Willamette Week, June 9, 2021 - Volume 47, Issue 32 - Surviving Hazelwood

"SAINTS AND VIRGIN BIRTHS ARE STILL PRETTY SPOOKY." P. 24 WWEEK.COM

VOL 47/32 06.09.2021

WILLAMETTE WEEK

PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

NEWS: A S H E LT E R W I T H P O W E R F U L F R I E N D S . P. 8 OUTDOORS: J E S U S S O U N D W A L K S . P. 2 3 CANNABIS: A $ 6 0 0 G R A V I T Y B O N G , R E V I E W E D . P. 2 6

HSurviving AZEL WOOD HEAR FROM PORTLANDERS LIVING IN A NEIGHBORHOOD WHERE GUNFIRE IS KILLING BLACK PEOPLE.

BY LATISHA JENSEN PAGE 10

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Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

DIALOGUE

FINDINGS CHRISTINE DONG

RAVEN’S MANOR, PAGE 24

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 47, ISSUE 32 The campaign to recall Ted Wheeler has 200 volunteers. 6 After four days in Bybee Lakes Hope Center, residents must enter a rehab program and pay $250 a month. 8 Jason Kidd will not coach the

On Record Store Day, you can meet Portugal the Man and get free gelato. 22 The Black Panthers ran a free breakfast program out of a

church that is now the Portland Playhouse. 23

Portland Trail Blazers, thank God. 9

A new Portland bar has blood smeared all over the place. 24

One in 13 Portland shootings last year happened in Hazelwood. 10

Questlove’s line of vegan cheesesteaks are sold at Phillies games. 25

Gunfire rang through Food Cart Heaven last Fourth of July. 12 The World Naked Bike Ride is canceled, but that won’t stop Portland from riding bikes naked.

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Henry Higgins is introducing special late-night hours to serve bagels fresh from the oven. 20

ON THE COVER: Gateway Discovery Park in Hazelwood, where gunshots can often be heard, photo

by Joseph Blake Jr.

A company is trying to sell a bougie gravity bong for $600. 26 Once again, an electronic musician has built a song from samples of crying dolphins. 27 Hollywood Theatre will finally

reopen to the public in July after a 15-month closure. 28

OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK: Damian Lillard tied his future in Portland to the hiring of an alleged abuser.

(See page 9.)

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A large number of recent charges filed against black bloc protesters have been based on eyewitness information from unnamed informants. Last week, WW reviewed probable cause affidavits on protesters who’ve been charged in the past two months, and found that half relied on “confidential reliable informants.” WW found no mention of informants in court filings from 2020 and early 2021 (“Smash and Gab,” June 2, 2021). Use of confidential informants is a long-standing police practice, but legal experts tell WW it’s highly unusual for law enforcement to use such tactics against protesters. The issue also taps into a growing disagreement among Portlanders: whether black bloc gatherings, which have repeatedly ended in property damage, should be considered legitimate protests. Here’s what our readers had to say: rfyorkinpdx, via wweek.com: “As a geezer progressive, I am not happy with police using these tactics. On the other hand, these people are tearing down our city. They are, for the most part, a bunch of mindless vandals who have little or nothing to do with Black Lives Matter. So, I guess I have to think that whatever tactics the cops need to slow down or stop this, they should use them.” @Macswain8, via Twitter: “Anyone who thinks police informants embedded in protests are credible hasn’t read anything about the history of cops and civil rights movements. The police use informants not to distinguish between criminal acts and legal protesting, but to attack the protest movement itself.”

Harold Shields, via Facebook: “I support the use of secret informants to identify the perpetrators of destruction. Let’s not forget that the black bloc people are nothing but vandals and arsonists. They stand for nothing but destruction.”

Dr. Know

VS, via wweek.com: “Glad the article mentions how little support these blac bloc events have among Black civil rights leaders. They are also wildly unpopular among the general public. Thank goodness the police are using these approaches.” @Maybe_Surely, via Twitter: “So cops just get to say whatever they want about a person and wreck their life if they just say a trusted informant told them.” @marziah, via Twitter: “That’s the part that makes me nervous, too. I Suzanne Fleming, via Facebook: “The police and now the mayor are acting more and more like authoritarians. So who are the secret informants? Are they Proud Boys? Oath Keepers? This is a worrisome development.”

SECESSIONISTS PAY TAXES TOO

I wonder if others were appalled as I with the comments Dr. Know made about our Eastern Oregon residents as well as Idaho [WW, June 2, 2021].

Marty Smith has a tendency to use sarcasm in his articles, but he crossed the line this time.

He doesn’t even know these people, but he uses thoughtless stereotypes, such as trailer trash and dead weight. Most of these people are hardworking farmers and ranchers, striving to earn an honest dollar for their family. They also pay their fair share in taxes.

Dr. Know’s comments feed the problems we are facing in our society. We need to treat all with kindness and respectfulness.

Conservative Sharon Southeast Portland 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: 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210.

Email: mzusman@wweek.com

BY MART Y SMITH @martysmithxxx

In-migration from The State That Dare Not Speak Its Name has finally resulted in Oregon gaining a congressional seat while our southern neighbor loses one. Will the resulting redistricting be more important than who the Blazers hire as head coach? —The Pearl Kid It’s official: So many people have moved to Oregon from California that they’re now entitled to their very own congressperson.

I’m not entirely kidding. Since the last time Oregon added a congressional seat—way back in 1982—we’ve welcomed (if you want to call it that) something like 1.1 million Californians to the Beaver State.

Of course, we didn’t really capture quite that many new citizens, since over those four decades a half million or so Oregonians moved to California. But even allowing for this, our net gain—the raw number of folks we added to our cargo of souls entirely at California’s expense—comes to a respectable 600,000.

That’s a lot of people. Given that the population of an average U.S. House district is 700,000, you could be forgiven for thinking maybe we should skip the nightmare of redistricting entirely and just let the Californians among us elect their own representative at large.

That said, Kid, I’m not entirely sure what this has to do with the Portland Trail Blazers’ search for a new head coach. I had a look at the Blazers’ 1982 roster, but the only thing I could determine—aside from the fact that it was a bunch of guys I’d never heard of—is that Fat Lever is probably the greatest name for a major league athlete since White Sox outfielder Rusty Kuntz.

Frankly, there’s not that much that politics and Blazers basketball have in common, aside from the obvious fact that devotees of either are guaranteed a lifetime of despair. But even I’m not cynical enough to say that they carry the same weight— Lebron James is a formidable opponent, but it’s not like if he dunks on you 60 million people are going to lose their health insurance.

No, redistricting is far more consequential than a basketball game. And you can get involved! Ten public hearings about how district boundaries should be drawn have already been scheduled. I can only hope Moda Center will be large enough to hold the multitudes who I’m sure—sure!—will be there to make their voices heard.

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

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

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MURMURS WESLEY LAPOINTE

OWENS-BROCKWAY PLANT

GLASS PLANT FACES MILLION-DOLLAR FINE: This spring, Oregon’s only glass recycling plant dodged a crushing blow when Portland city officials scrapped two proposed fees on carbon emissions that would have raised the plant’s annual tax bill by $1 million (“Glass Houses, WW, Jan. 27, 2021). But now the Owens-Brockway plant faces a new problem: a $1 million fine from the state for breaking air pollution laws. The Department of Environmental Quality levied the fine last week. A DEQ spokesperson alleges that Owens-Brockway was spewing too much soot. Environmental advocates say a crackdown on Owens-Brockway, which sits on 78 acres in the Cully neighborhood of Northeast Portland, is long overdue. “This disregard is a clear issue of environmental racism, given the proximity of the plant to Cully, one of Oregon’s most diverse neighborhoods,” wrote Neighbors for Clean Air. Every glass bottle recycled by Oregon’s Bottle Bill goes through Owens-Brockway. A spokesperson for the plant’s owner, Ohio-based Owens-Illinois, says: “O-I is aware of the announcement and is currently reviewing the scope but cannot provide comment on pending regulatory or legal matters.”

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NAOMI WOLF SLATED FOR OREGON ANTI-VAXX RALLY: Oregonians for Medical Freedom, a group opposed to vaccine requirements even before the COVID-19 pandemic, is advertising a June 9 rally at the state Capitol, headlined by Dr. Naomi Wolf, the noted feminist suspended from Twitter this week for spreading vaccine misinformation. “LETS STAND AGAINST THE INJUSTICES OF THE COVID LOCKDOWNS,” the online flier for the event reads. Wolf, a leading figure of third-wave feminism and author of The Beauty Myth, recently descended into conspiracy theories around vaccines. Twitter suspended her account after she suggested separating the human waste of vaccinated people from other sewage. She’ll be joined at a rally opposing vaccine passports by Kevin Jenkins, whom the London-based Center for Countering Digital Hate identified as one of a dozen anti-vaccine activists responsible for most vaccine misinformation online. Also speaking: Dr. Paul Thomas, the Beaverton anti-vaxx pediatrician, who still faces disciplinary proceedings that could permanently revoke his license. Oregonians for Medical Freedom did not respond to email inquiries.

LEGISLATURE CLEARS PATH FOR POLICE OVERSIGHT: The Oregon Legislature passed Senate Bill 621 on June 7, effectively paving the way for Portland to implement a police oversight board that voters passed by a 4-to-1 margin in November. The bill amends state law pertaining to labor negotiations with public employee unions so voter-approved police oversight boards can operate in “full force and effect” without being subject to mandatory collective bargaining. “We were honest that there were additional steps needed to ensure the new independent police oversight board would be the best it can be,” said City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty. “I’ve remained committed to that process, and I’m thrilled to see this next step is complete.”

PORTLAND WOMAN CLAIMS MISCARRIAGE AFTER EVICTION: A Portland woman says she had a miscarriage in the car where she was living, two weeks after her being evicted this winter. On June 7, Sara Kuust and Jake Blackburn filed a $1.9 million lawsuit in Multnomah County Circuit Court, accusing their landlords of unlawful eviction, negligence and retaliation for allegedly ousting them from their rented room at the Evergreen Inn and Suites motel in January. The couple says the landlords “instructed police to remove them from the premises” on Jan. 16, and that after five days in other motels, the couple began living in their car. Two weeks later, according to their attorney, Kuust had a miscarriage. The lawsuit names Manmohan and Jalpaben Patel and OM JSNRN Hospitality Group as defendants. An attorney representing them declined to comment. “As a result of defendants’ wrongful eviction, plaintiffs became homeless,” the lawsuit says. “After being wrongfully evicted, Ms. Kuust experienced a miscarriage while living in her car.”

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Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com 5 5/24/21 8:36 PM

NEWS

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK

W W S TA F F

SIX QUESTIONS FOR

There’s something fundamentally destabilizing about recalling a mayor immediately after he was elected. Do you have any concerns about setting off a cycle of recalls?

I cannot speculate on what people will do in the future.

But I do know that the majority of Portlanders are united in their belief that Wheeler should be removed from office as soon as possible. Again, he only received 46% of the vote—and people maybe didn’t agree about what they wanted at that time, but they did agree that he was not worthwhile enough to show up in force. And so we refuse to accept this. The failures impact the city and impact people who live here. We don’t have another three and a half years to waste on him.

Audrey Caines

W W S TA F F

THE BIG NUMBER

ENJOY THE RIDE: The campaign to unseat Mayor Ted Wheeler, Total Recall PDX, is underway.

She’s been hired to recall Mayor Ted Wheeler.

BY S OPHI E P E E L

speel@wweek.com

Audrey Caines just scored the cushiest sales job in Portland. Her pitch: She wants voters to kick Mayor Ted Wheeler out of office.

Fine, it’s a little more complicated than that. Caines is the newly hired campaign manager of Total Recall PDX. That’s a political action committee that was launched to remove Wheeler from office just days after voters elected him to a second term.

Or at least some of them did. Alan Kessler, a Portland lawyer hired by the campaign of Wheeler’s runoff opponent Sarah Iannarone, founded the PAC with this rationale: Only 46% of voters wanted Wheeler in office. The rest voted for somebody else. So even if Wheeler got the most votes, the majority of voters don’t want him running Portland.

This month, Total Recall PDX announced it had hired Caines, 32, whose previous political experience was with Rising Tide PDX, an environmental justice group that has blocked rail lines for oil trains.

Its aim? Collect 47,788 signatures in 90 days starting July 1 by knocking doors across the city, roaming around gatherings and events, and setting up plastic information tables all over town. If it succeeds, and Wheeler doesn’t choose to resign, the question of recalling him would go to voters in a special election 35 days later. The mayor would face no opponent. It would be Wheeler against himself.

Still, questions remain. Caines agreed to answer some.

The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

WW: Why recall Ted Wheeler? Didn’t we just have an election? How has his legacy changed in the past five months since he won?

Audrey Caines: He demonstrated that he doesn’t have the support of the majority of the city. And he’s done nothing since the election to show that he is more responsive to people’s needs and values. So it’s sort of a continuation of what he did prior, which was to be ineffective and unresponsive.

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What’s been Wheeler’s biggest failure in the past five months?

His failure to fund the Portland Street Response was a major failure on his part. [Wheeler and two other city commissioners voted against expanding the unarmed crisis response team citywide.] There was a huge amount of public support for that, and his decision to not fund led a lot of people to donate to us. We did see an uptick in people, both donating and joining our efforts as volunteers.

At this point, what do your efforts look like?

We have over 200 volunteers from a variety of backgrounds who are a part of the effort.We have a field team, and a lot of their focus is being available in public spaces and public events. So folks go out in the community, they go to an event, they set up a table. And then there’s also postering that goes on. We have volunteers running all of our social media. So basically everything you see coming out of this campaign is coming from volunteers.

Where’s the funding for this campaign coming from?

At this point, all of our funding is just coming from people. The average donation right now is around $46, which compared to most campaigns is just absolutely insane. We have a goal of raising $150,000 by July 15. The last time I looked at it, we were around $36,000. My salary is included in that number.

Who’s interim mayor if the recall is successful?

Nobody’s mayor. All the powers of the mayor are distributed to other City Council members. [Editor’s note: The City Elections Office says a special election for Wheeler’s replacement would be held within 90 days of the vacancy.” It did not say who, if anyone, would become interim mayor.] And because Portland has a pretty unique structure where the mayor already doesn’t have quite as much power as they do in other cities, it seems like it would be a fairly reasonable intermediate step to allow for other people to step into those spaces.

TIME IS SHORT: A mural of Damian Lillard on a Portland garage door.

106,671 That’s how many more Oregonians need a COVID-19 shot before masks come off.

As of June 7, 106,671 Oregonians still need to get at least one shot of the COVID-19 vaccine before the vast majority of the state’s pandemic restrictions will come to an end.

Specifically: Gov. Kate Brown will drop most of the state’s mask mandates as well as social distancing requirements.

Brown has set a benchmark of 70% of adults age 18 and above vaccinated. Currently, more than 66.8% of the state has been vaccinated.

Mask mandates will remain in place for airports, public transportation and health care. The state has said schools will return to full-time in-person instruction in the fall, but has yet to set specific safety protocols.

At the going rate, however, don’t expect pure freedom by the Fourth of July fireworks. The average number of daily vaccine doses administered in the last week has fallen below 17,000, from a peak of 44,000 on April 11.

Unless Oregon can juice those numbers, it won’t reach the 70% benchmark until late July, at the earliest. RACHEL MONAHAN.

NEWS CLOCKED

AARON WESSLING

CHRIS NESSETH

COURT RULING

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES: The Portland Police Association has some explaining to do.

REST EASY: Housing pods at St. Johns Village.

Martin v. Boise The citation of a notorious court case raises legal and moral questions about homeless camp sweeps.

On May 24, the Portland Business Alliance sent a letter to Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury, requesting that she use county funds to fund 500 extra shelter beds for unhoused people. (She didn’t, although she did accede to other requests to assist with erecting “safe rest villages.”)

The request itself was a large one. But what stood out about the PBA letter was its reference to a court ruling that ruffles feathers every time it’s mentioned: Martin v. Boise.

That’s a 2018 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that prohibits local governments from criminalizing homelessness if the government isn’t providing enough shelter for each unhoused person. That ruling is typically used to poke holes in governmental efforts to sweep homeless camps. So its citation by a powerful business group was unexpected. (Disclosure: The PBA’s 1,900 members include WW’s parent company.)

What the PBA said: It argued that the city and county were failing to uphold the standard of Martin v. Boise, that “local governments must provide a warm and dry place for unhoused residents to sleep at any given time as a prerequisite to enforcing clear sidewalks, parks, and other public spaces.”

The chamber of commerce argued that not providing enough shelter beds for people living on the streets right now is unethical, if not necessarily illegal.

“We urge you to use the legal and subsequent policy standards established in the 2018 Martin v. Boise decision issued by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to guide these improvements in this and future budgets,” the letter read.

