Drinking wine on a gondola in a swamp (?!)

Just two of my friends enjoying another day in the drrty south.

Austin & Texas Hill Country

Thesis

Well, I finished my master’s thesis: Tropicália & the Evolutionary Line in Brazilian Popular Music. 126 hot, steamy pages of academic rigor.

Interview with Photographer Andrew Moore (Uncut)

Andrew Moore’s large-format photographs are dense documentaries that depict the collision of past, present, and future. When seen from the bird’s eye, larger themes emerge: his past subjects include Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam, each of which explore the consequences of communism and socialism. More recently, his book on Detroit as America’s scarred monument to capitalism has received both a broad audience and a polemical reception. I saw in his work a shared obsession with the “metaphorical richness” of architecture, and reached out to talk. Proceeding from a mutual love of New Orleans, my adopted hometown, we were quickly off to the races. His photographs of nature returning in the Lower Ninth Ward have since graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine, coincidentally illustrating a story by my neighbor, Nathaniel Rich. We discussed Moore’s upcoming project in the Nebraskan Sand Hills, “ruin porn,” and irresistibly, as the Occupy Wall Street Protests were occurring just outside his New York apartment, politics and generational difference.

Birches Growing in Books, Detroit, 2008-9

Alec Quig: You grew up and went to school out east, but it looks like you came down here the first chance you got.

Andrew Moore: The thing about New Orleans, and even the South to some degree, was that there was a uniqueness to the culture. I was photographing small businesses, craft industries that were remnants of the 19th century industrialism that had persisted and were still in business in the CBD [central business district]. Only in a city like New Orleans could things like that exist. People were making brooms by hand. There were ladies sowing the lace linings for coffins. Strange Masonic buildings. Ice factories. There was a raw furrier at that time in the quarter. It was called Steinberg and Sons. They were buying raccoons from the bayou, scraping off the fat, shipping the fur off to Chicago and New York. My neighbor worked for him, and I have a good picture–not a great one—in this dimly-lit room. There’s a log with two nails in it, to which they’d affix the eye-holes of a raccoon pelt and stretch it over the log. Then they’d get a big scraper blade, and we watched them literally scraping the fat off of the raccoons…I guess they’re pretty fatty down there. And the room stank, oh..my goodness. It was just filled with fat scrapings. But I loved that! I was kind of learning to use the 8×10 and refining my craft. It prefigured all of my later work. It’s all about getting into and discovering these places that have an incredible connection to the past, making a bridge between the subject, myself, and the viewer, bringing people into the work. New Orleans had held on to that, but I think it’s mostly gone. Most of these places have vanished in the past thirty years.

AQ: Certainly in the CBD. There, along with much of mid-city, I still pick up the lingering scent of Katrina. But what are you working on now?

AM: I like the central part of America these days, because much of it is the least developed. Like the Sandhills in Nebraska. It’s still one of the least commercially developed and exploited lands. This is a theme that comes up all the time, but places that are still connected to their pasts—whether through buildings, culture, the stories people have to tell.

AQ: And you’re finding it in this little corner of Nebraska?

AM: The Sandhills are where the homesteader culture, people who came out to be farmers, collided with ranching culture. And there were a lot of wars, shootouts, and big tussles; in fact, the FBI was partly created in 1906 because of these ranch wars out there. But even before that, right after the Homestead Act was passed at the end of the Civil War, you have people crossing the plains, looking for land. These people ended up in a place that really wasn’t suited for agriculture, but they tried to make a go of it anyway. They had five years of what’s called “proving up,” which entailed planting trees, building a house, improving the land, and living on it for five years. Then you could get title to it. But the land was totally unsuitable for farming. The topsoil’s only four inches thick. It was really always land for buffalo, grazing, and cattle. So most of the homesteaders failed in that area, but there are remnants of the people who tried–mostly trees, sometimes houses. It’s not a well-known area particularly, but I love this landscape, and the remaining vestiges of these people who came out there and tried. Particularly the trees, which are sometimes 130 years old. Gnarly. Almost like the windblown cypresses on the west coast. They fought for every inch of their lives. Very soulful.

Aurora, Detroit, 2008-2009

AQ: A long way from Detroit.

AM: I know this sounds kind of crazy, but I’m really trying to make pictures now about the American soul. I know that sounds weird. I did Detroit, and it was a downer. I made it as beautiful as I could; I tried to make it compelling. There’s such historical richness there, but it feels rather apocalyptic, except in the sense of nature coming back.

AQ: It is of some comfort to know: even if humanity somehow engineers its own extinction, chances are nature will come back. Evolution will slowly and steadily continue.

AM: Building on that theme of nature, I’m trying to look at the other side of the coin, to see where nature itself speaks to the idea of persistence, the Pioneer spirit, this idea of the rugged individual in the land, toughing it out. I’m looking for those kinds of clues. It’s a work in progress, but I’ve decided: no more urban decay. Ultimately I hope that this Sand Hills project will be a chapter in a larger book about America. There are landscapes, some interiors, the trees, some portraits, but it’s sort of: what happened to the pioneers? What happened to that spirit? What happened to people working together in a tough environment? I’m hoping to find a diversity of emotional notes there, because what I don’t like is work that hits the same note every time. Even if the pictures change.

AQ: I read your response to the Dusseldorf school on Conscientious–is that what you’re referring to?

AM: That’s the weakness of the German school. They’re great on methodology and craft, but they’re afraid of emotions. There’s a dryness to their work. And I’m really focused on being an American artist these days, drawing from the tradition of American art, and really want to do something that speaks to America. This project out west is about birth, death, and resurrection. I’m looking for positive symbols about America, without being idealistic or nostalgic. Why has this country been such a powerful magnet for people from all over the world? What can we do to bring that back?

AQ: All of my favorite photography monographs seem to have “America” in the title! Walker Evans, Joel Sternfeld, Robert Frank, Alec Soth, who writes about this very phenomenon in his own Alec Soth’s America. But you’ve also said that America is becoming a tough place to find photographic subjects. How did you come upon this project? Driving through? Reading?

AM: It’s this chain of events. Somebody who knows somebody, who knows somebody. I ran into some ranchers in South Dakota, just below the badlands. Five years ago I was doing work out there, contacting ranchers, getting frustrated, because I didn’t want to do another story on cowboys–out there, it always seemed to be about the ranchers. I’ve been digesting this project for five years, and finally figured out the way to do it. The characters are large, but the landscape is very subtle. When I tell people I’m doing it, they’re always like, “Why Nebraska?” I think it’s something like 49th in the country for tourism.

AQ: But Lincoln, Nebraska was one of the craziest places I’ve ever been! My hosts there were popping psychedelics like candy. They took me hopping the freight trains that come and go in the middle of town as casually as you’d board the subway in Manhattan. But the state at large certainly strikes me as a difficult place to photograph.

AM: There’s two things about photographing America. First, people are very suspicious and very wary. It wasn’t like that forty years ago. And second, so many images have been made of America. But that doesn’t bother me too much, I think I’m okay at coming up with different takes. People out in Nebraska are very hospitable, very open. Just the other day I was reading about this pipeline they’re building from Alaska, bringing shale oil or something, and they want to run it right through the Sandhills. There’s a huge aquifer, the Ogallala, just beneath it, and people are worried about threatening this vulnerable area. So it’s a very crucial area to our country as well, in terms of the economy. It’s where a lot of the beef comes from. It has, I believe, the largest underground reservoir in the country, and the largest open pasture. It’s like the Russian steppes–it’s just open, rolling hills. For me, it’s the quintessential American landscape. It might take me a couple years. If you don’t live there, it’s hard to catch these ephemeral moments.

AQ: And aside from WPA [Works Progress Administration] or FSA [Farm Security Administration] photographs, there’s a dearth of images from the “bona-fide” Midwestern states. Have you been to Butte, Montana?

AM: No. But that’s interesting, because someone recently mentioned Duluth, saying that was an interesting city as well. I spent some time in Omaha this summer, and that’s a city I like, but it’s seen immense changes from the days when they had all the stockyards. A lot of American cities have lost the things that made them great to begin with. I would definitely check out Butte.

AQ: If I’m not mistaken, it was the richest city between Minneapolis and San Francisco in the gold rush era. Wim Wenders made a film there. When I came through serendipitously for the first time I couldn’t believe it. They have, or had, one of the most polluted lakes in the entire country, from what I think was mine runoff. It’s this unearthly blue color. People see my photo of it and say, “Wow, what a beautiful lake! Was that at Yellowstone?” But I think it still the kind of water where if you dipped your foot in, you’d come out with six toes. I don’t know when the city started to tank, but there’s lots of abandonment and weathered mining shacks, surrounded by the general splendor of Montana. The craziest, most diverse architecture I’ve seen in America outside of New Orleans. But if your project in Nebraska is the first chapter of a larger book on America, what will the other chapters be?

AM: It looks like I may get a commission to do a project about the South, through the High Museum in Atlanta.

AQ: And what route do you imagine taking?

AM: The first place I would come back to would be New Orleans. It’s most familiar to me, and there’s obviously been so many changes, and I already have a base of work there. With something as ill-defined as “the south,” I would probably start with the periphery: New Orleans, some of the coastline, the Sea Islands off of Georgia. From there I would do more remote areas–there’s a part of Georgia near North Carolina, some of the mountainous areas up there. I wouldn’t necessarily do small or big towns, I’d be looking more for the landscape and the periphery, then work my way to the center.

AQ: The landscape here is challenging. But in the middle of unvarying expanses like the Mississippi Delta, you have places like Birney Imes’ Whispering Pines.

AM: And he was from Mississippi, and I think he was very familiar with those places, most of which I think are now gone. The thing in the South particularly is personal contacts. Sneaking in, breaking in, finding access points, uncovering things that people haven’t seen before. It’s always a very person-to-person sort of research. That would make or break this kind of project. Making strong connections to people, and being shown places that are special to them. Ideally I’d like to do the Sandhills, then the south, then the west coast, and put all of these things together into a book.

AQ: Where would you go on the West Coast?

AM: It’s hard. I’m not really sure where I’d start, but if you’re going to do something about America, it has to be included. It might be outliers: people living off the grid in Oregon or northern California, but that’s a vague idea. I just read Memories of Lost Skin, about sex offenders in Miami. Sex offenders can’t live within 2500 feet of any place where children are: no schools, playgrounds, daycare centers, etc. The only place this group could live in Miami was under a highway bridge. Unfortunately that’s gone now, but the idea of people living—by purpose, design, or accident—in the outskirts, is interesting to me. If I did the west coast, I’d look for people living a kind of separate life in some way.

AQ: Not only marginal spaces, but marginal people. I understand their appeal broadly and viscerally, but is there a more personal compulsion for you?

Gypsy Camp, Sarajevo, Bosnia, 2001-2002

AM: It’s a place to start. It’s a place to look for clues. Where people are living slightly out of the mainstream, I think there are often more possibilities for metaphor. Why photograph an old house as opposed to a new house? A new house doesn’t have history to it. This is all speculative, but people living outside of what’s considered normal or acceptable…there may be more expressive potential in terms of what’s going on, say, with our country. A lot of the traditional pathways aren’t working for people.

AQ: The lie that reveals more about the truth than the truth itself.

AM: You see pictures of Orange County, California, these Chia-pet like developments, ticky-tacky, “Weeds”-like houses. That’s an interesting picture for me, but it’s lacking some poetry. That may be one picture, but anybody can see that, and can make a fairly decent photograph of it. I’m looking for things that are meaningful in some deeper way. It’s not easy to find, or even talk about.

AQ: It’s hard to hit “different notes,” as you say, in suburbia, until something uncommon drifts into the frame. It happens in the unlikeliest of places.

AM: I think Joel Sternfeld’s photographs in Oregon are really pretty good.

AQ: Oh, sure, American Prospects is in my top five!

AM: It’s also in mine. I’m not so big on Stephen Shore or Joel Meyerowitz, but I think Joel is a real master. There are some pictures in that book that continue to provide inspiration for me. The beached whales, the pumpkin and the fire, the maids outside of Atlanta. They capture that moment in time, and speak to a broader, deeper human drama.

AQ: In a way that’s difficult to talk about.

AM: But shows it.

AQ: You’ve also worked extensively in faraway places. What turned your gaze homeward?

AM: I decided that, rather than traveling to foreign countries, which is always interesting and exotic, I’d like to stay here and talk about things that I really know. I think that’s why the Detroit project was so successful. It was meaningful to me. It connected all the parts of my world in a unified way. So I’m searching for other places where I can do that. I don’t want to re-do Detroit. It’s unique and there’s no reason to try to do that in another place, like Gary, Indiana, Cleveland, or Buffalo. I went to Buffalo. They have some interesting stuff there–the grain elevators and everything–but I’m looking for new challenges.

AQ: Does your Detroit book as a sort of coda have anything to do with the polemics that came in its wake? I mean, on a scale of one to ten, how tired are you of talking about “ruin porn?” I think you’ve already addressed that phenomenon both succinctly and comprehensively.

AM: You know, when I was shooting in Detroit, starting in 2008, nobody ever talked about it. It was never an issue. Then towards the end, Vice Magazine did an article about lazy photojournalists parachuting into Detroit for a day. Of course, people should spend a little bit of time there, and if they’re all photographing one building, it’s very superficial. Anyone who shot pictures of abandoned buildings was eventually painted with this broad brush of making “ruin porn.” Then local politics and boosterism comes into it. People are saying, “Why didn’t you take pictures of the nice stuff?” I’m like, why not look at the magazine in your hotel room? I’m sure there are pictures of gardens and nice places to go to. But that’s not what I thought was of critical importance or unique to the city.

AQ: “Metaphorical richness,” as you’ve said.

AM: And the same thing happened in Cuba a little bit. Some Cubans asked me: why not photograph the nice parts of Havana? We had different ideas of what was “nice.” But I think ruin porn is a mask for bigger issues. People are very anxious about this country, its direction and future. I think Detroit is a metaphor for both the good and the bad in this moment. Detroit is America’s city. Detroit is not just about local issues. It’s not just about providing good PR for Detroit. It’s talking about America as a place, and where we’re headed. The reaction to the pictures in general has been very positive, but there’s a small fraction, mostly of people coming out of Detroit, who are very defensive, very protective. If they took the energy in the other way and used it…like in jiujitsu, where you use the other’s momentum. People are interested in Detroit. That’s the thing to capitalize on. Not, “We don’t want people from the outside coming here and talking about our problems. We can do it ourselves.” It’s clearly not going to happen. You need that interest. Civilization begins with people in the Mediterranean trading with each other, both in goods and ideas. I think the concept of “ruin porn” is shutting the doors, and just the opposite of progress in my mind. But I’m glad to humor them. In five years, nobody’s really gonna know what ruin porn meant. It’s kind of a bullshit term. You can attach “porn” to anything.

The Playpen, Times Square, New York, 1995-2005

AQ: And “porn” implies something…utilitarian. Something with an explicit function, perhaps without meaning.

AM: I try to be philosophical about this. What else is really at work here? Are they asking that photographers be socially responsible? That they should work for the betterment of society? These are classic arguments. They’ve been around since the beginning of the nineteenth century, right after the French Revolution. The ideas about socialism begin to ferment, and the role of artists in society begins to be questioned. This became opposed to art for art’s sake, where you work in an unhindered fashion. I’ve said it before: I don’t think these things are reconcilable. On the other hand, I think the dialogue between these two extremes, and the tension between them, is where a lot of great work comes from. Detroit is the absolute embodiment of that. Artists want to be free and have an open city to create things, but at the same time, it’s so emblematic of issues that trouble people, and it touches on both. That’s why it’s such a phenomenal subject. I respect their sensitivities. I try not to be dismissive of the argument in favor of turning it around and questioning what it’s really about.

AQ: Well, I sent you the video of Glemmie “The Coon Man” Beasly, and became fascinated by that and Charlie LeDuff, the journalist, who also did the incredible story about the frozen upside-down body in the elevator shaft that I’d read when it came out.

AM: My friend discovered that body.

AQ: Wow. Shawn Doerr?

AM: No, Shawn Hawking, who’s a sculptor. They were playing hockey in the basement of the building and discovered the body.

AQ: The Guernica piece on ruin porn makes reference to “rotten photojournalism” in Detroit, which yours doesn’t purport to be. Even if you were doing photojournalism, I think one could do a lot worse. LeDuff is a native son of Detroit and moved back there. I was astounded, after watching that video, to discover that his whole M.O. is “exploring race and class in America.” He shared in a Pulitzer at the New York Times for a veritably great piece he did on race relations within a North Carolina slaughterhouse. But within Detroit he’s making this guy kiss a skinned raccoon on local TV. By the end, he’s engaging the camera and audience in a way that’s very much on the verge of treating this guy’s life as some kind of joke. I couldn’t believe it; I showed it to a lot of people to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. I was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, a city very similar to Detroit, and your work hit very close to home.

AM: The other thing about Detroit is the overwhelming fact of its history. People are always telling me how their relatives worked in Detroit. It’s connected to America at large in a familial way. Closing the wagons in Detroit and saying that they don’t want outsiders coming in is so wrong, so narrowly focused. Detroit is an opportunity in America to think big, to come up with radical solutions. They should encourage young people to live there tax-free. They should give buildings to artists for development. So much could be done. There are so many buildings downtown that would be perfect for things like this, but they’re warehoused by their owners, who are just paying a little property tax. I was just there a few weeks ago. There are a couple of buildings being restored, but it lacks an agora, or a central meeting place. Every city should have that–a place where people can focus. A real public space that’s open. It’s one of the major faults of downtown. Plus, the city’s too big. They need to somehow partition off the parts of the city that are viable and let those other parts have another plan. It’s too vast now to really be manageable as it’s shrinking.

National Time, Detroit, 2008-2009

AQ: I was curious about your personal interpretation of Detroit as a metaphor for America. I just read an interview between Bill Moyers and David Simon, and Moyers asks Simon if he thinks America’s “going to make it.” Simon says, “We’re not going to make it as a first-rate empire. And I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing in the end. Empires end, and that doesn’t mean cultures end completely. Americans are still sort of in an age of delusion, I think. A lot of our foreign policy represents that.”

AM: I don’t know if I’m quite this pessimistic. I do think empires do go through phases. We started as a commercial empire, and segued into being this military empire. I think China is now in its commercial empire phase, and might one day be military. What comes after? I do agree that we’re in an age of delusion and denial. The pie might not be getting smaller, but the pieces are. How do we share it? It’s really ultimately about money. There’s less money than there was, but this is still the only place where people in the world can come to reinvent themselves. My wife is a Hungarian immigrant. She grew up in a communist country. And she’s a big fan of America. She talks a lot about immigrants, and part of this project I’m doing out west is about immigrants. People who travel eight-thousand miles to end up in a sod house in the middle of nowhere on the Great Plains. They came to work! I think if America’s going to have a future, we need to embrace our immigrants. There was a story in the paper today about how Hispanic immigrants are filling up these empty towns in the midwest.

AQ: You can drive straight up the spine of Michigan on two lane highways, and in what used to be overwhelmingly Anglo, main street-esque small towns, you have communities of Mexican immigrants, surrounded by endless fields.

AM: This idea of shutting the doors and putting up electric fences is shooting ourselves in the foot. We should be even more open. The soul of America is in people coming here to reinvent themselves. If I could make any statement through my new work, I’d hope to achieve that.

AQ: Even before I had encountered your work, I talked to another photographer about wanting to go to Detroit, and he said something about it having been “over-photographed.” But if you had Robert Frank, Henri-Cartier Bresson, and William Eggleston going into Detroit today, it would clearly be a worthy project for each.

AM: I still think there are many, many other books to be made about Detroit. I think it’s going to be a continuing thing. The Starn Twins are gonna do their bamboo project in Detroit, and Matthew Barney was there. The floodgates have opened.

AQ: Bernice Abbott said that you see architecture as “the symbolic key to a city’s meaning.” But you might expand from city to country, country to civilization.

AM: Cities represent our collective memory. Every time a building is torn down, it’s like losing that part of your memory. You build new parts, of course, but when a city loses a big portion of its buildings and  history, it’s like their identity has been cleaned, brainwashed.

AQ: That’s the situation in my hometown. “Urban renewal” cleared out most of the best architecture, roughly during Vietnam.

AM: And that’s the situation in much of America, and what can make it hard to photograph. Our collective past, and a lot of what made places unique, has been erased. I think that’s why you see a lot of photographers moving away from the experiential and towards manufactured or internalized work. You see that a lot within the arts in general in America. People moving towards creating their own internal vocabulary rather than going out and exploring and being more experiential. Take Thomas Demand. He recreates sets and photographs them, and there’s this tension between the real and the unreal. But it’s a turning away from the world, it’s turning inward. I feel like I’m in a minority of artists in that I’m not an inward turning person. I always try to focus on the outside.

AQ: I came to photography somewhat through the backdoor, via people like David Hockney, and then Jeff Wall, before I got to the classic “photographer’s photographers.” But there’s still a lot of room for “lyrical” photography, as it’s been called. Even if it’s dismissed as formally conservative, and even if every other schmuck can hit the road with their new DSLR, I think there’s room for everyone.

AM: I don’t think some of this more artificial photography is that formally inventive anyway. I’m less interested in Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson. I know their work and understand the theory behind it, but especially in the case of Crewdson, it’s second-hand. It’s derivative of people like Hitchcock and Spielberg. Wall’s work, though, has a lot of intellectual firepower behind it. Though I get where he’s coming from, I don’t always find the pictures compelling. I prefer someone like Struth, at least for his turning outward, constantly trying to sift through the scenes.

AQ: Who else’s work interests you?

AM: I’m always seeing Burtynsky, Pollidori, [Sze Tsung] Leong, some French photographers who are trying to make complex pictures about the complexity of the world, while still trying to have some poetic vision that focuses all of that material. It’s hard to name names. I see student work with bits and pieces that I like. But I don’t find Wall or Crewdson inspiring. That’s not a road that I’m interested in. I’m not a fabricator of my own mythology. I’m looking for mythology in the world, and trying to seam it together. I do love Matthew Barney, who really does have his own universe, and his own vocabulary of inhabitants in that world. I’m fine with all that. I think it’s an amazing thing to plunge into. But smarty-pants art references are less interesting to me.

AQ: What about painters?

AM: There’s the whole corpus of 19th century American paintings is very interesting to me. Starting with the Peel family, Caleb Bingham’s scenes along the Mississippi, George Catlin’s paintings of the Native Americans, the luminous painters like [Martin Johnson] Heade, [Albert] Bierstadt, [Frederic Edwin] Church, the trompe l’oeil painters like William Harnett and John Peto. I like that whole period, as well as 20th century realism: Hopper, Wyeth, Winslow Homer.

AQ: Close-to-home guys.

AM: That’s my foundation. American realism is particularly what I’m interested in. Photography has embraced that mantle as it’s gone forth. There’s not a whole lot of contemporary realist painting that I adore. I like Wayne Thiebaud, those landscapes of San Francisco, and Rackstraw Downes–long, skinny panoramas of peripheral industrial urban landscapes.

AQ: Have you ever messed with panoramic cameras?

