Willamette Week, August 18, 2021 - Volume 47, Issue 42 - "Baby Doomers"

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FINDINGS CHRIS NESSETH

SATURDAY MARKET, PAGE 18

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 47, ISSUE 42 Only vaccinated fans can attend Thorns games. 5 This year, Portland approved two of the eight largest payouts for police use of force in 30 years. 6 Workers who bake Chicken in a Biskit are on strike. 7 The Portland Clean Energy Fund has collected $109 million in taxes. 8 Strip clubs and payday lenders may correlate with increased gunfire. 9

If a kid throws a tantrum at a Familes for Climate meeting, no one is going to roll their eyes. 13 Come fall, Portland Public Schools will adopt its “Swiss cheese model” of COVID measures. 14 Some flowers feel like they were bred for apocalypse parenting. 15

The perfect mom meal: a fancy salad, two cocktails, five french fries and the crust of a grilled cheese sandwich. 16 This macaroni and cheese review will make a lot of 30-year-olds mad. 17 Lee Farms has sunflowers bigger than your face. 18 Last week’s wildfire smoke knocked a degree or two off the heat wave. 20 Smith Teamaker cafe staffers are

so nice, they’ll straight-up teach you to make their drinks. 22

Slow munching on infused “potcorn” is a good way to manage an optimal high. 25 Director Elijah Hasan traveled the city last summer to film the unique nods of Black Portlanders.

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ON THE COVER:

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Parenting at the end of the world: WW’s 2021 Kids Issue, illustration

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DIALOGUE Armed security teams are patrolling the streets outside Old Town nightclubs (“Hired Guns,” WW, Aug. 11, 2021). The presence of heavily armed security guards comes after an uptick in shootings amid the drunken revelry, including one last month that wounded six people and killed an 18-year-old woman. The Portland Police Bureau says it’s too understaffed to quell the violence—following last year’s budget cuts, the bureau dissolved its nightlife unit, leaving only two officers assigned to the city’s Chinatown club scene. Ravencrest Force Protection Group, a company hired by Shake Bar, describes itself as a private military contractor and deploys a guard who carries a semi-automatic rifle on the job. Here’s what our readers had to say:

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Tompetersonwristwatch, via wweek.com: “We have a police department that is understaffed by well over 100 positions, facing record gun violence and pervasive property crime throughout the city, and citizens expecting the police to be everywhere, all of the time. This article clearly shows the result of that—private security that is less trained and less accountable.”

Jeremy Roark, via Facebook: “Oh hey, a bunch of shell-shocked mercs who see us as perps they don’t answer to and who want to die with their boots on before they reach old age. What could possibly go wrong?”

Nobody Inparticular, via wweek.com: “It’s a shame that there’s not a group of people whose job it was to prevent crime. The City Council and mayor should look into creating one.”

Deborah, via wweek.com: “I don’t go downtown much anymore. But glad to see that private club owners are addressing the massive surge in gang violence and shootings by contracting with private security.

It’s not ideal. But probably better than nothing. And sadly, we have almost nothing to address this and so many other crimes that are taking over our city.”

Allred Ben, via Facebook: “Yep, nothing stops a shootout like a shootout…”

Dr. Know

1792 MARINE DRIVE, ASTORIA, OREGON

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Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

@cfdiatport, via Twitter: “Didn’t we just have an illegally armed security guard kill a man at a BottleDrop?”

Muriel Lucas, via Facebook: “Oh yeah. Can’t see how getting a bunch of heavily armed, trigger-happy Gresham militia types to ‘protect’ bars with predominantly Black customers can go wrong.…Shake needs to be shut down.” @smithann112233, via Twitter: “So Portland is OK with security guards who get a whopping 24 hours of extra training to carry a gun in the city.

Sounds like a great plan. Good job, PDX, really thought this one out.”

YORK WAS NO VEGAN

By all means, replace the bust of York on Mount Tabor. Even better, install a full-length statue, and in bronze as he deserves, not cheap plastic. But lose the former bust’s meek expression of subservience to William Clark. Show him as he was during the most independent time of his enslaved life—a Black man confidently carrying a rifle out in the open air, hunting animals to help feed the Lewis and Clark expedition. (Which, as Clark recorded, he did expertly.) That may well be an upsetting prospect for any number of white urban vegans who have made naive pilgrimages to the bust. Tough beans for them.

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BY MART Y SMITH @martysmithxxx

When the local murder rate spiked, I consoled myself that it’s rising in most U.S. cities; we’re just along for the ride. Then I saw that Portland homicides are up 327%, while the national average is 12%. How did we become America’s murder capital? —Say Hello to My Little Friend

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Sophlady, via wweek.com: “There’s no evidence the armed private security guards are being effective.

Note they had to call the police to deal with nonviolent drunk folks. And, that resulted in subsequent gunshots being fired at the club.”

Well, Friend, the good news is that the figure you’re citing is misleading (though technically correct).

The bad news is that Portland homicides really are surging, and the main thing that’s misleading about this statistic is that it implies things were fine in early 2020.

Homicides in Portland from January through June 2021 really did triple compared to the same period in 2020. This made us No. 1 among American cities in that category, a fact gleefully trumpeted on right-wing social media as proof that “defund the police” was a one-way ticket to perdition.

But this isn’t a very useful way to look at the problem. To see why, consider Gilbert, Ariz. January-to-June homicides there were up 133% over last year—not in the same Stalinist-hellscape league as Portland, but good enough for No. 2 on the list.

Don’t recall hearing about this Phoenix suburb’s streets running red with blood? Maybe that’s because the number of homicides there in the first half of 2020 was…three. But in 2021, that figure rocketed up

by four homicides to seven! (This inspired the new city motto, “Gilbert: Never more than one Larry the Cable Guy after-party away from a historic crime wave.”)

Portland’s sample sizes are larger, but not by enough to outweigh comparable effects of chance. As it happened, the first six months of 2020 were quiet in Portland, with only 16 homicides, compared with 47 in early 2021. (In fact, the first five months of 2020 had only six killings, briefly allowing the GOPosphere to crow that our murder rate was up by 530%.*) Don’t feel too bad for 2020, though—Portland homicides came roaring back to finish the year at 57, dwarfing 2019’s 36. Which, in turn, crushed the previous year’s 26, which edged the prior year’s 25, which beat 2016’s puny 16.

Taken together, these numbers certainly suggest that homicides really are increasing substantially (and, let’s be honest, 2021 is probably going to knock 2020’s dick in the dirt, murderwise). What they don’t suggest, however, is a narrative where Democratic cities are doomed because we protested police brutality. Also, the mayor of Gilbert? A Republican. Just sayin’. *The Fraternal Order of Police even posted a graphic claiming the figure was 800% because hey, why not?

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

MURMURS CHRIS NESSETH

TIMBERS NOW REQUIRE PROOF OF VACCINATION OR A RECENT NEGATIVE COVID TEST RESULT

EVICTIONS RESUME DESPITE PROTECTIONS: Landlords in Multnomah County filed 109 eviction cases in July. That’s a number Becky Strauss, an attorney with the Oregon Law Center, says is likely to climb in the coming months. Oregon’s ban on evictions expired June 30. Many of the 109 cases are still unresolved, but thanks to a state law and a county policy, the tenants could have avoided court proceedings by showing landlords evidence they had applied for state assistance to pay their rent.

The problem, says Strauss? Many renters don’t know about the policy or how to apply for aid. Each morning since July 30, two county employees have been trying to intercept renters showing up for eviction court at the Multnomah County Courthouse to help them apply for assistance. Soon, county officials tell WW, they will start sending workers door to door to seek renters on the eviction docket: “We knew that if we could have our staff actually present in the courthouse, we could initiate the rental assistance process and prevent evictions at the last possible stage,” says Nabil Zaghloul, director of the county team doing eviction outreach.

COUNTY WON’T ATTEMPT VACCINE MANDATE AT VENUES: Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury has no plans to require proof of COVID-19 vaccinations at bars, restaurants or event venues, she tells WW. As the Delta variant erupts across Oregon, sparking the most new infections the state has seen in a single week, venue owners have called for the county to issue a vaccine mandate for indoor activities, similar to requirements in New York City and San Francisco. Kafoury says the county has no means to enforce such a rule. “For one local government in a metro region to quickly implement a widespread adult vaccine mandate when we currently have no enforcement mechanism or administrative structure in place would be incredibly challenging,” she tells WW. “That said, we are looking at all the potential ways we can increase vaccination and blunt this surge.” On Aug. 17, Providence Park announced that only spectators with proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID test result would be permitted to attend Timbers and Thorns soccer matches.

NIKE REMOVES SALAZAR’S NAME FROM CAMPUS: Nike told employees in an internal memo Aug. 16 that it had renamed the Alberto Salazar Building on its Beaverton campus.

Salazar, the Nike Oregon Project coach, was issued a lifetime ban from coaching track and field last month after allegations were substantiated by the U.S. Center for SafeSport that he was emotionally and physically abusive to former runner Mary Cain. Nike has been notably mum about Salazar’s downfall—even after hundreds of Nike employees protested on its campus in the fall of 2019, demanding that the sportswear giant hold Salazar accountable for his actions. Nike’s announcement, which was obtained by WW and not publicly announced as of Tuesday morning, mentioned the justification only briefly: “This change follows the SafeSport decision to permanently ban Alberto from coaching. The nature of the allegations and the finding of the lifetime ban makes it appropriate to change the name of the building.” The building is now called Next%, after a new line of running shoes.

FIREFIGHTER IMPROVISES SOLUTION TO WEED THEFT: An off-duty firefighter with Portland Fire & Rescue achieved something Aug. 14 that Portland police have struggled to do: Douglas L. Bourland solved the burglary of a cannabis store. Just one problem: It was his weed store and his investigative technique allegedly included kidnapping. According to court records, Bourland and two other men allegedly snatched Colby Fleishman from a downtown Portland street on the evening of Aug. 14, later stashing him in a storage facility at an Estacada weed farm. The plan, according to court records, was to get Fleishman to lead the men the next day to product he’d allegedly stolen from Bourland’s business, the Oregon Hemp House in South Portland. But thanks to an observant Uber driver who witnessed the alleged kidnapping and alerted police, the three suspects were arrested and Fleishman was freed. Bourland could not be reached for comment.

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THE BIG NUMBER

CLOCKED

MISSING PERSON: A 2017 City Council protest of the police killing of Quanice Hayes.

Portland shells out big money to settle legal claims, mostly for police actions.

BY TE SS R I SK I

tess@wweek.com

That’s how much the city of Portland paid out in cash settlements in the first half of 2021 to nearly 130 people who sued or threatened to sue.

The payout figures—released by the Office of Management and Finance in response to a public records request

by WW—show that the vast majority of settlement money was paid to citizens who filed claims against the Portland Police Bureau.

Police-related claims accounted for nearly 81% of the city’s total payouts: $2,384,402 to 18 different claimants between January and July. That’s an unusually high figure compared with other bureaus: The Portland Bureau of Transportation, for example, tallied the second-highest settlement total, $269,802—about one-tenth of what was paid out by the Police Bureau.

The PPB figure is skewed by a single payout: In March, the Portland City Council unanimously approved a $2.1 million settlement for the family of 17-year-old Quanice Hayes, whom Officer Andrew Hearst shot and killed with an AR-15 rifle in February 2017.

But even without the Hayes settlement, the Police Bureau would still rank the highest among bureaus, accounting for nearly $290,000 in cash settlements. And the data WW received doesn’t include a $600,000 settlement approved July 21 for the family of 24-year-old Terrell Johnson, whom Officer Samson Ajir shot and killed at a MAX station in 2017.

Those are two of the eight largest settlements the city shelled out for police use of force since 1993, according to figures compiled by Portland Copwatch. The City Council must approve settlements above $5,000.

Juan C. Chavez, a lawyer with the Oregon Justice Resource Center who represented the Johnson family, says the city’s willingness to settle the Hayes case was unusual. “It was not lost on many of us that most of the commissioners seemed horrified by the specifics of the case,” he tells WW. Claims against the Police Bureau included one other six-figure payout: On June 23, the City Council voted unanimously to pay $250,000 to a former background investigator for the city who alleged she was sexually harassed and discriminated and retaliated against by a then-Portland police officer named Robert Bruders. He had been reassigned to the bureau’s personnel division because, in 2011, he and two other officers beat a man in a parking garage.

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Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

The large police settlements are outliers compared with the rest of Portland’s payouts this year. Citywide, the most common amount was $5,000, and the median amount hovered near $1,500.

So what kind of headaches does the city pay to make disappear?

Car crashes, mostly. More than half of the Police Bureau-related payouts resulted from vehicle collisions.

That category includes the third-largest PPB-related payout this year—$11,761—after an officer “struck [the claimant’s] building with police vehicle.”

So far this year, the city also paid out three settlements related to protests, including $5,000 to a claimant who alleged an officer used excessive force during a 2016 protest; $624 to an individual who claimed to have suffered injuries “after being struck by projectiles launched by PPB officers” on June 2, 2020; and $500 to a claimant who “alleges police teargassed protesters outside their house; gas infiltrated their home, damaged property and caused them to move” during an August 2020 protest.

And in April, the city paid $147.50 to a property owner who claimed officers damaged a fence while “chasing/capturing” a suspect.

Other bureaus paid their share of settlements this year, too: In February, following a claim against PBOT, the city paid $25,000 to a claimant who had “trip[ped] and fall[en] on tree roots under asphalt.” It paid nearly $2,500 last month to someone who claimed he suffered injuries after getting rear-ended by a Portland Streetcar. And it paid $11.38 to settle a claim against the Water Bureau for water bottles purchased for three days due to “water quality issues.”

Hunzeker Watch He resigned five months ago.

Why?

155 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.

166 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-and-run. It has released no results of its inquiry.

154 DAYS:

That’s how long it’s been since the city signed a contract with an outside investigative firm to probe the leak. TESS RISKI.

CHRIS NESSETH

$2,953,716

THOMAS TEAL

NEWS

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK

NEWS

PANTHER PRIDE: PCC’s Cascade campus in North Portland.

Community Spread The board of the state’s largest higher-education institution is split on requiring shots.

Portland Community College is approaching a showdown this week over whether to require COVID -19 vaccinations for returning students, faculty and staff.

THE POLICY On June 21, Portland Community College President Mark Mitsui announced that, unlike all of Oregon’s four-year public universities, PCC would not require COVID shots as a condition for returning to campus.

