ok, well what about Portland, Oregon?

hmmm

I am already spoken for on Saturday @ 7. Have fun, y'all.

Got my bag packed!

yay!!

I'm driving down, seeing yall, and driving back.

hmmm

― sleeve, Wednesday, November 19, 2014 4:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gonna be fun

way sry i'm missing this, part of a general pdx-missing melancholy i've had as the trees don't change here

OK we're in, will be staying with friends that night out in NE

think I might stop by and meet some of you seattle people i otherwise never seem to interact with on here.

looking forward to this!

leaving Eugene momentarily!

road trip music:

Amy Denio - Prodigal Light
Einsturzende Neubauten - Strategies 4
Camper Van Beethoven - 3rd album
Bevis Frond - Inner Marshland
Attrition - Realm Of The Hungry Ghosts

I am in vest w/ buttons, early??

Hey, I hope y'all are having fun. I'm having a particularly boring worknight in Seattle.

:( from me and Estella and Kate and lexy

I Love Everyone

that was super fun! thanks for coming out, portland and eugene and seattle and tupelo and brisbane!

Very nice to meet all of you! Hello from L and I.

it was very great to meet you both plus the other ilxors i hadn't met before, and to see the ones i had previously met again. sorry you couldn't make it, rev, i was hoping to get to meet you at last.

this was a lovely time!

So good to see everyone! And what a great neighborhood bar to take over.

and brisbane!

tsk

Had a great time last night and today, so good to meet everybody. Now I'm on the train with Jaq and Mr. Jaq, letting someone else do the driving.

Super-fun, y'all. And I made it back to Seattle in 2:20.

FAP of Missing Rev, tho.

I ran into an old friend of my brother's, now 30, and I asked him where he was living now
He said "Portland."
I asked him what he was doing now.
He said "A lot of dancing."
I said "Oh. What kind of dancing?"
He said "Blues dancing."
I asked him if he was a professional dancer.
He said no, he also just got a job in a vinyl record factory.

i'm going to portland for the first time ever this week! for a conference so i won't have tons of free time. i'm def hitting up powell's but anything else i should absolutely see/do if i have a free day? good stuff going on museum/gallery-wise? nice tree-filled walks i should take? (ps i don't care that much about donuts)

Dress warm. The museums are open and good.

xp eat delicious northern Thai food at Pok Pok (SE 26th and Division, I think)

I'd recommend self-touring My Own Private Idaho shooting locations, but there aren't many left! If you have park time i recommend this one at early morning or dusk tho:

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/parks/finder/index.cfm?&propertyid=97&action=ViewPark

http://movie-tourist.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-own-private-idaho-1991.html

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/1c/eb/7d/1ceb7df5eabcfe7484c3b68fbd6ed1a5.jpg

(it's a bit of a commute from downtown)

xp eat delicious northern Thai food at Pok Pok (SE 26th and Division, I think)

Really, you could just walk along this strip of SE Division (between 30th and 39th) and try a number of great restaurants - Sunshine Tavern, Bollywood Theater, Salt & Straw, Nuestra Cocina, Bar Avignon, Ava Gene's, Pizza Maria ... I could go on forever.

My folks are flying in for a visit this weekend. My mom expressly said they had a list of places from Guy Fieri shows and other food/travel shows they wanted to hit.

To which I said, oh great, lines for everything,

My one regret from my brief trip last year was not getting khao man gai at Nong's even though my hotel was just a block or 2 from the PSU food cart pod.

My folks are flying in for a visit this weekend. My mom expressly said they had a list of places from Guy Fieri shows and other food/travel shows they wanted to hit.

To which I said, oh great, lines for everything,

Let me guess - Screendoor, Apizza Scholls and Voodoo Donuts?

Pine Street, too, more than likely

Anywhere in the 20s to 40s or so along Hawthorne, Belmont, Division, and Burnside in the SE is fun to roam around, as is Mississippi and Albina in North Portland. I really like Kens Pizza and Apizza Scholls, Bollywood Theater, Pok Pok, Belmont Station for beers, Kens Bakery on 21st, salt and straw, and any number of other places. Voodoo donuts sucks though, don't waste your time.

Mother Foucault's is my favorite bookstore in town.

the park i miss is laurelhurst; also recommend the view from the rose garden and its little outdoor amphitheater not enough happens at. the pizza i miss is old town for tourist atmosphere (guy's probably on this) and hammy's for being high at 2 am and american dream for its giant cakelike slices that are the only non-nyc-imitative pizza i've ever loved. the rest of the food i miss is fire on the mountain and bombay chaat house and whichever of the east-side cart pods remain. the movies i miss are mostly at the 21st street cinema but stop making sense at the bag dad (w/ beer) poss the best concert i've ever been to. the museum i miss (besides movie madness' memorabilia collection) is "the crumpacker library", a more or less secret wing of the meager art museum i couldn't even give you reliable directions to but which is one of the most ornate spaces in the city and has a lot of neat books about photography. the sunday brunch i miss is at fucking home, in pajamas, with no boutique television fans flanking me like sibling sows.

20s and 40s on e hawthorne+belmont otm; this area also features a lower-pressure powells. jackpot records a naked emperor imo. the best thing to do in portland is this but it's only in september unfortunately.

(that list of pizza aside, i was a psu student and the pizza i ate the most was hot lips. could go for hot lips right now.)

