Last night I attended the Scottish Pub Sing, led by the Portland Revels, at one of my favorite breweries, Lucky Lab in Portland, Oregon. It was beautiful hearing everyone sing songs while we all drank together. We sang love songs, sad songs, and outrageously fun songs about sharing homebrews, making you feel at home, and drinking the city dry. Having a group of people sing together like this reminded me very much of church and just further solidified in my mind that the pub is really a wonderful social center, and good beer is an important element in bringing people together. Lucky Lab is on my list of places that are doing beer and community right. What a wonderful night!

The brewery had a whole load of new specials so I had to try out a few. I ordered the sample tray and had two different Alts, a Scottish Ale, Barleywine, an Amber, an IPA, and a Cascadian Dark Ale (Black IPA).

Here’s the chorus of one of the songs I don’t remember hearing, but I imagine would have been a good one:

OLD DUN COW
There was Brown, up-side-down,
Moppin’ up the whiskey on the floor.
“Booze, booze,” the firemen cried,
As they came knockin’ at the door.
Don’t let ‘em in ’till it’s all mopped up
Somebody shouted, “Macintyre!”
(Everyone shout) MACINTYRE!
And we all got blue blind, paralytic drunk
When the Old Dun Cow caught fire.

Did you know that Portland has a mysterious geographical location where gravity is different and paranormal happenings take place? A place where those fascinated with either beer or science fiction or both will find themselves trapped and unarmed? When friends visit Portland the first place I take them is not Forest Park or the top of Big Pink, but rather Portland’s Bermuda Triangle (click for map). It’s a little spot on the east side of town where the hours will pass and you may never leave. At each point in the triangle is a business that feeds off the other points in the triangle, creating a force-field that allows people to enter but only few can leave. In all of Portland, the Triangle is my favorite thing.

What are the businesses in question?
Before I go on I must say that there are a few rules that the Triangle, by existing, naturally oblige us to. The first is that in order to be in the Triangle, you must visit all three points in the Triangle. The other rule is simply that you must walk in the Triangle. If you were to visit each point without stopping, you could walk the whole thing in about 10 minutes. So, what are the points of the triangle?

1. Movie Madness – 4320 SE Belmont

The first stop in the Triangle is Movie Madness, where you will rent some sort of sci-fi or horror flick. Movie Madness is home to the Pacific Northwest’s largest collection of Sci-Fi, Horror, and Cult films. The first thing I would do in the Portland Bermuda Triangle is go into this store, go straight to the back and check out the collection. Their horror videos are arranged in further subcategories, so you can browse by “Rampaging Teenagers” or “Nature’s Revenge” or “Ghosts” or a large number of other topics. The sci-fi collection is right next to the horror collection and it promises to have some rare gems that would surprise you. Don’t see the title you’re looking for? Search the computer because there’s a chance it’s located under a director (they file movies by directors too). You can also browse around and find the “Male-Chauvinist Fantasies” section where you can find things like Beach Babes from Mars (I made that up), or you can look through the Red Scare Collection. On your way out, be sure to check out the collection of costumes and props from all sorts of movies including Alien, Blade Runner, and H.G. Well’s Time Machine (You know the little miniature test-version of the time machine…yeah it’s at Movie Madness!!!). It’s really a wild ride. If you aren’t careful, hours will have passed. You can always come back, but tonight you are on a mission to get lost in the Triangle, so you must move on.

2. Horse Brass Pub – 4520 SE Belmont

A block or two away you will find one of Portland’s most important pubs. Now that you’ve got a movie picked out for later you must come in here for a few drinks. I’m going to take a stab and say that Horse Brass has about 60 beers on tap. There are two menu’s – the guest tap list and the mainstay list. I’d say that about 20-25 of their beers are on the guest tap list and so the likeliness of you drinking a beer from that list again next week is pretty slim. Usually the guest beers last no more than 2 days. They serve 20 oz pints and 10 oz glasses. I usually do 10 oz glasses and I’ll order 2-3 for sampling. Horse Brass is a cozy place that is perfect for hanging out with friends and talking, it’s a real pub. There’s also a few dart boards. The servers are very knowledgeable about their beers and even Portland beer history. The selection here is so nice that it will be difficult to make an easy decision, and you may just have to stay till you’ve sampled everything you feel you might otherwise miss out on. This is why Horse Brass is such an integral part of getting lost in Portland’s Bermuda Triangle. (photo credit to Paul Lowry)

3. Belmont Station – 4520 SE Stark

If you finish up your drinking at Horse Brass before 10pm you need to come here. If you are going to take longer at Horse Brass, you should come here first. Don’t miss Belmont Station, your life depends on it. Belmont Station is going to be about a 5 minute walk from the other locations, but it is this short walk that helps form the perfect triangle in the first place. Belmont Station, the biercafé, is currently home to about 1200 different bottled beers. You will have no easy task ahead of you, picking out a few beers to drink with your movie. And you thought Movie Madness took a long time to make a selection! Beers are arranged mostly by geographical location of brewery. What are you feeling tonight? You feeling like something local? Maybe an IPA to go with your schlocky cult film, or a lager to go with your slow-paced sci-fi drama? Maybe a foreign stout to go with your Scottish foreign film? It’s your choice. Can’t figure it out, ask the staff, they are super knowledgeable and helpful. Attached to the store is a small pub with about 15 uncommon beers on tap. These beers are going to be different from the ones you will find 4 blocks away at Horse Brass so stay for a pint.

