let’s all move to Portland!

(originally published in the January 17, 2006 issue of the Brock Press )

Today I was contacted about filling some space with a column. My job around here used to be to take pictures of people in cute outfits, dispense fashion advice and colour in pictures in Photoshop. It was a pretty sweet gig, but I’ve moved on, and fresh young people have taken my place.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t have anything left to say to the students of this university.
I am here to talk to you about the merits of a little place called Portland, Oregon, and why we should be so lucky as to live there someday.
At first glance Portland doesn’t seem like it has a lot to offer.
But that’s like saying Alice’s rabbit hole looks like just a hole in the ground.
Then you fall into it.

Portland used to be a mainly industrial town, which survived mainly due to logging. Then they cut down all the trees.
Ghost town, right? Wrong. Here’s where it get’s interesting: Soon enough, a lot of hippies and counterculturists showed up and created an urban socialist movement that ensured that the town became a well-planned utopia.
You put a good infrastructure together, with a bad employment rate, in a beautiful setting and the end result is Portland: a place where people have nothing better to do than create beautiful things.
Now is where me writing an entire column devoted to the place starts to get legitimized: People from Portland seem to have this tendency to be incessantly creative, endlessly innovative and increasingly famous.
PDX DIY is their acryonym-tastic battle cry. PDX is the codename for the the Portland international airport, and is used as a short-form for the town itself, and DIY stands for Do It Yourself… and boy do PDXers ever.
Portland has officially replaced Manhattan in my mind as the place where I want to go so I can make it there, and subsequently anywhere.
The biggest thing to come out of Portland in recent months is the Decemberists. They are increasingly becoming the reason Portland is appearing as a blip on people’s coolness radar. They are a similar band to (and often associate with) Montreal’s Arcade Fire – except for when people read their bio, to see where they hail from, to laud that place as the latest bohemian epicentre: they actually find a bohemian epicentre (as opposed to a certain Canadian city whose claims to fame include Leonard Cohen, cheap booze and cheap rent).
If you don’t mind their pretensions (which include dressing up like historical figures, a album with a pirate theme, and “Rocky Horror Picture” show style audience participation) you will probably like the Decemberists (and are probably a humanities major). If you find pretentious things accordingly pretentious, they might make you want to yack.
If you saw a little movie called “Garden State” then you have no doubt heard of the Shins. Heck, you’ve probably heard of the Shins anyway, they put out one hell of an album (Chutes Too Narrow) last year. While they are not originally from there, the majority of their band members recently up and moved to … guess where? Portland. Boo-ya.
The Dandy Warhols had a huge hit a few years back with the infinitely catchy “Bohemian Like You” (which was on the soundtrack of pretty much every single teen related movie and/or television show made in the year 2000). The Dandy’s (or Warhols, if you’re feeling frisky) wrote that song (pretty scathingly, obviously) about the Portland scene because, guess what? That’s where they’re from.
Sleater Kinney has been around for quite a while (since “Seattle” and “alternative” were the buzzwords), and is famous for being the pop-punk, all-girl-rock band to end all ‘grrrl’ rock bands. But they aren’t actually from Seattle. They’re from Portland.
And what hip scene would be complete without an auteur? Miranda July recently wrote, directed and starred in “Me You and Everyone We Know,” a little independent picture about fractured (but fashionably attired) individuals who somehow manage to connect (despite our soulless modern world). Yeah, sounds kinda like Wes Anderson’s Royal Tanenebaums, doesn’t it?
The movie made a splash at Cannes and has a website that is so pretty; it had a lot of buzz floating around the internet about it, before anyone had actually seen it. July (in addition to being a performance artist, actress, writer, webmaster, director, fashionista and social darling) is such a graphic design nerd that she is making the studio that released the film re-design the DVD because she didn’t get creative control over the way it looked. I want to be her some day.
The most trendy and promising art form/literature of this century so far just so happens to comic books. If that sentence frightened you, you need to move away from the Manga and Spiderman aisle of the bookstore.
Modern comic books are often called “graphic novels” nowadays, and they tend to be about heartbreaking, but everyday situations (as opposed to superheroes and Japanese school girls) illustrated and authored in an appealing and innovative manner by one single person.
An excellent example of this is the author/artist Craig Thompson, who wrote the massively hyped “Blankets,” which is one of the few graphic novels that can be found at pretty much any neighbourhood Chapters. Thompson can currently be found residing in Portland.
Of course, if you prefer your comic books to be of a more traditional variety, you will be pleased to know that the biggest, most important publisher of comic books (that you’ve probably never heard of because their name isn’t Marvel, or DC) just so happens to have their head office in the P-dot. Dark Horse Comics publishes some amazing stuff, including Hellboy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Wars comics.
Portland is filled with people who make things. It seems like pretty much every last microbrewery, vegan-cafe and coffee-shop (and we’re talking about Portland here, so there’s an awful lot of all of those) has a crafting night.
Crafting in Portland has a long history, and actually started with the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century (made famous by such notable Edwardian hipsters as William Morris - who was not from Portland). At the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts (OCAC) you can actually get your Masters degree in crafting.
Literally. Honest to goodness.
Knitting and decoupage could get you a degree!
Four local Portland based professional crafters recently got together and wrote a craft-project-filled book called (appropriately enough) “Super Crafty” about this latest, post-modern, crafting movement. It can be found at their website: here.
If your idea of DIYing it up is more along the lines of getting together once a month with your nearest and dearest strangers to beat the crap out of one another than you might be surprised to learn that fuzzy-wuzzy, dreamy Portland holds something for you too. Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, hails from that foggy corner of the Northwest (now that whole, making your own soap thing is starting to make sense, right?). He has actually written a guide book to Portland called: “Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland Oregon.”
If you’ve taken a first year English class, then you’ve read Raymond Carver. Not much happens in his stories, but a lot of whiskey gets consumed. I, personally, am not a fan, but my boyfriend is, so I have some half-hearted respect for his existence. Anyway, long story short, he got drunk predominantly in Portland.
Another ENG 101 favourite, Ursula LeGuin, also hails from Portland. Hopefully Portland’s success has absolutely nothing to do with the sacrificial death of children.
The be all end all of Portland celebrities is: drum-roll please … Matt “The Cartoon Emperor” Groening. Yep. That Matt Groening. You know him, you worship him, well guess what? He’s from Portland, and apparently, many Simpson’s characters names are, in fact, taken from the names of the streets there.
So, how’s about it? Portland, Oregon anyone? I’ll bring the organic snacks, you bring the tunes and we’ll knit ourselves a bridge to high hipster heaven.