That raised a question: Does the PBA think the city’s new, more aggressive rules for sweeping camps from sidewalks are immoral until city officials have opened new sleeping sites? The PBA declined to comment on that question.

Do others want to comment on that question?

Why, of course they do! Notably, two state lawmakers agree with Chavez—including the most powerful figure in the Oregon House.

House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland) is currently championing House Bill 3115, which would prohibit cities

from criminalizing homelessness if there are no other viable alternatives. It would also mandate that cities rework and more clearly codify ordinances surrounding homelessness.

Kotek says City Hall has a moral obligation—if not yet a legal one—to halt sweeps until enough shelter is provided for each unhoused person under the Martin v. Boise decision.

“Sweeps are destabilizing, dangerous and traumatizing, and they do not address the root causes of homelessness. They should only be used as a last resort to ensure public health and safety of the individuals living on the streets,” her office tells WW. “Local governments should be following the Boise ruling right now. The speaker’s hope is that HB 3115 will ensure local communities refocus on investing in real solutions, like more transitional shelter options, permanent affordable housing, stronger support services and more.”

But Kotek was careful not to make a judgment whether the city was complying with the ruling: “Speaker Kotek hasn’t had a chance to review the exact details of the latest policy change and will defer to legal experts on whether the city is complying with the decision.”

Rep. Maxine Dexter (D -Portland), a co-sponsor of Kotek’s bill, also avoided making a judgment about the city’s compliance with the ruling: “Rep. Dexter does not have a background in the law and is unable to attest to the legality of the city’s actions,” a spokesperson says.

But she, too, expressed hesitancy about the new sweep protocols: “[Dexter] is worried that by not sending the outreach team to high-risk camps and not working to ensure there is a place for our houseless neighbors to go, the policy will do little to address the needs of our city and her people.”

Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office says that the city ’s approach is “consistent with Martin v. Boise...The case allows governments to manage the condition and locations of unsanctioned camping, to protect the health and safety of both people experiencing homelessness and the community at large” and adds that the ruling is “closely aligned with our values.”

Does any of this have legal implications for the city?

Probably not. The city has largely argued that its anti-camping ordinances aren’t in conflict with the ruling.

Even the most progressive lawyers are stumped by how much leeway the ruling leaves for cities to circumvent it.

“The truth is that the strictest reading of Martin v.

Boise doesn’t give enough guidance in this situation, and so we’re still stuck in an area where it’s clear what we need to do, and we shouldn’t need the law to tell us what the right thing is,” Juan Chavez, a civil rights lawyer, tells WW. “And that’s to stop sweeping.” SOPHIE PEEL.

Hunzeker Watch Portland still doesn’t know what Brian Hunzeker did.

So we’ll keep counting.

85 DAYS: That’s how long ago Officer Brian Hunzeker resigned from his role as president of the Portland Police Association due to what the union described as a “serious, isolated mistake related to the [Portland] Police Bureau’s investigation into the alleged hit-and-run by Commissioner [Jo Ann] Hardesty.”

We still don’t know what he did. The mayor’s office says it doesn’t know what he did. Hunzeker has been on paid administrative leave since May 27.

96 DAYS: That’s how long it’s been since the Police Bureau opened an internal affairs investigation into the leak of information that wrongly implicated Commissioner Hardesty in a March 3 hit-andrun crash. It has released no results of its inquiry.

84 DAYS: That’s how long it’s been since the city signed a contract to hire an outside investigative firm to probe the leak. TESS RISKI. Editor’s note: It is unusual for WW to track the timeline of such investigations, but the circumstances themselves are unusual: A veteran police officer and union president abruptly resigned from his union leadership role in connection with information leaked about an elected official. Meanwhile, he was assigned to work the patrol unit in the North Precinct until being placed on administrative leave. We believe Portlanders have a right to know what Hunzeker did that led to his resignation, and we believe it is critical to put pressure on public officials and law enforcement leaders who might prefer that the public forget about it. We will continue to publish this column until we know what Hunzeker did.

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

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NEWS

A homeless shelter in a never-used jail gets a government subsidy from well-placed friends.

HENRY CROMETT

Second Chances

REENTRY: Bybee Lakes Hope Center now houses about 45 residents a night.

BY TE SS R I S K I

F

tess@wweek.com

or $250 a month, unhoused Portlanders who stay sober can get three meals a day and a curtained-off bed in a never-used jail in North Portland.

That building, once known as Wapato Jail and now called the Bybee Lakes Hope Center, has for the better part of a decade been at the center of a debate over how to address homelessness in Portland. Last October, it officially opened as an emergency shelter that offers long-term housing to people who maintain sobriety. It currently houses about 45 residents a night.

“They said it couldn’t be done. That’s what I like about it,” says Alan Evans, chief executive of Helping Hands Reentry Outreach Centers, the nonprofit that operates Bybee Lakes Hope Center.

But Evans isn’t the only person who believes in the shelter’s model. And the facility’s residents are not the only ones paying.

In April, the Oregon Legislature passed a bill that helped fund the former jail’s transformation with a $2 million investment. That’s a sizable cash infusion for a project that local officials, most notably Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury, had long viewed with skepticism.

Bybee Lakes Hope Center has a well-placed ally: State Sen. Betsy Johnson (D-Scappoose), co-chair of the Joint Ways and Means Committee, secured the $2 million personally.

“Speaker [Tina] Kotek and I had a personal conversation about it,” Johnson tells WW. “We are trying to salvage taxpayer value out of a perfectly serviceable building that really has worn the test of time. After 20 years of no occupancy, that building remains remarkably intact structurally.”

The state investment, which has until now gone unreported by Portland-area news outlets, is notable because the county and state are now supporting strikingly different approaches to address homelessness.

Chair Kafoury and the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners sold the jail for $5 million in 2018, after rejecting pleas from business leaders to use it as a county-run shelter.

Kafoury toured the facility in early May—and, in the face of mounting homelessness, she sounds more equivocal.

“While it looks like it will work for some people, it also confirmed for me that selling the property was the right decision for the county,” she says. “But I appreciate that folks across the private sector continue to step up because it’s going to take all of us coming together to end homelessness in our community.”

The legislators who secured the $2 million did not get a financial analysis of the project, and the owner and operator did not provide information about operating costs to WW. Johnson, who has a well-earned reputation as a fiscal conservative, says she didn’t need financial details to support the project. “We’re well aware of their financial situation,” Johnson says. “I’ve been watching Helping Hands perform in communities that I represent in the Legislature for 20 years.”

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Indeed, Evans operates nearly a dozen shelters, many in Johnson’s coastal legislative district. Both Johnson and Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward (D-Portland), her Ways and Means committee co-chair, sit on the Bybee Lakes Hope Center advisory board.

Thanks to the senators’ efforts, the state of Oregon now appears to be one of the largest investors in the shelter. That means the state and county will now fund what amounts to competing models for aiding the poorest, most vulnerable Portlanders.

Multnomah County has tried to send services where unhoused people are—to meet their physical needs as well as treat possible substance abuse and mental health concerns. Bybee Lakes takes a different approach: It requires sobriety and a monthly fee from individuals who wish to stay at the facility for more than four days and enroll in what’s called the reentry program. That’s an old-fashioned model—and one that Johnson vouches for.

“I can’t think of anything much more moving than watching grown men throw themselves into each other’s arms to celebrate sobriety and clean living,” Johnson says.

“They kick drug habits, they don’t drink, they’ve got jobs.

Helping Hands’ success rate is formidable.”

A recent tour of Bybee Lakes Hope Center showed improvisation—and a lot of deferred maintenance.

A woman flipped pancakes on an electric griddle in a classroom, which serves as a temporary cafeteria while the kitchen undergoes renovation. The shelter has purchased and received new washers and dryers, but until they are installed, clothing is washed in large commercial laundry machines. Much of the 155,400-square-foot complex is cordoned off pending renovations.

In some regards, that matches the county’s analysis, which determined it would cost $950,000 to open the facility for a non-jail use, and an ongoing $140,000 a month for utilities. That analysis is largely what led the county commission to sell the jail.

In 2018, philanthropist and real estate magnate Jordan Schnitzer obtained the property after another business owner bought it from the county for $5 million. Schnitzer vowed that the private sector would succeed where the government had failed.

“What’s remarkable about this is, for all the city and county officials who said this wouldn’t work—wrong location, wrong building—it’s been perfect,” Schnitzer tells WW. “The county and the city throw around these numbers that are staggering. We’re doing it for a fraction of the cost. If you asked me what the biggest single problem is today, what I would say is the arrogance of our elected officials—that they think they know it all and have all the answers.”

After three years, Schnitzer says he has invested $7 million in the project. Still, Bybee Lakes Hope Center’s finances remain unclear.

“Like any nonprofit, it’s a nonprofit because it can’t function in the for-profit world. But it’s very cost effective in its results,” Schnitzer says.

Schnitzer said Evans could provide specifics on the center’s finances. Evans declined but said the shelter is preparing a financial report, including cost per bed and sources of revenue, which it will release in the coming weeks.

Much of the skepticism that still surrounds Bybee Lakes comes from its use of what’s called a “high-barrier” model for entry.

Residents can stay at the center’s emergency shelter for up to four days, a period that allows them to “rest, know where their next meal is coming from, have the basic dignities of a shower and safe place to sleep,” says Raven Russell, director of data and major projects for Helping Hands.

After those four days, Russell says, residents then “make an informed decision” whether to enroll in the Bybee Lakes reentry program, which places no limit on the length of stay but comes with other rules. “If a participant does not enroll in reentry at the end of their first four-day stay in emergency shelter, they may elect to return for additional four-day periods as they make a decision whether or not our longterm services are a good fit for their needs,” Russell says.

Residents enrolled in the reentry program must pay a monthly fee of $250 per bed (87% receive a scholarship in the first 30 or 60 days, Russell says). In order to pay the fee, many have jobs within blocks of the center, including at the Columbia Sportswear warehouse or OIA Global.

Residents are prohibited from bringing intoxicating substances onto the premises. Once they move out of the emergency shelter and into the reentry program, residents must be sober and undergo “frequent, random drug and alcohol screenings,” according to the program’s website. Those with a history of addiction are required to attend recovery meetings, which are offered at the center.

Housing advocates say this is an unusual approach in Multnomah County, where a harm-reduction model is more commonly embraced.

“It is not the norm in Portland. Most people value a lower-barrier approach,” says Greg Townley, research director of the Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative at Portland State University. “[That] model is one that most housing advocates and researchers have largely abandoned in favor of a model that is more flexible and recognizes the many complex, intersecting needs and vulnerabilities that people have.”

High-barrier programs that require sobriety tend to limit the number of people who are able to receive services, Townley says. “It’s not that housing can never be alcohol and drug free,” he added. “It’s when it’s the only option that concerns me.”

Currently, about 35 long-term residents stay at Bybee Lakes Hope Center through its reentry program, Russell says. Each night, an additional five to 15 people stay at the facility through its emergency shelter. Currently, the facility has 72 beds available. Just under half are low-barrier beds for emergency shelter clients, Russell says.

Once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted, the center will have 126 beds in six dorms. But Schnitzer says Bybee Lakes Hope Center is on its way to housing hundreds of people by the end of the year, thanks in part to the new public-private partnership. “In the meantime,” he says, “the city and the county keep running around in circles.”

Bybee Lakes Hope Center was granted the $2 million under Section 77 of House Bill 5042, which is designated for “navigation centers,” defined as low-barrier emergency shelters open seven days a week. Six other locations—in Salem, McMinnville, Roseburg, Bend, Medford, and Lane County—were granted funding for navigation centers.

“It made absolute sense to add Bybee Lakes,” Johnson says. “It’s going to be one of the biggest of the navigation centers.”

The $2 million Johnson secured means Portland taxpayers are now funding divergent solutions to homelessness.

And that experiment is occurring even as both Kafoury and Johnson are mulling runs for governor.

“The bigger point is,” says Ways and Means co-chair Steiner Hayward, “they’re trying to take a facility that was basically stripped bare, and turn it from a jail into a welcoming place where people who are really struggling can find a new path forward.”

NEWS NBAE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Dame Time’s Up Damian Lillard tied his future in Portland to the hiring of an alleged abuser. That left fans angry and hurt.

BOLTING?: Damian Lillard’s future in Portland is the subject of much speculation after several accomplished but frustrating seasons.

take in. I think everyone was focused on the abusers and forgot the survivors reading it.”

Damian Lillard, how could you?

Dame’s decision is especially baffling because he must That’s a question many Portland Trail Blazers fans startknow Portland’s history with violent and abusive players. ed asking after the franchise superstar made two shocking Blazers fans made a decision 20 years ago: They would decisions late Friday evening. not support a team made up of rapists, dog fighters, and First, Lillard announced to several reporters his two drunken drivers. preferred choices for the Blazers’ next head coach. That’s Contemporary reexamination of the “Jail Blazers” something no Blazers player has ever done before—it’s vanhas clarified that some of the complaints of the era were a ishingly rare in the history of the NBA, period—and was a moral panic and implicitly—sometimes explicitly—racist. forceful demonstration of how much leverage Lillard Life as a sports fan is full of compromises. We all But regardless of the pearl clutching over a little weed, the NS-KEITH O M AL holds over the Portland front office.

LI OM know that half of the purchase price for every city’s subsequent abandonment of the team had a massive S IC O N Second, he used that capital to recom- W I K ticket we buy will go in a billionaire’s pocket. effect. mend two candidates with documented The people who own these teams are not The Jail Blazers era was an ugly debate about race, genhistories of alleged domestic and sexual necessarily morally defensible. But we der and power. By suggesting the hiring of two men of color abuse. keep buying tickets and rationalize the accused of abuse, Lillard has asked the front office once Lillard’s top choice, Jason Kidd, choice as support for the players on the again to choose between supporting a person of color and accepted a plea deal for hitting his wife court, not the capitalist paying their sal- standing with victims of sexual abuse. in 2001. During divorce proceedings, aries.

Further complicating the conversation is the NBA’s she also accused him of kicking her in the That moral calculus changes when the history of inequitable racial representation among its head stomach while she was carrying his child. “bad guy” is the head coach. He will be at coaches. The league is majority Black, but most head coach Lillard’s second choice—and the candievery press conference, roaming the sidelines es are white. Steve Nash, a white former MVP, was even JASON KIDD date apparently preferred by the president of at every game, and quoted in every game recap. hired to helm the Brooklyn Nets with no head coaching basketball operations, Neil Olshey—is Chauncey “The coach plays a huge part in a fan base. He calls experience. Critics correctly pointed out that Black men Billups. In 1997, Billups and a teammate were accused of the plays, creates our starting lineup, shares in the success,” are rarely awarded top jobs with contending teams unless rape, eventually settling the case in civil court for an undis- said Alexa Cooper, a Portlander who grew up attending they have years of prior experience. Nash’s hiring highlightclosed amount of money.

Blazers games with her mother. “[Portland fans] care about ed a concerning trend: worsening racial representation in

By Sunday morning, Kidd had withdrawn his name from the players and coaches as humans, and it matters to us that the NBA coaching ranks. consideration. It’s not clear if the revulsion expressed by they’re not only good at what they do, but that they’re peo- Yet there are dozens of Black assistant coaches around Blazers fans on social media played a role in his decision. ple we’d all want to be friends with outside of basketball. I the league who would be strong candidates. Former Blazers He said he didn’t want to place Lillard in “an awkward posi- wouldn’t want to be in the same building as Jason Kidd.” forward LaMarcus Aldridge highlighted Portland’s own tion” with the team, ESPN reported.

The NBA has repeatedly claimed to be a social Ime Udoka as an example.

NS-KEITH O M AL But Dame doesn’t escape unscathed. For a generation of justice-focused league. The Blazers ran a LI OM Look, this is a truly miserable conversation to C S I O N fans who grew up with Lillard as a civic hero, the revelation campaign to help domestic survivors and W I K have. The near-palpable rage that bubbled about whom he reveres was crushing. continue to brag regularly about their work to the surface when Kidd’s name was first “The hardest part about all of this is that Damian Lil- in the community. The NBA instituted a linked to Lillard and the Blazers has given lard, an incredibly active and philanthropic member of our policy that, at least superficially, appears way to sadness and fatigue. Everyone community, is the one throwing these names out there,” designed to keep domestic and/or child involved, from the front office to the 300says Ashtyn Butuso, a longtime Blazers fan and founder abusers off its courts. level seats, thought we had moved past of Flagrant magazine, a women-created basketball publi- It’s hard to take those purported this legacy. We haven’t. cation. “Dame is a person too; it’s possible he just doesn’t reforms seriously when the Blazers are “By giving violent abusers fame and a understand how gruesome the allegations are.” considering Kidd or Billups as the face platform you’re telling survivors that they For much of Lillard’s tenure in Portland, fans have of the franchise. It’s hard not to cry at the don’t matter, that their experiences don’t feared he would leave this small-market city. But for some, incoming fallout when survivors share how CHAUNCEY BILLUPS matter and that you do not care about them,” this feels worse. A player who spent nearly a decade culti- even contemplating Kidd’s candidacy affects them: said Gemmet. “I would no longer be buying tickets vating the most unimpeachable public image in the league “As a survivor, to see constant posts all over my timeline or gear or supporting the team. I’ve always loved this team, has, in essence, placed a condition on his remaining in regarding these horrible acts, it’s a constant reminder of but some things are bigger than basketball.” town: hire one of two men with horrifying histories of how what I went through,” said Cooper. “Don’t get me wrong, I they allegedly treat women. appreciate everyone standing against it. It was just a lot to

BY E R IC G R I F F I T H

@EricG_NBA

“[Lillard] has spoken out consistently against injustice.

