EXPECTATIONS FOR THE DAY

Once upon a time, we lived in the wild, the human race exposed and roaming an uncensored earth. We wandered the desert and jungle, forest and savannah, and did so without houses and neighborhoods, without plumbing and bathroom, without the car or sidewalk or tennis shoes or chocolate or anything to help make it nice. In fact, we inhabited the earth for the longest time without even so much as a concept of such things. The basics of food and shelter, a meal scavenged, a rock outcropping to keep our head dry, were the beginning and end of our expectations for the day.

Throughout our history, humans also lived in environments surrounded by all manner of peculiar, threatening, ambiguous, exotic, and offbeat creatures. Creatures, many of who possessed similar qualities to us—eyes with which to see, legs to walk and run, teeth to chew and an appetite to match. Some, even, like us, possessed demonstrable moods: sadness, pleasure, contentment, fear, and ill temper. Like us in these ways, yet all the while being always somehow very different from us. Some were slow moving and hairy, others were fast and small, some came in a variety of colors, spotted and striped. Some had leathery skin and watchful eyes that never blinked. Some dug holes in the ground. Others flew through the air and sang and cawed. Some climbed trees. Many walked on four legs. Others were direct competitors for food, while others fell upon us with their teeth bared. These creatures we called animals.

And animals were everywhere and all around us, part of the wild earth in which we lived, each and every day. Any animal could wander right into where you ate and slept and have a peek at you. And vice versa.

It was in just this setting that early man would have to scare up something to eat. The most obvious option being the scavenging of plants, fruit, leaves, insects, whatever, whether it was from the forest floor or the desert steppe. The other option involved chasing down some other life form, preferably, one absent a good offensive strategy and precision incisors. All this was done without the convenience of garden scissors or rife. These two options amounted to early man’s version of a trip to the grocery store.

…Honey, I’ll get the steaks.

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL

It is possible in this day and age to find yourself among wild lions, tigers, and bears while eating chili fries. Simply stop into The Legendary Safari Club, in Estacada, Oregon, an utterly strange, one of a kind club that is filled with all manner of large scale taxidermy: buffalo, leopard, antelope, elephant, zebra, goat, bear, and baboon. The club walls are lined with glass enclosed dioramas, of the kind normally seen in a natural history museum, with scenes from the wild, staged against painted backdrops, and in and amongst jungle plants, faux streams, mounds of dirt and sand and tree stump. Stroll into the bar or restaurant and have your walk interrupted by a freestanding lioness or ten-foot bear.

Once simply called The Safari Club, this joint was something of a hot spot in the 70s and 80s, the place to dance, drink, and hang. Estacada is a small town, and the club is the kind of place around which everyone seems to have a story from the past, a place brimming with local lore. Among the animals, you’ll likewise encounter local denizens of the bar. They all have strong feelings about the club and the animals and their slayer, a fellow local named Glen Park, now deceased. Glen Park was a game hunter, a big game hunter. Most of animals fell before Park’s gun on twenty-three hunting expeditions, over the course of six years during the nineteen-sixties. The hunter sold his lumber mill to open the club, in nineteen-seventies, in order to feature his handywork alongside a meal and the opportunity to Jungle Boogie.

These days, neglected for so long, the club is struggling to shake off the dust and sew rends in its hide. At some point, portions of Park’s collection had been sold off, and some non-Glen Park replacement trophies have been purchased. Long-time Estacada residents and denizens of the bar are quick, in voices bombed-out yet smarting with jingoistic regionalism, to parse out for you, quite without solicitation, just what’s original to the club (and Park) and what has come along since. And why not? It is, after all, their bar and your tourist attraction.

The original vibe somehow still resonates with the recently dusted and sewn-up animals themselves, in some off-color fashion. There is something thrilling yet unnerving, seductive yet offensive, about this threadbare yet exceedingly life-like crowd of long-ago dispatched animals, who stare sweetly at you from a plaque upon the wall, or forage lazily about the faux cliff-side, or fight among themselves upon a wooden platform, or gape terrified from beneath the claws of an assailant behind a wall of glass. It smacks of a once rich world of life that, even at the time these animals were shot, still suggested a sense of life unbridled. A sense that today is thought of, for the most part, only under the umbrella of the animal refuge, animal park, or eco-tour. Institutions all, regardless of the nobility of their intent, which give off the keen scent of the theme park, museum, and tourist attraction. Which is to say, there is nothing “wild” about them.

