Square. All shows open at 5 pm. $49.50 and up. All ages.

MONDAY, AUG. 21:

Texas trio Portrayal of Guilt is one of the most unpredictable purveyors of heavy rock music in America. Coming to fame as a hardcore punk band, they turned toward horns-in-the-air heavy metal on a 2021 album whose title is unprintable in a paper such as this but, let it suffice to say, sounded great out of the mouth of the late Gilbert Gottfried. Their latest album, Devil Music, consists of half technically dexterous black metal and half classical renditions of the same material. File them under “capable of anything.” Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave. 8 pm. $16. 21+.

BY LINDA FERGUSON

There’s a moment in Broadway Rose Theatre’s production of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella when Ella (Jennifer Davies) quietly lays her head in the lap of her cruel stepmother (Lisamarie Harrison). The tender gesture is small but stunning and shows us that no matter how familiar we are with the folk tale, it still has more to tell us.

Throughout this luminous production, such visual delights gleam as brightly as its famous songs, which include “Impossible,” “A Lovely Night,” and “There’s Music in You.” Perhaps that’s because the show’s director, Lyn Cramer, is its choreographer, too. Thanks to her brilliant staging, the movement in every scene is breathtaking, whether Ella is running through the forest clutching a pumpkin while knights holding lanterns swoop low and high in hot pursuit or the townspeople are performing delicate heel digs and elegant kicks executed while supporting themselves in handstands.

The sparkles, puffs, and jewel-toned colors of the costumes also add to the dazzle of the play, which is a 2013 adaptation of the musical, with an updated book by Douglas Carter Beane. This time, the stepmother, now called Madame, is dressed in glimmering black and blood-red gowns. Sure, her words are as nasty as ever (she has a bit where she repeatedly calls the stepsisters her “real daughters” or her “daughters who count”), but her clothes alone say plenty about her character before she even opens her mouth.

Kristeen Willis’ lighting also adds to the enchanting picture-book quality of the production. This is especially true when the ensemble gleefully waves their ivory invitations to the ball against a purple-lit backdrop and also when a field of twinkle lights suggest a rural night sky.

As a story, Cinderella has come a long way from the folk tale the Grimm brothers recorded, a gory yarn called “Ashputtle” (which features blood spurting from the stepsisters’ feet and birds that pluck out their eyes). Charles Perault prettied up the story in the 17th century, as did Disney in various versions. All these stories, though, include a common theme: Patience and virtue are rewarded in the end.

Like her predecessors, this Ella is nice to everyone, even the poverty-stricken pariah “Crazy Marie” (a golden-voiced Leah Yorkston). Beane’s book, though, takes this niceness a few steps further by having

Ella and other characters dream of taking action to improve the world. At times, this can lead to some clunky lines that weigh down the story a bit, like when Topher (Eric Asakawa), the prince, tells Ella, “You make me wish I was a better person.” Such additions also add to the length of the play, as in the scene at the palace where Madame plays a snarky game called “Ridicule” with relish, but Ella gets everyone complimenting each other instead. By contrast, one magical feat of Disney’s 1997 made-for-television version of Cinderella, which starred the singer Brandy, was that its gloriously diverse casting made a powerful visual statement about social justice without adding a single line on the topic.

Beane’s wordier book, however, is also peppered with comedic one-liners. When Ella runs away at midnight, the stricken Topher cries, “She’s my destiny!” in a dramatic voice that pokes fun at romantic tropes. One of the stepsisters, Gabrielle (Lorna Baxter), is hilarious, too, as she announces she’s going to start volunteering at a soup kitchen, exclaiming, “I get to ladle!”

The talent of Broadway Rose’s cast complements Beane’s mission to create more three-dimensional characters. Harrison reveals a hint of humanity behind Madame’s money-grubbing heart, and Davies and Asakawa, with their gorgeous singing, make the relationship between Ella and Topher genuinely touching. This is especially true when they sing the sweeping “Ten Minutes Ago” while the ensemble gently waltzes behind them.

