"Portlandia" star Carrie Brownstein (Getty Images)

Portland—the one in the Northwest, not the one to our north where our friends have that charming beach house—is a little like Brooklyn and a little like a nursery school full of adults. Or at least that’s what we’ve been led to believe from two seasons of Portlandia, the sketch show that takes on Oregonian hipster/layabout culture, from its obsession with organics (we East Coast urbanites can relate!) to its disdain for anything even remotely corporate (what are they talking about?!). Tonight, little-cable-network-that-could IFC throws a premiere party for the show’s third season at the Museum of Natural History, a common location for black-tie galas but one that—until tonight—hasn’t seen many garments made of hemp.

Portlandia premiere, American Museum of Natural History, 200 Central Park West, invitation only.

Third time's the charm. (Photo by Chris Hornbecker)

The third season of everyone’s favorite IFC comedy-sketch show is fast upon us, with Portlandia slated to begin on January 4. In advance of the inevitable onslaught of new hipsterisms, hereto-unknown eccentricities and brand new organic fetishes, The Observer cornered co-creator Fred Armisen about what new “dreams of the Nineties” he would bring to life.

First among them is an appearance by No Doubt, the very ska-tastic Cali band that brought us Gwen Stefani before she turned all L.A.M.B. He would not divulge how Mrs. Gavin Rossdale and her cohorts would be featured in the show, but one might assume they will not be going Navajo. The Brooklyn-based band The Dirty Projectors will also be featured in the coming season.

Another newcomer to the show will be Chloe Sevingny. Ms. Sevigny recently guest starred on the third season of Louie--closing her act by unabashedly masturbating in a coffee shop, sitting next to a flustered Louis CK.

Ms. Sevigny will play a roommate to Carrie and Fred, Mr. Armisen said, as they are looking for something to “define their relationship a little bit more.” The dynamics of a third wheel crush perhaps?

“I’ll just say this, she causes a rift in the relationship, she kind of causes some problems in our friendship,” he said. But he stops to check himself, “I wouldn’t even describe it as problems, she kind of challenges their friendship.”

Fans can also look forward to a Christmas special, “Winter in Portland,” to air on IFC on December 14.

As a precursor to all the excitement, a travel-book based on the show was released on November 13th. Co-authored by Mr. Armisen and Ms. Brownstein, Portlandia: A Guide for Visitors, is intended as something of a keepsake for the fans.

“It was almost like going deeper into the stuff that already exists. Little things we couldn’t really do on the show,” Mr. Armisen said about his experience writing the book.

By way of an example, he refers to Candace and Toni, the women who own a feminist bookstore (‘Women & Women’)--which has had visitors like Aubrey Plaza, Heather Graham and Steve Buschemi in the past--on the show. Expect to find a ‘fem-zine’ insert, made by Candace and Toni, in the book. “When you look through that, you get a sense of who they are, it’s like their little book, it’s got their voices,” he said.

Putting the book and the third season together caused Mr. Armisen to reflect on what exactly he and Ms. Brownstein have tapped into with the show.

“The show is actually about people, it’s about trends, it’s about cities in general, and I am not just talking about living in the United States. I travel, and these communities exist in places like Sweden and England,” Mr. Armisen told The Observer. "It’s almost like Portland is sort of like, the book cover, it’s the wooden frame around it.”

Before letting Mr. Armisen get on with his busy schedule, The Observer just had to ask the SNL veteran if there was one personality he was itching to impersonate on the late night show. “I haven’t done Bill Maher yet. I just haven’t figured out a way to do a sketch about him,” he said, adding that he was a fan of Mr. Maher’s.

Nsharma@observer.com

Namaste (IFC)

Yoga class, of course.

Namaste, indeed. This season better have a running narrative about doulas, or we'll be really pissed.

*Unless you find out the truth about Portlandia by taking hallucinogens at its premiere party, at which point you pretty much are a Girls episode.

- Rob Lowe, Stephen Colbert, and the cast of Modern Family will be filling in for Robin Roberts on Good Morning America this week while the ABC host undergoes a bone marrow transplant. Hey, we'd take a soggy piece of bread over last week's substitute, Jessica Simpson.

