The bar that was showing The Good Guys (2016) last time I was in is showing Freeway (1996), different bartender I guess they’ve just cultivated a neo-noir sensibility for movie night.

Which knowing this bar (it’s where I captained a Sunday league pinball team for several years!) is a big change, they’re updating to keep up with the neighborhood and clientele by investing in staff, which is wise

In the last two weeks talked to three neighbors who were here before me and even one who showed up after who seemed earnestly surprised that the neighborhood was getting nice and young people were showing up, making me realize it was not in fact universal knowledge that this would happen a decade after I bought Karafuto

This bar’s getting.… more busy after 11. I haven’t seen that for years, that’s the sign of a young adult clientele with social circles that include food service workers. That’s a very good sign.

Microbreweries are largely the urban equivalent of “wine country” vineyards insofar as they’re split between alcoholic tourist destinations making adaptive reuse of economically obsolete regions that (barely) market a product as a side effect and actual businesses reinventing a market for the purpose of rediscovering scale always wins

Mathing it out if those neighbors leave and combine the adjacent lot for multifamily construction when their kids move out in a decade or so, depending on number of units feasible (and basement units/extended family compounds already here) the new building would suddenly constitute from 40% to 75% of all the households living on the block. Which is both the promise and cost of residential densification, I suppose.

Between GIS and Zillow maps you can trivially figure out how your neighborhood is changing in the upcoming 6 months ahead of time

Yeah so gentrification turns out to basically take exactly the paths I expected just first-time homeowners show up 7 years before young cool kid renters, apparently

Alright, the stage of gentrification where there are attractive young women walking the neighborhood streets in summer hitting just in time for the thing where I suddenly become incredibly charismatic and attractive

Feel bad for getting less than I could done in a day but then I remember I have no deadlines and I’m still making progress.

Well, I need to do the earth ramming for the side ramp while there’s still moisture in the dirt, and planting some cover will be month-dependent but I honestly don’t even know what and I can do that next year at worst, I’ll be here for a while.

Doing weeding after the first rain since a lot of stuff started to sprout, used the soil pulled out to construct a ramp of solid ground back onto Blueberry Hill where I can smash up the remainder

…and fill in with debris from the power line downed branches which I’ve been smashing up against Strawberry Ridge

Seeing more and more people take that path, part of it it lines up a good shot down to a respectable park/elementary school/cut-through to a shady route to walk/bike south, but I can even overhear from their comments walking by that part of it’s just they like the side yard as I’ve made it and prefer to come that way, it makes me feel really proud, I remember moving in when it was a total mess with a worn-muddy path through a field of broadleaf weeds with a tree-of-heaven nest (that it was a right bitch to untangle and cultivator mattock the roots from) and a blackberry bramble hanging from my (then-intact!) fence

But then again I remember – less than a decade ago! – when multiple houses on the block had bars on the windows.

In planning for the future of Karafuto I’m considering the possibility that before it reaches end-life the neighborhood will densify to the extent you at least want wrought-iron fencing if not window bars, that drifter knocking on my bedroom window from the backyard today reimpressed that that there are things that scale of defense is for

All the parents walking around my neighborhood with 3-year-olds are suburban office park types but all the ones with 12-year-olds are like, AutoZone workers

One thing about LA’s freeze on building and attempt to hold “neighborhood character” is that the commercial mix of an area is often like, 15 years behind the neighborhood demographic.

Like, there were parts of Melrose Boulevard that I went to in 2008 that I was like “oh, this makes Melrose Place (1992-1999) make a bit more sense!”

I visited back down to Echo Park in like, summer 2019? after leaving in 2011, and like, the only new construction I saw – some townhouses up by the terminus of the 2 in this hot neighborhood you heard about on the other coast – was about equal to the amount of change I would expect on any given Portland eastside block between 13th and 48th over the same period.

But the stores on Sunset, which had been like, cheap/blue collar work clothes, or storefronts that carried all, but only, the stuff you got with WIC vouchers, or these 3 restaurants that were owned in common as basically identical meh Mexican cafeterias, finally matched what I’d’ve expected from the block down from The Echo/Echoplex

When I walked out the door three teen boys who had been standing by the wall at the foot of my driveway over-casually sauntered away

And maybe they were being naughty and improper but there’s nothing there for them to really menace and the neighborhood has packs of teen boys now. Vitality!

I cannot emphasize enough that when I first moved in this neighborhood was for fuckups and people who couldn’t afford any closer in if it had to be good

So maybe “high maintenance” did never leave. But apparently it really started with When Harry Met Sally?