AM: Very little. But you know who’s very good? Josef Sudek, the Czech photographer. He has some of the best ever. It’s a great story: he had this old Kodak camera, and he could only put one sheet of film in it at a time. He only had one arm. He would take it out to the suburbs of Prague in the 50′s, and wait all day for the light and scene to get exactly right, and shoot that one sheet of film, and go back to his little garden shack in Prague and develop that sheet. Very deliberate, slow, awesome images. He also made some beautiful vertical panoramas in Prague.

AQ: I’m almost always shooting vertical because I can’t stand the aspect ratio of my camera horizontally. I hope I live to see the day when you’re able to modify things like this in-camera.

AM: One of the hard things to deal with in shooting 4×5 or 8×10 is that it’s a blocky, industrial format. 5×7 is a little longer, and almost has nicer proportions. I’m often fighting the blockiness of my format, and will crop the top and bottom to get a little more length and dynamic framing in terms of diagonals. I think that discipline and focus…limitation can be important. I need discipline.

Target, Times Square, New York, 1995-2005

AQ: Well, here’s something I always ask photographers, because it’s a so integral and seems to fall somewhere between an art and a science: how do you approach sequencing? Are there still images you wish you could shuffle around when looking through your books today?

AM: It’s very difficult. I recommend that photographers not do their own sequencing, because they’re too tied into embedded content and not able to distance themselves from either explicit or implicit meanings that the audience might not catch onto right away. I feel that my Havana and Russia books, which I sequenced myself with a little guidance, would have really benefitted from having an outside eye. In the case of the Detroit book, a very wonderful editor named Alice Rose George organized picture flow. I basically handed it off to her, and we tweaked it together after that. I couldn’t be happier with the sequencing of that book. So, my advice? Don’t do it yourself! [Laughs]

AQ: Was she nixing photos as well?

AM: I showed her a box of one hundred pictures or so, and maybe a dozen that I had my doubts about. From those she culled maybe eighty pictures and began to organize them. I printed out little baseball card-sized images so she could make a little booklet. You need to physically see them somehow. She liked some that I didn’t, and at the very end I added one or two that I thought were great and got stuck back in. Having a couple of minds together really made it work very well.

AQ: How do you know her?

AM: She was the editor of Fortune magazine back in the 80′s, but has worked for Geo, Magnum, and was the assistant to Howard Stein, who was head of the Dreyfus corporation. She’s very well known in New York, and has been a consultant on many books. She was terrific. She helps a lot of young photographers as well. What she brought to the project…I couldn’t really duplicate her efforts.

AQ: In addition to what you’ve been looking at, I must ask what you’ve been reading.

AM: Right now I’m reading Ian Frazier’s book on the Great Plains. I just read about the history of the Nebraska stock brokers’ association, detailed histories of families who went west and tried to prove themselves up, their struggles, the patchwork landscape of the west, and the different layers of it. Then I’m looking at Lucretius’ book, On the Nature of the Things. And Epicurian philosophy, how we shouldn’t be afraid of death. So, a mixture of history and philosophy.

AQ: Which sounds like it’s tied to this Nebraska project.

AM: When I go out there, I want to be pretty informed, because these people have lived there for generations. I want to have a shared vocabulary, to be able to offer them something. But in terms of research, I don’t like to look at too much before I go someplace for the first time. I find that it biases my eye. It’s happened a few times. I don’t do a lot of internet research or look at prior photographs. What’s more important is to develop a contact and find the right guy who can kind of lead me into that world. I just need one person. Someone who gets what I’m doing and is willing to be my guide. I find them in all kinds of ways. For me it’s not the books and research, which comes later. What you need is the guide to take you through hell. Isn’t that Dante? Didn’t he have a guide? That’s what I’m looking for. That one person to take you through the lower world. They’re the seed from which everything else springs. They inevitably know others.

AQ: Has that always worked out in your favor?

AM: The guy I worked with in Vietnam was very good, but I needed to expand my social circle there. It’s a hard place to penetrate. People are super busy. It was very hard to get some people to even stand in one spot for a picture sometimes.

AQ: The pictures do have an air of busyness.

Hai Duong, Vietnam, 2006-2007

AM: The main problem with Vietnam is that I got there a little too late. There was such a hectic, frenzied rush to create business that by the time I was shooting there in 2005-2006, some of the cooler parts of Hanoi had already changed. It’s a big country. There are 110 million people there. I had some trouble finding my way into that and creating intimacy. I think it would have been better to have gone there, say, in the mid-90′s, when the legacy of the war was still a little more raw, and there was more of the French legacy. Most of that’s gone at this point.

AQ: They’re tearing down those amazing buildings?!

AM: Oh, yeah. In Vietnam, things that are old and respected, have to be like, 500, 800 years old. 150 years is nothing for them. They have a very different relationship to the past.

AQ: Your Vietnam stuff is some of my favorite work of yours.

AM: Really? It’s still a communist country that has fully embraced capitalism. You can see a communist flag hanging right next to the Mitsubishi corporate flag. They have no problem with that. It’s top-down capitalism. I like the small cities. I like the north, and hated the south. Saigon is ugly. Hanoi, where there was less development, is a very cool city. I would definitely recommend that as a place to visit if you go to Asia. But maybe, someday, all three will be part of one project. Maybe another one for my old age [laughs].

AQ: How long were you there? The very first question I wanted to ask you was: how do you know when to stop? This goes for Russia, Cuba, Thailand, Abu Dhabi. If I put myself in your shoes, that would be one of the most difficult questions. These places go on and on.

AM: The question makes me think of painters who push and push, and take it too far. With Russia, I was trying to do the periphery. There was no way I could do the whole country. I tried to stick to the boundaries. The one part I feel that I didn’t do was the river in the south, I think it’s called the Don river–there’s unique culture along there. I just felt like I had done what I set out to do, in terms of capturing the defining edges of the country.

AQ: And in Cuba?

AM: With Cuba, I got to the point where I really exhausted…every time I went back, I tried to do a different thing. I was focusing on different time periods. On the last trips I was focusing on architecture from the 50′s. I got enough of that to create a spectrum of time in the work, from the colonial era to present.

AQ: What was the catalyst for your project on Havana? It was your first book.

AM: Cuba came about because I had seen some photographs of old theaters in Cuba, and been doing photographs of Times Square theaters. When I was there I realized immediately: wow, it’s not just about the theaters. It’s like the whole city is kind of an open room! There’s so much life on the street, and at the same time there are so many mysteries hidden behind doors. The truly amazing thing was that you could pretty much go to any house, knock on the door, and people would just welcome you inside! It was incredible. Not everybody was working, generally somebody was home, and they were very open to showing someone around their house. Could you imagine, in America, going to a random house asking to have a look at someone’s living room!? I would go with a friend from Havana, and he would quite formally introduce me as, you know, this illustrious artist from New York, and people would let me have a look around. It’s where my interests in architecture, history, narrative, the exotic, the familiar, color, politics…all these things came together in a very synergistic way.

AQ: So there were elements of both premeditation and discovery?

AM: Absolutely. I think the artistic process is…it’s a little hard to explain to…

AQ: …someone who isn’t somehow engaged in it themselves?

AM: You have to be completely focused. You’re on the edge of the razor. You’re totally focused, but also very spontaneous, able to make a turn on a dime. It’s hard to communicate that. I talk to young photographers, who through education become so self-conscious, so deliberate, so intentional, and it takes some of the joy from photography. You need intentionality and discipline, but you also need intuition and instinct.

AQ: And photography is so reliant upon the external world: light changing, people crossing your path.

AM: I’m going to republish that book. I want to go back and refocus more on the country at large, on what’s happening now with these new businesses, and the fact that Cuba is an island. When I was there in 1998-2000, it was right at the end of the “special period,” after the Soviet Union collapsed and all the subsidies went away. Cubans were almost starving to death while living in these mansions and big houses, with multiple families in each. Very little income, little to eat, little to buy. And that’s changed. There’s much more money now in Cuba.

En Casa con Los Alonso, Havana, Cuba, 1998-2002

AQ: And now someone else can step in and try to do something else definitive.

AM: There are moments of ripeness, and you try to capture them. Then they come to an end, and that period’s over. I feel that with Cuba, Times Square, and Russia, my timing was good. They’ve all changed tremendously. Russia is a richer country. With Vietnam, I missed the moment a little bit, where you have the past and present colliding. By the time I got to Vietnam, that struggle was over. But sometimes, it’s just a deadline. I have gone back to Detroit and shot after the book came out, but that was urban farming, people’s parks, people building their houses, and signs of renewal. If I reprint the book, maybe it’ll come back to that. I put some of it on my website, but for me, the moment’s over. You need enthusiasm and momentum, and at a certain point it dissipates. I think that’s really the crucial factor: your own commitment and energy in relation to the subject matter. Maybe some people could photograph Russia their entire lives, but for me, it would be really depressing [laughs]. It’s a heavy country.

AQ: How do you mean?

AM: If you look back, the original Russe invited the Vikings to come in and help give them structure. It starts about 1000 AD. They start around Kiev, near what’s now the Ukraine. If you look at these thousand years, you have the Mongol invasion, the Tartars, terrible tzars, Napoleon’s invasions, the revolts in the 19th century, the Bolshevik coup, and Stalin, which is one of the worst political episodes…there’s just a constant darkness to their country. I consider them to have the darkest history of any country on the planet. There’s no country that really compares to that thousand years of real bloodshed. Moments of beauty, of course, but a very dark history.

Akademy Model, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2000-2004

AQ: In your book, Boris Fishman describes Russia as “a place that derives its charm precisely from the feelings of artifice it provides.”

AM: Boris grew up there, and that’s more his take. But it relates to the Potemkin village. When Kathrine the Great wanted to make a tour of the Russian countryside to see what the villages looked like, her prime minister, Potemkin, sent out crews in advance to build large-scale, glorious-looking facades of villages along the highway, so when she passed in her carriages, they’d say, “Oh! Look at these fantastic villages! How lovely!” These come down in the language to mean an illusion, a falsely created semblance of the present. The delusional or illusional aspect that derives from that is still very much present. Whitewashing, fixing things up in a patchwork way to make it all look good, when beneath it’s shambles and doesn’t really function. I think that’s definitely part of the Russian character. They still do that today. They’ll take a public outhouse and paint it with bright colors, but you go inside and it’s still a hole in the ground.

AQ: He also says that “most Russians are ambivalent toward Americans: they long for the quality of life common in the states, but they consider the emotionless self interest that fosters such prosperity disgraceful and depraved.” What does he mean?

AM: I think that’s a bit of a stretch. I think they’re just as bad as us. It’s a country where people are very much out for themselves, particularly now, with the fall of communism. There was a kind of sharing and helpfulness during communism, but with the influx of capitalism, those virtues are kind of lost. I think we’re in some ways quite similar in temperament. I didn’t feel like they were really foreign to me, or that they feel demeaned by the west. Russia is a very rich country now, but they don’t share their resources very well. Moscow is unbelievably wealthy. They may feel that the west looks down on them, but I don’t feel like they’re resentful.

AQ: You also write about growing up during the Cold War. It struck me how different my view of Russia is than yours. I’m in my twenties. I hadn’t come to consciousness when the Wall fell. There’s a generation gap here. You’ve said to Joerg Coelberg: “My sense is that our perception of the world, as influenced by the rapid evolution of information technology, directs us away from history and the past. It’s as though we view reality through a speeding car: the future, which is rushing toward us, appears immediate and vivid, while the past, which can only be viewed through the mirror, falls away into blurriness and quickly vanishes.” Being raised on the internet, this doesn’t jibe with me. I feel like my generation, or at least the culturally engaged segment of my generation, has a proximity to the past that’s unprecedented. Hyperlinks, Wikipedia, the immediate gratification that the internet provides in the realm of facts. Can you remember the existence of a more widespread retro trend in American society? People my age seem overly aware that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, hyper-conscious of what’s already been done.

AM: I’ve been trying to get into your head, and spent a lot of time since the last time we spoke thinking about what you mean by this. I mentioned it to some friends, and it’s true! Maybe the past is more omnipresent in a way, and yet, on the other hand, the media is so engaged in the present, and all the minutiae of the moment. I became sympathetic to your point, and will be continuing to think about it. Because I love history, it made me happy to hear you say this. For you it may feel like a weight, but for me, it’s great that young people can be very historically aware, even if they have to go through the retro thing to get to their own original point of view. It’s all part of the process. I think you’re very fortunate in a way to be coming of age at this time. This is an amazing period in time. But for someone like you to have missed the high point or glory days of America…I feel sorry in a way.

AQ: This brings us back to Russia—these images probably aren’t quite as loaded for someone my age.

AM: I was so interested in traveling behind the Iron Curtain because these places were taboo and forbidden. Same with Cuba; you weren’t supposed to go there. Most of the time I went was illegally, through Jamaica. Montego Bay was the good highway to Havana when I was going. I wanted to see an alternative view. I wanted to experience a different view of America, and a different take on history. When I came back to Detroit, it was like, wow, this whole cyclical nature of things is now playing out in our country.

AQ: Well, that’s another running thread in your work: penetrating taboos, sneaking behind closed doors, getting into people’s living rooms or abandoned spaces. What are the roots of that?

AM: Well, it’s difficult to talk about this without sound psychoanalytical.

AQ: That’s the idea!

AM: It has to do with two things. The first is the place you think of where you feel comfortable and safe, like your home. I never really liked the home I grew up in. I was always desirous of other people’s homes. I was much happier at other people’s houses than my own. I always felt that my house was sterile. It wasn’t friendly, warm, or inviting, and I hardly ever had people over. I think that has stayed with me psychologically. I want to be in other people’s homes, in their worlds. That’s where I feel more comfortable, strangely enough.

AQ: Growing up in suburbs, I had something like that—my house was very much a gathering place, but when I encountered Victorian houses for the first time, I never felt the same in my own, newer house.

AM: My father was the distant cousin of a spinster in Hartford. When she passed away, he was the executor of her estate. We all went there with him and had to go through all of her stuff. He told me that when this woman’s dog died, she simply took the carpet and threw it over the dog. When they got to this house, they rolled back the carpet and found a skeleton. To discover that there were these crazy houses with all this amazing stuff and weird stories…that was deeply attractive to me from the beginning. I love both the story and the exploration.

AQ: This is reminiscent of the cat skeleton you photographed in Detroit.

Cat, Detroit, 2008-2009

AM: Yes. That was in a library, and that photograph is almost Egyptian for me, in the sense that the Egyptians would bury the pharaohs with their cats, and here you have this decrepit, abandoned library, and the sole remaining thing there was a cat that had starved to death, and was entombed in this library. It harkens back to the Egyptian ruins. And I don’t know if we should publish this, but when I was a kid I was arrested for breaking into people’s homes. We were taking random things–silver dollars, whiskey. I was the leader of this little gang. Getting arrested and all of that was kind of a bummer, but the adrenaline of going into someone’s house at night, when they might come home at any moment, was a huge rush. Detroit had some aspects of that. Being where you should’t be. Sometimes it was pretty dangerous. I definitely risked my life to take pictures in a couple of those places. Many of those buildings, their ceilings or floors, were nearly collapsing. It’s just part of my makeup. I like to enter into places that I’m not supposed to be. There’s something satisfying for me in that. I feel some kind of accomplishment. Some people like to climb mountains; I like to get into places that others don’t get into. It’s one of the fundamental things that drives me.

AQ: Since we’ve gone back to childhood, let’s go back to your original interest in architecture–you said it was your second love. How did it win out?

AM: Well, my father was an architect, and had a little home office. I loved playing there: not only were there all these colored pencils, protractors, templates, drafting paper, and tracing paper, but little balsam wood models of houses with different additions. I loved that. It was almost sculptural. And as a family we’d often go on the weekend to visit one of his projects. We’d get to these places and it’d maybe just be a slab, a couple of walls, and he would say, you know, “here’s the gymnasium, the bathrooms,” and so on. I got used to imagining space as a mental blueprint, and in a profound way, that got me used to thinking of spaces not by how they’re defined by structure, but how space is brought to life through architecture.

AQ: An interesting perspective with regards to Detroit.

AM: Whenever I go to a location and am looking to make a picture, the first thing I’m considering is, how alive is this space? How lively is it? How can I shape that in the photograph? There was a point where I thought I was going to study architecture. This was at Princeton in the late 70′s, when postmodernism was really flourishing. Michael Graves was the main teacher there. I just wasn’t really interested in theoretical architecture, paper architecture. I really wanted to make things. That was the tipping point. There was a saying there: “Why should we teach you how to draw? The English department doesn’t teach you how to type.” They equated these two things on the same level, and I couldn’t have disagreed with that more.

AQ: So what happened?

AM: I was fortunate to become a student of Emmet Gowin there. He really emphasized that craft and ideas were completely joined, that one couldn’t speak a language without learning craft, grammar, and syntax. The idea of engaging your body and mind together in making something…and being able to work with architecture through photography. All of my architectural knowledge and feeling has been incorporated into my photographs.

Dry Dock, Detroit, 2008-2009

AQ: On that note, places and things are much more often the subjects of your photographs than people, so I wanted you to personalize some of your figures. What, for example, can be said of the man living in the Detroit dry dock?

AM: The Detroit Dry Dock built propellers for the boats that plied the Great Lakes. It’s a remarkable late-19th century structure with a steel frame on the inside of the building—maybe one of the first in this country like that. It’s also where a young Henry Ford worked as an apprentice, and where he was first introduced to the combustion engine. That’s a remarkable history right there. It had been wide open, meaning easily accessible by the street, for many years—ten, maybe twenty. This homeless guy had probably been living there for several. People always ask me if I saw homeless people in the buildings in Detroit, and I always tell them there are so many abandoned buildings, every homeless person could have one of their own. I was there on a very cold February day, and he’s tucked back in the corner with this big plastic sheet hanging down, maybe as a windscreen. It was very dark and gray. We set up the camera and he said, “Oh, you’re not gonna take my picture, are you?” And I said no, we’re just doing the building. He was in the frame, but he couldn’t tell. We did a couple of long exposures–a couple of minutes–and I think we gave him some money at the end, just to help him out. I did not learn his name; he wasn’t very talkative. He was drying socks and maybe cooking something, staying warm. In some cases I try to learn people’s names and get information, but he was standoffish. We didn’t want to bother him. It was like going into someone’s house. He wasn’t violent, but he certainly wasn’t encouraging us to hang out. He was the “owner” of that building. Not literally, but he had been the resident for many years.

AQ: Do you think he hung up that big sheet?

AM: It’s interesting, because you couldn’t easily get to the second floor. The metal stairs had been cut away. Somehow, he must have figured out how to climb up there and hang up that sheet. And he’s the only person that could have been motivated to do it. There’s no other explanation. It was shielding his little shack there.

AQ: How old?

AM: Probably in his 40′s.

AQ: It sounds like it was much darker in there than the picture would attest.

AM: Very much. Because of that long exposure and the wind blowing that plastic screen, it somehow looks like a cave-dweller living under a waterfall. That’s what I love about it–this sort of atavistic aspect to it, while at the same time, it’s present-day Detroit.

Abandoned Missile Base, Skripleva’s Island, Far East Russia, 2000-2004

AQ: What about the abandoned missile base?

AM: That was an island in the harbor of Vladivostok, five or six miles offshore. It had been a missile base and silo. In the picture you can barely see a barracks building with a star, and supposedly the staff was all female. Locals were told that this was some kind of mental hospital or home for pregnant mothers as a cover story to keep people away, but supposedly it was an all female crew manning this missile base. After the collapse of the Soviet Union they took out the missiles. This guy with the mustache was the lighthouse keeper, his wife has the orange hair, and they and their children lived on the island. They only had a rowboat. Local crab fishermen, fishing illegally around the island, would drop off crabs for them to eat. Maybe somebody came and brought them milk and other supplies. But basically they were living, on their own, on this weird little rock island, in a lighthouse and abandoned dormitory. I was definitely not supposed to be there. I didn’t speak to the guy because I didn’t want him to know I was American. My Russian friend who was with me did all the talking, and I pretended to be the assistant.

AQ: So they could barely leave, living six miles offshore with just a rowboat?

AM: Yeah. They really depended on the kindness of fisherman to get to shore and bring them food. Maybe a supply boat came once a week. But otherwise they were living on their own out there.

Watchman's Room, Siberia, Russia, 2000-2004

AQ: You’ve already spoken elsewhere about the watchman’s room in Siberia, but I also wanted to know about that.

AM: It was near Ulan-Ude, which is in southern Siberia. The big factory had been used to make glass of some sort, and had been shut down a couple years before. There was a young couple taking care of the building, but they hadn’t been paid in something like a year and a half. They had nowhere to go. They were just living there in hopes that eventually the owners would come around and pay them. On the walls there are things written like, “Don’t forget to feed the cat.” Practical things. It was a really sad situation. They were virtually trapped. It was their job, but they hadn’t gotten paid. If they left, they definitely would’t ever get paid. That was their life.

Falcon Keeper, Abu Dhabi, 2009

AQ: Finally: the falcon keeper in Abu Dhabi?

AM: You’re the first to ever ask about that picture. I don’t know much about him. The sheiks–the big movers and shakers in Abu Dhabi–they like to go out to the desert to practice falconry and race their camels. They all have camps and tents in the middle of the desert. When they go home for the work week, these other guys basically stick around and take care of the animals while the sheiks are away. There was an older man in charge of the camels, and the guy in this photograph was in charge of the falcons. This was the little shack that they lived in, out in the middle of nowhere. He must have been from Yemen–he wasn’t from the UAE. He was a poor guy, but very cheery, and living out there in the middle of the desert taking care of the Sheiks’ falcons.

AQ: How did that project come about?

AM: The Abu Dhabi photos were a commission from NYU. Abu Dhabi is so wealthy–they’ve bought all the cars, jewelry, and handbags, there’s a surfeit of those things there—so now they’re starting to buy institutions from the west. They’re going to have a branch of the Hermitage, Louvre, Guggenheim, the Harvard Medical School, and NYU is building a branch there as well. NYU agreed to grant diplomas in Abu Dhabi on the same level as their New York campus. Yale refused this, but NYU is trying to make a global university, where they have campuses in China, Paris, et cetera, so students could transfer all over the world and be within the same institution.

AQ: Sounds great?

AM: I think it’s pretty cool. They wanted me to show what the texture of the city looks like, what kind of people live there. There was supposed to be a book published, but through various complications, the project stalled. I was there a month. It’s not a big city. If I was going to finish the book, I’d go back for one more trip. When I was there, it was an open, cosmopolitan city–very little police presence, virtually no crime, very placid, lots of money. Even the lowest workers, say, from Bangladesh, had some level of income. Despite their housing not being very good, there were opportunities for everybody. I think the UAE has become a bit more nervous with everything going on with the Arab Spring.

AQ: And finally that sentiment has made its way here. You can walk to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations from your house. Have you gone down there?

AM: Obviously I’m incredibly sympathetic to the Occupy protests, but as the parent of two small children, I don’t exactly relish the idea of being put in jail overnight. I think that this is a sign that the progressives in this country have had no outlet. We all voted for Obama thinking he was going to be a progressive and he turned out to be a compromising centrist. I think it’s a natural outpouring of emotion, of anxiety, of anger. Maybe it does have some kind of symmetry to the tea party, but of those I’ve met, they’ve mostly been of the angry, rump white state. I saw a police captain from Philadelphia arrested in New York the other day. He was saying that the police are the tools of the 1%. I feel like this 99% thing is an incredibly effective slogan, and I’ll be interested to see if it’s co-opted by more mainstream politicians. I think it was time for this. It’s the beginning of the death knell of Reaganism, thirty years of American conservatism. I think that’s great. Whether we’ve shifted so far to the right that we just need a small or big correction, time will tell. I’ve said for years that it’s the young people in this country that need to come to the fore and let themselves be heard.