- Would you like to go bowling with Paul Rudd, Rashida Jones, Denis O'Hare, John Oliver, and not one but two stars of a Law&Order franchise? Of course you do. We don't even need to mention that the whole thing's for charity. You were already sold.

- Candace Bushnell keeps having to resettle the same old lawsuit with former manager (and alleged Stanford inspiration) Clifford Streit. She keeps giving him money for his part in helping her get Sex and the City on HBO, and he keeps telling her its not enough. She should just stop and ask herself, WWCBD?

-Alec Baldwin's dream Portlandia role: "A meat salesman with all kinds of charts and graphs of the loins and the sections of the pig and the cow and the organs." Just no pig, please...we're keeping kosher this week.

Brokelandia

Did we need a Brooklyn spoof of Portlandia? Not really, since the IFC comedy encapsulates most of the tropes of hipster culture already, not just those relevant to the West Coast. (If you need further evidence, check out Adrianne Jeffries' amazing piece, "A Twee Grows in Brooklyn" on this exact subject.)

Plus, we already had that Sh*t New Yorkers Say last week, which was close enough. When Eliot and Ilana Glazer were naming off newspaper titles, it was just like that one sketch from Portlandia, "Did you read it?"

Brooklyn blog Brokelyn's latest incarnation of the imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-viral-flattery takes the "Did you read it" Portlandia sketch and turns it into a food fight. Funny if you live in Brooklyn and can laugh at a joke about Roberta's; kind of confusing if you don't and can't.

David Cross in deep chip

And then there was the matter of the one of the film's producers, whom he claimed was "the personification of what people think about when they think negatively about Jews."

Yikes.

What's so strange about this tirade is that Mr. Cross had clearly thought it out. He didn't say the producer WAS a negative Jewish stereotype. He said she was "what people think" when they, like Annie Hall's grandmother, imagine a Hasid with stylish payot trying to collect all their money and bagels. Thus taking the blame off himself--"I don't have any negative associations about Jews, other people do!"--Mr. Cross reveals himself to be unaware of the biggest irony of it all: as someone who was raised Jewish, a self-hating Jew is one of the biggest personifications of the negative connotations people have about the religion.

Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein (Getty Images)

First, a little bit of back story: The night before The Observer was to go to the screening party for the sequel season of Portlandia, the IFC comedy show starring Saturday Night Live fixture Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein, an Irishman stepped on our lighter in a bar. In exchange for the gaffe, the gentleman offered us a fist-sized piece of homemade organic chocolate truffle, wrapped in decorative foil. How sweet!

As we dashed our way to the Museum of Natural History last night in order to see what could possibly top the catchphrase "Put a Bird On It," we split the giant confection with a fellow famished coworker. Which would have all been fine, if we hadn't made the completely understandable mistake of confusing "chocolate truffles" for "chocolate-covered mushrooms." No, not truffle mushrooms. The other kind. (In hindsight, putting actual truffle mushrooms into chocolate doesn't make any sense either.)

We guess that's why your parents warned you never to take organic candy from strangers. Ooh look, there's Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig! Are those two glowing, or is just the hallucinogens kicking in?

Portlandia as a show works by playing on conventions of hipster culture. While the first season took on broad subjects like eco-freaks, obsessive crafters (Put a ___ on it!), and outraged feminist retailers, the episodes screened for next season were more niche in their targets. Andy Samberg played a cocktail creationist torn between the life of an artisan mixologist and that of a SoCal bartender, while Ms. Wiig's amazing cameo as a feline band's Misery-inspired super-fan reminded us why we never let the Keyboard Cat take creative control of our musical group.

It should be mentioned, our coats just felt really good, sitting in that theater. So soft!

The opening scene in Portlandia's second season tried to recreate its success with the "Put a Bird on It" catchphrase. Unfortunately the new slogan "We can pickle that!" felt like a Mad-Libbing of last season's hit formula instead of fresh material.

