Willamette Week, February 16, 2022 - Volume 48, Issue 15 - "Business Trip"

NEWS A Sweeping Homeless Plan. P. 8 WEED Strain Spotlight: Do-Si-Dos. P. 20

“OH, HUNNY, HOW GRAND IT IS…” P. 19 WWEEK.COM

VOL 48/15 02.16.2022

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2/11/22 10:23 AM

FINDINGS

SKIP

THE FIRE PATRICIA WOLF, PAGE 21

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 48, ISSUE 15 It will cost $22 to see CJ McCollum one last time this season. 6 Ted Wheeler’s staff pitched other offices on moving homeless people into 1,000-capacity camps. 8 A Minnesota chicken farmer blasted an Oregon man’s drone with a shotgun. 9 A Dutch company bought an Ashland property more than four times the size of Laurelhurst Park for a psychedelics resort. 12 Soap impresario Dr. Bronner is helping to legalize magic mushrooms in Oregon. 13

The Paris Theatre is becoming a burlesque venue once again. 16 Suttle Lodge is turning its six rustic cabins into mini-pubs for a beer festival. 17 The revived Woodsman Tavern may have the most expensive burger in town. 18

YOUR LUNGS COVID-19 CAN ATTACK THE LUNGS. WOOD SMOKE MAKES IT HARD TO BREATHE. multco.us/WoodSmokeStatus

Disco Dabs Do-Si-Dos Sauce

tastes like sausage smells—in a good way. 20 A Canadian after-school special was transformed into a Dennis Hopper cult classic. 31

ON THE COVER:

OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK:

The industry behind psilocybin magical mystery tours is waiting to take you away.

Illustration by Jax Ko.

People living in North Portland homeless camps can have their trash picked up for free.

MASTHEAD EDITOR & PUBLISHER

Mark Zusman

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3

DIALOGUE

• •••• • • • •

TA R E B A LRO S ER E T A •••• E H T FEB 17 FEATURING

THE DEATH of Bud Clark earlier this month at age 90 prompted a raft of reminiscences about the Portland tavern-keep turned mayor. Some of those memories could be found in our archives. (A 1984 profile of his underdog mayoral bid includes this gem: “Without blinking, he tells visitors to his house, ‘This was a whorehouse when we bought it.’”) We collected other stories—from his friends, allies and staff—in a roundup last week (“This Bud’s Forever,” Feb. 9). That triggered even more tales from our readers. Here are a few.

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Booklover’s Burlesque cozy classics

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benefit show

MOTHER HIPS

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CARSIE BLANTON +

+ Ashleigh Flynn & the Riveters

Alisa Amador

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PETER ROWAN’S FREE MEXICAN AIRFORCE feat. Los Texmaniacs an evening with

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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

mayor, I was living in Northwest Portland and working downtown, and would sometimes see him bicycling to or from work. Often, as he approached, I would shout, ‘Good morning, Mr. Mayor!’ and he would always reply with an enthusiastic ‘Good morning, citizen!’ Bud made me proud to live and work in Portland, and is the only politician I have ever encountered that clearly cared more about the citizens he represented than the office he held.”

VIRGINIA LEVINS-KIENLE, VIA FACEBOOK: “Bud was

awesome, just a laid-back regular guy! Often saw him at the Oregon Symphony dressed in his overalls, there to support his wife. RIP.” ALAN RYUN, VIA FACEBOOK:

“I read this article and shared the news with my grandmother, a longtime Portland resident.

She shared her immediate memories of Mayor Clark. ‘He used to paddleboard in the Willamette. You know, with a long stick. And he invited the police chief to breakfast at a little place in Multnomah Village…I think it was Fat City. And you know what? He fired his ass!’”

[Editor’s note: Clark fired Chief Jim Davis at the Fat City Cafe in 1987.]

GILBERTO DOPIENTO, VIA WWEEK.COM: “When I was

a young guy apprenticing as a carpenter after dropping out of Portland State, I worked for a builder that had a guy subbing for him who drove a Morgan roadster and poled his canoe all over the rivers and wetlands around the Portland area, circa 1970-’71.

“That guy’s name was John Forstrom, and he was also involved with the Psychedelic Supermarket, Portland’s first real head shop.

“He was also Bud Clark’s

Dr. Know

KAI WINDING, VIA WWEEK. COM: “Bud nearly died about

30-odd years ago when he severed a leg artery on a stick of sagebrush while rafting the South Fork of the Owyhee.

Lucky for him they were not far from the remote 45 Ranch, which was being taken care of at the time by two Chileans who couldn’t speak English. By sheer luck the rafters found out they could radio for help from one little spot on the canyon rim. Helicopter rescue out of Boise arrived shortly thereafter and took Bud to the hospital in Boise. At the time, Bud thought he was a goner.”

CASCADIA REPORT, VIA TWITTER: “Growing up in Seat-

tle, I was so jealous of Portland and its leaders. RIP.” FRED LEONHARDT, VIA EMAIL: “Back in the day, I fol-

lowed him into the Capitol early one morning. As he entered the empty rotunda, he let out a loud whoop-whoop just to hear the echo.”

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

Submit to: 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210 Email: mzusman@wweek.com

BY MARTY SMITH @martysmithxxx

For years I’ve seen the RV campers on Northeast 33rd dismantling and burning automobiles. Is this an openair chop shop for stolen vehicles? Are they parting out their own disabled cars? Should I feel sorry for them, fear them, or both? —T. Thatcher

MAR 3

MAR 4

K.D. CLINE, VIA WWEEK. COM: “During Bud’s years as

paddling/poling partner, and those guys were out there so far ahead of the time, exploring these wonderful waterways when very few were doing so in that manner.”

If you squint hard enough, T., you can find a reason to feel sorry for anybody. (“Stalin looks so lonely in photographs—there’s nothing but big blank spaces where his friends should be!”)

However, those of us who’ve had two cars stolen in the past four months (but who’s counting?) might suggest feeling sullen contempt instead, perhaps leavened with a soupçon of homicidal fury.

If it’s any consolation (and it isn’t) your camp on Northeast 33rd isn’t unique. As reported in this newspaper last fall (“Strip Mall,” WW, Sept.

15, 2021), a number of these cheerfully informal auto-dismantling operations have sprung up around the city over the past year or two.

The smoldering wrecks you saw are not, by and large, the legal property of the people setting them on fire. In fact, that’s the whole point: If you own a car legally, you can just sell the whole

car—title, vehicle identification number and all.

If you want to make a buck off a car you don’t exactly “own,” however, your only option is to sell it in pieces small enough not to be traceable.

There are a number of ways to do this. After the obvious catalytic converter cash grab, aluminum cylinder heads and manifolds (those are big, heavy parts, for the uninitiated) are worth close to a buck a pound as scrap. There’s also copper, though not as much, in the wiring harness—releasing this may be one reason choppers are so fond of torching cars at the conclusion of the automotive vulture feast. And assuming you can scare up an address, you can take advantage of the brisk market for used parts on eBay, no questions asked.

However (unfortunately for meth dealers), there’s still no walk-in location where you can sell used parts qua parts for cash: Oregon law forbids dealers to buy major vehicle components without proof of ownership. Of course, Oregon law also forbids carving up stolen cars with a cutting torch in the middle of the street in broad daylight, so enforcement isn’t exactly draconian.

If you want to found the Buffalo Exchange of car parts, this could be your moment.

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

MURMURS SAM GEHRKE

FEBRUARY 17–26, 2022 PORTLAND, OR

FORMER PORTLAND POLICE CHIEF DANIELLE OUTLAW IN 2018.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER JOINS BUSINESS GROUP: Erik Lukens, a highly decorated former journalist, joined Oregon Business and Industry as its new communications director last month.

Lukens won a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for editorials on the Public Employees Retirement System and served as the editorial page editor for The Oregonian before becoming the editor in chief of the Bend Bulletin. After the Bulletin declared bankruptcy, Lukens briefly left journalism for a job in the tech industry. He now returns to public life as the voice for the state’s largest business lobbying group. “Anyone who has worked in or around public policy in Oregon for the last several years knows that Erik is an effective communicator,” says Angela Wilhelms, president and CEO of OBI, “even when it comes to talking about complex—or even unpopular—ideas.” Lukens adds: “OBI does vital work in Oregon, and I’m happy to be a part of it.”

HEARD DOESN’T JOIN HERD OF CANDIDATES: As Republican candidates continue to enter the race for Oregon governor, one possible contender is choosing to sit it out. State Sen. Dallas Heard (R-Roseburg), who serves as Oregon GOP chair, says he’s all but ruled out a run for governor. “I’m not currently considering it,” Heard told WW on Feb. 8. There’s a story behind that decision: When he ran for chair of the party last year, Heard promised not to run for governor, at least not without the approval of party members, which he recently sought but did not receive. “I put the question up to the body,” he said. “The party decided I should stay.” Heard, who visited occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 and got thrown off the Senate floor this year for not wearing a mask, represents the right wing of the Republican Party. His decision to stay out means the radical right vote may be more divided in the primary.

WORKERS SUE MCMENAMINS OVER DATA BREACH: McMenamins employees filed a class action lawsuit late last month in the U.S. District

Court of Washington after the brewpub chain told workers in December it had suffered a data breach that may have compromised their names, addresses, bank account and Social Security numbers, and health histories. In the several weeks after the announcement, the potential magnitude of the breach expanded, affecting up to 20,000 former and current employees. Plaintiffs are represented by two law firms, one in Washington, D.C., and the other based in Seattle. The lawsuit, first reported

by Oregon Business, alleges the company took too long to alert employees of the breach, failed to protect worker information, and provided insufficient identity fraud protections after the breach.

“The ramifications of McMenamins’ failure to keep its employees’ private information secure are long lasting and severe,” the lawsuit reads. “Once private information is stolen, fraudulent use of that information and damage to victims may continue for years.” McMenamins declined to comment.

OUTLAW DRAWS FIRE IN CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE: This month’s edition of Philadelphia magazine examines the tenure of Philly’s police chief, Danielle Outlaw, as the first Black woman atop the cop shop faces criticism for her handling of protests and a spike in gun homicides. Sound familiar?

Outlaw was Portland police chief for just over two years, seeking greater authority to separate dueling protests groups and cracking down on leftist demonstrators before decamping to Philadelphia in 2019. The magazine profile closes with the glowing performance evaluation Mayor Ted Wheeler gave Outlaw just months before she left Portland, granting her the highest marks she could receive.

But Wheeler also warned: “This position is inherently political, not in a partisan manner, but in the sense that it is under public scrutiny and maintaining public trust is done in a political environment.

You have good instincts and judgment already, but learning more about political history and relationships in Portland is important to being successful in the position in the long term.”

Robert Glasper a black radio production Gary Bartz Diane Schuur Flor de Toloache Makaya McCraven The Soul Rebels Nate Smith + KINFOLK Marquis Hill Brandee Younger & Dezron Douglas Darrell Grant feat. Rebecca Kilgore The Cookers Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah feat. Weedie Braimah Angel Bat Dawid Mndsgn Marc Ribot Sasha Berliner Carlos Niño & Friends James Brandon Lewis & Chad Taylor Laufey Immanuel Wilkins Domo Branch Trio feat.

Gerald Clayton & Ben Feldman

Get tickets at pdxjazz.org Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

5

NEWS

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK

COSTS

Bargain Basement Blazers We found the cheapest Trail Blazers tickets at the end of a lost season.

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

@EricG _ NBA

The Portland Trail Blazers have found the cure for inflation: losing. Unlike the price of just about everything else in Portland, the bottom has fallen out of the ticket market for Blazers home games.

Interim general manager Joe Cronin and the Blazers spent the lead-up to the Feb. 10 trade deadline completely overhauling the team’s roster, going so far as to send longtime franchise darling CJ McCollum to the New Orleans Pelicans.

“It had become evident to us that the roster had plateaued,” Cronin said at a press conference hours after the deadline passed.

In total, Cronin made three trades dealing five players to other cities in exchange for seven new players, a protected first-round draft pick, and four second-round picks. Crucially, by trading McCollum and Norman Powell, the Blazers wiped more than $140 million in future salary obligations from their books.

Cronin admitted at Thursday’s press conference that all three trades were made with an eye toward becoming competitive next season—this season is a wash, even if the new guys are surprisingly feisty some nights.

“We want to be competitive. We want to come out and play and win ball games right away,” said Cronin. “Sometimes it doesn’t break that way, but our goal is to be aggressive this spring and summer and put together a really competitive roster out of the gate.”

For a full analysis of whether the Blazers can achieve that goal, visit wweek.com. But the immediate result is a hodgepodge roster—and cheap seats.

On most nights, it actually costs more to watch high schoolers play at the Les Schwab Invitational than it does to see an NBA game in Portland.

ONE QUESTION

Golden State Warriors, Feb. 24 // $68

While they’ve added several new players, the main attraction is still Steph Curry. Problem is, it looks like a bunch of Silicon Valley transplants are driving up prices.

Worth the money? Not really—we’ve all seen enough of the Warriors. Avoid the Californians and order some sushi at home instead.

Denver Nuggets, Feb. 27 // $16

Jusuf Nurkic vs. Nikola Jokic and a rematch of the 2019 and 2021 playoffs. This one is a chance to watch a motivated Nurkic try to outplay his former teammate with some lingering playoff resentment hanging in the air.

Worth the money? Absolutely. Closest thing the Blazers have to a rivalry until the Sonics come back.

