Where The '90s Never Die, Where The Tattoo Ink Never Runs Dry

IE Weekly

Welcome to every counter culture child’s dream city: Portlandia

By: Arrissia Owen Turner 

 

Carrie Brownstein helps keep Portland weird. The former guitarist for riot grrrl stalwarts Sleater-Kinney traded her axe for laughs, teaming with friend Fred Armisen to create, write and star in the breakout Independent Film Channel sketch comedy show Portlandia, which debuted January 2011.

After slowly building buzz, the show’s second season hit the airwaves in January. The parody targets the Oregon capital’s famously liberal residents known to prefer bikes to Bentleys and where those who don’t have tattoos or play in a band seem a bit subversive. Portlandia airs Fridays at 10 p.m. and is currently on the road.

Doppelgangers 

The show pokes fun at the hyper-diligent do-gooders of the famously laid back Northeast town where Brownstein is one of about 500,000 residents. The show’s opening musical number shows Armisen telling Brownstein that he’s found a place where the ’90s never died, where the “tattoo ink never runs dry.”

In the tongue-in-cheek ode to the city, Armisen tells us about the fictional town Portlandia, where young people go to retire.

Portland’s dreamy doppelganger is somewhere that singer-songwriter Aimee Mann could be your cleaning lady and where militant feminists may or may not sell you the books you want—even if they have them. Brownstein and Armisen excel at poking gentle fun at the counter culture pillars.

The citizens of the real Portland, known for their love of beer and bohemia, have for the most part been good sports. Mayor Sam Adams—seriously, that’s his name—even proclaimed Jan. 21, 2011, Portlandia Day. A local bicycle tour company began offering Portlandia tours taking visitors past well-known locations where the show is filmed.

The Residents

With Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels as producer, Armisen and Brownstein received back up from seasoned comedy writer Allison Silverman (The Colbert Report) and writer/director Jonathan Krisel (Saturday Night Live).

The show brings in big name guest stars, as well, including Heather Graham, Jason Sudeikis, Gus Van Sant, Jeff Goldblum, Kyle MacLachlan (who has a repeat role as Portlandia’s mayor), Eddie Vedder, Kristin Wiig and others. And keeping with its Northwest indie rock roots, members of Sparklehorse, The Decemberists, The Shins, Fleet Foxes and many more make appearances, too.

There aren’t too many archetypes safe from Portlandia lampooning. There’s the A-type couple’s OCD night out at an outdoor movie; purposely underachieving fashionistas; a band with a cat and kidnapper as members that is so good it shuts down music tastemaker website Pitchfork; self-righteous bicycle rights activists; a couple strung out on Battlestar Galactica and more.

From the Stage to the Big Screen

Brownstein grew up performing, so it’s not such a stretch that the Evergreen State College grad ventured into acting. “It’s something I have always been very comfortable with since I was a kid,” Brownstein says. “I took improv and theater classes before I got interested in music, and then spent 10 years on stage with a band.”

After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006, Brownstein was seen on screen with roles in the short film Fan Mail, as well as the movies Group and the Miranda July flick Getting Stronger Everyday. She also starred alongside The Shins’ James Mercer in the 2009 independent movie Some Days Are Better Than Others.

Working as a professional musician, Brownstein knows plenty about putting on a show. “A lot of improvisation is about being unafraid in the moment and being giving and to say yes and go with it,” she says. “It’s being comfortable with it. And playing music in front of people for many years definitely helped.”

Armisen, still a Saturday Night Live regular, also has a musical past. He played drums in the Chicago punk band Trenchmouth before migrating to comedy. The two shared mutual friends. “It was really music that brought us together,” Brownstein says. “We already felt like we knew each other when we met.”

The two mock stars, who met in the early 2000s, approach comedy in a similar fashion, Brownstein says. “He has his own very unique sense of timing and he has a really wonderful tangential quality that I find very purist, and it’s fun to work with that,” Brownstein says. “Certainly, I have learned a lot from working with Fred. He is very quick.”

ThunderAnt’s Demise and Portlandia’s Rise

With not much more than a witty NPR music blog called Monitor Mix, a gig writing music articles for The Believer and some short, funny videos to her comedic cred, Brownstein began collaborating with Armisen to make short comedy web videos under the moniker ThunderAnt. Those vids were the precursor to what would become Portlandia.

“That is where we honed our dynamic and where I did a lot of my improvisational, my Fred Armisen lessons,” she says.

For the second season of Portlandia, Brownstein and Armisen approached their writing similar to the way a band would take on its sophomore release following plenty of hype for the first: cautiously.

“We had a little better idea of what worked the first season,” Brownstein says. “We wanted to focus more on character and having a stronger story element.” The writing became focused on making sure that Armisen and Brownstein were at the heart of the pieces, that they weren’t concept-based pieces, she says.

“It’s a delicate balance of capturing that energy and a little bit of the clumsiness that is so charming about a first album or the first season of the show,” Brownstein says, “but polishing it just enough to make it better without losing some of those more chaotic elements.”

The new season of Portlandia is similar to a classic second album in other ways, as well. “It is stronger overall but may not have that first single,” Brownstein says. There might not be that first single, the “Put a Bird On It” sort of sketch, she says, referring to the popular sketch that mocked the plethora of crafting shops famously slapping whimsical one-dimensional birds on everything.

“I think audiences will find those things this season, but for the most part it’s a better season without some of the lows we had last season,” Brownstein says. “It’s just a little bit more coherent overall.”

“Portlandia Can Be Any City”

The show excels at pointing out the idiosyncrasies and idiotic nature of so many things that once seemed peculiar, which is now part of the mainstream. Is it unique to Portland, with its surge of pierced-beyond-employable-for-most-careers slackers, or just a microcosm of so much of the rest of suburbanized America? How different is Silver Lake, or even Redlands, Riverside or Claremont?

Portland is a city looking for its identity, Brownstein says, which lends itself to some of the craziness. “I think there is a specificity to Portland, in that it isn’t a huge city so it is still a little bit in metamorphosis as to who it is, that leads to questioning,” she says.

“It’s not as monolith of a city as Los Angeles or New York, but it also has a very dream-like quality, with beautiful green hills . . .  Portlandia can be any city,” Brownstein says.

Brownstein is one of Portland’s biggest fans. She sends her sarcasm with love.

“I think I have always been an observer of behavior and people, but I am not out and about mining situations for humor or studying people,” Brownstein says. “I wouldn’t have any friends if they thought I was watching and trying to study them.” Nobody runs in the opposite direction or covers their face when they see Brownstein out for a cup of coffee. But still, she’s thinking. Always.

“Sometimes you almost step back and feel like we are living in the inverse of what used to be normal,” Brownstein says. “I lived in New York for a while, and I moved back to Portland and about every mom and dad shopping for groceries was tattooed and I was like, I guess this is just what it’s like now.”

It’s enough to turn Brownstein sour. “At the grocery store by my house the main display is the stuff that is meat free, gluten free, sugar free, and if you just want something with sugar you have to go over to some little side shelf,” Brownstein says, admitting her compulsion to be a contrarian for the sake of it at times.

“But that is the inverse of what is normal,” Brownstein says. “I guess people’s special needs are becoming more pronounced and catered to, and that is fine and that is what has come to be expected in certain communities.

“But what if I want to eat a bunch of refined sugar? I have to go to a special section and like register my name, but if I want something with no sugar I have like 40 options. I think all of us who are engaged in this world are just becoming aware of sometimes how silly it is.”

www.ifc.com/shows/portlandia

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