He praises and celebrates the amazing strong women that surround him in his personal life,” said Cassidy Gemmet, a self-described Blazers fan since birth. “With everything that we’ve gotten to know about Damian Lillard as a man over the past nine years, these picks feel against what he stands for.”

Lillard could not immediately be reached for comment through team officials.

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

9

JOSEPH BLAKE JR.

Surviving

H A Z E LWO O D Hear from Portlanders living in a neighborhood where gunfire is killing Black people.

BY L ATISH A J E N S E N

ljensen@wweek.com

On a warm Sunday afternoon, Gateway Discovery Park looks like a postcard.

It’s easy to miss the park while driving along Northeast Halsey Street, the Hazelwood neighborhood version of Main Street, lined with a True Value hardware store, the former King’s Omelets family restaurant and a nearly finished low-income apartment building, christened the Nick Fish.

Behind that building sits the park, a $10.2 million oasis the city built in 2018 to give residents of Portland’s easternmost neighborhoods the kind of communal space they’d long been denied.

Children climb on a hill of green artificial turf, bang out notes on a metal xylophone and pedal Huffy bikes along paths painted blue. Moms spread a plastic Spider-Man tablecloth across picnic tables and inflate red birthday balloons. Heshers split a six-pack of Hamm’s next to the concrete skate bowl.

But all is not well at Gateway Discovery Park.

Adalia lives across the street from the park. It’s a place her family avoids after dusk. That’s when they tend to hear gunshots.

On a recent night, she says, dozens of people shot at each other. Even during the day, Adalia, who asked not to use her real name, can’t sit in the park without feeling edgy.

“You never know what’s going to happen, but we can’t just stay at home all the time,” Adalia says in Spanish.

“Some weeks there are shootings every other day and sometimes just every weekend. We always hear sirens outside our home.”

Last August, Gateway Discovery Park was the scene of a mass shooting. A few minutes after sunset on Aug. 27, someone shot four people. One died: 16-year-old 10

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

Jaelin James Scott. His father, Cash Carter, says the boy exchanged texts with his grandmother minutes before he died.

“He was outside and then she texted him and was like, ‘Can you go get me a soda from the store?’” Carter says.

“And the last text she got from him was, ‘I’ll get you a soda after I come back from the park.’”

For the past year, gunfire has torn through this city at a rate Portland hasn’t seen in at least a quarter century.

The number of shootings citywide more than doubled in a year—from 393 in 2019 to 890 in 2020.

The brunt of the violence is borne by Black Portlanders, like Jaelin Scott.

WW has exclusively obtained Portland Police Bureau records that show, for the first time, the racial demographics of all known suspects and victims of non-suicide shootings in 2020.

Black people made up 39.6% of suspects and 51.7% of the victims. That means Black Portlanders were injured and killed at a rate eight times higher than their share of the population.

No place in Portland has endured gun violence like Hazelwood, the neighborhood with the fourth-highest number of Black residents in the city.

For the past three calendar years, it is the neighborhood where bullets fly more often than anywhere else in Portland. Last year, 1 in 13 of the city’s shootings happened here. Yet only 1 in 25 Portlanders call Hazelwood home.

Hazelwood’s 4.1 square miles stretch from 102nd Avenue to 148th. In between stand enormous fir and hazelwood trees, vast car lots and pastel-painted former fast-food franchises now serving food from around the globe. Tightly packed wooden apartment buildings sit next to a nearly vacant mall, a hospital campus and the

TANGLED WEB: The playground at Gateway Discovery Park, where several shootings have occurred in the past year.

only Portland outpost of Pig ’N Pancake.

And it is a place where, as the COVID pandemic subsides, many residents still feel the need to stay inside.

In the past month, we sat down for conversations with people in or near Hazelwood who have endured and survived the violence firsthand.

A Black mom says she can’t find a safe or supportive environment for her son. A food cart owner says he wants to move his truck out of the area. A longtime resident moved to Beaverton a year ago to keep his family safe. And a county commissioner says she’s worried every time her teenage daughter leaves the house to go to the park across the street.

City Hall is now locked in an intense debate over whether the 2020 removal of a police unit focused on gun violence helped cause the rise in deaths of Black Portlanders. The people we spoke to in Hazelwood were keenly aware of a reduced police presence. Some said police could help reduce lawlessness. But few of them felt that was the fundamental problem—or the sole solution.

Instead, they described a disproportionate number of single-parent homes and lack of positive Black male influences for young boys. They talked of teenagers with little to no school or mentorship being manipulated and raised by seasoned gang members. And they pointed to the grief and fear of watching friends and relatives die that never gets processed—leading to gun violence as a last resort.

“While they’re writing laws, we’re writing obituaries,” says Lionel Irving, founder of nonprofit PDX Love Over Hate and a gang veteran who now counsels young men not to pull the trigger. “Something has got to be done. If we wait, we’re going to keep getting kids in the grave.”

Here is how eight people have survived in Hazelwood.

And here is how they think the shootings could stop.

Surviving

HAZELWOOD

CASH CARTER The night Cash Carter’s son died, he drove from hospital to hospital trying to find him.

For nearly three hours, Carter didn’t know whether his son, Jaelin James Scott, had survived the gunshots at Gateway Discovery Park.

“At one point in time at [Legacy] Emanuel, before we left, I could swear I heard him say, ‘Dad,’” Carter says. “I swear. I know his voice.”

Scott, 16, died from his wounds.

In the months before the Aug. 27 shooting, Carter, 40, had been running for Portland mayor. His platform included reform of the juvenile justice system, which Scott had entered. Carter also wanted to set an example for his son by seeking office.

In May, Carter finished ninth among a 19-candidate field. But Scott slipped further into gang involvement.

“I’M DOING SOMETHING POSITIVE, RUNNING FOR MAYOR, YOU’RE WINNING— AND THEN BOOM. YOU’RE LOSING. THEN YOU’RE AT THE LOWEST OF THE LOWS.” — CASH CARTER

“Everybody liked him. He could light up a room. He was a good big brother, a loyal friend,” Carter says. “He was a natural at music ever since he was a little kid. I wrote this hook for him when he was 4 or 5, and he just killed it.”

Scott is survived by his younger brother, who is just 8 years old. “He handles it right now better than I do,” says Carter, who is attending weekly grief counseling sessions.

Carter says it wasn’t just gangs that killed his son. He believes social media platforms fueled violence on the streets of Hazelwood. Carter saw Scott caught up in feuds between young men that started with insults delivered on Snapchat.

But Carter thinks that social media could become part of the solution: Snapchat advertisements could help spread the word to this younger generation with messages that Carter suggests could say something like, “Think before you Snap,” or “Don’t end up like this person.”

“They’re on their phones all the time,” he says, “so put it on their phones.”

LOST: Cash Carter is still grieving the death of his son, 16-year-old Jaelin James Scott.

“He got messed up in the wrong crowd.

By the time that I’m showing him positive things, he’s already in it,” Carter says. “I’m doing something positive, running for mayor, you’re winning—and then boom.

You’re losing. Then you’re at the lowest of the lows.”

Carter sports a red, black and white sweatsuit that has roses on it, and wears a pair of dark sunglasses. He’s proud of how close he was to his son; it gives him comfort that Scott viewed him as his best friend.

Scott struggled to stay out of trouble even with mentors and probation officers who Carter says could’ve held his son more accountable when he fell out of line. But Carter remembers Scott as a boy with enormous potential: effortlessly funny, charismatic, and able to offer advice beyond his 16 years.

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

11

JOSEPH BLAKE JR.

HEAVEN CAN WAIT: Food Cart Heaven sits in a parking lot along Northeast Glisan Street.

ISAIAH BOSTIC AND ARMANDO FERNANDEZ

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JOSEPH BLAKE JR.

Armando Fernandez thought the popping sounds at Food Cart Heaven were fireworks.

It was around the Fourth of July, and the co-owner of Mando’s was dishing out his signature burgers—each named after a neighborhood, like Alameda, Laurelhurst and the Pearl District—out of a blindingly red converted mail truck. “We looked outside and everyone was down ducking on the ground,” Fernandez recalls.

The noise was gunshots. One of the bullets shattered the rear window of Isaiah Bostic’s car. Most days, that’s where his daughter and niece sit and play while he’s dipping corn dogs at his cart, Batter on Deck.

“One day they both said they didn’t want to come,” Bostic says. “Any other day, the girls were sitting in the car.”

Gun violence doesn’t stop at a neighborhood line. Food Cart Heaven sits nine blocks east of Hazelwood on Northeast Glisan Street, in a neighborhood called Glenfair. You can see Gresham from Fernandez’s truck.

The cart pod is a tightly packed ring of rainbow-painted food wagons circling green picnic tables under huge Douglas firs. The carts serve tacos, fish on a stick, and a whole roasted chicken for $14. Bostic specializes in whole potatoes, spiral cut and fried, also on a stick.

The parking lot has been the scene of two shootings in a year, Fernandez says. The most recent was last month, when two cars pulled up in front of the adjacent, pale green office building, where tenants include a Farmers Insurance office, a dog groomer and an OnlyFans agent. Parked outside the office, the drivers began firing at each other.

Fernandez is considering moving locations after three years in the pod.

MANDO: Armando Fernandez is thinking of moving his cart.

“There’s a lot of gang activity going on, and I think that has to do with a lot of it, and then drugs, of course,” Fernandez says. “Some new customers, you can tell they’re a little intimidated and scared out here.”

Bostic, who opened Batter on Deck in May of last year, has already moved his family out of Hazelwood. He commutes to the cart from Beaverton each day it’s open.

“I don’t live over here anymore,” Bostic says. “If I have to do that to keep my kids safe, it’s what I have to do.”

Bostic thinks that one thing young Black men on the streets really need are jobs. So he recently hired 24-year-old Laron Barrow.

“Jobs can definitely change a person—I know it changed me. A person that’s broke don’t have nothing to live for. A person that’s got something to do and money, he’s not going to jeopardize that,” Bostic says. “If [Barrow] wasn’t here, I know what kind of person he would be and what he would be doing and who he would be hanging with.”

“JOBS CAN DEFINITELY CHANGE A PERSON—I KNOW IT CHANGED ME. A PERSON THAT’S BROKE DON’T HAVE NOTHING TO LIVE FOR. A PERSON THAT’S GOT SOMETHING TO DO AND MONEY, HE’S NOT GOING TO JEOPARDIZE THAT.” —ISAIAH BOSTIC OWNER, BATTER ON DECK

Surviving

HAZELWOOD

LARON BARROW Barrow, 24, says one of his favorite parts of living in Hazelwood is the number of Black people who also live there. Yet for much of the past year, he avoided leaving home because of the spike in shootings.

On New Year’s Eve, a friend persuaded him to make an exception and go to a house party.

“My homie begged me to go out. I had just got there and had been there for 30 minutes when a girl fell on me when she got shot,” Barrow says.

The woman survived. Barrow says that’s the new normal in Hazelwood.

“You kind of get used to it after a while,” he says. “You’re traumatized by it, but it’s a normal thing.”

As Barrow talks, he shakes the short dreads from the front of his face, which features sharp cheek and jawbones. He’s the single father of a 7-year-old son who is the reason Barrow stays indoors when he isn’t dipping corn dogs at Batter on Deck. He wants his son to have a father—unlike him.

“They took our fathers away, so we don’t have people to mold us into a woman or a man to know what the hell is coming up in life,” Barrow says. “They’re taking away our fathers, they’re taking away our mothers and making us figure it out on our own.”

For parents like Barrow who have to work and raise children, the closure of schools during COVID-19 was a calamity.

Those children, Barrow says, were left to fend for themselves—or to be raised by other children.

“They’ve got their nephews watching their kids who are 13 or 14, and they have friends over who are gang banging, so what do you think their nephew is going to do?”

Barrow says. “We’re losing that parent figure in our homes.”

Barrow’s main priority each day is to make it home unharmed so his son can grow up with a father.

“I’m trying to make it home,” he says.

“That’s the biggest thing for me right now, to make it home. It’s fucked up, messed up, but I guess that’s just what Portland is now.”

EAST OF EDEN: Hazelwood had the city’s highest number of shootings in 2020, with 70 incidents, and already has 29 in 2021.

FOR PARENTS LIKE BARROW WHO HAVE TO WORK AND RAISE CHILDREN, THE CLOSURE OF SCHOOLS DURING COVID-19 WAS A CALAMITY. THOSE CHILDREN, BARROW SAYS, WERE LEFT TO FEND FOR THEMSELVES—OR TO BE RAISED

BY OTHER CHILDREN.

Victims of Non-Suicide Injury/Homicide Shootings in 2020 BLACK

51.7%

WHITE

31.4%

HISPANIC

13.6%

ASIAN

1.2%

UNKNOWN

1.2%

NATIVE AMERICAN

0.8%

Source: Portland Police Bureau

KENNETH COMBS Combs, 39, was shopping in a Walmart on Southeast 82nd Avenue last month when a fight broke out. The woman he was talking to heard the discord. She dropped her shopping basket and walked out of the store.

That reaction, he says, is what a year of shootings did. “It makes you more cautious. You have to look around,” he says. “There’s so much fear here that it’s pushing people away from wanting to do things.”

It is a bleak irony of a shooting wave amid a pandemic that the places where people can still gather—outdoor spaces, like parks and food cart pods—are the places where people can get caught in a crossfire. Combs understands this: He too runs a food cart just outside Hazelwood, a barbecue ribs and catfish joint named Verajames, after his grandparents.

He doesn’t feel safe bringing his two children to work anymore. Last summer, shots sounded from the strip club a block west on Southeast Division Street. “We just all kind of hid behind the cart,” he recalls. “You knew what happened.”

Combs was born and raised in Portland; his grandfather’s name adorns James Lee Combs Field at the Riverside Little League. He says something in the neighborhood has changed.

“Laws have been really loose around here,” he says. “A lot of people went out and got a car and got a gun. As the crime goes up, you want to protect yourself.”

He worked for two years as a pawnbroker before starting Verajames. Now he wonders: Who’s selling the guns to teenagers? Who’s talking to them? Why aren’t elected officials in the streets of Hazelwood, demanding something better than this?

“It’s not the police’s job to raise your kids,” he says. “There’s got to be a change and it’s got to be soon. We lose time, we’re losing a kid.”

NOW HE WONDERS: WHO’S SELLING THE GUNS TO TEENAGERS? WHO’S TALKING TO THEM? WHY AREN’T ELECTED OFFICIALS IN THE STREETS OF HAZELWOOD, DEMANDING SOMETHING BETTER THAN THIS?

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

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JESSICA VEGA PEDERSON JOSEPH BLAKE JR.

Elected officials live in Hazelwood, too. Oregon’s newest state representative, Andrea Valderrama (D -East Portland), calls the neighborhood home. U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) has a home one block outside Hazelwood, in Mill Park.

Last August, Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson was playing Minecraft in the family room with her husband and daughter when she saw a man pull out his gun and fire shots toward the park across the street.

She remembers the focus in the man’s eyes. He was shooting as if he had no awareness of his surroundings.

Now Vega Pederson fears for her 13-yearold daughter each time she leaves the house.

“Our only outlet have been walking or biking around the neighborhood,” Vega Pederson says. “That’s something my daughter does on a regular basis. It’s something I think about.”

This month, Vega Pederson tacked an amendment onto the county budget: $300,000 for life coaching and grief support groups for teenagers who are considered high risk to pull the trigger.

Known Suspects in Non-Suicide Injury/Homicide Shootings in 2020 WHITE

47.9%

BLACK

39.6%

HISPANIC

8.3%

NATIVE AMERICAN PACIFIC ISLANDER

2.1% 2.1%

Source: Portland Police Bureau

COMMISSIONER: Jessica Vega Pederson loves Hazelwood for its rugged beauty, like in Lincoln City Park.

ASHLEY SLAUGHTER In May, Slaughter went on Facebook in search of a big brother figure for her 16-yearold son, Juwuan. She had received a call from his track coach at David Douglas High School about his dwindling motivation.