When the Grimm brothers, who were German, first published their collection of folk tales in 1812 and 1815, they didn’t realize that the same stories resonated with other cultures. In fact, there are many Cinderella-type stories throughout the world, such as China’s Tang Dynasty tale of Ye Xian. Does the addition of yet another Cinderella who also happens to be an activist reflect the values of the average American today? We can only hope it’s possible.

SEE IT: Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella plays at the Deb Fennell Auditorium, 9000 SW Durham Road, Tigard, 503-620-5262, broadwayrose.org. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday and 2 pm Saturday and Sunday, through Aug/ 20. $20-$60.

Amélie Takes Vancouver

The musical adaptation of the internationally beloved French film is playing at Magenta Theater.

BY ERIC ASH

It’s fitting there would be a musical adaptation of a film whose full title is a near-perfect rhyme: Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

Better known as simply Amélie, the 2001 Jean-Pierre Jeunet film starring Audrey Tautou garnered major prizes throughout Europe: the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, two BAFTA Film Awards, three César Awards, and four European Film Awards.

In 2015, a new musical adaptation of the film premiered at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Craig Lucas wrote the play along with lyricists Daniel Messé (of the band Hem) and Nathan Tysen.

Now, Amélie (The Musical) is playing at Magenta Theater in Vancouver’s city center. As the show started, director Erin Knittle suggested that if any audience members stepped outside during the performance, they might get swept up in the rush of cast and crew in the halls and be expected to perform in the next scene. This joking threat made sense as several cast members, between scenes, wheeled out doorways and signboards through the exits.

The stage design for this play proved versatile. There were two levels: an upper walkway which could act as one of Paris’ many bridges,

SHOW REVIEW

or the path to the apartment where Amélie (Eileen Leyva) lives, plus a larger lower level with retractable and reversible panels at the back.

These panels allowed the lower level, with the right furnishings (audience members remarked on the complex system of multicolored tape markers), to represent several locations: Amélie’s workplace at the Two Windmills Café, a Métro station with a photo booth, or the adult novelty store “Secret Désirs Boutique d’Amour.” The last is not correct French, but it doesn’t have to be to ensure the audience gets the point. Most did, laughing uproariously as one panel revolved to reveal a display of Playboys and sex toys.

Though the musical is written in English, with occasional French expressions, almost all the actors make an effort to sing and speak in French accents. This contrasts with the 2017 Broadway production, where Phillipa Soo performed in her own American accent.

In the playbill, Knittle said of the story, “Community was the first word that popped into my mind.” A play populated with a found family of quirky characters, each with their own emotional struggles, resonates strongly at a time following on the heels of the pandemic and widespread social isolation.

In particular, Amélie, imaginative and intelligent as she is, owes a lot of her diffi-

SOULS OF MISCHIEF AT THE STAR THEATER

BY ROBERT HAM

All the chatter about the 50th birthday of hip-hop has been wonderful to experience. But to truly get at the essence of what has turned this genre from an underground sensation into the driving cultural force of our modern age, your best bet is to see the music live and in person. And there was no better example of hip-hop’s breadth and reach than the show that packed out the Star Theater last Wednesday.

culty connecting with people to her parents’ misplaced fears of her physical fragility. In her own way, she must come out of her shell, even if she holds herself back and resorts to elaborate schemes to better her friends’ lives.

Leyva captures all of the contradictions in her performance as Amélie, portraying an anxious young woman with so much more heart than she knows—heart helps make her friends’ lives so much more full.

Those friends include Amélie’s neighbor, Monsieur Dufayel (James Stevenson). In a nice touch, the production commissioned Vancouver artist Scott McHale to create a painting “by” Dufayel—and for $10 a ticket, the theater will raffle off McHale’s piece on the night of the final show, to help recoup production costs.

Knittle speaks the truth: Amélie is a community production, and an ever-strong reminder that, despite the assertions of Amélie’s mother (Demarie Day) and her predilection for Zeno’s First Paradox, no one is truly alone.