“Because vaccination access and hesitancy looks different across racial lines, vaccination requirements create a barrier to educational access that will disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC),” the college explained in a statement. “This would not reflect PCC’s institutional values of equity, inclusion and belonging.”

WHO WANTS TO CHANGE IT At a special PCC board meeting Aug. 10, former Portland City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, proposed that the board reconsider mandating vaccinations. Saltzman’s proposal, first reported by the Portland Tribune, passed by a narrow 4-3 vote.

“We have a moral obligation to protect the health of our employees and students and a global obligation to lean into this pandemic,” says Saltzman, who joined the PCC board in 2019. “I am most concerned about the rapid increase of pediatric [hospital] admissions. A lot of our employees and students have children, and those under 12 years old are sitting ducks.”

WHO RESISTS THE CHANGE Backing Mitsui’s earlier position, board chair Mohamed Alyajouri, a health care administrator who oversees two clinics for Oregon Health & Science University, led opposition to putting a vaccine mandate on the board agenda. In addition to

equity issues, Alyajouri points to a staff report, which found that 85% of returning students will be vaccinated when classes start in the fall, far in excess of Gov. Kate Brown’s goal of 70%. So there may not be much greater efficacy in demanding that people get shots. Alyajouri emphasizes that he and the rest of the board are pro-vaccine; he just thinks a mandate could do more harm than good. “It won’t get us to a higher rate of vaccination,” he says. “It will just push away those who weren’t getting the vaccine anyway.”

WHY IT MATTERS PCC is the state’s largest higher-education institution, serving 60,000 full- and parttime students. Lane Community College has mandated vaccinations for the fall, and many big city K-12 school districts are doing so as well, as the Delta variant rips through unvaccinated America. Officials at OHSU projected last week that Delta infections would place more than 1,000 COVID-19 patients in hospitals by Labor Day, outstripping the state’s supply of hospital beds by at least 400.

Although the PCC faculty and classified unions have not yet taken a formal position on the issue, Michelle DuBarry, a spokeswoman for the faculty union, says her sense is that employees want PCC to act to protect their health. “We have been hearing strongly from a lot of members who feel strongly about a mandate,” DuBarry says.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT When the board meets Aug. 19, Saltzman says he will push hard to mandate vaccinations by January—it’s too late for the fall.

He is working on rallying support from medical experts and other elected officials.

Says Saltzman, “I’m going to take this to the wire.” NIGEL JAQUISS.

MICK HANGLAND-SKILL

ABE PROCTOR / PORTLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE

BOTH SIDES NOW

PRIMER

Cookie Contract

THE COOKIE CRUMBLES: Mary Vigil at a Nabisco protest.

Oreo makers in North Portland launch a national strike.

Last week, more than 200 Nabisco workers in Northeast Portland walked out of their cookie and cracker factory and onto a picket line—launching a strike that has since gone national.

WHO WENT ON STRIKE The 200 workers are part of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union Local 364. On Wednesday, about 15 union members held signs that read “Nabisco: Killing America’s Middle Class” and “Oreo is on strike.”

WHAT THEY MAKE The Nabisco bakery along Northeast Columbia Boulevard—tucked behind several fast-food restaurants at the intersection with Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard—produces Oreo and Chips Ahoy! cookies and Ritz, Premium saltine and Chicken in a Biskit crackers. It occasionally fills the nearby Woodlawn neighborhood with the smell of melting chocolate.

It is owned by Chicago snack giant Mondelez International.

Union vice president Mike Burlingham says nothing new is being produced at the bakery during the strike, but cookies and crackers already packaged are still being loaded onto trucks. “At this time, there aren’t any lines running,” Burlingham says.

But Mondelez begs to differ, telling WW it has a contingency plan to produce Oreos during a strike. “We have activated that plan and are committed to continuing to supply our delicious snacks to retailers and consumers,” a company representative said. The company did not share the details of that contingency plan.

WHAT THEY WANT The workers plan to strike until the company agrees to negotiate a new contract, says Burlingham.

One of the issues is a proposal by Mondelez to eliminate overtime pay for

working on the weekends by altering the schedule to incorporate weekends into the 40-hour work week.

Donna Marks has worked at this facility for 17 years in environmental health services. She says after the Nabisco brand was absorbed by Mondelez in 2012 after Kraft Foods split into two entities, one being Mondelez, “the environment changed.”

“I used to enjoy this job, it used to be like a family to me. Now, they want us to work more and pay us less, and everything that we have, we have because we negotiated,” Marks says. “They want to take away what we fought for with no negotiation. They act as if they gave us something.”

WHY IT MATTERS Portland was the first of Nabisco’s facilities across the country to strike. Since then, workers at a bakery in Richmond, Va., and a sales center in Aurora, Colo., have gone on strike, too. (Other unions in the Portland facility—including the machinists, electricians and operating engineers—are honoring the picket line.)

The labor dispute follows years of Mondelez cutting employee pensions and halving its unionized workforce by closing bakeries in New Jersey and Atlanta. That leaves just three Nabisco bakeries operating in the U.S.: in Portland, Chicago and Richmond.

So what happens on this Northeast Portland sidewalk has significant implications for who will make Ritz crackers in the coming decades.

On Aug. 13, the company fenced off the entire property with orange vinyl fencing, pushing the strikers closer to Columbia Boulevard, a thoroughfare for big trucks and speeding cars.

“It’s definitely an intimidation thing,” says Burlingham. “We’re getting sandblasted on the sidewalk as truckers blow by.” SOPHIE PEEL. Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

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NEWS WESLEY LAPOINTE

REHEATED: A resurrected carbon tax still leaves the owners of Evraz Steel dissatisfied.

Carbon Copy The city is inching toward a new carbon tax even as the Portland Clean Energy Fund is awash with cash.

BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS

njaquiss@wweek.com

Portland city officials tasked with meeting the city’s ambitious carbon reduction goals are attempting to resurrect a tax on smokestack industries.

Documents from the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability show that bureau officials hope to raise about $8 million a year from industrial companies whose factories belch carbon along the Willamette River and near the airport. BPS would use that money to meet its goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 and reducing them to zero by 2050.

Those goals became more urgent last week, when the United Nations released a doomsday climate report its secretary general called “a code red for humanity.” In a summer of lethal heat and choking wildfires, Portlanders are encountering substantial evidence of climate change.

BPS officials insist they can think globally by taxing locally.

But the bureau’s coffers are already overflowing with the windfall from a different tax that Portland voters approved in 2018.

That tax, the Portland Clean Energy Fund, has generated far more money than even its most enthusiastic boosters imagined: $109 million so far, with another $52 million expected this year.

That’s led some members of a stakeholder group that BPS Commissioner Carmen Rubio convened to ask: Why not tap that existing surplus rather than impose another tax that might have unintended consequences?

It’s not just manufacturing interests asking that question. In fact, WW has obtained a document showing that some members of Rubio’s panel—Democrats who believe lowering emissions should be an urgent priority—want Portland to use PCEF money aggressively to cut emissions.

“It’s an alternative that is worth a longer conversation,” says John Tapogna, president of the consulting firm ECONorthwest and a member of Rubio’s panel. “The tax has brought in far more than voters were led to expect.”

PCEF’s primary goal—like that of the proposed carbon tax—is to reduce carbon emissions, although through 8

Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

grants to nonprofits that will benefit communities of color.

City officials say the idea of dipping into the PCEF is a nonstarter because the ballot measure that created the fund strictly limits its use to grants to nonprofits that will generate green energy projects and jobs for communities of color.

When the PCEF question arose in an Aug. 17 BPS briefing of industry leaders, Kyle Dreiser, the bureau’s point person on the new tax, batted it away. “That money is restricted for community grants,” he said.

The city has tried before to create its own carbon tax, touting what would have been the first such tax by a city in the nation. Late last year, the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability proposed a two-part tax on heavy industry.

The idea would have raised about $11 million annually.

Strong opposition from prospective payers, including the two biggest targets of the tax, Evraz Steel and the Owens-Brockway glass plant in North and Northeast Portland, respectively, sidelined that proposal (“Glass Houses,” WW, Jan. 27, 2021).

But the carbon tax is not dead.

Rubio, who took over the bureau in January, has looked for a compromise. After consulting critics of the original proposal, the commissioner convened a workgroup led by her special projects staffer Jillian Schoene that met five times from April through August.

The tentative new idea: Significant industrial polluters would each undergo an emissions audit in preparation for a new tax. That tax would be about $17.70 per ton, the price California has assigned to carbon. That’s less than the $25 per ton embedded in the city’s earlier proposal.

And the new tax is aimed at being more than just what critics earlier called a “cash grab.” Instead of the city keeping all of the tax to pay for new emission reduction programs, the affected companies would get 40% to 60% of the money back to invest in improvements to lower emissions.

Corky Collier, executive director of the Columbia Corridor Association, a trade group that includes most of the

city’s heavy industry, gives Rubio high marks for listening to critics and running a collaborative process.

He’s still not sure he likes the carbon tax. While Collier says the idea of companies being allowed to reinvest some of their tax payments is an improvement, it’s not an incentive to reduce pollution.

“Why only give us back 40 to 60 percent?” he asks.

“Why not 100%?”

In other words, business leaders are frustrated that the city is still trying to generate more money to fund climate policy rather than creating specific carbon reduction targets.

David Kenney, a spokesman for Evraz Steel, the city’s largest carbon emitter, notes BPS doesn’t really need the money. “It doesn’t make sense given how much money they are sitting on,” he says.

That’s indeed the case. In November 2018, voters passed the Portland Clean Energy Fund to jump-start energy efficiency projects and jobs for Portlanders historically left behind. The chief petitioners promised in the Voters’ Pamphlet the measure “will bring in $30 million every single year.”

It’s done far more than that.

As of July 1 of the current fiscal year, the PCEF had $109 million on hand, according to city officials, and it expects to generate $52 million in new revenue this year.

Most of the tax dollars are sitting unused in a city bank account—and are not going to any green energy projects in the foreseeable future.

The fund distributed about $9 million in grants last year and hopes to hand out $60 million this year. If it succeeds in doing that, PCEF will still have around $100 million sitting in the bank at year’s end.

That’s about 12 times what the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability would raise with the revised carbon tax on heavy industry.

Some members of Rubio’s carbon workgroup noticed the paradox.

A document they put together, written by former Multnomah County Commissioner Jules Bailey and others, suggests borrowing against future receipts from the PCEF tax—but only touching the surplus above the $30 million a year that the fund expected to raise.

Borrowing against future revenues would allow aggressive, immediate investments in carbon reduction—electric vehicle fleets, vast solar arrays, renewable hydrogen, etc.—while also still fulfilling the equity and job creation goals of the ballot measure.

“By bringing the long-run value of PCEF into the present, Portland can ensure the existence of the fund, protect the promise it brings to frontline communities, and invest critical money when it matters most: now,” says the document.

But that idea is going nowhere because of the restrictions on the money, which could only be loosened by a vote of the Portland City Council. Schoene says no talks are scheduled to take any such action.

However, the bureau is still consulting stakeholders about the most effective way to battle the climate emergency, Schoene adds.

“We have shifted away from the original, draft proposal to one in which the city is working with industry [and] large institutions to directly invest in them,” she says, “plans that they have control over, with a shared goal to reduce carbon over time to the benefit of those most impacted by climate change and poor air quality.”

The city will open a 60-day public comment period on the proposal after Labor Day. Schoene says the policy that emerges is unlikely to come before the City Council for a hearing before December.

Collier says members of his association appreciate the city’s willingness to listen—but warns that the city’s search for money it doesn’t need could have unintended consequences.

“If you shun industry in Portland and send companies elsewhere, they are going to be even bigger emitters,” he says. “What you actually do with badly designed policy is increase emissions worldwide.”

BUILD THE LIFE YOU WANT FOR THE ONES YOU LOVE Kevin Holmquist welcomed a second son to his family while earning his degree at the Oregon Executive MBA in Portland. He also grew his professional purpose, moving to a new role in global financial strategy.

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Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

9

NEWS SAMUEL GEHRKE

ble effect on gun violence by doing things like addressing serious physical deterioration. Some of my work has looked at the effects of demolishing abandoned buildings in Detroit or improving the condition of vacant lots in Philadelphia and Flint, Michigan. In those cases, turning these really physically distressed places into simple, small parks had considerable effects, without increasing gentrification and without displacing crime and violence to nearby locations.

What kind of problems are you seeing when you drive around Portland?

Lack of parks and other community space. Places where neighbors can congregate and where kids can engage in programming. The preponderance of neighborhoods are physically designed for cars rather than for pedestrians.

And so there’s a lot of traffic—in the sense of people moving through—but not a strong sense of community control or neighborhood cohesion.

DESIGNED FOR DRIVE-BYS: Public safety experts believe East Portland’s car-centric design regularly facilitates violent encounters between members of rival gangs.

Finding the Deadliest Blocks

Portland safety officials believe an algorithm can pinpoint the city’s most dangerous places and make them safer.

BY AA RO N M E SH

amesh@wweek.com

By three measures, 2021 is already on its way to being the most violent year in Portland’s history.

The city is on pace to break its known annual records for homicides (70 in 1987) and traffic deaths (59 in 1996).

The city’s fire deaths—11 so far this year—could also challenge an all-time record: 26 in 1975. It is a bleak toll confronting Mike Myers, the former Portland and Las Vegas fire chief hired by the city in March to coordinate its public safety bureaus, which include police, firefighters and 911 dispatchers.

After starting his job, Myers soon noticed a pattern: Most of the deaths—by bullets, speeding cars or flames— are happening in the same places.

Portland’s violent deaths tend to recur in certain spots, Myers says, most of them east of 82nd Avenue. The intersections where Portlanders are hit by cars are often on the same streets where gunfire erupts.

“There are consistencies in where fire deaths occur, where gun violence occurs, and where pedestrians are getting hit,” Myers says. “Those consistencies are built environment—where your only shopping opportunities are a check-cashing store and a liquor store.”

To some extent, the overlap isn’t surprising. For years, WW and other media organizations have examined the unequal impact of violence on neighborhoods at the eastern outskirts of Portland, where low-income people of color have been shunted for decades.

But Myers goes further: He says city policies created streetscapes whose physical shape makes injury and death inevitable. And he says city investment can make these places safer.

That’s why Dr. Jonathan Jay journeyed to a Safeway parking lot on Aug. 12, looking at the expanse of pavement connecting a Rapid Cash outlet to a tobacco shop along the intersection of Powell and 122nd.