AQ: This goes back to the predicament of being burdened by the past. We have the example of the sixties. But you’ve lived through more, and have seen the pendulum swing back and forth. I’m twenty-five. I’ve only ever been truly conscious of Bush and Obama. Despite this, you, somewhat paradoxically, are able to more quickly and comfortably give OWS two thumbs up, and I’m ambivalent about it. Isn’t the young person supposed to be gung-ho, and the older person, you know, wiser, skeptical, and ambivalent?

AM: When’s the last time in this country’s history where there was youth movement standing up for the little person? I’m supportive because I think the pendulum needs to start to swing back the other way, because we’ve veered so far to the right. I can understand your skepticism, but in the larger picture, you have no idea how far right this country has veered since the 1980s. I think Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 changed things forever about America. It really introduced religion into politics in a way that never existed before. Barry Goldwater, this incredible conservative who ran against Johnson–he never talked about religion. And he was an ultra-conservative! The alignment of political, economic, and even religious forces in American life today is very disheartening to me. I think for your generation to find alternatives ways–whether the DIY movement, traveling easily outside of the country, protests–I hope that your generation can recreate the energy of the 60s. People were much more idealistic. On the other hand, by some accounts, the 60s were the product of a wealthy society. They had the time to go out, party, and be idealistic. That’s the rub. In a time of economic hardship, when your belly’s not full, how can you be in the street and protesting?

AQ: I do think Obama was the best person that could have been elected, and it’s like: if this guy can’t bring about some major changes, then we’re really fucked. When you’re in your twenties nowadays, you often lose your faith in the political system entirely, and focus instead on carving a little niche. This is where we get accused of generational selfishness. It’s often attributed to indulgent parenting. There are a pletora of articles coming out about “my generation.” Their sweeping generalizations usually drive me crazy, but I can’t help but read them. And I can see that most of my friends, while mostly culturally engaged and left-leaning, don’t talk too much or too deeply about politics. Most of the people who do end up being blowhards, representative of the polarization we have going on between the left and right.

AM: There’s only a certain amount of disenfranchisement that people can take before they start to take back what’s theirs. I think this is a natural part of the cycle of politics. I hope this is the beginning of something. Maybe it’ll be smothered. Look at Iran. They were ahead of the curve of the Arab Spring, and they got squashed. We’ll see what happens.

Walden Street, Detroit, 2008-2009

AQ: I’m working on a thesis here about the tropicália movement in Brazil. These avant-garde hippies grew up in the this golden age that’s exemplified by bossa nova, then came of age in the sixties under this awful military dictatorship. Though leftists, they disavowed the sloganeering and backward-looking orthodox left as well as the right. They didn’t take sides, and poked fun at both ends of the political spectrum. Artistically, that’s more interesting to me than anything.

AM: I don’t think anyone can disagree that art has disengaged from politics. Now, it’s about money. When people look back on the last thirty years, the big movement in art has been very decorative. Jeff Koons, for example, is a super decorative artist. He makes incredible, super-expensive tchotchkes, and he’s just the tip of that iceberg. He even looks like Reagan! We’re in a huge stalemate, obviously. What will break it? Usually it’s some kind of violence, whether in words or in the street. Something has to give at this point. I’m not advocating any particular scheme, but welcome young people becoming re-engaged in politics. If it’s because of disillusionment, that may be the best thing. It’s not based on idealism. I don’t think any of what’s going on now is idealistic at all.

AQ: Oh, no. Obama’s first term to me represents a kind of end of idealism.

AM: If he’s not going to provide strong moral leadership, then somebody else is going to fill that vacuum. I saw The Book of Mormon the other night, and it was amazing, by the way. We may have a mormon for president!

AQ: It wouldn’t surprise me. But to go back to art and money: how long have you been making a living as a photographer?

AM: I always tell my students to practice their craft daily, but I was making some kind of living since 1983, photographing work for artists. That’s how I made my living for six, seven years. Photographing for galleries, making reproductions. It was easy work, it paid OK, and I got to hang with interesting folks. I had some periods in the late 80′s where I sold quite a few pictures. It’s only been since the late 90s that I’ve truly been able to make a good living selling my work. I was an overnight success after twenty years of work. It’s good to hang in there, but not everybody’s up to that challenge.

AQ: Looking at sites like Booooooom, Fecal Face, etc. has been one of my quintessential aesthetic experiences. You see the infinitude of great work being produced right now without the excessive lag and curating that comes with traditional magazines or galleries, and it goes on forever. For me, it levels the playing field. It turns the structure of things in visual art upside-down—in a way, these sites serve the 99% who are just making cool stuff, compared to the 1% who are, say, savvy or connected or tenacious enough to get into the MoMA. It brings “high” visual art in our culture, maybe for the first time, towards a wider audience, towards something more folk-oriented. And that makes me more compelled to hang in there. The motive is not “success,” especially financially, or even any grand sort of validation, but simply making stuff that gets out there and seen by people through its own intrinsic merit, even if only on the internet.

AM: This whole idea of: if you’re not famous before you’re 25…I heard that a lot when I was younger, and it really broke a lot of young artists. They felt that if they didn’t make it before 25 or 30 that they would never make it at all. It’s a very poisonous attitude. It’s such a burden for the people who that does happen to that they have difficulty growing from there. If you look at someone like Cézanne, his first pictures were really pretty terrible. The same with Van Gogh. And the Japanese woodblock artists, like Hiroshi and Hokusai, were making great work into their eighties. It’s not like being a mathematician, where most do their best work before they’re forty. I think one of the great things about being a visual artist is being able to mature and grow. It’s not like being an athlete. You’re using your mind, body, and soul all together. You can ripen and mature. I never felt like I had any options. I just had to go forward and pursue my work, like a horse with blinders, building a brick wall one brick at a time. It’s been a long, slow, steady build. I hope that means I have a good foundation.

AQ: Was there a moment when you knew you were going to, you know, “make it?”

AM: I felt that I didn’t have any options as a photographer. Being an artist came later for me. I didn’t dream about being an artist when I was twelve years old. I did want to travel, and was always interested in storytelling and narrative. It’s been a very slow, gradual process. All of my projects are self-funded, in terms of being funded through gallery sales. I applied for grants, and got a few small ones, bust mostly I was just able to piece together a few thousand dollars here and there to do the work. The biggest breakthrough came in my early 40′s, when I went to Havana. That was the tipping point in terms of establishing my credentials as a photographer and artist, doing work at a high level. This is twenty years after I graduated from college. In the first ten years I struggled, did lots of projects, traveled, and finally had my first show in New York when I was thirty, with those montages. It took ten years to improve my craft, and another ten to finesse things and begin to figure it out. A full twenty years after graduating was when I really got up to speed.

AQ: I think the channel gets narrower every day. Being a career photographer doesn’t strike me, at twenty-five, as a sane ambition [laughs].

AM: I have a lot of young people asking me how to get started and get a career going as a photographer. A lot of the pathways are narrower than they once were, but on the other hand, all of the your generation’s technological advances, that’ll be the way to go. If there are advances, it’ll be made through those. Digital photography has so profoundly democratized the art of taking pictures. Anybody with a decent camera can make a decent picture, at least from a technical standpoint. New hybrid forms are going to be the realm where young people have possibilities. But I can’t even imagine them.

Portland Mercury Interviews

Name + nickname: Kay L. I’m known as the lightbulb lady.

Age: I’m older than my teeth and the same age as my gums.

Hood: Boise

Occupation: I light up lives. That’s my job.

Hometown: I was born in Ontario, Oregon. That makes me a native Portlander. I was raised in Idaho, and that makes me an Idaho potato.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: My own living room, coz I can do it faster, and keep it simple. Hey! A slice of fresh watermelon, a piece of corn on the cob, and we got some good food here!

Favorite place to drink in PDX: I don’t drink!

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Negative one. I don’t care about fashion. I like to be comfortable.

Pet peeve: That’s hard. Negativity would be my pet peeve. And people who bring dogs into stores.

Guilty pleasure: Dark chocolate—with a walnut or an almond. It feels like sin, but ya know it’s not.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? I wish that I was smart enough to make the right decisions the first time.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? I don’t have a favorite per-se, but I love anything science fiction, because it’s the imagining of the possible. And I’m old enough that I’ve seen many science fiction things become reality. I like the Dune series, because if you look at it, it shows what happens when people don’t have the freedom to expand and to grow. When you have a government that controls, you have a people that can’t develop the way they should. Both religion and government control people. I see it in the real world. In fiction, you can explore things the way you can’t do in reality. And there’s a whole lotta truth to it.

Were you cool in school? No. I was a wallflower. I disappeared.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Into the future. I’d love to see what’s gonna happen next. Even ten years.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Men are the opposite of women. And while I am very much a woman, and have a woman’s viewpoint, men have a counterpoint. They think different. They’re wired different. Neither better nor worse, just different. When you put the two together, you see things more fully. A man helps me see things better and more fully than when I look through only my own viewpoint. When my husband and I were planning things, his viewpoint and mine together made a better blend, and therefore we made better choices. They’re marvelous, wonderful critters!

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? As a whole, it’s very difficult because they’re all so different. As individuals, gee whiz, it’s really hard because every man is so different and wonderful. On a whole, they’re as wonderful a critter as the women are!

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? That it’s OK to stop and ask directions.

What is your dream? I would love to see this company, Sunlan Lighting, be so well known that when you think of lightbulbs, you think of me. Because this going to be the inheritance of my son, and we offer something that nobody else in Portland has. And I would save people a ton of time if they would just come see me when they wanna get lit.

What is your best Portland story? The first time I came to Portland, I had heard that there were bad neighborhoods. And having lived in Rochester, NY, where there are some really bad neighborhoods, I asked to see the worst neighborhoods in Portland. So I was driven through north Portland, and looked at the beautiful homes, and I looked at the streets, and I said, you know, other than the fact that there’s some boarded up homes and storefronts, the homes look like any others I’ve ever seen. The reality is that Portland is a really marvelous, friendly, wonderful city. I thought St. John’s smelled musty, but I grew up where there were other odors. Portland is really a charming city that has everything that large cities have. But when you come to a place like Mississippi, you have a small-town feeling, but you can look down the street and see downtown Portland. I can go to the coast, to the Hood, to another country, within hours. This is such a rich ball of people. Keep Portland weird? Yeah, we’re weird, and it’s wonderful.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? I do something really unique with my business. I believe that businesses should give back to their community. I have these marvelous windows—this building is wrapped in windows. We sell lightbulbs, fascinating ones. But the thing that draws people—when they come to Portland, people take field trips to see them. Did you see the Legos? Those are up all summer, every summer—they’re my son’s personal display. My windows change every month, except for the Summer of the Legos. You can see fun, fancy, dorky, educational, or even challenging things. Children gasp, and adults, like those out there now, take pictures and enjoy. It’s part of the weirdness of Portland, the culture of Portland, and what we present to the community. It’s fun, it’s fancy, it’s funky.

Name + nickname: Jim “The Bamboo Man” G. I build jasmine tea houses and bamboo furniture.

Age: 54

Hood: Vancouver

Occupation: Carpenter, basically.

Hometown: Chelan, WA

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Zilla’s Sake Bar

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Zilla’s.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I’d give myself a 9, probably! Hey!

Pet peeve: I don’t like it when people don’t give people who are down and out the time of day. It goes on too much. When people bitch about, you know, their stocks being down, I always have to say…I think the real crisis is in Somalia right now, where people are looking for food. There are many blessings to be had. We’re richer than King Solomon. Literally.

Guilty pleasure: Oh, pornography [laughs].

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? To have my house paid off.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? Right now I do a lot of Last Thursdays. It’s spontaneous, you can come out and try something. I highly recommend that—its all test marketing, basically. From kids to people like me. I know some of the neighborhood up there isn’t happy about it, and people trash stuff and they might have some trouble in the future, but still. It’s a nice event.

Were you cool in school? I didn’t think I was, but I guess I was a lot cooler than I thought I was. People remember me, but I remember thinking that I was a wallflower. I didn’t have a very high opinion of myself in school, and you can’t be cool if you have a low opinion of yourself.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? I would go back about 100 years, when there was less noise, more people growing their own foods, just to see how it was. My grandpa talked about that: coming off the farm, getting more into cities, some technological things going on. It seemed like they had the best of both worlds—the best of horse and buggy times, but also some technology. Things weren’t going so fast. And it was quieter.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Tits! [laughs] Women are a mystery, you know. At this stage in my life, what I’m mystified by is my own attraction to them. You realize how helpless we are. I tell it to young guys: we’re helpless!

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Probably the amount of work you have to do for them. But I even enjoy that. It’s always about chores. I have daughters, sisters, a wife, girlfriends, so it’s tough. Maybe that I just don’t, or can’t, understand how they think. After a while, I stopped trying to understand. Then you get accused of not caring!

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? I don’t know, that they’re smarter than us? But I think they know that. That they don’t need to depend on men as much as they do. But I think women and men are a real cohesive unit. You can prosper and be gratified in so many ways. And men that aren’t monogamous—that doesn’t mean they don’t love them. We’re just helpless when it comes to women! A lot of guys will deny their sexuality like that, but we’re interested in twenty of them a day. Hey, sometimes, even fat, ugly, old!

What is your dream? I have a dream of wanting to build a Japanese resort. I’d like land with a cliff on it, or a waterfront or stream, a large pavilion, and several teahouses that people could stay in, and ornate gardens like the Japanese gardens we have here in Portland. I can do all the building. I’ve been at it a long time. And to be more at peace with myself—not at war in my head. I listen to conservative talk radio, and find myself hating Rush Limbaugh’s guts, you know? But he’s just a guy out there, in a room, talking into a radio. Even he probably has some sweetness to him, he just doesn’t show it all that well. Plus, he’s making 25 million bucks a year, so what would I be if I had that? Conservative talk radio, really, is not the enemy. Not taking care of people who need it, not loving each other, ignorance, opulence, and just getting caught up in the world…all of that can be the enemy. There’s enough in this world that we can live really well, and take care of everybody.

What is your best Portland story? When I was a kid, my dog got hit. A little pure-bred Dachshund. We were a family of seven, real poor. The vet said that it was too damaged to be saved, mom and dad had no money, and so it had to be put to sleep. Well, three months later, I see my dog came hopping over our fence! The vet had sown it up and nursed it back to health on his own dime, and brought it back over to us. That’s the best thing that happened to me in Portland. It was pretty magical. I always believed that Wiggles wasn’t really gone, and I was in 4th grade or something, and here comes my dog, back from the dead.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? www.thebambooman.com. I make teahouses, bamboo fencing. Been at it twenty years. Pretty world-class stuff.

Name + nickname: Ariel “Treatmaster” A-C. I call myself a lunchlady, but I’m a cook at a university. Would you like an apple fritter or a donut? I have them in my backpack right now. The fritters came all the way from Seattle. I have bananas, too, if you like bananas. I’m gonna get a “Treatmaster” tramp-stamp soon, when I have enough money.

Age: I’m 25 years old.

Hood: Sellwood. My whole life.

Occupation: Lunchlady.

Hometown: Portland.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Well, I can’t say that it’s my favorite, but because it’s on my mind right now, I like the Big Assed Sandwich cart right over there.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Tube. On a Sunday. At five o’clock. Because there’s no one there. It’s a dive bar with no creeps. It’s me, and the bartender, for like, three hours. It’s awesome. I only go there when Tom’s working. He’s the best bartender in town, if I can add that.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I would say 9, and I know I don’t wear things that are particularly flattering, but I get most of my clothes at the bins. And I wear things because they’re awesome, not because I look good at them. I just got these glasses a month ago, and now I get hit on every day.

Pet peeve: People who sing along to the radio.

Guilty pleasure: Olive Garden. [Hysterical laughter]

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? I wanna be free. That’s my answer. From what? Free to do my thing, without being questioned. I’m kind of a weirdo, and people are always like, why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? And I’m like, “Coz I do!” Just to be able to live without people questioning.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? The Sonics. Whenever you talk about The Sonics, generally, no one knows what you’re talking about. You have the say, the Kinks sound like the Sonics. But The Sonics came first, and they’re the best. I’d recommend to people, if you have any interest in garagey stuff, fuck everybody else. Go for the Sonics first. And Techno from Amsterdam.

Were you cool in school? Oh, no! Never. I have a hard time being extroverted. I find that hard to believe. I guess I dress to get people to talk to me, rather than me talk to people. I get a lot of propositions. Like, “Hey, you should come home with me right now.” But sometimes it’s like, “Hey, what’s your number?” A lot people have been saying, “Hey, I like your Harry Potter glasses,” and they’re not fuckin’ Harry Potter glasses. They’re Encyclopedia Brown glasses. Go look at a picture of it on the internet. It’s the boy version of Harriet the Spy, part of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew universe.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? I know the perfect answer to this. I would go back to the time before the pilgrims, the Westerners—came to America, and warn the Native Americans about what was comin’. I would ruin America before it happened. Don’t take the blankets! 

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? I’m one of those people who would say that I love men: old men, two year old boys. They’re so dumb that it’s cute. On a whole, that’s my answer. It’s funny to try to watch a pack of men try to clean a room. It’s embarrassing. When men attempt to do things that women do, they’re so silly about it that it’s cute.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Oh, [heavy sigh] none of them want to by my boyfriend. That’s my thing in life. I always have a lot going on, but no one that wants to settle down. I would kind of like to be a serial monogamist, but on the other hand, I like having no responsibilities.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? When you’re not quite dating a girl, lots of guys say, “I’m hanging out with this girl.” And that phrase—”hanging out”—bugs the shit out of me, because I’m always in that situation. We’re not hanging out. We’re seeing each other. We hang out once a week. We see each other. I meet a lot of men who go out of their way to not say dating. That phrase grosses me out.

What is your dream? I’m waiting for my ghibli movie moment. I’m convinced that I’m a heroine in a yet-to-be-produced Miyazaki movie. I’m like the girl in Spirited Away. I’m waiting to walk through a tunnel that will transport me to a new, exciting world.

What is your best Portland story? This is like trying to remember a dream. People in Portland hate everybody else, but they act really nice. We tend to think people are douches. I’m a pretty good representative of Portland. I’m a shit-talking master. I’m pretty close to taking comedy classes so I can have an excuse to talk shit. But I do love how there will be ladies pushing their babies in strollers, and right next to them, people smoking weed. Like, fuck you! It’s Portland! This is how we do!

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Ariel! [laughs] I don’t have a page, or anything out there, but I’m kind of a jill of all trades when it comes to art, and I’m always running around wishing I could put my art in one of my friends’ bars. I would put my personal phone number, but I can’t. I have a Tumblr thing. Treatmaster.tumblr.com.

Name + nickname: Robert D. Don’t have a nickname.

Age: 3-11-48. So how old’s that? I don’t know! It’s funny. I have an uncanny ability to remember numbers and sequences. My children that learned long ago.

Hood: NW

Occupation: I work with the Federal Government.

Hometown: Oh gosh, you never heard of it. Walnut Grove, Mississippi.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Oh gee. That’s kinda hard! Depends on what time of day. But it could be spaghetti, it could be many places in Northwest or Downtown, and a steakhouse, from time to time. I’ll say El Gaucho’s.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Mostly at home, these days. But used to frequent Oregon Wines on Broadway.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I try to dress accordingly.

Pet peeve: I was taught to use grammar correctly. One of my pet peeves is listening to people use the to-be verb. “There is cars in the parking lot.”

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? I don’t do wishes!

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? I like a lot of jazz, sometimes I go to Jimmy Mack’s up here. I guess I’m kind of a trivia buff and a history and literature nut. I just finished reading The Help by Katherine Stockett.

Were you cool in school? Yeah, I guess so! I was just working hard trying to get through!

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Where I am now. Because I know where I’ve been, I know what’s back there, and I hope what’s coming is better, but, as I tell people, I tend not to gamble.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? These days it’s hard to come up with a favorite thing, because it’s so hard to know what women want, or are looking for, or are asking for these days. It’s really hard, and they like to play the game, man. Hard to tell anymore.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? The failure to realize that men are human beings as well as they are. We’re expected to understand and accept whatever it is that they come across or put down. We have to be perfect, while they don’t have to be.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? They don’t know men like they think they do. They should study, listen, and watch. That’s how I learned about women–I listen to what they have to say. I know who to leave alone, and with whom to socialize.

What is your dream? To live long and prosper in Christ Jesus.

What is your best Portland story? The best thing I like in Portland is easy access to fishing. Salmon, steelhead. Ah, yes–nothin’ like fishing. I was fishing with a guide one day, and we caught one, but he said it was a native and we had to turn it loose, but could take a picture first. Up on the Clackamas. 12 ounce steelhead. Beautiful. Like a bump on a brand-new Mercedes. He showed me how to hold the fish. Instead of trying to grip it, you just let it rest. And I love fly fishing. I was pushed into it. I said, well, I’m blind. They said, so? I said, what you talkin’ bout, Willis? I had a friend teach me about wet fly fishing. It’s under the water. I was visiting with some friends in Alaska, and they taught me how to cast. My friend said, you know what? I just taught you in a half hour what I try to get most people to understand in a week. I said, “Well, it’s mostly just touch.” He said, “That’s it!” I learned how to manipulate the line to dry fly fish, where it floats on top the water. Every fish I’ve caught since then has been on a dry line. I hooked and landed a 30 pound salmon up on the Calama one night, and I couldn’t believe it. On one of the most interesting ones, I committed the cardinal sin of fishing: never stop reeling. That same night, I had a steelhead on top of the water, dancing and jumping and everything. He got right straight out in front of me, and my line just went slack and I stopped reeling. One of the guys said, “You know what happened?” I said, “I lost him!” They said, “Nuh-uh. Remember when he was right straight out in front of you? When that line went slack, he jumped about five feet out of the water, dipped his head towards you, and when you stopped there was enough slack for him to spit that hook.” It’s the fight. They’re acrobatic. They’ll charge you. They’ll fight you right on the water.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? A lot of people, especially whites, they don’t have any idea what goes on with other people. I remember, right after September 11, some guy says to me, “You don’t know who to trust anymore when you’re walking down the street.” I turned to him and I said, “Hey–there are some people who have always had to live that way. If it’s a problem, just get used to it.” I remember a guy gave me a hard time once because I don’t live up on Nob Hill in northwest Portland and I said, “Look, guy, they don’t give a damn what color you are. You don’t have the money, you don’t live up there.” [laughs] I used to work as an artist model. I was with graduate students–graduate students!–and one guy was jumping up and saying he could tell if someone was black or white even when skin wasn’t on the body. This doctor was at this class–it was an anatomy class-and he says, “You fool! You have to be an extremely informed anthropologist–and they don’t even know what color they are or were!” I’ve been told by doctors that, when you open up the body, they all look the same inside.