Juwuan has been missing a positive father figure in his life ever since Slaughter’s fiancé was killed in a shooting six years ago. She feels that Juwuan’s biological father isn’t a positive role model.

“Being a Black woman and raising my son by myself—it’s been tough,” says Slaughter, 37. “I feel bad for him when he misses that dad part of his life, when he tells me he feels lonely and depressed because he doesn’t have a guy around to talk to, and I don’t know what to do on that part and that’s when I have to reach out.”

Her son loves to play sports: swimming, golf, gymnastics and others. He also volunteers by helping out his grandmother’s nonprofit, PDX People of Color Outdoors, but Slaughter says he also spends a lot of time alone at home while she’s at work as a deputy CFO for a technology academy.

Juwuan has been even more isolated since they moved to the Hazelwood neighborhood from North Portland.

“In New Columbia, it’s safe for the kids to walk around by themselves. Now I don’t like our area,” Slaughter says. “We hear firing all the time, and I don’t feel comfortable with him walking around—and he feels restricted because of that.”

Slaughter, who wears blue acrylic nails and dons a colorful cardigan sweater on an unseasonably chilly June afternoon, loves the outdoors, especially canoeing. As a year

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alone stretches into two, and one pandemic bleeds into another, she’s already considering moving out of the Hazelwood neighborhood, after just six months here.

She wishes the city would provide programs for single-parent families that were culturally-specific and would allow teenagers of color to associate with supervision, instead of just wandering around.

“He’s pretty used to being around a lot of people of color and a lot of other kids,” she says. “I feel like it’s something that a lot of boys need. I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops and work so hard to get information on how to help your kid feel supported.”

Juwuan has excelled at everything, she says. But this year feels like a turning point.

“I can only do so much as his mom. I am always going to be there, but I can’t relate to certain things that he may be feeling,” Slaughter says. “I know when they don’t have connections, sometimes they can look for that in the streets. I don’t want him to, and I don’t think he will. But no one ever thinks that their child will.”

“I KNOW WHEN THEY DON’T HAVE CONNECTIONS, SOMETIMES THEY CAN LOOK FOR THAT IN THE STREETS. I DON’T WANT HIM TO, AND I DON’T THINK HE WILL. BUT NO ONE EVER THINKS THAT THEIR CHILD WILL.” —ASHLEY SLAUGHTER

GROWING UP: Ashley Slaughter and her son Juwuan love the outdoors, but the possibility of violence often keeps them inside.

Surviving

HAZELWOOD

LIONEL IRVING JOSEPH BLAKE JR.

Irving expects a deadly summer.

“Last year and last summer you can’t even compare to what’s going on right now. No one has witnessed this amount of shooters and young men dying,” he says. “We watch the whole generation come down. And there’s anger from not knowing who did it and the lack of the support from the community.”

Portland hasn’t seen shooting numbers like this since the 1990s. Except this time it’s worse, says Irving.

He would know. Three years ago, he finished a prison sentence of 14 years and eight months for crimes committed while a Portland gang member. His job now? Counseling young men, kids not so different from himself, trying to get them to forswear violence.

“I got lucky—not everyone gets a second chance like I did,” he says. “But there are so many men in prison who are just like me, if not better, who would have a lot of knowledge to offer the community.”

Irving is a confident, powerful presence, with a sharp intelligence. He only purchases clothing made by Black people or other people of color. Today, as he visits a food cart pod, that’s a dark yellow sweatshirt from Black Mannequin and a matching black and yellow Blazers cap.

He lives in the Piedmont neighborhood.

But he spends many of his days in Hazelwood.

That’s where the kids are shooting each other, he says.

“We have a pandemic in our community,” he says. “All the men are in prison. The mother is trying her hardest to provide. The streets is going to be his father. It’s creating a cycle.”

Irving thinks local leaders are making a mistake by labeling Portland’s shootings as mainly gang violence. Some of it is, he says.

Some isn’t. And the legacy of gang affiliation is too closely interwoven into neighborhoods like Hazelwood to easily categorize it.

“It’s intercommunity violence—it’s not all gang violence,” Irving says. “Of course, it’s also gang violence but that’s a loaded word.

It’s really a stereotype. They’ve been saying that since I was a child. They don’t have to be gang members retaliating. That’s just a concept people have. Some of these guys are their older brothers or their cousins.”

He thinks that incarcerating Black men— including by adding additional time to sentences for people believed to be in gangs—will only leave a larger vacuum for teenagers.

“You think about how malleable a 19-yearold mind is,” Irving says. “So are we going to let somebody else mold that mind? Continue to put that poison in there? Or are we going to interject some positive fruitful thoughts that can grow?”

He’s thinking of one 19-year-old in particular. Irving encountered that young man a few weeks ago, in the aftermath of a shooting.

The Black teenager was visibly distressed. His friend had just been killed.

Irving hugged him. He told him: The friend left behind two young sons, so now it’s your job to fill the hole that was just made in their lives.

“Nonsense,” the young man said.

“Is it nonsense to raise your partner’s son so he don’t get put in a casket?” Irving replied.

“That’s nonsense to you?”

The young man looked at Irving. “Man, that’s not nonsense, but I can’t even wrap my mind around that.”

The admission moved Irving. It was so honest: The violence in Portland had simply overwhelmed the young man’s ability to understand it. The deaths were too many. The hole is too big.

“That was such a powerful statement,” Irving says. “I know that in my heart, I believe, he’s going to be one of those guys that’s going to be there for them young men.”

FATHER FIGURE: Lionel Irving says local officials must do more to save teenagers from violence.

“We have to take action,” he says.

“If we wait, we’re going to keep getting kids in the grave.”

Reporting for East Portland This story is the result of a yearlong partnership with Report for America, a national service that places journalists in newsrooms around the country. For the past year, Latisha Jensen has covered East Portland and examined the racial disparities that underlie much of daily life in this city. Perhaps no disparity is as stark as the gun violence that fills Hazelwood residents with daily worry.

To find out how you can contribute to more WW coverage like this, visit wweek.com/fund.

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

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SPECIAL ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE

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STATE DISTRIBUTION: A strict limit of 4 State Restricted Bank Rolls per OR resident has been imposed OREGON - “It’s a miracle these State Restricted Bank Rolls even exist. That’s why Hotline Operators are bracing for the flood of calls,” said Laura Lynne, U.S. Coin and Currency Director for the National Mint and Treasury.

For the next 2 days the last remaining State of Oregon Restricted Bank Rolls loaded with rarely seen U.S. Gov’t issued Silver Walking Liberties are actually being handed over to Oregon residents who call the State Toll-Free Hotlines listed in today’s newspaper publication.

And here’s the best part. If you are a resident of the state of Oregon you cover only the $39 per coin state minimum set by the private National Mint and Treasury, that’s fifteen rarely seen U.S. Gov’t issued Silver Walking Liberties worth up to 100 times their face value for just $585 which is a real steal because non state residents must pay $118 per coin which totals $1,770 if any coins remain after the 2-day deadline.

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Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

JACKPOT: Imagine finding the 1919-D Silver Walking Liberty shown above worth thousands of dollars in collector value in one of these unsearched Bank Rolls.

There are never any guarantees, but Oregon residents who get their hands on these State Restricted Bank Rolls will be the really lucky ones because even more common coins are still worth up to $115 $825 in collector value.

Rolls had better hold on to them,’” Lynne said.

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mint marks of the U.S. Gov’t issued Silver Walking Liberty Half Dollars sealed away inside the State of Oregon Restricted Bank Rolls have never been searched.

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will find until they sort through all the coins,” Lynne went on to say.

The only thing Oregon residents need to do is call the State TollFree Hotlines printed in today’s newspaper publication before the 2-day order deadline ends.

“Rarely seen U.S. Gov’t issued R1018R-2

(Continued on next page)

SPECIAL ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE

(Continued from previous page)

silver coins like these are highly sought after, but we’ve never seen anything like this before. According to The Official Red Book, a Guide Book of United States Coins many Silver Walking Liberty Half Dollars are now worth $115 - $825 each in collector value,” Lynne said.

“So just imagine how much these last remaining, unsearched State of Oregon Restricted Bank Rolls could be worth someday. Remember, these are not ordinary coins – these rarely seen coins date clear back to the early 1900’s. In fact, these coins have been forever retired by the U.S. Gov’t, and you can only get them rolled this way directly from the National Mint and Treasury because these are the only State Restricted Bank Rolls known to exist,” said Lynne.

“We’re guessing thousands of Oregon residents will be taking the maximum limit of 4 Bank Rolls because they make such amazing gifts for any occasion for children, parents, grandparents, friends and loved ones,” Lynne continued.

“We know the phones will be

ringing off the hook. That’s why hundreds of Hotline Operators are standing by to answer the phones beginning at 8:30am this morning. We’re going to do our best, but with just 2 days to answer all the calls it won’t be easy. So make sure to tell everyone to keep call-

ing if all operators are busy. We’ll do our best to answer them all,” Lynne said.

“That’s why the private National Mint and Treasury set up the State Toll-Free Hotlines in order to make sure Oregon residents get the State Restricted Bank Rolls

before they’re all gone,” she said.

The only thing readers of today’s newspaper publication need to do is make sure they are a resident of the state of Oregon and call the State Toll-Free Hotlines before the 2-day deadline ends midnight tomorrow. ■

IMPORTANT: The dates and mint marks of the U.S. Gov’t issued Silver Walking Liberties sealed away inside the State of Oregon Restricted Bank Rolls have never been searched. Coin values always fluctuate and they are never any guarantees, but any of the scarce coins shown below, regardless of their value that residents may find inside the sealed Bank Rolls are theirs to keep.

1916-P Mint: Philadelphia Mintage: 608,000 Collector Value: $55 $265

1919-P Mint: Philadelphia Mintage: 962,000 Collector Value: $32 $515

1921-S Mint: San Francisco Mintage: 548,000 Collector Value: $80 $800

1938-D Mint: Denver Mintage: 491,600 Collector Value: $60 $160

OREGON RESIDENTS: COVER JUST $39 MINIMUM PER COIN BEGIN CALLING AT 8:30 AM: 1-800-929-4439 EXT. RWL2055 if you are a resident of the state of Oregon call now to claim the state limit of 4 state of Oregon restricted bank rolls. all Oregon residents who beat the 2-day deadline are getting the only full fifteen coin bank rolls loaded with rarely seen u.s. gov’t issued silver walking liberty half dollars dating back to the early 1900’s some worth up to 100 times their face value known to exist. The only thing Oregon residents cover is just the $39 per coin state minimum set by the private National Mint and Treasury, that’s fifteen rarely seen u.s. gov’t issued silver walking liberty half dollars some worth up to 100 times their face value for just $585 and that’s a real steal because non-Oregon residents must pay $1,770 for each state of Oregon restricted bank roll. just be sure to call the state toll free hotlines before the deadline ends two days from today’s publication date.

NON STATE RESIDENTS: MUST PAY $118 PER COIN - IF ANY REMAIN DO NOT CALL BEFORE 5:00 PM TOMORROW: 1-800-929-8898 RWL2055 if you are a resident living outside of the state of Oregon you are required to pay $118 for each silver walking liberty for a total of $1,770 plus shipping and handling for each state of Oregon restricted bank roll loaded with fifteen u.s. gov’t issued silver walking liberty half dollars.

NATIONAL MINT AND TREASURY, LLC IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE U.S. MINT, THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, A BANK OR ANY GOVERNMENT AGENCY. IF FOR ANY REASON WITHIN 30 DAYS FROM SHIPMENT YOU ARE DISSATISFIED, RETURN THE PRODUCT FOR A REFUND LESS SHIPPING AND RETURN POSTAGE. THIS SAME OFFER MAY BE MADE AVAILABLE AT A LATER DATE OR IN A DIFFERENT GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION. OH RESIDENTS ADD 6.5% SALES TAX. NATIONAL MINT AND TREASURY, PO BOX 35609, CANTON, OH 44735 R1018R-2 ©2021 NATIONAL MINT AND TREASURY. Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

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STREET FLANDERS STREET CROSSING On June 4, Portland’s newest footbridge, which crosses I-405 at Northwest Flanders Street, opened to cyclists and pedestrians.

Here’s what opening weekend looked like.

PHOTOS BY CHRIS NESSETH @chrisnesseth

SATURDAY MARKET AND TOM MCCALL WATERFRONT

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STREET

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STARTERS

THE MOST IMPORTANT PORTLAND CULTURE STORIES OF THE WEEK—GRAPHED.

R E A D M O R E A B O U T TH E S E STO R I E S AT WW E E K .CO M .

RIDICULOUS B R U C E E LY / P O R T L A N D TRAIL BLAZERS

The Blazers fire coach Terry Stotts after being eliminated from the NBA playoffs…

Cocktails to go are here to stay in Oregon. Finally.

HENR

Y H IG

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WIKI COMMONS-KEITH ALLISON

…and then Damian Lillard goes public with his desire to be coached by alleged abuser Jason Kidd… … and then Kidd withdraws his name from consideration, saying he felt “uncomfortable” with Lillard’s endorsement.

AWESOME E M I LY J O A N G R E E N E

ALEX WITTWER

Portland Parks & Recreation releases plans for a multimillion-dollar makeover of the South Park Blocks.

SA

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G

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CHRISTINE DONG

DANIEL STINDT

Five Multnomah County Library branches have reopened for indoor service.

Three popular North Coast hiking trails—one at Cape Lookout State Park and two portions of trails at Oswald West State Park—will remain closed until 2023 due to wind damage.

K E

Crying in H-Mart, the memoir by Oregon musician Michelle Zauner, aka Japanese Breakfast, is being turned into a movie.

A large burn in The Dalles marks an early and foreboding start to Oregon’s wildfire season.

SERIOUS 20

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

AWFUL

B R U C E E LY / P O R T L A N D T R A I L B L A Z E R S

Bagelmaker Henry Higgins is launching “After Hours with Henry Higgins”—special nighttime hours to sell bagels fresh from the oven.

FLASHBACK

THIS WEEK IN 1984

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

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GET BUSY

STUFF TO DO THIS WEEK, INDOORS AND OUT.

HBOMAX.COM

GO: Rockin’ the Walk with Mood Beach In the pantheon of weird-ass promotional tactics perpetrated by the Portland Pickles, a concert series doesn’t even register. But leave it to the city’s favorite collegiate wood bat baseball team—and its favorite indie label, Tender Loving Empire—to remind everyone what Portland is supposed to feel like. In this case, it’s eating a pickle on a stick under the blue sky of Lents while half-watching college kids knock some dingers out of the park, then grooving to the synthy good vibes of Portland’s own Mood Beach. The series continues on intermittent Fridays through August. Walker Stadium, 4727 SE 92nd Ave., portlandpicklesbaseball.com. 7:05 pm Friday, June 11. Ticket prices vary.

It’s been a tough year for record stores. Really, it’s been a tough decade for physical music sales— which is exactly why Record Store Day was created.

If you haven’t ever participated in the nationwide day of special releases and deals, there’s never been a better time. This week is the first of two Record Store Days this year (the second is in July).

Big-name day one drops include Amy Winehouse remixes and, just in time for Pride Month, a deluxe version of Lady Gaga’s Chromatica. Portland has almost a dozen participating shops, including Music Millennium, which will be celebrating with a Portugal the Man album signing and free gelato if you buy an album. Saturday, June 12. See recordstoreday.com for participating stores.

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Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

WATCH: A Quiet Place Part II While it’s tempting to predict that this lean sequel to John Krasinski’s surprise 2018 horror hit could be one of the cinematic summer’s first loud entries, suffocating silence is still the new film’s signature move. In Part II, shotgun-toting mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and her two children (Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) continue their monklike eluding of audiophile aliens, while director Krasinski’s confidence with wideopen, Jurassic Park-inspired chases carry the taut action. Even if the sequel runs dangerously low on ideas to sustain 90 minutes, it’s hard to be peeved at PG-13 entertainment hoping only to showcase a family conquering fear through sensory puzzles. Screens at Bagdad, Cinema 21, Fox Tower, Living Room and other area theaters.

GO: Gaybaret! with Anna Sinatra Nationally touring singer and comedian Anna Sinatra brings three shows to Portland—the first at Local Lounge on June 10—with Siren Theater’s Friday and Saturday shows including a supporting roster of Portland cabaret stars.

Siren Theater, 315 NW Davis St. 7:30 pm Friday, June 11. $15. 21+.

DO: Third Angle New Music’s Soundwalks See feature, next page.

LISTEN: Chemz/Dolphinz by Burial Burial’s Chemz/Dolphinz EP is a return to steamy, urban Blade Runner blues from a producer whose recent work focused on rave nostalgia at the expense of sound design. The 12-minute first side is one of his most satisfying long-form experiments yet, at once an epic pop song and an environment made of creaking metal and acid rain. “Dolphinz,” meanwhile, situates the cries of the titular cetaceans within a sound world that seems too polluted for them to survive for much longer. Stream on Spotify.

