Actually been pretty distant from the kinksters, a lot of time they honestly seemed a little steampunk goth S&M 90s hangovery. One of the subtle signs of cultural degradation in the last 10 years is how even our famously numerous strip clubs are less centered as celebrated community institutions now

Heat wave not as bad as the last one, though it’s doing the Portland thing where it really ramps up from 1500 to 2100 and then stays there for 6 hours before falling

You notice all the rabble-leftist wheatpasting around here hasn’t come back since the downtown scrums died

kaziusklasterzoroaster:

kontextmaschine:

The major story in Portland politics rn is that the mayor when I first arrived in town, Sam Adams has basically co-opted the mayorality as the one who knows how to use it and is a good candidate to succeed stiff literal timber heir Ted Wheeler even (especially?) if the electoralist harder-left unsatisfied with last year do manage to recall him

And this replacement of old money with the more dynamic guy who’s making kind of a comeback after not running for a second term amidst fluff about fucking the boy who had been his high school intern as the defensive representative of the comfortable Portland establishment is just so correct you have to laugh

(and a reminder of what an epic own-goal 2020 was for the local left)

what even IS comfortable portland establishment at this point? My parents own a house literal blocks from Hawthorne and I’m not sure even I know anymore. What does this city DO at this point? 

(Was it an own-goal or did they just accomplish nothing) 

Basically, it owns land in Portland, which given that everyone and everything has to be somewhere and it’s one of the best places to be is huge. The fact that the Willamette and the Columbia link it to rich valley farms and timberlands to the south and dryland farms and ore to the east is of the same historical interest as the fact the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers connected the Pittsburgh steel industry to coal, iron, and markets.

And yes, it’s an own-goal. Eudaly, Schmidt and even Hardesty used to be tolerated by the establishment before they became liabilities. Now no one remotely associated with Iannarone is going to be allowed within a mile of power.

Appreciate that we are, apparently uniquely, not filled with apocalyptic hell smoke in Portland this year

The major story in Portland politics rn is that the mayor when I first arrived in town, Sam Adams has basically co-opted the mayorality as the one who knows how to use it and is a good candidate to succeed stiff literal timber heir Ted Wheeler even (especially?) if the electoralist harder-left unsatisfied with last year do manage to recall him

And this replacement of old money with the more dynamic guy who’s making kind of a comeback after not running for a second term amidst fluff about fucking the boy who had been his high school intern as the defensive representative of the comfortable Portland establishment is just so correct you have to laugh

(and a reminder of what an epic own-goal 2020 was for the local left)

Anyway I went to see the movie then hang out with another reader today in Tualitin. I have never managed to cross the West Hills without getting totally lost and sure didn’t start today, but built in just enough buffer to my schedule.

Along way saw a lot more of Southwest, including the new South, than I usually do, and then crossing into SE newly struck by the continuity of it all. I totally forget SW exists, and I think so did the leftists trying to crash last election.

Yeah that’s context for the heat wave, basically no one has AC.

The main factor in Portland weather is the gorge cutting through two mountain ranges, creating an airflow corridor between the ocean and the hot inland plains

So after the sun goes down it stays hot and a little more stifling even until 2AM or so as the hot inland air passes by on the way out to sea

The flip side is the morning and afternoon aren’t as hot as they might be otherwise, because they’re moderated by the cool sea air coming in. Which is to say if it’s this hot already at 9:45, woo boy is it gonna get bad

Just caught myself thinking “yes, the massive riots downtown all last year seem to have helped bring in a better crowd but the neighborhood is becoming more pleasant to walk and it’s been years since someone stole one of my vehicles or left a syringe in my yard, I just don’t know how much longer I’m gonna be able to live here”

Woo, just went out for some milk and I have not seen this much weekend traffic since April 2020

kontextmaschine:

Hear From Portlanders Living in a Neighborhood Where Gunfire Is Killing Black People

The parking lot has been the scene of two shootings in a year, Fernandez says. The most recent was last month, when two cars pulled up in front of the adjacent, pale green office building, where tenants include a Farmers Insurance office, a dog groomer and an OnlyFans agent. Parked outside the office, the drivers began firing at each other.

Wait what?