Had Hot Lips pizza Sunday night!

my brother is an art object until october 15 in portland. go say hi! maybe wear some rain gear.

https://cal.pnca.edu/e/1685

BUNNYBRAINS
Part of PICA TBA:16’s Makeup on Empty Space, curated by Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Co-presented with the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture director Mack McFarland.
Dan Seward, also known as Bunnybrains, is a musician, curator and promoter in Hudson, New York, where he runs the celebrated (and somewhat nomadic) record store, John Doe Records. This exhibition focuses on Bunnybrains’ thirty plus years as a transgressive, mutable, collaborative, performative project and what it means to illustrate the life of a true muse. From live broadcasts of Bunnybrains radio show Battlefield Earth, participatory workshops, rotating guest exhibitions, spontaneous happenings and performances, the artist shares their space with you in an effort to vivify “Bunnybrains is all.”
Bunnybrains’ career highlights include a vinyl only pressing with Matador, a national tour supporting Devendra Banhart, a four-CD boxset that garnered raves from the indie press, and opening for a reunited Hawkwind—a set credited with giving the many hippies in attendance bad trips.
Exhibition Opening September 1, 2016 6:00 – 8:00 PM

A while ago I stumbled across something that still trips me out.

We like to think of red lining as being a terrible problem of the past. But so much of that urban legacy still lives with us. The past as they say is not even past.

— Tim Dickinson (@7im) June 23, 2020

...thread...

To recap: A bunch of rich white folk got together just 10 years ago to make their exclusive neighborhood even more economically inhospitable (esp. to people of color) by getting it blessed by the National Historic Register -- on the basis of it having historically banned blacks.

— Tim Dickinson (@7im) June 23, 2020

I know that neighborhood well.

The major bone of contention is 'infill', where the city is trying to increase housing availability through zoning changes to allow greater density, mainly as multi-dweller units like duplexes or row housing. This is due to Oregon having land use laws that limit urban sprawl. As Portland attracts more people, they all compete for limited housing stock, driving up prices. SF and Seattle have seen similar dynamics, but that's due more to their topography; they can't sprawl into the bay, or the ocean, or Lake Washington. In Portland it is the Urban Growth Boundary.

The second leading factor at work here is that Portland in the 1970s embarked on a political program to push more power into neighborhood associations. For the city to impose new rules without getting some buy-in from the affected neighborhood associations is an arduous, time-consuming process. This neighborhood association is stacked with officers who are vehemently dead set against any increase in housing density. They are sitting in a beautiful neighborhood with tree-lined streets, living in nice houses that constantly appreciate in value. They are very, very happy with the status quo. The "historic register" gambit is their last gasp effort to resist having to change in any way.

However, I'd say the idea that this is a move to exclude people of color is misguided. It is entirely designed to protect privilege, but it would be more accurate to say it is wealthy privilege more than white privilege. In reality the changes the city is trying to introduce would not result in any appreciable influx of POC. It would just introduce high end multi-unit housing, bringing more residents and more traffic, and slowly altering the 'character' of the neighborhood. But the neighborhood would still be predominately white upper-middle class, just as it is today. Anyone with the right amount of money can live there now and probably be welcomed, so long as they kept up their house and yard.

they can't sprawl into the bay, or the ocean, or Lake Washington

(Seattle has plenty of room north and south of the bit between the lake and the sound; the main problem is that it has about 12 blocks where you're even allowed to build four storey buildings, let alone eight or 20.)

i was wondering where to post this. i'm glad i found caek's post here, which seems to indicate it's a good place for it:

https://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040

while there were many states that operated in similar ways to portland, portland was the only state to actually put its racist policies in writing

i remember an interviewer asking stephen malkmus about portland being so white and he seemed to brush it off, which i always thought was weird

planning a family trip to portland this summer. the idea is set base in portland and alternate spending time in the city with day trips to see some PNW nature and scenery.

are there any particular areas of the city (or outskirts) i should be looking at for airbnbs? we found a decent looking place in irvington, would that be OK? main priority is being able to walk to food or parks, other priorities i guess would just be character and being able to get out of town easily

also please recommend your favorite day trips out of the city. seems like cannon beach/astoria is a big one.

I don't know a lot of the minutia of portland neighborhood names but based on google maps Irvington looks like it would be a decent bet. I'd usually find myself along Williams/Mississippi in north portland or Hawthorne/Belmont on the east side when we'd go wandering and it's not for from either of those. It's also been five years since I've been there and a lot has probably changed.

We're going out in June and are staying like one night in Portland and a few along the coast near Astoria. Astoria is nice but not strictly necessary if you're hitting the coast - which you should do because it's really amazing. Cannon Beach is kind of our default spot but we've stayed at a number of places between Astoria and Manzanita. Seaside was kind of a methy shithole though at least based on what I saw of it.

In the other direction heading east along the gorge is worth it too - Multnomah falls is worth checking out and there are a lot of hikes and such along the gorge with amazing scenery. Hood River is also a fun place to stop and and get a beer and watch hundreds of people kiteboarding.

solid recommendations there, def go to Astoria at least once, Hood River is good, Multnomah Falls

Cannon Beach is REALLY crowded in the summer, at least when I was there last year briefly. my sister loves Manzanita and her family stays there every summer.

go to Powell's Books as well

thanks! looking forward to this trip - i haven't been to the PNW at all except for a work trip to seattle, and i couldn't get out of the city on that one. we had talked about trying to do some combo of seattle, portland, and vancouver/victoria, but decided to scale back so it wouldn't be as stressful and bc we realized we mostly cared about seeing portland and some regional parks/forests/beaches/falls/mountains that are different from what we know from the midwest and east coast. i still want to do vancouver/victoria some day but that will be a separate trip