Untitled Frank Beaton Project

23rd January 2011

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On PORTLANDIA

It’s been more than 24 hours since the west coast premiere of Portlandia, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s PDX-centric sketch comedy show, and, like all Portlanders, I am compelled (required?) to voice my opinion on it.

In short, I loved it. I’m a big fan of Christopher Guest’s scary-accurate satires like Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show, and—in its best moments, at least—that’s what Portlandia felt like. And, like Guest’s films, the best jokes in Portlandia are the ones that only someone familiar with the subculture being parodied are likely to appreciate. Take the joke about the puzzle store (transcribed from memory):

[Scene: A feminist bookstore. A man is being berated for using the restroom without being a paying customer. He picks a random book off the shelf.]

Man: Fine. Here, I’ll buy this.

Worker: That’s part of a series. There are 16 books, you have to subscribe to all of them.

Man: I just want to buy this one.

Worker: It’s part of a series! You wouldn’t go into a puzzle store and just buy one piece, would you?

Man: Where is there a puzzle store?

Worker: There’s one on Hawthorne and another one on Southwest Broadway.

If you know Portland, that joke is amazing, because it’s entirely plausible that there could be two separate stores in Portland that only sell puzzles, and if there were such stores, those are exactly the streets they would be on. If you don’t know Portland… well, I’m not sure that joke would land at all. Similarly, the sketch about the obsessive locovores who refuse to order the chicken until they’ve visited the farm where “Colin” was raised, is probably a hell of a lot funnier if you actually know—or are—someone like that.

The opening musical number (“The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland”) was brilliant, and perfectly expressed the show’s thesis: the things that make Portland great are the same things that make it kind of ridiculous. Those who contend that the show’s humor is mean-spirited, anti-youth, get-off-my-lawn-ism baffle me. Portlandia is a love letter to a great city whose only flaw is that its people tend to take themselves and their pursuits—noble as they may be—a bit too seriously. Anyone objecting too strenuously is just proving their point.

Tagged: tvportlandportlandiagetoffmylawn

19th January 2011

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And I just can’t help believing

Wrote this on a friend’s Facebook feed about Johnny Boy’s 2004 single “You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve,” which remains one of my absolute favorite songs of all time.  

(I wanted to be fancy and embed the song into this post, but I couldn’t figure out how. So I’ll just link you to JB’s MySpace page, instead: http://myspace.com/johnnyboyuk)

—-

Part of the song’s brilliance is that no one really knows what the lyrics are, due to the way the vocals are mixed, so it sort of invites you to map your own phrases and meanings onto it. You invest yourself in the song because it gives you no other choice. I’m sure that’s a large part of why we were all so obsessed with it when it came out. That, and because everyone loves the Wall of Sound.

“To see the sleek mystique reversed…”

At least that’s what I think she said. And I don’t want to be told any different.