Midway through the show, we realized we were sitting so close to Friday Night Lights/American Horror Story's gorgeous and talented Connie Britton that we had to physically restrain ourselves from touching her hair. But we really wanted to? She has great hair. To be fair, we had on our Red Wolf Spirit Hood, which at the time we believed rendered us invisible. Or invincible. (One of the two.) Jeff Goldblum, sitting three feet away, had a really deep purple chakra. Lorne Michael's chakra, visible two rows over, was pewter and had a slight Canadian accent.

After the screening, guests were ushered up to a Portlandia-themed bar room, which featured a lot of colors, pickle jars, anxiety emotions, a giant children's parachute, and a two-to-one celebrity/non-famous person ratio.

While Fred Armisen posed for photos with his mother, we asked if the actor felt like his show resonated as much to the East Coast, Williamsburg audience as it did with Oregonian hipsters. Did he see them as sister cities, or was the location of the show crucial to its humor?

"Portland's got a lot of sister cities," Mr. Armisen replied in his surprising dulcet voice, while behind him the wall began melting distractingly. "Williamsburg, Tokyo, Austin...that culture can be found in so many places now." The pandemic of 20-something liberal arts majors in large cities whose tastes run towards raw foods, hypocritical eco-snobbery, and a fanatic disdain of anything "mainstream" could explain the show success: to date, it's had the highest ratings of any show on the network.

Making our way to the back bar area where the cast and crew of Saturday Night Live were spending the evening, we were in high spirits. We were the spirit god Red Fox! No, you can't touch our hat! It's a hood! It has powers!

We found SNL writer and Law & Order enthusiast John Mulaney chatting with a small group about his love for American Horror Story. His lady friend was clearly a supporter of West Dillon High, with a shirt reading "Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose." Ms. Britton herself was nowhere to be found, though we did spot new cast members Vanessa Bayer, Taran Killam, and Paul Brittain all trying to look old enough to drink. We managed to tackle Mr. Killam; telling him how much we loved his recent cameo as a deranged glee teacher on Community, which lead to a short discussion with the actor on the NBC show's brilliance and unfortunate hiatus, before Ms. Bayer rescued him from an evening of chit-chat with an accidentally intoxicated reporter.

"Tell her how much you love her Miley Cyrus impression," a nearby friend elbowed us. Come on, we weren't that stoned.

While Mr. Hader and Ms. Wiig were early arrivals on the scene, looking glamorous, costar Jason Sudeikis showed up around midnight in what appeared to be sweatpants and a backpack. Coming from the gym, perhaps? Kristen Schaal, Seth Meyers, Dave Hill, Heather Lawless, Todd Barry, Kumail Nanjiani, Jack McBrayer, Jon Glaser, and David Cross rounded out the comedic social network. A heated debate between ourselves and our + 1 over the name of that Nicolas Cage film directed by one of the other Coppolas resulted in Mr. Cross leaning in and asking, "Are you having this conversation for my benefit?" (Totally! How did he guess?**)  There may have been some incisive commentary to parse from that exchange, regarding the parallels between celebrity and hipster narcissism, but we didn't feel like chasing the analogy once it took corporeal form as a misshapen bunny and hopped to the exit. We decided to follow our hallucination's pragmatic work-night vibe and put a bird on our evening before last call.

As for our tiny coworker with whom we shared our candy? We hadn't heard from her in the last three hours; as far as we know, she's still camped out somewhere in the museum, living out our childhood fantasy from The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. If she doesn't show up by tomorrow, we'll assume she's decided to live in the museum and off the grid for good. That would just be so Portlandia of her!

**The movie, by the way, was Deadfall.

He had discovered the most marvelous cocoa there, he enthused, and offered them a tiny, wrapped sample of stone-ground, small batch “virgin” chocolate, which he sells in four flavors including Blueberry Lavender and Vanilla Rooibos.

“I had just seen Portlandia,” Mr. LaRosa told The Observer, referring to the indie sitcom. “And as this nice guy began telling us all the trouble he’d gone to to make this chocolate, my head went straight to the first episode, where a young couple cannot order the chicken on the menu without knowing the chicken’s name and whether it had any friends.

“In his eyes it wasn’t a simple chocolate bar, it was this whole thing, it was all wrapped up in Thailand and meditation and yoga and beautiful paper,” Mr. LaRosa went on. “This is a guy you could imagine would be a young Wall Street exec or something but he’s making artisanal chocolate bars in Brooklyn.”