Jay, 38, studies urban health at the Boston University 10

Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

School of Public Health. He runs a project that analyzes crime data to reduce gun violence through environmental improvements—a fancy way of saying he spots the places in a city where shootings occur most often and tries to figure out what makes them prone to bloodshed.

“THE NEIGHBORHOODS SEEM TO BE DESIGNED MORE FOR CARS THAN FOR PEOPLE.” —JONATHAN JAY Last week, he toured deep Southeast and Northeast Portland with local experts assembled by Myers, who contracted Jay to tell the city where to invest American Rescue Plan dollars. (The city is expecting $208 million in ARPA funds.) They visited Mount Scott Park, drove up and down 82nd Avenue, and looked at strip malls in Powellhurst.

Jay listened to anecdotes from his tour guides. Now he plans to map violent deaths and use artificial intelligence to guide city investments in safety.

Last week, Jay spoke to WW by phone about what he’s seen and what his data programs can detect. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

WW: There’s a huge debate happening in Portland about whether we need more police intervention to reduce shootings. Do you think that infrastructure projects would reduce shootings?

Dr. Jonathan Jay: We have good evidence from multiple cities that improving the physical environment in urban settings can reduce gun violence. It’s a meaningful, dura-

I get how having highways run through neighborhoods would increase traffic deaths. But how does that increase shootings?

We want to see how well the data corroborates this. But one of the dynamics that we’re hearing about is: If you have a dispute with someone, either because of a group affiliation or just an interpersonal argument, you’ll see them in their car outside the mini-mart or you pass them in traffic as you drive. If a large majority of interactions are happening in out-of-control public spaces—like on roadways—one way to address it is to increase and improve the community spaces where people are better able to self-sort into spaces where they understand who’s going to be there.

Shootings are also occurring in community spaces.

Parks created to make East Portland a better place have turned into places where gang members gather in the evenings and shoot at each other. How would more parks fix that?

The solutions to problems that originate in infrastructure aren’t always infrastructure changes. The programming in parks can change the number of people who are in a place at a given time. Midnight basketball is kind of a classic example: The idea is that you’re bringing out community members to a place that otherwise might be unsafe, but because there’s so many, there’s safety in numbers and a stronger community feeling. The place becomes safer.

So what kind of data do you analyze?

These analyses are part of a broader project I’ve got called Shape-Up. It’s based on an algorithm I developed, which uses machine learning to look at aerial imagery and gun violence locations, and to identify high-priority locations based on the aspects of urban form that are visible in these photos—like green space, roadway layout, or vacant lots. Last year, we worked with Albany, New York, to use the algorithm to help decide which abandoned buildings they’ll demolish in the near future. We’ll run this algorithm for Portland in the coming weeks, but we’ll also analyze other factors.

Like what?

We’re looking at things like corner stores, strip clubs and liquor stores. It has sometimes been a matter of looking at zoning and where those kinds of stores will go. But sometimes it’s about empowering neighborhood organizations to exert more control over the spaces around them. It came up in our conversation this week that there was a particularly high concentration of strip clubs in Portland.

Strip clubs haven’t come up in my past research. But that may end up being a Portland-specific dynamic.

After the past two days in East Portland, what sticks out in your mind?

The neighborhoods seem to be designed more for cars than for people. And there’s a lot of people who live there.

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11

What quality does a parent need most right now? Our vote is for bravery.

Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported—in the sternest terms yet—that a degree of catastrophe due to global warming is now inevitable.

Even if world leaders somehow wrestled civilization onto a more sustainable track, we’re still looking at three decades of heat-strengthened hurricanes, drought, unprecedented forest fires, and other natural disasters.

Our Parents & Kids Issue may provide some comfort to parents troubled by this report—and other tools for coping with “Why are we raising kids in this world?” angst.

Frustrated by the lack of child-friendly attitudes in local environmental activism, families for saving the world’s climate started up their own nonprofit. After all, their children were a big reason why they were fighting for the future of the planet in the first place (page 13).

12

Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

How do local high schoolers feel about returning to school, given the rise of the Delta variant? We talked to some and they gave us their unvarnished truth (page 14).

You’ll want to take the edge off then, and our regular cannabis authority Brianna Wheeler has some recommendations for low-THC strains parents can lean on through this stressful back-to-school season (page 15).

Don’t overlook our story about a local mom who just wants to find an affordable grilled cheese for her daughter at a restaurant she still wants to hang out at (page 16) along with some perfectly brutal food reviews from the desk of a 14-year-old (page 17).

Raising children at the crossroads of a dire global climate crisis and a worldwide pandemic sounds like trying to climb two or more ladders at the same time—or trying to help your kid climb those ladders while you hold all of them still. So don’t forget to eat carbs.

—Suzette Smith, WW Arts & Culture Editor

MARITZA ARANGO

FAMILY AFFAIR: Three board members of Families for Climate at the July Pedalpalooza ride—from left to right, Maia Hixon, Leonard Barrett, and Noelle Studer-Spevak.

The environmental nonprofit Families for Climate doubles as a support group for parents and children as they face the grim realities of climate change.

BY S HA N N O N G O R M L EY

sgormley@wweek.com

Whenever Nora Lehmann takes her two kids out to Kelley Point Park, she fears environmental disaster.

Driving to and from the sunny banks of the Columbia River, she passes Zenith Energy’s Northwest Portland terminal and the train tracks it uses to transport crude oil through the city.

Zenith recently filed for permits to expand its Portland hub, a move that’s faced fierce opposition from environmental groups like Families for Climate, an environmental education and activism nonprofit focused on engaging kids and working around parents’ busy schedules.

As board co-president and a founding member of Families for Climate, Lehmann has helped organize letter-writing campaigns to the Portland City Council, urging commissioners to block Zenith’s expansion.

She fears the oil hub could cause an ecological catastrophe, whether it’s a massive spill from an earthquake or a train car derailing—like the Union Pacific train derailment that ignited a massive oil fire near Mosier in 2016, or the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster in 2013 that destroyed a small town near Quebec.

“From an immediate safety perspective, it’s really shocking,” says Lehman. “It’s a dereliction of duty by the City Council to protect city residents. And on a larger, global scale of having this fracked oil being exported and burned, it’s an environmental crime.”

Families for Climate aims to combat not only the transport of fossil fuels, but also the feelings of helplessness and dread that come with raising kids in a world that could be hurtling toward self-destruction.

The environmental nonprofit doubles as a support group—both for parents who’d otherwise have little time for activism due to busy schedules and kids who are growing up at a critical point in the fight against climate change.

Lehmann and the other founding members realized there was a need for a family-focused group in the fall of

2019, after they ran the child care section for the Portland arm of the Global Climate Strike.

In Portland, there are plenty of environmental nonprofits, but none that cater specifically to families.

“You’re so booked as a parent with school, day care, the commute, shopping, cooking, cleaning, bedtime, bathtime,” says Lehmann. “The thought of another meeting where you can’t bring your kid and you have to get a babysitter—no one’s going to do it.”

Families for Climate hosted its first meeting shortly after the climate strike, at a community center in Northeast. The parents met in one room to discuss their ideas.

Child care was offered in an adjoining room.

There was a clear understanding that if someone’s kid ran into the meeting room throwing a tantrum, no one was going to roll their eyes—after all, everyone else there was a parent, too.

Dozens of families showed up, many of whom became emotional during the introductions.

“Parenting young children in particular can feel really isolating,” says Noelle Studer-Spevak, Families for Climate’s board secretary. “This was an opportunity to come out and be with other people” In 2020, Families for Climate became a registered nonprofit. Immediately after, the pandemic hit.

The coronavirus increased feelings of isolation and decreased free time for parents, especially those juggling work from home and their children’s online learning schedules.

But after a two-month break, Families for Climate’s members decided to find a way to fit meetings and activism back into their schedules. They shifted to virtual meetings and webinars about local climate policies, how to talk to kids about climate change, and dealing with eco-anxiety as a parent.

Climate Defender Kids, initially the child care section during in-person meetings, moved online too. Now Climate Defender Kids offers monthly environmental Zoom learning sessions geared to ages 5 to 12. Past topics have

included the respiration cycle of trees, how to grow plants, and music as a form of activism.

Though the group organizes around specific policies, Families for Climate is first and foremost an educational resource for parents and kids. But it can be a tricky balance between fostering a sense of hope and agency and overburdening kids with the fate of the world.

“You don’t want them to be feeling a heavy responsibility and burden before they’re ready to take that on,” says Studer-Spevak. “We’re just mostly talking about how the world works, being curious about nature, and using their growing minds to observe what’s going on around them.”

Last month, Families for Climate hosted one of its first in-person Climate Defender Kids events since the pandemic. As a part of Pedalpalooza—a three-month series of guided bike rides and events this year—kids were encouraged to wear superhero capes and masks for a short ride down a neighborhood greenway to the King Farmers Market. Another Climate Defender Kids bike ride is scheduled this Saturday, Aug. 21.

Still, the pandemic has put a limit on how much Families for Climate can do.

For Lehmann and Studer-Spevak, the inability to safely hold in-person events has been particularly frustrating. In addition to write-in and call-in campaigns to urge the City Council to disallow the Zenith Energy expansion, they’d also be organizing in-person marches and demonstrations if it weren’t for the rise of the Delta variant.

“I’ve been trying to think of what we can do, as families, as an action against the Zenith expansion,” says Studer-Spevak “It seems like we need something more visible.

Hopefully, we can turn the tide this month.”

But even while members can’t meet in person, having a group she can go to with some new, terrifying report about the future of our climate has been crucial for Lehmann.

“Knowing that there are people you can call and say ‘What are we doing?’” she says, “is a really powerful antidote to that helpless, sick feeling.”

Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

13

MORGAN TROPER

Three high school students in Portland Public Schools share their thoughts on returning to in-person instruction.

BY M O T R O P E R

@mo_troper

For K-12 students in Portland Public Schools, Sept. 1 marks the beginning of the 2021-22 academic year.

After more than a year of schools experimenting with alternative models—fully remote and then hybrid learning—students are now, in most cases, expected to return to class.

In an effort to reduce transmission of the coronavirus, PPS will be adopting what it calls its “Swiss cheese model” of “Layered Health and Safety Measures Against COVID-19.” This includes a mask mandate except during outdoor activities, routine cleaning and disinfecting of all surfaces, robust air filtration in school buildings, and promoting—though not requiring—vaccination of students 12 and up.

Willamette Week spoke to three PPS high schoolers about their expectations for the coming school year. Not surprisingly, their feelings on returning to an in-person setting were mixed: excitement over the prospect of socializing with their friends, but anxiety about the Delta variant and the possibility of future lockdowns.

Larsen Raddle, 18, second-year senior at Leodis McDaniel High School What has the last year or so of school been like?

I took summer school this summer, and I passed that a couple of weeks ago.

Some of my senior year before that was hybrid. Going back is supposed to be all in person, but I don’t really know right now, because of Delta COVID. Have you been looking forward to returning to school this year?

I like the idea of everyone going back to school in person, but I feel like it’s not really the right time with the new variant. If they’re going to have everyone back in public school, you should at least be fully vaccinated before you can go.

Do you know anyone who has contracted COVID? Not anyone who went to school with me. My dad had the first variant, but it didn’t really affect him that much, and he was vaccinated. My mom just recently got the new variant, and she’s vaccinated. I don’t live with either of them.

Is there anything the school district could do to make you feel better about returning to school?

I would feel the safest going back to something like hybrid or even online.

14

Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

Declan Bilotta, 15, sophomore at Grant High School What has the last year or so of school been like?

With remote learning, we obviously didn’t get to see much more than the computer screen. Then, moving into hybrid learning, I was still a little skeptical, because it was still such a big problem back then. My brother actually stayed remote, but I went into hybrid because I thrive more in a social environment. I got to meet some of my classmates and, overall, I felt like that was a safe environment. But now, this year, I feel a little more unsafe going back because of the Delta variant.

Have you been looking forward to returning to school this year?

When the school year ended last year, I had been a little bit excited for the summer to end so that I could actually go back to school. I made some plans for what I’d be doing this year—I had plans to start a club, I had plans to join the choir. And I’m not going to abort those plans, but when I heard the Delta variant was spreading very quickly, there was a bit of trepidation, because I was thinking, “OK, we have this new strain of the virus.” There was this reality check for me. It was this moment when I thought, “Not again…”

Do you know anyone who has contracted COVID? I know of people who have been ill in the past year. I don’t know, and I also know they don’t know, if it was COVID. My family, very, very early before COVID hit the USA, came down with something very bad. We don’t know if that was COVID, we didn’t get tested. We didn’t know it was moving through the country.

What would you say are the best- and worst-case scenarios for this coming school year?

Best-case scenario: We go to school with masks, everyone’s vaccinated, we get through the whole school year, no one gets sick, and no one dies—just go through the year normally with face coverings. Worst-case scenario: The Delta variant gets into the school. The vaccinations aren’t effective. Possibly people die. And we go back to distance learning. Chaos unfolds.

Danny Cage, 17, junior at Grant High School What has the last year or so of school been like?

At the start of COVID, it was really lonely. There was no one to really interact with. The hardest thing was not being able to ask the teacher—even if I asked the teacher, I didn’t feel like I was really interacting with the teacher.

I just got really distracted.

We have all these variants that are popping out…every three weeks [laughs]. When we went to hybrid, they were only half days, so they didn’t do lunch.

There’s no plan yet in PPS for what lunch [will look like]. And that’s something I want to know. Are we not going to eat? There’s no way to, like, slip a piece of pizza under your mask. Kids are going to have to take off their masks to eat.

Do you know anyone who contracted COVID? I know two people, but they didn’t get sick. They just tested positive, but that was before the new strains. I know one person who got sick with the Delta variant, and they just got vaccinated.

Is there anything Portland Public Schools could do to make you feel better about returning to school?

A lot of kids failed a whole bunch of different subjects. Giving people that time to make up that credit in the off time or during the summer, or giving an online option. A lot of PPS schools are really resistant to online options to make up credits and stuff like that— as if their curriculum is the only adequate curriculum!

Pennywise,

less than 10% THC For the more advanced consumer, Pennywise is a balanced, 1-to-1 CBD-to-THC cultivar bred from the therapeutic strain Harlequin and the invigorating sativa strain Jack the Ripper. The resulting flowers typically sport 10 mg each of THC and CBD per dose, leaving users with a tempered euphoria that seems to smother anxiety, PTSD and physical tension as well as treat certain neurological disorders. Most users find this to be a superb strain for daytime management of their stressiest symptoms, calming them without sedation and energizing them without manic intensity.

