July 08, 2003
The Portland That City Hall And The Portland Business Alliance Don't Want You To See!
With the likely exception of the rather full chapter on the local sex industry, this headline is something of an exaggerated description of Chuck Palahniuk's Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk In Portland, Oregon -- which I only managed to get ahold of today as part of a book sell-off at Powell's Books on Hawthorne.
Right from the start of the book -- the Introduction and "A Portland Vocabulary Lesson" -- can be laugh-out-loud. Which sort of sets you up for a kind of whiplash when you get to some of the darker bits.
Actually, the juxapositions -- frentically funny to nearly depressing to almost prosaic (there's a section of recipes from local restaurants, for crying out loud) -- can be very jolting. But that's part of the charm, and if you don't go for that sort of thing you should probably just stay away from the book altogether.
(Parenthetically, the map presented inside the covers of the book -- 8. Psycho Safeway ... 14. Eviction Court ... 17. Chuck Got Beat Up Here -- is close to inspiring me to put out a call for my fellow local weblog writers to create similar maps of their own, or perhaps a photo project detailing our own personal maps of Portland.)
I unavoidably smirked at Palahniuk's inclusion of ACE of Hearts, which he claims is "Portland's premier club for swingers." Before any readers here begin to wonder about me, this struck me because I used to live just across and down from this particular establishment (incidentally, in the only actual house on a stretch of SE 39th Avenue that is otherwise all apartment buildings).
Inevitably, part of the entertainment on Friday or Saturday nights was sitting on my front porch watching the ACE of Hearts patrons come and go. Most notable of these evenings was the night the club was circled by a preacher in a van, venting Biblical through a PA system affixed to the vehicle's roof.
And not to mire this post in sex, but given my current readings on Portland history, I'm horribly amused to discover that in 1912 there were so many prostitutes working Portland that the mayor "campaigned to turn all of Ross Island into a penal colony solely for sex workers."
Most surprisingly, I learned a number of curious things about the Bagdad Theater that I had not known, despite having spent a considerable amount of time there in the not too distant past, and knowing essentially everyone who was working there at the time.
Interspersed throughout the book are so-called postcards, which Palahniuk admits "aren't from places so much as from specific Portland moments." Easily the best of these is "a postcard from 1995" in which he describes a late-night visit to the Apocalypse Cafe.
What we have is an almost random tour through the bits of Portland that don't show up in City Hall conversations about, say, livability or economic development. Which, in a sense, is odd, because represented in this book is precisely the sort of local culture and economy that ultimately makes Portland, well, Portland.
But those conversations always come with baggage, most pressingly in some sense the question, "Livability for whom?"
In the end, Fugitives and Refugees documents the cultural livability actually down here on the ground, rather than the pie-in-the-sky visions that pump like so much factory ash from the Portland Development Commission. Portland is far more about Stripper Bingo and the Adult Soapbox Derby than about Major League Baseball, and I'll likely go to my grave believing it shouldn't be any other way.
Comments (1)
hilsy on 08 Jul 2003
As your local raving native I an't wait to read Chuck's latest. I've met the man more than a few times outside any kind of literary circles. I've enjoyed his books but found the Trib aricle to, let's just say, be a bit misleading. But I'm excited to hear about his insights into a our wonderfully interesting, provincial little city. I think the smallness and insular qualities help to breed its own brand of weirdness. I'm still waiting to read the great thesis that connects the bad old days of totally corrupt Portland with the current environment of Strip clubs, meth and pot. The connection may be more subconscious than actual but would be an interesting investigation. You up for it B!x??