Name + nickname: My name is Silver Boo. I got the name Silver from a little girl in Watts in 1970. I was visiting her father, who was a musician. She had a nickname, and I wanted one. She looked me up and down and said, I think you should be silver. I didn’t have white hair then; at the time, it was bleach-blonde. At the time, I was working my one and only waitress job, and there was another girl there with a real name the same as mine. The chef asked if I had a nickname, so I put Silver on my nametag. Later, I went to the DMV, and told them that my name was Silver. I didn’t have to jump through any hoops, or fill out any paperwork, and it’s been that way ever since. And my husband is a real ghost. Mister Boo. He haunts everywhere.

Age: I’m one-hundred and seven.

Hood: Downtown.

Occupation: I’m a retired landscape artist. I do landscapes artfully. I’m continuing to be a performing artist. I talk and talk, and talk some more.

Hometown: I grew up in Pasadena, and was born in Hollywood. I was getting really sick of palm trees, and kept hearing this song on the radio about Portland. I had never heard it before, and I haven’t heard it since. And I’ve been here since 2004.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: The Maya, a Mexican restaurant down by the waterfront.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: I bring my tea bags, and I like to sit in Director Park. It’s a concrete park with a subterranean parking garage underneath. I’m working on an event for next year there: The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Right now, I’m wearing my pajamas, according to Macy’s. I don’t look like anyone else. I’m 107. And these earrings are thirty years old.

Pet peeve: People that lie. I hope they fall off the next cliff.

Guilty pleasure: Julie’s ice cream, pints at a time.

If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? That my grandson would come hang out with me here and fall in love with Portland. I’ve been bribing him with coupons.

Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? Performing art. Storytelling. I like the Tears of Joy Theater: puppets.

Were you cool in high school? I was a seriously good student. Mostly I tried to get out of school and do art projects. I went to Catholic school. I had problems with a nun in seventh grade. She gave me a blank mark on my report card for “prompt and willing obedience.”

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Back, to renaissance France.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? They’re men. I like men. They have strength in a different way than women. Some of them are jerks, but mostly they’re not.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? When they’re unconscious and rude.

What should all women know that they never seem to? That women are soft. Inside, they are. Even if they act tough. But men do this too—they act like macho men, when they’re not. They fake it till they make it.

What is your dream? To get an Oscar for the documentary film I’ve been working on in my mind. I’ve gone to film school, and want to see if I can get into the Northwest Film Academy via their fairy godmother program—and I am a fairy godmother.

What is your best Portland story? I could tell you this weird story, but I hate the place that it happened, coz I used to live there. It’s a notorious place in Portland. I met this totally bizarre kind of girl who was semi-retarded, in a workshop at the library. Anyway, it’s weird how people are one way, and they end up being another way. I was having an event at this building I was living at. The police call it “victim city.” They suck people there on a six month lease, and everybody that’s in there is on a prescription or chemically-altered experience. This girl came to my Easter potluck. We were hiding eggs and stuff, and she had decided that she wanted to help somebody. And there was this old guy who was pathetically disabled, and his room reeked of urine. Management did absolutely nothing, and it was on my floor. She decided she was gonna help me clean this room. Nightmare. We had to talk to this guy for days to convince him to let us clean his room. Eventually, we did. In five hours, we took all the trash, empty tuna fish cans…three huge garbage cans full of stuff. This guy needs help! It bothered me that this exists in this town. It shouldn’t. This is the most givingest place I’ve ever lived. Portland to me is like a big city dream. It has heart and soul, and people care about each other. In that building, the management? They don’t care. He didn’t give a shit, and that guy’s still there, walking around with toilet paper hanging out of his pants. Sometimes he didn’t even have his pants on. And he’s not that much older than me, diabetic, in an electric wheelchair, and his feet are all bandaged up and they drip. He needs help, but he doesn’t want it. That doesn’t mean that we can’t figure it out. I disdain that manager with every ounce of my being. He totally disassociates from what Portland is, because he doesn’t give a shit about anything but his Bluetooth and his computer. Meanwhile, the maintenance guy is putting up air fresheners and it ain’t working. That whole building is a nightmare, and I’m getting over it. I don’t live there now. I got on a train, went to California, and it became my epiphany trip. I had no money, no clothes, all my stuff in storage. Everything in my backpack. Went to Eugene and stayed on a piece of property full of rocks and old trucks. I love old trucks, and I spent two weeks taking pictures of really old vehicles. The guy there was thinking about making his property a junkyard for old vehicles. I spent all these days of rain sitting inside an old dump-truck, sitting on a big red seat, taking pictures and having a wonderful time. Then I got a ride to Mendocino, and then to San Francisco, to see my two grandsons. Now, I never want to go back to California. My trip brought me back here to Portland, and made me appreciate it more. I wrote a short story about that building: “An Episode Around Midnight.” But Midnight is a black cat that lives there, and is the narrator of the story. And I want everybody to know that this building is run by Cascade Management. Their job is taking money from poor souls.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, next September. It’s going to be a tea party with costumes–you have to wear one to get in. You have to make reservations, because there are three seatings for tea: morning, afternoon, and evening. I’m renting Director Park for the entire day. People that are interested in teaching others how to be crafty will be there–not selling their wares, but showing people how they make them. In ten minutes, for ten dollars, you have to be able to show somebody how to make something. Quick and painless. The doorman at Nordstrom’s is coming to do a Michael Jackson dance routine. He’s been honored by Cirque de Soleil in Vegas. He’s gorgeous; all the women in that building think he’s gorgeous. I won’t know the exact date until I speak with Parks & Recreation.

Name + nickname: Aric M.

Age: 36

Hood: NW

Occupation: I’m a small business owner, of Sterling Roasters. I’m a roaster and barista.

Hometown: Binghamton, NY

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Pok Pok. We make recommendations here all the time, and because we’re an outdoor booth, we get asked a million questions, and I think we have a responsibility to direct tourists. Lucy’s Original. Tastee n’ Sons is great for some breakfast. I had a breakfast burrito from the Big Egg the other day that was phenomenal. A place that gets no love, but is some of the best food I’ve had, is Kin, down in the Pearl. Nobody seems to know about it. It’s sort of Asian Fusion, if you will, though I hate to bandy that term around. Everything on their happy hour menu was phenomenal.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Sterling Coffee Roasters, right around closing time [laughs], we just made a few cocktails. Really, anywhere and everywhere. June. Cork. North 45. Mumu’s. Nightlight, when I’m across the river.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I’d say a seven, and that’s definitely increased in the past few years based on the uniform we wear here. Maybe an eight. Our uniform is to be dandy, so we end up looking the part.

Pet peeve: People asking questions when that the answer is so readily available or in front of them. There are stupid questions.

Guilty pleasure: Drinking rosé on my roof in the summertime. It’s something I try to do every afternoon after work. It’s an indulgence, but we’ve been trying to enjoy some quality of life, because we work all the time. And eating Trader Joe’s pizza in bed and watching Netflix.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? It sounds stupid, but just be able to life comfortably and happily, and that includes the people around me. We talk about this—our goals in business, and in life. As bad as things are right now, I really want for nothing.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? Right now, remembering what the rest of America is like. We’re so sequestered in Portland, where we begin to think that this is what the rest of the country is like. And you have to drive no farther than about five minutes to discover—oh, yeah, this is the rest of America. I think it’s important to reconnect with that. We’re very very spoiled here. We have access to everything, in a very small space. Spirits, wine, all the food you could ever want in multitudes. That’s my cultural obsession: driving out to—I won’t name any names—and finding some serious pockets of humanity.

Were you cool in school? I was. I went to a small school in upstate New York, and because of that, and because of my upbringing, I was a three-sport athlete—soccer, basketball, and baseball—and fared well in athletics, and that lends itself to a modicum of popularity. I also did fairly well in school, so that broadened my range. I was in classes with a bunch of people I was friends with, and then friends with other people from athletics. But where I’m from is not set up for people who doing things differently. That’s another thing we have here, and it took me a while to figure it out—when I first moved here, everyone I saw looked cool—like, they must be in a band, or a painter, or something. It took me six or seven months to realize that, just because this guy has tats, he’s still probably a douchebag. Now, if someone looked like that where I was from, then he must be cool—there were no ifs, ands, or buts about it, but here, it’s run of the mill. That was a weird thing for me.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? I gotta go back and see dinosaurs. My lifelong obsession with the t-rex—you know, little arms. I don’t care to see the future. I want to find that out on my own.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? That they’re opposite.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? That they’re opposite, as well. I don’t have a least favorite thing. It’s hard making a broad generalization. There’s just way too much to like. They’re intriguing, mysterious, and at the same time, not at all. Especially now, I’ve been single for a while [laughs], so I have nothing I dislike right about now.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? You are beautiful. They’re too obsessed with others’ perceptions.

What is your dream? Last night I had your service industry nightmare—I was trying to dispose of bodies while people were coming in for happy hour, and I didn’t have my uniform, and was disposing of these bodies while waiting for my uniform to be delivered and making cocktails for people. But really, just to create something, even if it’s transitory. If you’ve been in your mid-thirties and drifting, bartending…I’m a painter by trade, that’s what I went to school for. I want to create something that takes on a life of its own.

What is your best Portland story? I think it’s yet to be written. I think that where the future’s headed, my best story’s down the road. I’ve been here six years, but I finally feel like I’m firmly entrenched here culturally, and starting to hit my stride, and the next year or two will be great. Everything’s been a promo up to this point.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? I suppose I’d be a cad if I didn’t plug my own business, Sterling Coffee Roasters. But also, everybody fighting the food fight—someone told me the other day that Portland has gone from a town built on industry, to a town built on being industrious. And I think that’s so true. In a lot of other places, people look at a painting and say, I could do that. But then they don’t. Here, people do. People have a passion and they actually bring it to fruition, or at least give it the old college try. So I want to promote the industrious spirit that makes Portland so great.

Name + nickname: Paulina M-B.

Age: 22

Hood: Pearl

Occupation: I recently got my first job, as a barista.

Hometown: Westfield, NJ

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Screen Door, on Burnside. Sweet potato fries.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: I’m not too much of a drinker, so Slabtown? I just moved next door, and I’m honing my skiball skills there.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Five? I don’t know. Middle of the road.

Pet peeve: I think a lot of people need to lighten up, like 50%. No matter where you are, you can always lighten up.

Guilty pleasure: Blogs. Fashion blogs. I love looking at them, people that are braver than I. I would love to be able to spend more than $2 on a t-shirt.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? To live closer to my two little brothers.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? I read the Patti Smith book, Just Kids, this summer, and thought that was phenomenal. I wept. I was so sad that that’s where it ended, that that was all there is. It was like ending a really great relationship—not really sad, particularly, just, oh, it’s done. And No One Belongs Here More Than You. I really loved it, too. Miranda July is one of those people who I’d love to somehow find myself with in a creative situation.

Were you cool in school? Oh, I was really, really punk rock in high school. Like, dyed hair, leather jackets, jean jackets with lots of studs and band patches. My parents were punks when they were young, so they got a kick out of it, and their records were around the house. But all my friends would want to smash bottles, and I’d be thinking about whoever would have to clean it up, like, “That’s not very nice, you guys!” And then going to clean it up.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Late fifties, early sixties. I would go see Otis Redding and Clara Thomas.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Hands. Masculine hands.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? The tendency to get very serious.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? Too nice is never good.

What is your dream? In my dream, I want to be a pageant queen. Like, Texan, big hair. I think that would be a phenomenal experience. Like, I would be completely overjoyed someone was like, we will completely 100% fund your journey to become Miss Oregon! I would love it. There’s something about the fake, phony, glitz and glamour, and the pointlessness of it all that makes me like, does no one else think this is hilarious and want to do it?! So I’d do it one-third for ego, and two-thirds for hilarity’s sake. “Toddlers in Tiaras” is legitimately frightening, and I love it.

What is your best Portland story? I was walking home one night from the yellow line, and a few blocks ahead of me was a woman with a FedEx box on her head. I tried to go around her, you know, minding my own beeswax. She was obviously a vagrant and mumbled something at me. I heard her speed up behind me, so I walked a little faster. She tells me to stop following her and I giggled, because I was ahead of her, and she’s wearing a big dress, and a jacket, with a pull cart full of stuff. She kept following said I was a jerk, and that I was dumb, all the while with this FedEx box on her head.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Can I just say my phone number and say I’m single? [Laughs] Because I’m the kind of person that would call someone like that and tell them to, like, have a good day. But no, there is nothing I want to promote.

1 Name + nickname: Bryan W. I have many nicknames. Kid Friday and Doctor Wiley are two. My high school soccer coach called me boner once. When I asked him why, he goes, “…Coz you look like one.” I’m like, “Wow, coach, did you spend all night thinking that up?” Fuckin’ guy.

2 Age: 28

3 Hood: SE.

4 Occupation: Man, how does the Big Lebowski describe it? He doesn’t say unemployed. “Between opportunities.” I’m a self-employed student/musician.

5 Hometown: L.A.

6 Favorite place to eat in PDX: I got two, I guess. Rudy’s and Thai BBQ, which are both right around the corner from my house.

7 Favorite place to drink in PDX: My house.

8 How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I feel like we need an outside opinion. I’m wearing USA socks. This is standard fare for the Tadbury. I’ll just go by shoe size. I’m a 13, but that’s generous. I’ll take a six.

9 Pet peeve: Dudes with food stamps that have better jobs than me. Fuck them.

10 Guilty pleasure: I think in order to have a guilty pleasure, you have to be capable of feeling guilt. I don’t think I have one, man. I don’t know.

11 If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? So many options, you know? First thing, I’d wish to be able to go to school for free. But that’s not that far off the mark—they do that in Europe, you know? I’d wish that auto-tune was never invented.

12 Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? I’m a big fan of horrible movies, so people need to get more into “Walker, Texas Ranger.” Also, The Room. And I’m a big proponent of jazz culture. A lot of cool improvised music going round here. Otherwise, I don’t know, man. Join your own damn cult, or start your own. That’s what L. Ron Hubbard did.

13 Were you cool in high school? I, believe it or not, won the superlative for “most likely to be famous.” And look at me now! I’m in the Mercury! Look ma, I made it!

14 If you had a time machine, where would you go? Dude, I know exactly where I’d go. I’d go to feudal Japan and study under Miyamato Musashai, probably the gnarliest dude to ever live. He is like the samurai that people talk about in samurai movies. Between the ages of 13 and 28 he was in sixty to-the-death duels. It got to the point where he no longer fought with a sword. There’s this story: he was cutting wood to make a bow and this dude came up, a master at fighting with a sickle, and challenged Hisatchi to a duel. So he picks up the wood he was cutting and knocks this fool out. He got enlisted with one warlord, fought this huge war and won, and then, ten years later, got enlisted with the other side, fought this other war and lost. In a battle where 10,000 of his men were killed, he survived the ensuing manhunt. He had his own school of swordsmanship, among many in Japan, and he’d go around and challenge the other masters of these schools because he wanted to see if his really was the best. He went in to one, challenged two masters, killed them both, and the students got so pissed that they revolted. And he fought his way out the door and bailed! This book, The Book of Five Rings—everyone should read it. It’s his swordsman style, taught in metaphors. If he couldn’t get his body to do a certain move, he’d describe and mimic something in nature. He would think of a situation—let’s say a room, with three guys, and a staircase in the back—and he would go out and test himself in that situation. Is this practical? Does it work? I’m gonna put this out there: I don’t think there’s anyone putting themselves on the line like that anymore. One of the gnarliest guys I’ve ever heard about.

15 Favorite thing about the opposite sex? I like [sings in the fashion of a Dr. Dre chorus] bitches with at-tit-ude! Girls that don’t put up with all my bullshit.

16 Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger…I don’t like drunk chicks. I don’t like girls that expect me to do things because “I’m the man.” It’s not what I’m about. Or girls that don’t take me as I am, and want to change me. Which just isn’t gonna happen.

17 What should all women know that they never seem to? That I don’t mean half the shit I say. I run my mouth a lot. I get myself in a lot of trouble.

18 What is your dream? To be able to eek a living out of music one way or another, on either side of the glass.

19 What is your best Portland story? Here’s a good one. Not sure if it’s my best one. I have a bunch of LA ones that are untoppable, you know? The other day I got a flat tire at PDXPopNow, and I have no money on me, and I have to get home. I get to this bus stop, there on Hawthorne and 6th or something. It’s one in the morning and I have no cash on me, so I’m just gonna beg the dude to let me on, you know? Out of nowhere, this tall, thick dude shows up. And he is just covered in tattoos. There’s like, no skin on his face. He looks like he has zinc on his nose, and eyeballs tattooed on the back of his eyelids—so when he closes his eyes, he had scarier eyes looking at you. I’m like, oh shit, this guy looks rowdy. What am I gonna do with this guy? He was obviously drunk. He starts telling me about his night, how they wouldn’t let him walk through the drive thru at Burger King, you know, and I tell him about my night, and getting this flat. He offers to pay the bus for me, and I’m like, naw man, I don’t want to take money from you, you know? He goes, well, I got a day pass, if you need it, I’ll hook it up. And I’m like, I just have this one from a few days ago. He takes it and punches the right holes in it for me, then goes, OK, this is what you do: come in behind me, hold the ticket like this. And he walks right up to the busdriver’s face, gets in too close—scarily close—and starts asking him stupid questions. And I walk up behind him and wave my ticket. This dude totally ran interference for me. We talked on the bus. He’s in a Satanic country band called Sulphur Valley Wranglers. He plays spoons and jaw harp. Coolest fucking dude. At first I thought, this guy is tougher than me, and I don’t even have money for him to steal, he just might kick my ass. Then he ended up just being the nicest guy.

20 Anything you’d like to hype or promote? My band, A La Mode. And my own project, King Friday, is about to bust on the scene like crazy. I’m currently looking for string and horn players, then it’s gonna just be crazy live hip hop.

Name + nickname: Jennifer O. My guy name’s George.

Age: 39. I’ll be 40 in three weeks. I didn’t think you were a day over 30. It’s the makeup.

Hood: NW

Occupation: I’m a cartographer for the US Government. I’m not gonna say which agency. My boss is here, and if he sees me dressed like this, that’s gonna be a funny situation.

Hometown: Brownsville, PA.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Dan & Louis Oyster Bar. Love that place.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Hamburger Mary’s. Great place, man.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Aw, look at me! I’m totally fashionable! 10.

Pet peeve: Entitlement people. People that expect that they society deserves to give them something. Drives me nuts. I have a friend, I love him, he’s a good dear friend of mine, but he’s on unemployment and refuses to even look for a job! It’s too easy! The money just rolls in! He just gets out of bed and goes and picks his check up. It’s gonna catch up to him someday. Those people are my pet peeve. [Sighs] But he’s my friend. I love him.

Guilty pleasure: Wine. I drink a bottle of wine a night, every night. Any recommendations? I really like pinots and cabernets from the Willammette Valley. Amity Vinyards.

If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? I don’t know! Never thought about that. You know what? That nothing would change in my life. That everything would stay exactly the way it is, without change or turmoil. I love my life the way it is.

Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? The drag show, every Sunday night, at C C Slaughter’s. It’s the best drag show in all of the city. There’s no cover charge. And they’re the most talented drag queens in this whole city. There are a lot of drag shows in this town, but I think Sunday night, 8pm, is the best.

Were you cool in high school? No! I was a total nerd. Straight A student, total nerd.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? The 1950’s. I love the clothing style.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Aww, I love the way women dress. I love the way they dress. Ever since I was a little child, I’ve been into women’s clothing.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? They are so…they don’t have their crap together. They just…they can’t decide anything. They’re indecisive.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? That I’m really not listening to them when they talk!

What is your dream? To retire and live in a cabin on a mountain. I’m a big outdoorsman. Keep going with my career the way it is, and eventually, someday I’ll be able to retire to a little cabin in the mountains and I’ll be happy.

What is your best Portland story? Aw, jeez, I have a lot. Wow. I don’t know. I mean, I moved here for my last year of high school, went to PSU, graduated, met my wife here, was married for fourteen years, got divorced, been divorced for eight years…my whole life! Every day something strange or wild happens. It’s really tough. I met by best friend here. Her name is Kanna. She is my bosom buddy, good friend of mine, got me into roller derby originally, and we’ve been the best of friends ever since. And through all the travels and all my life, 39 years, I can honestly say she’s my best friend ever. She’s gay, I’m not, and you wouldn’t think we’d have that much in common, but I really cherish the fact that I’m here in Portland and was able to meet her.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? The Rose City Rollers.

Name + nickname: I don’t have a nickname, but my name’s Fred.

Age: 44

Hood: Pearl District

Occupation: [long pause] Comedian!

Hometown: I’m from New York.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Ping. I forgot the address, but it’s the best. It might be closed Sunday-Monday.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: I don’t drink. Sister’s Coffee, Stumptown Coffee. Even after they sold out!? Oh, that’s fine. They make great coffee and Starbuck’s makes great coffee. You know, making coffee is such a benevolent, great thing. I love Stumptown. I’ll never not drink it.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Zero. I’m proud of it! Fashionable? When I picture stylish and fashionable…I’ve been wearing the same uniform since I was twenty. It’s pretty utilitarian. Sometimes I get fancy glasses, so I’ll give it a two.

Pet peeve: The sun. I hate the sun.

Guilty pleasure: Grand Theft Auto on Xbox. And nowadays, Red Dead Redemption.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? Health! Mental health, emotional health, and physical health.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? My recommendation is to listen to whole albums. Force yourself to do it on your iPod. It’s a good discipline, even songs that are just filler, to hear a complete piece of work. It’s difficult. It’s not an easy thing to commit to, but it’s good to go, I’m gonna listen to this whole album. I’m really happy with the music scene nowadays. Joanna Newsom is what I’m talking about—it’s a lot of songs, but that’s a great full album.

Were you cool in school? Yes.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Like, ten minutes from now. I just…have air conditioning. This wasn’t reflecting that I don’t want to be here with you—this is lovely!—but if there was a time machine, it’d be like, this is great, it’s a free ride home.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Everything! Everything.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? That’s a hard one. Because anything that I can think of for the opposite sex, I bet you could apply to the male gender. No matter where I go, anything I think of, there’s just as many examples with guys, including myself. The common things are easy, but for all the times I’ve complained, I do all of the exact same things.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? They know everything! They know way more than me.

What is your dream? To work, work, work, work, work, work.

What is your best Portland story? All of my favorite moments of Portland are just hanging out with my friends. Being in people’s houses. It’s better than any restaurant, or bar, or band I’ve seen—it’s all just being with my friends.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? The band Wild Flag.

Name + nickname: Brooke H.

Age: 42

Hood: NE

Occupation: I am the owner and operator of Built to Grill.

Hometown: Gainesville, FL

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Nicholas’s

Favorite place to drink in PDX: I don’t drink. Stumptown. Before it got bought out. So now, actually, my kitchen. But I still drink Stumptown in my kitchen.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I’d say a two.

Pet peeve: People who don’t answer me when I ask them questions. And people that are mean to their dogs—like when they jerk their chain when they’re walking them.

Guilty pleasure: Foie gras.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? A time machine.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? Right now I’m really into the Black Angels. They’re a psych-rock band out of LA.

Were you cool in school? I thought I was. I think I was. I didn’t go to school a lot. I skipped every Friday and Monday.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? New York in the 20’s. I would go back and buy Manhattan.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Uh, genitals.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? The high-maintenance part.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? That men are stupid.