HYENA POPPERS UNDER GLASS

Pop open the Safari Club menu and browse for a Cheetah Chili Burger, Monkey Melt, Gorilla Nachos, Samba’s Spinach Dip, or Hyena Popper. The menu makes complete sense and seems intent on a mildly ironic smile. It’s much harder to imagine ordering Chinese, which patrons once did during its previous incarnation as Jen Jen’s Safari Club. Yet, even when ordering, it’s difficult to ignore a palpable sense of aging history, and lurking sense of untold stories. The kind of local lore such as this juvenilia. There was once an elephant foot table that was stolen from the club. The table began showing up on front lawns around town. And then, just as mysteriously as it had disappeared, it reappeared at the club. The feeling is that the place has secrets, mostly undocumented, mostly untold. Cause no one is any longer asking, if they ever did, or no one is all that interested in telling. When asked about the club, the son of the man who built it and owned it is said to prefer another subject.

Now that you’ve had time with the menu, go ahead and order a burger and notice something odd. These dead creatures, under glass, standing on platforms, or perched upon the wall, they still have a spooky animation, a suggestion of real life. Their pelts are organic matter, the same skin the tiger wore in life, the same fur upon the Brown Bear, the feathers and talons of the hawk. And, as gruesome as the stuffed animals might be, as strange as their aspect, the quality of the taxidermy is outstanding. The sculptor has captured the emotional content, or what might be said to be the inner life of the animals. They are portrayed with something akin to an animal’s soul. Or, if you prefer, they posses the spark of life. Whatever an animal’s soul or their spark of life might be is difficult to settle on, it’s infinitely arguable. But to recognize the thing, to immediately apprehend it… This is simple. In the Safari Club you are surrounded by it.

And there you sit, gnawing on a burger, sipping beer, alongside other diners at tables painted with leopard spots and elephant ears. Everyone is eating domesticated animals, all the while, surrounded by wild animals, some of which are feasting on other wild animals. The setting—a very peculiar scenery—can begin to feel like the taxidermy itself is commenting on the diners, even somehow staring at them. Even as we, the diners eat animals and stare back at them, curious and uneasy.

One feels like they should hate the display—but you don’t. It’s just too poignant. It’s just too weird. It’s just too old.

THE POST-DISNEY ANIMAL

There is an arc, a trajectory of human relationship to animals. Once, we lived side-by-side with them. For better or worse, we were forced to deal with wild animals in the most immediate fashion, and in the wild. After significant history, with the creation of animal husbandry, we domesticated certain creatures, while other remained wild, outside our purview. More time passed, and even just a few generations ago, the air could be so full of birds that the flock would darken the sky like a rain cloud passing before the sun.

Since that recent history, humans had a surge in the interest in, and efficiency of, sport hunting with finely tuned weapons. Sport hunting only went into decline after human population growth was understood, largely, to have cause the rapid overrunning of animal’s natural environments. Not to mention the over-consumption of the animals as products. All of which redefined the relationship between man and animal, yet again.

Considering all this, Safari Club appears perversely nostalgic.

These days, the reality is that much of our relationship to animals—and to life in general—is through artifice. We’ve run with and run from the animal, we domesticated the animal, we’ve hunted and shot and taxidermies and classified animals. But now even taxidermy is a relic of times past, as we enter what could best be classified as a virtual relationship to animals, a post-Disney animal. The truly amazing thing might be that Safari Club itself has survived all these years. An entirely accidental entity: the strangest of historical documents, a living time-capsule. Filled with the dead.

IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR

Some families pressure their offspring to pursue competitive sports—or to major in business administration. My family pressured me into puppetry. Well, perhaps, gently coaxed is more like it. When my artist aunts Alva and Nina hatched a plan for a family puppet troupe—featuring marionettes of Alva’s creation—and asked me to narrate, do voices, and write the plays, a wave of terror shot through my shy-bot system. Even though, say, a petulant mermaid would be my mouthpiece, I was only one puppet removed from an audience of real humans.

