We're just back from the Oregon Country Fair in #1 Eugene. We loved it. 30,000 wildly dressed (or undressed) folks every day, and about 5,000 newbies, like us, who aren't expected to come in regalia until year 2. Nine stages with a lot of good music. 92 food purveyors with interesting stuff. Very high level of crafts. We wondered where these people are the other 362 days of the year. Local friends told us that about 1/3 are year-round counterculture (more than a few enrolled at the U of Oregon), and the rest are 3-day hippies who go back to being stockbrokers, ministers, teachers, bus drivers, and the like, the rest of the year.
When my wife and I lived in Portland we took a trip out to the Oregon Coast. On the way there we stopped by to see the tallest tree in Oregon (since knocked down in a storm, IIRC) and there was a quite a number of hippies hanging around. Anyway, I leaned into my wife and said we should chop this down and make Oregon's largest picnic table...we heard an audible *gasp* from two chicks right behind me who overheard what I said. Too funny...not for them but for us. We used to go downtown quite a bit and one time there was a bunch of naked hippies protesting the Harley Davidson store screaming about leather and animals. They were all naked, so I did not mind as some of the girls looked pretty cute if a little dirty and funky. After living in Baltimore I have a good comparison between the two coasts. People are politer to be sure in Portland, and there’s less overt antagonism than in Baltimore, but people are far more passive-aggressive and cliquish. Portlanders are extraordinarily intolerant of anyone outside of their little tribes and constantly have a fake front up pretending to be unimpressed with everything and everyone. If you don’t have a tattoo and/or a visible piercing, they don’t like you. If you take care of yourself physically, they don’t like you. If you have any ambition in life, they don’t like you. Whereas east coast people will just say “fuck off” to anyone they don’t like, Portlanders will lead you on for months with their insincere smiles and thank-yous, then badmouth you when your back is turned. That passive-aggressive, backstabbing attitude is endemic to the West Coast in general, but it’s especially intolerable in Portland because the people there haven’t done anything to deserve it. Seattle, San Francisco, L.A. etc. are full of successful showbiz people, successful tech workers etc. The snobbiest people in Portland work at minimum-wage jobs well into their thirties and have no motivation in life beyond playing one gig a month with their shitty Dirty Projectors-ripoff band. But, good for the hippies.
I once gave a talk to a group of medical interns in Baltimore. All terribly proper, they in their white coats, me in my suit and tie. When we returned from a coffee break, there was a note on the lectern, from someone who had noted on my CV that I had been a consultant to the Grateful Dead. It said, "Don't be fooled. There are at least a dozen Deadheads in this room." I think the "Portlandia" series gets it just right, and I gather it is as popular in Portland as it is elsewhere, and I'm pleased it has been renewed for another season.
I knew Austin would be on the list. If it weren't for the bad traffic, I would love to live there: relatively low cost of living; more good paying, professional jobs than San Antonio; a well educated population; low unemployment rate (lowest out of the major cities in Texas); and a great music scene. San Antonio is a larger city, but it usually loses out on the good concerts to Austin.