Oh and regarding the article subject itself – this area centrally east of the 205 freeway is the new Black Part of Portland, replacing the older concentration in North and inner NE (the turnover not too hostile, there was high homeownership so this cashed out less as evictions than as estate sales and nice nest eggs for heirs)

It was originally built on unincorporated county land not up to the amenity standards (parks, sidewalks etc.) of the city then reluctantly annexed in when it clearly couldn’t pay for sewer upgrades (it was a poor white area at the time).

But it IS in range to all the warehouses by the 205/84 junction, and the airport up by the river and thus some of the best unskilled jobs in Portland. This combination of cheap (substandard) housing in proximity to port and goods-moving jobs is really the same thing as North Portland (around the port) and the old downtown Skid Row (around the working waterfront and rail yards) were in their day.

Hear From Portlanders Living in a Neighborhood Where Gunfire Is Killing Black People

The parking lot has been the scene of two shootings in a year, Fernandez says. The most recent was last month, when two cars pulled up in front of the adjacent, pale green office building, where tenants include a Farmers Insurance office, a dog groomer and an OnlyFans agent. Parked outside the office, the drivers began firing at each other.

Wait what?

Living east of 39th but west of 82nd for 5 years it threatened going from “families putting up with ‘Felony Flats’ for the price” straight to “new kids moving straight into their new apartments without encountering Portland proper, normies who would have lived in Clackamas but now think they’re too cool for it (they aren’t)”

So been nice this last week getting out and encountering people who reminded me of the Portlanders I saw further in a decade ago, just 10 years older now and settling down, do hope the development ends up chasing that. On a shorter horizon, insofar as places have standing waves of “culture” I suppose the wave will be reestablished by the first, boldest types to emerge from reclusion, let’s hope it’s something everyone later is drawn to match.

That said when I moved in 5 years ago there was a sporadic car parked on the street but now I guess between the 6-plex put in two blocks away, and the few houses moved over w/o garages, and houses going from 2-car families to like 4 adults, and whatever pressure wave propagating out from the apartments on the corridor corner like 9 blocks away, the street is crowded and narrowed, if I didn’t have a garage or a driveway I’d really still be fine but that I’d have to look for a second-best spot at all is new.

Portland is, statistically, less of a biking and transit-riding city when it moved in. Part of it’s that just like repurposing and reusing things, growing your own food, or entertaining yourself outdoors or with local performance, that had historically come, as much as from the city being precious, as it being practical and poor.

Part of it is that 10 years ago, Portland! was more compact, like an arc defined by SW/NW/NE Broadway plus Alberta. It wasn’t quite as compact as before it spread across the river, in free-transit “fareless square”, but like it was at most 20 minutes and zero transfers end to end. Now like, I can’t even imagine someone from Lents dragging ass to North Portland. I never make it out to either!

kontextmaschine:

Portland announces it will aggressively clean or remove homeless encampments

I cannot emphasize enough how much the local left shot itself in the foot last year and left the downtown business/property developers/West Hills old money establishment as the only viable governance base in town.

After they damn near shot themselves in the foot in 2012 by going with super-insider Charlie Hales instead of trying to establish an Eastside base with Jefferson Smith, I’d been wary of Iannarone for years. But now that’s all sealed away for another generation!

Like, the Trump years started with the street left trying to clear out the right from the city and rightist groups from the outskirts mounting presence-showing drives and skirmishes, and that’s mostly settled in that they’ve focused on consolidating their suburban bases.

In suburbs in the two “country” cardinal directions, Vancouver across the river to the north is where “Patriot Prayer” mounted PDX actions from all along, when there was a police shooting a few months ago and the Portland regulars tried to send a delegation to protest the cops were on them like white on rice, which is maybe good cause it bought space from the locals patrolling them in trucks with ARs.