But I braved the possibility of complete mortification (what you do for family!) hopped up on homeopathic remedies for stage fright. Thus was born Mr. B’s Puppet Theatre, named in memory of my sweet grandfather, Mr. Bradford, and a stage for all our creative energies for the last decade.

Aunt Alva made exquisite 3-foot string puppets modeled on 19th century Sicilian marionettes, aunt Nina painted fantastical backdrops and props and narrated, uncle Ron and my mother Thia, both talented musicians, turned their gifts to puppeteering and other duties as assigned. Even Alva’s granddaughter, as soon as she was old enough, was sent out front to entertain and tame the audience as a dashing girl-pirate. In my family, whether you are born into it or co-opted, you enter as human and are recast as a singing oyster, a foolish king who turns everything to gold, or a basket of squeaking mice. It’s a sort of reincarnation in real time and, ultimately, I have found, a way to be in the world.

MISTRESS OF MARVELS

A professional costume designer for theatre, mask-maker, puppeteer, sculptor, and multi-media artist, my aunt Alva has always been a mistress of disguise and guises, stager and creator of unique intermediaries between this earthly realm and the world of imagination. Few girls can boast of dancing cheek to cheek with life-sized (or at that point, 8 year old sized) cloth puppets with stirrups on their feet, but Alva ensured that I could. When I wasn’t dancing with her creations or manipulating them on a stage, I was wearing them (and still am). I met the usual horrors of teenager-dom costumed by Alva as a series of historically unfortunate Queens—from Anne Boleyn to Marie Antoinette—with one traitorous stint as a French revolutionary. Through her expert arts, she made someone else’s discarded curtains and used tablecloths from the bins assume the shape of imperiousness, sumptuous elegance, and commanding royalty. Adjectives, I might add, that would never describe me at 15, but which I was allowed to assume in proxy-by-costume for a few precious and refined hours. You could say aunt Alva equipped us, her family and familiars, with the means to engage in this often harsh and unforgiving world with some measure of dignity, beauty, and playfulness. And, naturally, let-them-eat-cake-ness!

When not designing and crafting for theatre in her costume shop, Alva is making art in her woods-enclosed fairy tale cottage. It’s unclear exactly where art and house end and begin—as the expressive, sentient faces of her marionettes, masks, and figures that populate the same space as humans, peer wisely from their corners, seem to yearn to dance off of walls, or alternately make a useful receptacle for extra hats. Much of her art features the materials others have thrown away—mismatched buttons, scraps of ribbon—or material that for most people, say, is just a sweater and not the perfect stuff to make an Octopus magician who turns tricks under the sea. I’ve even spied an old vintage dress of mine repurposed into her menagerie. Most recently, Alva has been making a series of collages of found materials—found, that is, in her house. A set of snaps, sheet music, playing cards, or the small slips of paper from the end of a spool of thread, are sewn onto paper and in concert might form tidy philosophical titles of “Belong” “Give and Take” or “Focus.” Alva once observed that, “They say you should throw things out if you haven’t used them for 6 months but I’ve had these things for over 15 years.” And then where would she be if she had followed the general advice of a misguided public? Alva is a muse for those who have lovingly collected multi-colored bottlecaps and flashcards knowing that they will someday be used in the service of art. Take heart, collectors!

THERE'S AN AUNT-I-DOTE FOR EVERYTHING

When you first meet my aunt Alva, you might notice her snappy dress style, a sea of vintage finery. On a third or fourth meeting, you might begin to see a most dominant and distinguished and honored color emerge in her wardrobe: every shade of green, from forest to lime to sage. Alva has been wearing green, everyday of her life, since I can remember, and a greenly leit-motif marks her cupboards and her walls and her floors. I came across some photos once of Alva in her salad days—in heretical reds or some other blasphemous non-green color, and I prefer to pretend that never really happened. This constancy to color is like a familial north star: continents shift, nations fall and rise, relationships end, but Alva’s green, true and sure, still remains.

Naturally, I accepted this color-centricity as the way things had always been, as most family mysteries generally are. It was only recently I asked why she dressed in green and she responded simply that “she liked plants.” She has since upgraded her status to “plant wannabe.” Her beautiful, wild, lush garden, full of medicinal herbs, wildflowers, towering trees, is a testament to her vegetal aspirations. Alva’s reverential green, whether in skirts or in plants, is a reminder of some hallowed life force—the kind that courses through a bower of honeysuckle, animates a tablecloth into the habit of queens, or an old sweater into a marionette Octopus who speaks truths on behalf of the shy-bots hiding behind the stage. For all my life, the power of green has been an antidote—or in this case aunt-i-dote—to the woes and cares of the world.