A L L S TA R / PA R A M O U N T P I C T U R E S

GARY BAHEN

ATTEND: Record Store Day

DO: Albina Soul Walk Despite the bougie bars that now fill the area, Albina was once a hub for soul, R&B, funk and jazz.

From the 1960s through the ’80s, a string of venues hosted touring sets from legends like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, and launched the careers of local musicians. As part of this year’s Vanport Mosaic Festival, two local legends—Calvin Walker and Paul Knauls Sr.—will give a 1-mile walking tour of the neighborhood’s hidden musical history and a once-thriving scene that was pushed out by gentrification. The in-person tour is open to only 25 people, but if you don’t make the cut, a self-guided soundwalk will be available on the same day. North Tillamook Street and Vancouver Avenue, vanportmosaic.org. 10 am Saturday, June 12. Free.

W E L L S P E N T M A R K E T. C O M

CATCH UP ON: Sharp Objects Now that there are no more new episodes of HBO’s addictive miniseries Mare of Easttown to look forward to each Sunday, we’ll have to get our crime drama fix elsewhere. This 2018 miniseries is easily the closest thing to Mare we have. Adapted from Gillian Flynn’s novel, it stars Amy Adams as a depressed journalist assigned to travel back to her hometown in Missouri to cover a gruesome murder. Familial trauma stemming from her domineering mother (Patricia Clarkson) soon emerges, as does an attraction to the detective solving the case (Chris Messina). Streams on Amazon Prime, HBO, HBO Max, Hulu, Vudu and YouTube.



EAT: Festa Italiana Not to be confused with the festival of the same name that turned Pioneer Courthouse Square into a drunken European piazza every summer for decades, this Festa Italiana is a more intimate affair.

The new Italian-inspired marketplace will offer everything from radicchio seeds from the mother country to hand-carved marzipan. And if any outlet is to be trusted to source high-quality ingredients, it’s event co-host Wellspent Market, the expansion of Jim Dixon’s distribution business Real Good Foods that supplied some of the city’s best restaurants for years. In addition to a pantry full of beautiful pastas, tomatoes and fresh produce available for purchase, you can find food and beverages to consume at the festival, too, including frozen treats from Pinolo Gelato and Sorbu Paninoteca’s Tuscan sandwiches—that way you don’t have to wait until you get home to dig in. Wellspent Market, 935 NE Couch St. 503-987-0828, wellspentmarket.com.

Noon-6 pm Saturday, June 12. Free. Registration is recommended via Eventbrite.

GET OUTSIDE Jesus Walks RO

SH I

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COURTESY OF THIRD ANGLE

HI

For his entry in Third Angle’s Soundwalks series, musician Darrell Grant takes an emotional stroll through the history of Portland’s Black churches.

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DARRELL GRANT

BY R OB E RT H A M

@roberthamwriter

“As I say at the end of the soundwalk,” Grant says, “as you walk through these neighborhoods, you wonder what they would look like and how they would be occupied if we hadn’t had all of these actively discriminatory policies, like every single possible barrier to it being a Black neighborhood.”

These issues have dominated Grant’s creative work for some time. In April 2020, he was set to debut Sanctuaries, a jazz opera that he had been working on for three years that explored Portland’s deep history of gentrification and redlining.

As the pandemic delayed the premiere, Third Angle approached Grant about creating a piece for its Soundwalks series. It was a concept he struggled with at first, but he realized that the work he had put into researching the changing face of North Portland for Sanctuaries gave him a foundation to build on.

LISTEN: Each entry in Third Angle’s Soundwalks series is available for download at thirdangle.org/soundwalks.

Power House Church of God in Christ, 732 NE Jessup St.

COURTESY OF THIRD ANGLE

COURTESY OF THIRD ANGLE

Community Church of God, 202 NE Skidmore St.

The Church of the Living God, 5637 NE 14th Ave. COURTESY OF THIRD ANGLE

Darrell Grant is fighting back tears.

The jazz musician and Portland State University professor is sitting on a bench in DeNorval Unthank Park, a rambunctious game of basketball playing out behind him and small groups of people splayed out on the grass in front of him. It’s the starting point of his entry in the Soundwalks series of audio pieces commissioned by contemporary music ensemble Third Angle New Music meant to be listened to while strolling through various locales.

For his piece, titled Come Sunday, Grant chose to honor the history of Portland’s Black churches, mapping out an hourlong tour that stops by 15 houses of worship in North and Northeast Portland. The soundtrack to this hike is a dense collage of sounds: snippets of spirituals, free-jazz drumming, a recitation of the Black Panther Party’s TenPoint Program and recorded testimonials by Black Portlanders.

Come Sunday is a powerful tribute not only to the rich community that once thrived in the King, Alberta and Humboldt neighborhoods, but also how much the city’s Black population has lost. With rapid development and discriminatory housing practices pushing Black residents out of North and Northeast Portland, many churches have declined or disappeared. It’s that reality that has Grant choked with emotion.

“I realized this would be a really great opportunity to explore this neighborhood through the sounds of a community as it used to be,” he says, “what it would have sounded like when all the people that were the reason those churches exist were in the neighborhood.”

The path that Grant mapped out for Come Sunday reveals how deeply embedded the roots of the Black community remain in spite of the neighborhoods’ changing demographics. The walk begins at Unthank Park, named in honor of Dr. DeNorval Unthank, a medical practitioner who served as president of the NAACP in Portland and co-founder of the Portland Urban League. It ends at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a church that has been serving Black Portlanders since 1889.

As we take the first part of the soundwalk together, Grant points out a number of Black-owned homes and businesses that have managed to survive even as modern apartment buildings and high-end boutiques popped up around them.

But it’s the churches that didn’t survive that weighs on Grant the most. One of the most haunting and powerful moments of Come Sunday finds him reading the party platform for the Black Panther Party over a blustering avant-garde drum piece by local musician Machado Mijiga. It’s a nod to the church where the local chapter of the Black Panthers ran its free breakfast program in the ’70s.

It is now home to the Portland Playhouse.

The building we pass on Northeast Mason Street brings out more emotion from Grant. It’s currently the home of Grace City Portland, a vaguely hipster church led by a nearly all-white ministerial team. It was once home to Philadelphia Missionary Baptist Church, an affiliation that once served the Black community and provided sanctuary and services to homeless Portlanders.

On the soundwalk, the voice of Philadelphia MBC’s former leader, Pastor Roy Clay, takes over as listeners reach the building. He recounts starting with the church when it was “still pretty much a Black community” and the work it did clothing and feeding the homeless. But, Clay says, the church had to sell its building as “Blacks began to move out and…it wasn’t like it was. Our church started declining.”

As hard as that is to hear, Come Sunday doesn’t feel like a lament. The spirituals featured in the piece, including “Every Time I Feel the Spirit” and “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” provide uplift, as does the words of Mariah Taylor, a longtime Portlander who opened the first Blackowned nurse practitioner clinic in the city in 1981.

“I was asking her, ‘What do we do when the churches are gone?’” he says. “And she said, ‘No, we are the church.’

The church can never die because we are the church.

These buildings are beacons and reminders of the community that’s still possible.”

A plaque commemorating Dr. DeNorval Unthank in the North Portland park bearing his name, the starting point for Darrell Grant’s Come Sunday soundwalk.

FIVE OTHER ESSENTIAL SOUNDWALKS Amenta Abioto’s Abe Modern R&B artist Amenta Abioto created a rhythm-heavy soundtrack for a freeform stroll around Whitaker Ponds Nature Park meant to serve as “a musical portal into the heart.”

Branic Howard and Gabi Lewton-Leopard’s Overlay This work uses anecdotes from anonymous voices discussing their experiences using and enjoying Mt. Tabor Park as the backdrop for an hourlong stroll through the recreation area.

Julie Hammond’s Soil to Sand/Sky to River Artist Julie Hammond asks listeners to “pay attention in unfamiliar ways” to the buildings, nature and skies around St. Johns and Cathedral Park.

Crystal Quartez’s Sonic Blooming This “guided meditation” through the International Rose Test Garden was created, in part, by the artist attaching sensors to the plants there, turning their electrical impulses into music and sound.

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

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FOOD & DRINK CHRISTINE DONG

BAR REVIEW

 THE CLIENTELE:

From the servers to curious customers wearing long shorts and Toms, Raven’s Manor is a place where everyone is persistently pleased to be there. At one point, a group began to clap loudly, seeming to signal a possible chain restaurant-style birthday chorus.

We craned our necks outside our intimate, carriage-style booth and observed a merry group simply excited for the Sweeter Than Death sweet potato tater tots.

 GRAVE WATER

DEADLY TONIC:

Tricks and Treats Raven’s Manor is Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion in bar form.

Here are the 10 spookiest things you’ll find there.

BY S U ZE T T E S M I T H

@suzettesmith

Creatures of the night, be forewarned: Portland’s newest goth bar isn’t all that goth.

Sure, there are creepy sights in view as soon as you enter Raven’s Manor, from haunted dolls to dusty grimoires, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be the Encyclopedia Britannica. But don’t go expecting the westside version of the Lovecraft. Instead, think Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

Masterminded by co-owners Rebecca Vega and Jared Bradley, Raven’s Manor opened in the former home of high-minded, short-lived Old Town nightclub No Vacancy in April, immediately drawing lines of interested, if not exactly ghoulish, customers. On the night we visited, patrons in full-body lace gowns mingled with others sporting brightly colored soccer jerseys. Not a single person was wearing corpse paint.

It’s hard to imagine whiling away long hours in the lounge’s darkened halls. The bar fires off glowing drinks and pentagram-seared burgers with assembly-line efficiency, and the extremely competent staff is ready to shuttle you through your visit in order to turn over your table as quickly as possible.

But that’s not to say Raven’s Manor isn’t worth the trip—it’s a fun experience that aims to appeal to a broad clientele. And just because it delivers scares with a commodified wink doesn’t mean there aren’t some true chills involved.

How spooky is it? Here are the top 10 spookiest things we saw there, ranked:

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Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

Moments into our visit, our server spilled a Grave Water cocktail all across our table. For the rest of the evening, the air around us held a deeply pleasant scent of roses, which, as any Catholic will tell you, is a sign the Virgin Mary is near. Saints and virgin births are still pretty spooky in the grand scheme of ghostly happenings, but also fairly Bible-y. Important note: The Grave Water was hands down the best drink we tried. Its rose water, though fragrant, is perfectly balanced with elderflower liqueur and vodka.



OLD TOWN LOCATION:

Located on Southwest 1st, in Old Town, it’s easy to imagine the haunt-themed establishment couldn’t possibly hold a candle to the surrounding neighborhood, but the lounge is actually situated on one of Old Town’s quietest streets, with low traffic other than the Red and Blue Line MAX trains shuffling diligently past.



CHILLED BRAIN DESSERT:

The Tillamook White Chocolate Raspberry Yum ice cream, set in a pleasing brain shape, comes atop an impenetrable chocolate brownie that gradually gives up its defenses as the dessert warms. If you give it a minute, the ice cream loses the frost that is likely a result of its brain mold. Hit it with the accompanying chocolate ganache and you’re no longer remotely frightened—just delighted.



ABSINTHE TORTURE DEVICE:

Are you even making absinthe correctly if it isn’t presented to you in a crystal goblet beneath what appears to be a medieval-looking torture device? We think not.

Water got absolutely everywhere, and the absinthe tasted like fennel, licorice and herbs.

 FOOD COLORING:

The mostly deadly thing about Raven’s Manor was what all the food coloring did to our poor stomachs. The Eerie Elixirs are a lot of fun—Dr. Raven’s Reserve is served in a glowing, smoking Erlenmeyer flask—but at the end of the evening, we were not drunk at all, only deeply queasy from the rainbow of body-part-themed beverages and snacks consumed.



THE EERIE (IF CLICHÉD) MUSIC:

The jaunty notes of Scott Joplin-esque ragtime piano only further added to the Disney-like approximation of spookiness that ran throughout Raven’s Manor.

With a shiver, we wondered if they had the rights to Kubrick’s The Shining score as it thrummed above.



GHOSTLY VOICES IN THE RESTROOMS:

The restroom recordings of ghostly murmurs and cackles are much appreciated as an ambient solution to toilet-stall stage fright.

However, one woman entered and—apparently near her wits’ end with all the spookiness—loudly exclaimed, “I just wanted to pee!

Enough with this shit.”

 REAL CANDLES:

The lit candelabras on the larger group tables, surrounded by groups of carousing friends—many of whom seemed to be wearing extremely flammable tulle-based ensembles—are one of the spookiest aspects of Raven’s Manor, at least from a public safety standpoint.

 BLOOD SMEAR

PLACEMENTS:

From the bloody handprint on the creepy painting that seems to be watching you when you enter to the haphazard smear at the bottom of the bar’s basement stairs, the blood placement at this bar cannot be understated. Creepy dolls are a passing fad. Bloodstains on the restroom faucet are forever—and ultimately even more upsetting to that overstimulated woman having a panic attack in the toilet stall.

‚GO: Raven’s Manor, 235 SW 1st Ave., ravensmanorexperience.com. 5-11 pm Wednesday-Monday.

FOOD & DRINK CHRIS NESSETH

FEATURE

TOP 5

BUZZ LIST

Where to get drinks this week.

1. Holy Goat Social Club

1501 NE Fremont St., 503-282-0956, holygoatpdx.com. 2-10 pm Monday-Saturday.

It’d be inaccurate to describe Holy Goat as a “new” bar. Longtime residents of the Sabin neighborhood will remember the tiny watering hole as Daddy Mojo’s, and though it’s undergone a change in ownership and name, the rebrand mostly amounts to an aesthetic upgrade rather than a full-scale remodel.

Regulars will still find what they’re looking for: a drink menu consisting of stiff takes on old classics, soul music on the stereo, and soul food in the kitchen.

2. TopWire Hop Project

STEAK OUT: Buddy’s co-owners Angela D’Occhio and Buddy Richter.

Cheesesteak Impossible

BY JAS O N CO H E N

@cohenesque

Missing Mare of Easttown already? Then step right up to Buddy’s Steaks, where the tip jar is a 64-ounce Wawa travel mug, and if you ask Buddy Richter about the menu’s sole dessert item—Philadelphia water ice—you’ll definitely think he said “wooder ice.”

But what you’re really here for is a cheesesteak. With no cheese. And no steak.

Vegan cheesesteaks are all over Philadelphia—Questlove’s brand, made with Impossible Meat, is even sold at Phillies games—and certainly in Oregon as well. At Buddy’s, co-owned by Richter and Eem general manager Angela D’Occhio, the “steak” is made in-house

by Richter, who already concocted meatless proteins while working at such establishments as Vtopia and the Mocking Bird. Buddy’s exists because Richter and D’Occhio hadn’t found any meatless cheesesteaks that lived up to their own pre-vegan, Philly native memories.

“Ang likes to call it ‘toy food,’” Richter says. “Even though it looks like it and all the elements seem to be there, the flavor, texture and nostalgia are all missing.”

Normally when you order a cheesesteak, the big decision is: whiz, American or provolone? For a Buddy’s cheesesteak, the choice is whiz or whiz.

The cashew- and coconut-based liquid gold is available as both “cheddar whiz,” which is an especially radioactive-looking orange, and “provolone whiz.” They are certainly no more or less “‘authen-

tic” than the stuff that comes from Kraft.

(Less melty vegan cheese slices are also available for anyone with nut allergies.)

Also on the menu: egg rolls with steak, provolone whiz and onions ($7), a Philadelphia stalwart at both dive bars and high-end hotels; kale salad ($9); french fries ($3); and vegan mozzarella sticks ($8), which are more like fried Italian queso; and the aforementioned wooder ice, a Philly-Italian frozen concoction that falls somewhere between a sorbet and a snow cone.

As a non-vegan and fellow Philadelphian, I enjoyed my cheesesteak ($12) more on its own terms. It got better the more I ate it, as my brain moved past that first “I know this isn’t real meat” moment, as well as any notion that it might remind me of a favorite from back home. The Dos Hermanos roll is excellent—definitely better than Philly’s beloved, mass-produced Amoroso’s, a company for which D’Occhio’s father once made deliveries—and the meatcheese-sautéed onion filling has an almost French onion souplike savor and umami.

For the fully trashy cheddar whiz experience, make use of the provided ketchup, but if your cheesesteak palate is more haute, get the provolone and add mushrooms ($1), hot peppers ($1) or broccoli rabe ($2). And don’t forget to take one home for Mare.

EAT: Buddy’s Steaks, 5235 NE Sandy Blvd, 215-694-8095, buddyssteaks.com.

3-8 pm Friday and Monday, noon-8 pm Saturday and Sunday, or until sold out.

