December 02, 2003
Requiem For Portland's Underbelly?
Jack's referencing it, and Emma's buzzing about it -- the "it" being The New York Times and its article on Portland through the eyes of Chuck Palahniuk and his book about Portland's fringes:
And in Portland the fringe may be unraveling rather quickly. The former mill town turned growth management problem has fallen on hard times. Since March 2001 the city has lost 50,000 jobs, giving it the highest unemployment rate among American cities, 8 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last year, voters of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had to agree to a new temporary income tax for schools.
Which is a curious thing to use as an argument for Portland's fringes unraveling, since much of any city's truly fringe culture has nothing whatsoever to do with standard economic indicators. Not to mention that another relevant statistic would be the fact that creatively-inclined young people -- the sort from which the fringes often arise -- continue to move to Portland in droves, despite those traditional economic indicators.
The article's author goes on to say this:
The most significant change this year was in Portland's cultural institutions. Traditionally, the city's cultural strength came from its youth and included garage bands and rogue bicycle gangs. Now, Mr. Vogel said, three new cultural leaders could change all that. This year the leading ballet and opera companies and symphony brought in directors from out of town.
That "Mr. Vogel," by the way, is the editor of the new bi-monthly Portland Monthly, which itself tends to be a tourism magazine for the Pearl District set, and (despite Vogel's sop to Portland's "quirkiness") so perhaps has something of a vested interest in the cleaner "next level" City that Palahniuk fears so much.
Anyway, the notion that the presence of "three new cultural leaders" in the top-level mainstream of the City's culture will somehow negate, or inherently disparages, Portland's edgier, fringier culture is the sort of simplistic nonsense one would like to believe is beneath such a stalwart national newspaper like the Times (although these days, few people are so naive as to actually believe this).
The article closes with Palahniuk saying, "You know, everything I've touched with this book seems to be just collapsing. The nature of those places is that they disappear and reappear."
Which seems, oddly, to undercut the strange form of nihilism projected by the article through its other uses of Palahniuk -- because this last is, in fact, the actual point. The fringe is not constant, perhaps precisely because the moment the fringe becomes an institution it finds itself diving headline into being, well, institutionalized. And therefore no longer fringe.
Then again, perhaps Palahniuk himself is simply no longer privvy to what constitutes the City's fringes. Perhaps his book (no matter how much I like it) is little more than a lamentation over Palahniuk's fringes crumbling, and his lack of connection to what invariably will reclaim, has already been reclaiming, those nooks and crannies.
Perhaps someone should tell the Times (and others) that while Palahniuk may be right that a certain era of the City's fringes has passed, his knowledge of that era doesn't make him an expert on the fringes of today's Portland.
Comments (1)
The One True b!X on 02 Dec 2003
I should also say that this part:
"Last year, voters of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had to agree to a new temporary income tax for schools."
also, I think, argues for precisely the opposite point as the one for which its used.
To wit: Portland stepping up to the plate to institute this tax is a political-world example of the same "do it yourself" philosophy which informs Portland's cultural fringes.
Quite the opposite from somehow using it to argue that Portland is lost at sea.