These sugary buds have a sweet, citrusy perfume with a spicy, earthy undertone. Expect a floral, woody mouthfeel and a grassy, botanical exhale.

Six low-THC cultivars to get you through the year’s scholastic stresses.

BY BR I A N N A W H E E LER

For some of us, shuffling our children off to school was anxiety-inducing enough before the pandemic. Add climate crises, virus variants, and an increasingly volatile commonwealth and, woof, that anxiety intensifies to impressive new levels.

Even if pothead parenting isn’t your preference, modern hemp and cannabis are fantastic tools to have in your parenting tool box—for reasons more complex than stress management or trying to parent through news-cycle-induced junk sleep.

When keeping a level head for the sake of my child is essential, CBD-forward or 1-to-1 THC-to-CBD cannabis cultivars—in the form of a dropperful

In the Pines,

of tincture, a single puff, or a teensy edible—can be an enormous mood support.

More than that, CBD helps replace the aforementioned junk sleep with restful, restorative slumber.

Many contemporary cannabis phenotypes are cultivated for more than just astronomical highs or therapeutic efficacy. In fact, some flowers feel as if they were bred especially for apocalypse parenting on a public school schedule— which is to say, their profiles make for a plant that’s mood-altering enough to deepen your parental well of patience and medicinal enough to keep that well full.

Here are a few of our favorite, parent-friendly, low-THC cultivars:

Special Sauce,

less than 5% THC

less than 1% THC

A buzzy sativa strain with an entourage effect that a wide swath of users describe as creatively inspiring, In the Pines has a CBD -forward profile supported by relaxing myrcene, pain-killing caryophyllene, and chest-clearing ocimene. Together, these elements not only seem to quell anxiety and nervousness, they galvanize users to open their minds and get expressive, which is itself an awesome therapeutic approach to handling anxiety and stress.

Expect a heavy pine aroma and resinous, verdant mouthfeel.

The exhale is a grassy bronchodilator that lingers in the chest and throat.

Special Sauce is a CBD-forward strain that users celebrate for its non-psychoactive, calming, sleep-supporting effects. This is the nug to smoke the night before a stressful, first-day-of-school morning. The strain’s myrceneheavy terpene profile is mildly sedative without being obtrusively energy draining, and the balance of cannabinoids keeps users clearheaded and relaxed enough to tie up any pre-homeroom loose ends before falling into bed and sleeping through the night.

The dense, sticky buds make for robust concentrates and extracts, as well as a slow-burning bowl or roll of satisfyingly familiar skunk. Expect an earthy mouthfeel and a grassy, peppery exhale.

Get it from: Gram Central Station, 6430 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 503-284-6714.

Get it from: Plane Jane’s, 10530 NE Simpson St., 971-255-0999, planejanesdispensary.com.

Get it from: Green Muse, 5515 NE 16th Ave., 971-420-4917, gogreenmuse.com.

CBD Blue Shark, less than 7% THC

Another strain cultivated for a balanced tableau of cannabinoids is CBD Blue Shark, which, despite its name, features a 1-to-1 ratio of THC and CBD. This cross of classic therapy strain CBD Shark and deep stoner fave Blue Cheese highlights attractive features of each parent, including powerful inflammation and nervepain relief and a mellow, rose-tinted euphoria that massages away anxiety and stress in just a few puffs.

CBD Blue Shark has a complex perfume of fresh cut flowers, ripe, juicy berries, and offensively stank cheese. Expect a mouthfeel that’s equally challenging and a thick, lingering skunky exhale.

Get it from: Mind Rite, 1780 NW Marshall St., 503-477-4430, mindritepdx.com.

Sweet and Sour Widow,

less than 5% THC Novice smokers still exploring their response to THC might enjoy Sweet and Sour Widow’s 2-to-1 CBD -to-THC ratio, which allows for psychotropics mild enough to soothe even first-time users into a manageable, clearheaded bliss. Sweet and Sour Widow is a White Widow derivative, cultivated with specific sativa CBD genetics to enhance the therapeutic benefits without suffocating this strain’s gentle recreational head high. Though its genetics are indica forward, users report this strain as being responsive enough for daytime or evening use.

Expect a—no joke—sweet onion perfume to precede a commensurate oniony exhale.

Get it from: Electric Lettuce, 2026 NE Sandy Blvd., 971-544-7241, electriclettuce.com.

Cali Mandarina, less than 10% THC

Consumers who prefer a lower THC percentage but not at the sacrifice of efficacy may enjoy Cali Mandarina, a citrusy hybrid strain with a 1-to-1 ratio of THC and CBD. The cannabinoids that make up this strain’s profile have sativa genetics, but users report this strain’s anxiety-quelling properties are both soothing and revitalizing. The tempered buzz makes this cultivar an excellent choice for daytime use, especially on those especially extra-stressful days when your parental anxiety has parental anxiety.

Get it from: Mongoose Cannabis Co., 3123 SE Belmont St., 541-933-8032, mongoosecannabis.com.

Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

15

Five fun places for families to dine out that won’t charge $20 for a grilled cheese sandwich.

BY E LI NO R JO NE S

@elinorjoneser

Before I was a parent, I scoffed at kids’ menus in cool restaurants. Why expect kids’ options when families could just go to—I don’t know—Shari’s?

Well, I am the first to admit that most of the things I thought about parenting, before I was one, were wrong.

For my family, finding a place that has good food and drinks for adults as well as a kids’ menu grilled cheese with french fries is one of our true joys.

Grilled cheese and french fries is the perfect dining-out kid dinner option for many reasons: At its most basic, it is in the tan-to-light brown food color family that kids demand. Also important: Grilled cheese sandwiches are

generally not served at molten-lava temperatures, unlike fish sticks or chicken strips.

Have you ever tried explaining to a wily child that— although they are hungry and have food in front of them— they may not touch their food yet because it’s too hot?

Doesn’t work.

Grilled cheese and fries have worked their way symbiotically into my life because now most of my dining-out meals consist of a fancy salad, two cocktails, approximately five french fries, and the crust of a grilled-cheese sandwich—served in an environment where my kid will feel welcome but I can still feel like a human woman. Friends, parents and friends of parents, I would like to share with you my five favorite places that meet this specific criterion.

The Observatory 8115 SE Stark St., 503-445-6284, theobservatorypdx. com. 11 am-11 pm daily.

I didn’t even know you could take kids to the Observatory, until I had one. It turns out it even has crayons. And guess what else it has? Cocktails, salads and all sorts of other fancy bar foods—including a truly excellent cheese board, aka grown-up snack plates—and the crucial grilled cheese with fries.

Bonus points: The Observatory turns out food and drinks pretty quickly, which is perfect because dinner with a child is ideally chill but never leisurely.

Killer Burger Multiple locations, killerburger.com.

Tabor Tavern 5325 E Burnside St., 503-208-3544, tabortavern.com. 11:30 am-9:30 pm Sunday-Thursday, 11:30 am-10 pm Friday-Saturday.

This casual, bustling neighborhood joint always miraculously has at least one table available whenever we roll up. Its adult menu is exceptional pub grub: a perfect beet salad (with quinoa and pepitas) and a fried chicken sando that my partner orders every time and will not shut up about. It also has a small kids’ menu, which includes the coveted grilled cheese and fries for $7. Hell yes! Tabor Tavern is perfect for cool families, although a passerby would hardly even know it, which is the ideal aesthetic.

My daughter went through a phase where she would request a cheeseburger but then refuse to eat it when it arrived because she didn’t like the hamburger part. Eventually, we figured out that, to her, “cheeseburger” meant “melted cheese on a hamburger bun.” And guess what— Killer Burger serves precisely this sandwich for children! Thank you, Killer Burger, for offering gigantic, decked-out burgers for adults and also for not making me order a “normal burger, hold everything but the cheese” for my child. Six dollars gets you that and fries!

Laurelwood Brew Pub 5115 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-282-0622, laurelwoodbrewpub.com. 11 am-9 pm Thursday-Saturday, 11 am-9 pm Sunday-Wednesday.

Laurelwood’s kid-friendly ways aren’t a secret, by any means, but I must include it. It really does know what it’s doing, and it does it well! In the Venn diagram of “for families” and “for grown-ups,” Laurelwood is the place with the biggest overlapping middle part. It has a legit, pagelong kids’ menu— though clearly I can forget about all of it, aside from that essential GC&F. It also possesses a spaciously arranged dining room with plenty of room to give families like mine a wide berth. While obviously my child is polite and delightful, I do understand that not everybody “likes” “children.”

Migration Brewing 2828 NE Glisan St., 503-206-5221, migrationbrewing.com. 11 am-10 pm daily.

The upside of Migration Brewing is its award-winning beers. The downside is that you have to order at a counter, which doesn’t always work with a kid.

However, so long as you go with another adult who can pin down the little one(s) while one grownup is ordering at the counter, Migration is delightful as all get out. Note: The kids’ grilled cheese here actually comes with tortilla chips instead of fries. No biggie—I am fine eating five of those, too.

Epilogue: Over the course of my researching this piece, my daughter decided she no longer likes grilled cheese sandwiches.

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Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

A 14-year-old goes HAM on some macaroni and cheese reviews.

BY S I MON HA M, 14 YEA R S OLD

In keeping with the Kids Issue mission to platform the dreams and anxieties of today’s youth, we asked Simon Ham—son of local critic Robert Ham—to write some reviews. As he is an avid reader and Star Wars obsessive, we thought he might want to review something related to pop culture. It turns out Ham the younger had some very strong views on store-bought macaroni and cheese.

BOXED VARIETIES

THE FROZEN APPROACH

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese

Michelina’s Macaroni & Cheese Bake

6.5 out of 10

3 out of 10

This review will make a lot of 30-year-olds mad. I thought this macaroni and cheese was just OK. However, it’s still the second-best one on this list, which shows you how bad the others get. Kraft is creamy and would be the best on this list, if not for one thing: the flavor. It is very tangy and there’s not much to it. The cheese is supposed to carry the flavor, which will be a big problem as you will be well aware of soon. Other than the flavor, this is a very good macaroni and cheese.

Annie’s Classic Mild Cheddar Macaroni & Cheese

You might notice a problem already. MILD CHED DAR!? That’s blasphemy on the scale of Pope John XII. This is a boring and frankly bad mac and cheese. As I’m sure you could figure out before I said it, this mac and cheese has almost no flavor to it because it is mild cheddar. As with Kraft, the cheese is supposed to carry the flavor, but in this brand there’s almost no flavor.

On top of that, the packaging is a falsehood—as the pasta itself looks nothing like what’s on the box. Overall, this is a mild macaroni and cheese for mild people.

3 out of 10

Cheetos Mac ’n Cheese

Sometimes science goes too far. And it sure as beans did with this devil’s brew, as Cheetos Mac ’n Cheese is the second-worst food I’ve ever had. I feel sick to my stomach thinking about it.

Let’s go through this step by step, alright? First off, the smell. It smells as if Cheetos was both sour and moldy and was made entirely out of blue cheese. For some unholy reason the higher-ups at Cheetos—that’s right, I’m calling you out—decided to put blue cheese in this witches’ broth. Now on to the taste. Right out of the batter’s box, this might be one of the most synthetic-tasting things I’ve ever tasted. AND IT ACTUALLY TASTES LIKE CHEETOS! It tastes like Cheetos but if Cheetos was made with moldy extra-sharp cheddar.

No one should ever eat this devil’s sacrifice ever again.

Michelina’s Macaroni & Cheese Bake macaroni and cheese is almost a carbon copy of Annie’s, except it’s frozen. That little bit of difference makes the pasta mushy. Unlike Kraft, which has a weird flavor, this has almost no flavor! The pasta itself is intrusive and not very awesome-pants. This macaroni and cheese is very, very mediocre, but it’ll work if it’s 10 pm and there’s nothing else to eat because everything is sold out.

Stouffer’s Macaroni & Cheese

Quite good. Stouffer’s Macaroni & Cheese actually beats out Kraft, which surprised me a lot as I thought the frozen dishes were going to be the worst ones.

Let’s talk about the taste in full, as I think it deserves it: The pasta, thank God, does not include any flavor or intrude into the cheese in any way, which is how it’s supposed to be. The sauce—which is the mainstay of macaroni and cheese and should always be—is creamy, thick and something close to a sauce, which hasn’t happened for anything else up to this point on the list. Stouffer’s was a very good meal, the best one on this list.

7 out of 10

Banquet Mac & Cheese Meal

Coming off of that high note, you would think I would’ve picked a good meal to close with. NOPE! This one is very bad. The cheese tastes like athlete’s foot and—as I’ve stated before—the pasta is supposed to hold the dish together, not add any extra flavor.

Overall, Banquet Mac & Cheese Meal has bad cheese sauce, and not much else going for it.

2 out of 10

0 out of 10

Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

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STREET DOWNTOWN AND FARTHER OUT Photos by Chris Nesseth On Instagram: @chrisnesseth

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Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

Over the course of a weekend, Portlanders learned to roller skate (or showed off their tricks!) at the Brown Girl Rise Skate Hang, kept cool at Saturday Market, bought sunflowers bigger than their heads at Lee Farms, and demonstrated their concern for the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

CARS

WARBIRDS & JETS

RV CAMPING

MUSIC

tics AeroTHbEaSKY

FIREWORKS

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Music b

IN

PRECIOUS BYRD

Coming to

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You can now shop online, or book an appointment to visit for fine antique and custom jewelry, or for repair work. We also buy.

Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

19

STARTERS

• •••• ••••

A T R E A LRBO S ER E T •••• A E H T

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

J U S T I N YA U

CHRIS NESSETH

SEPT 10 + 11

JIMMY DORE SHOW

Wildfire smoke from the Middle Fork and Bull complex fires blocks the sun and knocks a degree or two off the heat.

political comedy SEPT 15

BFF podcast gone wild

SEPT 16

CHRIS NESSETH

THIS MIGHT GET WEIRD

Italian marketplace Cooperativa welcomes visitors to its 5,000-square-foot market, cafe, pastaria-pizzeria, gelato outlet and bar for the first time since the pandemic.

NPR radio show

SEPT 17

the high priestess of cabaret

RIZO

…and Chinook Winds Casino in Lincoln City closes through at least Aug. 25, citing outbreaks of the Delta variant.

IN THE FLESH

with special guest Jet Black Pearl

The Los Angeles Times reviews six Portland restaurants, ensuring you’ll no longer be able to get a table at those restaurants.

DUFFY BISHOP

one night only!