It's the day after Thanksgiving and I am grateful to see the face of my dear friend, Sam Alexander, walking toward me on a rainy Portland sidewalk. We embrace and enter Heart Roasters Coffee on E. Burnside, eerily quiet for Black Friday. We grab a corner table. Sam buys me a latte after I ask the barista to turn down the music to accommodate my recording device. The barista does, and changes to track from some non-descript indie rock to Sade. Interesting. As usual, we are the only black people in the room.

As I commence the interview, I begin to notice the eavesdropping. I was expecting this. It is not the first time it has happened to me. White people with study materials, laptops, and newspapers keep glancing in our direction. They become rigid and upright, like antennae, trying to tune into our signal.

Sam, as usual, is being effortlessly charming and funny. It is a talent he has. As the lead singer of the Portland-based band No Kind of Rider (NKOR) and cofounder and partner of Switchyard Creative, a company that creates digital services and marketing for other businesses and organizations, he is accustomed to capturing people’s attention. Also, being black and a hipster in Portland, you get used to people staring.

I know why they’re staring. And I know Sam knows why they’re staring. Not only are there two black hipsters in the room, but we are also talking about race in Portland. It is almost as if we are acting out a social experiment on white people’s curiosity or doing some kind of performance art about identity in public spaces. Sometimes, just having a conversation can be both an act of defiance and a gesture of invitation.

Aisha:
Sam, you’re from Tulsa, OK. When and why did you move to Portland?

Sam:
Laughs. You’ve heard this story before.

Aisha:
Tell me again. A wink and nod to the recording device.

Sam:
In Tulsa, I was playing music with the same guys I play with now. We had a different name then, Black Swan. But, it was a tight-knit music scene. So, when the job I worked for had an opportunity to relocate to Portland, I hemmed and hawed because I was so close to the music community and wanted to continue to play with the guys I was with.

Anyway, my supervisor, being a fan of our band, offered to move the entire band up. We flew out to Portland in advance of that for a visit. I immediately fell in love. It was June, you know, the false sense of what Portland can be. After that, [my band mates] were totally on board. Everyone immediately dropped what they were doing and threw everything into RVs and moved out here.

That was four years and still June is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Portland still makes me feel that way.

Aisha:
Giggling agreement. Then, serious journalist face. Can you describe the makeup of the scene you were involved in Tulsa versus what you’ve become a part of here in Portland?

Sam:
Yeah, it was definitely more diverse [in Tulsa], which is bad because it wasn’t that diverse at all. In terms of the people booking shows and the diversity of music that would booked together, weird eclectic acts would end up on the same bill because the scene was just smaller.

Portland wants its hip hop acts to be a hip hop act. It wants its folk singers to look and feel like folk singers. Everything is more stylistic, more harmonious. There's fewer events that are a hodgepodge of things. I miss that sometimes.

Aisha:
Yeah, it’s homogenous, but I mean in terms of racial diversity. Portland, for example, is 72% white. How does the make up of Tulsa compare?

Sam:
It’s a little bit less. Tulsa is like 70%, but 15% black. In Portland, the proportions are of minorities are just so much smaller. Laughs. I actually thought Portland was 90% white. I guess that's just what I see out my window.

Aisha:
Should have said this at the time: That’s what you get for living in Southeast, Sam.

Were you surprised when you first got here?

Sam:
It was pretty odd at first. I felt like the diversity was every type of white person imaginable. Lots of laughter. In Tulsa, you just have, you know, your country folk. So, that was different.

[Portland] is very progressive but it was the first time that I was a lot more self-aware of being a black artist, being a black person, because I was treated differently. It wasn’t necessarily negative but I felt more unique and different than I was used to.

Aisha:
How has NKOR been treated differently? At shows or by press?

Sam:
The press here has been careful which is interesting. We were compared to TV on the Radio and Bloc Party all the time in the Midwest.

Aisha:
We both laugh heartily. That’s funny. I think KNOR sounds more like The Dears.