SEE IT: Amélie (The Musical) plays at Magenta Theater, 1108 Main St., Vancover, Wash., 360-949-3098, magentatheater.com. 7:30 pm

Thursday-Saturday and 2 pm

Sunday, through Aug. 20. $28-$30.

The gig was ostensibly a celebration of the 30th birthday of 93 ’til Infinity, the debut album by Oakland rap group Souls of Mischief. The quartet has been on the road pretty much nonstop since March honoring this anniversary, and anticipation for their arrival in Portland has been high. Wednesday’s performance sold out fast, leading promoters to tack on a second date the night before. The group acknowledged that fact in their set, promising to give a little extra to thank folks that bought tickets early. True or not, the group was road tight and bounding with energy as they hit their call-and-response raps with well-rehearsed ease.

To more fully grasp hip-hop’s impact on the Northwest music community, the artists joining Souls of Mischief on the bill painted a clear picture. Directing traffic was DJ Klyph who welcomed to the stage two fine representatives of hip-hop’s past and present: Boom Bap Project and Bad Habitat. The former is a sharp-tongued duo that returned to the scene after a long hiatus and lost none of their wry wit or streetwise truth in the process. The latter, a young, goofy multicultural group that dresses like they hit the stage after a trip to the beach, pepper their songs with pop culture references and feature DJ LadyX, an all-too-rare female presence behind the decks. Voices like theirs are guarantees that hip-hop will remain relevant and refreshed for decades to come.

Big Wednesday (1978)

Among the many outlandish quotes Apocalypse Now screenwriter and Red Dawn director John Milius gave throughout his one-of-a-kind, iconoclastic career, “My religion is surfing” lands on the sweeter side.

So does Big Wednesday, Milius’ homage to his Malibu youth. This memory piece spanning 1962 to 1974 drops in on the lives of three SoCal surfer pals played by Jan-Michael Vincent, Gary Busey and William Katt as they age from carefree hot-doggers to potential Vietnam War draftees to old-timers (in surfer years, anyway) still waiting on a legendary wave.

Big Wednesday is not a particularly spiritual film—it’s more watchful and wistful about how America alternately softens and hardens its young—but it does feel spiritually made. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees (High Plains Drifter, Escape From Alcatraz) gives the water of the film a mythical treatment, contrasting the loss and compromise the characters face on shore.

When the boys are surfing “the morning glass,” the blues couldn’t be bluer, and the camera fixates on the surfers’ light, almost dancing feet. When the titular “big Wednesday” comes and the swells arrive, they’re shot like leviathans rising from the waterline. Academy, Aug. 18-24.

ALSO PLAYING:

5th Avenue: Fantastic Planet (1973), Aug. 18-20. Academy: Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), Aug. 18-24. Cinemagic: Carrie (1976), Aug. 19 and 24. The Shining (1980), Aug. 19, 21 and 23. Creepshow (1982), Aug. 18 and 20. Misery (1990), Aug. 20 and 22. Cinema 21: Oldboy (2003, 4K re-release), Aug. 16-19. Rebecca (1940), Aug. 19. Hollywood: The Last Starfighter (1984), Aug. 18. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Aug. 19 and 20. Memories (1995), Aug. 20. Orlando (1992), Aug. 21. Lady Gunfighter (1972), Aug. 22.

Twihard With a Vengeance

BY BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON @thobennett

As of Nov. 12, 2012, Jenna Vesper had been sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles for four nights with one goal in mind: to be one of the lucky fans to attend the premiere of Breaking Dawn Part 2, the final film in The Twilight Saga

Having read Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels since high school, Vesper knew how the tale of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and her vampire husband Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) would end. So you can imagine her astonishment at the carnage of the film’s climax, which departs from the book by staging a gruesome battle that begins with fan-favorite Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) being decapitated.

“People got out of their seats and they were on the floor crying and almost throwing up,” Vesper tells WW. “I will never forget that. I was worried for the safety of the people around me.”

