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| The Decemberists guest starred on The Simpsons S24 E7, but didn't, alas, play their weird 20 minute version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge |
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Portlandia is a loosely related series of vignettes set in contemporary Portland starring Fred Armisen of Saturday Night Live and Carrie Brownstein of the 90's grunge band Sleater Kinney. Its an affectionate look at and satire of Portland's hipster culture with the central premise being that Portlanders are so leftie and PC and up themselves that in fact they've become gentle, sodden, quasi fascists, not completely removed from the loopy Roderick Spode of the Wodehouse universe.
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The first episode of Portlandia I saw was episode 2 of season 2, the great Battlestar Galactica episode (in which a couple binge on the BSG DVD box set to the point where it destroys their lives) with cameos from Edward James Olmos, Jamie Bamber, Eddie Vedder and Ronald D Moore - a geektastic introduction to the show. Nothing has quite been as good as that but there are a lot of decent episodes out there (and many fun famous actor and singer cameos) and having now visited Portland itself and done a mini Portlandia tour the whole thing has a lot more resonance. (And on the Greyhound bus back to Seattle I was delighted to see the famous Sleater Kinney off ramp sign on Interstate 5 just outside of Olympia). ...
When The Simpsons discovers a thing it usually means that thing is already dead (a meta concept S24 E7 actually explored). It was with some trepidation therefore that I watched the much anticipated Portlandia episode of The Simpsons. Armisen and Brownstein guest starred as Portland hipsters (owner operators of a knock off Voodoo Donuts Van) who moved to Springfield and gentrified it (or hipsterfied it if you will) until it looked like a mini version of Portland. I particularly liked the couple's alienated son played by Patton Oswalt who was ironically bored with all of contemporary civilization and who expressed this Weltzschmerz and anomie by having a West Ham United poster on his wall...Nice touch that.
12 comments:
That was the first Simpsons episode I'd seen in a long, long time and I've never seen Portlandia but I think I got all the jokes.
John
Yeah strangely it was the first episode of The Simpsons I've seen in a while too but I liked it.
Check out that Battlestar Galactica episode of Portlandia to see if you'd like the show, its one of the good ones.
Just watched the BSG ep of Portlandia. Hilarious. "I've never been in space . . . ever . . ."
Alan
I'll bet Olmos has to say that a lot poor devil...
If only they'd got Katee Sackhoff for that episode it would have been perfect.
I've never even heard of Portlandia, but as I'd bet Portland shares many aspects of Santa Cruz culture, I will try to find it.
I am reading Dead Souls at the moment, and this reminds me of the bit I just read where the author says, condensing the passage a bit, You will laugh with all your heart at Chichikov but who among you will look deep inside your own soul and ask this difficult question: "Isn't there a bit of Chichikov in me too?" Quite out of the question!
Seana
I think you'd like Portlandia. Its a very affectionate satire on that culture.
I had never heard of Portlandia, but it sounds worth a look. Good God, but it's been a long time since I've watched The Simpsons.
I quite like the idea of affectionate satire or, more generally, satire that works even if thge target does not get the joke. It's one reason the Onion's piece on the Newtown shootings was so good.
I watched the first episode last night. I enjoyed it.A lot of life in Santa Cruz still seems very much like that, though on a smaller scale.
Peter
This is the only Simpsons ep I've watched all season and it was only because the Portlandia people were on it. The Simpsons feels like a nostalgia show these days.
Seana
Yes I imagine you'll see a lot of Santa Cruz connections. The first one was the one about the chicken, right? If so yeah pretty funny...
The chicken actually reminded me of a trip I took up to Napa last summer where we visited the garden-and chickens-of a famous restaurant there.
True Santa Cruzans don't eat chicken. Which makes me kind of a counterfeit.
My son, a Portland native and seventh -generation Oregonian, showed me this episode today. It is too, too true.
I recently saw a guy in the smoking section at PDX wearing a fedora and knickers, playing the ukelele. I told him he was very Portland, and he looked embarrassed.
I've lived here most of my life. I love to travel, but I can't imagine living anywhere else.
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