Sam:
Well, thank you. I think so too, but I guess they're just too obscure to mention in a press release. I don't think it’s ever been heard of in Portland to have an indie band with … Pause to think of how to say it.

Aisha:
Two-thirds black people …

Sam:
Wry smile. Yeah.

It hasn’t been held against us but it comes up in every interview that we have. Like, the interviewer will ask subtle questions about our influences and contemporaries or it's in the comparisons that are made. At a certain point, we would start interviews by saying, "Will you compare us to TV on the Radio or Bloc Party?" Now, they sidestep it. We want the press to relate us to a band that’s …

Aisha:
… Awesome.

Sam:
Right! But you also want them to distinguish the individuality of our sound. So we want to at least be compared to a band that we sound like.

Aisha:
*Note for all future press* They do not sound like TV on the Radio or Bloc Party.

Enough about your band. Can we talk about how we know one another? I wonder if you can remember how we met?

Sam:
Like, the real story? I mean, we’ve met so many times.

Aisha:
Yes, the real story. Winking.

Sam:
Ok. It was at Rontoms. I was there with my band mates. I had probably only been in town a couple of months. You walked in and everyone, you know, held their breath. Pause for sarcastic effect. I think I was standing with Joe Bowden [of Bladen County Records] who introduced us. There was this like short, quick banter between you and my friends, and I remember you turned, and looking at me like you knew who I was, and said, "Yeah, you’re the kind of guy who only dates white girls." Then you walked away, and I was like: "Ok. Welcome to Portland."

Aisha:
Do you have a sense of why we were drawn to one another and why we became friends?

Sam:
I think that pretty much explains it. You called me out (on something untrue) and I just enjoyed your willingness to do it. That’s it in a nutshell. It’s one of my favorite parts of our friendship.

Aisha:
I really enjoy seeing your face in the crowd. I never feel alone when I’m at a show or party. I’m curious about your sense of that.

Sam:
Yeah, when you think about being a part of a community, and us as artists or patrons or fans, the reason we are there is for that sense of cohesiveness. On the one hand as an artist you want to stand out as an individual, but as a member of a community you want others to experience your statement in the same way you do. When everyone around you looks different, or looks at you as different, it sort of sullies that sense of community.

I think just being around you at parties, or being in the same circles, it just allowed me to feel like: "Ok, this is a place where I can feel like I have something in common with these people. I don't have to feel like an outsider. There is at least someone else with the same racial identity as me. If the community accepts you, maybe they'll accept me too."

Aisha:
At some level we must admit that what we’re talking about is being black in a hipster community. So, from your definition, what is a hipster?

Sam:
Laughing and leaning back in his chair. I think the first thing about hipsters is that you can’t ever describe what is a hipster. I don't know. I’ve been called a "blipster," I’ve been called all sorts of stuff…

Aisha:
Oh, the new term is "blerd." Yeah, black nerd.

Sam:
Shaking his head. I’m sure the people I know don’t even know that word yet or I would be called out all the time. It's such a minefield to even try to talk about. It’s like the definition of obscenity with the FCC, like I'll know it when I see it.

Aisha:
I think one reason for me why it’s been nice to have you in my life in the this "aesthetically similar" scene, is because often people just say some fucked up things to me, and to be able to look at you and know you heard it too, without having to explain, is relieving in a way.

Sam:
Yeah, like there is someone who just gets the outrageousness of some of the things that happen.

Aisha:
Can you remember or describe some of the things people have said to you?

Sam:
Yes and no. Some of the people that I have come to really love, initially, I was like "Who do you think you are?!" At this point, I just know that they don’t have any sense of awareness, so I forgive them that. No specific scenario jumps to mind, just everyday kinds of dumbness.

Aisha:
One of the most innocuous and common things that I witness is people jokingly mocking slang language. Like, repeating things in a super-white way. Mimicking: That's ghetto!

Span:
Oh yeah. Ignorance abounds. There's mean-spirited, there’s ignorance and then there is well-meaning ignorance. I mean, for example, the number of people to this day who want us to hook up is staggering.

Aisha:
Laughing. Yeah. It’s funny. Sometimes, I feel like that expectation set so clearly contributes to why we have circled around one another for such a long time. I mean it's really about scarcity. If the scene was proliferated with black people, no one would be saying anything about us.