SEPT 21 SEPT 25

SEPT 29

SEPT 30 blues rock guitarist

RUTHIE FOSTER

TOO SLIM & THE TAILDRAGGERS

+

+ Tevis Hodge Jr.

OCT 2

Mary Flower

OCT 3

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality issues a “moderate” air quality advisory for the Willamette Valley.

ALEX WITTWER

award-winning acoustic blues

Yeast-forward craft brewers Little Beast announce they’re opening a taproom off Highway 212 in Clackamas, welcome news to recreationalists.

DARRELL SCOTT

stand-up comedy

with special guest Gary Ogan

UPCOMING SHOWS

•••••••••••••

10/7 • BOOKER T. JONES | 10/8 • TONY STARLIGHT 10/9 • JOHN PRINE TRIBUTE | 10/10 • TOM WAITS TRIBUTE 10/12 • THE DEAD DAISIES |10/22 • BOOKLOVER’S BURLESQUE

•••••

albertarosetheatre.com

3000 NE Alberta • 503.764.4131 Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

WESLEY LAPOINTE

PETE CORREALE

With 100-degree days in the forecast, Tillamook State Forest and Siuslaw and Willamette national forests ban all campfires and motorized vehicles on unpaved roads to reduce the risk of wildfire.

J U S T I N YA U

genius Americana songwriter

JOE MICHAEL RIEDL

OREGON BURLESQUE FESTIVAL

NW favorite blues diva SEPT 24

AWFUL

Hawaiian supergroup

Nina Simone tribute

D A N I E L M A R K O YA

I PUT A SPELL ON YOU

AWESOME

SEPT 18

20

Organizers of the new Westside Beer Fest cancel a little more than a week after announcing the event…

Ahead of last week’s forecasted 105-degree heat wave, the city of Portland and Multnomah County declare a state of emergency.

SERIOUS

Two hip-hop artists and cousins of ODB of the Wu-Tang Clan—David Turner, aka Murdock, and Odion Turner, aka 12 O’Clock—are fatally shot in Northeast Portland.

GET BUSY

STUFF TO DO IN PORTLAND THIS WEEK, INDOORS AND OUT.

LAURA GLAZER

GO | Multnomah Days The quaint hamlet of Multnomah Village is only a five-minute drive from downtown Portland, but once you’re there, it feels as if you’re 50 miles from the city’s core. Many of the century-old brick buildings are still intact and house just about every small-town business you could possibly need or want, including an independent bookstore, charming boutiques, diners and dive bars, and even a Lucky Labrador Public House operating out of a former Freemasons lodge. The neighborhood really comes to life during this annual summer celebration, which returns in full force this year after COVID canceled the festivities in 2020. You can expect over 100 vendor booths, food carts, a stage for live music and, in general, a pervasive sense of cuteness that actually isn’t annoying. Southwest Capitol Highway between the bridge on Garden Home Road and 31st Avenue, multnomahvillage.org.

9 am-5 pm Saturday, Aug. 21. Free.

⚯

Crawfish & Cornhole There comes a time every August when you begin to feel as though summer has overstayed its welcome. All you want to do is get the hell out of the city and the concrete, the sun-baked stench, and the crush of sweaty bodies. Thankfully, 80 acres of botanical beauty is just about an hour away.

The Oregon Garden is always an invigorating venue for a stroll thanks to its 20 specialty plots that all have different themes.

But if you can make it out there for an event, even better—this new gathering features a crawfish boil, beer from nearby Silver Falls Brewery, and live music from the Shed Stage, an outbuilding that was newly renovated for this year’s summer concert series. Bring a friend and challenge them to cornhole before retiring to your room in the on-property resort. Oregon Garden Resort, 895 W Main St., Silverton, 503-874-2500, oregongardenresort.com. 4:30 pm Tuesday, Aug. 24. Concert only $25, concert and dinner $40, overnight packages start at $239.

SEE | Suspiria When an American ballet dancer transfers to a prestigious academy in Germany, she begins to suspect the school’s administration may be supernaturally sinister after a series of gruesome deaths. Featuring vibrantly colored production design and an unforgettable prog-rock score by Goblin, this 1977 Italian horror staple begs to be viewed on the big screen. Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 7:30 pm Tuesday, Aug. 24. $8-$10.

SAM GEHRKE

SEE | Agnès Varda Forever Festival Back in spring, local artists Laura Glazer and Jennifer “JJ” Jones decided to put up posters around Portland with the words “Agnès Varda Forever” and pull tabs with names of the iconic French New Wave director’s films. The project took off better than the pair ever expected: The term “Agnès Varda” saw a dramatic spike in searches here in Oregon, friends and strangers began putting up posters in other cities, and news even reached the pioneering director’s daughter, Rosalie Varda.

Now, the project has led to a film festival, too.

Starting this week, Clinton Street Theater will hosts the Agnès Varda Forever Festival—screenings of five of Varda’s films, curated by Glazer and Jones.

It kicks off with Varda’s life-affirming classic Cléo From 5 to 7, which follows a singer in Paris for the two hours leading up to a biopsy result. Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St., cstpdx.com. 7 pm Thursday, Aug. 19. Festival continues through Aug. 31. $8 per screening, $35 for all five.

READ | Summer Park Reading Series Future Tense’s Summer Reading Series returns for another outdoor session with a trio of local writers. This time, Chris Stuck’s Give My Love to the Savages takes center stage. Recently published by HarperCollins’ Amistad imprint, Stuck’s short story collection tells of the life of a Black man, centered on every time someone lobbed a particularly virulent racial slur—that we won’t print here. Kimberly King Parsons (Black Light) and Genevieve Hudson (Pretend We Live Here) will also read. Books will be available for purchase. Irving Park, 707 NE Fremont St., futuretensebooks.com. 7 pm Saturday, Aug. 21. Free.

☛ DO |

☛ DO |

Portland Hip-Hop Week Portland Hip-Hop Week has undergone many changes since it was founded six years ago.

Originally Portland Hip-Hop Day, the celebration of local hip-hop became a weeklong festival in 2019 and, for the past two years, has built its schedule from a long list of community-submitted events.

After its first virtual year, Hip-Hop Week returns to a slightly more centralized schedule, with one or two events every day for a week—from mixtape release shows to a producer showcase and an awards ceremony. The kickoff event is a special edition of the long-standing hip-hop showcase Mic Check, headlined by the Boom Bap Project, celebrating the release of their first album in 15 years. See pdxhiphopweek.com for full schedule. Aug. 20-28.

SEE | Nick Cave Night Local author, DJ and—full disclosure—occasional WW contributor Santi Elijah Holley reads from his 33 1/3 series book Murder Ballads, which takes a deep dive into the making of Nick Cave’s album of the same name and the long trajectory of myths behind the ballads Cave and the Bad Seeds drew from. Holley is accompanied by an impressive roster of musicians paying homage to the record: Amy Bleu, Annie Vergnetti, Barret C. Stolte, Complimentary Colors and more. Although Kenton Club recently announced that it has discontinued indoor shows, this event was always planned for the patio. Kenton Club, 2025 N Kilpatrick St., kentonclub.com. 6 pm Saturday, Aug. 21. $10. 21+.

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21

FOOD & DRINK

feature

All Is Full of Tea Smith Teamaker cafe incorporates tea into colorful lattes, aromatic mocktails, baked goods—even sandwiches.

BY J E N N I M O O R E

@ J e n n i fe r Kay M o

The vibe in a tea shop—and in a Smith Teamaker tea shop in particular—differs greatly from that in a coffee shop. For one thing, it’s not so loud. There’s no coffee grinder abruptly roaring to life, no frantic drink names called over blending frappucinos.

Instead, there’s merely the murmur of bar staff talking tea.

Stacked tins rest next to various brewing systems that line the wall. Cushioned stools trace the tea bar’s long counter. The loudest thing in the room is a quote on the wall from Steven Smith, which reads, “The perfect cup of tea is one shared with others.”

Located on the corner of Northwest 23rd Avenue and Glisan Street, the first-ever Smith Teamaker cafe opened in May—long after its namesake rose tumultuously through the Portland tea market to iconic status.

Smith co-founded Portland-area point of pride Stash Tea in 1972. In 1994, he created Tazo Tea Company, which he eventually sold to Starbucks.

Despite retiring at age 57 and moving his family to France, Smith returned to Portland two years later with the idea of starting yet another tea business—this time focused on extra-small-batch, high-quality teas. Sadly, Smith died of liver cancer in 2015, but his legacy of treasuring something as meaningful and simple as the ritual surrounding a good cup of tea has surged on. The cafe serves 30 kinds of hot tea, but the curious come in for colorful lattes and aromatic tea mocktails.

The Golden Light Latte is a major favorite and can be served iced or hot. It’s made by pulling Smith Golden Light tea—with turmeric, sarsaparilla root, and black pepper—through an espresso (or “teapresso”) machine, then adding maple syrup and dousing the blend with oat milk. The result is a beautiful, complex, sweet and softly spiced drink that goes mind-bendingly well with one of the pastry case’s sea salt-sprinkled miso-peanut butter cookies.

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Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

Even the cafe’s more filling food items incorporate tea into the recipes. The Garden Sandwich, for instance, slices beets roasted in floral jasmine tea and piles them high on spelt bread with tea kimchi, cucumber, sprouts, herbs, White Petal tea-infused cheese, and avocado.

This intentional tea touch was designed by chef Karl Holl, who wanted the cafe menu to go easy on the earth while showcasing how much could be done with plants. The menu is entirely vegetarian and offers gluten-free and vegan options.

Holl also sought to incorporate plants and fruits from Oregon. The shop’s thumbprint cookie uses just the right amount of jam made from Oregon berries.

Similarly, a partnership with bakery Grano led to a chocolate chip cookie that makes unique use of lavender tea.

One of the best things about Smith Teamaker is that one can stop in to grab a special tea drink, read a chapter of a book, and then end up leaving with several pouches of tea, matcha and bottled masala chai to enjoy at home.

The staff aren’t hiding any trade secrets. They’re happy to instruct customers on how to make home versions of their favorite café drinks.

For a home version of the Golden Light, add some honey or maple syrup to a glass measuring cup. Then add tea bags. Pour in just enough hot water to cover the tea bags; then pour that mixture into another cup filled with ice. Finally, add a milk of your choice to taste.

It’s hard to come by a cafe open past 4 pm these days, since COVID zapped a lot of local businesses’ ability to fully staff their operations. So Smith’s hours—open until 6 pm!—are something of a pandemic luxury. The only thing not so ideal about the new Smith Teamaker cafe is the sometimes lengthy search for a parking spot on Northwest 23rd.

DRINK: Smith Teamaker, 500 NW 23rd Ave., 503-206-745, smithtea.com. 9 am-6 pm daily.

AARON LEE

AARON LEE

MAR • 68

Proudly serving Portland since 1946 We’ve been through a lot these past 75 years, a couple of fires, a changing Portland landscape. But we’re still a Portland grown, family owned business. And proud of it.

(503) 252-4171 • 10519 SE Stark St • saylers.com

Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

23

VISUAL ARTS

FOOD & DRINK shade of pink thanks to the bar’s own pinot noir grenadine, and a tingly lemon concoction called the Bees Knees, which tastes like a Sprite spiked with honey.

BUZZ LIST

Where to drink this week.

3. Tope

AARON LEE

1. Lolo Pass

1616 E Burnside St., 503-908-3074, lolopasspdx. com. Coffee 7 am-2 pm, cocktails 4-10 pm daily.

Lolo Pass’ open floor plan lobby is a fine place to start or end a night, but the hostel-like hotel’s main attraction is the fifth-floor rooftop, which features a fire pit, a communal guitar, its own bar and no shortage of socially distant seating arrangements. The vantage offers a unique view of downtown and the Central Eastside, with everything from Big Pink to Buckman Field visible on the scenic smorgasbord. Lolo’s house cocktails trend toward sweet and fruity, as evidenced in the pineapple-infused old fashioned, the unmuddled schnapps in the Teaches of Peaches Sex on the Beach, and the pamplemousse and aperol of the metropolitan but off-cycle Gemini SZN.

2. Botanist

910 NW 14th Ave., 971-533-8064, botanisthouse. com. 4-10 pm Wednesday-Thursday, 10 am-2 pm and 4-10:30 pm Friday-Saturday, 10 am-2 pm Sunday.

When Botanist’s original subterranean location appeared too cramped to safely host customers during the pandemic, its owners moved the operation to the prime real estate once occupied by the perennially disappointing On Deck Sports Bar. Though it can only be seen from the second story, the view of neighboring condos at dusk under twinkling string lights is pretty well perfect. Look for even more delight in Botanist’s lineup of mixed drinks, like the Triple G Mule that’s an unusual

TOP 5

HOT PLATES Where to eat this week.

1. Birrieria PDX

2. Sari Ramyun

2713 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-841-5149, sari.smartonlineorder.com. 11 am-8 pm Sunday-Thursday, 11 am-9 pm Saturday-Sunday.

Typically, the phrase “ramyun” refers in Korea to instant noodles, the peninsular answer to Top Ramen. But chef Tommy Shin’s stall in the Zipper food court specializes in a chicken noodle soup— well, technically chicken and beef broth, with meltin-your-mouth brisket slices floating on top. This is a heretical opinion, given the proximity of Basilisk, but Sari makes the best chicken in the Zipper.

3. Magna

2525 SE Clinton St., 503-395-8542, magnapdx.com.

5-9 pm Thursday-Saturday.

It’s past time for a food city like Portland to have its own great Filipino restaurant, and one year ago, we got one. Chef Carlo Lamagna’s dishes are both intimately familiar and achingly cool, with show-

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Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

15 NW 4th Ave., 503-770-0500, thehoxton.com/ portland/tope-restaurant. 4-11 pm Thursday-Friday, 11 am-11 pm Saturday-Sunday.

While Tope is only a short elevator ride nine stories up in the Hoxton Hotel, once you arrive, it feels as though you’ve traveled much farther.

Having shed the grit of Old Town-Chinatown at the ground-level entrance, the swanky taco bar almost seems to exist in its own immunity bubble.

Breezy beige wicker chairs and sofa sets along with tropical cocktails like the Opening Day—a swirl of citrus, vanilla and coconut—create a poolside vibe. Even though there is no water to admire, a clear blue sky isn’t a bad substitute, particularly on a day when you can see the crown of Mount Hood peering over Powell Butte.

4. Lady of the Mountain

100 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 971-3452992, kexhotels.com/eat-drink/ rooftop. 5-10 pm Wednesday-Sunday; Brunch 10 am-1 pm SaturdaySunday.