Earlier that month, Brooklynites were passing around a clip of Brian Williams riffing on the ironic glasses frames, homemade beads, shared apartments and gourmet grilled cheeses of their home borough, and the New York Times's marveling at them. “I’m leaving here to get to an artisanal market that just opened up today!” the anchorman snarked. “It’s a flash artisanal market! The newest thing!”

How often the Connecticut commuter actually gets to the better borough is unknown, but the bit killed. “It was dead on,” said Eric Cunningham, a Carroll Gardens-based comedian, who was inspired to start a website calling on Mr. Williams to run for president.

Heroic though it was, Mr. Williams’s intervention may have been too little too late. Brooklyn’s overwrought mustaches and handmade ice cream in upcycled cups are now well-established facts of life. It’s as if the tumor of hipster culture that formed when the cool kids moved to Williamsburg had metastasized into a cluster of cysts pressing down on parts of the borough’s brain. Around the militantly organic Park Slope Co-op, for example, or Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, where you can buy rings glued to typewriter keys as well as used, handmade, vegetable-dyed, vintage Oriental rugs for $1,000. Brooklyn is producing and consuming more of its own culture than ever before, giving rise to a sense of Brooklyn exceptionalism and a set of affectations that’s making the borough look more and more like Portland, Oregon.

“Would you like one of my cool little bags?” the chocolate vendor asked after Mrs. LaRosa bought a few bars to use for baking. No thanks, she said.

So it wasn’t until later, when he passed by again, that Mr. LaRosa noticed a sign above the bags. He took a picture because he was afraid he wouldn’t be believed: “Raaka’s packaging is designed by his friends and printed with soy inks on 100 percent postconsumer-recycled, chlorine-free, processed paper that was made from wind-generated energy.” He put the picture on his blog in a post titled “Brooklandia?”

Portland was “Brooklyn before Brooklyn was Brooklyn,” as NPR correspondent Ari Shapiro once quipped. His colleague Kurt Andersen, host of the public radio show Studio 360 and co-founder of Spy, put it more starkly: “Brooklyn without black people.”

Mr. Andersen co-founded the Portland Brooklyn Project, a “loose sister-cityish entity” to unite what the organization calls “creators of culture … with an interest in the connection between Portland and Brooklyn,” in 2010; it’s since changed hands. “Both suffered from an urban inferiority complex that during the last decade or so has become a superiority complex,” he explained in an email. “Brooklyn at its best today is in lots of ways probably like Manhattan at its best in the middle third of the 20th century, although with less hard-core, playing-for-keeps, drunken, druggy, up-all-night Bohemianism.”

I lived in Portland for two years after college. It’s a delightful place with plenty of drunken, druggy Bohemianism. But, dear Brooklyn, you do not want to go there.

This cautionary tale begins in December 2008, when your unemployed college graduate reporter wrote a post on Couchsurfing.com looking for a place to stay. “I’d love to show you around (currently underemployed) so weekdays are just fine for me,” replied Laura, a filmmaker who became my first friend in town. She lives with three or four roommates in a vast former church in Southeast Portland, across from New Seasons, Portland’s pricier answer to the pricey-enough Whole Foods. “I can teach you how to properly wipe your tush with just one square of toilet paper,” she promised on her Couchsurfing profile.

I never took her up on that offer, but she gave me a copy of the Zinester’s Guide to Portland—this was before I knew about zine culture, when I thought “zinester” rhymed with “sinister”—and loaned me and my then-boyfriend bikes so we could ride with her to the Green Dragon, a warehouse-turned-bar known for a rotating selection of 50 microbrews and geeky gatherings such as Beer and Blog. We rode back tipsy and crashed on a pile of mattresses in a corner of the church.

