Portlandia

My Portlandia post for Culture Brats goes up sometime today. I'll spare you the actual post (since I'm kind of not supposed to do that anyway), but this is what I wrote on my Tumblr blog yesterday morning in response to a Salon article that was published earlier in the week:

I finally got around to watching episode one. Maybe it’s because I’m not from the Northwest, but I see it more as poking fun at a sort of entitled “alternative” lifestyle available to those have the money to, well, check out the farm from where their food came. A lot of those stereotype apply in my conservative, Midwestern state too. Just hang out at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s.

I get how Portlandia is supposed to parodying Portland in the 90s, which has become a symbol for the kind of uber-liberal, privileged, "new hippy," but most major cities, even in conservative "god bless us" America, have similar enclaves. I spent a good chunk of my twenties in one of those enclaves, and Portlandia is scarily accurate.