My mom would be 60 today. :-)

Tonight walking home from work and dinner and downtown we saw that the place that used to be Aurafice is now a Stumptown Coffee. We stopped full to turn and gaze at the newest white spot of gentrification seeping its way up Pine. For all of recent memory that space was Aurafice with its plywood-coated black and red neon sign. Where has the industrial and goth scene gone? Musicwerks, Aurafice, The Vogue—all gone. And later, as we passed Linda's, we saw enormous trophy kills protruding from the wall. I asked Andrew if those were always there and I just hadn't remembered them, but he said they were new. Linda has retrofitted Linda's with dead animals—perhaps to draw some of the crowds back down the hill from Smith?

What is tragic is the triumph of insincerity over authentic pockets of subculture. Stumptown, for all its anti-Starbucksness is a Portland hipster* export. Aurafice was a small business serving the community of a particular subculture. Linda's used to be its own thing too, and now it's just a facile copy of one of its own spawn.

Andrew says, "What's next in our quest for ironically chic? Racial segregation?"

*Is Portland's pustule of fame exploding? What could be more logger chic (our current fashion veneer) than Doug Fir and Stumptown Coffee... or this place? And it seems every time I open the New York Times, the Arts or Travel section is raving about the splendor of unpretentious, and still inexpensive, Portland. All we need now is a band....