We wound up sharing a house with a yoga instructor and an underemployed deejay. Our rent was $195 each; we spent about four times that on food and beer. I bought a bike immediately and talked about it a lot; I developed a highly discerning palate for gourmet coffee and I.P.A.’s. We bought local and composted impeccably. I carried around a Kleen Kanteen to which I’d affixed a map-of-Oregon decal with a green heart over Portland. We were irreproachable environmental stewards with one guilty exception: the gallons and gallons of water we used to fill and refresh a 12-foot inflatable pool in the front yard, a gift from the Israeli backpackers we were hosting during the summer heat wave of 2009. We had a video projector in the living room for movies and Nintendo. Pot was $30 an eighth and very potent. We indulged frequently on the front porch, splayed on the full-size couch we got for $25 on Craigslist.

One of Portlandia’s catchphrases is that it’s “where young people go to retire,” but that doesn’t fully capture it. Rather, think back to the moment when you realized you were grown up enough to buy candy whenever you wanted. Then imagine extending that phase indefinitely, for years.

Portland, a city of about 600,000 residents (compared to Brooklyn’s 2.6 million), is, according to various lists, the “greenest,” most bike-friendly and most-tattooed city in the nation, in addition to boasting the highest concentration of food carts. It’s also the 11th-most alternative city in the nation, according to a “Weirdness Index” commissioned in 2006 by the Chicago-based nonprofit CEOs for Cities; weirder than Austin, Texas (17th), and New York City (14th) but not as weird as San Francisco (first).

The city has embraced the idea, and for good reason. Without the weirdness, Portland would be little more than a dreary, down-and-out, virtually all-white town in the flyover between San Francisco and Seattle. It inspires a weird pride: more than 18,000 “Keep Portland Weird!” bumper stickers are said to be in circulation (they sell for $2 apiece). “Keeping Portland Weird ought to be the theme of our economic strategy,” Portland economist Joe Cortwright wrote in an editorial in The Oregonian. “As Hunter S. Thompson advised, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

But Portland’s weirdness is hard-won. The place was settled by pioneers who had the guts and grit to schlep across the country and then ford rapids to traverse the Cascade Range. More recent factors contributing to the city’s popularity with independent spirits—and its lack of appeal for more typical American hustlers who might have provided a countervailing force—include economic stagnation that set in after the collapse of timber industry; redlining and other manifestations of racial discrimination that persisted into the 1990s; and lush soil and unrelenting rain (a boon for local produce of both the edible and smokeable varieties). Hippies, hipsters, homosexuals and other deviants moved to town in waves until weird started to look normal. Consequently, those who wanted to keep defining themselves as weird had to worry about being more alternative than the Joneses—which explains people like Dingo Dizmal, a 30-something clown of my acquaintance who rode around on a tall bike made of two frames fused together while rocking a top hat.

At the same time, the generally lousy economy meant that, like kids in a poor neighborhood bouncing on an old mattress, Portlanders had to make their own fun. Hence the thrift store industrial complex that keeps ’80s blouses circulating until they fall apart or get made into pillows; the competitive sport of coffee connoisseurship; and the Sunday tradition of midnight “zoobombing,” in which participants unlock a fleet of kids’ bikes piled high around a bike rack downtown and head west to the top of an 800-foot hill at the Portland Zoo.

Brooklynites seeking a vision of the future need only visit Portland’s Casa Diablo, which claims to be the nation’s first vegan strip club, then pop into Voodoo Donut, which sells doughnuts covered in Froot Loops or shaped like a phallus with cream-filled balls (the shop also officiates weddings). And don’t miss the regularly scheduled Adult Soapbox Derby or the food carts. Portland’s food carts have their own iPhone apps and trade journal, FoodCartsPortland.com. They are organized into food-cart “pods,” with names like Cartopia, Good Food Here and Cartlandia, a “bike-centric food cart superpod.”

Last month Portland held its Eighth Annual Naked Bike Ride, a beery, movable party that doubles nominally as an environmental awareness event. The police sent out a press release reminding everyone that it is legal to be nude in public in Portland, but to please wear a helmet.

The city’s effect on people goes beyond the urge to strip. Emi lived three houses down from us. She’d arrived in Portland, age 24, a gorgeous, perfectly manicured Gucci- and Prada-clad rich-girl princess. A friend of mine dated her for a while. Then she went full-on Portland. She shaved her head, gave away her iPhone, started wearing flowy dresses and spending weeks at a commune she called just “the farm.” She and the couple next door conspired to rip up all the concrete between their houses. Then it rained and her basement flooded.