Sam:
Really! Like we have to save the race or something.

Aisha:
Laughing. We have to save the blipsters!

Sam:
I remember telling you that we would be black royalty. Royalty of what though, I don't know.

Aisha:
Who are your other brown friends in Portland?

Sam:
Smiling. Thankfully, I’m in a band that has a few. That helps. Over time, you find people, like my friend Brandon. He works a Wieden and Kennedy. We found each other pretty early on. After a while, you start noticing that you can find more brown folks in the right places.

Aisha:
I have noticed in the last year there are more than have been here in the eight years that I have been in Oregon.

Sam:
It’s good; people are finding out about it.

Aisha:
I think that’s the thing about being brown and in such a small community. There is a particular way that we go about meeting each other. Can you describe what that looks like?

Sam:
I get introduced to other black people a lot by my white friends. It’s usually like someone yelling, "Hey, come meet this other black person." Shakes his head.

Aisha:
I guess my approach has always been to just walk up to people. That’s actually how we met. Joe didn’t introduce us. He was standing there, but I intentionally walked up to you. I literally walked in Rontoms and was like "Who the fuck is that?"

Sam:
Laughing. That sounds like you. I guess I’m just a little more low key about meeting people. But someone will say, "You gotta meet my friend" and I’ll just know what that means.

Aisha:
Most of the brown folks that I know, I met just by walking up to them. There is a certain kind of hunger that I have found in brown folks in the artist community here, like we’re desperately looking for one another. Like, I had this experience the other day when Kara Walker spoke at Reed College. My friend, Rashida (another brown artist), and I were chatting in a corner of the gallery opening, and another black woman approached us, almost crying, and the first thing she said to us was, "Where have you been?!"

I feel like there is this palpable desire to connect and, maybe, women are a little more direct about it. That isn’t the first time that it’s happened to me, and usually, before someone approaches me, I can see them seeing me across the room or the bar or whatever.

Sam:
I have also noticed that there is a drive in every other person of color in this community, not only to find each other but also in everything that we do. There isn't a lot of complacency. We are all working and not sitting around and waiting for something to happen for us. I take some pride in that.

Aisha:
Not to tokenize you, but I’m going to tokenize you. Laughing.

From your perspective, is there anything that you see about brown folks in the scene that's different than their white counterparts?

Sam:
You have to want to be here.

Aisha:
You do have to struggle to stay. It easy to say fuck this place and go.

Sam:
Yeah, it’s hard to even end up here by choice. There's not a ton of black families moving here. In fact, the schools are getting whiter by the day. We all have chosen to be here and the story behind that is different for each one of us. We do have a commonality of self-directedness.

Also, my friends of color here, their interests are not stereotypical. For example, my white friends talk more about hip-hop to me than any of my black friends.

Aisha:
The thing that I really notice - and this is specific to black people in the scene - is that in order to be this person, someone who does not participate in mainstream black culture, you have to fight to be yourself. There is a certain amount of super weird idiosyncratic-ness in each of folks I know.

Sam:
Yeah, not only do you have to fight to maintain that, but it’s the only thing you can draw your comfort from because don’t have the comfort food of BET or whatever to reinforce your sense of identity. You have to actively seek out your sense of self-assurance. It’s hard enough trying to identify yourself. It’s even harder here to get others to identify you the way you want to be identified. I think it makes us more aware of how we present ourselves.

Aisha:
I think we also share the burden of having to educate people. Like, it’s always a choice between, "Am I going to say something to this person and ruin my night or am I going to let it go?" I think the tension is always there. Or, I’m often asking myself how intercultural communication styles are getting in my way. I think it makes it hard to be settled in either community, among our original communities or within this white indie scene.

Sam:
Yeah, it’s like when you go home to a family reunion, or whatever, you realize that in your efforts to identify yourself in this foreign community, you miss some of the more basic shared experiences. I go home to recharge, but I end up in this weird place where I don’t feel at home there or here. Sadly, that’s just the way it is.

Aisha:
And oddly, I wouldn’t want it to be any other way. Sam agrees.

So, in all the awesomeness of being a part of the scene and all the shittiness of being a part of the scene, we clearly want other brown people to come here. What advice would you give to the other brown hipsters, artists, "aesthetic similars' thinking about moving to Portland.