Washington Wizards, March 12 // $24

How are tickets to this game more expensive than the Nuggets game?

Worth the money? No. Buy an extra drink before the Nuggets game instead.

San Antonio Spurs, March 23 // $9

The Spurs are in the middle of their own rebuild and are neck and neck with the Blazers in the standings. This one may have lottery implications, but the quality of play won’t be particularly high.

Worth the money? Only if you’re a Zach Collins fan.

Houston Rockets, March 25 and 26 // $12, $6

Find literally anything else to do with your time. The Rockets are a team of bad players and worse vibes.

Worth the money? This one wouldn’t be worth it even before COVID.

Oklahoma City Thunder, March 28 // $6

One of the two cheapest games on the calendar features a young and feisty team made up of guys you name drop to prove you’re a real NBA fan. Both teams figure to be out of the playoff picture by next month, so this one will likely be a matchup of hungry young players looking to prove their worth. Sounds fun!

Worth the money? Yes. It’s going to look more like the D League than the NBA playoffs, but $6 is too cheap to pass up.

New Orleans Pelicans, March 30 // $22

CJ McCollum returns home.

Worth the money? YES. Buy an extra ticket with the money you saved on the Rockets games.

Utah Jazz, April 10 // $16

It’s the last night of the NBA regular season, which is never a good sign, Anfernee Simons miracles notwithstanding.

Worth the money? Wait until next year.

Do You Support the Strategy in Sam Adams’ Memo?

City Council incumbents and their spring challengers weigh in on a controversial idea to shelter 3,000 homeless Portlanders.

In a city that prefers to avoid direct conflict, it’s rare to see elected officials display open contempt for suggestions from another official’s office.

Apparently, the idea of compelling 3,000 homeless people to live in three mass shelters is an exception.

Last Friday, WW broke word of a memo that mayoral aide Sam Adams penned in late January and shared with various government offices in hopes of enlisting their support. In it, he proposed building three massive shelters to accommodate 3,000 homeless people that would be staffed by National Guard security forces, social work graduate students, and medical personnel.

6

Just nine games remain this season. Let’s run down the team’s remaining schedule and see if it’s worth a trip to the Rose Garden.

Ticket prices reflect the cheapest seats currently available in a sideline section of the 300-level (that is, the nosebleed seats) on the secondary market via vividseats.com.

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

Portland would then ban unsanctioned camping citywide—in effect giving people sleeping on the streets no choice but to move to the three emergency sites.

That idea caused some consternation (see page 8). But the city’s response to homelessness and addiction is also the central issue in the May election. So we asked the two incumbent city commissioners up for reelection this spring, and their challengers, to weigh in on Adams’ controversial plan.

SOPHIE PEEL .

WW asked: Do you support the strategy outlined in Sam Adams’ memo? Why or why not?

Commissioner Dan Ryan, Position 2: We need to move forward with pragmatic solutions that get us out of the decade-plus status quo playbook. There is a houseable population on the streets with poverty and unaffordable housing as the root cause. Another population on our streets and parks

chooses their addiction over their recovery.

We need to address them differently and consider additional options to address both. As we do that, my priorities are to keep everyone, housed and unhoused, safe and healthy. Locate restorative villages and other service-focused shelters near transit, with mental health, addiction, and other treatment services as an on-ramp into housing and back into the workforce.

I will continue to lead with compassion, innovation and action to move us beyond Multnomah County’s approach of decriminalizing drugs, which has resulted in a significant increase in drug supply, and their housing-first-only policy. We must stop enabling the untreated drug addicts who are causing great harm on our streets with violence and robbery, and demand accountability and consequences that include mandatory addiction recovery. Allowing openair drug markets of cheap hard drugs that are much more difficult to withdraw from to flourish on our streets is killing Portland.

AJ McCreary, Position 2 Challenger: This plan to require folks to move into temporary shelters is wild and will be unproductive. It’s not a long-term solution, nor is it humane.

How come we aren’t requiring local government to make long-term, humane policy changes? How come we are not resolving the root problems, and how exactly is this going to go in regards to forcing/requiring people into this housing? That sounds like jail or a concentration camp. This plan sounds expensive and like it won’t work, and I’m deeply sad for the community members most impacted that were not considered in this plan making. Also, who is implementing this? Our local government doesn’t have relationships with the community so they’re going to have the police execute this, because please, God, not that. Also, I’m very curious, in all of Sam Adams’ planning, how long does this shelter housing really last?

How will folks be connected and supported with long-term housing if that’s not part of this in a logical way? Again, I’m not sure

DONOR

CONTRIBUTION OF THE WEEK

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR DISABILITY RIGHTS OREGON

Emily Cooper When will the pandemic be over for the most vulnerable? “When you’re not seeing us die.”

Here’s an inconvenient statistic: Since January 2021, 1 out of every 5 COVID-19 deaths in Oregon was someone who was fully vaccinated. That’s 833 deaths, according to Oregon Health Authority data.

That is not a reason for most Oregonians to be fearful. The median age of vaccinated patients who died was 81, roughly 80% have been over age 70, and only 0.6% of documented breakthrough cases resulted in death. And a national study of breakthrough deaths found that more than three-quarters of fully vaccinated patients who died had at least four underlying medical conditions.

That number does not mean vaccines aren’t working, though there will be plenty who make that case without facts to back them up.

But it does mean that vaccines alone haven’t stopped the deaths of the most vulnerable. (Nationwide efforts continue to make the vaccines more effective for people who are immune compromised—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended this week a fourth dose at a shortened interval, three months.) For the

what we are doing. As a taxpayer and City Council candidate, I’d like to see long-term, ongoing solutions that are community led, community centered. Shelters are not a long-term solution, nor do they address the root causes of our housing crisis.

Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, Position 3: No. Massive encampments for the houseless guarded by the military are misguided and dangerous. Improving the health and safety of our most vulnerable Portlanders needs to include houseless representation in the policymaking, like the way my office developed the Queer Affinity Village for LGBTQ+ homeless persons and the Portland Street Response. Criminalizing poverty is not the answer.

We have an affordability crisis and income inequality that is at the root of people living on our streets, exacerbated by the global pandemic. We must scale up housing development, expand temporary and long-term options, and provide strong, accountable community outreach and supportive services that humanely transition people into better housing.

most vulnerable, the pandemic is not nearly over.

Emily Cooper speaks for some of those people.

As the state prepares to drop its mask mandate, WW asked Cooper, legal director of Disability Rights Oregon, what Oregonians owe the most vulnerable. R AC H E L M O N A H A N .

WW: Who is still dying?

Emily Cooper: My understanding, based on the dashboard at the Oregon Health Authority, is who’s getting the most sick and who’s dying are predominantly people who are unvaccinated, but also people with underlying health conditions, including people with disabilities.

What are you hearing from people with disabilities during this supposedly milder Omicron wave?

The attitude that, in the worst case, I get COVID, I have a really bad cold—that may be a perspective that some have. But the risk shifts when something like that kind of infection can shut down your organs or kill you. And then, when you look at that fear and you see it mirrored in the data of who’s still dying, you know, it’s hard to have a cavalier attitude about that.

Rene Gonzalez, Position 3 challenger: Yes, although the plan needs clarification and refinement.

Portland faces a livability and humanitarian crisis on our streets that requires historic action. Unsanctioned camps are devastating our neighborhoods, parks and rights of way, and act as unregulated drug markets, enabling the worst of addiction, as well as property and personal crime.

Large emergency shelters will allow us to consolidate social, mental health and addiction services, and public safety resources. They will also facilitate accelerated enforcement of Portland’s existing camping proscriptions.

Shelters are not replacements for longterm housing or addiction or mental health services—each of which require sustained policy commitment and investment. But despite very generous financial support from Portland voters, Oregon’s current path does not inspire confidence that Oregon is on the right path in addressing affordability, addiction or mental illness comprehensively.

Large shelters can provide prompt relief to Portland neighborhoods and businesses

There is some concern in the worst-case scenario that “long COVID” will permanently disable millions of people. What needs to be in place for them?

I would really love to change how we are seen in the community, particularly the medical community. I think the crisis standards of care were one really big tool we wanted to dismantle. [Disability Rights Oregon advocated changing OHA standards for how care is rationed in a crisis, so that people with disabilities are not discriminated against.] I would love to see more doctors with disabilities who bring with them that perspective and can really, you know, kick that bias out the hospital doors.

I would love for more people to look at disability the way I do, which is 1 in 4 of us have a disability.

That’s a lot of us.

And so, instead of this being a marginalized community or these are just a small subset of folks who don’t count and don’t matter, it’s your neighbor, it’s your mom. It maybe is you now.

What do you say to someone who says, “I’ve done everything asked of me (stayed home, worn masks, gotten vaccinated and boosted) and I’m ready to enjoy life”?

I get that people are tired and want things to go back to normal. But what I live every day is that we are still afraid. We are still afraid of this disease killing us, of getting the disease and not getting fairly treated when we go to the hospital, not having our support people when we get there [a right Disability Rights Oregon fought for early in the pandemic when hospitals closed to visitors], having our benefits taken away from us. And as long as there is that very real fear that is borne out by what has happened, then I’m going to be fighting for the protections and the steps to make sure that as many of us get through this pandemic safely.

When will the pandemic be over for people who are vulnerable?

When you’re not seeing us die. Or at least not disproportionately.

under siege and offer our most vulnerable safer shelter.

Vadim Mozyrsky, Position 3 challenger: Yes, I support a combined city, county, Metro and state intervention to address the humanitarian crisis unfolding in our homeless community. Despite hundreds of millions spent in recent years, City Hall inaction and divisive politics have resulted in the highest ever death and overdose rate on our streets, all while two-thirds of our homeless never received outreach for housing services. Portlanders care deeply for each other, whether housed or unhoused, but this growing tragedy cannot be solved with more of the same failed politics that brought us here. We should by no means “warehouse” the vulnerable or “militarize” safe shelter areas, as some assert. But while we await promised permanent housing and wraparound services, we must utilize all resources at our disposal to provide stability, mental health, and drug addiction services in a humane way that balances the needs of the homeless and the neighborhoods in which they reside.

HOW MUCH? $500,000 WHO GOT IT? Former state Rep. Bob Tiernan (R-Lake Oswego), who is seeking the Republican Party nomination for governor.

WHO GAVE IT? RI-Grants Pass LLC, a Berkeley, Calif.-based real estate company managed by Read Realty Management LLC, also of Berkeley. “It’s from a client that I solved their very difficult problem, and they are extremely grateful and they realize that I know how to fix things in Oregon,” Tiernan says. “They have a lifetime presence in Oregon, and they want to see Oregon better.”

WHY DOES IT MATTER? Another week, another entrant in the GOP primary race for governor. This time, it’s Tiernan, 66, a former Republican Party chair who holds a law degree from Georgetown.

With the conservative wing of the party reeling from the scandal befalling Sandy Mayor Stan Pulliam and the entrance of anti-tax ballot measure champion Bill Sizemore, Tiernan could end up a serious contender.

He enters the race with a substantial amount of cash: just over $1 million raised, with half of it coming from a loan to himself. In fundraising, that puts him behind only Christine Drazan, who has raised more than $1.2 million.

Serving in the Oregon House from 1993 to 1997, Tiernan was a chief sponsor in the Legislature of 1994’s Measure 11, which established mandatory minimum sentences for felonies. He now cites crime, homelessness and public schools as the issues of the day. Tiernan promised results from his professional experience in business and in Navy intelligence. “I don’t know other candidates who have this kind of experience and know how to get results for Oregon,” he said, announcing his candidacy in front of a homeless camp in Southwest Portland.

WHAT DOES THE DONOR SAY? Officials with the management company did not return calls seeking comment.

R AC H E L M O N A H A N .

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

7

NEWS BRIAN BURK

A Modest Proposal As West Coast leaders pledge to crack down on homelessness, a mass shelter concept copies their law-and-order approach in Portland.

BY S O P H I E P E E L

speel@wweek .com

Many Portlanders recoiled last week at an idea proposed by mayoral aide Sam Adams to create three massive homeless camps to house up to 3,000 people.

Shocking as Adams’ memo, first reported by WW, might have been, its aim to aggressively move campers off of streets is consistent with what leaders north and south of Portland are saying.

During a December press conference to address burgeoning homelessness and crime in her city, the liberal mayor of San Francisco called the streets there “nasty.”

“We are not a city where anything goes,” said Mayor London Breed.

Breed’s statements that day marked a stark shift in her tone around homelessness. She soon after declared a state of emergency in the crime-heavy Tenderloin neighborhood. There, she greenlighted federal arrests of people with outstanding warrants. She pledged to compel people to go to rehab programs. Her stern rhetoric and actions enabled law enforcement to be more assertive about disrupting sales of stolen goods.

“We can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result,” Breed said.

Last fall, Los Angeles banned camping in certain parts of the city, allowing law enforcement to more aggressively clear encampments.

To the north, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a progressive Democrat, is urging lawmakers 8

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

to pass a bill that would create a new agency to remove camps along highways.

Over the past several months, progressive West Coast leaders have announced their intent to crack down on homelessness, an abrupt shift in what has historically been a more hands-off approach. If anything, Portland is late to recognize a substantial change in voter sentiment.

Recent polling in Portland shows voters here would welcome what not long ago would have seemed drastic measures. A Jan. 28 poll

by DHM Research for the Portland Business Alliance found that homelessness is the top issue on voters’ minds and 79% of Portlanders “support requiring people who are currently living outside to sleep in shelters or designated camping locations.”

