Memo from NYC

There are certain cities, at certain points in time, that become legendary, mythic, memorable; that grab the popular imagination for years, decades afterwards.

These cities and their golden eras are usually powered by a unique perfect storm of artistic creativity, cultural exuberance, sexual liberty, and, most of all, lifestyle, something that makes people from far away -- geographically, even temporally -- say, "I want to go there! I want to be there! I want to be part of it! I want to live that way!" 

And, most of all, "I wish I had been there!"   

To whit: Paris in the 1920s (think Midnight in Paris). Berlin in the early 1930s (think Cabaret). London in the 1960s (think Blowout). NYC in the 1970s (think Taxi Driver or early Saturday Night Live). 

And Portland in the 2010s. Think Portlandia. 

The popular sketch TV show is ending tonight after eight seasons. It's had an amazing run.

Perhaps it's too early to declare this but I will: thanks to this show, thanks to the era it started in (2011) and captured (mostly the Obama era), thanks to the "hipster lifestyle" it both ridiculed and lionized, Portlandia and Portland in the second decade of the 20th century have now gone into the history books as a city and era that will be remembered decades later as a mythic time and place. It defined something uniquely American at the time, something culturally trailblazing, and we'll be studying this place and its era in the future. 

Want to understand what hipster culture in general and the city of Portland were like at this time? Watch Portlandia. And understand Portland. It's that simple.

Remember Girls? The ultimate NYC hipster show of the 2010s started a year after Portlandia and ended a year earlier. It existed in the shadows of this show, almost like a satellite. Girls wouldn't have made sense without Portlandia.  

I take a little bit of pride that I was onto this show and its influence at the time. In 2010, a year before Portlandia premiered, I visited the city itself and had a great, memorable time. I saw it then as a special place, a city just bursting with culture and creativity, a place where people wanted to live and thrive (or retire, as the joke goes). 

Then, a year later, along came the show. I thought it would be good. I didn't realize it would become so popular and last almost a decade!

But eras end -- they have to or otherwise they aren't special, unique. Paris in the 1920s and Berlin in the 1930s were destroyed by Depression and War. London in the 1960s petered out. NYC in the 1970s went from crazy to boring. And Portland in the 2010s ... well Trump.

Great as it was, Portlandia these days seems more dated and a little less relevant. We can no longer laugh at the hipster lifestyle in quite the same way when the cloud of fascism hangs over it. And Portland, apparently, is no longer the same city that the TV show first parodied. 

You can't fully appreciate an era until it's long over and another era has come and gone. It doesn't come into clear, mental relief until the biases of its day are gone. So twenty-years from now we'll look back at Portlandia and laugh again. 

For now, however, we bid it adieu. From a grateful New Yorker, thanks for the laughs!