Happily, the battle is revealed to be (decade-old spoiler alert!) a mere prophecy that never comes to pass. But fans’ explosive reaction to the brutality stands as a testament to the passion of “Twihards,” who may chuckle at the series’ soap-operatic shenanigans, but are unashamedly sincere in their enthusiasm for Meyer’s creation.

That enthusiasm fuels Twilight Forever, a four-month film festival at the Clinton Street Theater produced and hosted by Vesper and Blue Holgate, two local podcasters who are fixtures of fan culture. Beginning with New Moon (2009) on Aug. 21, the festival is a rare chance to experience the series on the big screen, with plenty of trivia and costumes along the way.

“I didn’t want to just watch the movie,” Vesper says. “Blue and I love fandom events and connecting with community—and the Twilight fandom is so rich. People have been in it for so long and are so great and kind of like little misfits.”

The Clinton’s first congregation of Twilight misfits took place in November 2022, when Holgate and Vesper screened the original 2008 Twilight film. Clinton co-owner Aaron Colter had never seen any of the movies in the series, but agreed to a one-night event— which sold out.

“One of the neat things about running the theater is hearing from people in the community, like Jenna and Blue, and helping arrange the details so that people can see their ideas flourish,” Colter says.

“This is probably something we would have never done if it wasn’t for them.”

The first Twilight has long been a local obsession, given that

scenes were filmed at Madison High School and other Portland locations. Yet it was New Moon that solidified Twilight as an irrevocable part of pop culture, dominating the global box office and minting Taylor Lautner, who played the werewolf Jacob Black, as a comically pouty sex symbol.

In the books and films, Jacob is a member of the Quileute Tribe in Washington. Fans recognize there’s something dubious about Meyer, who is white, portraying several of the series’ Indigenous characters as mythic shape-shifters forever on the sidelines of the story.

“ When the movie came out, there was not a lot of money given back to the Indigenous group that Stephanie Meyer used to tell her tale,” Vesper says. “Since the books and the movie series got so popular, there’s been a ton of tourism to that area.”

To help address that imbalance, Holgate, Vesper and the Clinton are donating 10% of their New Moon ticket sales to the Native American Youth and Family Center. “We are romanticizing these movies, but we wanted to acknowledge problematic parts and give back,” Vesper says (future screenings will feature similar fundraisers).

That, Holgate and Vesper believe, is the essence of being a Twilight fan: understanding that you can embrace the series even as you recognize its flaws. “I didn’t expect this, but [at the first screening] there were people in the crowd who would call ‘Gaslighting!’ when Edward said some shit,” Vesper says. “We can love this movie and love the love story, but also, now we’re all adults.”

For progressive readers and viewers, it can be tempting to dismiss Meyer, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (“My goal, with this whole thing, is to make sure everyone in the audience understands that you should wait until you’re married to have sex,” Vesper jokes.)

Still, what makes the series problematic to some makes it perversely fascinating to others—and Twilight acolytes often start out as agnostics. Take Holgate, for instance, who reluctantly started reading the books in their 20s after their mother died.

“I thought it was stupid: ‘You’re never going to see me reading a teenage vampire love story!’” Holgate says. “I picked it up randomly…and it was just endgame for me. I teasingly say that Twilight saved my life.”

SEE IT: New Moon screens at the Clinton Street Theater, 971-808-3331, cstpdx.com. 7 pm Monday, Aug. 21. $15, series pass $50.

Two Portlanders set out to create the ultimate Twilight film festival. They succeeded.

Editor: Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Contact: bennett@wweek.com

and their supernatural discoveries—only here, the heroes are a Western Pennsylvania town’s septuagenarians, including alien caretakers played by Jane Curtin (SNL) and Harriet Sansom Harris (Frasier), being instructed by their adult children to stop imagining things. Heartfelt to the end, Jules has no ambitions to ascend to the alien-encounter movie canon, but by toying with the E.T. formula, it makes clear a gentle point well taken: Before life ends, the need for childlike wonder comes back around. PG-13. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport, Cascade, Clackamas, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Living Room, Progress Ridge.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA

TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM

PASSAGES

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A German filmmaker announces to his British husband that he’s just had sex with a woman—and that he’d like to tell him about it. Thus commence the erotic games of Passages, a caustically witty fable from director Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange). Franz Rogowski stars as Tomas, who, when not making films, is busy being a needy, self-pitying nogoodnik. Lucky for him, his oily charisma hypnotizes seemingly everyone who should know better, including his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), and his French mistress, a teacher named Agate (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Good news for fans of Exarchopoulos’ quietly explosive performance in Blue Is the Warmest Color: Sachs gives her plenty of opportunities to dance, gaze silently and power through Agate’s private anguish even as her students demand every ounce of her attention. So entrancingly familiar are these motifs that Sachs could almost be making a Blue sequel, though it’s often Whishaw who commands the screen. As Q in the recent Bond films and the titular marmalade-loving bear in the Paddington series, Whishaw was miraculously sensible and sensitive, a feat he repeats for Sachs. A lesser film might have become overly besotted with Tomas’ morbidly fascinating manipulations, whereas Sachs lets Whishaw cut through the gaslighting with five simple words: “I want my life back.” Who needs Q Branch gadgets when you have some fucking self-respect? NR. BENNETT

CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cinema

21.

OPPENHEIMER

At the start of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, raindrops fall; at the end, fire rages. You’ll feel it burn long after the end credits roll. Nolan has made violent movies before, but Oppenheimer is not just about physical devastation. It submerges you in the violence of a guilt-ravaged soul, leaving you feeling unsettled and unclean. With agitated charisma and vulnerability, Cillian Murphy embodies J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist whose mind birthed the atomic bomb. When we first meet him, he’s a curly-haired lad staring at a puddle, but he swiftly evolves into an excitable visionary leading a cadre of scientists into the deserts of New Mexico, where they will ultimately build and test a plutonium device (referred to as “the gadget”) on July 16, 1945. What saves the film from becoming a connect-the-dots biopic is Nolan’s ingenious chronicle of the post-World War II rivalry between Oppenheimer and Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). The more Oppenheimer fights to put “the nuclear genie back in the bottle,” the more Strauss seethes and schemes, thrusting the movie into a maze of double-crosses that echo the exhilarating games of perception in Nolan’s 2001 breakout hit Memento Of course, the thrill can’t (and shouldn’t) last. As many as 226,000 people were killed when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they haunt the film like ghosts—especially when Oppenheimer imagines a charred corpse beneath his foot. A man dreamed; people died. All a

work of art can do is evoke their absence.

R. BENNETT CAMPBELL

FERGUSON. Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, City Center, Clackamas, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One.

TALK TO ME

Talk to Me is the scariest horror movie of 2023. Walking the fine line between referential and redundant—good horror filmmakers employ motifs, but bad horror filmmakers rely on them— twin-brother duo Danny and Michael Philippou stun in their directorial debut, delivering a gripping (pun intended) plot driven by starmaking performances. Sophie Wilde shines as Mia, a grieving teenage girl reeling from her mother’s death two years earlier. Then, a paranormal party trick lifts the veil between the living and the dead—and teens recklessly abuse it for entertainment purposes (shocking!). In some ways, Talk to Me is a natural evolution beyond the Ouija board, the deadest horse of all horror tropes. In others, it’s an existential exploration that leads to a genre-defining question: Can new rules be made and/or old ones broken? Either way, there are moments when the movie makes the theater feel like a vacuum, sucking you into a vortex of heart-racing, chest-clutching, jaw-dropping terror. It’s the enthralling kind of horror that you can’t look away from. R. ALEX BARR. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Vancouver Plaza.