That doesn’t mean 8 in 10 Portlanders support Adams’ concept, an arguably extreme notion of shelter—no other coastal leader has publicly proposed requiring 1,000 people to move to a mass shelter. But it does show that Portlanders are hungry to remove tents from the streets, so much so that they don’t want to give homeless people any choice in the matter—something Adams mirrors in his memo.

On Feb. 11, WW reported the eight-page memo penned by Adams, a top aide to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler. (He shared it two weeks earlier with the offices of Gov. Kate Brown, Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury and Metro Council President Lynn Peterson.)

The memo floated the concept of a mass

shelter model using National Guard security forces and social work students to help manage the camps. He proposed that it be an intergovernmental effort drawing on state and regional offices.

And while many critics rejected the memo out of hand, it fits in with the trend of other West Coast cities’ efforts to remedy homelessness.

“We’re falling back on the old ways of more law, more order, the punitive ways of listening to the wealthiest and most powerful people for solutions,” says Angela Uherbelau, founder of Oregon Kids Read, who calls the memo “frightening.”

Dan Saltzman, the city’s former housing commissioner, however, says the memo may be jarring, but a lot of Portlanders support the thrust of it: “It’s honest about the number of homeless people we have in the city,” Saltzman says. “It’s got a lot of moving parts, but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it.”

Mayor Wheeler says all options are on the table.

“I directed my team to leave no stone unturned in finding a solution that will address this problem in an urgent and meaningful way,” Wheeler says, “and that is exactly what they have been doing.”

Adams’ memo comes at a pivotal time for Portlanders, when their frustration over sprawling camps is boiling over.

Since the Portland City Council declared a housing emergency in September 2015, officials have proposed a series of modest, unsuccessful ideas. The latest: six “safe rest villages” that Housing Commissioner Dan Ryan promised last year but hasn’t delivered yet.

Some housing advocates balked at Adams’ idea, calling it inhumane and cruel.

“Forcibly relocating people already suffering to mass shelters, which many on the streets have been clear will not work for them, and staffing those shelters with untrained members of the military and students is an inhumane response to our failed approach to house all our people,” said Human Solutions, a low-income housing provider, in a statement.

Other government offices and Wheeler’s colleagues on the City Council also panned it.

Commissioner Carmen Rubio said it was a “nonstarter”; Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty called it a “half-baked idea.” Ryan’s office said he “remains opposed to the concept of mass encampments with inadequate services.”

The governor’s office tells WW it won’t consider the idea, citing “a number of unanswered legal, logistical and financial questions.”

Even City Commissioner Mingus Mapps, generally a supporter of Wheeler’s policies, called the proposal an “overcorrection” to the “current hands-off approach [that] has failed everyone”: “There are ethical and effective solutions between internment and anarchy.”

Wheeler’s response: Doing little to nothing is no longer an option.

“Allowing for dangerous, squalid living conditions is not how we treat our houseless community with compassion and empathy,” Wheeler said in a statement. “The current solutions do not match the scale of our problem.”

Wheeler already invoked his emergency powers earlier this month to unilaterally ban camping along highways, an idea laid out in Adams’ memo. It allowed him to bypass the approval or opposition of his council colleagues.

Last week, Wheeler said the ban on sleeping along highways was prompted by a Portland

Bureau of Transportation report that found 70% of pedestrians killed by cars last year were homeless.

Adams raised another threat in his memo: lawsuits by fed-up Portlanders.

“I have been told school parents, neighbors, and business owners are gathering evidence and looking for potential plaintiffs and lawyers to sue state, county and city for failing to enforce camps that violate public sanitation and chronic nuisance rules,” he wrote.

“The deaths themselves are motivators,” Adams tells WW. “But so is the legal risk to the city.”

Uherbelau says she thinks People for Portland, the advocacy group that’s been highly critical of conditions on city streets and has talked publicly of legal action, is swaying the mayor’s office.

Commissioner Carmen Rubio said it was a “nonstarter”; Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty called it a “halfbaked idea.” Ryan’s office said he “remains opposed to the concept of mass encampments with inadequate services.”

“It’s such a hard lurch to the right,” Uherbelau says. “It’s hard to imagine the mayor’s office floating an idea like this before the dark money push.”

People for Portland tells WW: “Don’t blame us for the mayor’s incompetence or bad ideas.

This one is both. We’re the voice of 80% of Portlanders who believe every person who needs the safety and hope of shelter should get it.

The status quo is indefensible. We need more action and results—not useless memos and blame-shifting.”

Others see Adams’ memo as an expression of Portlanders’ frustration with tents, trash and drug use on sidewalks, even as local and state governments are awash in dollars to reduce homelessness.

The question remains: When Portlanders see a proposal for a crackdown in writing, will that reduce or increase their appetite for it?

Ethan Seltzer, a professor emeritus at Portland State University’s Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, says there’s an “unresolvable tension” right now over homelessness. Seltzer says Portlanders feel solutions for homelessness are moving with “glacial slowness” and adds that the memo might “recalibrate that balance between a desire to see something happen and a desire to not appear to be callous in some way.”

But some other cities are already a big step ahead of Portland in their own crackdowns, and Wheeler has already acted unilaterally on one pillar of Adams’ concept by banning camping along highways.

That, political strategist Len Bergstein says, is a trend that local elected officials ignore at their peril. “It’s not just an eye roll and let’s move on kind of thing,” he says. “This plan threatens a whole range of community values and brings us into an unchartered territory. It should not be treated lightly.”

NEWS BRIAN BRENEMAN

POPULATION ZERO: A new group wants Portlanders to stop reproducing.

Three Billboards and No Babies Even in a city accustomed to freewheeling messages, calls for a human breeding ban are unusual.

BY V E R O N I C A B I A N C O

Early this year, two mysterious billboards rose above the city.

The boards, at North Killingsworth Street and Interstate 205 and Southeast Division and 106th Avenue, went up Jan. 3 and 12, respectively. Both blare the same terse message: “Stop Having Kids,” in white text on a black background.

The billboards say they are paid for by a little-known organization called Stop Having Kids. That same advocacy group, which got its start in Portland, according to a spokeswoman, put up a third billboard along Interstate 5 near Salem: “A Lot of Humans Wish They Had Never Been Born.”

Oregonians pride themselves on free speech—our state constitution provides broader protections than does the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Animal rights groups, environmental extremists, and white supremacists have long taken advantage of the state’s “say anything” attitude. Even the police buy billboards to get their message out.

But advocating against procreation? That’s a new message for this city.

So we set out to figure out who’s behind it.

First things first: By all accounts, the billboards are not somebody’s idea of a sick joke.

Stop Having Kids spokeswoman Ashley Riddle says the group started informally in Portland a few months before March 2021 and identifies itself as a “collective liberation movement.” Its website makes the group’s platform clear: The organization is “antinatalist,” meaning it’s against all human reproduction.

Lamar Advertising, a billboard company based in Baton Rouge, La., owns the billboards in question, part of the company’s portfolio of 400 billboards in the Portland area.

Richard Smith, Lamar’s Portland manager, says headquar-

ters reviews prospective advertisers. “Once [the vice president of governmental affairs] vets it with his people, then we don’t worry about it because it’s been done at the highest level of our company,” Smith says. “You sign a contract, you pay for it, your billboard goes up.”

Smith declined to disclose the duration of Stop Having Kids’ contract or how much the group is paying, but he says medium-sized bulletins on the eastside of Portland cost between $800 and $1,200 a month.

Riddle says money for the billboards came from an anonymous donor, and actually getting them put up was a long process:

A small group stations itself on a sidewalk with signs that say things like “Normalize Antinatalism” and “Parenthood Regret Is a Silent Epidemic.”

“There was some difficulty in finding a company that would follow through. [Companies] would seem all for it, and then they stopped responding.”

She declined to identify the founder of Stop Having Kids by his full name, saying she knows him only as “Dietz.”

State records show, however, that Stop Having Kids was incorporated in January 2021 by Eric Goldberg, a Portland photographer whose middle name is Dietz.

Riddle says Dietz creates almost all of the content on the organization’s website, most of which is information on antinatalism.

Information about Goldberg isn’t readily available. The owner of stophavingkids.org is cloaked by an internet proxy, and the

website lists no staff or contact information aside from the email address info@stophavingkids.org.

Goldberg did not respond to WW’s requests for comment.

That makes it a little harder to unpack what he’s seeking.

After all, Oregon’s birth rates are already low. According to the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, the state’s birth rate stands at 40th in the nation. And in 2020, state figures show, deaths here outnumbered births for the first time ever.

Stop Having Kids defines antinatalism as “a philosophical and ethical stance against human reproduction” and says antinatalists consider human reproduction to be “an irreversible, unnecessary, indefensible, and enduring form of harm, regardless of circumstances, situations, or consciousness in living.”

The group says it wants to inspire and provoke critical thinking about reproductive choices and is against forcing individuals to do anything either way.

The site lists a myriad of reasons for being antinatalist, including “Birth Defects,” “Life Is Suffering” and “Enough People Already.”

Stop Having Kids also links antinatalism to veganism, coining the term “vegantinatalism.” The site says the two ideologies are one and the same since both are rooted in harm reduction and compassion.

Goldberg’s activism apparently isn’t reserved for antinatalism.

2020 news reports from Minnesota say an Oregonian named Eric Goldberg, the same age as the Stop Having Kids founder (now 34), used a $1,900 drone to surveil a chicken farming operation there when a truck driver for the chicken processing plant blasted the drone from the sky with his shotgun. The shooter was arrested.

In addition to billboards and its website, Stop Having Kids does advocacy work through sidewalk demonstrations that Riddle calls “street outreach.”

A small group stations itself on a sidewalk with signs that say things like “Normalize Antinatalism” and “Parenthood Regret Is a Silent Epidemic.”

Riddle says the goal of street outreach is to have as many conversations as possible. “People share their stories about being child-free or wishing they were never born or their parents saying that they regret having them.”

On the flipside, sidewalk pop-ups often spark confrontation, which is documented and posted on Stop Having Kids’ YouTube channel.

In a clip taken on Southwest 5th Avenue in Portland and uploaded to YouTube on Jan. 17, a man on a bike rides by the demonstrators and says, “Not down with eugenics.” The unseen camera operator recording the interaction responds, “Where do you see anything about eugenics?” The biker says, “I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.” To this, the recorder says, “This has nothing to do with eugenics.…We are totally against human procreation all across the board.”

The Portland clip isn’t the only time the group’s messaging has been likened to eugenics, controlling reproduction to increase desired heritable characteristics. In a video uploaded Jan. 25, 2021, a woman, after filming and yelling at demonstrators, says, “I don’t like Nazis who pretend to help others and try to make minorities not have children.”

Riddle says despite such incidents, responses from passersby have been overwhelmingly positive. (Riddle’s Minneapolis chapter of Stop Having Kids also prepares food and hands it out to individuals experiencing homelessness and does garbage cleanups.) But increasing the fold has been difficult. “There’s a lot of people who will reach out and say they would love to join,” Riddle says, “but then a day comes and they don’t show.”

Stop Having Kids raises money through donations and merchandise sales. Every month, a portion of proceeds goes to a different organization.

For February 2022, it’s sending money to React19, an organization “working to increase our understanding in the role of COVID-19 in those who experience systemic and prolonged symptoms, after acute infection or after vaccination.”

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), one of the most ardent anti-vaxxers in Congress, hosted an “expert panel” on vaccine dangers in November, including a React19 co-founder as one of his experts. React19 did not respond to a request for comment.

Riddle says she’s unaware of any particular reason Stop Having Kids chose to support React19. “It’s just whatever pops up on Dietz’s radar.”

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

9

PRESENTS

DRACULA February 19 – 26, 2022 | Keller Auditorium ALL PERFORMANCES Feature

OBT ORCHESTRA Tickets start at

$29

obt.org

Image: Courtesy of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre Company

ARE YOU OUT THERE? 10

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WW is looking for a new Advertising Sales Director and Membership Manager!

Go to wweek.com/careers to learn more and apply.

BUSINESS

TRIP

These four companies want to take you on a psychedelic voyage in Oregon.

BY TESS RISKI

tess@w week .com

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

11

O

regonians will soon have a frontrow seat to what researchers and enthusiasts have dubbed the “psychedelic renaissance.”

As early as next year, Oregon will become the first state in the country where people legally consume psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms.”

Unlike the ballot measure that legalized the widespread use of cannabis, however, Ballot Measure 109, which voters passed in 2020, legalizes the use of psilocybin only in state-regulated service centers, where adults of legal drinking age can trip on mushrooms under the supervision of licensed guides.

Cue the entrepreneurs.

Next January, the state will begin accepting applications from businesses seeking licenses to run their own psychedelic retreats.

Details of how, precisely, these service centers will operate are unknown. Only last week, the Oregon Health Authority released draft rules that the Psilocybin Advisory Board has been crafting—and sometimes debating—since early 2021. Those rules primarily cover the growing and packaging of psilocybin and the training curriculum for staff who will run retreats.

But the board hasn’t released any rules for the actual ingestion of mushrooms within the licensed sites.

This much is certain: The trip will cost you.

Lawyers closely monitoring Measure 109’s implementation say it is unclear how large of an impact the psilocybin industry will have on the Oregon economy, or how costly a supervised psychedelic experience might be. But if prices for similar services in the Netherlands—one of the few countries on the globe that permits psilocybin use in some form—are any indication, it could cost hundreds or, potentially, thousands of dollars for such an experience.

