Portlandia Begins Tonight

Tonight, welcome to my world: Portlandia. I’ve lived in the real-life analogue of Portlandia for eleven years, and it’s a place of dreams — dreams of sleeping late, of opening a yarn store, of becoming a freegan, of getting rid of your car and becoming a bike commuter who only wears natural fibers while working quarter-time at a gluten-free bagel shop. It’s a city where young people have come to get away from being in a city. As Fred Armisen (now famously) says in the first episode of Portlandia, “It’s where young people go to retire.”
Tonight on IFC (Independent Film Channel) at 10:30pm, you can see the first episode of Portlandia — and see how us Portland residents have been living all this time, right under your noses. Yes, we put birds on things and call them art — and we sell that art at stores devoted to selling handcrafted bird art. Yes, many of us don’t seem to have proper jobs, and we often have four or five roommates — and yes, most of them work at a co-op that sells bulk alfalfa on the cheap. Yes, we organize “sports” leagues that happen entirely indoors, because it’s frickin’ raining most of the time.
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