By the time you’ve finished your time in the Triangle you will be pretty exhausted. Now it’s time to make your way home (don’t drink and drive), pop in the movie from Movie Madness, and pour yourself a pint from the beer you bought at Belmont Station. Portland’s Bermuda Triangle has made it’s way to your living room. It’ll provide some good leisure, don’t miss out!

I’ve long thought that Portland takes it’s local pub culture very seriously. But not too many people know about Dean’s Scene. Dean is a plumber by day, brewer by night and he has retrofitted his basement to be a microtopia for beer lovers. You can just barely see the neon light from the sidewalk, you have to know where to look, but if it’s on you can walk around back and enter a whole new world. Dean’s Scene is one of Portland’s best beer culture offerings, and most people miss it entirely. So, why is it one of the best places in Portland to drink a beer? It’s a top-secret, underground speakeasy for beer drinkers!

Down in his basement is a complete brewery and bar and it’s available to anyone who wants to come have a drink with Dean and his pals. He offers about four of his own homebrews on tap. You walk in, get yourself a glass and self-serve your beer. He’s constantly brewing new batches and he has a rule that he’ll never brew the same beer twice. He’s made friends with a lot of the brewers in town and he’s obviously a big collector of beer paraphenilia. It’s quite an exciting place to visit. He’s got a bunch of youtube videos where he’s brewing beer and talking politics with his friends here. Here’s a nice image of the brewery with the bar in the background: Here’s the cabinet with all the beer glasses:

It’s a real microbrewery. Sometimes he’ll open up any number of bottles of beer from around the world for you to taste with him. He’s built his own walk in fridge and he’s aging a lot of beer there. One time he opened up a 3 year old bottle of Stone Brewery’s Epic Ale (2006). That was tasty. Another time he opened up a Heater Allan Hefeweisen, a beer I had never seen before. Yesterday I walked in and he had just finished giving tastes of about 7 different beers that I had never had before. Just missed it!

It’s the only bar in Portland you can smoke at. Really though, it’s not licensed, it’s just Dean opening his house to anyone who loves beer. I always give him a little cash to be nice.
UPDATE ***
I had removed the location of Dean’s Scene due to readers concern. Dean and a few regulars have assured me that they don’t mind having the location posted…SO, you can look for Dean’s neon sign on Fremont, just across the street from Alameda Brewery…between NE 47th and 48th.

Additionally, here is another concern from a regular Dean’s Scene attendee: “Just making sure that it is clear, that Dean’s Scene should 1) remain open 2) entrance is through association cannot be done freely and without the presence of the invitee 3) leave a healthy donation reflective of your consumption.”

If you live in Portland, Oregon you have until September 14th to see Khris Soden’s project for the Time Based Arts Festival. He is giving a tour of the town of Tilburg, Holland as you walk through the streets of Portland. I am giving it high recommendations.

I’ve written more about it below, but first here is the information if you want to go on the tour. The tour starts from inside the Wieden and Kenedy/PICA building at 224 NW 13th. More information here. Here’s a list of the remaining tour times:

Sun . Sept 7 . 6:30-7:30 pm
Mon . Sept 8 . 6:30-7:30 pm
Tues . Sept 9 . 6:30-7:30 pm
Wed . Sept 10 . 6:30-7:30 pm
Thurs . Sept 11 . 6:30-7:30 pm
Fri . Sept 12 . 6:30-7:30 pm
Sat . Sept 13 . 12:30-1:30 pm
Sat . Sept 13 . 2:30-3:30 pm
Sat . Sept 13 . 4:30-5:30 pm
Sun . Sept 14 . 2:30-3:30 pm
Sun . Sept 14 . 4:30-5:30 pm

My wife and I went on the tour yesterday after we received strong recommendations from friends. We were very impressed and had a lot of fun. Khris walked through Portland as if it were actually Tilburg, explaining historical landmarks, pointing out special buildings, and talking about the people. He took us to one of the great Tilburg churches and explained how Protestantism, Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism were all foundations of the social structure of the city however in “reality” we were actually in front of the Hilton. There were many wonderful juxtapositions such as that. It was also funny to see reactions of people who were not on the tour, who were just walking by, as Khris spoke about old buildings and monuments that weren’t really there.