There’s also money to be made in training the supervisors. Some for-profit companies in the Netherlands— where truffles derived from psilocybin mushrooms are legal—charge over $20,000 for facilitator training programs.

At least one of those Dutch companies, the Synthesis Institute, has formed several LLCs and purchased property in Oregon in anticipation of the burgeoning industry.

Synthesis is not alone. Multiple international groups are staking their claim in Oregon, some motivated by what industry insiders describe as a “gold rush mentality” that blossomed around 2018 as researchers and investors alike have turned with renewed interest toward the psychedelic world.

“There is this recognition that psychedelics are the next big thing. There’s just more and more potential to make money off of drugs,” says Jon Dennis, a lawyer who co-hosts the Eyes on Oregon podcast for the website Psychedelics Today. “People are all interested in getting a slice of this pie. Nobody knows how big it’s actually going to be, but I think everybody agrees, it’s going to be really big.”

How big? Market research conducted by Dutch microdosing-focused truffle company Red Light Holland projects psilocybin will be a $1 billion industry in Oregon alone.

The law allows the use of psilocybin for “personal development,” which means that a doctor’s prescription is not needed, nor do therapists who administer the drug need a medical degree.

Instead, the Psilocybin Advisory Board’s new draft rules outline the 160-hour curriculum required of licensees.

The curriculum will most likely be provided by private companies, not through the state.

What the clinics can offer is an “experience.” “[It’s] not just talking about psilocybin, but talking about the whole experience that surrounds the actual delivery of the molecule,” says Matt Emmer, vice president of health care practice at publicly traded Canadian company Field Trip Health, which operates a psilocybin center in Amsterdam. “The setting, the environment, even the music, all of the other elements that are part of the overall treatment

12

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

experience become very much amplified around the use of psychedelics.”

All of that could come with a hefty price tag.

Measure 109 does not place any restrictions on prices, meaning psilocybin businesses could choose to cater to a wealthy clientele by operating licensed clinics more akin to wellness retreats or luxury resorts.

“You’ll have your bare-bones, no frills, get-the-job-done service centers, and you’ll have your high-end destination resorts, and you’ll have everything you could imagine in between,” says Dave Kopilak, a Portland lawyer who authored Measure 109. “Once that happens, everybody is going to be competitive and there will likely be casualties.

People will wave the white flag at some point and not make it, just like any business.”

A tourism-based, experience-focused model could present the biggest risk but highest potential for reward, Kopilak says.

“From a pure business and profit perspective,” he adds, “I could see a few high-end destination resorts being very

successful—especially as a result of out-of-state tourists.

But that’s also the most expensive and riskiest proposition, and there could be a few spectacular failures.”

That starts to explain why corporations have an appetite to establish themselves in the state 11 months before the application period begins.

“Oregon really represents this new legal and regulatory environment,” Emmer says. “We’re closely watching the developments there in terms of what the guidelines and requirements and licensing stipulations are.”

It’s worth noting that international groups may face a pitfall: Measure 109 states that all psilocybin businesses must be majority Oregonian owned. That is, at least 51% of the owners need to have residency here.

The fight over control of and profit from altering consciousness will define the next several years. Perhaps the best way to understand what the mushroom market will look like is to ask the entrepreneurs who want to spread their spores in Oregon.

Over the past week, WW spoke to the proprietors of four

C O U R T E S Y O F F I E L D T R I P H E A LT H

DR. BRAINFISH / FLICKR

TRIP SITTER: Psilocybin will be used in supervised settings much like this ketamine service center, operated by Field Trip Health.

C O U R T E S Y O F F I E L D T R I P H E A LT H

DOUBLE BLIND STUDY: Psychedelic researchers at Johns Hopkins have asked study participants to wear blackout eye shades while listening to classical music.

SHROOM WITH A VIEW: Oregon has legalized the psychedelic compound that’s derived from Psilocybe cubensis, a mushroom that can be found growing in the Cascadian woods.

businesses—three of them from other countries, and one with deep roots in Oregon. They described their visions of this state’s psychedelic future.

Synthesis Institute

seek to run their own clinics. Those 18-month training programs can cost over $20,000, according to the company website. Katz plans to also host training programs in Oregon, as early as this year.

In many ways, what Synthesis did in the Netherlands offers a blueprint for what the psilocybin industry could look like in Oregon. That expertise helped inform the Measure 109 campaign, as well as the Psilocybin Advisory Board, says Nathan Howard, an Oregon cannabis farmer who assisted with the Measure 109 campaign and now helps run a nonprofit for Tom Eckert, one of the architects of the measure.

“They have been advisers in the sense that they have come in and shared protocols to the advisory board,” Howard says of Synthesis. “They were on the ground floor, like a bunch of other people during the campaign.”

In fact, the institute shared its extensive knowledge during a 90-minute presentation before the advisory board’s training subcommittee in September.

“I am really so inspired by what’s happening in Oregon, and if there’s…any way we can help, we are really at your service,” Dr. Rosalind Watts, clinical director at Synthesis Institute, said during the meeting.

Eckert, who chairs the advisory board, says, “They’ve been very generous to share and kind of open source their stuff so we understand how they do what they do.”

Field Trip Health

The Dutch aren’t the only international investors eyeing psilocybin prospects in Oregon. Our neighbors to the north are, too.

Field Trip Health, a publicly traded Canadian company with a $46 million valuation, plans to open at least one psilocybin therapy center in Oregon.

The vision? “A best-in-class, carefully designed, curated clinical environment so that people can both safely access these modalities, but also in a setting that is comfortable, is inspiring, is warm, inviting,” says Matt Emmer, the company’s vice president of health care practice.

The price tag could fall at the higher end.

A single seven-hour “truffle dosing session” could cost upwards of $2,000. That’s the price for the “basic” session offered by Field Trip Health in Amsterdam.

Add-on services, including screenings with a physician and therapist, one to two “preparatory” sessions, and a post-trip “exploratory” session, can tack on an additional $1,500.

And it doesn’t take into account expenses for food, lodging and travel from other parts of the country or the world.

(Ballot Measure 109 restricts psilocybin use to Oregon only, but anyone can visit the state if they wish to imbibe.)

This isn’t Field Trip Health’s first psychedelic rodeo.

It currently operates about a dozen ketamine-assisted therapy centers in North America, including in New York City and Chicago. (The U.S. Food and Drug Administration categorizes ketamine as a Schedule III controlled substance. It is legal to use the psychedelic in a clinically prescribed setting in all 50 states.)

Meanwhile, a handful of U.S. states, including Washington and California, are considering legislation that would legalize psilocybin in some form.

That makes Oregon somewhat of a case study for companies with a lot of capital: If they can find success in the psilocybin industry here, the next step would be to replicate that model elsewhere as psilocybin use becomes legalized in other states.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 14

Netherlands-based Synthesis Institute, which had raised $10 million from investors as of September, has been involved in Oregon’s psilocybin world since before Measure 109 passed.

In fact, one of its co-founders, Myles Katz, moved here from the Netherlands in 2020 specifically because of Oregon’s nascent psychedelic industry. Starting in 2018, he began leading psilocybin retreats near Amsterdam. During that time, he says, his team hosted about 50 groups totaling approximately 700 clients.

Now, Katz plans to translate much of that model to Southern Oregon.

“Our approach is multiday, immersive, nature based,” Katz tells WW. “There’s a really great opportunity to bring what we learned in the Netherlands here.”

In September 2020, Katz, whose last name used to be Lutheran, formed Synthesis Digital LLC in Oregon, state records show. Eight months later, in May 2021, he registered two more Oregon businesses: Mythic Properties LLC and Oregon Retreat Centers LLC. Katz has already decided on a location. In June 2021, using Oregon Retreat Centers LLC, he purchased a 124acre property in Ashland for $3.6 million, Jackson County property records show. That’s a property more than four times the size of Laurelhurst Park.

The sprawling estate, located in the Rogue Valley, includes a restored lodge with eight private rooms and a commercial kitchen, 13 cottages, three residences, and a 12-sided yurt-style meditation room, according to an online real estate listing.

Katz says the plan for the site is to host multiday immersive retreats, with about 20 guests total. At his Netherlands location, he offered three- and five-day retreats.

The three-day retreats are more common, Katz says, with a “ceremony” where participants ingest psilocybin typically occurring on day two. During this ceremony, participants wear blackout eye masks and lie down on mattresses while classical music plays. There is sometimes an altar in the center of the room, with crystals, flowers or personal objects from the guests.

As Katz points out, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research have asked the participants to wear eye shades while listening to an hourslong, curated, classical music playlist—a sensory combination that can help guide the psychedelic journey and enable the study participants to reflect inward.

Katz says the center has not decided on pricing yet. But he expects it to be “on the more expensive end of the spectrum.” His Netherlands retreat, for example, costs about $1,000 a day for the three-day stay. That includes picking up guests from the airport, food and lodging expenses.

“I am very much expecting people to travel to the state of Oregon—not just for Synthesis, to all centers,” he says.

“I think there’s a huge appetite that’s not really quantified because there’s no legal way to quantify it.”

In addition to the psilocybin retreat centers, Synthesis also offers training in the Netherlands to facilitators who

“There is this recognition that psychedelics are the next big thing. There’s just more and more potential to make money off of drugs.”

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C O U R T E S Y O F F I E L D T R I P H E A LT H

“We are creating a regulated system that’s about access,” Eckert says. “It’s about a holistic healing paradigm. It’s humanistic rather than medically dominated.”

So far, the foundation has raised about $170,000, including a sizable donation from David Bronner of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, Eckert says.

“I think this is a spoke in a bigger wheel of change,” he adds. “But it’s an important one, because it’s about ourselves. It’s about consciousness itself. If we’re going to survive as a species, something has to change internally.

Psychedelics are not a panacea, but they’re a step in the direction of going a little deeper, and I think we need to.”

Red Light Holland

A R T P U B L I C A F FA I R S

NEW AGE: Field Trip Health, which plans to enter Oregon’s psilocybin industry, currently operates about a dozen ketamine service centers in North America.

experience become very much amplified around the use of psychedelics.”

InnerTrek

VISIONARIES: Sheri and Tom Eckert championed the legalization of psilocybin in Oregon.

Emmer says expanding throughout the U.S. is “100%, absolutely” a possibility for his company, which already operates a psilocybin therapy center in Amsterdam.

“Our vision from the start is that, as other psychedelic molecules become available for clinical use, we’d be able to add those on to the menu of treatments available into our clinic,” he says. “If we had a clinic in a state that passed a similar measure as Oregon, then we would work to incorporate psilocybin along with our existing ketamine-assistive therapy treatments.”

Field Trip Health has not decided on a location in Oregon yet, according to Emmer. But the ideal spot would be a “desirable, accessible, convenient location” that’s highly populated or in a city, he says. That way, the location can be accessible for people traveling from afar.

In Emmer’s description, Field Trip’s Oregon outpost would likely gather clients to consume psilocybin in a group setting. He says he’s seen highly transformative experiences with groups of strangers, in fact, especially when those strangers have a commonality, such as veterans who suffer from PTSD. What’s important, however, is attracting clients who are interested in the therapeutic aspect of psilocybin use, and “actively engaged in their healing journey.”

“These are experiential medicines, so it’s not just that you passively receive psilocybin or a psychedelic, but that they almost serve as a catalyst for deeper inner work,” Emmer says. “The setting, the environment, even the music, all of the other elements that are part of the overall treatment 14

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

Few people in Oregon are better positioned to run a training program for psilocybin facilitators than the man who asked voters to approve the ballot measure to make such therapy legal in the state.

That’s Tom Eckert, the co-chief petitioner of Measure 109 who now chairs the Psilocybin Advisory Board, which makes recommendations to the Oregon Health Authority.

Ultimately, the OHA is the final decision maker for adopting the state’s psilocybin rules.

In March 2021, Eckert formed InnerTrek LLC. And, as early as this summer, he plans to begin training one of the country’s first cohorts of licensed psilocybin facilitators— the people who will supervise you while you trip.

“I’ve always thought that training is kind of the heart of this whole statewide program,” Eckert tells WW. “It’s super important to have competent, ethical, well-trained facilitators to populate this new framework that we created in Oregon. And so InnerTrek is a response to that looming demand.”

The maximum class size will be 108 students, Eckert says.

He adds that he is aware that similar training programs abroad can cost tens of thousands of dollars. While he hasn’t set a price yet, he says he doesn’t want his program to be “cost prohibitive” and he’d like to offer a sliding scale so the training is accessible.

Eckert’s business venture means he is simultaneously leading the government advisory board that is crafting the rules surrounding psilocybin legalization and starting a company that will profit from that new marketplace.

Eckert says he is mindful of this dynamic and that Oregon’s ethics rules lay the groundwork to address potential conflicts.

“The way the board is set up is very transparent. All the discussions happen in public. So there’s no kind of information that’s behind the scenes. It’s happening in real time, in the public eye,” he says. “It’s really about creating a community around developing the infrastructure to make Oregon succeed as a whole.”

“And let’s also be clear that’s an advisory board,” he adds.

“The OHA creates the program.”

Eckert was not the sole chief petitioner for Measure 109.

He and his wife, Sheri, spearheaded it together. But the month after the measure passed, December 2020, Sheri Eckert died. The couple had dedicated years of their lives to bringing psilocybin into the mainstream. Together, they founded the Oregon Psilocybin Society.

