who?
twenty third july | nine post meridiem
Seattle and Portland, rather than being predominantly urban, are both a kind of mash of urban-suburban, with small metropolitan centers and extensive semi-self-contained neighborhoods, each with their respective bars, independent movie theaters, cafes, specialty shops, etc. They're not ugly suburban, fortunately; most houses date from the '20s to the '70s, have front porches, small, beautifully tended yards, and the streets are pleasant to walk in. Because the oldest houses are generally no more than 80 years old, and because there's been little new construction since the neighborhoods found their current shape 30 or so years ago (and that which is new is usually held to strict building codes) (actually this applies more to Portland than Seattle), they're microcosms of the numerous passing fads in middle class residential architecture over the past few decades (keep in mind I know nothing about architecture; I'm simply basing this on naive observation). If you took a stroll through one of them on a Sunday afternoon, you'd likely pass a rather austere symmetrical two-story facade with classical pillars, then a Mock Tudor beam-and-plaster residence with a submerged garage, then a flat-roofed one-story Cali-style home with broken rock and plaster siding and the original '50s light fixtures visible through the window. If you were to put off your stroll until later that evening, just after the sun had gone down, you'd see the front windows lit up from the street, with plaster statues shadowed against the half-closed drapes and a couple of figures bent over a table under framed pictures like smudges of green and gold, the whole scene so still it would seem to be preserved in amber.
I spent some of the best years of my life living in these neighborhoods. It's rare for there not to be a park or school playground nearby, and a pub on the corner (my corner pub in Portland was called THE HORSE'S ASS! Ok, it was really Horse Brass, but no one called it that). They are of course not edgy, wild or crazy by any means, but they do seem to support a gentle, domestic, and often invisible bohemia. Like most residential districts, where nighttime means a meditative silence and the sky stretches out to the corners of your vision above the low rooftops, I'm sure they hide much more as well. At the end of FemaleTrouble's street in Portland there is a small and silent boarding school for troubled children, with perfectly manicured hedges and immaculate brickwork. You hardly notice the place except for each Friday at noon, when the streets suddenly fill up with Lexus SUVs and Jaguars - visiting hours. One night while walking home we heard cries for help. Just outside her door we found a young girl, about 12 years old, being held face down on the sidewalk by four clean-cut camp counsellor types. "They don't work at the school!" she shouted, contradicting what the counsellors were trying to tell us, "They're going to rape my mouth! My mouth!" We left them, but called the police anyway. I don't remember if they ever came; ten minutes later the cries were gone and the street had returned to its usual silence.
If you go west on the cross street in front of the school, towards the river, at dusk, you'll follow a slight decline through this silence with the translucent hive of downtown twinkling on the horizon. Eventually you'll come to an inauspicious intersection, with a small theater advertizing a limited-run arthouse film on one corner, a darkened diner on another, a restaurant advertising Hawaiian specials with sidewalk picnic tables full of softly conversing couples on a third, and a small thrift store (Closed Come Again) on the last, its dimly lit window display a formal ball attended by posh plastic residents of a parallel Weimar Republic on Easter Island. Next door is a hipster student bar, with velvet wallpaper and tattooed tummy-baring barmaids. Once, craving sticky girly sweetness, I asked for a lemon drop. The girl (bangs, tongue stud) offered to make me a lime drop instead, her own recipe. It tasted like blossoms fresh from the tree. Many blossoms, in many glasses - enough to drown a slumbering guest at one of Heliogabulus's banquets. Three days later, after being resurrected, I went back for more but the girl had gone. I never saw her again, and no one else there can make a decent lemon drop, let alone such esoteric elixir of lime.
When (If) you leave the bar on that summer's night, to take the incline home, the city will be at your back, while in front of you will be these same silent neighborhoods, their lights extinguished, the moonlight dripping like quicksilver from the leaves of the oaks whose heavens throw cloud shadows across the stilled facades. Young families live here, shaggy-haired parents with their yoga-stressed bodies, under-stressed toddlers, bands, and organic gardens. Packs of those slightly younger and with better defended wombs live here too, amongst recent accumulations of dishes and laundry, inflicting newly developed domestic habits on each other. There's a belatedness to this quiet bohemia, as if its cultural trappings were a - not exhausted - but evanesced, reflective shadow of their former selves. There's a keen interest in culture, in the bizarrely-spangled pop universe of products and gatherings by which post-collegiates structure their lives, but it's an import interest, a desire to bring plastic fabrications of Swinging London and harmonized SoCal sunshine into the rhythms of domestic life, rather than seeking them out on their own terms, in mini cabs and studio apartments and shiny clothes and Indian takeout. It's layers of digested fads, exchanged outfits and contested enthusiasms, nourishing a lifestyle like compost, and given a moon-struck, wistful sheen.