What is your dream? I’m livin’ my dream right now. Making food for people. It’s what I love to do.

What is your best Portland story? Shopping with a bunch of twisted rock stars who are without sleep or food. Evan from the Lemonheads and my friend, the drummer for Bad Religion, came here to eat, and Evan had a backpack on and kept digging in his pockets, looking for money. In his backpack he had a bunch of hundred dollar bills wadded up in a mesh thing and big bottles of pills, and both were falling out of his backpack like a trail of crumbs down the street. He’s like, “I can’t find my money!” and we’re following behind, picking up hundred dollar bills. “I can’t find my medicine!” and there’s a trail of Oxycontin running back down the street. He was going around buying guitars from the guitar stores, then forgetting and leaving them in the store. He’d pay for this $3000 Gibson and the owner is running out of the store behind him like, “Uh, you just bought this!” Totally out of it. Funnest afternoon I ever spent. Hilarious.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? I’m not big on promotion, but I think they should do something about all the homeless and gutter punks around. They need to pass some vagrancy laws. Put some money into land, food, medicine, clothing, so that they’re out of the downtown commercial district. It’s the wrong place for them to be, it’s not safe, it slams prostitution, drugs, and homelessness all together. You can buy crack and heroin and get your dick sucked all in the same two block area. Then they can go sell their methadone for crack, and there you have it.

1 Name + nickname: Carrie “Careb” or “Care Bear” H.

2 Age: Twenty…five! I just turned 25.How does it feel? It feels great! I feel more like myself. The best I’ve ever felt, actually. It feels great.

3 Hood: SW

4 Occupation: Makeup artist, writer.

5 Hometown: Wilsonville, OR

6 Favorite place to eat in PDX: Nob Hill. They have these furry…I don’t want human services to go harass them, but they have cats that wander around. It’s amazing! It’s the best omelets, andamazing cats! They’ll sit next to you and watch you eat and stuff. They’re amazing cats. I love cats.

7 Favorite bar: The Bye and Bye. They have cocktails in huge mason jars. You need one, really, and that’s it. Or two.

8 How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I’ll just say that I like to stick to neutrals, dresses, and things that feel comfortable. I just like pretty, well-fitting clothes.

9 Pet peeve: When people get spiritually…up on their high horses, and then want to teach you everything they know. But I like spirituality, and I don’t want to say that. How about this: spiritual materialism. When someone gets to where they’re missing the point. And passive agressive behavior. If there’s a problem, let’s just have it out.

10 Guilty pleasure: Eating Mexican Food at two in the morning.

11 If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? That I could experience the extreme human emotions I feel with a little more cushion, or grace. Feeling what I feel, but not having it hit me so hard.

12 Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? The rare book floor at Powell’s is my favorite. Rare books, big, huge fashion books, art books, beauty books, history books, photography books…I could hang out there for days.

13 Were you cool in high school? Let’s just say that no one’s cool in middle school, and I’m sticking with that. But I’ll go with high school, and, well, I don’t know! I…really liked activities. All of them. So I was a dork! All of the extra curriculars were my thing: sports, newspaper, yearbook. The teachers thought I was cool! I don’t know if that’s cool. I was prom queen, but I was also a big dork.

14 If you had a time machine, where would you go? To the Italian Renaissance. I know women didn’t have a lot of power during the time, but there was still all of that art being created.

15 Favorite thing about the opposite sex? I love how strong and sexy men are. I love when men are just so, like…just men in general. All of them. And, that they used to be babies, and they’re really, really, hilarious. I’m really into guys as babies.

16 Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Ugh, don’t get me started. Their egos. Their insecurities. They need their egos to protect their insecurities! And sometimes, they don’t take very good care of their feet.

17 What should all men know that they never seem to? That white shirts are boring.

18 What is your dream? To be a writer, makeup artist, editor, travel the world, have a home in Portland, a home in Manhattan, jobs around the world, a cat, a baby, and a big, nice, lush garden, and beautiful tree-houses…beautiful space, enough money to do these things, and lots and lots of work that feels really good. That’s my dream.

19 What is your best PDX story? My friend helps do booking for PDX Pop, so earlier this year we were checking out a band at The Woods with a couple of girlfriends. We were sitting on some couches, just completely wrapped up in each other, talking, laughing, telling juicy stories, when maybe an hour into the show I noticed in my periphery that everyone was starting to sit down cross legged in front of the stage. I didn’t think much of it, until a guy in the front row turned around to us and said, “Will you please just shut up?” It was then we realized that everyone was silent, watching this jammy soft emo-rock show as if it were a play or the symphony. On our way out a guy explained that “this is shoe-gaze.” Everyone just listens and stares down at their shoes. I think we get too much rain here in Portland!

20 Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Myself, if you need a makeup artist for your wedding. And I have a fashion-poetry blog.

1 Name + nickname: Thaddeus S.

3 Hood: I’m everywhere, man. Like Elvis, man. Like Elvis. 

4 Occupation: None.

5 Hometown: Born in Vancouver, WA, raised in Beaverton.

6 Favorite place to eat in PDX: I have to choose one? I’m gonna go with Tik Tok’s. A lot of food, for cheap.

7 Favorite place to drink in PDX: Alchy-hall? Whatever you want. Then Southeast Grind.

8 How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Uhhhh…zero. One.

9 Pet peeve: Don’t know. I’m gonna pass on that one.

10 Guilty pleasure: I’d have to think of something I was actually ashamed of, first.

11 If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? Nothing novel, you know: wealth.

12 Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? Hey kids! Damnit! Test yer ears a little bit, sit down…hanker down for a few months, and learn some progressive jazz fusion and progressive rock, damnit! Thank you.

13 Were you cool in high school? Not to people. But I might have burnt a few fireants with a magnifying glass.

14 If you had a time machine, where would you go? You mean when would I go? Yes, but where is also an important component. Ahh, I see. England. In the late 1700’s. Why? Even though they weren’t highly favored by us Yanks, you know, they’d already done their bit for democracy and were well on their way. And yet, other than the soldiers being shipped over to America, they were pretty much safe, home, and dry at that time. So, they got to have their Enlightenment and eat it, too.

15 Favorite thing about the opposite sex? I take it you’re looking for a body part? Oh, no. I get all kinds of answers. I’m probably just gonna be un-novel: I guess it’s a toss up for me between tits, ass, and face, you know what I mean?

16 Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? That’s a loaded question. That’s my answer. If I told the truth on that one, I’d further reduce my chances of getting laid.

17 What should all women know that they never seem to? That we males should not always have to change our damn minds about something we’re planning on doing every time we want to enjoy coitus.

18 What is your dream? I want my computer back. It was stolen on the twenty-first.

19 What is your best PDX story? Gosh, I mean… Yeah, you have a lifetime of them. One came to mind, but my flash answer isn’t that special, at all. I once saw an eagle…I mean, I sea gull, attempt to eat a pigeon. Underneath the Hawthorne Bridge or something. The pigeon is injured, and the seagull thought, you know, that damn thing’s…starting to look an awful damn lot like food.

20 Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Yeah, my blog.

Name + nickname: Emily “Amelia” S.

Age: 23

Hood: NE

Occupation: Starving barista and writer.

Hometown: South Bend, IN

Favorite place to eat in PDX: My house. The sandwich bar at the co-op in Northwest.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Moloko.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? What’s fashionable, really? In terms of having my own fashion and enjoying it, how I feel? An 8. It’s about confidence.

Pet peeve: Complaining. Complainers.

Guilty pleasure: Complaining!

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? Space travel.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? Delve into consciousness more. Not as some hippy-dippy thing, because it’s kind of marketed that way–going deeper into yourself and extracting something.

Were you cool in school? No!

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Into the future. Figure out what we need to do to make it better. 50, 100, 150, then 500 years.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Grace. People can be really graceful, regardless of gender. Knowing how to conduct yourself.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Arrogance.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? Don’t cling. No clinginess.

What is your dream? To inspire.

What is your best Portland story? I think today might have been it, actually. We went to the coast, on the ocean, and on the drive back, blaring Brahms in the car, stopped off on the side of the road, went down to some random river, found a beautiful, clear, green pool reflecting the sunlight, and just as we were about to go skinny dipping, this random duck ran across the water quacking at us.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? I don’t know. I’m kind of against promoting. Let’s promote being kind to one another. Being loving. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. But I can also say Annie Montgomery, who makes amazing jewelry and sells it at Eden downtown.

Name + nickname: Ian L. I worked at the Montage for a while, and my nickname was Dolf, after Dolf Lungren, of course. I’m only marginally familiar with who he is, but it caught on fast. Obviously there’s a strong resemblance.

Age: 25

Hood: NE

Occupation: I’m a professional guitarist. I studied classical guitar at PSU, and now I play for STRFKR.

Hometown: Portland.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Oh, Jesus. Right now that would have to be Random Order on Alberta.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: We’ll say the Liberty Glass. It’s nice. Homey.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? That’s a good question–how fashionable do you feel? I’ll say 7.

Pet peeve: When people say that they’re bad with names. Everyone’s bad with names, but that’s a poor excuse.

Guilty pleasure: 90′s radio rock. Smashing Pumpkins.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? That I would have infinite amounts of time to learn languages and get proficient at every instrument.

A cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? Mexican psychedelic folk rock from the 60s and 70s.

Were you cool in school? Not cool, but fairly well-liked.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? I want to see dinosaurs. I want to go way back.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Smell. I love being able to hang out with them in the same sense that I hang out with my friends. When you don’t have to be on point all the time, when you can relax, and maybe, you know, fart and think it’s funny. I like that they like to be beautiful and get dressed up, but I don’t want them to take that too seriously.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Revisiting past events. Taking themselves too seriously.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? Nine times out of ten, they’re way more beautiful than they think they are.

What is your dream? This isn’t a recurring dream, but it doubles, because it would be awesome if this happened: swimming in the ocean at night with whales, and there’s tons of stars in the sky, and a huge moon. And to be a hugely successful musician.

What is your best Portland story? When I was, like three or four, my mom was walking with me downtown, and Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix stopped to say hi to me.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Publication Studio.

1 Name + nickname: Olga M. I don’t have a nickname. People call me Olga. Olga’s pretty, uh, different from, Jenny, Rachel, and Ashley.

2 Age: 22

3 Hood: NW

4 Occupation: Clothing designer. Designer. Let’s just stick with designer.

5 Hometown: Define hometown. Where you were born and raised. I was born in Berdychiv, Ukraine. I was looking at a globe the other day, and it wasn’t there. It’s way small. When we had to call my grandma ten years ago, we had to call the person with the phone in the village. They had to go get her and told us to call back in an hour. The economy collapsed in 1993. Religious persecution and shit. So corrupt. Bad cops. You didn’t feel safe. My dad never thought we’d come to America until we had to. You emigrated to Portland? Yeah. Vancouver, Washington really.

6 Favorite place to eat in PDX: Whatever. That’s a stupid question. I mean, I have a lot of favorite places. I love to eat and drink. I love sushi. And Indian food. And, hey, look: sometimes it can even be shitty sushi. Where is the good sushi? Masu. Oh my god. It’s amazing.

7 Favorite place to drink in PDX: Urban Farmer. In the library room. Leather couches, books everywhere, and a pool table right in the center. So if you get there first, it’s all yours. I want it. I want everything in there. And St. Jack’s is amazing. I could just, like, sit there all day long. Spend all kinds of money. I mean, whenever I have it, you know.

8 How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I mean, I’m pretty fucking confident in what I wear and how I wear it, and I think that says a lot. I mean…I think…I could be a nine, actually! [With growing sense of wonderment] I’m a catch! That’s right!

9 Pet peeve: Sunglasses inside or at night. Who the fuck needs sunglasses at night? Know what I saw the other night? Sunglasses in a movie theater. What the fuck is that? I mean, she obviously has something wrong with her eyes. Maybe she had them dilated. Another one? Getting out of the shower, putting on clean white socks, and stepping on a puddle of water [Glowers at boyfriend]. I need new socks now!

10 Guilty pleasure: I don’t know. I don’t have any really. I don’t feel guilty about doing things. Whatever! I do what I want, without feeling guilty! I’m not guilty, bitch! Do what you want without feeling bad about it. Don’t feel guilty! That’s a lame term. Next.

11 If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? That’s a weird question. I really just want…do I have to be realistic? I just want…a really big studio. A studio.

13 Were you cool in high school? To myself. Not necessarily. I mean, I had boobs in eighth grade, so that was cool. And in high school I was hanging out with, heh, the seniors…I was cool in a way, I guess. I never really thought about it.

14 If you had a time machine, where would you go? Dude, there’s no time like the present. I love living in the present. I never thought about going anywhere else. If I had to think about it though…I love 2011, and technology’s pretty awesome, cars, and people are open-minded. Like, no more shit. It’s cool.  

15 Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Cock!

16 Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Oh, um…I don’t know? I love the opposite sex so much. I guess I’d have to say fighting. I hate fighting with boys.

17 What should all women know that they never seem to? How to give a good blowjob. I mean, I use that term androgynously.

18 What is your dream? To be able to make clothes for people—made to measure clothing. I’m trying to do that right now. We’ll see how Portland treats my dream. Financial freedom—to be able to travel and do this abroad. I charge more than the normal…well, there are shops that charge more than me, but it depends on what you want!

19 What is your best PDX story? Dude, I don’t know. I live in Portland. I’m living the best Portland story.

20 Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Yeah, my shit!

Name + nickname: Michael “Dub-G” G, II. WG stands for “white girls.” I only date and hook up with white women.

Age: 20

Hood: Beaverton

Occupation: Unemployed student.

Hometown: Portland, St. Vincent’s, downtown, all over.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Sansai Sushi.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: House parties.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? An 8. It depends. If I’m going out, I’ll dress up, but if I’m going to class, sweats and shorts.

Pet peeve: When you hold the door open for ladies and they don’t say thank you. It makes me want to stick my foot out and trip you!

Guilty pleasure: When people need a favor really bad, and ask me. I’ll say oh, yeah, maybe, what is it? Then they tell me what I need to do, then saying, ahh, no. That’s fun to me.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? To function without money. Life would probably be better.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? Music-wise, I’d go with Kendrick Lamar. California underground hip hop. And my favorite high school teacher—Brian Hartenstein—came out with an autobiography called Me Gook. He dropped out of grad school in 97, and traveled around Europe and China for a couple of years, and it’s about that. Funny guy, and lots of stories.

Were you cool in school? I wasn’t like, a preppy kid, but I guess I was kinda cool. People knew me, I knew everybody else. I would talk to anyone in the hallway.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? To ancient Rome. I’d kick it with Romulus Remus. But when I was actually in Rome a few years ago, I hated it!

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Eyes and smile.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? How much they talk about their life, as though you want to listen. Like, about their girl drama with their friends. Kind of don’t want to hear that every day. And how some girls aren’t athletic at all.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? How attractive they are in their own self. They put too much pressure on themselves, how other people think about them.

What is your dream? Right now it’s patchy. When I was a kid, I wanted to work for Nike. To provide for my kids and a family, that’s my dream.

What is your best Portland story? My junior year of high school, I was seeing a certain somebody. She was younger than me. I slept at her house a couple nights, here and there. It was the day before Thanksgiving. I go through the back, sneak into her house, go upstairs. She’s like, let’s go get some alochol. We took her mom’s car, snuck back out, drove to a friend’s house, got some alochol, drove back, snuck back in. Her mom lives on the first floor, the girl on the second. Start drinking, start getting into it, we both get naked, and she’s on top of me. She said I’d have to be on top, and I was like, no. And we started arguing, and eventually she won, and as I was flipping over, I didn’t know I was at the end of the bed. I fell off into the closet, and it made a huge, loud, noise. I didn’t think anything of it, I was under the influence,  a little belligerent. I walked off, started going to the bathroom, and I didn’t hear the mom come upstairs and start yelling at the girl. The mom came into the bathroom, and I hopped into the shower, and she yelled at me to get the fuck out of the house. I went back into the room and was getting my clothes back on, I have my shorts and shoes on, and my shirt in my hand, and she appears with a Western-style six-shooter gun, saying I’d better get the fuck out of her house. The girl was in bed, hiding under the sheets. I run down the stairs and outside, and was a good ten, fifteen miles from my house. I found an elementary school, slept outside for two hours, walked to Safeway, got something to eat, then walked home, and got back at eight in the morning.

Name + nickname: Arjuna.

Age: 52

Hood: NE

Occupation: Nurse

Hometown: Boulder, CO

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Bartini. On Sundays—it’s half price!

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Brother’s Crawfish

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? 10. We submit to a jury of our peers on this.

Pet peeve: Birkenstocks.

Guilty pleasure: Hookah. I should feel guilty when I do it, and I do. It’s not good for your health.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? For an excellent companion for many years.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? I love the free theater in the park. I just saw Romeo & Juliet at Milepost 5.

Were you cool in school? No. It was an evolutionary process, and I’m now 52 years young.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? I’d go back ten years. Everyone that’s middle aged wants to be younger, to have a younger body. But these are good times for me.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? My friendships. My best friend is a man. I have some ambivalence in general about men, but my best friend is one.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? The tendency to blame other people. That’s my observation.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? How to dress better!

What is your dream? For more summer days like this one.

What is your best Portland story? I’m doing research for it right now. Dressing up and going to see the town.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? I think women should wear bow-ties. Frequently. I think it adds some elegance to everyday life. Let’s celebrate every day.

1 Name + nickname: James K.

2 Age: 40

3 Hood: NE

4 Occupation: Filmmaker, inept teacher.

5 Hometown: Greely, CO

6 Favorite place to eat in PDX: Por Que No. But I’ve only been here two weeks. I eat at home.

7 Favorite place to drink in PDX: Ladd’s Inn. They sell cheap beer cheap.

8 How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? [Effortlessly] 10.  

9 Pet peeve: People that are smarter than me. And taller.

10 Guilty pleasure: Masturbation.

11 If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? To live a good life. You don’t need a genie for that, though, man. It seems like I might. I struggle, man, I struggle with it. Being who I can be.

12 Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? The Dark Backward. It’s an interesting film that was overlooked and makes me laugh hysterically. It’s dark and backwards. It’s one of the only comedies I think is funny. One of the only American movies that uses deadpan humor well. And it’s got squeezable bacon in it.

13 Were you cool in high school? [Emphatically] No. I owned a skateboard ramp and was the best skateboarder in my town, so I was only cool with skateboarders. People only drove muscle cars  and would yell out the window at me. “Get a car!” This is how uncool I was. Are you ready? One day I was riding my skateboard home and tried to do a powerslide. It came out from under me and flew in front of the shorty bus. Shorty bus? A bus for special needs children. Anyway: it completely crushed the board and the trucks. Everything was ruined. My whole life was my skateboard. It was the only place in my life that felt good. The bus stops and all the special needs kids look out the window at me, and I shuffled off with my dead skateboard. I already didn’t have any friends, and now even the retarded kids would be pointing and making fun of me. Then, on the last day of school, right before graduation, I got my face beat in by the toughest guy at my school and everyone I knew watched it. I got my face kicked in on the ground. That’s how my high school ended. In the dirt, on the ground, in front of everyone I knew. My hometown was a shithole…damn, I just started to cry. Feeling sorry for myself a little. Anyway, this guy was ridiculous, because he was trying to kill a snake. I was like, what the fuck’s wrong with you, why would you kill an innocent animal? I wouldn’t fight him, and he just beat the shit outta me. Twenty years later, I went back to Roma, this pizza restaurant I used to hang out at, and ran into him, right when I was leaving the place. And this guy can’t get over it—kicking my ass. His wife, who was also there, hasnt forgiven him, 20 years later. He really wants my forgiveness and always tells me the same story. Now I text him and feel bad for him. Back then, he was the toughest motherfucker in the world, a golden glove boxer. Now he’s a born-again christian. And when he kicked my ass, he wasnt even in high school anymore. He was one of those dudes that still hung out with highschoolers. That was my burden. My high school burden.

14 If you had a time machine, where would you go? I would go forward. Just to see another planet, and other lifeforms that exist. To be present when the earth meets another society. I feel really depressed that we’re not going to see that in my lifetime. The whole world would change so much. Like Europe finding America.

15 Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Vagina. I know, that’s really easy to say. Women are easier to talk to for me. They’re not…smarter, but they’re emotionally easier to talk to. I love women. At one point I lived with seven women, I was the only guy. My family and my mom’s best friend’s family lived together, and I learned how to talk girl talk early on. I can talk about conditioners, lotion, and makeup way easier than I can talk about sports and douchebaggy guy shit. I’d rather hang out with chicks. Other than you, of course. You have really long, pretty eyelashes, you know. When you wear black it looks nice becuase it accentuates them. See? I told you I could talk about chick shit.

16 Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? They try to control my life and steal my money. [Laughs] And they withhold their…sexual bounty. I just want the booty, and they want to withhold it! I feel like the least favorable things are the same with men. It hurts when you don’t get laid. And when I’m not with a woman, I’m alright, and when I’m with one, you’re waiting for them to call or text. I feel like a chick in a relationship most of the time. Super needy. I always date girls that really really like me. I’m too insecure to be with someone on equal footing. I have to have some kind of advantage. I’m trying to get over that, have a real relationship for the first time in my life. Trying to be happy alone. Still do get laid, though.

17 What should all women know that they never seem to? That an uncircumsized man is what they’re looking for. They need to understand that men have foreskin for the same reason they have pussy lips. If women didn’t have pussy lips, how much fun would they have?

18 What is your dream? I walk into a room and the water’s running in the sink. I’m like, why is the water running in the sink? I go into the bathroom. The floor starts sagging, and I think its gonna break through. I keep climbing up different ladders and I get up on the roof and the shingles keep slipping off. Finally I fall off the roof, but theres a tree next to it. I grab onto a branch and start walking on the tree limbs. And then I just take an elevator down. And usually I’m in a hotel crawling through catlike cavern spaces and end up in a warehouse or a building when I go up different floors and each has different art mediums. I get to the attic and it’s just this dusty room with boxes in it. I look inside of the boxes, and they have toys from childhood.

19 What is your best Portland story? I was staying in a hotel and needed to find a cheaper place to stay because I have to wait to get the house im moving into. I looked on craiglist and saw an ad for a garage/treehouse. So I responded to the ad, and the guy I’m subletting from is already out of town, but he says to just head over and someone should be there to show it to me later. I’m like, who? And he’s like, the girl who would show you doesnt have a phone right now. Then I’m like, who should I pay? He says to just leave the money in his room. This is kind of sketchy, but I go anyway. The guy who answers the door seems normal—über normal. And he shows me the room and I ask him about the house and he’s like, I don’t know, I just moved in yesterday. So I’m like, who lives here then? He says he doesn’t really know, he met the girl who runs the house yesterday once, briefly. Finally a chick comes home and I figure this must be her. I’m like, do you own this house? And shes like, no, I moved here a few minutes ago. So the three of us are sitting at the kitchen table. The guy that’s lived here the longest has only lived here one day. So I’m like: dude, I think were being punked. I think somebody’s got cameras set up all over the house and this is some weird reality show based on craigslist where nobody really lives here. So we literally started looking for cameras and hung out drinking, and it was weird coz we didnt know who fucking lived here. It went on for days like that, and we finally met the girl who lives here, and found out why its so weird – she almost runs it like a bed and breakfast or hostel, and kind of attracts and thrives off chaos. She just invites these people into the house who keep it interesting and crazy. It was a really great experience. Plus, I almost got laid that night, which was really nice. Except I didn’t have a condom. So I took the girl back home. When I got back, I looked in the drawer that was right next to the bed and it was full of condoms. Fucking twenty-five condoms in one drawer. But thats fine. I have a lot of notches on my bedpost and dont need anymore. I just want love. Or pimp juice.