Last February, Eckert formed the Sheri Eckert Foundation. In addition to honoring his wife’s legacy, he says the nonprofit will operate as a scholarship fund for students who want to enroll in a facilitator training program.

Another Netherlands-based psilocybin company plans to throw its hat in the ring. Red Light Holland, a publicly traded corporation, formed Red Light Oregon Inc. last April, state records show.

But unlike some of its Dutch colleagues, the Red Light group doesn’t want to host multiday, resort-style programs.

Instead, its area of focus is something that’s caused strife on the advisory board in recent weeks: microdosing.

That’s the practice of taking a fractional dose of a psychedelic—in this case, psilocybin—semi-regularly for weeks or perhaps months.

The main reason microdosing is a priority is accessibility, says Sarah Hashkes, chief technology innovation officer at Red Light Holland.

“If they want this to be as accessible as possible, then microdosing is important, because it’s going to be at a cheaper price point,” Hashkes says.

Red Light Holland has also conducted extensive market research, releasing results in the fall that showed 16% of Oregonians would want to microdose on a weekly basis. While that research is funded by the industry, Hashkes argues that immersive psilocybin therapy is too large a commitment for many people who are interested in psychedelics.

“People don’t need to take days of vacation [to microdose],” she says. “When you’re doing this big dose, you need to significantly prepare for it. And there’s a whole day of the dose. The next day, you’re still floating and can’t just jump back into work. And for a lot of people that’s not something that they can do.”

In the Netherlands, a person can walk into a store and purchase truffles derived from psilocybin mushrooms, similar to cannabis dispensaries in Oregon. That won’t be allowed under Measure 109. But Hashkes says the company envisions locations where clients could take a low dose of the substance, then practice yoga or meditation during the “supervised” portion of the experience.

“It’s quite different than the pharmaceutical model of just giving people some chemical,” she says. “Here, it’s really the support structures around the use of the substance, to help people connect to themselves, to connect to a community and slowly build healthy patterns.”

But whether microdosing will be allowed in Oregon is still up for debate. As WW first reported in January, the advisory board is split on the idea. Eckert, the advisory board chair, says microdosing is not in line with the measure’s intentions, because it promotes a “dispensary-type model” as opposed to a therapeutic one.

But Dave Kopilak, the lawyer who authored Measure 109, says the measure’s text intentionally omits rules around dosage, effectively leaving the door open on microdosing.

“The spirit of the measure is the words of the measure,” he says. “The measure doesn’t say anything about dosage, nor does it say anything about how long an administration session must be. This is an OHA decision. It’s a policy decision that they will make.”

Should microdosing be prohibited, what would that mean for companies like Red Light for which smaller psilocybin doses are a primary focus?

“We’d need to look into it,” Hashkes says. “If we can’t do microdosing services, is it worth our while to both manufacture and have a facility? We don’t know that yet, but we’re definitely going to be doing something.”

STREET

ALL THAT DRAG Photos by Brian Burk On Instagram: @bpburk

The Black & Beautiful drag show at Kelly’s Olympian on Feb. 12 was a celebration of Black Queer humans as well as an opportunity to educate the community during Black History Month.

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

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STARTERS

T H E MOST I MP ORTANT P O RTLA N D C U LTU R E STORI E S OF T H E W E E K—G RA P H E D .

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

PA L A D I N P I E

COMFORT SHOES FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY

Dungeons & Dragons-themed pizza cart Paladin Pie is scheduled to open in March.

Mon-Sat 10-6pm Sunday 11-5pm

Seattle’s Can Can Culinary Cabaret is spinning off a second location inside Portland’s Paris Theatre.

1433 NE Broadway St Portland • 503 493-0070

You can watch most of the Oscars’ Best Picture nominees in Portland movie theaters right now.

After opening a pop-up in Washington Square for the holidays last year, Wild Roots Spirits and Wyld CBD decide to stay for good.

RUSSO LEE GALLERY

OUR EVENT PICKS, E M A I L E D W E E K LY.

KIM ROSE ADAMS

Astoria’s Cannery Pier Hotel begins an extensive renovation.

Get Busy Tonight

The Portland Art Museum’s Whitsell Auditorium will offer weekend matinees after a two-year pandemic closure.

Portland artist Gregory Grenon dies at age 73.

Statewide nonprofit Oregon Parks Forever funds the planting of 553,000 trees.

SERIOUS

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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

AW F U L

JANUS FILMS

AW E S O M E

Five Guys is opening its first Portland restaurant in the Lloyd District.

JERRY HUDDLESTON

Paris Baguette, the South Korean bakery cafe chain with more than 4,000 locations around the globe, opens in Beaverton’s Cedar Hills Crossing.

GET BUSY

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

OREGON BREWERS GUILD



LEARN | Zwickelmania Over a dozen years ago, a handful of Portland breweries decided to welcome customers behind the scenes for what became the first-ever Zwickelmania. The event has gotten so big, there are now 120-plus participating businesses across the state, and it’s broken up into two separate weekends. This Saturday, brewers in the Portland metro area will show you how they turn water into beer and provide special tastes of batches in the making from their tanks’ zwickel valves. Both Migration and Threshold are holding anniversary parties the same day, so be sure to add them to your itinerary. Various participating breweries, oregoncraftbeer.org/zwickelmania. Noon-4 pm Saturday, Feb. 19. Free. 21+.

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DRINK | Suttle Lodge Winter Beer Festival If you’ve hit pretty much every Zwickelmania in years past and really don’t need to spend an afternoon staring at more fermentation vessels, then take a beer escape. The Suttle Lodge has brought back its Winter Beer Festival following a COVID pause. The lakeside property’s six rustic cabins will be transformed into mini-pubs, while outdoors the resort promises cozy fires and grills filled with brats and vittles. The Suttle Lodge & Boathouse, 13300 Highway 20, Sisters, 541-638-7001, thesuttlelodge.com. Noon-5 pm Friday-Sunday, Feb. 18-20. $40-$125.

ADVERTISE in one of Willamette Week's upcoming special issues: Portland's Funniest

�

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WATCH | Dracula Ballet history is adorned with iconic characters like the Nutcracker, the Swan Queen, Giselle and…Dracula?! Oregon Ballet Theatre is getting vampiric with its Bram Stoker-inspired production, which brings the story of a blood-drinking count, an odious henchman, and a kidnapped bride-to-be to the stage. Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St., 503-248-4335, obt.org.

7:30 Friday-Saturday, 2 pm Saturday-Sunday, Feb. 19-26. $29-$103.

SWE EKLY LAND ’S NEW

This

E WEEK PORT

WILLAMETT

P. 24 A THING?" WAS STILL

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WATCH | Maz and Bricks In 2021, Corrib Theatre unleashed three plays that delivered compassionate and unflinching chronicles of Ireland’s culture wars. With Maz and Bricks, the company continues that journey with a tale of two strangers—a woman who is about to protest against the Eighth Amendment, Ireland’s now-repealed abortion ban, and a man on his way to visit his daughter.

Portland State University, Boiler Room Theater in Lincoln Hall, 1620 SW Park Ave, 503-389-0579, corribtheatre.org. 7:30 pm ThursdaySaturday, 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 18-March 13. $30.

5

FOOTBALL YOU KNOW "HEY, DID

WATCH | Chungking Express With its beautifully blurred colors and glorious bursts of wit and feeling, Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 Hong Kong anthology is a movie that belongs on the big screen. Thanks to Clinton Street Theater, you can savor its surreal narrative, which includes femme fatale theatrics, snack bar shenanigans, and the best use of “California Dreamin’” in the history of cinema. Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St., 503-897-0744, cstpdx.com. 10 pm Friday, Feb 18. $5-$8 suggested.

Is Portland's Funniest Person

Quarantine comedy. can’t stop city’s Here are the as top comics, chosen by their peers.

WWEEK .COM

Page 11

Katie Nguyen

P. 6 Could Play Hooky.

SCHOOLS: Teachers No Unity. P. 9 NEWS: All Timber, P. 25 ture , Take a Crea .

MAP: Give a Creature

VOL 47/14 02.03.2021

Spring Arts Preview, 3/2 • The Money Issue, 3/9 Funniest Five, 3/23 • Housing Issue, 4/13

Email advertising@wweek.com for more.

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Top 5

Hot Plates WHERE TO EAT THIS WEEK.

1. NICO’S ICE CREAM

5713 NE Fremont St., 503-489-8656, nicosicecream.com. 3-9 pm Wednesday-Friday, noon-9 pm Saturday-Sunday.

Ice cream in February?

Where do you think we are, New Zealand? At Nico’s Ice Cream, yes. The Northeast Portland shop’s only item, vanilla ice cream blended with berries, has its roots in the land of kiwis. It also requires its own appliance to prepare—a Little Jem Elite Real Fruit Ice Cream Blender that combines plain vanilla Tillamook with your choice of frozen fruit. Once the ice cream is finished mixing, you have something with the butterfat richness of hardpack, but the airiness and mouthfeel— plus the delightful swirl—of soft serve.

FOOD & DRINK

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

2. SUNSHINE NOODLES

2175 NW Raleigh St., Suite 105, sunshinenoodlespdx.com. 5-9 pm Monday-Thursday, 11 am-3 pm and 5-9 pm Friday-Sunday.

Diane Lam, the former chef de cuisine at Revelry, is back in full force with Sunshine Noodles, a relaunch of her pandemic popup that now has a brick-and-mortar home in Slabtown. Snag a seat at the countertop, where you can watch the kitchen team work the wok station, then dig into the catfish spring rolls. Though not a noodle dish, it’s the current standout. The fish is blackened, then rolled into rice paper with herbs, vermicelli noodles, a slice of watermelon radish, and then topped with a citrusy nuoc cham sauce that’s a mixture of bitter, sweet, salt and funk.

3. SEBASTIANO’S

411 SE 81st Ave., 503-841-5905, sebastianospdx.com. 11 am-3 pm Wednesday-Saturday.

As we continue to ride the Omicron crest, Montavilla’s Sicilian deli, Sebastiano’s, has launched a take-and-bake dinner program to keep you cozy through winter. Specials rotate, but the extra-large, Catanese-style arancini are a must-have. Each order includes two goose egg-sized fried balls of rice mixed with Olympia Provisions mortadella, Tails & Trotters ham, and mozzarella.

Add a radicchio salad, a bottle of wine, and a slice of olive oil cake, and you’ve got yourself a nice little weeknight meal.

4. PASTIFICIO D’ORO

8737 N Lombard St., doropdx.com. 5-8 pm Monday-Tuesday.

Pastificio d’Oro is a restaurant inside another restaurant in St. Johns. But its heart—and thus, your stomach—is in Bologna, the Northern Italian city known for its handmade pasta, meat ragù (aka “Bolognese”) and mortadella (which America turned into, yes, “bologna”).

Chef Chase Dopson had never cooked this style of cuisine until he caught “the pasta bug” at the start of the pandemic.

With just a single induction burner to boil water and Gracie’s Apizza’s wood-fired oven, Dopson generally builds his menu around just two pastas, most frequently a tagliatelle ragù and a filled pasta in the tortellini family. It’s very heavy food, but incredibly soul-soothing.

5. UNICORN CREATIONZ

4765 NE Fremont St., 971-319-1134, nacheauxpdx.com. 4-8 pm Wednesday-Thursday, noon-8:30 pm Friday, 10 am-4 pm Saturday-Sunday.

Despite its name, Unicorn Creationz is more of a tricera-corn. The bar/restaurant is split into three concepts inside the former Alameda Brewhouse space: food cart favorite Nacheaux—whipping up breakfast, lunch and, if you make it there in time, weekend brunch—as well as a bakery/dessert shop called Karnival Kreations, and Bourbon St. Bar. The cart is the heart of this food hall, so get there early on a Saturday to ensure owner-chef Anthony Brown has a spicy chorizo burrito left for you.

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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK: The Woodsman Tavern returns with a familiar menu, though the execution isn’t always spot on.

ALL PHOTOS: AARON LEE

Lost in the Woods

The Woodsman Tavern was a longtime hot spot in Portland’s dining scene.

The revival, however, doesn’t yet live up to those memories.

BY A N D R E A DA M E WO O D

The door of the Woodsman Tavern reads: “Opened 2011. Closed 2018. Opened again 2021.”

To which we ask why?

The Woodsman helped define Portland’s dining scene at a time when we were ascending to the top of national food destination lists— think dark wood interiors, menus filled with Oregon-raised ham, and bourbon and beards galore.

But the revival falls far short of its glory days.

Originally owned by Stumptown Coffee founder Duane Sorenson, the Woodsman was a success from the start, having been named one of GQ’s Ten Best New Restaurants in America and The Oregonian’s 2012 Rising Star. Diners went mad for signature dishes like a whole trout served in “crazy water” and gussied-up deviled eggs.

The quality of the food waned in the late 2010s, but the kitchen got a breath of fresh air with the entry of Top Chef finalist Doug Adams, who did a stint at the Woodsman while waiting to open Bullard inside downtown’s Woodlark hotel.

Sorenson eventually sold the tavern to John Gorham’s Toro Bravo restaurant group, which turned the Southeast Division Street location into Tasty n Daughters. That company collapsed in 2020 amid a combination of Gorham’s personal troubles and the financial fallout from state-mandated pandemic closures.