Salem, the capitol down in the farming Willamette Valley (it’s what the Simpsons’ “Capitol City” is riffed off!) is reportedly a no-go zone for visible leftists

Oregon City, the proximate southern suburb in Clackamas and probably the most bonehead part of the region, is hosting weekly Proud Boys “flag hoist” rallies drawing like 200 people and melee weapon vendors and regularly running off the “antifascists” who come down to hassle it

One thing is these are the exact places the fringes of Portland are going to get priced out to as North and Lents level up over the next 10-15 years. A big part of local street left lore is coming together to “take” the city from white gangs in the 90s after the murder of African immigrant Mulugeta Seraw, I don’t know they’ve yet grokked the significance of priming their future territory against them in the exact opposite way

THAT’S NOT ALL, the mayor’s pushback-reconsolidation drive has made use of connected black pastors E.D. Mondainé and Matt Hennessee and brought in played-the-mayors-aide-on-Portlandia-as-sitting-mayor-of-Portland Sam Adams as advisor (cause Wheeler really doesn’t know how to mayor. Afaik Adams’ contribution is Xanaxposting fights on Twitter)

The thing is those guys had kinda been on the outs over, y'know, kerfluffles over them fucking teenagers under their care or supervision, but all water under the bridge now.

Which is a tradition in Portland politics! It was an open secret in elite circles that 70s mayor turned Governor Neil Goldschmidt was fucking his aide’s daughter/babysitter, there was a thing with some Seattle mayor who’d made use of the kids as some 70s/80s outreach worker to homeless queer youth, they’ve been hassling some big donor in the hills and sotto voice the pushback is, like with Adams, gay people never gave up on the 70s and got weird about it

And not just elite circles. Maybe something about how Oregon was a frontier of hard-living, non-religious, very masculine-coded rural blue collar workers and rich playboy landowners whose culture really “set” in the 1970s, so there’s establishment buy-in to those values – we literally have a free expression constitutional right to full-contact nude lapdances, I’m not making that up. But like, the promotional materials for summer rock camp for girls pitching how fuckable chick rockers are as an appeal to parents re: enriching their adolescent daughters, seeing a bunch of locals get a bit drunk and trade “top this!” stories of all the teachers their friends were fucking in high school…

My #sex with teenagers kick the last few years, of realizing how key it had been to everything for decades? That came from somewhere. Portland is quite literally the city Omelas, you know, “utopian city where everyone ultimately makes their peace with the fact it’s all built on child abuse”, is based on. So over and above the 2010s valence, when the answer to “how bad did they fuck up?” is “so bad they forfeited all progress with getting the establishment to stigmatize sex with ~MiNoRs~” like, they fucked up

The model as it stands is to make it an attractive place for companies who could be headquartered anywhere to move by making it an attractive place for them to recruit to, including building enough housing to keep cost of living down.

I think they’re mostly going to go head-down back to that and less let themselves get dragged off. Rebuilding the “brand”. I think Wheeler (who is surprisingly amateurish, but that’s decayed aristocracy for you) thought of #Resistance liberalism as part of that and cheap applause and having been burned and consolidated a defensive machine instead he’ll be shy of even Nice White Ladies Who Care stuff.

Question how much they can bring the DA on board to tying people down long term or if they’ll have to hard bounce him in ‘22. Hardesty probably out in '22 too, our council is at-large so she can’t get that much edge even servicing other minority, Eastside stuff like shaking the state highway super-arterials out of ODOT hands.

Portland announces it will aggressively clean or remove homeless encampments

I cannot emphasize enough how much the local left shot itself in the foot last year and left the downtown business/property developers/West Hills old money establishment as the only viable governance base in town.

After they damn near shot themselves in the foot in 2012 by going with super-insider Charlie Hales instead of trying to establish an Eastside base with Jefferson Smith, I’d been wary of Iannarone for years. But now that’s all sealed away for another generation!

Just went to the dentist and hit up a different supermarket than usual

1. Saw a birdlike, normie-dressed late-30s woman with a face mask that just said, white on black, all caps, no quotes, “AHEGAO”
2. The checker had to go get something, so got talking to the cute bagger girl. On an impulse asked for her number and got it.

kontextmaschine:

So, where we’re at in Portland:

• The sheriff’s department has reversed years-old policy to now book misdemeanants through prison rather than handing them a citation and releasing
• Someone is going around targeting houses with those virtue-signaling yard signs for arson
• It’s May Day, when for years the anarchists predictably get together and get rowdy

So I am wondering if we’ll advance the plot today

Last year at the downtown courthouse counter-leftist “chud” trucks would sometimes threateningly circle at night protests but today at multiple locations cars with no obvious signs of purpose are no longer waiting patiently for them when blocked in the road.