Sam:
I don’t know if this is advice, but I want to advertise for Portland. If you know what you want to do, you can do it here. You can't just show up and something will come to you. I can’t imagine a town that has as many resources that you can actually access. The support is there to creatively do what you want. But Portland won’t incubate you. You have to do the work first.

However, the weather here. Long Pause. You get used to it.

Aisha:

The advice that I would give is stick it out. The first year, you're just having all this fun. And then the second year, you're like, "Fuck all these white people." Both laughing. If you can get through that, it really becomes home. I couldn't imagine wanting to live anywhere else. I mean, even though I keep waiting for this big train of brown people to show up, I really don’t want to live anywhere else.

Sam:
Definitely! I agree. If you can get through that dip of "I can’t believe I chose this place," the relationships that survive that period are strong and true and authentic.

Aisha:
And I have found that my relationships with my white friends, and men that I have dated, have really raised their awareness about race, and often they are not the same person ever again in terms of their understanding of how race shapes experience and identity. I think there is an openness to grow but you have to be willing to ease into addressing it, sometimes.

Sam:
It's true. But also I think for you, it has to do with the fact that you are a life-changing person. I make an AWWW face at him.

Seriously though, the bottom line in advice for brown artists out there is: Move here.

Aisha:
We need you.

"Lights and display contest! Oh no, my own dog's gone commercial. I can't stand it."

So says Charlie Brown, of Peanuts cartoon fame. Snoopy the dog has decorated the doghouse in a gaudy pageant of colored lights and Charlie is too high-minded for it all. While you gotta respect Charlie Brown, most of us are rooting for Snoopy. And it’s not because we lack taste or have entirely sold out, or even because Charlie is such a wet blanket. No, it's solely because Charlie Brown has missed the point…

The point is that it's winter. The days are grey and short on daylight, and the evenings are dark like broken love. This is a confusing time of year, a time when it can be as difficult to comprehend your own feelings as it is to spot a street sign though frosted windows. And all winter long, that’s typically how it goes. Then one evening, walking or driving home, or off on some errand, your mood is suddenly interrupted by a thing that is as much contrary to the foul weather as to the foul mood. And what is it, exactly? It’s a simple thing, really.

And to top it off, they’ve made the centerpiece of the entire spectacle a gimcrack reindeer that looks every bit the red plastic it’s made from.

In all this dreary dark and evil weather, some fool has bothered to paint their house with a string of kaleidoscopic light. They've outlined the porch into a Roman arch, limed the angles of the roof into points of a triangle, and traced the shrubs into sparkling cylinders. And to top it off, they've made the centerpiece of the entire spectacle a gimcrack reindeer that looks every bit the red plastic it's made from. And this reindeer is lit so badly, so inadequately designed—a single dim and listless bulb powering the whole thing—that it smacks of Charlie Brown’s own pathetic Christmas tree, a tree so faint and frail that it strained under the weight of a single ornament. It’s just the kind of sorry touch that makes you laugh.

Looking down the road, you can see that it’s the same at the next house, another light show. And further down it’s the same again, to the next house and the next and the next. Suddenly, there's something to look forward to, and your mood is improved. All sponsored by strangers.

Folk artists of the past were ordinary people who made art using the materials at hand, painting primitive figures in locally made paint, whittling wooden animals from fallen branches, weaving quilts from leftover scraps of fabric. Their naivety, their lack of training, was exactly the charm. Some of it, admittedly, is pretty silly. But you love it just the same.

Christmas lights are really just a modern paintbrush, or stick of wood, or collection of fabric, that ordinary folks makes things with. What you see is not some sorry neighborhood gone crass and commercial, people misunderstanding the season. Quite the opposite. These light displays on the lawn and house and fence and shrub are nothing other than contemporary folk art.

Folk art plugged into the wall socket.

Opposite Day stars Lester, an animated columnist. He might look primitive, but Lester keeps on eye on the human animal. Each month, Lester makes a report — about the funny business, the niceties, the hypocrisy. About the "dilemma."

In this espisode, Lester takes a peek outside…

In this account, Ancient Portland reminds both newcomers and natives of a gentler age when Sasquatches were valued for their cheese, curbside corpse pickup was weekly, and Hall & Oates was available on wax cylinder.