This is a good piece. It’s a “looking back on previous decades’ pop culture, it wasn’t that ‘19 feminist!” piece but with actual insight to it.

Something that needs pointing out, if your two examples of an assertively classifying, questioning man in late ‘80s pop culture are Seinfeld and the Nora Ephron/Billy Crystal/Rob Reiner-crafted character of Harry Burns, is that this is a specifically New York Jewish boomer type

Born maybe still early enough to get a splash of working class Noo Yawk, sandlot baseball and all, but mostly heir to a psychoanalytic culture that valued mastery through self-knowledge, self-knowledge through probing questions

And I’m realizing, by the late ‘80s that was kind of what was left of White urban culture. Well, South Boston. Like you watch the ‘66 Adam West Batman and its picture of Gotham as continuous with small town whitebread culture, just bigger, it would have been mindboggling from the perspective of 1989. Gotham City in ‘89 was a Tim Burton nightmare realm.

Probably more and more true every day now, though, as the rich whites move back to the cities. But I’m realizing how much that’s the point, this stuff was a vision of urbanity for an increasingly tired-of-suburbia White America. “Look, life in cities isn’t tenements and mugging, it’s urbane wit”, Harry and Seinfeld said.

And they invited people back into the cities, and modeled how they should act - as post-religious, post-Freudian, postmodern post-any grand narrative college-educated Jews. Like, Friends, the huge ‘90s back-to-the-city sitcom, one of the things is the guy who gets through life on a cloud of cynical, self-deprecating “Jewish” humor is Chandler Bing, the gentile office guy, to the point that Phoebe had just been assuming he was the whole time.

Kinda was the world I expected to inherit tbh

Now that all the stock of early-20th cen bungalows has been gentrified and urban frontiersmen have to move on to ranch houses, I’ve been seeing all these Pinterests and supermarket magazine aisles pushing renovation ideas along this mid-century modern “atomic ranch” style that owes more to The B-52s and the ‘90s swing revival than either the style’s original Eames-and-Lloyd-Wright (or Monsanto House of the Future) aspirations or its actual contemporary busy-wallpaper-floral-print-couch-Sacred-Heart-of-Jesus-painting implementations

number34:

I recently worked on some really fun stuff for GOOD magazine.

Check it all out here: http://youngjerks.com/GOOD-Magazine-WPA-Posters

this is the enthusiasm with which the 1990s walked into the pit of the 2010s

I’ll be damned, a friend just pointed out that Green Day’s “Welcome to Paradise” is about gentrifying a neighborhood.

Speaking of YIMBYs

Just out on the road, saw three pedal bikers, young, stylish in the gay thin way, one had a sign on his back

this road
needs a
DIET

obvs they came from Foster, which for a while there’s been stenciled anti- signs up in the businesses, which are basically all taking advantage of the cheap irregular lots (Foster cuts diagonal to the grid) to serve builders of LMC housing - tile, fixtures, furniture, lumber.

not gonna be LMC housing any more, that’s the point

the more important thing is it’s a commuter route from Clackamas but that can’t last as things build so may as well pull the band-aid and shove them to 205->82 or the MAX already

interesting it’s an obv. outlet for gentrification but unlike Division or Glisan the lots are triangular so that might slow things, in clusters you’re already seeing the twee stores that obviously couldn’t make rent unless developers were subsidizing them as plants

but there’s that cluster of sex businesses at the mouth, the strip club, modeling studio(/brothel), adult store(/scum brothel), they just put in the “sex-positive coffeeshop” and I bet they’re gonna make the developers buy them out DEAR

But oh, the bike YIMBYs. Is that your radical ~activism~? That was what Matt Yglesias made his name on, repeating the Harvard conventional wisdom of 2003, you fucks, somehow you’re worse than Shepard Fairey, worse than Banksy, than fucking Adbusters, fuck you you millennials you found an axis to be worse on than the Boomers, fuck you fuck you fuck you

you killed my heimat you fucks

On Sunday Preston Page and his fiancée, Jessica Faraday, found their house and car covered in graffiti, and the car was also keyed. The gold paint messages included “CALI - surfs up” and “get California out of Portland.

tbh been slumming in Portland these past years

got a bit of an immersion in working class culture, through ex-roommates and social circle and just Portland in general

as the city changes thinking a lot of things I liked and attributed to a strong, earthy working class culture were more properly *bohemianism* - the ability to live a more relaxed life by accepting working class material standards and social comparison groups while remaining culturally a/o structurally bougie

and Portland’s changing, maybe more cosseted but less soft. dunno, not sure what my place is now, what I should be going for, or what place I even want tbh