Scoop: What Jello Biafra Said in '81.

  • SWASTIKA CHIC: An only-in-Portland battle between a punk-rock lifestyle magazine and a local activist resulted in the deletion of a Portland Mercury blog post last week. Merchandise from Pork magazine, which often prints swastikas and other Nazi symbols on its buttons and T-shirts to piss people off, is sold on consignment at Naked City Clothing on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. Pork merchandise without swastikas got a fawning write-up from Merc contributor Katie Gunn, generating an angry email from a local activist, who wrote the newspaper and local Anti-Defamation League that "it's a full-blown, hate-mongering slap in the face to any reasonable Portlander." The Mercury subsequently removed the post. “The author of the post requested its removal after deciding she didn’t want to defend its subject’s use of certain symbols,” wrote managing editor Marjorie Skinner. “We obliged.” Naked City owner Julian Recanzone says the shop carries Pork publisher Sean Aaberg’s merchandise because “we love Sean’s art” and “it has always sold well.” “But swastikas, for any reason, just aren’t our bag and so are not in the store,” Recanzone says.
  • FEDERAL MATTER: Portland electro-R&B singer-producer Natasha Kmeto’s next album will be among the first releases from Federal Prism, a new label headed by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek. Sitek—whose credits include work with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Jane’s Addiction—calls Kmeto “hands down my favorite producer out there.” A release date for the record, titled Inevitable, has not been announced, but her manager, Aaron Meola, says it contains 10 songs, all written and produced by Kmeto. “This is the first time she’s recorded a whole album in a proper studio setting outside of her bedroom,” he says, “and we are pretty stoked on how it’s sounding.”
  • MORE SEX: Southeast Division Street is getting a new sex shop, one that’s very different from the porn cinema at 35th Avenue or the tawdry strip clubs further east. Female-friendly She Bop plans to open a location across the street from Pok Pok and a mere three blocks from the seedy Oregon Theatre. She Bop co-owner Jeneen Doumitt says customers have long been asking for a second store. The new space, still under construction, isn’t much larger than the current shop in the Mississippi neighborhood. “We won’t have a huge expansion of our offerings,” Doumitt says. “We believe in quality over quantity.” Southeast Portlanders should be able to shop for vibrators and locally made lube by the end of the summer.
  • ATTACK THE LOT: Sources at Hawthorne Boulevard’s Cartopia say the sale of the longtime food-cart pod has been finalized, meaning this will indeed be the last summer for the lot that includes Pyro Pizza, Potato Champion and Whiffies Fried Pies. The carts’ leases expire in October, and the lot is expected to become mixed-use apartments. The carts plan to go out with a bang by hosting movies on Sunday nights for the rest of the summer. There’s a theme in the early movie choices: On June 22, the pod will play host to Attack the Block, while on June 29, the carts will show Independence Day.
  • CORRECTION: Last week’s Scoop column misstated the number of honors given in the first Pacific Northwest Cider Awards. Washington cideries actually won five of 11 categories.

WWeek 2015

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