I put quotations around the word “reality” because clearly we are in Portland, Oregon during the tour, however, we begin to mentally get a sense of what this city might be like and we begin to replace our reality with what we think could be the reality of this other place. We also get a sense that Tilburg and  Holland have a couple social structures in place that are admirable, beneficial, and something that we might aspire to implement here in Portland. The tour was prefaced with a short conversation about how Portland and Tilburg are similar in many respects, and in both places people seem to have utopian ideas that they work toward. Utopia is not a perfect place, but one in which the community works together to achieve a better social good. So, there are some things we can learn from Tilburg. This may not have been the point or purpose of the tour, but this is something I was able to take away from it. I won’t spoil the tour for you. I highly recommend it; it was a lot of fun.

Khris was a part of the M.O.S.T., an arts group that I have written about on beerandscifi.com here. This group believed in a parallel reality, called Mostlandia, that operated in friendship and love and promoted fun and community among other things. They were able to inspire a sense of community with the people who attended their functions. Like Khris’ tour, the M.O.S.T. was able to confuse reality with this sense of “I am here” and “I am not here.” Even though the four founding members of Mostlandia have disbanded, Khris is carrying the torch of presenting “non-place-places” to the general public in ways that help us see the world in a new light.

The Portland State University Art and Social Practice group recently had a vacant lot in Northeast Portland, OR, near Alberta street. We were building a structure there that we hoped would be a hub for various art activities and community-based art projects as well as a movable classroom. Recently, we walked around the neighborhood, stopping in various offices and businesses and just asking them what they do. One particularly telling stop we made was at a house that facilitated a group called Sisters in Action. Here’s a picture of an informative sign that they’ve made:

A member there told us about how Sisters in Action raise women leaders in the community through social and political action. We discussed briefly the state of middle schools and how many have been shut down but they are still needed. They want to make sure the schools aren’t just sold to private investors so more condos can be put in. The issue of gentrification came up when we asked about one of their window signs that exhorted participants of Last Thursday – a monthly event that fills the streets of Alberta. The sign read “Last Thursday, What Is It You Are Celbrating?” and another sign read “Last Thursday is an Example of Gentrification.” From what I’ve heard, Last Thursday started as mostly a bunch of artist-type people having fun and doing little street performances and has now turned into a night that not only fuels local businesses but also causes police action because of the large amount of people drunk in public. The problem is that many new businesses have moved into the neighborhood solely because it is now a reasonably profitable neighborhood. This in turn is driving out lower income residents who have lived there all their life. We all know the story, this happens all over the place. What the Sisters in Action group told us is that many of the new business don’t have in mind the interests of the community but rather their own monetary intersts.

This predicament was interesting for us, being that we were a bunch of art students and thereby contributing to gentrification by erecting our own little program. But we are also “art and social practice” students and we concern ourselves with the social elements located in a given site. How could we balance this? The situation became more tense for us when the New York Times released an article about how Portland applauds itself for being so environmental and progressive, yet the people here turn their heads when it comes to the displacement of one of it’s own communities. Ouch!

Not knowing what to do about this situation I decided that I would host an active boycott of Last Thursday. A group of the students got together in a different neighborhood on the night of Last Thursday and we watched the utopian/dystopian movie The Lathe of Heaven (1980), which was originally written by the novelist, and Portlander Ursula Le Guin. This movie is one of my science fiction favorites. In it, whenever George Orr dreams, that dream becomes a reality. A scientist discovers this and begins attempting to control the dreams so that he can make a name for himself and solve the world’s problems. Whenever he tries to solve the world’s problems, however, things go terribly wrong. One of my favorite lines in this movie is at the end when George tells the doctor that maybe every person’s dreams becomes reality and he just doesn’t know. Oh the intensity of that statement! There is no one utopia, each person’s world is his/her own and sometimes our world’s overlap, but generally, people’s ideals are going to shift from one person to the next

After watching this movie with the group I felt more empowered to do these community-based art projects out in the neighborhood. We had been given the opportunity to work in that neighborhood, to get off of the boring PSU campus, and to really try out some public art. I was an outsider to the neighborhood and should not attempt to solve “problems,” but rather to move forward with the community’s interest in mind.

Sandy Sampson and I decided to collaborate on a project. We began what we called the “Neighborhood Resource Exchange” where people could identify their needs as well as tools/resources they could offer other community members. When we had enough information we were able to put people in contact with each other. For example, if a couple people grew to much food in their garden, and another person knew how to can food, we connected them. We launched this project with a neighborhood Meet & Greet BBQ where neighbors showed up, ate some good food, and met each other if they did not already know each other. Here are a couple images from that event:

Our next event was scheduled to be a Swap Meet as a continuation of the Neighborhood Resource Exchange. Due to some unforseen circumstances, however, we needed to cancel all events on the lot and we would no longer use the space. It seemed almost fateful that this happened, many of us felt relieved, given our concerns about us contributing to gentrification.

I would like to end with a quote from an art theorist, Miwon Kwon, in her book One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity:
“Homi Bhabha has said, ‘the globe shrinks for thos who own it; for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers.’ Today’s site-oriented practices inherit the task of demarcating the relational specificity that can hold in tension the distant poles of spatial experienced described by Bhabha. This means addressing the differences of adjancies and distances between one thing, one person, one place, one thought, one fragment next to another, rather than invoking equivalencies via one thing after another.