There’s a Dr. Who-themed bar in Portland because obviously there is. I’ve been in there a few times, I know a bartender. It’s a weird crowd split between British expats (place started off as a Brit-run fish and chips shop), geeks, and black guys from the neighborhood in to play pool with their fat white girlfriends.

The whole thing’s a little ridiculous but the only part that really bugs me is they’ve got the bathroom doors made up to look like the canonical police box-styled TARDIS door, including the “Pull to Open” sign even though they’re push to open.

The new Apple store downtown is literally a Greek temple rendered in sleek glass and brushed aluminum. If I had made this up I’d’ve scrapped it as too on-the-nose.

A telling thing about Portland is how the street renamed MLK Boulevard, & the one Rosa Parks Way, were in places where they made sense and for maybe another decade still will, but all the streets that made sense for Caesar Chavez Boulevard were passed over in favor of one that the downtown/inner SE white lifestylers might ever use.

The most specific bumper sticker I’ve seen in a while

Every fucking bar on Alberta Street, every night this week, full of fucking Australians.

Salt & Straw’s been a tourist draw for a while, but mostly Americans (haven’t overheard the line recently), now even Pine State Biscuits on a Wednesday afternoon it’s 2-3 person groups speaking in Korean, in German, in eastern european stuff I don’t even recognize.

But Australians, who knows, maybe we made the cover of Rugbyfucker Monthly.

But what’s the alternative, “the new Alberta” of Divison? Been going to Scoreboard recently (decent pinball lineup, the only Fireball I remember in town that’s for sure) and it’s a little rough out there still, people walking in circles talking to themselves on the street. But feh, is that more than one or two years worse than Alberta was when I showed up three years ago and The Nest was still open?

Went to a birthday barbecue today at 94th and south of Powell. Damn nice house on a big lot. On the other hand there’s that voice going “we can’t live here, this is juggalo country”.

LA style gang grafitti too (3-4 character tags, and I even recognize some of the ones they’re franchising off of), but a little halfassed I can tell. The dude making an effort of looking all hard in front of the local girls on his bike in his wifebeater also made an effort of looking back and pulling off to the side to let me overtake him.

Chalk graffiti in the men’s bathroom of Over & Out, the discordantly fancy bar at 82nd & Stark:

How much $ is enough, and what will you do with it when you get it?

Free thought defined this country. Why aren’t you thinking?

#Stoplivingonacomputer
#getyourhandsdirty
#socialmediaistheoppositeofsocial

Before I die I want to: LIVE

Describe your poop with a song name

Graffiti carved into the wood table outside:

WHITE POWER

piusxijinping:

i stole this post from etienne but for the love of fuck look what molly crabapple has been up to lately 

I went to one of the sessions of the local branch of her empire once. I’d only once done any life drawing since Risley but I’d enjoyed it, and there was an event happening at the gaming store where I’d played some L5R sealed deck tournaments. There were props - cloaks and fur mantles, staves, lanterns. It was fantasy-themed, of course. D&D themed, specifically, some of the models cited the specifics of the characters they were portraying. (“I’m not just someone who enjoys getting naked for strangers, I also know my 6th-level wizard spells” is a very Portland sentiment.)

Some of the stuff was a little gratuitously sexual, but all well within the Frazetta/Vallejo tradition, and it’s churlish to complain about tits at a life drawing session. Race didn’t really come into it, being that everyone was thoroughly white, being that Portland. Well, I guess the Howardian notion of the barbarian. Okay, yeah, race came into it.

My main issue was that as a beginner, and for a session with such interesting props, the poses were awful short. By the time they changed I’d still be trying to get the torso proportions right, but the attendees on either side of me would have done some really beautiful, shaded work, in that volumetric sketchy style, lines wandering away like curly hair on a humid day, that you’d expect from acolytes of Molly Crabapple.

It was fun though, and afterwards I checked their website for more, maybe one without props. There was a session near my neighborhood, though on examination it was a steampunk-themed session in a kink-oriented coffeeshop/gallery, the day after a recycling event for wax fetishists where they could bring their candle stumps in to be melted down and recast.

(edit: this was all actually more recent than that link, dunno what terms you’re using that 2009 counts as “lately”)

At The Standard and “Discipline Daddy” has most of the Big Buck HD local top scores

Hermon MacNeil’s “Oh Fuck, White People”, the real sculptural embodiment of Portland.

The most Georgia O'Keeffe flower at the Portland Rose Test Garden

Biked downhill ; there was a Stop sign coming up on Hawthorne with stickers below reading “YOUR VOTE COUNTS” and I couldn’t tell if it was civicist with “counts” as a verb or anarchist with “vote counts” a noun phrase.

Went to Vancouver for the first time. This about sums it up.

Keep in mind that other candidates for “best Portland-area amusement park” include the Air & Space Museum/waterpark with CIA ties, and for “most Portland thing I’ve ever read” include Fight Club’s vision of overthrowing emasculating bourgeois last man society through the redemptive violence of insurrectionary primitivist service-class masculinity.

I’ve been in Oregon going on three years and I’m still regularly stunned that this is a place that exists in reality and not some 1988 fantasy novel where USENET founds its own country.

http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/the-best-of-enchanted-forest/Content?oid=1517266

A 1/3-sarcastic, 1/3-loving, 1/3-self-loving tribute to a local institution that anywhere else would have been supplanted by a polished corporate version, but is instead loved for its hand-crafted, three-quarters-assed, vaguely Germanic and sinister character, as rendered by semiprofessional creatives who constantly digress into adolescent self-hating humblebragging about how they’re habitual intoxicants who consider their interactions with other people, the young included, primarily in terms of sex.

This might be the most Portland thing I’ve ever read.

C Bar, Gladstone St., Portland, OR

“Bath Party”

The Alhambra, Hawthorne St. , Portland, OR

Lady and the Tramp remake where as fancy as she acts Lady’s in heat and she does the same thing with every mutt around and Tramp shows up in time every time as far as he knows and the plot goes on but still

local heroes

Townshend’s, Alberta St., Portland, OR