4. Portland Cà Phê

2815 SE Holgate Blvd., 503-841-5787, portlandcaphe.com. 8 am-3 pm daily.

Admittedly, we’re talking about a buzz of a different kind here. Portland Cà Phê opened less than a month ago, but its signature Vietnamese coffee drinks have already managed to become iconic. You’ve surely seen what’s already become a signature snap of the Southeast Holgate coffee shop on your socials: a perfect purple ube latte held aloft in front of a wall-sized map of Vietnam. It tastes as good as it looks.

5. Landmark Saloon

4847 SE Division St., 503-894-8132, landmarksaloon.com. 3-10 pm Monday-Friday, noon-10 pm Saturday-Sunday.

If you’re from a small country town, the Landmark will remind you of your hometown bar—a little grimy, a lot drunk, and always a ton of fun. The slightly ragged but highly functional outdoor space is covered in a perpetual haze due to the meat smoker in the corner, and the vibe is perpetually boisterous—those with rural pasts will feel a twinge of nostalgia for the bonfire you and your friends would spend every weekend at in high school.

3. Bar Bar

3943 N Mississippi Ave., 503-889-0090, mississippistudios.com. Noon-11 pm daily.

With the exception of a ban on huddling around the fire pit, it’s business as usual at this beloved pre- and post-show party spot adjacent to Mississippi Studios—lack of live music

TOP 5

AARON LEE

What’s a cheesesteak minus the cheese and steak? At Buddy’s, still really damn good.

8668 Crosby Road NE, Woodburn, 503-9825166, topwirehop.com. 11 am-8 pm Thursday and Sunday, 11 am-9 pm Friday-Saturday.

The state’s most secretive beer garden is hidden among the crops at Crosby Hop Farm in Woodburn. Follow the half-mile gravel road that runs between the bines and you’ll wind up at a 40-foot shipping container repurposed as a serving station pouring from 10 rotating taps exclusively featuring batches made with the hops growing around you. This season, that includes a collaboration with brewer Grains of Wrath to produce three different IPAs that use the brewery’s base recipe with rotating hop varieties from Crosby to showcase how the aromatic cones transform the taste of the beer.

be damned. The tap list is consistently above average, with three IPAs and a soul-warming stout from Ferment available on a recent visit, and the entire setup is frictionless and reliable.

HOT PLATES Where to get food this week.

1. Prey + Tell

3560 N Mississippi Ave., 971-220-1997, preyandtell.com. 4-11 pm Wednesday-Sunday.

If you’re looking to ease back into an IRL social life, eating crispy chicken wings and sipping a mango slushie on the patio at Psychic Bar is about as close as you can get to a party vibe without going to an actual house party. Chef Diane Lam has brought her perfectly crispy, gluten-free, Cambodian-style wings to Psychic’s ample outdoor space. Even though they’re great at home, those flats and bats are obviously at their finest freshly delivered to your table and paired with her aromatic ranch or lime Buffalo sauce.

2. Festa Italiana at Wellspent Market

935 NE Couch St. 503-987-0828, wellspentmarket.com. Noon-6 pm Saturday, June 12. Free.

Registration is recommended via Eventbrite.

Not to be confused with the festival of the same name that for decades turned Pioneer Courthouse Square into a drunken European piazza every summer, this Festa Italiana is a more intimate affair. This new Italian-inspired marketplace will offer everything from radicchio seeds that hail from the mother country to hand-carved marzipan. And if any outlet is to be trusted to source high-quality ingredients, it’s event co-host Wellspent Market, the expansion of Jim Dixon’s distribution business Real Good Foods that supplied some of the city’s best restaurants for years.

3. Ice Queen

1223 SE Stark St., icequeenyouscream.com.

11 am-7 pm Friday-Saturday, 11 am-6 pm Sunday.

You need only scroll through Ice Queen’s Instagram feed to understand why there’s always a line outside the Stark Street vegan popsicle stand—you’d be hard-pressed to find cuter frozen treats in Portland, vegan or otherwise. Each popsicle looks so joyful it could gain a following on appearance alone:

The pastel-hued She’s in Parties is dotted with sprinkles and contains a hidden slice of birthday cake, and the lip-puckering Lime All Yours comes with a tiny bottle of Tajín chile flakes.

4. Da Pine Grinds

1208 E Historic Columbia River Highway, Troutdale. 11 am-3 pm Tuesday-Friday.

The charmingly retro Sugarpine Drive-in has been one of Portland’s essential summer visits for three years now—and with the recent addition of Hawaiian food cart Da Pine Grinds, the trip has only grown more crucial. Here’s the early recommendation: Grab the ahi shoyu poke, add in a P.O.G.—a frozen mixture of passion fruit, orange, and guava juice—then take your food to an oversized picnic table above the Sandy and, boom, a perfect afternoon.

5. Jerry’s Pizza

3237 SE Milwaukie Ave., 503-239-9208, instagram.com/jerryspizzapdx. 4-9 pm Monday-Thursday.

In just under a year, Jerry Benedetto has gone from tinkering with recipes for Chicago-style tavern pizza in his home kitchen to opening one of Portland fooderati’s most anticipated new restaurants. Now slinging pies inside the Bear Paw Inn in the Brooklyn neighborhood, Jerry’s is the stuff of fond Midwestern memories: a thin, crispy crust with square-cut slices, preferably with sausage and hot giardiniera.

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POTLANDER PRODUCT REVIEW ///////

The Gravity Bong Glow-Up ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

The Stündenglass looks like art, hits like heaven and costs a fortune.

BY BRIA N N A W H E E L E R

What if a bong looked like contemporary art?

This seems the question the makers of Stündenglass asked themselves before creating a legitimately sophisticated, coffee table-worthy gravity bong. If the phrase sophisticated table-top gravity bong seems an oxymoron, that’s because gravity bongs are typically the least sophisticated way to consume cannabis. The Stündenglass Gravity Hookah, however, has taken what has always been the stoniest of pothead party favors and refined it into a smoking experience heady connoisseurs across the board can get into.

Gravity bongs and hookahs both have unique reputations as smoke utensils. What one lacks in sophistication the other lacks in efficacy; gravity bongs are typically made with repurposed garbage and hookahs are notorious weed wasters. Stündenglass has activated the most functional aspects of both smoke concepts via a kinetic device that’s equal parts compelling conversation piece, dynamic smoke device and extraordinary party-stoner flex.

Naturally, we had to give it a try.

What is it? //////////////////////////////////////////////////// The first gravity bong nearly every career stoner smoked out of was made with a chopped 2-liter soda bottle, a suspicious knot of aluminum foil and a dual-spout mop bucket.

Naturally, when I told my (admittedly mature) squad I was bringing one over for a group audition, the response was lukewarm.

Their tune changed significantly when I arrived with the Stündenglass in it’s glossy, white, custom-padded trifold case.

The machine was easily assembled in only a couple minutes. Slim metal pipes are attached to the central housing, the first of the two pint-size glass goblets is screwed on, the chamber is filled with water, and the second goblet is attached. A mouthpiece dock, which can be used hands free or with a traditional hookah hose, and a bowl dock that can be used with a classic pull-stem bowl or a larger, double-chambered unit for shisha and charcoal, jut from the left and right hinges of housing. Once assembled, the device looks like an oversized, Prozac-shaped lava lamp.

Rotating the glass 180 degrees on the axis that connects it to the housing causes water to rush from one globe to the next, drawing thick, milky smoke from the shisha or cannabis. Another rotation forces the smoke out, and once a rhythm is found, hits can be easily passed from one person to the next, no mouth contact necessary.

The machine pulls apart easily for cleaning, and a comprehensive cleaning kit is included in the package.

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How we used it: ///////////////////////////////////////////// Once the unit was assembled, we got to choose either a shisha chamber or a traditional glass bowl. The Stündenglass shisha attachment is a thick metal cylinder that holds both shisha and coal and clicks into a tray that clicks into the side of the housing that holds the smoke material. The glass bowl meant for cannabis, on the other hand, drops directly into the housing, sliding bowl-style, no accessories or alternative heating methods required, save for the flash of a dollar-store BBQ lighter.

Opposite the landing for the bowl is the mouthpiece, which can be assembled in a variety of ways. Adding one metal pipe will create a stationary, contactless delivery where users can simply point their mouths at the jet and inhale. This option seems best for single users. We opted to use the included 3-foot hookah hose instead, and pass it around for a communal hookah effect.

The hose indeed gave good puff-puff-pass vibes, and we were all able to draw long, intense hits without having to wrap our lips around the nozzle—the force of the smoke being purged from the bong is powerful enough to deliver consistent smoke without requiring mouth-to-nozzle contact. It was reminiscent of sharing water from a powerful garden hose. We just had to point it at our faces, open our mouths, and deal with whatever happened after that.

The bowl holds about a soybean-sized pile of flower, preferably finely ground, which among us barrel-chested smokers shook out to about two full hits per bowl. By balancing the hourglass on its axis, smokers can control the flow of their smoke, but putting a thumb over the hose between tokes does the same job. One person was the designated attendant, alternately lighting the bowl, rotating the bong, pulling the bowl from the slide, and then keeping the hourglass action flowing so smokers could focus on their hits, which became increasingly potent as we fell into a smoke circle groove.

Did it work with a group? //////////////////////////// “That went straight into my brain” was one homie’s assessment of her first gentle inhale. The homie she passed it to next took a heroic full chamber hit and spent the next minute fighting for his life in a coughing fit. The next homie cleared a fresh chamber with ease, shook out her hair, and melted into her loveseat, wondering aloud if she should be coughing more and longing for a dab option. (A dab extension is available for an additional cost.) I took a hit, went full canna-tonic, and lay on the floor for a little while.

Even our buddy with the lowest tolerance was able to enjoy the milder hits that lingered after the denser draws,

and when the hits became too much, placing a thumb over the house and passing it to the next person was, for the first time in over a year, a reasonable action.

A bong ejaculating potent smoke straight into your face invites double entendres, which, in our crew, was an appropriately crass segue into our weekly RuPaul’s Drag Race watch party. Typically, we smoke several joints each during these watch parties, but after our Stündenglass hits, I think we managed maybe a half-joint each.

After two hours of Aussie drag, we steeled ourselves for another round of bong hits. We found our rhythm a bit easier the second time around, and everyone got the rightsized hit for their personal capacity. I avoided succumbing to the floor, and was able to play bong porter with relative ease. Before we disbanded for the night, I asked everyone if they were cool with me bringing the Stündenglass back next week, and maybe making it a weekly thing. I was met with deeply stoned but enthusiastic yes replies all around.

Did it work with a single user? /////////////////// After the squad called it a night, I assembled the Stündenglass for a personal use session, and without the energy of the homies, focused on some points of interest I would have missed otherwise. The contactless inhale option has a therapeutic vibe during personal use sessions. It requires no fine dexterity aside from applying the initial fire to the bowl and pulling the slide, and the smoke can be consumed with gentle, natural inhales, as opposed to hearty, throat-rattling water pipe draws.

The hypnotizing flush of water back and forth was soothing in an ASMR way I hadn’t noticed before, and the attention paid to the rotation of the glass required a meditative focus I found just as relaxing as the thick-ass hits I was producing from my bowls. Though the Stündenglass has an undeniable party vibe, it also maintains a sophisticated single-user or everyday use sensibility. The streamlined design and clever functionality feel at home on an ornamental end table or in the center of a smoke circle.

Bottom Line ////////////////////////////////////////////////// The Stündenglass retails for about $600, a price that excludes a considerable percentage of everyday stoners.

But for consumers with gravity bong nostalgia, extensive disposable canna-toy income, and a predilection for cosmopolitan pothead parties (or someone with their own traveling party bong-dab business), I could see the Stündenglass becoming an all-time favorite tool, if not a popular addition to an already impressive menagerie.

Get it at: stundenglass.com

PERFORMANCE

Editor: Andi Prewitt | Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com CASEY CAMPBELL PHOTOGRAPHY

MUSIC Written by: Daniel Bromfield | @bromf3

Now Hear This

Listening recommendations from the past, present, Portland and the periphery.

SOMETHING OLD Hugh Small made a minor splash in Glasgow in the ’80s with his band Vazz and dipped out for a quarter-century. Now in his 60s, he’s making the best music of his life. His two volumes of Piano Music (2014-2016) represent some of the best single-instrument ambient music of recent years, placid and dusky at once, continually inhabiting a late-afternoon moment when the sun is still out but the shadows are growing long. Stay tuned for his collaboration with saxophonist Anenon, which comes out on Melody as Truth next month.

WE CAN BE HEROES: The Ballad of Aurelie the Bold is a loose adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Iron John.”

Aurelie’s Ascendence Bag & Baggage’s Brothers Grimm musical is solid gold.

BY BE N N E T T C A M P B E LL FERGUS O N

In one of the most uproarious scenes in the new play The Ballad of Aurelie the Bold: A Grimm Brothers Story of Iron & Gold, Aurelie (Elliot Lorenc) tries to sit on a talking tree stump named Bobby (Janelle Rae). “Don’t you do it!”

Bobby squeals. “In all my years of growing here, in all my years of just kind of sitting around as a stump, I have never been so disrespected!”

Believe it or not, this is hardly the strangest thing that happens in Aurelie the Bold, a filmed play by Hillsboro’s Bag & Baggage Productions. Lorenc, who wrote the script, transforms the ancient saga of “Iron John” into an environmentally conscious musical comedy about how Aurelie, a hapless musician, helps an eccentric collection of allies (including a golden-feathered goose) ignite a political revolution.

While a less savvy playwright might have struggled to blend the surrealism and sociopolitical commentary of Aurelie the Bold, Lorenc stirs them into a sublime theatrical cocktail. Creativity, integrity and working-class solidarity are the themes that define the play—and it embraces them with contagious smiles and conspicuous seriousness.

Aurelie the Bold is set in a village languishing under the reign of Coyne (Rae), the head of a dastardly company called Coyne Enterprises. Coyne’s greatest nemesis is Iron Jo (Jesse Groat), a towering creature who guards a forest pond that can transform any material into gold—and when Aurelie bonds with Jo, Coyne manipulates their friendship as part of a plan to create a “mega spa.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, Aurelie the Bold is a loose adaptation of “Iron John,” which was retold by the Brothers Grimm in the early 1800s and is also known as “Iron Hans.” The change from Iron John to Iron Jo is noteworthy (the play refers to the character using gender-neutral pronouns), as is Lorenc’s decision to toy with time. The play is set in an era when fairy godmothers and curses exist alongside corporate greed and phones, a liberty that cleverly closes the distance between our own time and once upon a time.

Aurelie is our guide to this absorbing world, but Lorenc graciously allows himself to be upstaged by a series of wondrous puppets designed by Trevor Harter. The play’s breakout star is the aforementioned goose, an epically extroverted bird (voiced and puppeteered by Harter) who introduces himself to the village by declaring, “Hello, lowly village peasants. My name is Skyler and I am a talking goose.”

Getting to hang out with beautiful goofballs like Skyler and Bobby the Stump—whose globular eyes are as expressive as Skyler’s gaping beak—is a treat. Yet Lorenc and director Mandana Khoshnevisan have created a play that is both a spirited diversion and a 21st century fairy tale with progressive fire in its belly.

When Coyne’s goons begin draining Iron Jo’s pond, Aurelie leads a protest march. Using the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” he and the workers of the village sing, “Clean the pond and save the forest/And tear Coyne Tower down.” Their revolution seems so contemporary that it would not have been surprising if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had shown up and asked Aurelie to endorse the Green New Deal.

By weaving together modernity and myth, Lorenc reminds us that fairy tales are what we make them. While “Iron John” spotlighted a misguided prince, Aurelie the Bold is about an uprising vast enough threaten the power of Coyne, who plans to plunge Aurelie’s village into a capitalistic grind by using the mega spa to turn customers into gold statues so that they will have to pay to be revived.

Humanity, not an individual, is the hero this time.

Aurelie the Bold is a rare play that isn’t preachy or afraid to mean something. You’ll have to watch it for yourself to find out if Aurelie and friends clean the pond and save the forest, but it’s not a spoiler to say that the play is one of the most cheering Portland-area productions to emerge during the pandemic. When it’s over, you will be drenched in delightfulness—and ready to vote Aurelie-Skyler in 2024.

SOMETHING NEW Burial’s Chemz/ Dolphinz EP is a return to steamy, urban Blade Runner blues from a producer whose recent work focused on rave nostalgia at the expense of sound design. The 12-minute first side is one of his most satisfying long-form experiments yet, at once an epic pop song and an environment made of creaking metal and acid rain. “Dolphinz,” meanwhile, situates the cries of the titular cetaceans within a sound world that seems too polluted for them to survive for much longer.

SOMETHING LOCAL We loved Body San’s split with Dorosoto earlier this year, and now the local producer’s back with a new fulllength, Reborn While Shopping, whose dense chords and aqueous drums recall how lo-fi house sounded when it was still the provenance of labels like 1080p and not yet the internet. Imagine a fountain with blue tiles and vaguely fake-looking plants around it and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the vibe he’s going for: aesthetically New Age, but far from reassuring.