Now, the Woodsman is under the Submarine Hospitality umbrella (Ava Gene’s, Tusk), a company that has also faced challenges after being accused of fostering a toxic workplace culture.

That’s a lot for one tavern. As the Woodsman once again, Submarine has slapped a trendy smiley face on the neon sign out front and restored much of the aesthetic and menu you might remember—paintings of Mount Hood on the walls, oysters featured prominently on the menu (now $38 a dozen).

This total resurrection would be fine, except the food just isn’t good. And not in a “we swung for the fences and fell short” kind of way, but in a “we’re bunting” effort.

Take the Butcher Burger. At $24, it’s one of the most expensive in the city. The burger is made with 30-day aged beef, imparting a strong funk, and then topped with onions and a slice

of gouda that remained mostly unmelted on the charcoal-grilled patty. The burger, which was dry, was served without condiments, but came with a full pitcher of dijonnaise on the side. We’re all for pricing menu items to reflect the reality of what it costs to source and make them, but at that price, we should be hungry for more.

The same went for a $24 cauliflower steak, which, while tasty, was simply two massive slabs of grilled cauliflower dressed up with mornay sauce. It’s the only vegetarian entree, and feels as though someone thought, “Oh, you’re plant based? Here’s a whole plant.” Solo, it would be a slog; if you’re sharing, you’re OK. A New York steak ($32) arrived cooked to medium rather than the requested rare, again with a pitcher of sauce—this time bearnaise.

That’s a classic combo, but somehow here it felt discordant.

The bone-in pork chop ($32), served with a pitcher (why all the pitchers?!) of huckleberry jus, was actually pretty great, the sauce adding a nice acidic punch to cut the richness of the pork. The Brussels sprouts we got on the side, however, were too crunchy for primetime.

Top 5

Buzz List WHERE TO DRINK THIS WEEK.

1. 503 DISTILLING LOUNGE

4784 SE 17th Ave., Suite 150, 503-9755669, 503distilling.com. 3-9 pm Thursday-Saturday, 1-7 pm Sunday.

Portland has a new outlet where you can sample draft cocktails right next door to the source. 503 Distilling recently opened a lounge adjacent to its distillery inside the Iron Fireman Collective building. That’s where you’ll find six rotating cocktails on tap, plus made-to-order mixed drinks, beer and wine. The draft options offer visitors first tastes of some of the newest concoctions coming out of the distillery, acting as something of a laboratory. And once you’ve had your fill of spirits, Ruse Brewing is a short stumble away.

2. HOLY GHOST

4101 SE 28th Ave., holyghostbar.com. 3 pm-late daily.

This may be the fifth entry in Ezra Caraeff ’s bar portfolio, which includes long-standing favorites like Hi-Top Tavern and Paydirt, but Holy Ghost has its own personality, which can be found in everything from the goddesslike blue and gold color scheme to the impressively deep selection of agave spirits. Make it a point to always order at least one gin fizz while you’re here. A machine behind the bar named “Shake Gyllenhaal” agitates the New Orleans classic for at least five minutes—a manual task that keeps the drink off many other menus.

3. ECLIPTIC BREWING MOON ROOM

930 SE Oak St., 971-383-1613, eclipticbrewing.com. Noon-9 pm Wednesday-Thursday, noon-10 pm Friday-Saturday, noon-8 pm Sunday.

Legendary brewmaster John Harris’ spinoff of his North Portland brewery is darker and moodier than the flagship—an aesthetic meant to evoke conditions on Earth’s natural satellite. The design also continues the brand’s space theme, reflecting the founder’s passion for astronomy. Inside the former Base Camp Brewing building, you won’t find a full kitchen, but there is an extensive tap list and a gin-focused cocktail program. And the on-site food cart serves a lineup of hearty sandwiches.

We want to pause here and acknowledge that there are human beings running this restaurant—servers who were very pleasant and attentive, bartenders who make a mean boulevardier, and someone with a great eye for Oregon beer and wine to put together a stellar drink menu.

But Submarine Hospitality should know, and do, better. It’s been behind some of the most successful and inspiring openings throughout the years, and that has set the bar quite high for Woodsman.

Still, we’ll end on a high note: the baked Alaska.

Oh, hunny, how grand it is to receive a flaming orb of meringue, holding within it a ball of coffee bean ice cream covered in an almond magic shell.

There’s plenty of time to shoot video as the liquor burns off, and it’s hard to beat the combination of toastiness and cold ice cream. So, if for nothing else, go for dessert and a cocktail. Just don’t expect the alchemy of the past Woodsman; that’s been gone a long time.

EAT: The Woodsman Tavern, 4537 SE Division St., 503-342-1122, thewoodsmantavern.com.

4-10 pm Wednesday-Sunday.

4. BRASA HAYA

412 NE Beech St., 503-288-3499, brasahayapdx.com. 5:30-9 pm Tuesday-Thursday, 5:30-10 pm Friday-Saturday.

Though only open since June, Brasa Haya serves a traditional Spanish coffee that’s already one of the best in town. Rich chocolate vies for dominance with locally roasted Junior’s brew and a cool cloud of amaro whipped cream. Start your meal with a glass and have a second at the end—you’ll be justified because the decadent drink appears on the dessert menu, too.

5. PUNCH BOWL SOCIAL

340 SW Morrison St., #4305, 503-3340360, punchbowlsocial.com/location/ portland. 11 am-11 pm Sunday-Thursday, 11 am-1 am Friday-Saturday.

If you’re looking to spend an evening trying to rack up the high score on The Simpsons arcade game and then pickup spares in a bowling alley, head to Punch Bowl Social. Sure, the 32,000-square-foot gaming palace may be in a mall, but it fills a wonderful niche in downtown Portland—there’s something on the menu for everyone, a deep beer list and creative cocktails, to boot. You can also count on at least one special punch to be offered during holidays, of which there are an abundance.

music millennium

welcomes festival

february 17th - 26th info@pdxjazz.org

lp: $24.99 cd: $11.99

Sale prices prices good good in in store store only only Sale

jazz is dead 006

GARY BARTZ

live

The Winningstad Saturday theatre

FEbruary 19th 7pm 11th annual

Bring Your Kids

To To Music Music Millennium Millennium

Saturday Day february 19th

10am - 6pm Free Gift Bags To The First 200 Under 18 To The First 200 Under 18 live performances

Triple rainbow (12pm) youth youth music music project project band band (2pm) (2pm)

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

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POTLANDER

Do the Do-Si-Do Does the Leafly strain of the year live up to the hype?

We tested several varieties to find out.

BY B R I A N N A W H E E L E R

What is it about Do-Si-Dos that captivated stoned America last year?

From coast to coast, it was the most popular strain; a super-relaxing cultivar bred from a phenotype of Girl Scout Cookies and Face Off OG that reportedly delivered a high potent enough to ease both common anxiety and the flaming hot collapse-ofsociety-as-we-know-it variety of fear as well. And there’s no way an entire nation of stoners could be wrong.

Since cultivars can differ so greatly between growers, processes and products, we decided to explore the strain in its three most common forms—dabs, joints and stickyicky buds—to find out just what, exactly, is so spellbinding about this hybrid, and hopefully figure out the best delivery systems for a variety of needs. Here are the results:

Round One: Concentrates and Conversations Disco Dabs Do-Si-Dos Sauce, 39% THC I brought two dab rigs and a stack of alcohol wipes to my squad’s weekly RuPaul’s Drag Race watch party to observe how my crew was affected by both Disco Dabs’ sauce and Bobsled’s live resin.

The first homegirl to partake in the Disco Dab gulped a solid 4-ounce chamber of opaque smoke without even needing to clear her chest; not because she’s an ironlunged champ, but because the quality of the Disco Dab was velvety smooth. After a few moments of contemplation, her first impression was that the exhale “tasted like sausage smells,” which is to say, it had a buttery, botanical finish. It also led to the kind of immediate high that can make perfect sense of the phrase “this tasted like sausage smells.”

As our highs unfurled, I could see my buddies blossom into chattier versions of themselves, albeit in ways that were tender and disarming rather than clumsy and disconnected.

BUY: Vibe | Amberlight Cannabis Dispensary, 2407 SE 49th Ave., 503-2330420, pdxvibe.com.

Bobsled Dosidos Live Resin, 39% THC Near the end of our watch party, I passed a second rig loaded with Bobsled’s live resin. My friend’s exhale was rougher than the previous dab, eliciting rattling coughs from even the most experienced dabbers in our crew. Though we agreed that the mouthfeel of Bobsled’s Dosidos live resin belied what were heavy, cashmere-cozy effects.

The exhales were bright, with notes of lemongrass and citrus that felt fresh even through a series of barking coughs. But this high felt quiet, cozy and introspective. We settled a bit deeper into our seats and slow-

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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

ly our chatter turned from superficial to sympathetic. The two dabs felt like perfect bookends to the night.

BUY: Club Sky High, 8975 N Lombard St., 503-719-5801, clubskyhigh.net.

Round Two: Pre-rolls in the Kitchen and Bedroom Kleen Karma Gardens Do-Si-Dos, 30% THC A primary takeaway from my time spent auditioning Do-Si-Dos was how enthusiastic it made me about eating. The munchies I experienced were significant and, weirdly, principled: After a half-gram Kleen Karma pre-roll, I didn’t crave any processed foods.

Instead, I buzzed with kitchen creativity, going straight into Instagram chef mode. The entire process, from cooking to cleanup, was a magic carpet ride. But as the high evaporated, it zapped what was left of my energy, and I spent the rest of the afternoon napping.

BUY: Happy Leaf Portland Dispensary, 1301 NE Broadway, 971-800-0420, happyleafportland.com.

Ionic Do-Si-Dos Distillate-Infused Pre-roll, 32% THC Ionic’s Do-Si-Dos-infused pre-roll felt similar to smoking moon rocks in that any discernible nuance that the flower might have delivered was buried under distillate. That said, this pre-roll still delivered the trademark euphoria I’d come to expect from the strain, with compounded munchies and an even more intense need to nap post-munch.

BUY: Tetra Cannabis, 1815 N Williams Ave., 971-238-1232, tetrapdx.com.

Round Three: Waking, Working and Winding Down With Flower Million Elephants, 27% THC How a plant is cultivated determines a great

deal. Factory farms typically produce a different quality of flower than independent farms, and even smaller local growers can produce two notably different varieties of the same cultivar. Million Elephants’ Dosido varietal, for example, has a tight bud structure, candy-sweet exhale, and verdant, savory nose.

It didn’t quite look, taste or smell like any of the other Do-Si-Dos products we auditioned.

When smoked in the morning, it delivered mild euphoria, potent munchies and an easily managed lethargy. When smoked at night, though, we were couchlocked.

BUY: Oregon Weedery Dispensary, 2327 NW Kearney St., 503-750-4594, portlanddispensary.net.

TerpScouts, 24% THC The nose on TerpScouts’ Do-Si-Dos is stringent and cutting, with lingering notes of sharp pine that made my nostrils flare. The exhale had a buttery richness reminiscent of the one we got from Disco Dabs, but the high felt more physical than cerebral.

At the onset, my fingertips tingled, my toes curled and my chakras all lit up. The familiar euphoria was present in my body, but the head high was watery and intractable. Any kind of cognitive exertion was a challenge, but because of Do-Si-Dos’ euphoric streak, thinking complex thoughts didn’t feel terribly annoying, just harder than usual.

BUY: Kaleafa Cannabis Company, 5232 SE Woodstock Blvd., 971-407-3208, kaleafa.com.

MUSIC

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

Now Hear This Listening recommendations from the past, present, Portland and the periphery.

BY DANIEL BROMFIELD // @BROMF3

SOMETHING OLD

Betty Davis, who passed away earlier this month at 77, cut three of the most scorching funk-rock albums of all time between 1973 and 1975, Betty Davis, They Say I’m Different and Nasty Gal (after ushering her ex-hus-

band Miles into his incendiary electric era).

She’s a force of nature, howling with as much gusto as Robert Plant as the music clatters like she’s dragging something heavy. Few people have ever sounded more badass on record, and though her imposing presence didn’t translate into sales, her cult has steadily grown each year.

SOMETHING NEW

DEPTH OF FIELD: Patricia Wolf records sounds for I’ll Look for You in Others.

Solace and Ambience Loss leads to music in ambient artist Patricia Wolf’s new album, I’ll Look for You in Others.

The shaggy, hardworking indie rock of Big Thief blossoms over nearly an hour and a half on their wild and woolly new double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. Singer Adrianne Lenker’s cosmic-trickster

humor suggests Robert Hunter’s best work with the Grateful Dead, and they’ve at once become a full-blown country band (“Spud Infinity,” “Red Moon,” the wonderful “Blue Lightning”) while going farther out on a limb than ever with dark, hip-hop-flavored tracks like “Blurred View.”

SOMETHING LOCAL

BY DA N I E L B R O M F I E L D

On local ambient artist Patricia Wolf’s Twitter page is one of the last photographs of her mother-in-law, Kathleen Karle, before she passed away in 2019.

Wolf and Karle stand together at the foot of a hill as the long shadows of dusk start to fall. In the background are dozens of curious structures, superficially resembling flowers, but clearly artificial: lights installed by the artist Bruce Munro in Paso Robles in central California.

“All the little lights made me think of people’s spirits and energy,” says Wolf, who audibly grows emotional as we speak over the phone. “I made such a major spiritual connection to it.”