Unlike many of the newly installed sidewalk cafes, Kex’s outdoor patio wasn’t urgently thrown together with social distancing in mind. The boutique hotel—a spinoff of an upscale hostel in Reykjavik, Iceland—is one of those rare gems in the city with a rooftop oasis. Four stories up is just enough height to provide an attractive view yet still sit below most of the surrounding buildings.

Lady of the Mountain possesses an impressively long wine, beer and cocktail list. To make things easy, just order the Pimm’s Cup. Arriving in a mound of pebble ice that looks like an adult snow cone, the cocktail—made of cucumber-infused gin, lemon, ginger and soda—is the most refreshing thing you could possibly order on a Portland rooftop in August. The glass will be empty in less than five minutes.

5. Migration Rooftop at Canvas

1750 SW Yamhill St., 503-939-4164, migrationbrewing.com. 3 pm-midnight WednesdaySaturday, 11 am-8 pm Sunday.

Migration Brewing’s rooftop outpost is the peak realization of the rooftop bar. A 180-degree view takes in downtown, the West Hills and the Alphabet District. The panorama stretches all the way to the St. Johns Bridge and Mount St. Helens.

After a round, it’s easy to understand why people keep moving to Portland: Above the din and discord, this city seems like paradise.

stoppers like the crispy pata, or fried pork leg, and pancit bihon, the Filipino version of Chinese glass noodles—and now you can enjoy it all on patio furniture on a closed-off block of Southeast Clinton.

4. Eem

3808 N Williams Ave., Suite 127, 971-295-1645, eempdx.com. 11 am-9 pm Sunday-Thurday, 11 am-10 pm Friday-Saturday.

The superstar restaurant from the trio behind Hat Yai, Matt’s BBQ and the Shipwreck, Eem somehow manages to exceed all expectations. The white curry with brisket burnt ends is a dish so rich and nuanced it’s almost without precedent, while the chopped barbecue fried rice is another mashup that’s bafflingly simple yet unbeatable in flavor.

WESLEY LAPOINTE

16544 SE Division St., 971-336-6804. 11 am-9 pm Tuesday-Thursday, 9:30 am-9 pm Friday-Sunday.

The birria boom has reached Portland, and this cart in deep Southeast is one of its main purveyors. Birria de res, like its sibling, barbacoa de res, has a long tradition in many parts of Mexico, but Birrieria PDX’s options go beyond classic applications: Other inventive options include the keto taco, made with crispy melted cheese instead of a tortilla, and birria ramen, the Japanese noodle soup made with the broth of the birria, resulting in something that tastes more like pho or Thai boat noodles.

B L U E S K Y G A L L E R Y. O R G

TOP 5

5. Hapa PDX Ramen and Whiskey

3848 SE Gladstone St., 503-376-9246, hapapdx.us.

4-9 pm Wednesday-Monday.

Lots of food carts make the leap to brick-and-mortar, but rarely is the effect quite so sexy as it is at Hapa. The soup here is a blend of two beloved cuisines: In the “G-Special” ramen, you’ll recognize elements of a Hawaiian plate lunch and a Tokyo ramen. But this is very much an izakaya, and drinks are as much the attraction as the soup: The ginger ale-sake highball is worth traveling across town for.

WESTEROS: A girl perches on horseback in Ingeborg Gerdes’ Somewhere, Nevada.

Personal Geographies A memorial retrospective of Ingeborg Gerdes photographs blurs the line between the myth and reality of the American West.

BY A N N GU O

T

here is often a familiar script to depictions of the American West, and it goes a little bit like this: canyonlands, open skies, cowboys on horses, idealized indigeneity, and rusty cars winding along desert highways. The list goes on.

Photographer Ingeborg Gerdes no doubt wielded an awareness of these recycled motifs while turning her own sharp lens on the Western condition.

An exhibition of the late photographer’s 50-year repertoire at Blue Sky Gallery, titled Out West, reflects on German-born Gerdes’ careful approach to capturing life and culture in the West’s desolate landscapes.

In a smattering of both black-andwhite and color—the photographer revisited the themes many times over the course of 50 years— Gerdes’ subjects are unposed yet poised, caught in the free-flow movements of daily life.

In one composition, a girl perches on horseback in Nevada, sharing the frame with a stray Texaco sign and a dog. In another, a stuffed antelope stands alongside an Oregon road, as if about to cross. A nondescript man bends precariously over the lip of his run-down truck while the grasslands of Montana stretch beyond the curve of his exposed back. The front of a dusty-pink movie theater, flanked by an abandoned opera house, shows a single film—Star Wars, one of the most famous pop culture allegories to Western expansionism.

By reworking common myths of the American West, Gerdes peels back layers of camp while carving out her own essential truths beneath. Some of these truths are common—the unshakable, almost spiritual, sense of solitude on land that still remembers its own freedom, for example, or the unusual eccentricity of life in the region.

Gerdes cannot pick these elements out from her Western compositions.

Nor does she desire to; doing so would be to remove their soul. Her bare studies are akin to a portrait of a character offstage—absent makeup, lights and action, the ghost of their role remains in subtleties of speech or movement.

The player and the played have morphed into something inseparable; it is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and myth.

Perhaps the most intriguing addition to the series at Blue Sky is the photographer’s focus on her own vulnerable body. In one frame, a triangular hollow in Gerdes’ sinewed neck casts a dark relief against her pale spine. The photographer touches herself in another, the intimate act veiled by sheer underwear and a patterned robe.

These works, from Gerdes’ Autobiography series, suggest that as she began to understand unfamiliar Western lands, Gerdes was, in turn, drawn to the valleys and canyons of her most personal geographies.

SEE IT: Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW 8th Ave., 503-225-0210. Noon-5 pm Wednesday-Saturday, through Aug. 28.

POTLANDER

Corn-Crossed Lovers We tried all three flavors of Mellow Vibes Potcorn over the course of a day at the Tillamook County Fair.

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

Popcorn is one of my all-time favorite foods.

I have a vintage stovetop popcorn popper that I use without oil to make huge bowls of air-popped kernels almost daily. At any outdoor event, my first stop is the kettle corn booth. My theater preferences have more to do with popcorn quality than what’s on the marquee. I don’t mess with the chemically seasoned microwaveable versions or the store-bought brands that trade integrity for longevity. Popcorn is a perfect food that should be adulterated only minimally. Even when it comes to weed.

Unadulterated popcorn is arguably the most gratifyingly snackable of the fiber-rich whole grains. Whether it’s munched morning, noon or night, plain, air-popped corn has been linked to lower risk of heart disease, diabetes and some cancers. It’s rich in polyphenols, the antioxidants linked to healthy circulation and digestion, and popcorn contains more fiber per serving than whole-wheat bread.

Popcorn’s association with healthy snacking is only enhanced by the addition of cannabis, and as novel as they are, Mellow Vibes’ three versions of infused “potcorn” are stellar examples.

Grain snobs that we are, my partner and I auditioned each Mellow Vibes variety of potcorn, and spoiler: We found more than just a new and notable canna snack, we found a whole new way to be high.

The Setup After a few days stuck at home huddled around the air conditioner, we decided to eat some potcorn and visit the coast for the day, where, incidentally, it was 20 degrees cooler. The plan was to travel out to the Tillamook County Fair and spend the day high-fiving 4H kids and mooning over prize-winning quilts. If the day allowed, we would cruise the bay, hopefully pulling into a quiet inlet to splash around in the muddy water and bask in some fine coastal mist. We would eat the popcorn in small handfuls throughout the day, parsing out each 50 mg bag between the two of us over the course of around eight hours. Here’s how each of the bags shook out:

Mellow Vibes Potcorn Kettle Corn

Of the three, the kettle corn was by far our favorite. This variety of potcorn had a gratifying simplicity. Its listed ingredients are just kernels, safflower oil, sugar, salt and cannabis distillate. Both of us thought we might have detected a grassy suggestion of canna-aftertaste, but as soon as we articulated that thought, the flavor had evaporated and our mouth memory was only recognizing the flavors of classic, salty-sweet kettle corn.

The recipe is simple and familiar enough (save for the addition of cannabis distillate) to make the popcorn uniquely versatile. We talked about shaking this bag into a larger bowl of plain or lightly sweetened popcorn to dilute the dosage for a more diverse group of consumers versus

taking down an entire bag to oneself. Both felt like attractive possibilities. We also considered how the experience would differ were we to eat the bag over the course of a few minutes versus nibbling on a bag slowly for an experience more akin to microdosing than blasting off.

One mouthful took a hard left when my partner caught several unpopped or half-popped kernels in a row and had to spit them out like tiny THC projectiles. Pro tip: Avoid confrontational half-popped kernels by air popping at home!

At this point, my partner had consumed approximately 10 to 15 mg over the course of about a half-hour. Their tolerance is medium low, so even if they hadn’t been interrupted by the unpopped kernels, they were ready to settle into that dose and ride it till the wheels fell off.

I have a higher tolerance (and a penchant for Chicago-style popcorn—more on that in a sec…), so I decided that instead of finishing the kettle corn to myself, I would try to mix it with a few handfuls of the white cheddar potcorn. The result was more challenging and less toothsome than I’d expected.

Mellow Vibes Potcorn White Cheddar

My first impression of Mellow Vibes White Cheddar potcorn was, “dang, this popcorn is dusty as heck.”

The thick layer of white cheddar powder was intense, but not unpleasantly so, especially if you’re already down with powdered cheese. It was giving my fingertips Cheeto dust vibes, which may or may not appeal to some consumers. My Cheeto nostalgia runs deep, but it’s not really a great climate for finger-sucking, so I was on the fence about licking my digits clean after every couple of bites.

My partner found the dust somehow artificial tasting, but I suspect they were just reacting to its intense amount.

After eating a few kernels of the white cheddar potcorn, I think the high from the kettle corn began to kick in because I attempted a Chicago-style mix from the remaining kettle corn and half a bag of the white cheddar corn not by simultaneously sampling from the two open bags, but by dumping the whole of one bag into the other.

Chicago-style popcorn is cheddar corn mixed with caramel corn, and one of my favorite approximations mixes kettle corn with a white cheddar corn. When I attempted to replicate that flavor profile with the Mellow Vibes flavors, I found the cheese corn a bit too heavily dusted to complement the sweet smack of the kettle corn. When the two flavors mingled, my partner and I both thought we tasted a dupe for Kraft Mac & Cheese.

At this point, about an hour after our first mouthfuls, our highs had begun to unfurl in earnest. The 15 mg dose my partner was sustaining brightened their mood and extended their patience; my 50 to 60 mg felt like a crisp complacency with sparkling edges. We were able to maintain those effects by slowly snacking through the rest of the popcorn, though I low-key wished I hadn’t dumped them together.

The effects of a single-dose edible like a bon-bon or cookie certainly have their place, but my partner and I both agreed it was delightful to be able to balance and sustain what we each felt was our optimal dose over the course of an entire day.

Mellow Vibes Potcorn Jalapeño White Cheddar After examining the prize-winning livestock through blissfully stoned eyes at the Tillamook County Fair, we wandered off toward the coastline. Over the course of about five hours, the two of us had gradually eaten 100 mg of cannabis, and though we were by no means incapacitated or even visibly intoxicated, we were at cruising altitude and maintaining a level flight path. By the time we’d arrived at the rocky bay shore and opened the Jalapeño White Cheddar flavor, we’d been navigating our doses long enough to be able to enjoy a few bites without fear of overmedicating ourselves.

The Jalapeño White Cheddar variety of Mellow Vibes Potcorn is a flaming effigy to corner store, ice cream truck and vending machine hot chips. This snack, however, is decidedly more garden fresh pepper than novelty acid burn, and it appealed to our more mature sensibilities.

The cheddar powder is, again, heavy, and potential consumers should confidently be able to handle the bang of jalapeño, but if flaming cheese whets your palate, I highly recommend this savory sack of whole-grain edibles.

Bottom Line

Mellow Vibes Potcorn is a unique edible not just for its savory selection or healthy essence, but because users can tailor and maintain super-specific doses. Whether eaten in one sitting by a high-tolerance astro traveler or sparingly snacked by a persistent microdoser, these potcorns are versatile and functional enough to suit an enormous swath of cannathusiasts. Just exercise caution before attempting any Chicago-style popcorn shenanigans.

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

GET YO UR REPS I N TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES

SCREENER

MOVIES

Point Break (1991) Keanu Reeves stars as undercover FBI agent Johnny Utah, tasked with taking down a ring of bank robbers who are seemingly led by charismatic surfer Bodhi (Patrick Swayze).

Kathryn Bigelow directs this action crime thriller, and while these genre elements are compelling, the film shines brightest when it’s examining the chemistry-infused relationship between Johnny and Bodhi. Hollywood, Aug. 18.

Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962) Filmed in real time, this existentialist French drama from cinema titan Agnès Varda follows a neurotic singer as she anxiously awaits a cancer test result. One of the best, most thoughtful films to come out of the French New Wave.

Screening as part of the Clinton’s Agnès Varda Forever Festival. Clinton, Aug. 19.

Irma Vep (1997)

FRONTIERLAND: Director Jacques Tourneur used widened cinematography in Canyon Passage, placing its stars as interdependent figures with the landscape.

As Canyon Passage turns 75, it’s the perfect time to look back on the Oregon-shot Western, one of the best forgotten films of its genre.

BY C H A N C E SO L E M - P F E I FER

@chance_s_p

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Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

Western and first color film, following cult horror classics Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, the focus on Jacksonville as an ecosystem of free women and compromised men (and Hoagy Carmichael wandering around with his mandolin) politely subverts the Western as a hypermasculine, individualist fantasia.

Roan points out how even the widened cinematography, placing ’40s stars like Andrews and Hayward as ambiguous, interdependent figures amid the landscape, was a rare visual language in an era when studios like Universal all but demanded dramatic close-ups. “[Tourneur] just hangs back,” he explains. “When you’re making a movie about a community, the close-up takes you away. Let’s look at everybody as a group.”

Though it broke Portland box office records in 1946 and registered as a sizable hit, Canyon Passage faded into obscurity like many Westerns absent generationally transcendent film stars. But with companies like Kino Lorber, which hired Roan to record the commentary on its recent Blu-ray release, and cinephiles gradually reclaiming Tourneur as a major auteur of the ’50s, you need only hop on a forum like Letterboxd to find new fans struck by Canyon Passage’s complex character development and visual brilliance. If online film fandom counts for nothing, Martin Scorsese called Canyon Passage “one of the most exquisite and mysterious examples of the Western genre ever made.”