BARBIE

Once upon a time, Barbie dolls liberated all women from tyranny. The end… at least according to the first few minutes of Barbie, a sleek and satirical fantasia from director Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women). Set in the utopian kingdom of Barbieland, the movie dramatizes the existential crises of the winkingly named Stereotypical Barbie. She’s played by Mar-

got Robbie, who was last seen battling a rattlesnake in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon and her misadventures in Barbie are hardly less bizarre. Plagued by flat feet, cellulite and fears of death, Barbie seeks the source of her ailments in the real world, bringing along a beamingly inadequate Ken (Ryan Gosling) with catastrophic consequences: Awed by images of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, Ken becomes a crusading men’s rights activist, leading a revolt against the government of Barbieland and instituting bros-first martial law. And they say originality is dead! With its absurdist wit, glitzy musical numbers, and earnest ruminations on whether matriarchy and patriarchy can coexist, Barbie is easily one of the most brazen movies released by a major studio. Yes, its tidy ending betrays its anarchic spirit—after insisting that empowerment can’t be neatly packaged in a doll box, the film seems to say, “No, wait! It can!”—but it would be churlish to deny the charm of Gerwig’s buoyant creation. In an age when genuine cinematic joy is rare, we’re all lucky to be passengers in Barbie’s hot-pink plastic convertible. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Empirical, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, McMenamins St. Johns, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.

JULES

Like clockwork, solitary widower Milton (Ben Kingsley) makes two testimonies at his weekly city council meetings. One statement amounts to senile nonsense about the town motto (“a great place to call home”); the other is a genuine concern regarding a much-needed crosswalk. Through this dichotomy, we understand Jules ’ take on Milton (whose grumbling sounds like Kingsley meets Dustin Hoffman): Yes, he’s slipping mentally, but his everyday experience shouldn’t be discounted. So when Milton believes a flying saucer has crash-landed in his azaleas, Jules presents the kind of earthbound sci-fi usually reserved for movies about children

Part of what makes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles unique among other franchises is its malleability. Reinvention is as much a part of the Turtles’ DNA as glowing green ooze and a love of pizza—and in the case of Mutant Mayhem, the recipe is a blend of family dynamics, grandiose sci-fi and heartfelt comedy. For the first time in franchise history, the Heroes in a Half-Shell are actually voiced by teenagers: Leonardo (Nicholas Cantu), Raphael (Brady Noon), Donatello (Micah Abbey) and Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr.) goof around and clown on each other like any other kids, and their interactions make for the movie’s strongest moments, comedically and emotionally. Things get mighty chaotic in the back half when we’re introduced to the megalomaniacal Superfly (Ice Cube) and his cadre of mutant henchmen (voiced by several recognizable names pulled from producer-writer Seth Rogen’s contact list), but it all fits with the movie’s eager, excited vibe. There’s a love for the boundless possibilities of the TMNT world and a desire to bring as much of it to life as possible, all through the filter of a wonky, hand-drawn aesthetic that makes for some spectacular creature designs and doesn’t skimp on the martial arts action. The quest for a perfect TMNT film remains incomplete, but Mutant Mayhem is nonetheless a fine effort: a stylish, fastpaced, eminently fun take on the material that updates the Turtles for the modern world without losing the oddball charm that has made them fixtures of pop culture since 1984. Cowabunga, dudes! PG. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Evergreen Parkway, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Studio One, Wunderland Beaverton, Wunderland Milwaukie.

HEART OF STONE

Heart of Stone, the latest vanilla action film from Netflix, is little more than a Mission: Impossible rip-off. Gal Gadot plays Rachel Stone, an agent for a group called “The Charter” who step in to save lives when governments fail, using tech called “The Heart” (which can hack into any computer). Heart of Stone starts out decently enough with a big action sequence at a ski resort, but the script goes nowhere new as Stone hops from one exotic location to the next while chases and explosions are thrown in. These moments are occasionally fun and well executed (such as when a blimp blows up, leading to a skydiving scene), but most of the time, everything plays out in a rote fashion, from obvious character betrayals to unrealistic hacker nonsense. Heart of Stone may have the ingredients of an M:I film, but it lacks the excitement and cleverness found in that series. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Stop indulging Netflix’s fantasy that it can make good action movies. PG13. DANIEL RESTER. Netflix.

by Jack Kent

TRUE SCENES FROM THE STREETS! @sketchypeoplepdx

JONESIN’