Such dramas kept things entertaining, but after nearly two years, it became clear that none of my three very part-time jobs were going anywhere, and I started to feel trapped in Neverland. In September, I crash-landed on my mom’s couch in Manhattan, which meant I was spending most nights in Williamsburg and Bushwick. But it wasn’t until I walked out of the Bedford stop during the cold light of day for the first time and saw 40 bikes stuffed into the racks on the sidewalk and a frozen yogurt truck and thrift store racks in the street that it really hit me: I’m in Portland. But this Portland was in an alternate universe, where people have money and ambition!

“I get all the press releases from, let’s say, Third Ward,” said Robert Smith, an NPR reporter based in New York who went to college in Portland, referring to the crafty collective in Williamsburg that hosts art installations and offers classes in glass blowing and medicinal herbs. “They’re doing it on a sort of almost Manhattan kind of scale. When they do D.I.Y., they have the giant building and press releases and marketing opportunities and that’s great, but it seems a little too proud of itself.”

A recent game of human Scrabble on Bedford Avenue reminded him of Portland, as does the popular Brooklyn pastime of crocheting sweaters for statues and fireplugs, “which is darling,” he said. “Although apparently there is an ür–yarn bomber who started on the East Coast somewhere.”

He added, “There’s a whole culture around that sort of thing now. It says something about you. It says, ‘Yeah, I ride my bike every day, I make pickles in my basement, and I sell those myself.’ It’s funny that those were discrete things that someone would do 20 years ago in Portland but the cultural package didn’t all come together in one nice stereotypical whole.”

It does now, thanks in part to the IFC series starring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein.

“Portlandia, as a 20-something Brooklyn person, hit home,” said Max Silvestri, a comedian who has lived in Williamsburg for five years. “Like ‘Put a Bird On It,’ where it’s just two artists where what they do is they put a bird on things?” he went on, referencing a now-famous sketch in which two interior designers decorate everything with bird appliqués. “I feel like that’s what Brooklyn Flea is. No offense to Brooklyn Flea. A lot of things look better with birds.

“I am guilty as or more guilty than anyone of it all,” he added. “None of this comes from a place of condescension or loathing. Only self-loathing.”

Alex Basek, a freelance travel writer, recently settled in Prospect Heights after eight years in Manhattan. “I live within a five-minute walk of two bike shops that sell $700-plus bikes,” he said. “That’s the Portlandiest thing about it. There’s Glass Shop, a fancy coffee spot, like single roaster blabbity blah, all the way on Classon Avenue. Which heretofore I thought was one of those stops you wonder about on the A train en route to J.F.K.”

And then there’s Dr. JJ Pursell, a naturopath and owner of the Herb Shoppe, a botanical medicine pharmacy located on Hawthorne Street, the double-bike-laned main drag of Southeast Portland, who plans to open her second outpost in Boerum Hill. “I just read in The New York Times, maybe a month ago, some article about this warehouse party that was happening in Brooklyn, I think it was even under a bridge,” she said when asked about the two cities. “It was definitely very much the theme that you often see in Portland for a late-outing type of event where there’s a lot of art and music and interactive art going on. I don’t want to use the term Burning Man, but it was that kind of feel.”

Mike and David Radparvar, who founded Holstee, an environmentally conscious apparel company after David decided pants pockets were too tight to carry a wallet and sewed a “holster” onto the side of a T-shirt, can relate. “We were really attracted to Dumbo,” said Mike. “We found that it’s an area that attracted a lot of forward-thinking, progressive people in similar types of spaces and mind-sets. You’ve got everyone from leading agencies like BBMG to Etsy,” he said. “Like, it’s right next to Brooklyn Flea.”

When they started, they used 6-percent recycled fabric. Now the shirts are made with 100-percent recycled jersey knit fabric fashioned from plastic bottles and industrial scraps, and excess fabric from making the shirts is turned into “fins,” small scarves that can be worn around the neck or arm.
The brothers were speaking to The Observer from a cafe where they were prepping for a TEDxEast talk. Mike read from a slide: “‘Are we a generation driven by hippie values—minus acid, plus funding and smart phones—that can create sustained change? Or are we just a group of overprivileged, underexperienced, overconfident Bohemian revivalists that are just trying to defer reality?’” He added, “You know what I’m saying?”