For modern audiences, its appeal may well be in attempting to intelligently straddle Western paradoxes.

Its lead characters are “stuck on this Oregon,” seeking to belong in the Northwest yet simultaneously chasing more freedom. Many know they’re colonial interlopers yet hope for peace on a canvas where collectivism and individualism shift and collide at all angles.

“A man can choose his own gods,” Logan quips in the film’s opening moments. He’s about to depart muddy, crowded Portland and take to southward trails where his shipping work is its own reward. It’s a heady line for a witty cowboy, winking at the very idea of frontier faith and reinvention. If he’s wrong about this Oregon, he’ll just start over—in the next Jacksonville, on a new trail, with a new god.

SEE IT: Rent Canyon Passage at Movie Madness, 4320 SE Belmont St., 503-234-4363, moviemadness.org.

Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung plays a version of herself in Olivier Assayas’ meta-drama, centering on Cheung’s casting as a latex-clad cat burglar in a remake of the silent film serial Les Vampires. On set, egos clash and Cheung feels alienated as a Chinese woman in Paris, attempting to carve out a spot in the pompous French film industry. Clinton, Aug. 20.

Chicken Run (2000) In this stop-motion animated classic about the awesome power of union-based revolution, a group of oppressed chickens, along with a fast-talking stunt rooster (regrettably voiced by Mel Gibson), plot to overthrow and escape the bourgeois establishment that holds them captive: Tweedy’s farm and its dastardly new chicken pot pie machine. Clinton, Aug. 21.

Suspiria (1977) MUBI

Rarely the domain of the wild bandit or granite lawman, the Oregon Western has historically contemplated self-determination. From Meek’s Cutoff (2011) to Bend of the River (1952), they’re a thoughtful cinematic breed, and that’s never more true than in Canyon Passage—a 1946 Technicolor frontier film from Jacques Tourneur—considered one of the best forgotten Westerns of Hollywood’s Golden Age. “This movie is so unique,” says film historian and Western expert Toby Roan. “It’s one of those I’m blown away every time I put it on.”

Filmed in the Diamond Lake area of the Umpqua National Forest and released 75 years ago this summer, Canyon Passage was somewhat erroneously marketed as the first feature shot in Oregon. (Silent classics like City Girl and The General would beg to differ.) But you can see why local press like the Medford Mail Tribune pushed such a claim in 1946. In an era when popular Westerns were churned out on a veritable assembly line, Canyon Passage is quintessentially Oregonian, both in spirit and in its immersive embrace of the landscape—from Crater Lake to Mount Thielsen.

“There are lots of movies about carving a place out of the wilderness, but not many where [the characters] are still in the middle of the wilderness like that,” says Roan, author of A Million Feet of Film: The Making of One-Eyed Jacks.

The nature near Bend and Medford plays majestic host to nearly a dozen crisscrossing characters with a home base in 1856 Jacksonville. Adapted from Oregon paperback scribe Ernest Haycox’s 1945 serial, the script is busy, wise and charming as almost every figure—freight mover Logan (Dana Andrews), conflicted bride-to-be Lucy (Susan Hayward), dodgy banker (Brian Donlevy)—has settled into an unsustainable predicament of business or love. Down the line, performances from world-beating character actor Ward Bond, a young Lloyd Bridges, Tin Pan Alley composer Hoagy Carmichael, and Yakima actor and opera singer Chief Yowlachie are uniformly lived in and intriguing, as we see how village-building precariously ebbs and flows with frontier Oregonians’ best intentions and worst impulses.

With Paris-born Tourneur directing both his first

LINCOLN CENTER

An Oregon Trail

When an American ballet dancer transfers to a prestigious academy in Germany, she begins to suspect that the administration may be supernaturally sinister after a series of gruesome deaths. Featuring vibrantly colored production design and an unforgettable prog-rock score by Goblin, this Italian horror staple begs to be viewed on the big screen.

Hollywood, Aug. 24.

ALSO PLAYING: Academy: The Goonies (1985), Aug. 20-26. Fantastic Planet (1973), Aug. 20-26. Clinton: A Dessert for Constance (1981), Aug. 18. The Lego Movie (2014), Aug. 19. The Warriors (1979), Aug. 20. Mamma Mia! (2008), Aug. 21. Long Strange Trip (2017), Aug. 21. Lions Love (...and Lies) (1970), Aug. 22.

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), Aug. 24.Hollywood: 42nd Street (1933), Aug. 19. Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country (1991), Aug. 20. The Iron Giant (1999), Aug. 21-22.

Throne of Blood (1957), Aug. 21-22. Rooftop Cinema at Lloyd Center: Steel Magnolias (1989), Aug. 22.

MOVIES 1614 PRODUCTIONS

NOW PLAYING TOP PICK OF THE WEEK

Big House Big House answers the question none of us were asking: What if mumblecore met The Real World? The film opens on half-sisters Claire (Ellie Reed) and Ali (Paige Collins) arriving at their father’s vacation house. It’s Claire’s birthday weekend, and they’ve brought their boyfriends along to celebrate. As the couples unpack, we learn more about this odd, tiki-themed pad where the ladies have set up shop. They’re staying at their father’s “honey house,” the tropical beach abode where he once took his mistresses. Even juicier, we discover that history is repeating itself: Claire has a fiancé, but she’s left him at home while she cozies up with the nerdy, endearing co-worker she’s taken as a lover. Big House was shot in just two days with improv-heavy dialogue, and you can hear it in the mumblecore-style exchanges. Often shot at close—even claustrophobic—range, with audio that lingers even after the scenes change, the movie has a hazy, confined quality. It’s a tone that fits with the broader questions about monogamy and transparency that writer-director Jack Lawrence Mayer is raising through the sisters’ romantic arcs. The script is witty, and the acting is natural and often resonant, particularly Michael Molina’s turn as Claire’s awkward, unappreciated lover String. The finale does take a turn for the Real Housewives, but after shaking the proverbial soda can for 90 minutes, the explosion feels earned. NR. GRACE CULHANE. Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vimeo, Vudu, YouTube.

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 Green Knight

With A Ghost Story, director David Lowery demonstrated he was a master of dreamy wonderment. Yet that film never hinted he was capable of creating The Green Knight, a romantic fantasy so overwhelming it leaves you shivering in awe of cinema’s possibilities. Dev Patel stars as Sir Gawain, a callow adventurer who must repay a debt to his nemesis, the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson). As their final confrontation looms, Gawain wanders, encountering giants, a talking fox and a noblewoman (Alicia Vikander) who challenges his sexual timidity. Vikander also plays Essel, a sex worker with whom Gawain is in love, creating the impression that a single soul is guiding his journey in different forms. All of this strangeness makes perfect sense in Lowery’s universe, which modernizes the 14th century epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While Gawain hungers for greatness, Essel asks him, “Why is goodness not enough?”

The Green Knight matters, but not as much as Gawain’s acts of compassion, like helping a violated spirit (Erin Kellyman) find peace. It is possible to simply bask in the film’s surreal visions—like a beautifully haunting shot of Gawain and the fox walking along a ridge at night— but the wisest moviegoers will also cheer its rejection of hollow patriarchal glories and embrace its conviction that goodness is more than enough. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Dine-In Progress Ridge, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Studio One, Tigard.

Stillwater

Bill Baker (Matt Damon) has a new life. After a career working on oil rigs, he has moved to Marseilles, started dating an actress named Virginie (Camille Cottin) and become a father to her daughter, Maya

(Lilou Siauvaud). Yet Bill didn’t plan to forge a new family. He left his home in Stillwater, Okla., because his daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin), was convicted of murdering her college roommate and has been languishing in a French prison for five years. While a wimpier film would have turned Bill’s dogged quest to prove Allison’s innocence into a righteous tale of a hometown hero battling foreign evils, Stillwater’s sharp emotional claws shred Bill’s moral authority and the myth of American exceptionalism. In ways both shocking and right, director Tom McCarthy (Spotlight, The Station Agent) reinvents the story seemingly in real time. Mystery and melodrama give way to romance, which gives way to horrific vigilantism and a reckoning with the anguish and delusions of America’s white working class. Late in the film, Bill stares at Stillwater and claims that he no longer recognizes it, but the truth is that he also no longer recognizes himself. Like us, he’s seen too much. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cinema 99, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Eastport Plaza, Evergreen Parkway, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Sherwood, Vancouver Mall, Wilsonville.

Small Town News: KPVM Pahrump A charming docuseries about an independent news station 60 long miles west of Las Vegas might seem the ultimate slice-of-life piece. Nothing seismic happens at KPVM. The station struggles to raise money and retain talent.

It reports on petty desert crimes and livestock interest stories. Its founder, Vern Van Winkle, dreams of getting an antenna that will allow the broadcast to reach Vegas. But the mundanity of Small Town News belies its existence at an event horizon of creative nonfiction, reality television and 25 years of mockumentary comedy.

Some of the show’s riotous yet eerie highlights depict station

employees giving self-deluded pep talks worthy of Michael Scott or revealing their secret soft rock à la David Brent. The new weatherman in Pahrump could rival Fred Willard in any Christopher Guest outing for witless mugging.

What’s more, the creators edit and score the show to play more like Waiting for Guffman than the actual documentary it purports to be. Two episodes in, that certainly renders Small Town News a gold mine of tomfoolery, but it’s never going to feel totally right finessing human beings into caricature, no matter how lucky the find or how funny the form. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. HBO, HBO Max.

Free Guy

The premise of Free Guy is so smart it almost makes you forget the movie is stupid. In a video game called Free City, a background character (Ryan Reynolds) gains sentience and teams up with Molotov Girl, the avatar of a gifted game designer (Jodie Comer) searching for dirt on Antoine (Taika Waititi), the shameless, swaggering mogul behind Free City. The film is basically a comedic riff on The Truman Show and Ready Player One, and for a while, it’s clever fun. Director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum) is an action ace—a garage battle that pits knife against steering wheel is a thing of kinetic beauty—and Comer relishes Molotov Girl’s goofy affections, including her artfully disheveled dark hair and faux-Emily Blunt accent. The movie is bursting with good vibes, but they get crushed by the climax: a bland brawl that bluntly reminds viewers they’re watching a Disney product. It’s sad to see storytelling shoved aside in favor of obnoxious cross-promotional gimmicks like Reynolds wielding a lightsaber and carrying Captain America’s shield. It’s even sadder that next to abysmal recent Disney films like Black Widow and Jungle Cruise, Free Guy looks like art. PG-13.

BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Dine-In Progress Ridge, Eastport Plaza, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Pioneer Place, Sherwood, St. Johns Theater & Pub, St. Johns Twin Cinemas, Studio One, Tigard.

Space Jam: A New Legacy

Early in Space Jam: A New Legacy, two marvelously smarmy Warner Bros. executives (Sarah Silverman and Steven Yeun) pitch a galaxy of LeBron James crossover projects, including LeBron v Batman and LeBron of Thrones. LeBron (who plays himself) calls the concept one of the top five worst ideas he’s ever heard, but the idea is essentially the plot of A New Legacy, a shameless commercial for Warner Bros. properties that barely keeps up the pretense of being a movie. If the film were merely the story of LeBron and his son Dom (Cedric Joe) being sucked into the so-called Warner Bros. ServerVerse to play basketball with the Looney Tunes, it might have gotten by on goofy charm, but director Malcolm D. Lee (Girls Trip) inserts LeBron into The Matrix, Mad Max: Fury Road and even Casablanca. By the time LeBron is playing basketball in front of Catwoman, Pennywise and the Night King, it’s clear that the film is nothing more than a product engineered to sell other products.

Like too many mainstream movies, it adheres to the golden rule of the Ready Player One school of filmmaking—bludgeon your audience with references until they beg for mercy. PG. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Clackamas Town Center, Eastport Plaza, Evergreen Parkway, HBO Max, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Sherwood, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza.

The Suicide Squad

In one of the most memorable scenes in The Suicide Squad, a giant shark with the voice of Sylvester Stallone is repeatedly bitten by a school of deceptively cute-looking fish. Why? Because the film was directed by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy), who likes to blend sweetness and savagery until you can barely tell the difference. The Suicide Squad directs his gruesome imagination toward Task Force X, a gaggle of superpowered convicts who invade a fictional Latin American nation called Corto Maltese in exchange for reduced prison sentences. The cast—which includes Idris Elba, Viola Davis, Margot Robbie and John Cena— is charismatic, but it would take more than good acting to redeem Gunn’s warped world. While the film depicts the murder of a main charac-

ter as a tragedy, it plays a boomerang slicing an anonymous soldier’s head in half as a joke, suggesting that Gunn thinks violence is funny as long as it happens to other people.

It’s a disturbing perspective, especially since it goes hand in hand with the film’s absurd conviction that Task Force X’s brutal brand of American interventionism could actually bring democracy to Corto Maltese. The Suicide Squad may be based on a DC comic book, but its ideal audience isn’t your average superhero fan. It’s George W. Bush. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Dine-In Progress Ridge, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, HBO Max, Lloyd Center, Laurelhurst, Movies on TV, Pioneer Place, Sherwood, St. Johns Twin Cinemas, Studio One, Tigard, Wunderland Milwaukie.

Jungle Cruise Eighteen years ago, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl took the unholy idea of a film adaptation of a Disneyland ride and slathered it with subversiveness and eyeliner. Yet instead of admitting that Black Pearl was a corporate product that had personality almost by accident, the House of Mouse unleashed Haunted Mansion, four Pirates sequels and now Jungle Cruise, a bludgeoning voyage from Jaume Collett-Serra, director of four Liam Neeson action movies. Dwayne Johnson stars as Frank Wolff, a skipper helping two British explorers (Emily Blunt and Jack Whitehall) search the Amazon for magic flower petals called the Tears of the Moon during World War I. The story is absurd, but it isn’t messy enough for Jungle Cruise to be a batshit B-movie. Collett-Serra mechanically serves up stingy doses of action, humor and romance—watching his film is like watching an alien try to create a summer blockbuster based on a checklist. Jungle Cruise may be a movie, but it isn’t cinema. It’s a Disney film that wasn’t made by Lucasfilm, Marvel or Pixar, which is another way of saying it’s from a studio currently better at buying dreams than creating its own. PG-13.

BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Dine-In Progress Ridge, Disney+, Eastport Plaza, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Pioneer Place, Sherwood, Studio One, Tigard, Wunderland Beaverton, Wunderland Milwaukie.