20 Anything you’d like to hype or promote? I have a special place in my heart for the mentally ill. The brain itself is crazy. That’s the natural state of the brain. It never stops. Some people manage it better than others. But we should all sympathize with the insane person babbling in the street, because all of our brains are like that, somewhere, somehow. We’re just lucky that someone took care of us enough to be able to think straight and control our minds. I feel a lot of empathy towards that person on the street thats just fucking muttering insanity, you know? There needs to be a place for those people, besides the street or an institution. It’s hard to see in the world – all these people struggling with something they cant control and having…fucking just no suppot from our society, beyond hiding or incarcerating them. I wish there was some kind of public health that would help that group of people. That’s it. That’s my special thing that I care about. And cats. I like cats, too. Mental illness and cats, they go together.

Name + nickname: Michelle B. I went by Rain in Chicago, Camille in Oaklahoma, Michelle in Michigan. I’ve modeled for Suicide Girls, City Girls, a lot of different places. Chi Angelique Starr is my modelling name.

Age: 31

Hood: SE

Occupation: Two jobs: tropical fish and retail.

Hometown: Cheboygan, MI. It’s beautiful, but the people there suck. Most people I know from Northern Michigan are extremely rude and stuck up. Everywhere we go, if we’re from Michigan, people are like, “Oh, really? You’re a good worker.” It’s automatic. It’s fucking—and excuse my language—I think they’re the rudest, most arrogant motherfuckers who have ever lived.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: This little taco cart down the road. Michoacan.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Tom’s! I love my bartenders, man. I have over seven years bartending experience, so if I don’t like my bartenders, I will not go there. I’ve been to a million goddamn bars in this city. Tom’s? Day and night.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? As in, what’s up to date? What’s fashionable? Isn’t that based in how you feel comfortable? “Fashion,” quote unquote, to me, is all these people wearing weird gear, weird hats, and all these things they’re trying to make popular. Then you have people who wear what’s comfortable, what makes them happy. I think happy is fashionable.

Pet peeve: Messiness, rudeness, arrogance, disrespect. You respect me, I’ll respect you, and if you disrespect me, I don’t care, I’ll disrespect you back. I don’t care if you’re the Pope, Santa Claus, or freaking Jesus. I’m the most moralistic…my parents raised me very well. I have extremely high morals, high respect.

Guilty pleasure: Muscle. Not a lot, but tone-ness. And I like tummies. Muscle, tummies, and tacos.

If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? I would ask for no more child abuse.

Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? Seeing through a blind man’s eyes. Hear through a deaf man’s ears. Live life like a dying man would.

Were you cool in school? No.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Nowhere!

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? They can lift heavy shit!

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Penis. They just weird me out. They just kinda hang there. Most guys are not very hygenic.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? Compassion and less male arrogance.

What is your dream? To be happy. Even though I am happy, that’s my dream.

What is your best Portland story? Negative or positive? Both. At 6 am I was downtown. This happens a lot—I attract a lot of crazy people—people crazier than I am, which is hard to come by! The crazier they are, the more I attract them. Anyway, I’m going to work, minding my own business. And I come out of the store, cigarettes in one hand, coffee in the other, and this chick looks at me and starts calling me satan! She really thinks I’m the goddamn devil. What does she look like? This crazy little old black woman, I don’t know. That was a negative one. So, for the positive one, my wife and I just moved here, and we meet this kid. Cute as hell. He looks like a goddamn fucking goldmine to me. I’m sorry, I can sell you your own shirt for five dollars more than you paid for it, with the button missing, off your own back. I can sell you the piece of paper you’re writing on. I felt like I could make a mint off him. But I’m married. The wife didn’t want me to be a pimp. But he wanted me to sell him! He was fucking cute! I coulda made a fortune off this kid! That’s probably one of the best positive Portland stories I have. How old? I dunno, he looked like maybe 24 or 25.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Let’s use Portland as a promotion. It has something for everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you believe in, what you think, what you do, it doesn’t matter. I’ve lived in almost every state in the US, I’ve lived in Germany, I’ve lived everywhere, and Portland is the friendliest city I’ve ever been to, and I absolutely love it. I don’t ever go back to anywhere, but I came back here. I think it’s the most homeless-friendly city that ever was, is, or could be, and if you have the goddamn vocals to talk, you have the help—anything and everything you need. Portland can give you your poetry, your drinking, your stripclubs—god knows, it’s the highest per capita in the whole United States. All you have to do is open your mouth. Open your mouth and it will happen. Portland will help you. I’ve never experienced such…individualism. You have it all here. Diversity is the main thing of life. Here is my promotion: live life like a blind man. If you don’t look with your eyes, and you only look with your heart, Portland has everything you need. Period. This is Michelle speaking. Have a great night.

Name + nickname: Hyonam “Huey” N.

Age: 24

Hood: NW. It’s worth the cost.

Occupation: Restaurant manager

Hometown: I was born in LA, lived in San Diego, but for most of my life, this has been my home.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Korean food at my mom’s house. All day, every day.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: O’Brien’s, and east China town, on 3rd and Everett. My friend, Chris Dudley, DJs there.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I’d go, like, 7 or 8. I dress nice, and I’m always clean, but I’m always working, so it’s never anything crazy.

Pet peeve: People who truly believe that the customer is always right. They feel like they have the right to do whatever they want. If we get an order wrong, I don’t care, I’ll give it to you, just ask politely, but if you give me attitude, it’s another story. They’re like, I wanna talk to the manager, and I’m like, I am the manager. Then they’re like, I wanna talk to the owner, and I’m like, “Dad! Come over here!” [laughs] And he’s even worse!

Guilty pleasure: Cigarettes. There are days when it’s like, 10, 15. I work six days a week, sixty hours a week. I just have Tuesdays off, and on my days off, I have no desire to smoke. They keep me from not strangling my servers and customers. So I blame my dad.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? Just another job. My major was in construction engineering management, but I’ve been in restaurants for a year and a half now. A job in construction. Hire me. Save me. Please.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? I’m into house and dubstep musisc right now. Everyone loves Deadmau5, but right now I’m a big Scrillex and Laid Back Luke fan. I love SoundCloud.

Were you cool in school? I was…yeah. I didn’t have a problem with anyone, and our high school never had any cliques, really. There were preps, jocks, AP classes people, but I was friends with everyone, never on anyone’s bad side.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? The Wild West. Honestly, like, I feel like the whole idea of, if someone pisses you off, you don’t have to shrug it off. You can be like, I’ll see you tomorrow, high noon. You’re on horses, you get a rifle, you get a six shooter. You drink every day. C’mon!

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Legs. I just love. Legs. I’m a leg man.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Sophomore year of college, my roommates and I figured this out. Every girl is crazy. There’s different levels of craziness, but they’re all crazy. There’s a level you can deal with. There’s also an acronym we came up with. SAF: Sketch As Fuck. Women lie so much more than men, about little things. Guys are trying to hide a body, where girls are just nit-picky liars. It can be as simple as, what are you up to today? They’re like, I’m gonna sit at home, do nothing. Then you see them out and about downtown. Just be forward! I don’t care!

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? Women call guys dogs. But dogs are loyal. Treat a guy right, and we’re gonna be so loyal, and we’re gonna do everything right. But their craziness, their sketchiness, is gonna cause us to lie about the body in the trunk.

What is your dream? To live a simple life, be able to provide for my family, keep my family happy and well-off, and whenever I find the right girl, to just be able to be the provider. My mom doesn’t work and my dad does, and he’s able to provide everything for us. So my dream is to be like my dad. But to work less hours, and hopefully not in a restaurant. Everyone else in my family is artistic, but I want a 9 – 5. I need structure.

What is your best Portland story? My friend—somehow, we left him alone for the entire summer. He got the idea that he was fat. He’s 6’5, weighs 225. After the summer ends, we come down, and he’s like 165 pounds. One weekend, we were drinking, and his tolerance is way down, because he lost all that weight. We’re at this bar. I know the bouncers. One comes up, tapes me on the shoulder, and tells me I need to get my roommate out. I ask why. He just sighs, and beckons for me to follow him. We go to the back part of the bar, on the dance floor, and my friend is on the ground—and this is the grimiest dance floor in the entire world—doing snow angels on the ground. I’m trying to carry him out, but he’s six-five. My friends and I take him out, and he’s dragging his feet down the stairs. He wants to eat. We take him to Pita Pit. He’s standing in line, just lumbering, swaying. The cashier needs seven dollars. He doesn’t have his wallet on him, so he looks at the cashier with total seriousness, hands him his cell phone, and says, “Take it. It’s a good deal. Just take it.” I’m trying to pay the guy with my own money, but my friend insists. The guy just takes the cellphone to appease my friend, and I go around and secretly give him money and take the cellphone back. He hates onions and olives, and he asks for extra onions and olives. We walk outside, and he just immediately chucks the pita. He falls on the lawn outside, and we just leave him there and call his dad to pick him up. We get in the car and my friend tells him, hey man, if you need to throw up, just let us know. Don’t throw up in the car, OK? And he’s like, “I need to. I need to.” We roll down the window, and he sticks his head out the window and, [in a mocking, languorous fashion], just goes “blehhh.” Nothing comes out. Just this ridiculous sound. We get back to our house. I’m changing to go to bed, and he’s in the living room, fully dressed above his waist, even wearing a jacket. But he throws his blanket off from where he’s sleeping on the couch, and is wearing no pants. He’s groaning like the giant he is, proceeds to drop his boxers, and is eyeing the ficus in the corner. He goes to pee on it, and my roommate doesn’t stop him, because he’s worried that if he bothers him mid-stream, he’ll turn and pee all over the floor or the couch. We wake up the next day, and my formerly drunken friend is furious, demanding to know who created this legitimate puddle in the ficus plant. And we’re like, dude. That was you.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Sterling Roasters, the micro-roasters down the street.

1 Name + nickname: Leah “Lil’ Three Feet” H. Not “little,” but “lil.” This came to me in a vision when I was at a party one night. My friends told me I needed a gangster name, and that’s what I came up with. And it became my Country Fair and Burning Man name.

2 Age: 25

3 Hood: SW

4 Occupation: Sexual health educator.

5 Hometown: Portland.

6 Favorite place to eat in PDX: Pok Pok.

7 Favorite place to drink in PDX: I don’t care that much about drinking. I think it matters more who you’re with and the attitude of the group of people you’re with. You could be anywhere with lame people and it would still suck.

8 How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Okay, I’m gonna say, for Portland standards, an 8. Portland’s not a very fashionable city. Really? Is it bad that I say that? My mom’s from New York, and I spend a lot of time there, and my dad’s from California, so I think about that whole fashion scene, too. There’s a hipster scene here that’s pretty fashionable, but from a high fashion perspective, compared to New York or California, it doesn’t compare. So, for myself, I’d say about an 8.

9 Pet peeve: I try to be as tolerant as I can. I know that’s totally a Portland answer, but I try to be as tolerant as I can. I don’t have anything that sticks in my mind. It’s usually like, “I can handle this.” So no pet peeves.

10 Guilty pleasure: I love candy, so much. I can’t go a day without eating a piece of candy. Any meal that I have, I have to follow it with a sweet piece of candy. A piece of chocolate, a piece of licorice, a Sour Patch Kid or five.

11 If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? To have a job that I love and sends me around the world. With some free time to explore these places I’m going to. And maybe being able to bring a loved one with me when I go.

12 Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? I’m Jewish, so I’m trying to come up with something Jewish to drop upon the Portland population. Every few months, people say I’m the first Jewish person they’ve ever met. I wish I could give the best bagel recommendation in Portland. Kettleman’s is good. According to my mother, bagels are pretty new to Portland within the last thirty years. Just eat bagels. They’re good. With schmear and lox. And challah at New Seasons is delicious! It is warm, and it is doughy, and it is good. We ate a whole loaf last night. And go to summer camp. If you’re Jewish, it’s fun. Camp Solomon Schechter!

13 Were you cool in high school? I was a princess my junior year. How? Like, at a dance. I was voted a princess at homecoming. I was kind of like the anti-cool person. I did not hang with the cool people—I think I could have, but I didn’t really care to. I had a boyfriend, and we were cool to one another. Our plan didn’t really involve other people.

14 If you had a time machine, where would you go? I would go back to the 1960s and be a raging feminist. And I would try to go back and see my mother, who makes herself sound like she was really cool and politically active. I wanna see if that’s true. I love my mother. She doesn’t believe in the west coast hippies. She thought they just did acid and wore flowers in their hair, and the east coast hippies smoked pot and were very politically active. I’d love to be a mover and shaker in the 1960s, and really explore that movement away from the 1950’s housewife into this free, expressive, saucy-woman period.

15 Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Okay, one thing I do like is that boys are pretty drama free. Or at least they like to pretend they are, at least in the sense that they don’t express themselves and create drama. As a whole, and as a gender, they don’t like to cause a whole lot of drama if they can prevent it, and I appreciate that.

16 Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? They can be emotionally disconnected and unintelligent.

17 What should all men know that they never seem to? A woman’s not necessarily trying to spend the rest of her life with you; she’s just trying to really experience a deep and rich life and connection. Just open up and let it ride, enjoy the experience of being with that person and don’t try to read too much into the future, and what this and that implies. Let it ride.

18 What is your dream? To be passionate, and full of love in every aspect of my life.

19 What is your best PDX story? On my 25th birthday, we went to Darcelle’s, and I had a birthday list. Things I had to do. Like, pretend it’s your 21st birthday, get on stage with Darcelle at some point, and get spanked by a drag queen. When they went around and asked whose birthday it was—and there were about 18 people with us, including my parents—and I stood up and told everyone, “It’s my 21st birthday, and I’m so excited, because this is my first drink ever!”  My parents were so embarrassed. Later, as the night progressed, I realized I had two things left to accomplish. So I ran on stage at the point where he..she brings all of the bachelorettes on stage, and I go up on stage, too. Darcel is looking at me like, “What the hell are you doing on stage? You’re not a bachelorette.” Just by the way she was looking at me, I could sense it—my God, I’m about to get beat up by a drag queen! So, I said to her later, “No, this is on my birthday list, I have to do this!” She clearly wanted me off stage, so I asked her, “Is this OK? She goes, “No. Stay.” She turns to her bachelorettes and I’m like, three feet from center stage and clearly not welcome. Eventually I asked her to spank me, and she goes “NO!” and sends me off the stage. The end! That was my experience, and it was fabulous.

20 Anything you’d like to hype or promote? My really good friends are in a band, Just People.

Name + nickname: Homer J.

Age: 28.

Hood: NE

Occupation: I am an artist, a singer-songwriter, dishwasher, writer.

Hometown: St. John’s, Portland.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: I like eating indoors. At people’s houses, when we make food, that’s really nice. I don’t generally spend money on, like, pre-made food cooked however many hours ago, but I do spend too much money here at Sizzle Pie.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Once again, outdoors. I don’t go to bars, really. It’s a waste of money.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I’d give myself a seven.

Pet peeve: Oh, god. I hate when people don’t roll the toothpaste tube from the bottom and squeeze randomly. When people don’t clean up after themselves but complain about not having a clean house. Know what else chaps my hide? Pretentious writers.

Guilty pleasure: Sodomy. [Maniacal laughter]

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? To sodomize. No. Everlasting youth and strength.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? I listen to a lot of music, but from 91 to now, suicidal depression music. It’s gone from hip hop to classical to country, and I can’t wait till it hits reggae, coz I fucking hate reggae. Black metal. Suicidal depression. If you wanna die, you should listen to it.

Were you cool in school? No! I’m popular now, I guess, but middle school to high school, people didn’t accept me.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? The time before man! If this age existed, the age of might and magic. Hundreds and thousands of years before humans, but think Lord of the Rings, before there were races. Sorcery, and all that bullshit that made sparks and killed things. Are you gonna quote me on this? That’s hilarious!

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Sides. The curvature of the female body is amazing. It’s like fruit. And I like fruit.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? The fact that they don’t talk the same way as most people I know. Implied words, instead of saying what they mean. Deciphering what they have to say, while they take my shit apart and hearing the exact opposite of what I mean.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? Don’t carry your baggage on to the next relationship.

What is your dream? To be part of armageddon. To destroy the world and make it better. Decimation, in other words.

What is your best Portland story? When I was 14 years old and a runaway, I always loved hallucinogens. There’s something about mind expansion and just tripping the fuck out. I was on roughly sixteen to twenty hits of LSD. This is when LSD was actually around—now there are a lot of synthetics around that pass as LSD, research chemicals that are legal to sell, and people push it off as LSD. Anyway, I was wearing this dirty white t-shirt. I ran away from home while at church so, like, I was in my church clothes, and dressed rather nicely, but dirty, from sleeping outside. I was wearing a plastic gold sheriff’s badge and had a potato that somehow managed to fall into a glass and make a perfect smiley face, and had this two natural eyes. And I got sent to the 7-11 in St. John’s to get change for the laundromat next to my friend’s house, and me, my potato, my dirty shirt, and my badge go to 7-11, and I asked the cashier with a totally straight face if my potato could get some change. And he hands the change to the potato. Next, we’re walking across the street, and I see a homeless man pushing a shopping cart and mumbling to himself. I said, “Hey, mister, doesn’t this potato look happy to you?” And he had the nerve to tell me I was fucked up. That I was on acid. Which, ironically, I was. That story has always stuck with me. A homeless man calling me crazy, and pointing out specifically why, as he’s mumbling to himself. Ah, life. Life in Portland.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? There’s a local writing scene at Eraserhead Press. They do bizarre, quote unquote, stuff. Very avant garde. If you’ve got a sense of humor, are dark, or just plain fucked up, you’ll love it.

Name + nickname: Kellie B.

Age: I’m over 40. That’s all you’re gonna get.

Hood: Beaverton

Occupation: Event planning.

Hometown: I was born in Iowa, and came here from Idaho, but have lived in Portland long enough for it to be.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: SanSai Sushi.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: O’Connor’s Restaurant.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I want to say a 10, but I dress too young sometimes, so I’ll give myself an 8.

Pet peeve: Men who do not show common courtesy—opening doors, knocking into you up the stairs.

Guilty pleasure: Dancing. I don’t dance in Portland, but I dance in other places when I travel, and it’s kind of guilty looking. Kind of crazy dancing. I don’t even need a dance floor. So, dirty dancing in spaces that aren’t even dance floors. When I dance here, I feel old. Clubs here, of course, are catered to young kids. In other places, you feel like everybody else.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? I would ask for a happier second half of my life. The ability to do more things, spend more time with my son.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? Hipstamatic, on my iPhone. I’ve gone from using a nice digital camera to using this. It’s kind of my obsession right now.

Were you cool in school? No, I was not. In high school I was very quiet. I had friends in different groups, but was very shy. I broke out a bit in college, but was still low-key.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? To ancient Rome. A couple years ago I was on sabbatical, and went there for a month, and I just thought it was amazing. Everything is so old, and you’re walking on the stones that they walked on that long ago. It’d be nice to see where all of this stuff came from back then.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Arms. Muscles, not tattoos.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? They lie a lot. They like to cover shit up to not tell you the truth, just so they can get what they want. They try to pull the wool over women’s eyes, and they get caught a lot. Even my son tries to do this!

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? That women are not as dumb as they think. Women are smart, we can figure things out.

What is your dream? I hope one day to be able to travel, write, and be creative.

What is your best Portland story? A couple of years ago, I would be traveling and my son, while in high school, would stay home. He could take care of himself. He wouldn’t have parties, but I would always find condom wrappers laying around. He would claim that he didn’t know whose they were. Anyway, we adopted an older beagle, and she goes into my son’s room, scratching around. I go into his room, and she had gotten into his garbage, and there were used condoms all over my son’s floor. And, she was eating them. We’ve never had a problem since. Thanks, son, for using condoms.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? I just got a new tattoo, or the second phase of my tattoo. So I’ll recommend The Little Tattoo Shop on Fremont. They did a great job.

1 Name + nickname: Nicholas “Baby Jesus” T.

2 Age: 21

3 Hood: SE

4 Occupation: Marijuana connisseur. An entreprenuer of everything. Comfortability is my main concern, all throughout life. Let’s make a comfortable environment for everybody. I like to think of myself as a vampirate.

5 Hometown: Nevada County, CA. Did you know that Erowid started there? It was named Nevada before the state, and the county lines are shaped like a gun pointing towards Nevada for stealing the city’s name. Like, 85% of the gold from California came from my county. It’s the beginning of the Sierra foothills. It’s where the West started. We have the oldest operating bar west of the Mississippi.

6 Favorite restaurant: I haven’t eaten here, but there’s this little guy from Brazil and he’s got the dreadlocks, the rasta…thing, it’s this little stand right on Hawthorne, and it looks good. And Nick’s…Cajun Cooking or something.

7 Favorite bar: I haven’t drank anywhere here.

8 How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? A 10.  

9 Pet peeve: People talking about stuff, and complaining about people who talk about stuff, without doing stuff. I’m like, shut the fuck up and start doing shit!

10 Guilty pleasure: Oooh…indulging in manifesting. Why is that guilty? Sometimes you can manifest too much. Everything in moderation – even moderation. Manifesting—I change my reality, and I change reality for other people. Thought is very powerful, so you can change your environment, and I should just leave it as-is.

11 If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? Complete control of quantum mechanics. Of probability, of possibility. Why? Because then you could do anything. I wanna be the one rolling the dice.

12 Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? The Celestine Prophecy, The Tao of Pooh (that’s is T-A-O), the I-Ching, the Angelic Dictionary, and the Bhagavad Gita.

13 Were you cool in high school? I wasn’t super cool in school, I did my own thing, I didn’t really have a clique, I was just kinda with everybody. Yeah, I was cool in school.

14 If you had a time machine, where would you go? I would go to where the vedas first started to teach people. They’re the people who made sanskrit.

15 Favorite thing about the opposite sex? There are so many things with the opposite sex that you cannot do with the same sex. So many good things. There’s so much potentiality for a relationship with the opposite sex, way more, I believe, than you can have with the same sex. You’re different reflections of one another. I believe that we’re all dust. And if you think about it, if we’re all dust, then we’re one giant crystal. Humans are the most complex biological living crystal there is, and we have all these different facets, and we shine light into one another’s facets. We’re like a diamond, with an infinite amount of facets. We shine that light into each others’ crystals and that light shines back. And then we learn things. When you get down to it, everything is a vibrating string. Did you know they found the unified theory of everything? They unified quantum mechanics and the theory of relavitity. When? ‘Bout two years ago. It was turning into like seven theories. They thought there were nine dimensions. But they found it was just a permutation of the same theory. So they made the TOE – theory of everything. We can theortically make universes that will occupy their own dimensions and time and we won’t even notice them.

16 Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? How girls nowadays don’t really care about chivalry. It’s like, “Cool! You’re self-sufficient! I’m self-sufficient, too! Let’s be self-sufficient together!” You know what I mean? You don’t have to do everything on your own. I can help you. I’m accepting your help, now please accept mine, you know?

