Isaac Brock On Portland: "What a collection of human turds."

The Modest Mouse frontman tells Poland about the dark side of weirdness.

By Matthew Korfhage

Isaac Brock and Modest Mouse just played the Heineken-sponsored Open'er music festival in Gdynia, a little Baltic port town in Poland best known for the Heineken-sponsored Open'er music festival, which also featured Mumford & Sons, a band that is the musical equivalent of Heineken.

Anyway, the Poles were super excited to know about Portland. 

Via Isaac Brock, this is what the people of Gdynia, Poland, now know about Portland:

I didn't mean to live in Portland.

- "Portland is weird, but it's kind of a crappy weird. It is the most vagrant-ridden [city]—it's really fuckin' up my liberal mind. I'm just like, what a collection of human turds."

- "Within the one week before I came on this tour, I had to run people out of my house. Twice with axes."

- "Two people died. This is within 300 feet of my house. It's just a constant shitshow of fights. And that's just Portland keeping itself weird."

- "Portland is like the last vestige of the die-hard hippie. Actually, Eugene, Ore., is. But some of them end up moving to Portland to sell crafts and weed."

- "I'm really worried because weed's legal as of now, and so many of my unemployable friends have just lost their job to legal weed. Who's gonna buy their dried-up shit when you can actually get really good weed?...They gotta start a job program for the unemployed. Some of these people have no backup plan. Selling weed, that was it."

- "It's a cool city. But a lot of the keeping itself weird is actually just allowing people to be complete pieces of shit. And that's exhausting."

The interviewer was visibly unable to contain her sadness at all of this. And Polish people are pretty sad already, because of the history. (Just ask my grandmother.) But on the bright side? Now no one from Poland will ever come to Portland to drive up apartment prices. 

And frankly, the Portland he describes is the Portland we know best—a place of police who shoot beanbags at men with swords and then run away, chronic masturbators trapped in Port-a-Potties by angry vigilantes, and Salt & Straw. 

Anyway, here's the video. Modest Mouse will play MusicfestNW on Sunday, August 23. Tickets on sale here.

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