Barring a late-game fumble, I ought to be en route from Portland to Northern California for a serious writing getaway. I’ll be back in Oregon next month, hopefully to further a new business pursuit.
In and out, that’s how it tends to be with me and this town.
When it comes to knowing Portland, I’m a fraud compared to the Oregonians featured in the latest WCS podcast installment. Upon her early 2010s arrival, Memphis native Intisar Abioto created The Black Portlanders, an online portrait project that across a decade evolved into the Portland Art Museum show Black Artists of Oregon.
It would never have hit me to be so comprehensive; the most I did that decade was roam the state for Oregon Humanities.
“Bubbles on bubbles on bubbles. I think that’s what happened to me here.”—Intisar Abioto
And let’s not get me started about Rian Dundon, who was born in Portland, then spent most of his youth in California. When my man returned to Oregon and the 2020 George Floyd protests broke out? He hustled his camera over to the frontline, persevered, and produced a document whose enduring relevance is difficult to challenge.
Oregon news media coverage of the Oregon State University Press product has been almost non-existent because Portland uncommonly lacks honest talk about who it actually is. (That’s just my personal opinion. Rian Dundon doesn’t necessarily think this.) The subject of Portland’s identity is an irrepressible facet of our hour-long exchange.
Key to the subject dexterity is Lev Anderson, another Portland native. My cohost happens to have worked in Cali urban planning before moving onto film. He’s why our talk about restaurants moving from the city’s core toward the Washington County suburbs resonates as thought-through content, not just stoners talking out of our
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