The same installation adorns the cover of her new album, I’ll Look for You in Others, released this month on the Indianapolis ambient label Past Inside the Present. It’s quiet, patient and instrumental, composed mostly of wordless vocals, field recordings and synths.

Yet its contrast of gorgeous ambient sweep and minor-key introspection reflects the emotional rhythms Wolf experienced after her mother-in-law’s death, and she hopes it will connect with listeners dealing with loss in the same way Munro’s lights connected with her.

“I like to communicate something that I think will connect with other people, even if it’s just a small group,” Wolf says. “I was hoping that maybe other people who are in that same place can find some sort of refuge there, or understanding.”

Though this is technically Wolf’s debut album, she’s hardly a new face in Portland’s avant-garde. She first became known in the local music scene as a DJ, and from 2017 to 2019, she ran and lived above the Variform gallery at the border of Old Town and the Pearl District, hosting shows by both local and international experimental artists.

Yet even aside from Karle’s diagnosis with breast cancer in 2017, the last few years have been tumultuous for Wolf. She closed Variform in 2019 due to concerns over crime in the neighborhood (“I

would feel really terrible if someone came down for an event and ended up getting shot or something”), and when the pandemic came to Portland, she found herself hardly able to work at all.

Much music during this time didn’t feel “right” to listen to, and her tastes started to skew toward ambient music.

“We shifted our lives more toward being there for family and away from social activities,” she says of herself and her husband, Max Wolf, who masters her music and designs some of her artwork.

“So the music just got a little bit more introspective and reflective and slowed down and thoughtful. When you’re going through a lot of grief, you don’t feel like dancing around in a club.”

During this period, Wolf found herself touching up old recordings, abandoning her previous aversion to digital processing and running her synths through plug-ins. “It was good for taking me out of my own head a little bit,” she said of this material, which forms the bulk of I’ll Look for You in Others.

Wolf isn’t touring behind the album, but she’ll perform her first public DJ set since the beginning of the pandemic on March 28 at Holocene, opening for German guitarist Fennesz and rising Kenyan ambient artist KMRU. Just don’t expect a party: “I haven’t done a dancey DJ set since like 2018.”

She’s also recorded a new album, which doesn’t have a name or release date yet, but will be released on the Balmat label run by Portland-born DJ and electronic-music scholar Philip Sherburne.

She describes it as lighthearted compared to I’ll Look for You in Others.

“I feel really proud and happy about that, because it took me a lot of time and processing to get to that point,” she says. “Things do get better. You’ll still carry this loss and sadness in you, but you can get yourself back to a place of not feeling so heavy about things and feeling light and playful again.”

SEE IT: Patricia Wolf performs at Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 503-239-7639, holocene.org. 8 pm Monday, March 28. $27.

I’ll Look for You in Others is available now at pastinsidethepresent.com.

As Raum, local ambient hero Grouper and San Francisco guitarist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma have crafted the best album ever about the shared experience of watching movies.

Daughter is a tribute to late filmmaker Paul Clipson, and one of the first things we hear is the sound of a projector running before the album toggles between different field recordings and permutations of guitar and piano. It’s a “cinematic” album that, rather than being big and bombastic like a blockbuster, is slow and patient like an art film.

SOMETHING ASKEW

The Aluminum Group is one of the most undersung groups of Chicago’s turn-of-the-millennium explosion of creativity. Like their onetime producer Jim O’Rourke, brothers John and Frank Navin are fascinated with the kitschy sophistication of Burt Bacharach, lounge music and smooth soul. Yet the bright electronic bounce of their wonderful 2002 album Happyness, plus their arch wit and tender evocations of same-sex love, sets them apart as some of the great purveyors of dapper urban pop.

Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

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MOVIES

G ET YO U R R E P S I N

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

DISCOVERY PRODUCTIONS

SCREENER

Black Girl (1966)

DOOMED DRIVE: Linda Manz and Dennis Hopper in Out of the Blue.

Dark Blue The Hollywood Theatre is screening a 4K restoration of Dennis Hopper’s controversial 1980 film Out of the Blue.

BY G R AC E C U L H A N E

If the 2020s have a zeitgeist, it’s weariness.

Two years into COVID, it seems to have inflected every corner of our media landscape, from the casual pessimism of internet discourse to the uncharacteristically depressing Sex and the City reboot. Even the most cheerful media properties are suddenly imbued with an exhausted, disillusioned edge.

If ’80s counterculture was defined by punk music—anarchic, furious, leaning into nothing—the 2020s equivalent is harder to define. Perhaps that’s why it feels like an eerily appropriate time for a remastered version of Dennis Hopper’s 1980 drama Out of the Blue, which screens at the Hollywood Theatre starting Friday.

Set in rural British Columbia, Out of the Blue stars the incandescent Linda Manz (Days of Heaven), who died in 2020, as a teenage girl named Cebe. The film begins with one of the most upsetting opening scenes in cinema history: Cebe riding shotgun while her alcoholic father, Don (Hopper), chugs whiskey and accidentally plows his semi-truck into a school bus full of children. And it only gets darker from there!

Originally financed as a Canadian after-school special, the film almost imploded when its intended director backed out at the last minute. Hopper, looking to save the production, had one weekend to rewrite the script and step into the director’s chair. The result is a wild, galloping, associative masterpiece, with breathtaking cinematography by Marc Champion and an improvised feel.

Out of the Blue is most successful as a character study of Cebe: Cebe the thumb-sucking delinquent, Cebe the Elvis-worshipping punk. It’s her movie, whether she’s picking a fight, smoking angstily or getting kicked out of a country-Western bar where Canadian tuxedos abound in every shade of denim.

When Cebe witnesses her flimsy, histrionic mother (Sharon Farrell) shooting up in their living room, she hightails it to Vancouver. The rest of the film unfolds like a fever dream. Cebe even gets to play the drums amid the raucous nirvana of a Pointed Sticks concert, one of the few joyful moments in a film propelled by an aura of creeping dread.

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Out of the Blue also chronicles Don’s release from prison five years after the bus crash. We watch as an already-dysfunctional family falls apart in real time and the story takes on a tilt-a-whirl quality, careening from one party scene to the next. Adults booze and leer at underage girls, while Cebe escapes into her Elvis records and punk.

At times, Out of the Blue feels like a moving painting.

Don drives a forklift around a garbage dump, scattering a cloud of white seagulls. The family picnics on a deserted beach. Cebe gels her hair back and paints sideburns on her jaw and, in another scene, sings “Heartbreak Hotel” in an empty greenhouse choked with overflowing vines.

All of this is held together by Manz’s stoic, expressive minimalism, and Crazy Horse and Neil Young’s “My My, Hey Hey (Into the Black),” which gives the film its title (“Out of the blue and into the black/You pay for this, but they give you that”) and plays throughout. “It’s better to burn out/Than to fade away,” Young sings, reminding us that the characters in Out of the Blue are pretty good at both.

While Out of the Blue’s explosive, frankly ridiculous final scene might linger for some viewers, it doesn’t resonate with me. Instead, I often find myself thinking about the scene at the Pointed Sticks show where a camera crew trails the musicians. “What does punk rock mean to you?” a man asks as he waves a microphone in their faces. No one answers.

From the very first frame, Out of the Blue vibrates with a dark, animal cruelty. Cebe’s world is a dangerous place for a girl to come of age; it’s populated by broken people who don’t have much left to live for and lash out in startling ways.

If anything offers a counternarrative to the cruelty Cebe endures, it’s that punk show. Elbowing past the camera crew, eyes lit up, Cebe sits at the drum set, trembling with excitement when she’s handed the sticks. With teetering, fragile bravado, she fights and rocks out while the world crumbles around her. That’s punk.

SEE IT: Out of the Blue screens at the Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 7 pm Friday-Thursday, through Feb 24. $8-$10.

In this groundbreaking French-Senegalese drama, a woman from Dakar moves to France to work as a nanny for a rich white couple, dreaming of a cosmopolitan lifestyle. But when she arrives in Antibes, she’s subjected to harsh treatment by her new employers, alienating her and causing her to reflect on her previous life in Senegal.

Directed by Ousmane Sembène, arguably the most influential sub-Saharan African filmmaker in cinematic history. Clinton, Feb. 17.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) “Hasta la vista, baby!” Somehow improving upon the stellar first installment in the series, this Terminator sequel follows the titular character (Arnold Schwarzenegger) as he’s sent back in time to 1995 to defend Sarah Connor’s (Linda Hamilton) son John, the future leader of the human resistance against the malevolent AI takeover. Directed by James Cameron, who serves up his signature blend of operatic emotions and sterling special effects. Cinemagic, Feb. 18.

Fat Girl (2001)

Written and directed by auteur Catherine Breillat, this French coming-of-age drama tells the tale of two very different sisters on a tense seaside family vacation. The elder is conventionally beautiful, attracting the attention of an Italian student, while the younger is insecure about her looks and harbors simmering jealousy. Temporarily banned in Ontario, Canada, of all places, for its sexual frankness, the film defied controversy and received critical acclaim. Clinton, Feb. 21.

Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

Udo Kier stars as Baron von Frankenstein in this campy, Andy Warhol-produced retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic sci-fi horror novel. Initially banned in Italy and rated X for its extreme violence and sexuality, the film has since enjoyed a critical reevaluation, even earning a highly coveted spot as one of the Criterion Collection’s inductees.

Hollywood, Feb. 22.

ALSO PLAYING:

5th Avenue: Losing Ground (1982), Feb. 18-20. Academy: Dirty Dancing (1987), Feb. 16-17. My Bloody Valentine (1981), Feb. 16-17.

Boyz n the Hood (1991), Feb. 18-24. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010), Feb. 18-24. Cinemagic: Trancers II: The Return of Jack Deth (1991), Feb. 18. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Feb. 19. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), Feb. 19.

Clinton: Pickpocket (1959), Feb. 18. Chungking Express (1994), Feb. 18. Black Sun (1964), Feb. 20. Land of Milk and Honey (1971), Feb. 22.

Hollywood: The Secret Life of Plants (1978), Feb. 17. Sign o’ the Times (1987), Feb. 19-20.

MOVIES NEW LINE CINEMA

TOP PICK OF THE WEEK

OUR KEY : THIS MOVIE IS EXCELLENT, ONE OF THE BEST OF THE YEAR. : THIS MOVIE IS GOOD. WE RECOMMEND YOU WATCH IT. : THIS MOVIE IS ENTERTAINING BUT FLAWED. : THIS MOVIE IS A STEAMING PILE.

Kimi The latest from director Steven Soderbergh, Hollywood’s most prolific shapeshifter, opens with a swipe at relevance. Locked in her Seattle apartment with crippling pandemic anxiety, tech worker Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz) discovers a Kimi recording (think Siri or Alexa) of a possible violent crime. By reporting it, she’s thrust into a spiral of tech malfeasance: shady IPOs, hackers and surveillance. But once the movie’s thriller elements accelerate, David Koepp’s script resorts to tired tropes, borrowing shamelessly from Rear Window, Blow Out, The Firm and even Koepp’s own Panic Room screenplay. No points for originality, but Soderbergh’s eternal wit and curiosity elevate the material. He portrays Kimi (voiced

by Betsy Brantley) as both latent and central—a paradoxically powerful MacGuffin—while visually and thematically capturing Angela’s domestic existence. She’s curated a stylish, spacious, gentrified apartment (complete with untouched vinyl, guitars and gathering areas), but for all her elegant taste, the animating force in her world is Kimi, a pink gadget identical to millions of others. Clear-eyed tech observations suit Soderbergh, who’s traded Ocean’s romps and Oscars for intelligent, inexpensive streaming efforts (No Sudden Move, Let Them All Talk) that drop without fanfare every eight months or so. If Kimi’s best moments keenly probe the behavior of the housebound, it’s no wonder. In 2022, that’s where Soderbergh finds us all. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. HBO Max.

DRIVE MY CAR

After you see Drive My Car, you will never look at snow, suspension bridges or stages the same way again. When you see the world through the searching eyes of director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, there is no such thing as mere scenery.

There is only the living fabric of the places and objects that envelop Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Misaki (Tôko Miura), whose compassion and complexity are a world unto themselves. Most of the film is set in Hiroshima, where Yûsuke is directing a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Misaki is assigned to be his driver, but their relationship transcends the divide between the front seat and the back. During drives, conversations and surreal yet strangely believable adventures, their reserve gradually erodes as they reveal their losses and their inner lives to each other, building to a cathartic climax that leaves you at once shattered and soaring. The film, based on a novella by Haruki Murakami, isn’t afraid to face the agony of grief and loneliness, but Hamaguchi’s obvious love for his characters suffuses the entire journey with life-giving warmth. A tender, hopeful coda set during the pandemic could have been cringe-worthy, but like every moment of the

movie, it’s worth believing in because Hamaguchi’s sincerity is beyond question. “We must keep on living,” Yûsuke tells Misaki. With those words, he speaks not only to her but to us.

NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cinema 21, Hollywood.

A HERO

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi seems poised to become a household name among film buffs around the world following the release of this latest project. He’s already snagged two Academy Awards and most recently won the Best Director Award at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in November 2021, and A Hero is now a leading Oscar contender in the Best International Feature Film category. It begins simply with the main character, Rahim, played with a quiet grace by acclaimed Iranian theater and film actor Amir Jadidi, walking out of prison and into the Iranian urban landscape.

Over the course of two days, we learn Rahim was incarcerated because he couldn’t repay a debt and, upon his release, he attempts to start fresh and even performs a good deed.

