PORTLANDIA Put A Bird On It Following an airing on ABC2, US cult comedy sketch show Portlandia is released today on DVD through Umbrella Entertainment. If there’s one thing Fred Armisen knows, it’s sketch comedy. Currently he is the longest running active cast member on the legendary live-to-air sketch show Saturday Night Live, and if that wasn’t enough, he spends SNL’s offseason writing and filming Portlandia with Carrie Brownstein. Brownstein became known to the public eye in raucous riot grrrl band SleaterKinney, and now Wild Flag, and the independent music scene is something Armisen has long been a part of as well. He played drums in hardcore band Trenchmount throughout the ‘90s. “I lived in Chicago for a little while, and when I did I worked at a nightclub there called Lounge Acts, which a lot of bands came through there, and that’s how I got to know Jeff [ Tweedy] from Wilco, who back then was in Uncle Tupelo. And also I’ve always loved that world.” Armisen opened for a Jeff Tweedy solo tour, footage from which appeared in their acclaimed Wilco documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart in 2002. Once Armisen went to NBC later that year, he continued his love for music that was unlikely to appear on Saturday Night Live. “Carrie and I had some mutual friends, and I know Janet [Weiss] from Sleater-Kinney, so I invited the band to come see an SNL taping,” Armisen recalls. “They couldn’t come to that show because they had a show but they came to the after party. I was a huge Sleater-Kinney fan, so I was star struck and psyched; and then we just became friends right away.” After toying with the idea of starting a musical project together, Brownstein and Armisen decided to write some sketches and post them online under the name ‘Thunderant’. “We just thought, ‘well we gotta do something, so let’s make some videos’,” the softly-spoken Armisen remembers. “For me it was fun because it was low stakes. There was no reason to do it. They didn’t even need to have a point. They didn’t even need to be well done - it was like, ‘let’s just do this’. In the same approach that one would have if they were jamming with someone. Like ‘let’s just make these videos’, and then we found that we liked doing it, and we liked the results.” It turns out that they weren’t the only ones. “I was coming to a place where my manager was like ‘what do you want to do?’. So I was like ‘I wanna do this, I love doing Thunderant’,” says Armisen, who likes to re-enact previous conversations in current conversations. “He helped us get it together as a presentation for a pilot. First we went to Broadway Video, which is [SNL creator] Lorne Michaels’ company, and this guy he was like ‘yeah this sounds great, let’s do it’. I knew IFC was looking for a comedy show, so we
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Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armison star in Portlandia just went to IFC - that’s who does it here in the States - and IFC said ‘great, make a pilot’. So every step of the way I thought ‘well we’ll see’. But then it turned out to be a show and we had enough to have episodes, and more and more sketches. Then we got a director, this guy named Jonathan Krisel, who’s brilliant. He helped shape it into the form that it’s in - the vision of what it is.” Not all of the early Thunderant sketches were filmed in Portland, but it wasn’t too long before Armisen, who lives in New York where SNL is filmed, fell in love with the home of the Trail Blazers. “It’s probably easier for me to go to Portland than for Carrie to come to New York,” Armisen says. “New York has been videoed enough, you know? Portland felt a little like ‘wow, what’s this place?’. Not to treat to Portland like a place... I didn’t mean to make it sound like they’d never been filmed before! It’s just like it felt newer to me. And also it’s a little less video-ready. People are little bit more open. Everything about it was nice...” After asking about where the hipsters hang out in Perthlandia, Armisen tells X-Press that he always finds himself gravitating towards the arty areas in every city he visits. “My whole world is cities like that, and those parts of them,” he says. “Even though when you’re in them you kinda complain and go ‘oh I can’t believe it’s getting gentrified’. In reality it’s where we all end up and
what we all truly like, I think.” Armisen is currently working on the third season of Portlandia, and wasn’t willing to give much away, and is gearing up to return to Saturday Night Live for his 11th season. Best known for his impression of US president Barack Obama on SNL, Armisen says the finale of last season was bittersweet as it spelt the end of the tenure of both Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg. “It’s a mix of sadness and happiness when someone leaves,” he says. “Because the one thing that remains is that in a way no one ever really leaves SNL; they always come back and they’re around and we’re all friends. So it’s never the kind of heartbreak where ‘we’ll never see you again’. Amy Poehler left years ago
and she’s at the show and we see her all the time, and the same goes for Maya Rudolph, and Rachel Dratch, and Tina Fey, everyone, Jimmy Fallon. They stay in the family. There’s a little bit of sadness, ‘oh we don’t get to do some of these sketches anymore’. But mostly, it’s a happy ‘good for you, like you’re always going to do great’. So it’s a mix of all those things, if that makes any sense. I don’t if it’s almost the equivalent of, well I don’t have any kids or anything, but when someone graduates. You know what I mean? It’s like ‘we’re still together but you’re going into a new phase’. There’s emotion attached to it, but for the part it’s good emotion.” _MATTHEW HOGAN
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