SOMETHING ASKEW The title of Haji K.’s Black Against an Orange Line implies the sort of stately, arty minimalism the great ambient pioneers like Brian Eno and Harold Budd tried to capture through sound. But this is no wallpaper music: It’s grand, billowing dub techno based on the faintest ghost of a beat and seemingly designed to replicate the feeling of entering a dense cloud of steam. Don’t miss Haji K.’s contributions to this year’s Picnic, which serves as an international summit for superfogged ambient music.

SEE IT: The Ballad of Aurelie the Bold: A Grimm Brothers Story of Iron & Gold streams at bagnbaggage.org through June 13. Tickets are pay what you will.

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

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Editor: Andi Prewitt / Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com ROCKY BURNSIDE

MOVIES

screener

GET YO UR REPS I N While local rep theaters are out of commission, we’ll be putting together weekly watchlists of films readily available to stream. Now that there are no more new episodes of HBO’s addictive miniseries Mare of Easttown to look forward to each Sunday, we’ll have to get our crime drama fix elsewhere. Look no further than the five films below, all of which contain some element of Mare-ness.

Hounds of Love (2016) While on her way to a party in Perth, Australia, a young woman named Vicki is abducted and tortured by a sinister and violent couple. In order to survive and escape, Vicki realizes her only option is to drive a wedge between the pair’s obsessive “love”—by any means possible. Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Hoopla, Hulu, Vudu, YouTube.

IMDB

ACTION!: Hollywood Theatre is scheduled to reopen July 2.

Big Screen Time

Portland’s independent cinemas are welcoming back audiences, but what does the simultaneous VOD and theatrical release practice mean for those businesses?

BY C H A N C E S O L E M - P F EI FER

@chance_s_p

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Directed by multi-Academy Award winner Bong Joon-ho and recently inducted into the Criterion Collection, this highly acclaimed thriller follows two detectives (Song Kang-ho and Kim Sang-kyung) as they attempt to solve the murders of a string of young women. The script is loosely based on South Korea’s first recorded serial killings of 19861991. Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Hulu, Vudu, YouTube.

Prisoners (2013) Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal headline this unforgettable slow-burn mystery from Denis Villeneuve. When a 6-year-old girl goes missing in a small Pennsylvania town, her father (Jackman) takes matters into his own hands after becoming frustrated with the detective (Gyllenhaal) assigned to the case. Viola Davis, Melissa Leo and Paul Dano co-star.

Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Hulu, Vudu, YouTube.

IMDB

As if movie theaters weren’t imperiled enough by a virus spread most quickly among enclosed crowds, the exhibition industry returns this spring facing the same old questions of survival, plus a few new ones.

Still, morale among Portland theater operators is high.

Cinema 21, the Living Room Theaters, Clinton Street Theater and Cinemagic are all tearing tickets again for limited-capacity audiences. The Hollywood Theatre has announced a July 2 comeback. Regal Cinemas began reopening locations in late April and, judging by the box office returns, did booming business over Memorial Day weekend with A Quiet Place Part II. Cautious optimism abounds, not to mention some sea legs.

“It often feels like we are starting a new business,” says Laurelhurst Theater owner Prescott Allen, whose East Burnside Street and Northeast 28th Avenue venue is targeting a June 11 return, after a year of remodeling and HVAC updates.

The sensation of starting fresh is common all over town, although leading up to this spring, reopening strategies varied. On the one hand, Cinema 21 and Living Room have ping-ponged right along with Oregon’s shifting COVID regulations since last fall—launching private rentals, ceasing them, reopening, closing again, opening again. Other Portland venues, like Laurelhurst, the Academy and Roseway theaters, closed in March 2020 and stayed that way.

“Part of the complexity of wrestling with this business over the last 14 months has been holding two opposing ideas at the same time,” says Cinema 21 manager Erik McClanahan on balancing safety with ambition. “The thing I’ve come to appreciate the most is that [reopening] does need to happen at some point. In some ways, it’s about giving confidence to the distributors.”

Speaking of, after a 15-month hibernation (total or relative), Portland screens are flickering awake to an altered studio landscape. While releasing titles simultaneously into theaters and on streaming platforms (“day-and-date,” in industry speak) had grown increasingly prevalent during the past five years, that approach has never touched so many mainstream movies as now. With Warner Brothers making its entire 2021 slate available on HBO Max same day, Disney+ concurrently offering PVOD options, and Amazon buying MGM, what do day-and-date practices becoming an industry standard mean for Portland theaters?

“I never saw [day-and-date] as an existential threat,” says Cinemagic and Moreland Theater manager Nicholas Kuechler about the practice pre-pandemic. “I thought it would take a bigger chunk out of us than it did.”

Many local independent theaters count on their spaces holding more sway with audiences than theatrical exclusivity windows. Kuechler points out how much of Cinemagic’s Hawthorne neighborhood clientele works in the service industry—apartment dwellers, he infers, often with small TVs. Packing into Cinemagic, cranking the volume, and vibing so hard with a movie that their beer sloshes is half the appeal.

“The idea of watching Godzilla vs. Kong on my 30-inch TV just sounds wrong,” he adds. “There are some movies [where] you just want that size. They were built for it.”

What Kuechler did notice when Warner Brothers’ latest Godzilla blockbuster played at Southeast Milwaukie Avenue’s Moreland Theater in April is that surprisingly strong crowds tapered dramatically in the weeks after opening.

That observation squares with McClanahan’s personal view of film exhibition’s present and future: Plugged-in movie lovers flock to theatrical openings (regardless of streaming availability) and generate enthusiasm, and then the film slips toward its eternal online resting place with some genuine buzz.

“We’re propping [films] up for their eventual life on VOD or streaming,” McClanahan says. “A theater like [Cinema 21] becomes a version of the film festival ecosystem; you want people who love movies the most to come see stuff that needs any help it can to be found.”

In this version of events, theaters book more titles at quicker clips for shorter durations. Luckily, cities don’t change as quickly as media strategies.

As Kuechler puts it, even if Cinemagic or the Moreland screens Marvel’s Black Widow this July, the theaters aren’t beholden to the same pressures of being “everything to everyone” as the global blockbusters sometimes on their screens. Knowing their lane can be not only a boon to theaters on the comeback but a relief. Serve and trust the neighborhood crowd and Kuechler believes moviegoing just might feel normal again this summer.

“You’re not going to make a lot of money that way,” he says, “but it’s much more enjoyable.”

Memories of Murder (2003)

Zodiac (2007) In this second Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle, the actor plays a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who becomes fixated on the Zodiac killer. The obsession is only fueled when the killer starts sending cryptic messages to the newspaper. Crimethriller master David Fincher directs. Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Kanopy, Pluto, Vudu, YouTube.

Sharp Objects (2018) Not a movie per se, but this miniseries is easily the closest thing to Mare we have. Adapted from Gillian Flynn’s novel, it stars Amy Adams as a depressed journalist assigned to travel back to her hometown in Missouri to cover a gruesome murder. Familial trauma stemming from her domineering mother (Patricia Clarkson) soon emerges, as does an attraction to the detective solving the case (Chris Messina).

Amazon Prime, HBO, HBO Max, Hulu, Vudu, YouTube.

MOVIES

WA R N E R B R O S .

TOP PICK OF THE WEEK

Those Who Wish Me Dead Those Who Wish Me Dead is the kind of movie that makes you feel alive. The suspense that surges through the film is so intense it’s almost as if you’re wincing at the heat of the flames surrounding Hannah (Angelina Jolie), a Montana firefighter defending an orphaned boy named Connor (Finn Little). A nonsensical conspiracy has put Connor in the crosshairs of two assassins (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) who are so single-minded that they chase Hannah and Connor into a forest being devoured by a wildfire. Can Jolie triumph over the cruelty of man and nature?

Director Taylor Sheridan (who wrote Sicario and Hell or High Water) keeps you guessing by making the action rough and fierce, pummeling his characters with everything from bullets to an improvised blowtorch. Gillen is a laughable villain (Game of Thrones actors don’t belong in Westerns) and the story is annoyingly tidy (why does Hannah have to be motivated by her failure to save a group of boys who were the same age as Connor?), but Those Who Wish Me Dead transcends its artificial trappings. It’s a bracing adaptation of the novel

by Michael Koryta—and a reminder that Jolie is an indomitable action star. She is the fire. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Clackamas Town Center, Hilltop.

OUR KEY

: T H I S M O V I E I S E XC E L L E N T, O N E O F T H E B E S T O F T H E Y E A R. : T H I S M O V I E I S G O O D. W E R E C O M M E N D YO U WATC H I T. : T H I S M O V I E I S E N T E R TA I N I N G B U T F L AW E D. : THIS MOVIE IS A STEAMING PILE.

ALSO PLAYING The Killing of Two Lovers

Robert Machoian’s family drama knows it’s freighted with a foreboding title, and violence looms immediately over this story of a freshly separated couple.

The longer it takes for that title to come true, the more we nervously rifle through its possible meanings. Even so, The Killing of Two Lovers slips into an inquisitive mode, deeper than pure tension.

We witness father and Western Utah day laborer David (Clayne Crawford) make genuine and misguided efforts to resist the deadbeat-dad status that his moving out and family visiting hours suggest.

While some of the supporting acting verges on stilted (given the film’s overall earthiness), The Killing of Two Lovers is largely a director’s showcase. Known mostly for short documentaries, Machoian concocts an internal universe of David’s rage through sound design full of slamming doors and endless creaking. And the complex, uncut blocking of a key marital squabble against a high-desert horizon blends stark indie filmmaking with Edward Albee-esque theatrical instincts. The particular shape of this failing marriage confronts the characters’ expectations as much as the audience’s. It’s easy (perhaps sickeningly preferable) to believe David is living out a filmed murder ballad, or elegy for faded youth and manhood. The reality is both simpler and more complicated than all that country poetry. Realities always are. R. CHANCE SOLEMPFEIFER. Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube.

Profile This latest entry in the emerging screenlife cinema format, which filters all action through a laptop screen, might seem oddly ambitious given that the microgenre is still hovering perception-wise between the formalist pretensions of feature-length single takes and Blumhouse’s found-footage schlock.

Based on a French reporter’s exposé of how extremists recruit young women to join the Islamic State only to sell them into sexual slavery, Profile uses the trappings of a ripped-from-the-headlines story and elevates it into an effective little thriller steeped in modern social media and a catfishing pas de deux. Just as Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) and Body Double (1984) updated Hitchcockian voyeur tropes with advancing technology, Profile director Timur Bekmambetov maintains a fusillade of ADHD diversions to enliven the more mundane aspects of newspaper reporting while preying on the tensions of our Not Safe For Work-braving, right-swiping age. Really, though, he just sets the minimal stage for freelance journalist Amy (Valene Kane) and terrorist-as-21st-century-rockstar Bilel (Shazad Latif) to promote their precisely curated brands. The result is a film that features just enough manipulative carelessness and toxic aggression to remind audiences that some personae are best left virtual. R. JAY HORTON. Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube.

La Dosis Like a giant shouldering the weight of the planet, Marcos (Carlos Portaluppi) lumbers through this Argentine thriller, which is simul-

taneously sinister and lethargic.

Marcos is a nurse in an intensive care unit, but he doesn’t just heal the sick—he quietly puts them out of their misery when he believes it is necessary. He’s a murderer, but not like Gabriel (Ignacio Rogers), a slick nurse who kills not out of compassion, but for kicks. La Dosis is essentially a morbid duet performed by these two men. One considers taking lives to be a solemn duty, and one revels in the unholy thrill of playing God, but they are both symbols in writer-director Martín Kraut’s medical parable. La Dosis is a portrait of health care workers who are so brutally demeaned and exploited that they can’t feel in control unless they shatter their most sacred oath. It’s a perverse and audacious idea, but the film built around it is punishingly slow and lacks conviction. Kraut seems afraid to decide whether the psychological battle between Marcos and Gabriel is a showdown between good and evil or if they are just devils in slightly different disguises. Despite its impressively dark premise, La Dosis doesn’t end with a shock. It ends with a shrug. NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. On Demand.

A Quiet Place Part II While it’s tempting to predict that this lean sequel to John Krasinski’s surprise 2018 horror hit could be one of the cinematic summer’s first loud entries, suffocating silence is still the new film’s signature move. In Part II, shotgun-toting mother Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and her two children (Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) continue their monklike eluding of audiophile aliens, while director Krasinski’s confidence with wide-open, Jurassic Park-inspired chases—an actor fleeing some heinous pursuer over their shoulder—carry the taut action. Still present is the Abbott family’s survivalist pride, arguably more cloying here, as flashbacks illustrate how ready the tight-knit family was to stand tall and shut up when disaster first struck. It’s a testament to the quality of actors like

Blunt and a new survivor played by Cillian Murphy that anyone would care, what with their emotional range trapped somewhere between determined and very determined.

Even if the sequel runs dangerously low on ideas to sustain 90 minutes, it’s hard to be peeved at PG-13 entertainment hoping only to showcase a family conquering fear through sensory puzzles.

No need to turn down zero-calorie Spielberg this summer; crank up those theater speakers and be overcome by sounds of nothing. PG-13.

CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bagdad, Bridgeport, Century 16, Cinema 21, City Center, Dine-In Progress Ridge, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Theater & Pub, Tigard.

The Woman in the Window Dan Mallory is a liar. His deceptions include pretending to have a doctorate from Oxford and falsely claiming that his mother died of cancer, but most people don’t know that. He is better known as A.J. Finn, the author of the bestselling mystery novel The Woman in the Window, which has been transformed into a glossy and frenzied film by director Joe Wright. Amy Adams stars as Anna Fox, an agoraphobe barricaded in a gloomy brownstone in Manhattan. Addled by pills and alcohol, she’s a less than credible witness when she says that she saw a woman (Julianne Moore) stabbed to death across the street, but that doesn’t stop her from spying on Alistair Russell (Gary Oldman), a neighbor who she suspects is a serial killer. The Woman in the Window is modeled on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but Wright doesn’t have Hitchcock’s patience—frantic pacing and a pounding score by Danny Elfman combine to create a film that is exhausting instead of exciting.

Wright can be an ingenious director, but the visual flamboyance that he brought to Anna Karenina and Pan— both of which were cinematic car-

nivals of swirling colors—has all but dried up. Skip The Woman in the Window and wait for the upcoming TV series about Dan Mallory starring Jake Gyllenhaal. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Netflix.

Wrath of Man Whether playing obligatory human among action figures (The Fate of the Furious, The Expendables) or driving his own all-too-literal vehicles as humble functionary pushed too far (The Transporter, The Mechanic), Jason Statham attained a frankly bewildering stardom with weaponized competence. However unlikely the stunts, something about Statham seethes stolid believability, which made him the perfect tent pole for Guy Ritchie’s stylized cockney capers. Transplanting the action to Los Angeles for their latest collaboration, alas, proves disastrous.

Shelving the film-school trickery and dumbing down dialogue to grunted tropes, this remake of 2004 French shoot-’em-up Le Convoyeur inexplicably leans into Statham’s dour and dull character named “H.” He’s the new man on the armored car security team whose 24/7 moping and unexplained proficiency in the violent arts betrays a hidden vendetta against the crew of robbers responsible for his son’s death. Separated into four chapters, Wrath of Man shoehorns a heist flick into the traditional revenge yarn, but a shotgun marriage of the genre’s hackneyed plotlines further dims investment in the succession of charmless dolts (hapless guard Josh Hartnett, smooth ringleader Jeffrey Donovan, and loose cannon Scott Eastwood). This may best be understood as Ritchie’s American film, and he doesn’t seem too much like us. R. JAY HORTON. Bridgeport, Cascade, Cinema 99, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Dine-In Progress Ridge, Division, Eastport Plaza, Evergreen Parkway, Hilltop, Living Room, Regal Movies On TV, Sherwood, Vancouver Mall, Vancouver Plaza.

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

29

ART N’ COMICS!

CALLIN’ ALL CARTOONISTS! We’ll be adding some new comics! Send yer samples to art@wweek.com. If chosen, your comic will run weekly!

FEATURED ARTIST: MEG MCLAIN

As a Portland native, and self taught freelance graphic designer, I started 2020 in London, where I’ve lived for many years. I had just released my first book “The Comedy of Dementia”, a collection of hilarious illustrated quotes from my grandfather during his final days with dementia (available on lulu.com). I moved back to Portland, with my dog Finnick, in the spring of 2020, in high demand with stand up comedians seeking promotional materials for the 2020 Fringe Comedy Festival. Due to covid, the festival was cancelled, and I lost all my clients. Late January 2021, a small leak in my right eye caused fluid to pool behind my retina, distorting and obstructing my vision so much, the eye became unusable. I have since been relearning how to do graphics with one eye and no depth perception. Using photos, I am able to follow shapes without my distorted vision affecting my work.