Of course, as the saying goes, such righteous actions never go unpunished. Farhadi never insults his audience with obvious exposition. The viewer is left to discover who

Rahim is, the various characters’ motivations, and who the stories’ villains and heroes are.

All of the film’s atmosphere and emotional drive is delivered with naturalistic faithfulness by the actors, and ambient street noise replaces a contrived score to emphasize that tone.

The story unfolds exactly how it’s introduced by the main character. With a quiet grace.

PG-13. RAY GILL JR. Amazon Prime.

I WANT YOU BACK

I Want You Back, directed by Jason Orley (Big Time Adolescence), contains so many lazy rom-com tropes it feels like a parody, but it still has enough genuine laughs to be worthwhile for fans of the genre. The story follows the high jinks of Peter (Charlie Day) and Emma (Jenny Slate), who randomly meet as they are struggling to cope with recent breakups.

Drunk with courage, the two decide to sabotage their exes’ new relationships in a convoluted plan to win them back.

It’s a cringy premise, but Slate’s ability to find comedic moments in scenes that have no business being funny makes Emma easy to root for, even though you probably shouldn’t. Day, on the other hand, can’t elevate the film’s generic writing. His character is a morally inconsistent jerk, despite the fact that

the film constantly tells us he’s a “nice guy.” It’s purely because of Slate’s performance that the film avoids being a clichéd bore and becomes something surprisingly fun and heartfelt. R. RAY GILL JR. Amazon Prime.

MARRY ME

In the most rousing scene in the 2002 romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan, Marisa Ventura (Jennifer Lopez) tells her mother, “I’m going to take that chance without any fear.

Without your voice in my head telling me that I can’t.” Given the genre, you might guess that she was talking about marriage, but you would be wrong. She was talking about her dream of being a manager at a hotel, but Lopez spoke those words with the level of passion that many actors reserve for romantic love, proving that she possessed the power to make a rom-com more than a frictionless fantasy. At least some of that spirit lives on in Marry Me, which stars Lopez as a pop goddess who falls for a guileless math teacher (Owen Wilson). It’s a slick, shiny film— the emotional roughness of Maid is a distant memory—but Lopez’s performance invests it with more passion and pathos than it deserves, and Wilson is perfectly cast as a guy who’s frightened by the intensity of his desire to bask in her glow.

Best of all, Lopez sings several original songs, including the swoon-worthy “After Love.”

She and Wilson have chemistry, but her singing is a chemical reaction in and of itself. PG-13.

BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Peacock, Pioneer Place, Studio One.

SUNDOWN

At its outset, director Michel Franco’s new film is a study in selfishness. While vacationing in Acapulco with his sister and her children, Neal (Tim Roth) indefinitely extends his stay in paradise, though to no apparent end. Alone on the beach, he drinks a Dos Equis, graduates to a bucket of Dos Equis, and then begins to resemble a beer bucket himself, practically melting into the sand and inviting onlookers to check whether there’s any of him left.

Best known for twitching in Tarantino movies, Roth proves masterful and provoking here, even when he’s seemingly doing nothing. Though Sundown eventually forces a plot on his understated performance, Neal appears only mildly apologetic that family and locals have to deal with his masturbatory beach-bumming. But what good is a true character study when the back half of the narrative functions as an answer key?

Franco’s effort to make Neal’s destructive behavior more realistic backfires almost fatally.

Ultimately, Sundown flirts with brilliance when it scrutinizes the most universal of all vacation fantasies—“what if I never went back?”—but it would be nothing without Roth’s portrayal of the most pathetic Jimmy Buffett character you’ll ever see on film.

R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.

BREAKING BREAD

When Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel declares there’s “no room for politics in the kitchen,” she sets the table for a harmonious food festival and this one-note documentary about it. Celebrated as the first Muslim Arab to win Israel’s MasterChef contest, she spearheads the A-Sham Arabic Food Festival, which sees Jewish and Muslim chefs exchange traditions and revitalize a forgotten culinary unity. While viewers hoping for a Food Network experience in the theater might be nourished (there is much slow-motion hummus), the film fails to reckon with the specter of ceaseless conflict.

Forget religious debates; the chefs don’t even haggle over seasoning. In their world of apparently secularized, middle-class liberalism, all parties go swimmingly. To the limited extent we see locals dine, they dig the food, but in the doc’s waning moments, Atamna-Ismaeel insists, without evidence, that hearts and minds have been changed by the festival.

While messages of peace warrant repeating, Breaking Bread essentially spends 80 minutes claiming that “food is the universal language.” Ironically, it’s missing a diversity of flavor.

NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.

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23

JONESIN’

FREE WILL

B Y M AT T J O N E S

"These Go To Eleven"--and five down.

ASTROLOGY ARIES

(March 21-April 19): "A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it," wrote author G. K. Chesterton. Amen to that! Please regard his observation as the first part of your horoscope. Here's the second part: It's sometimes the right approach to move in harmony with the flow, to allow the momentum of elemental forces to carry you along. But now is not one of those times. I suggest you experiment with journeys against the flow. Go in quest of what the followers of easy options will never experience. Do it humbly, of course, and with your curiosity fully deployed.

TAURUS

(April 20-May 20): "You're never allowed to step on people to get ahead," said TV personality and author Star Jones, "but you can step over them if they're in your way." I suspect the coming months will be a time when you really should step over people who are in your way. There's no need to be mad at them, criticize them, or gossip about them. That would sap your energy to follow your increasingly clear dreams. Your main task is to free yourself from influences that obstruct your ability to be the Royal Sovereign of Your Own Destiny.

GEMINI

ACROSS 1. Toning result 12. Celebrity gossip website 15. 1993 Mary J. Blige hit that reached #5 on the R&B Singles Chart 16. Elvis’s longtime label 17. Bitter almond, as seen in French desserts 18. Acne wash maker 19. It’s posed for passersby 21. Radcliffe’s group 22. Dear one?

23. Violinist Menuhin 27. Throws out 30. Eldest von Trapp child in “The Sound of Music” 35. Pet Shop Boys’ longtime label 36. Locates 37. Comparable 39. Tomei of Spider-Man movies 40. Where Will Shortz is the “Puzzlemaster” 43. Dish with grapes, walnuts, and mayo 50. Bookstore category that features the town’s authors

2. Friends, ‘90s-style 3. Russian infant emperor of 1740-41 (too young to be the “terrible” one) 4. E-mail writer 5. _ _ _ a positive note 6. Chain that merged with AMC Theatres 7. Boy’s name that means “God is my nation” in Hebrew (A MILE anag.)

8. “San _ _ _ High School football rules!” (shouted line near the end of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”) 9. Pearl Jam bassist Jeff 10. Actors Reed and Meredith Baxter (when she took a husband’s surname) 11. Pilots 12. Apparel that gets “dropped,” facetiously 13. CI times XI 14. Former groupmate of Harry and Liam 20. Decoy vessel used as early as WWI 24. Actor Kier of “Dancer in the Dark”

53. Squishee purveyor on “The Simpsons”

25. Morse code component 26. Provisional terms 27. Old Prizm automaker

54. Record the meeting, in a way 55. Blues guitarist Mahal 56. Place where it’s hard to pass

28. Australian coat of arms bird 29. Frank McCourt’s sequel to “Angela’s Ashes” 30. On the _ _ _ (running)

57. “Hold On Tight” group

31. Garten who had a 2022 moment responding to Reese Witherspoon

58. Words before “of smell,” “of self,” and “of right and wrong”

DOWN 1. Cat scratch sources

32. Canal zone?

33. Guardian Angel Curtis who was the Republican nominee for NYC mayor in 2021

©2022 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.

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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2022 wweek.com

34. Northern Silicon Valley city 38. “Highlights for Children” do-gooder 40. Vacuum hater?

41. Igneous rock that solidifies deep in the earth (like a god of the underworld) 42. _ _ _ hen’s teeth 44. Scottish builder of stone walls (not Dutch, surprisingly) 45. Work alongside “El rey Lear,” “La tempestad,” and “Ricardo III” 46. Furnish a new crew 47. “Breaking Bad” businessman/drug lord Gus 48. Neurobiologist Joshua who developed the “brainbow” by mapping neurons with different colored proteins (and whose name uses letters from “synapse”) 49. “_ _ _ un Principio: From the Beginning” (1999 Marc Anthony greatest-hits album) 50. In the wee hours 51. Birthstone that shares a first letter with its month 52. “... a Saint Bernard in his prime, five years old, nearly two hundred pounds in weight ...”

last week’s answers

(May 21-June 20): Gemini-born Gina Rowlands is retired now, but she had an awardwinning six-decade career as an actor. At age 20, she decided what she wanted to do with her life, and her parents offered her their blessings. She testified: "I went home and I told my mom that I wanted to quit college and be an actress, and she said, 'Huh, that sounds fascinating. It's wonderful!' And I told my father, and he literally said, 'I don't care if you want to be an elephant trainer if it makes you happy.'" Dear Gemini, in the coming months, I would love for you to receive similar encouragement for your budding ideas and plans.

What can you do to ensure you're surrounded by influences like Rowlands' parents? I hope you embark on a long-term project to get all the support you need.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): As you enter an astro-

logical phase when vast, expansive ruminations will be fun and healthy for you, I will offer you some vast, expansive thoughts. Hopefully, they will inspire your own spacious musings. First, here's artist M. C. Escher: "Wonder is the salt of the earth." Next, author Salman Rushdie: "What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same." Here's poet Allen Ginsberg: "When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred." A proverb from the Omaha people: "Ask questions from your heart, and you will be answered from the heart." G. K. Chesterton: "Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair." Finally, playwright Tony Kushner: "I'm not religious, but I like God, and he likes me."

LEO

(July 23-Aug. 22): "Out of love, you can speak with straight fury," wrote author Eudora Welty.

Here's how I interpret that in light of the current chapter of your life story: You have an opportunity to recalibrate some misaligned energy. You have the necessary insight to fix an imbalance or dissolve an illusion or correct a flow that has gone off-course. And by far the best way to do that is by wielding the power of love. It will need to be expressed with vehemence and intense clarity, however. It will require you to be both compassionate and firm. Your homework: Figure out how to express transformative truths with kindness.

VIRGO

(Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo political science professor Tatah Mentan was born and raised in the African country of Cameroon, which has never fully recovered from its grueling colonization by Germany, France, and England.

The democratic tradition there is tenuous.

When Mentan first taught at a university in the Cameroonian capital, authorities found his ideas too controversial. For the next 16 years, he attempted to be true to himself while avoiding governmental censorship, but the strain proved too stressful. Fearing for his safety, he fled to the US. I'm turning to him for advice that will serve

WEEK OF FEBRUARY 24

© 2022 ROB BREZSNY

you well in the coming weeks. He tells us, "Peace does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. Peace means to be in the midst of all those things and still be calm in your heart."

LIBRA

(Sept. 23-Oct. 22): "Anything you do from the heart enriches you, but sometimes not till years later," wrote author Mignon McLaughlin.

I'm pleased to inform you, Libra, that you will soon receive your rewards for generous actions you accomplished in the past. On behalf of the cosmic rhythms, I apologize for how long it has taken. But at least it's finally here. Don't underestimate how big this is. And don't allow sadness about your earlier deprivation to inhibit your enthusiastic embrace of compensation.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): No matter how reason-

able and analytical you are, Scorpio, you possess a robust attraction to magic. You yearn for the refreshing invigoration of non-rational mysteries.

You nurture urges to be delighted by outbreaks of the raw, primal lust for life. According to my astrological assessment, you are especially inclined to want and need these feelings in the next few weeks. And that's good and healthy and holy! At the same time, don't abandon your powers of discernment. Keep them running in the background as you enjoy your rejuvenating communions with the enigmatic pleasures of the Great Unknown.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Author Diane

Ackerman tells us, "In the absence of touching and being touched, people of all ages can sicken and grow touch starved. Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight." This is always important to remember, but it will be extra crucial for you to keep in mind during the coming weeks. I advise you to be ingenious and humble and frank as you collect as much physical contact as you can.

Be polite and respectful, of course. Never force yourself on anyone. Always seek permission.

With those as your guidelines, be greedy for hugs and cuddling and caresses.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): "Education, funda-

mentally, is the increase of the percentage of the conscious in relation to the unconscious." Author and educator Sylvia Ashton-Warner said that, and now I'm telling you—just in time for one of the most lesson-rich times of a year that will be full of rich lessons. In the next nine months, dear Capricorn, the proportion of your consciousness in relation to your unconsciousness should markedly increase. And the coming weeks will be a favorable phase to upgrade your educational ambitions.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): You're entering a

phase of your cycle when your ability to boost your finances will be stronger than usual. You'll be more likely to attract good luck with money and more apt to discover useful tips on how to generate greater abundance. To inspire your efforts, I offer you this observation by author Katharine Butler Hathaway: "To me, money is alive. It is almost human. If you treat it with real sympathy and kindness and consideration, it will be a good servant and work hard for you, and stay with you and take care of you."

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Author Deb Caletti

made the following observation: "You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same." In my vision of your destiny in 2022, Pisces, there could be several of these personal Big Bangs, and one of them seems to be imminent.

To prepare—that is, to ensure that the changes are primarily uplifting and enjoyable—I suggest you chant the following mantra at least five times every day: "I love and expect good changes."

Homework: Give yourself a blessing. Say why you're wonderful and name a marvelous event that's ahead for you. Newsletter.

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