BY MATT JONES

"Twisting Apart"--yes, I accept cookies.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): The Lincoln Calibration Sphere 1 is a hollow globe of aluminum launched into Earth orbit in 1965. Fifty-eight years later, it continues to circle the planet—and is still doing the job it was designed to do. It enables groundbased radar devices to perform necessary calibrations. I propose we celebrate and honor the faithfulness of this magic sphere. May it serve as an inspiring symbol for you in the coming months. More than ever before, you have the potential to do what you were made to do—and with exceptional steadiness and potency. I hope you will be a pillar of inspiring stability for those you care about.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): "Live as though you're living a second time and as though the first time you lived, you did it wrong, and now you're trying to do things right." Holocaust survivor and author Viktor Frankl offered this advice. I wouldn't want to adhere to such a demanding practice every day of my life. But I think it can be an especially worthwhile exercise for you in the coming weeks. You will have a substantial capacity to learn from your past; to prevent mediocre histories from repeating themselves; to escape the ruts of your habit mind and instigate fresh trends.

happy, maniacally miserable, kooky with contentment, or bonkers with boredom—and that’s in a good relationship." They add, "You have to be a little nuts to commit yourself, body and soul, to one other person—one wonderful, goofy, fallible person—in the hope that happily-ever-after really does exist." The authors make good points, but their view of togetherness will be less than fully applicable to you in the coming months. I suspect life will bring you boons as you focus your intelligence on creating well-grounded, nourishing, non-melodramatic bonds with trustworthy allies.

ACROSS

1. Late Beastie Boys

rapper

4. "Iliad" warrior god

8. Comprehend

13. Doofus

14. Prom ride

15. Lessen

17. Picnic invader

18. Brilliant feat

20. 2023 Ali Wong show

22. Dish from a crockpot

23. Pretend

24. Riff's partner?

27. Pine (for)

29. Part of mph

30. Breakfast cereal

33. Workers on sets, ships, or construction sites

35. Place to see animals in southern Australia

37. Food fight noise

38. "Ode ___ Nightingale"

39. Bond backed by the govt.

43. Golden Globe winner for "Lady Bird"

46. User of recycled material?

49. Qatar, for one

50. Stayed in first

51. Squeaked (out)

53. Makes the decision

54. Tough task

56. General ___ chicken

58. :// preceder

61. "No way!"

65. Outrage

66. Clean out, as a river channel

67. Automated prefix

68. Pool room tool

69. "August: ___ County" (2013 film)

70. Hit the water

71. Any of about 8 characters in the "Barbie" movie DOWN

1. Utah city named for a Biblical kingdom

2. Sugar source

3. Nevertheless

4. Space bar neighbor

5. ___ Grande

6. Flightless birds

7. In a sense

8. "Well, golly!"

9. U.K. fliers

10. Beginning on

11. Blanketlike shawl

12. React to citrus fruit, maybe

16. Jury members

19. Wane

21. Enthusiastic group

25. Filmed material

26. Reason to get a shot

28. Heady activity?

©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.

30. MLB execs

31. Workout unit

32. Pretension

34. Head toward a pole, maybe

36. Usually partnered conjunction

40. Like corn dogs

41. Ink

42. Ethyl ending

44. Acorn source

45. Like some broody teens

46. Reason for sandbags

47. Brad of "Sleepers"

48. Elicits

52. Action takers

55. Airline freebie

57. Winter blanket?

59. "Right you are!"

60. Ball-___ hammer

62. Australian boot brand

63. "Madama Butterfly" sash

64. Cruise of the "Mission: Impossible" series

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Gemini author Jamie Zafron wrote an article titled "To Anyone Who Thinks They’re Falling Behind in Life." She says, "Sometimes you need two more years of life experience before you can make your masterpiece into something that will feel real and true and raw. Sometimes you’re not falling in love because whatever you need to know about yourself is only knowable through solitude. Sometimes you haven’t met your next collaborator. Sometimes your sadness encircles you because, one day, it will be the opus upon which you build your life." This is excellent advice for you in the coming months, dear Gemini. You’ll be in a phase of incubation, preparing the way for your Next Big Thing. Honor the gritty, unspectacular work you have ahead! It will pay off.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): You’re entering a phase when you will generate maximum luck if you favor what’s short and sweet instead of what’s long and complicated. You will attract the resources you need if you identify what they are with crisp precision and do not indulge in fuzzy indecision. The world will conspire in your favor to the degree that you avoid equivocating. So please say precisely what you mean! Be a beacon of clear, relaxed focus!