17 What should all women know that they never seem to? They can have poor senses of self. And even if you marry them, there’s a piece of them that they won’t let you see. I have that too! You know, I’m a gemini, I have a real strong core. There’s some things that they won’t show. And everyone needs to have that. I don’t know what they know.

18 What is your dream? To be an international businessman, sailing on a boat. I want to sell weed up the coast of Oregon, California, and Washington, just sailing. I’m from California, man. That shit is a flower to me.

19 What is your best PDX story? I went to a Shpongle after-party. I didn’t go to the concert, just the after-party. Ended up getting taken home by a kind-of merry prankster, and he gave me some good shit. I’ve just been spreadin’ the love of what he gave me to everybody else. It’s amazing.

20 Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Have you heard of Timewave Zero? By Terrence McKenna. He studied the I-Ching! And Timothy Leary. He’s the one floating around in the satellite around the earth.

Name + nickname: Cheryl C.

Age: 56

Hood: Milwaukie

Occupation: I’m a Telephone tech.

Hometown: Wichita, KS

Favorite place to eat in PDX: I like the food at Chipotle.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Tube. [Laughter] Dive bar par excellénce. I’m not sure if it’s my favorite, but they have a two dollar well. No, that’s not my favorite. It doesn’t really matter.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Me? Probably maybe a five.

Pet peeve: Rude drivers.

Guilty pleasure: Staying up really late. Too late. Like, four or five, even if I have to get up the next day.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? I would love to live in the mountains, or someplace like Montana. Under big sky.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? Dance music. Electronica.

Were you cool in school? No. I was just an outsider. Not in the cool crowd.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? I would go to 12th century England and Scotland, just to visit. I love that era. I don’t know that I’d love to live there, though, especially as a female.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? I can appreciate a well-built guy. From a distance.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Everything else. I like the body, but everything else…[laughter]

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? That they are not gods.

What is your dream? I’d like to be able to live in a place with, of course, plenty of money, plenty of friends around. In a beautiful place, of course.

What is your best Portland story? Nothing comes to mind.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? No.

1 Name + nickname: Duane “Superman” P. Jr.

2 Age: 24

3 Hood: Beaverton 

4 Occupation: I work for Nike, and play running back and linebacker for the Portland Raiders.

5 Hometown: Kansas City, MO

6 Favorite place to eat in PDX: Rock Bottom.

7 Favorite place to drink in PDX: Bar 15.

8 How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I’ll say 9.

9 Pet peeve: Assumption. You know, it makes an ass out of u and me.

10 Guilty pleasure: Women! I’m attracted to women. Women get me in trouble. Good trouble. You meet me, you’ll have a good time. You got a boyfriend, you don’t wanna meet me.

11 If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? Peace. World peace.

12 Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? Music. All music.

13 Were you cool in high school? Yep. Let’s just say I know a lot of people.

14 If you had a time machine, where would you go? The 1400s. Rome.

15 Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Hoo! Eyes!

16 Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Complaining. Bitching! For no reason, sometimes.

17 What should all women know that they never seem to? Know men. Know more about men. All around.

18 What is your dream? To be famous!

19 What is your best Portland story? Putting a guy to sleep! I was downtown one night with some of my friends, and there was a guy and chick sitting on a ledge by a parking garage. The girl was not smiling at all, so I walked by and was like, “Smile!” And the dude next to her says something to me. I stopped, walked backwards, and was like, “What’d you say? I just gave the girl a compliment. You should use it. If you have a girl next to you and she’s not smiling, you’d better brighten up her day.” So he says something. Called me a bitch or whatever. How big? Six one, six two. A little bigger than me. Words were exchanged. I was like, “Don’t get beat up and I take your girl.” The girl’s like, “That’s not my man!” And he’s like, “That’s not my girl.” So I’m like, “Ok, this is a great reason for you to get beat up and me take this girl.” He started slapping at my face, smiling. He stood up. I’m like, oh, this guy’s ready. So I took off my shirt, coz I was wearing some letters from my fraternity. I was at an angle and let it fly. He woke up ten minutes later, all like, “Where am I?” There was a cop on the corner, but he didn’t see, so I didn’t get in trouble. Then I just, you know, went about my business!

20 Anything you’d like to hype or promote? 503 Mixers. It’s my rap group. We have no website, but have been doing shows, trying to get our name out there.

Name + nickname: Ellie O.

Age: 18

Hood: SW

Occupation: I work at Urban.

Hometown: I was borne in Melbourne Australia, raised in Istanbul, Turkey, moved to Virginia when I was five. Then I fell in love with Portland because I was researching Elliot Smith’s lifestyle, and moved here because of it.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Dorio, this little Greek place. It’s homey. It reminds me of Turkey.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Camelia Tea Zone.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I guess an eight. I enjoy myself, the way I look, so an 8.

Pet peeve: People who are kind to your face and then talk about you. Backstabbers.

Guilty pleasure: I watch Sesame Street still. I watch it online. I don’t care, it’s cute. Whatever! I’m still a child at heart, I don’t care. I watch The Magic Schoolbus, too.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? To visit Cyprus once in your life. That’s where I’m originally from.

Were you cool in school? No! I was really nerdy. I wore big glasses and cat sweaters, and everyone else wore Abercrombie.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? I would go to the 1959 Oscars and meet Audrey Hepburn. She’s my idol.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Eyes.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Really weird hands. And creepy disposition. I don’t want people breathing down my neck like the guy in Hey, Arnold.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? To keep your word.

What is your dream? I wanna be a photographer and have my own gallery one day in Paris.

What is your best Portland story? Meeting my best friend. She sat next to me at orientation. I came here knowing no one, after having my heart broken in Virginia. I saw her and we just became best friends instantly. It’s the best thing to happen to me here, honestly. Same issues and life problems, same childhoods, same place in our lives. Everything happened to us at the same time, it’s just really weird.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Buy my friend’s feathered hair extensions.

Name + nickname: Kevin “The Darkness” B.

Age: 26

Hood: NW

Occupation: Construction.

Hometown: Portland.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: I eat at the little taco stand at 3rd and Stark all the time. At, like, three in the morning.  

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Holocyne. It’s a great dance spot, plus it’s right next to Sassy’s. I would go to Sassy’s even if there was no one stripping there.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Oh, zero.

Pet peeve: Needles.

Guilty pleasure: Jersey Shore.  

If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? To reach into my pocket and pull out whatever amount of money I wanted at the time.

Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? Leaves of Grass. It’s an Edward Norton movie. He’s a philosophy professor and gets a call from his estranged identical brother—also played by Norton—and his brother is from back home, some backwoods Alabama small town or something. His brother says that mom died or something. The brother is a weed grower and is in some sort of trouble, and wants to use his other brother. He wants his brother to walk in, see his mom, and walk by this cop, so he has an alibi. And the whole thing turns into…it’s one of those movies where you see each part building. It’s amazing how low key this movie went out, maybe four years ago. It didn’t get the attention it deserved.

Were you cool in high school? Umm…no. Very uncool, actually. I got cooler in college! In high school, I was really into computers and webpages. And then I lost my virginity. Pretty huge [laughs]. I became much cooler then, started going out more.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Probably the 70s. The coolest cars, and the attitude seems right.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? They’re so sexy! Don’t know how to break that down. I’m just trying to dig deeper than boobs, you know? Boobs are always just doing something, they’re showing a little more, then they cover up [laughs]. This sounds like such a perverted answer.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? They think that everything means something.

What should all women know that they never seem to? Girls never know when they’re hot. They never think they’re hot enough, and they usually are, you know, extremely hot!

What is your dream? To find a way to make money…being a successful writer. I’m working on a book, called To Survive. There’s a group of three guys. They’re hiking, and they run into this guy coming down the mountain. He’s like, “Guys, I think my friend’s dying, and he needs help.” One of the group happens to be a paramedic. They run up there, and the messenger thought he waited long enough for his friend to die, but when they get there and puts a little bit more life into him, he’s like, “My friend tried to kill me.” Everyone’s like, shit! And they turn around and the dude pulls a revolver, blasts two of them. The protagonist jumps down a chute, it’s all fucked up. Where’d the idea come from? A dream. I was being chased in the snow, and in the dream I was like, how the fuck do I make my footprints disappear? And I woke up that morning, wrote down all the ideas I had, and went from there.

What is your best Portland story? Shit. One night one of my friends went outside the bar—the Goodfoot—and started paying girls to kick my other friend in the balls. It became this war of money. “$5 to get him in the nuts!” There were two chicks, but one in particular really became an entreprenuer. “5 bucks. I’ll get him in the ball for you guys.” So everyone’s paying little assassins to nut-kick each other.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? West Portland Boxing. It’s a boxing club I go to. Even if you’re not serious, or want to fight people, you can go Tuesday or Thursday. It’s a good workout, learn to protect yourself. It’s cheap: $50 for the year, then $15 a month. They’re not making money off of it, but they get people into boxing, and all the money goes to the kids who are doing this for real, travel expenses and stuff.

Name + nickname: Lisa “Sugar Cookie” S.

Age: 40

Hood: Goose Hollow

Occupation: Healthcare provider.

Hometown: Corvallis, OR

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Pok Pok.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Beer festivals.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I’m gonna say a 6.

Pet peeve: Spitting.

Guilty pleasure: I don’t think there are any guilty pleasures. If you take pleasure in it, you should just do it.

If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? Thick, curly hair. I could say world peace, but c’mon, really?

Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? Go see “The Allure of the Automobile” at the Portland Art Museum.

Were you cool in high school? I was a jock and alternative, so I kind of knew a little bit of everybody.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? The 1950s, so I could get a 50’s convertible Thunderbird.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? A deep voice.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? How honest can you be? Stinky balls.

What should all men know that they never seem to? Give your girlfriend hugs if she’s freaking out. The freakout will pass.

What is your dream? To travel the world.

What is your best Portland story? Oh, good lord. New Year’s Eve at Darcelle’s, dancing at Tube, and 20 po-po running down the street.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? The Portland Art Museum. People should be involved in the museums in their communities. That’s what it’s about. Museums should reflect their communities.

Name + nickname: Bruce C.

Age: 58

Hood: Burnside & 22nd area.

Occupation: Food service worker

Hometown: Burbank, CA. I left there when I was five. I could also say Laguna Beach, CA.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Ken’s Bakery.

Favorite bar: Never had to have a drink in 30 years.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Not fashionable. All Goodwill, all garage sales.

Pet peeve: War.

Guilty pleasure: Prolly masturbating.

If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? To be younger, more virile. More virility.

Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? The painting is the “Raft of the Medusa,” by Théodore Géricault. It’s a social commentary painting about the 1800s. To be brief, it’s about a shipwreck where the captain had to decide who would live and who would die, and the guys who were gonna die were all slaves. The captain put them on a raft and towed them behind, knowing they would die. Some of them lived, and they got back to Mauritania and ragged on the captain. It became a cause célèbre in the early 1800s. Who lives, and who dies? Whose life is worth something? It was about class struggle, and it was painted by this famous painter. They eventually wrote operas about it.

Were you cool in high school? No.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? I guess I’d go back to the birth of this country. 1770’s.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? I dunno, hair?

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Bitterness. I’m bitter, so if they’re bitter, it’s really horrible, you know what I mean? You don’t seem bitter! Well, I’m not. I’m here on the river and it’s sunny. But when you’re bitter and she’s bitter it’s like, aww, fuck! One of you’s gotta pull the other up. I hate it when women are turning 40 and complaining that they’re not getting laid. I don’t wanna hear it, because I don’t believe it. I don’t want that kind of baggage as a relationship. I don’t want those kinds of hangups; I have my own!

What should all women know that they never seem to? All females should know that life doesn’t end at 50 or 60. Sex, romance doesn’t die at 50. Or 60. Or any time. It just depends on where you’re at emotionally. People shouldn’t have preconceptions with things like this.

What is your dream? To just get on a bike and ride to Astoria. Wonderful place. And to have a lot of adventures along the way. I’m just gearing up to do this now.

What is your best PDX story? The death of the fire cheif 100 years ago this year. He died about two blocks from here, on Salmon and Water. He died June 236, 1911, fighting a fire at the Standard Oil of California facility. He was the only guy that died, and it’s a day to reflect not only on service, but on how serious life can be. That’s my favorite Portland story, because it’s the centennial.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? I would say, generically, check out all local artists, all local musicians, check out people like Surf Sauce. I just met her for the first time at a little concert. People are out there doing really good things on a local level and it’s not just raising food, but art. And I think that’s one virtue I hope that Portland has—you can network and find really good people.

Name + nickname: Hana C.

Age: 19

Hood: Rosa Parks

Occupation: Student, Beauty

Hometown: Vancouver. “The Couv.”

Favorite place to eat in PDX: I just now started to go to a lot of places. I really like Pita Pit. Love Pita Pit. Roxy.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: I really enjoy The Gold Rush, which is across the street from my school.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? 11. I like to stay up with the fashion, especially with school. 10. 9.

Pet peeve: Stupid people? There’s a lot. I don’t like people who can’t drive. Who can’t merge. Who don’t use their blinkers. So irritated. To think of the rest would take a long time.

Guilty pleasure: Girls. This one, over here.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? I’m already happy, so the ability to teleport. Go everywhere, see everything.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? I do really enjoy Hollywood & Dead, and dubstep—Flux Pavillion.

Were you cool in school? I’d say I was—I had a lot of friends. But I don’t like school in general.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Back when I was younger, so I could talk with my grandma more.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? The opposite sex? There really isn’t anything that I like. Conversation? I don’t particularly think of anything when they walk by.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? I don’t like when they hit on me. Especially when they don’t drop it and follow me.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? That women have feelings. They never seem to do that, and just see them as a [sings] hunk of meat!

What is your dream? To be successful in my career, which is beauty. I want to go somewhere big and do fun things.

What is your best Portland story? When I was intoxicated and hopping trains on Burnside Bridge. So much fun. If you go on that bridge, you know, the double-decker one, and run with them, you can ride until Union Station, hop off, and run back.

Name + nickname: Ryan S.

Age: 22

Hood: SE

Occupation: Actor

Hometown: Oak Park, CA

Favorite place to eat in PDX: The food carts at 34th and Belmont, because I go there all the time and am on first name basis with all of these people.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: The Morrison Hotel bar. It’s an actor’s bar.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? 10!

Pet peeve: Spreading violence and fear. And people who do it with their art, too. People who make art that’s not a cautionary tale…just senseless, gratuitous violence and fear, where the world is a hateful and dangerous place where we all die and hate each other. It irks me to the core.

Guilty pleasure: There’s nothing guilty about sex, right? Sex, food, and acting are my main pleasures, but I don’t feel guilty about them. My naturopathic doctor—I’m getting all pacific northwest in the two years I’ve been here, doing acupuncture and stuff—just told me I can’t eat dairy or sugar anymore. Ever. And I’m already a vegetarian, so now that I can’t eat this stuff after three years of being a vegetarian, I’m gonna go and eat a big, fat steak. And trying not to think of that poor cow, whose rights I’ve been defending for years.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? Salvador Mali’s is awesome. They have this five balls of fire challenge, where if you eat these five habanero fritters, they’ll put your picture on the wall. Each has two habaneros, plus sauce, so it’s like thirteen habaneros at once. My picture’s on that wall. I love spicy food. That’s another guilty pleasure: making Thai or Indian food cart vendors actually listen to me—no, not just extra spicy. Extra, extra spicy. And I want to do the naked bike ride next year, and the Sauvie Island nude beach. So generally the naked stuff around here.

Were you cool in school? It’s complicated, because I was the cool jester. The jester gets laughed at, but is a loved member of the whole. I was cool towards the end. The popular girls apologized to me, and on my birthday this year, a jock dude from my high school that was mean to me commented on my Facebook wall like, “Happy birthday dude, I’m so sorry, I was so mean to you in school, you’re like the funniest fucking kid I know.” Meant a lot to me! After getting suspended multiple times my senior year for cussing out the principal in my French class journal, and leading a school-wide protest against a new schoolwide roll-call system, the principal and I were on terms where if we say each other outside of school at, like, Starbuck’s, it’d be like: [Solemn nod] “Principal Block.” [Solemn nod] “Ryan.” “I can’t wait till you graduate.” “I can’t either.” Lots of glaring and nodding.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? The future. No telling where that’s gonna be. And a different planet. Out of curiosity. I have internal battles with nostalgia and romanticizing the past, like that new Woody Allen movie. So let’s go onwards.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? It’s tough. I don’t wanna be one of those guys who’s like, “Boobs!” But at the same time, I’m gonna say boobs. I need an asterisk or something in there that says, you know, “I am not a bro.”

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? There’s this stereotype that men are rational and women aren’t. I don’t think that’s the case. Not at all. But complete narrow-mindedness far and away from what I consider to be rational. Where you’re like, “That doesn’t even make sense!”

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? That slutty makes my penis go inward.

What is your dream? My dream is to be in major motion pictures and television as a iconic actor who is considered a brilliant artist. It’s lofty, but I truly believe that that’s my path.

What is your best Portland story? There are so many, especially with Craigslist acting gigs. Dressing up as Prince Charming with other actresses as Cinderella, Jasmine, Winnie the Pooh, and Mickey Mouse at a Red Lion Inn hotel grand ballroom. It was for the birthday party of two one year olds in a giant, rich, Greek family. They rolled in on a carriage which that later became ours. There were some planning inconsistencies in the carriage, and at one point they threw me a baton and had me lead this traditional Greek dance and a conga line. And one time I was paid to do the music for an art auction. It was themed as a “ridiculous” art auction, and I dressed in a top hat and a rainbow jacket, played the organ, slide whistle, buzzers, whizzers. Every time a bid went up, I had to play ridiculous carnival music, and if it didn’t pan out, a pathetic slide whistle. Finally, I dressed up as South American Jesus and had a camera crew follow me around as I interacted with people. I wore a pancho and wig, very deadpan and serious.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? I’ll promote myself, as an actor. And Switch, a sketch comedy show for the internet I’ve been working on.

Name + nickname: Deanna “DD” H.

Age: 21

Hood: SE

Occupation: Student, Hispanic Literature & Anthropology

Hometown: Long Island, NY. I don’t really like it that much. It’s like a crowded suburb with a lot of mean people on it. Natalie Portman went to my high school. I tell everyone that. It’s my one point of pride. My friend got her school-owned English textbook in class my senior year, but in the ledger inside the front cover, it was Natalie Hershlag, her real name.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: I Like Thai, the cart.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: House parties! And shows and stuff. Cranberry vodka.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Probably a six or a seven. People keep saying I look like a referee, so I’ll stick with six.

Pet peeve: I just got this iPhone recently, and am trying not to be that person who is looking at their phone when they should be paying attention to whoever they’re talking to.

Guilty pleasure: Dance Moms. It’s a TV show…on Lifetime [laughter]. About moms who make their kids do dance at a really young age.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? I just want to feel good about what I’m doing, whatever that may be. And a house that I didn’t have to pay utilities for. A small eco-friendly house. If I were five, my wish would be a treehouse. I always wanted that, and never got one.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? The Parking Lot movie. It’s a documentary about a corner parking lot in Charlottesville, VA, where a bunch of misfits and over-educated people work—like, people getting master’s in philosophy.

Were you cool in school? I think I wanted to be cool, and would hang out with the ska kids, go to ska shows, and skank at them. I wore a lot of black. I thought I was cool, but I wasn’t. I only had a small group of friends.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Beards. Because girls can’t grow beards.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Catcalls. I just came from Chile this semester, and it was disgusting. People would slow down their truck to make hissing noises at you. What pissed me off the most was how one-way this is—if girls did that to guys, they would like it! I hate that! How do you retaliate?

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? Girls will say that they feel fine, but they’re not telling the truth. And they expect the guy to get that, and understand that. But they never do. Look out for that.

What is your dream? I have dreams that my teeth fall out a lot. And I wake up and,  for a second, really think that my teeth are gone.

What is your best Portland story? Last year, on the first day of summer, this guy wanders into our driveway geocaching. But he didn’t say that at first. I went to go help him with it, and it ended up being a little toy under the stairs at the Hawthorne Cafe. He ended up being in town with his band, Flobots, who had that one big song about riding your bike with no handlebars, a huge hit in suburban America. So I went geocaching with the lead singer of Flobots, went to their show on the guest list, and left after they played that song.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Kelsey Morris. She’s a great musician from Portland, and we live with her sister.

Name + nickname: My name’s Jerry. My nickname was given to me in 2003: Crocodile Dundee, because of my facial features.

Age: I’m 58 years old. You look great! Thank you. What’s your mom look like? [laughter]

Hood: NW

Occupation: I’m an unpaid paralegal. I get people pointed in the right direction. And I’m a Vietnam Veteran.

Hometown: I was imported to Portland in the 70′s when the hippie movement was going on. I grew up in Chicago.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Vinny’s Hamburger Stand, right here in the square.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: I don’t drink alcohol. I’ve been weaned on Starbucks since I had my injury in Birmingham in 2008, so I like a lot of the coffee shops around here, but I go to Starbucks. They have a lot of good kids up there.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Five.

Pet peeve: Pervs. And what we call street urchins.

Guilty pleasure: I don’t have any. I made amends with those long ago.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? To buy my mom a house before she passed away.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? People need to get out and not lock themselves in their rooms, there’s a lot of stuff going on.

Were you cool in school?  No. I was a little guy, always small. Got bullied.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? I would go back to 1971, when I enlisted, and when I was married, still had my mom, wife, and family.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Everything. Personality, actually. The old days of free love are gone. That’s where the sexual revolution began, you know, in the 60′s, and everyone wants to be a 60′s child. But it’s not gonna happen. It was a phase, like disco, that came and went. Will something come through today? Women are more career-oriented. But women my age are gorgeous, to me, because they take good care of themselves. They work out, they’re more fun to be around. And I’m  very flirtatious with them, but very respectful, too.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? I think that’s the sixty-four million dollar question. Arguin’ and fightin’–sometimes you say and do things that you can’t take back.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? Most women have been great to me, but I blew a lot of relationships when I was young, not wanting to settle down. Nowadays, I have regrets because I’ve watched so many women out of my life over the years and now don’t have one in my life.

What is your dream? To survive every day.

What is your best Portland story? When I first came to Portland in 78, before all of this was here, there was this park that my girlfriend and I used to come to all the time. One night, we had a party at my house, but of course no one brought any weed. So everyone went to the park to get some. At that time, you could buy a joint for fifty cents. I bought four. I stuck one behind my ear, and the others in my pocket. I passed it to my friend, and he passed it back. As I was passing it back the second time, a hand from nowhere came and snatched it from me. It was an undercover police officer, and he wrote me a ticket. My friend LeRoy was carted off to jail, and this guy wrote me a citation. When I went in to court, I had $100 in my pocket for the fine. But when I walked up to the judge, he said mister, we want to thank you for being here today. There’s no trial. This is pardoned. You’re free to go. That’s my happiest Portland moment.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Street Roots Magazine. I volunteered and bought papers from them for six years. I had a bad ending with them, and am going through a grieving process with that, but most of the people over there are pretty good.

Name + nickname: Erica “Puke Baby” C. Why?  I used to throw up a lot! Like, when you were a baby? When I was a baby. And when I ate gluten.

