I LEFT PORTLAND one and one half of one year ago. Actually, I don’t know how accurate it is to say I LEFT Portland. I live in Los Angeles now, but I come back home all the time. Every single person I love is in Portland. My most treasured feelings all live in Portland, but AWW DANG, I do not live in Portland. I keep a few keepsakes around my MTV Crib to remind me of my home and my beautiful times in the Rose City. A poster from a comedy show, a ticket from a basketball game, and a cut of wood from one of those trails that snakes through the woods and spills right into a neighborhood and makes the city feel like an Ewok village that a wizard summoned from the clutches of the soil itself (hell yeah, Karms mixed a wizard reference with a Star Wars reference, hell yeah, Karms).
I have these physical manifestations of memory, and they mean Portland to me, which means the world to me—but with each return visit home, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Portland is for sale. The very idea of Portland is for sale.
By no means is this a new problem (is it a problem?), but holy fuck, is it bigger than ever. It seems every third store is just selling Portland back to people who want their homes, their clothes, THEIR ENTIRE EXISTENCE AS A CREATURE THAT BREATHES AND DIES to scream “PORTLAND!” You know the shops of which I speak. An indie rock elf stands behind a counter. Salvaged wood tables play host to smatterings of trumped-up candles and stripped-down candies. Everything has a tiny pine tree on it. Music drones on in the background, the kind of music that Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach are waging whimsical warfare over (not knowing Miranda July ran that well dry by making an ice cream flavor based on that particular Donovan song).
So what does it all mean? Are these stores just Portland’s version of Disneyland gift shops? Are tourists coming here to see “Hipsters of the Willamette Valley”? (WATCH AS THE ANIMATRONIC BEARDMAN’S PLAN TO BREW SINGLE-ORIGIN COFFEE IS FOILED BY A GOAT THAT THIEVED HIS POUR-OVER FILTER. BEHOLD A BATTLE OF MICROAGGRESSIONS AT A VEGAN HOT FOOD BAR.) Are these shops just serving the particular peculiar needs of the type of person attracted to Portland? Maybe folk here need body wash that smells like Big Sur. I don’t know, but it makes me uncomfortable.
I’ve spent nearly three years writing this column, trying to define what it is I love about Portland, and I still don’t think I’ve hit on the truth—so it’s an uneasy feeling to see this place we love defined so clearly, and at times so cynically, and purely for profit. I’m worried that some people take far more than they give back, that they take run-of-the-mill dreck and somehow associate it with bridges or stumps and sit there like, “I’M PART OF THIS, TOO.” Naw kid, you’re a parasite. Get symbiotic or get the fuck out.
Hm, I totally get how reductive a store like that is…buts it’s not any different from a store selling silly NYC junk or an LA store selling fake autographed Marilyn Monroe photos. Portland had entered the “famous city” tourist phase.
Silly Amy. Thinks karmel isn’t just bragging about his mtv crib.
I love Portland because it pisses off Vermont and Georgia so much.
These stores also will always knee-length carry socks with “BEER”, “NERD”, or “GAY” down the sides of them. ALWAYS.
One thing that doesn’t change, people have always bitched about change.
For as much as I occasionally find myself rolling my eyes at lots of these things, I know for a fact that it’s exactly this sort of shit I’d miss if I moved somewhere else.
The actual crafty shit people do; not stores that sell them. Amy called it: these stores happen wherever there’s any sort of tourism, and that’s always been where a fair amount of this city’s income comes from.
Please don’t make us call you “Karms”.
Usually, I don’t find IK very entertaining but he has a point here that I find hard to dismiss:
A guy that moved away from Portland is making money by writing about Portland to Portlanders.
Go be symbiotic with Los Angeles. the IRONY!
That’ll be $14.99. Would you like a complimentary bust of Fred n’ Carrie with your Portland today?
Of course, you could always walk into Red Robin and buy a piece of Beaverton.
Hmm. Honestly I’m so entrenched in my life and work and such that I don’t often notice this kind of stuff (I also have the benefit of living in SE away from most of the more hipstery sections), but I was randomly on a rare visit to NW 23rd/21st last night, and on Mississippi last week, and I gotta say yeah, there’s “follow your dream/support local” and then there’s “repackage that dream/stay local long enough to franchise it”, and I’d say we’re skirting that line at the very least.
^^ Yes Todd Berry, the “dream” of Portland is no longer to see your bar / restaurant / craft / venue get successful– it’s to see it hit national- and international-level recognition. You see it in the obvious success stories like Voodoo Donut and Stumptown, but at lower levels too, like Bunk and Pine State and Little Big Burger. Your newly gentrified neighborhood isn’t complete until it has its very own Salt & Straw! I mean shit, dig deeper and you’ll find the same groups of asshats buying up dive bars over and over again and homogenizing them, promising all along that they’re honoring the history and preserving character, etc. I call bullshit on all of that. It takes real neighborhoods and makes them into phony plastic hashtags, landmarks to pose in front of and brag about on Instagram. It’s funny: I have no desire to hang out at Stumptown or New Seasons or Sizzle Pie or Mississippi Studios because they all feel like insincerely constructed hipster / yuppie memes, requiring all the mental self-flagellation of a weekend of Coachella. Any yet people wait in line to pay out the nose for this stuff. Guess they have money with no better uses and the time to spare.
^^ Yes Todd Berry, the “dream” of Portland is no longer to see your bar / restaurant / craft / venue get successful– it’s to see it hit national- and international-level recognition. You see it in the obvious success stories like Voodoo Donut and Stumptown, but at lower levels too, like Bunk and Pine State and Little Big Burger. Your newly gentrified neighborhood isn’t complete until it has its very own Salt & Straw! I mean shit, dig deeper and you’ll find the same groups of asshats buying up dive bars over and over again and homogenizing them, promising all along that they’re honoring the history and preserving character, etc.
I call bullshit on all of that. It takes real neighborhoods and makes them into phony plastic hashtags, landmarks to pose in front of and brag about on Instagram. It’s funny: I have no desire to hang out at Stumptown or New Seasons or Sizzle Pie or Mississippi Studios because they all feel like insincerely constructed hipster / yuppie memes, requiring all the mental self-flagellation of a weekend of Coachella. Any yet people wait in line to pay out the nose for this stuff. Guess they have money with no better uses and the time to spare.
Hear the fuck hear!
” “I’M PART OF THIS, TOO.” Naw kid, you’re a parasite. Get symbiotic or get the fuck out.” Thank-you for finally breaking it down.
Ian Karmel is an anagram of “ram in kale.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Todd Mecklem: “Ian Karmel is an anagram of “ram in kale.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
And now the veggiesexual readers of this are aroused.
C’mon folks, you know in Portland there are veggiesexuals.
There totally *are*.
I’m going to start protesting these places by hanging around them holding a corn dog in one hand and a tiny American flag in the other.
The author of this article hit it on the head. Portland isn’t fun anymore and I think more of us oldies are moving away. It’s too bad. Used to be a fun and cheap place to live. Oh well.
Don’t worry, peeples. Come east of 82nd avenue. This is where the real Portland moved out to after the Portlandians took over. We still have divebars.