Thinking back over this weekend’s activities, I can’t help but be reminded of how fortunate I am to live in the soggy lefty cultural paradise that is Portland, OR, USA. This was one of those weekends where every night there’s fifty great things to do, and choosing is the hardest part. Best of all, these are often local homegrown type things that could only happen here, or at least only will, bestowing a sense of pride and place that feels both totally un-2005, and just awesome.

Case in point: Friday. We started out the night at the Portland premiere of Matt McCormick’s new documentary/art film Towlines. Centered on the existential plight of humble-yet-majestic tugboat – always pushing others to sea, never making the voyage, etc – the film was full of beautiful imagery and colors. It came across like a series of perfectly composed photographs, but moving. Matt seems to favor dark, muted tones and wide spaces; buildings, giant ships, the ocean.

fig 9: still from Matt McCormick's Towlines

McCormick’s childhood friend and fellow Portland resident, James Mercer, who is also the exceptionally talented songwriter behind the Shins, provided the score, matching the tugboat theme with suitably slight and transcendent acoustic guitar interludes. Very nice, as was the hilarious American Nutria, narrated by none other than Calvin Johnson. And here I thought nutria was the plural of nutrients.

Mercer played an acoustic set after the films, but we had to run, over to the newly renovated Bossanova (ex-Viscount Ballroom), to catch the Arcade Fire. Now, this band has been hyped like crazy, with everyone screaming album of the year and such. I’d heard the record a little bit before the show, and was a little skeptical. It’s mostly that (1) I’m a nasty person, with an immature predisposition for disliking what others like and (2) I’m not so into hyper-melodramatic music, as a general rule. I’m not sure where that last one came from, but it probably has something to do with falling hook line and sinker for all that peak-by-numbers progressive trance stuff in high school. One can only sustain so many epic buildups and breakdowns before distrust sets in, especially if one is not on ecstasy.

figs 10, 11: the arcade fire on ecstacy

I should probably drop that shit; the music is impressive, especially the part about trying to create a new sound instead of simply cobbling together the requisite record geek signifiers and looking cute (see: rock music in 2004). Still, part of me thinks this band is the musical equivalent of the Oscar-winning movie starring Denzel Washington, set in the Holocaust, featuring at least one tragically gifted, mentally disabled person, released right at the end of the year (that last part is true); those string sections and genre-hops scream “Look at me, I’m the album of the year!” Which is a pretty petty reason to dislike an album, so the jury was still out when I arrived at the show.

And I enjoyed the show. Those kids have energy and they get excited. More power to them, right?

After that we headed over to Dunes for Suicide Club, the weekly dance night that is the project of Nathan from the Gossip/Die Monitr Batts (whose new album is sounding good, btw). He plays the kind of stuff Steve and I like to play when we do CUM LAZER (Pop-Rap dance hits, dance-punk, etc), but he probably has a better record collection. My only requests are that he fade the one song out before the next song comes in if he’s not going to beatmatch (which is really freaking hard, and I can’t do it either, so no diss there) and maybe that he play a little more of that freakier “mutant disco” I read about on the flier. Maybe he did play this stuff earlier, but we got there really late, and he wasn’t.

fig 12: looking east from mt. tabor, portland, oregon

My point being: that’s an awesome night! What a cool town, right? All of it was totally local, except the Arcade Fire, but the huge number of people who turned out for that show bares evidence to another local treasure, that being a large musical-loving populace out of proportion with this city of less then a million.

The rest of weekend was equal good: Saturday saw Steven Stapleton aka Nurse With Wound‘s only US appearance (disappointing but still, pretty cool that it even happened) and Friday saw the Cancer Fags (sinister and satirical gay-ish house duo) and the awesome lesbo party rap troupe Scream Club. I’d talk about these but this is already quite long, and my attention is wandering.

Anyway, yeah, I like it here.