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Unless you are French, chances are you have never heard of Saint-John Perse (1887–1975). He was a renowned diplomat for the French government and a poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Now he’s virtually unknown outside of his home country. Can we draw useful lessons for your use, Leo? Well, I suspect that in the coming months, you may very well come into greater prominence and wield more clout. But it’s crucial for the long-term health of your soul that during this building time, you are in service to nurturing your soul as much as your ego. The worldly power and pride you achieve will ultimately fade like Perse’s. But the spiritual growth you accomplish will endure forever.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): "Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination." Virgo author Christopher Isherwood said that. I'm offering his thought because I believe life will be spectacularly *not bad* for you in the coming weeks—whether or not you have a good physique. In fact, I'm guessing life will be downright enjoyable, creative, and fruitful. In part, that’s because you will be the beneficiary of a stream of luck. And in part, your gentle triumphs and graceful productiveness will unfold because you will be exceptionally imaginative.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): "You know how crazy love can make you," write Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez in their book *Love Poems for Real Life*. "On any given day, you’re insanely

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): "I don’t adopt anyone’s ideas—I have my own." So proclaimed Scorpio author Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883). Really, Ivan? Were you never influenced by someone else's concepts, principles, art, or opinions? The fact is that all of us live in a world created and shaped by the ideas of others. We should celebrate that wondrous privilege! We should be pleased we don't have to produce everything from scratch under our own power. As for you Scorpios reading this oracle, I urge you to be the anti-Turgenev in the coming weeks. Rejoice at how interconnected you are—and take full advantage of it. Treasure the teachings that have made you who you are. Sing your gratitude for those who have forged the world you love to live in. You now have the power to be an extraordinary networker.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The Tibetan term *lenchak* is often translated as “karmic debt.” It refers to the unconscious conditioning and bad old habits that attract us to people we would be better off not engaging. I will be bold and declare that sometime soon, you will have fully paid off a *lenchak* that has caused you relationship problems. Congrats! You are almost free of a long-running delusion. You don’t actually need an influence you thought you needed.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): If you’re like many of us, you have a set bathing routine. In the shower or bath, you start your cleansing process with one particular action, like washing your face, and go on to other tasks in the same sequence every time. Some people live most of their lives this way: following well-established patterns in all they do. I’m not criticizing that approach, though it doesn’t work for me. I need more unpredictability and variety. Anyway, Capricorn, I suspect that in the coming weeks, you will benefit from trying my practice. Have fun creating variations on your standard patterns. Enjoy being a novelty freak with the daily details.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In July 1812, composer Ludwig van Beethoven wrote a 10-page love letter to a woman he called "My Angel" and "Immortal Beloved." He never sent it, and scholars are still unsure of the addressee's identity. The message included lines like "you — my everything, my happiness . . . my solace — my everything" and "forever thine, forever mine, forever us." I hope you will soon have sound reasons for composing your own version of an "Immortal Beloved" letter. According to my astrological analysis, it's time for your tender passion to fully bloom. If there's not a specific person who warrants such a message, write it to an imaginary lover.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): At age 32, artist Peter Milton realized the colors he thought he used in his paintings were different from what his viewers saw. He got his eyes tested and discovered he had color blindness. For example, what he regarded as gray with a hint of yellow, others perceived as green. Shocked, he launched an unexpected adjustment. For the next 40 years, all his paintings were black and white only. They made him famous and have been exhibited in major museums. I love how he capitalized on an apparent disability and made it his strength. I invite you to consider a comparable move in the coming months.

Homework: Make up a story about a time in the future when you will be excitedly content. Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com