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May 21, 2008
What is an "authentic" person?
Ben and I have started working our way through "The Wire," an HBO cop and crime drama set in Baltimore. The characters are gritty and real. Inner city poor. Immigrants and their kids. Blue collar dock workers and cops. Black and white, mostly, with a few other hues tossed in here and there. Skinny and fat and muscled and in between. The show confirms my impression of Baltimore as a beautiful, bustling, gritty and authentic city. What does that even mean, though?
Why is Baltimore authentic and why doesn't Portland feel that way to me? Is it because the oldest houses here have usually stood for less than a century, the income disparities are less visible and possibly less severe, the ethnic neighborhoods and entrenched communities don't exist? There are poor people here, there are immigrants, there are blue collar workers. Black and white and Asian and Native American, skinny, fat, fit, muscled.
But we're not a very gritty city. Portland is sunny or rainy but always clean, with evergreen trees in yards and a giant pointy mountain looming on the skyline. A coyote wandered onto the light rail here a couple years back, because that's how close to the wilderness we are.
And all of us, from the rich folks whose mountaintop homes overlook valleys and rivers to the blue collar folks who might have had grit between their teeth out east but instead chop down trees or turn them into paper, well, we can't help but be sucked in by the green and the blue and the relentless salmon forging upstream and the call of the wild.
A hunting son of a mechanic in a family too too familiar with drug and booze abuse is also an environmentalist who worries about particulate in the air. Hipsters with thick rimmed glasses ride their bikes alongside bearded beer bellies and graying suits.
Everybody camps. The wild is free, it's close, the air is so clean and clear and smells so good you can't imagine if you haven't breathed it deep.
Isn't that authentic, too?
The first-generation community college student who rents a dilapidated room in a dilapidated house with a compost pile in the yard, who spends all her money on shoes and all her time creating bad art: is she any less authentic than the son of Greek immigrants squeezed into a row house on a street rich with history in a world full of accents and families tight side by side?
The weed smoking carpenter in ragged overalls who in the early '70s drove in a van with his young long-haired wife to a city of dreams, who a few years later with hungry kids put away the grass and cut his hair and spent 30 years as a cop on the vice beat, then retired to write a novel and volunteer at literary festivals and advocate for legalized prostitution while sipping red wine, what type does he fall into? He's real, I've met him. He's in Portland. But is he authentic?
I'm not trying to say that Portland and Baltimore are the quintessential cities in any way. But I'm trying to wrap my mind around what it is to have a Portland identity, and maybe because I'm so steeped in this world I'm having a pretty hard time. There's a depth associated with the character types I link to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Chicago. And its opposite, I guess, shallowness, that's what I think of when my mind wanders to the types of the west.
Maybe I need to read more Raymond Chandler to get some L.A. archetypes fixed in my mind, some authentic stories about people from my adopted coast. Or maybe I need to spend some time with Ken Kesey, who knew an Oregon that faded into memory before I was born. Maybe I need something I haven't found yet, or maybe I need to create it so that it exists.
I need something.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at May 21, 2008 08:58 PM
Comments
Maybe you need to embrace the fact that you are of Oregon roots. Your grandfather and your mother were both born in Oregon. Your great grandparents migrated to Oregon and spoke with thick accents. You have family buried in Oregon. And living in Oregon.
You don't need to meet these people, your family who share common ancestors. You don't need to visit the graves. But you cannot avoid the fact that you *are* from Portland. Through me . Through my father. You live less that two miles from where I took my first breath. Allow yourself to feel the pulse of your origins. At least half of them.
Here are just a few definitions:
au·then·tic Audio Help /ɔˈθɛntɪk/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[aw-then-tik] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective
1. not false or copied; genuine; real: an authentic antique.
2. having the origin supported by unquestionable evidence; authenticated; verified: an authentic document of the Middle Ages; an authentic work of the old master.
Posted by: Mom at May 21, 2008 10:00 PM
Mom, that's awesome! I'm GOING to embrace my Oregon roots. Thank you for what you have said, and for saying it so well.
Posted by: Courtney at May 21, 2008 11:17 PM
In terms of "The Wire," the reason people are authentic is a result of great writing, acting, storytelling. In real life everyone's authentic, if mundane sometimes.
Portland doesn't really have the poverty and violence depicted in The Wire's Baltimore. The grit. I don't really know much about Baltimore per se, so The Wire seems real to me. What if Baltimore actual is totally different? Also, just the fact that example after example after example of three dimensional black character in The Wire make it unusual, in the sense that these people are like people I know, associate with, or maybe are even a little like me, and that's contrary to what I'm used to seeing on TV when it comes to black characters. That's a failing of television.
I can tell Baltimore buildings are mostly brick and stone, and that gives it a look. And like a lot of east coast cities, there are people who live there generation after generation. The Wire definitely makes it seem that way. Architecturally, Portland definitely has a look. But the population is transient, with a great many people from somewhere else. Historically, I'm a little bit at a loss, but it feels like a town like Baltimore has never changed. That's just a 3000 mile away impression I get, and I'm sure it's wrong, but it seems to enhance its authenticity.
We know for a fact that Portland has systematically gentrified and metamorphosized, pushing some people around and making way for the new, shiny and different. This is a very white town in part because black people haven't been treated very well in the past. At present, we try to get along and generally have liberal politics, so we often get mistaken for hippies. There is also a large generation of people all across the country who actually were hippies, but get to talk about it or keep acting on it openly in a place like Portland.
To me "authentic" is a strange idea because we often tend to apply it while fantasizing. Real is every day.
Posted by: Ben at May 21, 2008 11:57 PM
Good social commentary, cultural observations, and insight into the distinction between art and reality. Thank you, Ben.
Posted by: Courtney at May 22, 2008 12:01 AM
Great to read this entry, and glad you guys are enjoying The Wire. We are desperately trying to download it here in Japan so we can keep watching it. Right now we are into Lost, which is good, but nothing like the wire.
Posted by: amy at May 29, 2008 02:31 AM