Age: 23

Hood: Mississippi 

Occupation: Nanny. For two boys. And I’m playing with various creative talents. Lately I’ve been making neck wraps.

Hometown: Reno, NV

Favorite place to eat in PDX: My kitchen. With my best friend, Madeline. We have…kitchen magic. Every meal we make together is amazing. We have similar dietary needs. We just made the best Fourth of July meal ever. Gluten-free fried chicken wings, kale salad, sausages, potatoes of some kind. We made a really good pizza on an anti-inflammatory diet—no tomatoes, no dairy, no wheat. Homemade pesto.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Liberty Glass. It’s in this funky house.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I don’t know. I don’t consider myself fashionable. I just buy things that I like, and that feel nice. I really like colors, that’s all. It doesn’t feel like I try at it—you know how people really strive toward things? I don’t go shopping that much, or even have that many clothes. I don’t want to be fashionable.

Pet peeve: I don’t really have one. A lot of people say shitty drivers. Yeah. That’s probably the only thing that gets me worked up. Especially after this car wreck. Whose fault? Mine. It sucks. It’s embarrassing.

Guilty pleasure: Coffee, and combining words.

Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? I just bought this book, The Subtle Body. It’s about any energetic body thing you could ever want to know about. This hippy Portland stuff…meridian and acupuncture points. I was recently in a car accident and had all of this residual tension. I got acupuncture, and now I have these gold seeds taped in my ear because the needles in my ear were making my ears feel gigantic. Like an elephant.

Were you cool in high school? No. I guess in pretty typical fashion I didn’t like high school, didn’t have many friends, and people thought I was a weirdo. I was pretty unfriendly, I think. Pretty shy.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? The 20’s in America. It seems really similar to the economic situation that’s happening right now. And the whole flapper thing.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? They have different perspective. They experience the world in a way that women don’t. And firemen. So fine. They save little kitties.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Where did you come up with these questions? From chain “survey” emails I received from my female classmates in seventh grade. Oh, you weren’t kidding! I try not to have least favorite things about people. Lack of talking. But I hate generalizing.

What should all women know that they never seem to? That girls aren’t crazy. And that a bad experience with someone doesn’t mean they’re psycho.

What is your dream? To be a really good whistler. Whistling: a hard skill. I can’t think of a better answer right now.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Being gluten free!

Name + nickname: Greg “Hazard” B.

Age: 22

Hood: NE

Occupation: I make sunglasses out of wood.

Hometown: Boston, MA

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Muchos Gracias.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Muchos Gracias.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Like a 7.

Pet peeve: Reading a Kindle on the bus.

Guilty pleasure: Shitty cop TV shows.

If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? To be a pimp.

Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? Take everything Gary Busey says more seriously. Guy’s a genius.

Were you cool in high school? Nah.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? 1990. Why? Fuckin’ gangsta rap.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Boobs.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Pssht…mixed signals.

What should all women know that they never seem to? That I’m really good in bed.

What is your dream? Ta like…have the end of the world happen, and like me be one of the survivors and like loot a bunch of shit and live off the fat of the land. Wouldn’t that be cool?

What is your best Portland story? Okay, so: I broke my ankle skateboarding and had to get five screws in my ankle. So I went, had surgery done, and went to see if I needed phsyical therapy or whatever. I was sitting in the waiting room waiting for the doctor, and Greg Oden walks past me. I’m like, damn, that fool’s super big. Then I realized it was Greg Oden. He turns around and walks out, and his shirt says, “Part-time athlete…Full-time player.” And I was like, “More like: no-time athlete.”

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Check out my Tumbr. [Giggles all around]. Shameless.

Name + nickname: Danielle D.

Age: I’m twenty-five tomorrow.

Hood: NW

Occupation: Let’s just say I work in education. Outreach education.

Hometown: Portland. Born and raised.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: My favorite restaurant right now is Iorio’s, because I’m gluten free, and they have gluten free pasta.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Heh, heh. Bar Mingo. It’s just a little Italian place on 21st, but they have great wine.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? I think I’m like, a six. [At least four friends begin scraming "Shut up! Shut up!" and “10!” “20!”] But I did get best dressed in high school. I may have been counting the votes, but the majority were still for me. My friends are telling me that I’m not very fashion-forward, but very fashionable. So I’ll go with an eight.

Pet peeve: Racism. And…judgment. People being really judgmental. People here are very openly judgmental.

Guilty pleasure: Gluten.

If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? It’d be, like, to fall in love in Paris. To have, like, love that was gonna last forever. Till the day you die love—not the kind where it’s really great for ten years, then you get divorced.

Were you cool in high school? I think so! I’d like to think I was.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? I love that question. Would I have to live there forever? Because I wouldn’t. I would only want to live in this time period. The 20’s. But I don’t want to be a flapper. Let’s even say the 30’s. I’d like to see the Harlem Renaissance. I’d have to change myself, though. I couldn’t go back as me.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Their backs. No. I think a lot of guys have the ability to just let go. Not give a fuck and let go. And I appreciate that. Sometimes. Like, with emotional stuff. “It happened, and now we’re done with it.”

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Their inability, sometimes, to show emotion.

What should all women know that they never seem to? That they should respect women like they would their mother or sisters. And you do have to have some sort of game or swag about you. Confidence, without crossing the line into meanness.

What is your dream? My own personal dream is to have a really fulfilling career in which I’m helping people. I’m going into school counseling. I want to do that for a lifetime, help kids, and feel really fulfilled and interested in what I’m doing on a daily basis.

What is your best Portland story? My whole life is a Portland story. But in high school, it was my senior year, seven of my best friends and I threw a jungle juice at Rose City Park golf course. We were totally organized, had matching shirts on. We were all on this mission, not as much to get drunk, but to make money. The cops came, everyone ran all over the place, and all but one of us—the only who had been going shot for shot—got off totally fine. Our initial plan with the cops was to say we were stargazing. Seven girls in matching wife-beaters, stargazing.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Oooh, I have a little food blog.

Name + nickname: Alex “Grandpa” J.

Age: Oh, god. 30.

Hood: NW. I’m in the process of moving back from Montana to Portland.

Occupation: I’m a creative. Advertising.

Hometown: Pomona, CA. You know who was born there? Tom Waits! We were born in the same hospital.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Pho Gia.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: Yurs. I don’t actually drink, but they have pool, darts, and one of those digital jukeboxes that has everything, you know? It’s near my house, so it’s my bar. It’s like the Portland cabby bar. People are really nice there. Half cabbies and half art school kids, because it’s the closest bar to PNCA.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? 9 1/2. That’s gonna sound terrible. I’m gonna look like an asshole.

Pet peeve: Ooh, I have three. People who talk to animals in baby goo-goo voices, sweatpants in public, and made up words. Like “conversate.” These are in descending order.

Guilty pleasure: High school girls [evil chuckle].

If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? Money! If an actual genie came to me, I’d have to spend some time with that. I’d really have to look inside myself. The first thing that comes to mind is: I wanna pay off my fucking student loans, because I’m never going to be able to have any sort of life with $100,000 in student loan debt. It’s a toss up between harmonious union among men worldwide, unlimited income, and superpowers. All of them. Let’s say all of the powers of the X-Men, combined.

Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? This is Portland. People are pretty culturally hip. But OK: Curren$y’s Pilot Talk 2. It kind of grows on you. At first you’re like, the beats are incredible, but this guy’s delivery isn’t that good, his rhymes are just kinda OK, but after you listen to it a few times, you want to listen to it more and more. Weekend at Bernie’s is pretty good, too.

Were you cool in high school? I was the kid that people threw rocks at until my junior year of high school, when I discovered I could be funny. And flirt with girls. I guess I always flirted with girls, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become better looking. My body’s kind of filled out. I look like a grown-up. Until I was 25, I looked like an 11 year old. I’ve grown into my beard a little bit.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? That was gonna be my answer for what to do with a genie! I would visit myself at 21. To give myself…financial information.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Hips, and laughter, thighs…I like…just, conversation. Smiles. The little tiny wrinkles in the corner of a 30 year old women’s eyes when they smile?! Ugh! [Loud car horn and near-crash nearby] This fucking guy over here, wearing fucking boxing gloves, just crosses the street on a red light and gets mad at the fucking car that’s trying to drive past. Fucking dick!

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Fighting with them in general. I like nice girls. I can count the number of fights I’ve had in six cumulative years of committed relationships on one hand. I can count the number of fights I’ve gotten in with my girlfriend in the last 48 hours on one hand. She has this barrier where she doesn’t express her emotions or communicate her needs. So instead it all comes out fucking sideways. Suddenly she’s yelling at me for watching Star Trek or something stupid like that. Can’t you just fucking be nice? And know what I really don’t like about the opposite sex? When they get drunk. I fucking hate drunk girls. When they’re drunk, it’s the least attractive thing a woman can do to me. Hate drunk bitches.

What should all women know that they never seem to? Not for all women, but I just need an hour in the morning. Where you don’t ask me questions or talk to me about stuff. Little things are fine: “Have you seen my cup?” This is my mom as well. I’ve had to tell her, “Can we just leave it alone? It’s cool and everything, and I love you, ma…but chill the fuck out! Don’t give me advice on what to do with my college degree when it’s like, 7:45am and I’ve been awake for six minutes! Let me have a cup of coffee! We don’t need to plan everything right now. Can we just have breakfast and shut the fuck up?!”

What is your dream? Make money just being me. I just wanna do what it is that I do and have people pay me for it. I like to write, take photographs, create things. And I just want people to give me money for that. I listened to this interview with Kevin Smith and he was talking about that’s what he does.

What is your best Portland story? Yesterday I met Kenneth from 30 Rock, which was pretty cool. But I’d have to say spending the Fourth of July in 2008 with this girl on a roof in Chinatown, making red paper airplanes and throwing them off the roof all night long. Thousands of them.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Draught Dry Goods. It’s a luggage company that does really hype shit. It’s a small, local Montana company that’s moving here. They don’t really need promotion, they’re already all over the internet.

Name + nickname: Marissa S. One of my friends calls me Mary, but no one else is allowed to call me that.

Age: 21

Hood: SE

Occupation: Student, Sociology & Anthropology, at Lewis & Clark.

Hometown: Bay Area. Moved to Salt Lake City when I was ten, and when we moved, I went through this rebel phase and got seven piercings and then went to an N*Sync concert.

Favorite place to eat in PDX: Waffle Window. But that’s just where I go because it’s cheap and good enough. And Fuego de Lotus.

Favorite place to drink in PDX: I just turned 21, and I’ve been in China the last six months, so can I say the water fountains? The “bubblers.” I guess when they were building the city, all these construction workers were just drinking beer, then would get in serious accidents or get killed! So Portland put these water fountains in.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? Can I say a seven? I feel like I wear things that I like, but I don’t like to be really un-boring about it. I don’t want people to think I’m an asshole because I’m trying too hard. Like, if you see a cute girl walking down the street and she seems down to earth and approachable, she’s probably not wearing high fashion.

Pet peeve: Unwashed dishes.

Guilty pleasure: R+B music from the late 90’s—but that’s not so guilty because it’s good. Like 112, Usher. “You Make Me Wanna?” That’s a good time for everyone.

If you had a genie, what would your first wish be? Happiness. What’s it called? “Self-actualization.” The top of that pyramid they have.

Do you have a cultural recommendation or obsession to share with our readers? Lauryn Hill.

Were you cool in school? Um, no. I got more comfortable with myself senior year, so I could like, say hi to people in the hallway. Freshman year of high school—I probably shouldn’t say this—there are lunches during freshman year where I would eat mine in the bathroom stall, because I did not want to go down to the cafeteria.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? This really goes for both genders, but weird, obscure muscles that you forget that they’re there. We could just say skin, too.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Stinky feet. My dad’s biggest problem.

What should every member of the opposite sex know that they never seem to? This goes for all people, but you can change how you feel about a situation, almost just like that.

What is your best Portland story? I studied in Beijing. Once the program got out, I was going to go to Qinghai, which is a province right outside of Tibet, to meet a professor who was going to hook me up with a volunteer position. I get a hostel for two nights and a train ticket. And on the second night, there’s a rainstorm, and I’m on the basement floor because it’s the cheapest room. And my room floods while I’m sleeping. And my suitcase, books, and computer were on the floor. When I woke up, everything was floating, my clothes had bled in with each other, and my computer was totally down. So I talked to the owner, who agreed to give me $1000. And I was like, “Thank you! So much!” And he gave me a room to stay, and I was there for a week, because I kept trying to meet with him and he wouldn’t meet with me. So I got to know the other employees, and would just end up on the roof hanging out and drinking beers with them, coz they rock. I became friends with all of them. It’s been a week and a half now, and he still hasn’t given me the money. So I just go up to him, and I’m like, I’m gonna be leaving soon, and he tells me to get my ticket. Just when I’m leaving, I go to get my money, and he gives me $1000 renminbi, which is roughly $150. I was like, “No, we agreed to $1000!” And he just told me that I should leave soon if I wanted to catch my train. The next night, my cellphone got stolen, so I had no way of contacting anyone in the city. At this point I was sleeping on my friend’s floor, which was really lucky, though it wasn’t a clean floor. It was just already the worst week ever, and then I got an email from my friend in Portland saying that my bike back here had been stolen. I had volunteered like, 250 hours at a co-op to get it—super, super nice. So I couldn’t find a job in Beijing, was floating around, trying to find something to do, and felt like I was wasting time and money, which I was running out of. Finally, I just kinda made peace with all of it. It was all material shit, and I was just like, [takes a deep breath] “It’s OK.” Two days later, I got a forwarded email from someone from PDXbike.org, and they’d found my bike. I was just like, god, that would only ever happen in Portland. So at least I got my bike back.

Name + nickname: Evan “White Savage” D.

Age: 22

Hood: SE. But I’m from all over, man.

Occupation: Been travelin’.

Hometown: Redding, CA

Favorite restaurant: Probably the Hawthorne Cafe.

Favorite bar: At the park, hehhehheh.

How fashionable are you on a scale of 1-10? An 8.

Pet peeve: People who stare.

Guilty pleasure: Smoking.

If you had a genie and one wish, what would it be? That everybody would get along!

Do you have a cultural recommendation for our readers? Cage the Elephant.

Were you cool in high school? Yeah! Football star. What’d you play? Running back. I was fast and hit real hard.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Back to the days when Jesus was walking. Why? To hear his teachings. See with my own eyes.

Favorite thing about the opposite sex? Probably’d be the eyes. Legs.

Least favorite thing about the opposite sex? Doubting themselves. I think most women look badly upon themselves because of the world and the way it wants women to be. Supermodels, you know.

What should all women know that they never seem to? They gotta respect one another. The way it should be. I think a lot of relationships are based on respect for one another, and the healthiest ones are based on finding an equal amount of love and respect for one another.

What is your dream? My dream was to play college football and go into the NFL, but now it would probably be to make others happy. Make other people feel the way I do everyday.

What is your best Portland story? Meeting the amazing people in the streets. Walking down the road and having this guy try to start a fight with me and my friend here. He started with him, then slowly turns to me and says, “Wait. I wanna fight that guy!” And he kept trying to step up to us and we’re like, no man, we don’t believe in that. Drunk people. They think this liquid courage is helping them.

Anything you’d like to hype or promote? Going up to Mt. Tabor, to the free concerts that are up there.

New Orleans guide for CouchSurfers

I’ve been back home in New Orleans for one full week and am already swamped with CouchSurfers. I received four hosting requests all summer in Portland, and four every two weeks in Chicago. Here, I get four per day. So, In honor of everyone I’m unable to host, I’d like to present my eating, drinking, and doing guide, generally tailored for young travelers on a budget.

EATIN’: I am a curmudgeon about food in New Orleans. I think the myth of food here was created for and then perpetuated by tourists sometime in the mid-1800s. I eat out far better in plenty of other American cities. Plus, I’m allergic to shellfish (most New Orleanians write off my opinion right there). And most of the best southern, Creole, Cajun, or simply New Orleans food I’ve had has been served in the kitchens of friends, not restaurants. The largest part of this dilemma is being a 25 year old student amid a historic recession–most CouchSurfers will feel me here. On top of most places closing early, it is amazingly hard to eat in this city for under $10—arguably, most of the really good stuff is in the $25/meal range. If you’re going to spend that much, go to Boucherie (Uptown) or Sylvain (French Quarter). Most of the time when I eat out, it’s because a place is reasonable, not great. Despite the city’s reputation as a flyover zone for BBQ, I regularly go to The Joint for BBQ. Juan’s Flying Burrito is also a staple–just about everything there is pretty good. Felipe’s Taqueria‘s basic, filling, student grub is cheaper than Juan’s, but lacks the former’s atmosphere and creativity. Cochon Butcher, if a little overpriced, makes truly amazing sandwiches, though it would be more at home in Brooklyn, Austin, or Portland than the deep South.

First, you must eat a poboy, and if you’re going to do so, do it at Parkway or Domilise’s. Parkway is retro-fun, and where the Obamas went when they came here. Plus, it’s in Bayou St. John, a cool little residential hood along a canal/stream (a bayou is simply a stream, by the way). Domilise’s is my neighborhood go-to, divey, unassuming, and improbably more expensive than Parkway, but each sandwich is made individually, and with great love. While I’m at it, Tracey’s (formerly Parasol’s) roast beef poboys are no slouches, either. While we’re talking sandwiches, muffulettas (that’s “moo-fa-lotta,” folks) too are amazing and essential, and the only place to get a good one is the original Central Grocery in the French Quarter. Make absolutely sure you go around lunch so they’re still fresh. Also, they’re closed Monday–can’t tell you how many times I’ve made that tragic mistake.

The original Cafe du Monde on Jackson Square–don’t bother with the other fast food style variations–is squarely positioned in the bleeding heart of tourist New Orleans, but, especially during off-peak hours, is eternally delightful, even if you’re a local. $5–up front!–covers beignets, cafe au lait, and tip, and will entail some of the best people-watching in our blessed nation. For breakfast, your best bet is Slim Goodies. It’s half the price of  most of the other brunchier places, and they have two cool quasi-hipster diner seating areas inside and an even-better back porch. When it’s hot, get ya snoballs at Hansen’s Sno Bliz, and accept no imitations. Cameila Grill is one of the only places here I know of open late, and though their food is so-so even for a greasy spoon, it’s worth going for the outlandish employees. If you’re in the French Quarter, the Clover Grill, for my money, is just as good, and as much of an experience—it’s one of the most vibey, atmospheric greasy spoons I’ve ever been to, and on top of that, they usually play awesome music.

There is no truly great and/or affordable Italian, Mexican, pizza, or even coffee in NOLA as far as I know. Overrated Awards: 1) Jacque Imo’s 2) Lüke 3) Coop’s Place 4) Vincent’s 5) Delmonico.  A special mention must be made for Evelyn’s Place, which looks awesome, but on top of their food not being very good, a malicious waitress put a hex on me there because of a bad review I wrote on Yelp.

DRANKIN: My favorite bars are Snake n Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge, which rumor holds also happens the favorite bar of the bearded dudes in ZZ Topp, Johnny Depp, Brangelina, etc. It is a filthy, perfect little dive in a Vietnam War-esque semicircular tin shack nestled on an improbable residential street corner in uptown, and the take-no-shit bartenders usually play awesome or hilarious music from their iPods. My other favorite bar, if it’s warm out, is on the diametrically opposite end of the uptown economic spectrum: The Columns Hotel, where You sit on their grand porch and sip southern-style drinks while watching the streetcars clank by. Happy hour is best, but beware congregations of obnoxiously drunk greeks from Loyola and Tulane. The Saint is a great dive in the charmingly dilapidated and now-gentrifying Lower Garden District that often hosts indie bands, a bit of a rarity in these parts. Another top-fiver would be the laid-back Le Bon Temps Roule, which is generally beloved for hosting the Soul Rebels Brass band and lots of other awesomely funky local shit quasi-nightly. I’m a bit biased; it’s a mere block and a half from my house. If there, it’s also eminently worth stumbling five blocks down to Grit’s, which is painted as though you’re in a cypress swamp, and has free pool, and is next to F+M’s, an infamous dive and the epicenter of debauchery Uptown: drunken sorority girls dancing on pool tables, latter day saints still wearing their bike helmets, neighborhood drunks, regulars, the whole potpurri of Uptown NOLA. The Bulldog is notable for being one of the few bars in town with a decent lineup of craft beer, and has a great porch with torch heaters for when it’s chilly, but one must again anticipate a khaki-wearing Greek/Law/Med-school crowd, especially on Wednesday nights, when you get to keep each pint glass you order (!). Finally, Frenchmen Street is where local people go out-out. The prevailing cliché is that it’s “the local’s Bourbon Street,” which is actually pretty accurate. There will be various bands playing 365 days a year. The general idea is that if you buy a drink, you can hang out and listen for free while you drink it (except at Maison, who started charging after the Treme show came out). Off Frenchmen, there are lots of crazy, excellent, and edgier music joints on St. Claude Ave, and Mimi’s in the Marigny (that’s “Mare-in-ee”) would complete my top five. Downstairs is a chill bar, and upstairs people often get down to various DJ’s. During the day, the intersection on which Mimi’s rests is the hub of its vibrant neighborhood, and is generally a cool spot to hang. Deeper into the Bywater, Bacchanal sells wine at practically liquor store prices and you take it to drink in their massive backyard seating area, rife with heatlamps. And my favorite bartender in town is at St. Joe’s, a neighborhood bar to end all uptown New Orleans neighborhood bars.

DOIN’: The way to have fun here is to just exist, not have much of an itinerary, and take it in. Ain’t nowhere in America like this (except maybe Savannah, which is smaller, cleaner, and on the ocean). The essential walks are through the French Quarter, up and down Esplanade Ave (the prettiest street in the entire country, in my humble opinion), through the Garden District, and up and down Magazine (particularly for shopping, if you’re a chick). Riding the St. Charles Streetcar is amazing and essential (the red Canal Street ones, less so). The St. Louis Cemetery above the French Quarter is amazing, as is the quainter cemetery near 6th and Prytania (beware, it keeps strange hours), and finally, the gigantic one at the top of Canal Street. If you can and want to see beyond the city, Jean Lafitte Park has amazing elevated walkways through the swamp, and the plantations on the River Road are as amazing as you might imagine. If, like me and many others here, you have a cultivated taste for the macabre, the defunct Six Flags New Orleans is just 15 minutes from the city, and is a trippy, creepy playground where any reasonably skilled photographer can have a f*cking field day.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, start A Confederacy of Dunces on your way, read while you’re here, and finish when you’re gone. It’s a good 25% of the reason I live here in the first place, at least as funny as anything Mark Twain ever wrote, and the most perfect encapsulation of this little sub-sea level alternate universe anyone’s ever likely to produce.

This list, of course, is not definitive–I still need to go to Mother’s, the bar at the Hotel Monteleone, and a slew of restaurants I only wish I could afford–but it generally comprises the matrix floating in my head when I need to entertain people. If you’re a New Orleanian and want to add a suggestion or start something, feel free to bring it in the comments section. And lassiez les bon temps rouler.

Crater Lake

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dignity Village

SF

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Swamp

I finally made it to Jean Lafitte park, where you can ramble around raised platforms through the swamp. These looked awful in color, but as soon as you go black and white, everything turns into texture and contrast and it looks how it should.