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PERFORMANCE

Editor: Andi Prewitt | Contact: aprewitt@wweek.com

MUSIC Written by: Daniel Bromfield | @bromf3

Now Hear This

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

ON THORNS: A scene from After the Rose, a short about domestic violence, featured in PassinArt’s new online festival.

Telling the Stories of Black Portland— and Beyond The first PNMC Readers Series & Film Festival also features projects on everything from anti-Asian hate crimes to the regrets of a Latinx guard of the Border Patrol.

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

Jerry Foster, artistic director of PassinArt, knows that theater is plagued by a disconnect between actors and audience.

That’s why he decided the performers in PassinArt’s production of Black Nativity needed to stay in the lobby after the show to shake hands with the people who had just watched them bring Langston Hughes’ gospel song-play to life.

“I said, ‘We need to do something different. Let’s personally thank the audience for coming,’” Foster remembers.

“And in effect, that’s what happened.”

Like all theater companies, PassinArt—the longest-running Black theater company in Oregon—has struggled to overcome the disconnect during the pandemic. Yet Foster decided it was the right time to host the inaugural Pacific Northwest Multi-Cultural Readers Series & Film Festival, an idea that has been in the works for years.

“We had to do something,” Foster says. “And we wanted to provide some work for actors and actresses of color.

Because a lot of time, their work does not get the justice that it needs.”

The festival’s play readings and short films, which will be presented virtually, are helping Foster and festival curator Leasharn Hopkins realize their dream of hosting a profoundly intersectional event. While there will be films about Black Oregonians, the featured projects reflect on everything from anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic to the regrets of a Latinx guard of the U.S. Border Patrol from El Paso, Texas.

Foster was also committed to including a variety of voices in the festival’s panel discussions, which will cover topics like colorism in casting.

“They’re about things that affect communities of color, period,” Foster says. “That’s including Asians and the Latino 28

Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

or Hispanic community. What happens to us happens to others too, and we want them to be able to tell their stories.”

The festival’s multicultural spirit led to the selection of two short documentaries by director Woodrow Hunt, a descendant of the Cherokee, Klamath and Modoc tribes.

Hunt’s contributions are Stories From the River—Surrounded by History and Salmon’s Agreement, a film about the bond between salmon and the Indigenous people of the Columbia River that features Chief Bill Yallup Jr. (Yakama).

“He talks about coyotes and salmon having their own conversation and making a decision together—and then informing the people: The salmon will come back,” Hunt says. “Focusing on the idea that humans aren’t at the center of this—that they might not even be in all of the conversations—really was important to me, and that’s why that story bookends Salmon’s Agreement.”

Some of the festival’s films immerse audiences in difficult debates. Hopkins sees works like Francisco Garcia’s Ofelio: A Borderline Story—the film about the border guard—as an opportunity to encourage viewers to explore the nuances of a character who could be controversial.

“People put people into boxes and compartments, just like how everybody wants to defund the police and thinks all police officers are bad,” Hopkins says. “This [border guard] had a soul. He was hurting. He was torn. Sometimes there’s not a black and a white. There are gray areas, and that’s the beauty of art.”

One film that promises not to be controversial is Reviving the Black Nod, a joyous Portland odyssey by producer S. Renee Mitchell and director Elijah Hasan. The documentary was shot last summer, when Hasan traveled the city to film the unique nods of Black Portlanders, including City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty and legendary activist Richard Brown.

“By no means did we get every Black person in Portland, but if you see this film and you’re in Portland and you’re Black, you’re going to know somebody in this film,” says Hasan. “It was [Renee’s] way of giving something back to the Black community here—something that we could be proud of, something that could be representative of us. And in that time when we were so detached, she wanted to give a remedy, to spread some Black joy.”

2021 will not be the last time the PNMC Readers Series & Film Festival spreads joy. The festival will return in 2023, although it has yet to be decided whether it will continue as an in-person or hybrid event.

“It’s not a one-shot deal, although sometimes I feel it should be with all the hard work that goes into it,” Foster laughs. “But it’s rewarding when you see artists get recognition.”

SEE IT: The Pacific Northwest Multi-Cultural Readers Series & Film Festival streams at pnmc.eventive.org/welcome. FridaySunday, Aug. 20-22. Full festival passes cost $125. Access to either the play readings or film screenings only is $50.

SOMETHING OLD The Heat Warps is a new blog documenting every live tape of the Miles Davis band between 1969 and 1975, and if you’ve never heard Davis’ music from that period—or have only heard comparatively tame documents of the time like In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew— it’s time to dive in. This might be some of the furthest-out electric music ever devised, and though many of the bootlegs The Heat Warps digs up are of questionable sound quality, the music is rarely anything less than stupefying.

SOMETHING NEW At the intersection of shoegaze and ambient live, Ulrich Schnauss and Jonas Munk meet up every five years or so to make an album defining their shared style.

Eight Fragments of Illusion is their third and best. Its synth arpeggios create great archways and vaulted ceilings as echo-drenched guitars bounce endlessly between them. It’s hard to imagine anyone not liking this stuff. There’s so much more personality in Eight Fragments than in most of the “chill” music YouTube algorithms endlessly churn out.

SOMETHING LOCAL Astorian ambient master Grouper’s new album, Shade (out on Kranky on Oct. 22), documents her travels between San Francisco, Portland and her hometown over the past 15 years. It feels like a travel diary, and the first single, “Unclean Mind”—just a lightly strummed acoustic guitar and her vocals ducking in and out of comprehensibility—sounds like a lonely missive from an empty hotel room. It’s Nebraska, if Bruce had to keep his voice down for the neighbors.

SOMETHING ASKEW Twenty years old this year, Christian Fennesz’s Endless Summer is a reminder of how satisfying it can be to have to work a little bit for your comforts. It’s as true of shucking an oyster or plunging into a cold river as it is of penetrating Fennesz’s dense clouds of guitar distortion and electronics to find the pop melodies buried below.

Endless Summer is named for a Beach Boys greatest-hits compilation, and the more you listen to it, the more you realize he’s not just being ironic.

JONESIN’

by Matt Jones

"Spuh Day"--or is it schwa day?

Week of Week of August 26

©2021 Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19) Aries mythologist Joseph Campbell advised us to love our fate. He said we should tell ourselves, "Whatever my fate is, this is what I need." Even if an event seems inconvenient or disruptive, we treat it as an opportunity, as an interesting challenge. "If you bring love to that moment, not discouragement," Campbell said, "you will find the strength." Campbell concludes that any detour or disarray you can learn from "is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege!" Few signs of the zodiac are inclined to enthusiastically adopt such an approach, but you Aries folks are most likely to do so. Now is an especially favorable time to use it.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20) The brilliant Taurus dancer and choreographer Martha Graham spoke of "a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action," adding that "there is only one of you in all time." She added, "It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open." But even if you do this very well, Graham said, you will nevertheless always feel "a divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest" that will fuel you. This is the perfect message for you Tauruses to embrace in the coming weeks.

GEMINI (May 21-June20) There's growing scientific evidence that we make ourselves stupid by complaining too much—or even by listening to other people complain a lot. Excessive negative thoughts drain energy from our hippocampus, a part of our brain that's essential to problem-solving.

This doesn't mean, of course, that we should avoid dealing with difficult issues. But it does suggest we should be discerning about how many disturbing and depressing ideas we entertain. According to my reading of the omens, all this will be especially useful advice for you in the coming weeks.

ACROSS

(Beatles song)

25 "I smell _ _ _!"

1 Raises, as children

47 You can't make a silk purse out of it, it's said

26 Closer-than-close friends

6 "_ _ _ Paradise" ("Weird Al" Yankovic song)

49 Anti-allergy brand

11 Acad. or univ.

51 Hex- ender

14 Former inmate

52 Boxing match with a Dutch philosopher and ethicist?

15 Expensive drive in Beverly Hills 16 Nail polish target 17 Billy Idol song about Italian ice cream?

19 Gp. with many specialists

55 California NBA team, on a scoreboard 56 Lacking fruit on the bottom, e.g.

57 Italy's largest lake

29 "Famous Blue Raincoat" singer Leonard 30 Former FBI director James 31 Arctic homes 32 Cocktail with lemon juice and soda 33 Vans may get a deep discount here 34 Kind of pronoun

58 Capital of Liberia?

35 First part of a Shakespeare title

59 Gossipmonger

36 Quick doc. signature

24 Repair bill item

60 Actor Williams of "Happy Days"

40 Fruit banned on Singapore subways

27 Terrier treaters

DOWN

41 Fur-fortune family

28 Part of a desk set

1 Get plenty of sleep

42 Fake prefix?

29 1977 American League MVP Rod

2 Reveal, as a secret 3 Insight

43 Certain inverse trig function

4 Some 20-Acrosses

45 Canada's official tree

5 Obnoxious brat

46 Rural opposite

6 Jackie's husband #2

48 Notice from afar

7 Mid-May honoree

50 Baba _ _ _ (witch of folklore)

20 BLT ingredient 21 Jotted down 23 Manipulates

30 Personnel group 31 Bits 32 Succeeded at an escape room 33 Commercial photo source that's only for pasta pics?

37 "Catch-22" author

8 Comment from someone who changed their mind after an epiphany

38 Core

9 Title with a tilde

39 Acrylic fiber brand

10 "Joy to the World" songwriter Axton

40 Turn to God? 41 Psychological org.

11 Alaskan Malamute or Boston Terrier, e.g.

44 Gas station still available in Canada

12 What dreams may do

45 "_ _ _ do everything myself?"

18 On or earlier (than)

46 "Back in the _ _ _"

13 Call center equipment 22 James Cameron movie that outgrossed "Titanic"

©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.

53 Annual coll. basketball contest 54 Words before whim or dime

last week’s answers

CANCER (June 21-July 22) Your brain contains one hundred billion nerve cells.

Each cell has the potential to be linked with tens of thousands of others. And they are always busy.

Typically, your grey matter makes a million new connections every second. But I suspect your number of connections will increase even beyond that in the coming weeks. Your most complex organ will be working with greater intensity than usual. Will that be a bad thing or a good thing? It depends on whether you formulate an intention to channel your intelligence into wise analysis about important matters—and not waste it in careless fussing about trivial details.

to the other. Dear Libra, I hope you will employ these tender actions with greater frequency than usual in the coming weeks, Libra. Why? In my astrological opinion, it's a ripe time to boost your Affection Quotient with the allies you care for the most.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) Naturalist Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal, "I feel slightly complimented when nature condescends to make use of me without my knowledge—as when I help scatter her seeds in my walk—or carry burs and cockles on my clothes from field to field. I feel as though I had done something for the commonweal."

I mention this, Scorpio, because the coming weeks will be an excellent time for you to carry out good deeds and helpful transformations in nature's behalf.

Your ability to collaborate benevolently with plants and animals and elemental forces will be at a peak. So will your knack for creating interesting connections between yourself and all wild things.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) You may have never heard of Sagittarian artist Baya Mahieddine (1931–1998). At age 16, she experienced a splash of acclaim with a show in Paris. Famous artists Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse, and George Braques came. They drew inspiration from Mahieddine's innovative use of color, elements from her Algerian heritage, and her dream-like images. Picasso even invited her to work with him, exulting in the fresh perspectives she ignited. But her art never received the full credit it warranted. In accordance with astrological omens, this horoscope is a small way of providing her with the recognition and appreciation she deserves. It also authorizes you to go out and get the recognition and appreciation you deserve but have not yet fully received.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) "Who knows what is unfolding on the other side of each hour?" asked Capricorn poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (translated by Capricorn poet Robert Bly). "How many times the sunrise was there, behind a mountain.

How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off was already a golden body full of thunder!" Your assignment, Capricorn, is to imagine what is unfolding just beyond your perception and understanding. But here's the twist: You must steer your mind away from inclinations to indulge in fear. You must imagine that the events in the works are beautiful, interesting, or redemptive. If you're not willing to do that, skip the exercise altogether.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)

"You should have a sticky soul," counsels author Elizabeth Berg. "The act of continually taking things in should be as much a part of you as your hair color."

I especially endorse that attitude for you during the next four weeks, Leo. Your task is to make yourself extra magnetic for all the perceptions, experiences, ideas, connections, and resources you need most.

By September 23, I suspect you will have gained an infusion of extra ballast and gravitas.

"Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup," wrote author Wendell Berry. I mostly agree with that sentiment, although I will also put in a good word for certain kinds of arguments. There are moments when it's crucial for your psychological and spiritual health that you initiate a conversation about delicate issues that might lead to a dispute. However, I don't think this is one of those times, Aquarius. In my astrological opinion, picking dew-wet red berries is far more sensible than any argument. For further inspiration, read this testimony from actor Natasha Lyonne: "I definitely would rather take a nap than get angry."

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20)

"I sing like the nightingale whose melody is crowded in the too narrow passage of her throat," wrote author Virginia Woolf. That was an insulting curse for her to fling at herself. I disapprove of such behavior— especially for you in the coming weeks. If you hope to be in alignment with cosmic rhythms, don't you dare say nasty things about yourself, even in the privacy of your own thoughts. In fact, please focus on the exact opposite: flinging praise and appreciation and compliments at yourself.

For painter Vincent van Gogh, love wasn't primarily a sentimental feeling. Nor was it an unfocused generalized wish for health and happiness in those he cared for. Rather, he wrote, "You must love with a high, serious, intimate sympathy, with a will, with intelligence." His love was alert, acute, active, and energized. It was animated with a determination to be resourceful and ingenious in nurturing the beloved.

For van Gogh, love was always in action, forever moving toward ever-fresh engagement. In service to intimacy, he said, "you must always seek to know more thoroughly, better, and more." I hope you'll make these meditations a top priority during the next seven weeks.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22) The blogger at www-wlw.tumblr.com says the following are the top tender actions. 1. Fastening clothes or jewelry for your companion. 2. Letting them rest their head on your shoulder. 3. Idly playing with their hands. 4. Brushing a leaf out of their hair.

5. Locking pinkies. 6. Rubbing their back when you embrace. 7. Both of you wearing an item that belongs

HOMEWORK: This is what I do to earn a living. Let me know what you do.

Newsletter@FreeWillAstrology.com

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

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

1-877-873-4888 or 1-900-950-7700 Willamette Week AUGUST 18, 2021 wweek.com

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SPOTLIGHT ARTIST GLENN ALLEN Glenn Allen is a creative dabbler in a variety of pursuits. Whether putting paint to canvas, ink to paper or sticks to cymbals, he does so with charm, humor and hints of existential dread. He lives in Portland with his wife and dogs and hopes to win another karaoke contest someday. http://glennallen.net instagram.com/glenrickson

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