Portlandia

Portlandia is an IFC (independent Film Channel) production series that started early in 2011. So, when I saw the first season at Netflix I was interested. I played a promo for it about recycling and thought that was very eccentric and funny and weird but it reminded me of when I went to UCSC in 1989 when recycling first started through Universities and colleges throughout California. Now, recycling is in almost every northern California Coastal City. Even Santa Barbara has recycling bins at home now. And where I live we have a recycling bin, a trash bin and a plant refuse bin. And we combine paper, plastic and glass, and aluminum and tin cans in the home recycling bin. And what I find interesting is that approximately 75% of trash is recyclable. So, in the Portlandia promo skit they have about 12 different recycling bins to separate things into and I found this sort of funny and weird at the same time.

But when I watched the first episode of Portlandia I really enjoyed it a lot and I personally have seen incidents in my life that paralleled each skit so it really is based upon real behaviors of real people in Coastal California, Coastal Oregon and Coastal Washington. However, each of these areas has their own kind of style and variation about all this. For example, some of the behavior parodied in this Portlandia started in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Berkeley and San Francisco and then spread out just like long hair throughout the nation. Different parts have stayed and morphed throughout the Country. In some places long hair and beard is still going on. And other places certain ways of dressing and behaviors are still going on and morphing. For example, in the early 1980s, after experiencing much of the 1960s in Los Angeles and Venice and places like Big Sur and Mt. Shasta and later Santa Cruz. I went with my family (wife and three children ages 10 to 14 to the Eugene Oregon Country faire and was completely surprised when the long hairs dancing to the Grateful dead that were female stripped to the waist just like they did in the 1960s and 1970s while dancing in public. This I had thought even then was gone forever. But the real live Ecotopia exists in many places from San Francisco North and even to some degree in places like Santa Cruz to this day. I was also amazed more recently by a parade in Arcata that I went to because my God Daughter was graduating from Humbolt University in Arcata, California in the early 2000s. In the parade people dressed in all sorts of costumes but one woman basically dressed in makeup and looked sort of like the girl from X-Men (you know the one that is all blue makeup) and nothing else. And this seemed to be okay with everyone in this cultural local. But the skit in Portlandia that made me laugh until I got almost couldn't breathe was the one about the store  "Women and Women First". I have also met women like this and as a man this is always quite a challenge to maintain politeness and chivalrousness when dealing with people like this. When the two women go to the bank to change the man's money and lock him in the store so he can't get out. That was just too much. What is even more funny is that I have actually met women who are just like this over the years.

Though my son and my wife laughed also out loud during the first episode I probably will be watching this series alone. But to be able to laugh at experiences that shaped my life from 1968 until the early 1990s and to some degree since as well when I visit old friends is really wonderful for me now. I find it very therapeutic to watch this series because all my emotions go this way and that especially now I tend to live a more traditional lifestyle than I did between the 1960s until the 1990s. I have been married and living with my wife and now 15 year old daughter in a very safe and relatively affluent community near the ocean since about 1994 now. So, watching Portlandia it takes me back to a more alternate lifestyle that I lived successfully from the 1960s until I decided that I needed to move on with my life during the 1990s. In some ways I found living a more alternative life sort of like never completely growing up. And even now when I visit friends who never married or never had or raised children who still live very alternative lifestyles I'm glad I had the experiences that I did but am also grateful to be living a more traditional, financially secure lifestyle that I do now. I miss a lot of the amazingness of the past. But sometimes things could just get so crazy in unpredictable ways that I really appreciate the ongoing stability of my life now.

One of the funnier points of view about this is my present wife. Her point of view that is well taken is that : "One cannot live an alternate lifestyle successfully without starting out being a very fortunate and somewhat elitist kind of person." Though I would have argued vehemently against this point of view in the past, I realize now that usually this point of view is right. Only those who are fortunate enough to get enough exposure to many different points of view and a diverse education become successful in an alternate lifestyle. So, the average person in the world would only consider someone living an alternate lifestyle as an oddity sort of like living as an artist or a bohemian or a beatnik or whatever, but basically unattainable or confusing or even not useful to the average person on earth. So then, Portlandia is basically about a certain kind of elitism that is usually (at present) reserved for middle to upper middle class or rich white kids who also might be of any race or persuasion. But at core this is also a form of elitism even though that really might offend many in the middle of this kind of living. I know as a young alternative person I couldn't have seen it in this way then.

For example, Stephen Jobs (when he was alive) would have been considered a Rich Hippie in the mold of an alternative Zen thinking Northern Californian. And since his company right now is the most successful in the world, that is pretty elitist in itself as well as ultimately successful.