I remain hopeful I can once again have a career in graphic design, despite this set back.

Instagram: @MegMcLainArt

Twitter: @mmDigitalArt

Patreon: megmclain

My book, “#FunnyStuffMyGrampsSaid: The Comedy of Dementia”, is available for purchase at Lulu.com

JACK KENT’S

Jack draws exactly what he sees n’ hears from the streets.

IG @sketchypeoplepdx kentcomics.com

30

Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

JONESIN’

Week of June 17

©2021 Rob Brezsny

by Matt Jones

"BAD Company"--it works, initially.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)

Aries playwright Tennessee Williams was honest about the trickery he engaged in as he composed his entertaining masterpieces. "I don’t want realism," he exclaimed. "I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people." I fully support you, Aries, if you would like to make that your goal in the next three weeks. In my astrological opinion, you and the people in your life have more than a mild need for magic. Your ability to thrive depends on you all getting big doses of magic.

Libran author Oscar Wilde disproved the misconception that Libras are wishy-washy, overly eager to compromise, and inclined to overthink everything. His writing had wit and flair, and his life was vivid and daring. He wrote, “There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands." I suspect that one of those pivotal moments will soon be coming up for you. Be Wildelike!

TAURUS (April 20-May 20) On my wall is a poster that says, "Avoid the Tragic Magic Triad: taking things too personally, taking things too seriously, and taking things too literally."

This advice doesn't refer to important matters, like my health or my ongoing fight against our culture's bigotry. I take those issues very personally, seriously, and literally. Rather the motto refers to trivial and transitory issues, like the new dent made in my car by a hit-and-run driver in the Whole Foods parking lot, or the bad review of my book on Amazon.com, or the $18 that a certain Etsy seller cheated me out of, or the joke about the size of my nose that some supposed friend made on Twitter. According to my reading of astrological omens, Taurus, you would benefit right now from meditating on things like these that you take too seriously, personally, and literally. Here's Don Miguel Ruiz: "There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally."

GEMINI (May 21-June20)

ACROSS

59 "It's whatever"

1 File extensions?

61 MV divided by V

6 Chipotle option, for short

62 "What You're Made Of, We're Made For" insurance co.

10 Gifford's TV successor 14 Neckwear for Fred in "Scooby-Doo" 15 "Take _ _ _" (1985 hit)

63 The McKenzie brothers of SCTV's "Great White North" sketches

16 "_ _ _ Ruins Everything"

66 "Le Freak" disco group

17 Nicknames of two legendary bebop musicians (and the title of their 1952 album)

67 Character before Borat

19 "Swan Lake" movement

30 It depicts "the unit of counting or measurement," per Wikipedia 31 Inflatable couch filler 32 SW1P, for Westminster Abbey, e.g.

33 Inert lamp gas 34 Wall St. fixture 35 "_ _ _ Your Enthusiasm" (Larry David show)

68 Sierra _ _ _ (California range)

36 Unfooled by

69 Hit the bottom

41 Station wagon, e.g.

40 Prevail

"I remember wishing I could be boiled like water and made pure again," writes poet Jeffrey McDaniel.

Judging from the current astrological omens, Gemini, I think you could be made reasonably pure again without having to endure an ordeal like being boiled like water. Do you have ideas about how to proceed?

Here are mine: 1. Spend 15 minutes alone. With your eyes closed, sitting in a comfortable chair, forgive everyone who has hurt you. Do the best you can.

Perfection isn't necessary. 2. Spend another 15 minutes alone, same deal. Forgive yourself of everything you've done that you think of as errors. Perfection isn't required. 3. Spend another 15 minutes alone. Imagine what it would be like to unconditionally love yourself exactly as you are. 4. Spend another 15 minutes alone.

Remember ten amazing moments that you enjoyed between ages five and 13.

CANCER (June 21-July 22) On June 23, 1940, Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely to a family that already had 19 other children. During her childhood, she suffered from pneumonia, scarlet fever, polio, and infant paralysis.

The latter two diseases damaged her left leg, and she wore a brace until she was 12 years old. Nevertheless, by the time she was in high school, she had become a very good athlete. Eventually she competed in the Olympics, where she won four medals and earned the title "the fastest woman in history." I propose that we name her your official role model for the rest of 2021.

May she inspire you to overcome and transcend your own personal adversity.

20 Oscar-winning role for Forest

70 Supreme Court garb 71 "People tell me ..."

21 _ _ _ Maria (coffee liqueur)

DOWN

22 They're risky

1 Beyond zealous

24 Obligation

2 Line that breaks the fourth wall

45 Current "SNL" cast member Yang

3 More illegible, like some signatures

47 Return remark 48 Wee drink

4 "_ _ _ Save America" (show cohosted by Jon Favreau) (no, the other Jon Favreau)

49 Adjuster's assessment

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)

53 Upscale Honda

Leo-born P. L. Travers wrote the children's books about Mary Poppins, a nanny with magical powers. She was thoroughly familiar with folklore, ancient myths, and the occult. The character of Mary Poppins, Travers said, was a version of the Mother Goddess. But in her writing process, she drew inspiration mainly from what she thought of as the vast dark nothingness. She wrote, "I’ve become convinced that the great treasure to possess is the unknown." To generate her tales, she listened to silence and emptiness. I recommend you emulate her approach as you create the next chapter of your life story.

26 Way to look inward?

28 "The Matrix" role for Keanu 29 Country duo behind "Ain't Nothing 'bout You" and "Boot Scootin' Boogie" 35 Ant habitat

5 Sports factoid that I'll never understand

42 Indy 500 winner Luyendyk 44 Buffet that might have several salsas

54 "Life of Pi" feline

6 Lose luminosity

55 Super Bowl XXXVII champs 56 Accident prevention org.

39 Get together

7 Sturm _ _ _ Drang (German artistic movement)

57 Principal

40 Out-and-out battle

8 In the center of

58 Ralph Lauren brand

41 Syndicate bosses

9 "The Card Players" painter Paul

60 Cable that connects to a TV

10 2013 Eminem song that has a Guinness World Record

64 Lobster shack wear

37 Twisted tale 38 Item on a ring

43 U.S. hwy.

44 Soldier or solder material 45 "Everybody Loves Raymond" surname 46 Caillou's Daddy and Mommy, according to the official website (sorry, parents, I feel your pain) 50 Open _ _ _ night 51 Spotted 52 State, to Sarkozy 55 Red, white, and blue frozen treat

11 Without much movement 12 Twosome 13 Iowa State University location 18 "Three Men and a Baby" director Leonard 23 Homer Simpson's neighbor 25 It's slower than a gallop 27 Archipelago components

65 "Well, la-di-freakin'-_ _ _!"

last week’s answers

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) Virgo poet Melissa Broder writes, “Romantic obsession is my first language. I live in a world of fantasies, infatuations and love poems." I wouldn't normally authorize you to share her perspective, but I will now.

The astrological omens suggest you have something important to learn from being more enamored and adoring than usual. If you say YES to the deluge of yearning, you'll gain access to a type of power that will prove very useful to you in the coming months.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) Philosopher Simone Weil wrote, “Only the light that falls continually from the sky gives a tree the energy to push powerful roots into the earth. The tree is actually rooted in the sky.” As you bolster your foundations in the coming months, as you deepen your roots, I hope you keep Weil's brilliant observation in mind. Like a tree, the nourishment that will help you grow the stamina and strength and structure you need will come as you turn to the brightest, warmest, highest sources of inspiration.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) To be in groovy alignment with cosmic rhythms, you won't merely walk, and you certainly won't trudge.

Rather you will saunter and ramble and promenade.

You will strut and rove and prowl. Likewise, you won't just talk, and you certainly won't mutter or grumble.

Instead you will banter, rhapsodize, improvise, beguile, and lyricize. Catch my drift? You won't simply laugh, but will chortle, cackle, and guffaw. In other words, Sagittarius, you are authorized to imbue everything you do with style, panache, and imagination.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) Congratulations on being such a duty-bound, nononsense adult. May you continue to ply your dogged persistence and beast-of-burden attitude as long as it gets important tasks done, helps you feel useful, and doesn't make you sick. But if you do get tempted to depart from the sacrificial path anytime soon, please know that you will not offend any gods or demons. Nor will you incur a karmic debt. In fact, I believe you have cosmic clearance to dabble with lightheartedness for a while. You should feel free to experiment with fun and games that appeal to your sense of wonder.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) "I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy," wrote poet Charles Baudelaire.

What?! That makes no sense. I'm aware of millions of beautiful things that aren't tinctured with melancholy.

California's Mount Shasta in the late spring twilight, for example. New York City's Guggenheim Museum, a gorgeous gleaming building designed by genius architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The Marmore waterfalls in central Italy. The gardens of painter Claude Monet in Normandy, France. David Byrne's gloriously hopeful website, ReasonsToBeCheerful.world. I mention this, Aquarius, because I expect life to bring you a flood of non-melancholic beauty in the coming days. Take advantage of this grace to replenish your trust in life.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) Piscean author César Aira praises the value of escaping one's memories. He writes, "Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, transforming everything to the present." I'd love to see you enjoy alchemy like that in the coming weeks, dear Pisces. It's a favorable time to lose at least some of the inhibitions and limitations you think you have to accept because of what happened in the past. As Aira says, forgetting "makes our lives into a visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past."

HOMEWORK: My birthday's coming up. I welcome your blessings! newsletter@freewillastrology.

Check out Rob Brezsny’s Expanded Weekly Audio Horoscopes & Daily Text Message Horoscopes

©2021 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.

freewillastrology.com The audio horoscopes are also available by phone at

1-877-873-4888 or 1-900-950-7700 Willamette Week JUNE 9, 2021 wweek.com

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SHE’S

CASH for INSTRUMENTS

NOT TED “GOOD THING CLIMATE CHANGE IS A HOAX LIKE COVID.” P. 4

503-243-2122 mdonhowe@wweek.com

PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

GRIEF In 2020, everyone is struggling with mental health. Here’s our guide to finding peace.

Page 12

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NEWS: OREGON IS ON FIRE.

WWEEK.COM

WWEEK.COM WWEEK.COM

VOL 46/46 09.09.2020

By Nigel Jaquiss | Page 13

Tradeupmusic.com SE 503-236-8800 NE 503-335-8800

Pruning and removals, stump grinding, 24-hour emergency service.

Licensed/Insured. CCB#67024. Free estimates: 503-284-2077

TRADEUPMUSIC.COM

Buying, selling, instruments of every shape and size. Open 11am-7pm every day. 4701 SE Division & 1834 NE Alberta.

NEVER MISS AN ISSUE

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VOL 46/44 08.26.2020

VOL 46/45 09.02.2020

NEWS: Ted Wheeler Still Wants This Job. P. 9 • KAYAKING: Holy Toledo! P. 22 • CANNABIS: Strains for Late Summer. P. 25

“DO I WANT TO DROP DEAD NEXT WEEK? NOT REALLY.” P. 29

Steve Greenberg Tree Service

WAR MOVIES

By Aaron Mesh | Page 12

Sarah Iannarone?

VOL 46/47 09.16.2020

WILLAMETTE WE

A cadre of helmeted guerrilla filmmakers is coming to you live from Portland’s flaming streets.

Portland voters are fed up with Ted Wheeler. But are they ready for

WWEEK.COM

VOL 46/48 09.23.2020

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P. 6

WILLAMETTE WEEK PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

“SHOCKINGLY, STILL SINGLE AND WAY TOO BORED.” P. 21

GOOD

“MY TASTE BUDS ARE WRECKED.” P. 22

MICHAEL DONHOWE

WILLAMETTE WEEK

“TIRED OF WHITE SUPREMACY? WELCOME TO THE CLUB.” P. 21

CLASSIFIEDS TO PLACE AN AD, CONTACT:

NEWS: REMEMBER TERESSA RAIFORD’S NAME. P. 9 RESTAURANTS: WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN? P. 21 CANNABIS: WHAT WE LOST IN THE FIRES. P. 25 WILLAMETTE WEEK PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

FULL ISSUES A LWAYS AVA I L A B L E ONLINE

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R

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VOL 46/43 08.19.2020

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Complete Yard Service Senior Discounts

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PAGE 9

WILLAMETTE WEEK

WILLAMETTE WEEK

PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

BEST NEW BAND

It’s Snow Time 10 ARTISTS

PORTLAND

LOCAL MUSIC INSIDERS SAY YOU'VE GOT TO HEAR. PAGE 10

WWEEK.COM

+

IN MEMORIAM

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WWEEK.COM

Goodbye, BarFly

VOL 46/39 07.22.2020

PAGE 24

P. 6

PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

Distant Summer

Think everything is canceled? We’ve got 16 adventures that will help you salvage this season.

PAGE 10

MUSIC'S ROLE IN THE PROTESTS: 4 SCENE

LEADERS SPEAK OUT

VOL 46/37 07.08.2020

7400 SW Macadam Ave

gorgeperformance.com

sunlanlighting.com

PAGE 22

NEWS: A LITTLE POLICE REFORM. P. 9 BUSINESS: LAST CALL, AGAIN? P. 23 FOOD: TONARI, WITH LOVE.

P. 27

3901 N Mississippi Ave. | 503.281.0453

Sunlan cartoons by Kay Newell “The Lightbulb Lady” Facebook / Twitter Instagram / Google

OUTDOORS

Cape Disappointment Does Not Disappoint

P. 8

For all your lightbulb fixtures & parts

Essential Business Hours 9:00 to 5:30 Monday - Friday | 11:00 to 4:00 Saturday

DS:

PLUS CAUGHT COVID?

Boss Says "Too Bad"

VOL 46/41 08.05.2020

PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

By Rachel Monahan Page 13

REA

By Tess Riski Page 11

VOL 46.40 07.29.2020 WWEEK.COM

In a nation succumbing to COVID-19, where does Oregon stand?

These 9 charts will show you.

VOL 46/38 07.15.2020

TH

Night after night, Portlanders confront Trump’s violent police in downtown. It feels like a party, and the end of the world.

WWEEK.COM

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P. 23

WWEEK.COM

ST

By Latisha Jensen | Page 13 LL

NEWS: BLOODSHED ON THE SIDEWALK. FOOD: PIZZA! AT THE STREET DISCO. MOVIES: MARCHING WITH JOHN LEWIS. WILLAMETTE WEEK

PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKL

INTO THE GAS

That’s also where Portland's housing is the most overcrowded.

EV

TH

WILLAMETTE WEE

PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

BE

WILLAMETTE WEEK

People are more likely to catch COVID east of 82nd Avenue.

G

RI

RE

“BRING BACK THE HORSE COPS.” P. 4

Wed - Sat start 6:30pm Sun 5pm - All Shows Are Outside

B

W A

“I’M GETTING GASSED IN MY OWN HOME.” P. 8

Call for Tickets!

503-830-4681

THE MAGIC IS IN MEL’S HOLE. page 22

VOL 46/42 08.12.2020

P. 26

Live Music Schedule Wed June 9 Little Sue Weaver w Marilee Hord 630p Thur June 10 Johnny Ward 630p Fri June 11 Left Coast Country 630p Sat June 12 Turtle VanDemarr's Guitar Mafia 630 p Sun June 13 McCarthy Creek 2pm -5p Sun June 13 Patrick Buckley's Uncle Mary 6-9p Wed June 16 Dumpster Joe 630p Thur June 17 Lynn Conover & Dave Reisch Fri June 18 Gravel Sat June 19 Blue Flags & Black Grass 6:30p Sun June 20 McCarthy Creek 5p Wed June 23 Annette Lowman Trio 630p Thur June 24 Kyle Blessing & Blaine Heinonen 630 p Fri June 25 Freddy Trujillo Band 630p Sat June 26 Turtle VanDemarr, Dave Reisch, Lynn Conover 630p Sun June 27 McCarthy Creek 630p Wed June 30 Chuck Warda 630p Thur July 1 John Lowell Mitchell, Johnny Ward, Lynn Conover 630 p Fri July 2 Quick and Easy Boys 630p Sat July 3 Hill Williams 630pm Sun July 4 Closed

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PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY

“IT'S A CATFIGHT, MAN. THE FUR WILL FLY.” P. 52

Our firm is looking for experienced makers and also suppliers of Noble Fir and Western Red Cedar.

Chris M. 1-888-954-6453

WILLAMETTE WEEK

“I WANTED THEM TO SEE WHAT THEY'RE SHOOTING AT.” P. 20

“WE’D SPRAY AND VACUUM, BUT NOTHING’S PERFECT.’’ P. 28

Wanted: Christmas Wreath Makers

PAGE 16

WWEEK.COM

VOL 46/36 07.01.2020

WWEEK.COM

VOL 46/34 06.17.2020

"THEY A KILLING AND Y'A MISS A PARADE

Seven queer black Portlanders spea out on what Pride means to them.

Page 12