First, allow me to confirm the rumors. I, Janglemore (which is definitely NOT an anagram for my real name) downloaded and enjoyed an album by No Doubt[1] and was subsequently exiled from Carrboro. Lost[2] but not forgotten, I realized I already had a plane ticket and place to stay for the summer in Portland, which, according to an interview I read with Youth Lagoon[3] this morning, is basically just a blueprint for the sprawling hiptropolis Boise is going to be in five years’ time.

Now, as you may have heard, Portland is cool. Saying Portland is cool is like saying Colin Stetson[4] is good at the saxophone, or, if you write for Tiny Mix Tapes, like saying Wittgenstein is skeptical of philosophy. Like, Portland is so cool that the whole idea of counter-culture has been lost, and now the only way to stand out is to not have tattoos, or maybe drive a car. Although that’s not quite true, because when I got hit by a car on my bike[5] it turned out the bro who hit me was a (stoned) bike mechanic. Anyways, the point is that this town is some straight-up Twilight Zone shit where independently owned coffee shops, art galleries and food trucks have stopped challenging cultural norms and instead usurped them.

How was it so easy for seemingly necessarily underground trends that are only cool because they are in opposition to a lamestream culture to just become real-world equivalents of The Strokes[6]? Well, not having any culture in the first place is a great start.[7]

Xzibit A would have to be the statues commemorating Portland’s tumultuous founding and subsequent heart-wrenching militaristic victories that can be found in the downtown area. Observe the graphic detail with which every iota of passion that makes Portland great is controversially, yet undeniably brilliantly, encapsulated in one sole monument:

Xzibit B is the city’s migration patterns, which I am way too lazy to look up right now. From what I can tell, Portland doesn’t have schools. One time, I thought I found a public school because I was biking near a field at 3:30 in the afternoon on a weekday and I saw a road that was closed off and had a crossing guard on either side. Not letting the prospect of running over children get in the way between me and a vegan bakery, I tore through the street at a minimum of 7 mph, but instead of children, I saw somebody doing Carrie Brownstein’s makeup. Yes, I had accidentally fulfilled the “Portlandia” biker stereotype and biked through a filming of “Portlandia,” not through a school letting out. So yeah there are schools in Portland somewhere, but they’re kind of in the shitter and my guess is a lot of the people moving here aren’t concerned about setting up families because they are either in their twenties and drinking microbrews every night[8] or in their thirties and drinking microbrews every afternoon. When people move to a city just to hang out, they probably aren’t planning on staying very long or settling down, and this endangers a long-lasting sense of community and kills any chance at a shared history. As this slowly begins to change, I’m curious to see what effects it will have on the town, but equally afraid to see what effects it will have on the Next Generation when they find out there’s a real world out there.

Xzibit C is Mount Tabor, which brings us to the title you thought was just a witty quip unrelated to the content of this post. Mount Tabor is a volcano. It is well within the city limits of Portland. It’s inactive, but, as my buddy KStein put it, that’s only because it’s in Portland. Portland, then, is a city with a volcano. There are not very many cities with volcanoes. Only one person here has talked about Mount Tabor, and he is my friend from home who was hanging out here for a few weeks. What’s cooler than having a volcano that you can take an easy bike ride up to and picnic on for an evening? Being too cool to care.

Now I’m all for apathy and irony[9] in the face of a global situation we are all terrified to enter in a few years, but I’d like to think that even the most Carrburntout of the Carrburnouts has a breaking point. When, back in Based God’s country, I see a cigarette fogging up horn-rimmed glasses as it sticks out of a patchy beard, I can at least safely assume there was some level of effort that went into this present-day ennui. For the townies, this comes from Actually Having A Job, something that Portland seems firmly opposed to, both from unemployment rates and an unearned sense of entitlement that our generation admittedly owns the shit out of. For the students and former students, this comes from reading a thousand pages of critical theory a night for a few years and then realizing that it’s all bullshit and giving up on ever amounting to anything. So while both of these states lead to a person who looks dead behind the eyes and baffles the lamestreamers with their seeming ability to care about nothing other than the next Group Doueh[10] release, and while I don’t want to sound like an asshole by saying these folk have earned their place in the world, at the very least I can say they weren’t (all) thrust there as a result of being born into a fortunate financial situation and never doing anything on their own. Obvz, Portland has a whole lot of exceptions, but as a city without a dominant university, a high unemployment rate and the aforementioned overwhelming amount of cool shit that requires minimal levels of engagement on the part of the consumer[11], it’s less of a sweeping overgeneralization than most of my opinions about things that aren’t Xiu Xiu.[12]

Now, if I wasn’t going out of my way to prove a point here, I could talk about how I’ve never been in such a widespread community before that cares so much about the arts and individual expression, and how the accepting nature of the city literally permeates everything from the vegan options at taco trucks onwards, but life isn’t all about ironically going to see Taking Back Sunday with your friends. Without a sense of being grounded in something real, that punk rock feeling of rebellion that turns something as simple as your style of throw in Canhole into a lowercase ‘s’ statement loses its cosmic significance. Come to think of it, it is precisely this fear of excess and lost ambitions that Portland’s ancestors were warning us against when they plopped this baby in the heart of the Pearl District:

AckLOLedgements:
I have been in sPortland for two months and Chapel Hill/Carrboro for 19 years. Maybe my point of comparison isn’t quite unbiased and I am missing something. Don’t think I didn’t catch that. Also, all the local bands I’ve seen here have been bafflingly mediocre.

[2] This song seriously comes into my head every time I hear the word ‘lost’ : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ7lMcNnFCI

[3] You haven’t heard of this band

[4] See footnote 3

[5] Don’t worry, my tattoo of Scott Stapp reading a book was fine

[6] Negate footnote 3

[7] Bromeo, if that was too many words, you can change that sentence to just read “white people”

[8] The grocery mega-chains here all sell microbrews

[9] In at most three months, Apathy and Irony will be a reference to footnote 3

[10] Did you know you could use WXYC’s phone number as your VIC card contact info at Harris Teeter?

[11] DID I MENTION THAT LIKE NOBODY HERE EVEN WEARS JORTS? GAME-SET-MATCH CARRBORO

[12] Chad and I first became friends after seeing each other at a Xiu Xiu concert and each having the distinct thought of “damnit, I thought I was going to be the only one here who wasn’t a thirteen-year-old Hot Topic girl”