The Radparvars, like many Portlandy Brooklynites, have only the purest motivations. But money, native competitiveness and proximity to the Manhattan media machine are quickly escalating what would pass for endearing quirks in Portland into lucrative commercial ventures and conspicuous consumption in Proco and Bococa. While Portland seems destined to remain a funky cheap neighborhood for the rest of the nation unless someone discovers oil, Brooklyn has been gentrifying from the Manhattan-side in since long before the Lonely Planet named Brooklyn “the hippest part of New York City” in 2007.

“You get a concentration of people who are visibly different in some way that’s not repulsive but kind of attractive for other people to consume,” explained Sharon Zukin, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. “That becomes a kind of brand for a neighborhood, or for the city as a whole, in the case of Portland.

“Then real estate developers start jumping on the bandwagon and marketing the brand, so that what starts out as alternative culture, alternative lifestyle, laid-back, D.I.Y. or whatever you want to call it, that becomes a product and the brand of a place, and then it becomes part of a business cycle where the media pick it up and”—she threw The Observer a bone—“not you, of course, but you know it could be rock critics or lifestyle journalists, they pick it up … and then it becomes very expensive to live there because more affluent people beg to move in, because they want to be different too.”

This process, she added, “seems to be getting more intense faster than before.”

At this point, Brooklyn is already so Portlandy that even the media appear to be tiring of the story. “One of the things I’ve found is that as a reporter it’s getting harder for me to pitch Brooklyn stories that start like, ‘Hey, there’s a group of guys in Brooklyn or a group of young people in Brooklyn who—’” Mr. Smith said. “You can sort of feel the eye-roll of the editor, like, yeah, there’s a bunch of people in Brooklyn who, you name it, are constructing a huge skyscraper out of used coffee cups! They’re learning how to butcher pigs in their own kitchen!

“I’m not trashing Brooklyn folks who try things,” he hedged. “God love them. They’re making it a more interesting place.”

“It’s a little overhyped,” admitted Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin, 34, who grew up in Park Slope. Mr. Dobkin refused to participate when his writers asked for input on a recent listicle, “100 Reasons Why Brooklyn Lives Up to the Hype,” which included Smorgasburg, Kombucha Brooklyn and the borough’s “alt-performance art party scene.”

“Williamsburg is just becoming like a circus,” he said. “When I’m there, I hear the circus music in my head. Mustaches were like 2010. We’re on to mutton chops. Everyone is walking around like the Sartorialist is about to take a picture of them. That’s not a healthy way to live.

“It’s all just becoming so precious,” he reflected. “And Brooklyn is not supposed to be a precious place.”

I don’t want to trash Portland. It may be precious, but the people who live there enjoy life tremendously. You can eat and drink really well without having to work very hard. I miss having to choose whether to pass the time with pub trivia, disc golf or mushroom hunting.

But I’ve been thinking of checking out Detroit. The Times says an influx of young creative types is turning it into a Midwestern Tribeca.

Correction: The original version of this story reversed the "distinctiveness" rankings of New York and Austin in the City Vitals study. New York is 14th weirdest and Austin is 17th weirdest. The Observer regrets the error.

The new show, which premiered Friday on IFC, depicts a eco-friendly wonderland where the denizens of this magical Portlandia enjoy a rigorous pursuit of the liberal ideal. There are militant feminist bookstores, restaurants with overly extensive information about your dish's living experience on a sustainable farm, and the openness to not scoff at adult hide and go seek games held solely as an excuse for the microbrew-sponsored after party.

How accurate is the show? The New York Times treks all the way to the Pacific Northwest to investigate whether or not the people of Portland like the show as much as the more objective New York crowd who watched it with The Observer at the premiere party.

Local opinions are mixed, but The Times managed to find a cast of characters who may very well be future targets for "Portlandia" creators Fref Armisen and Carrie Brownstein. Let's take a look at the representative sample!

• A restaurateur that has on hand the skull of the pig that provided the pork head mortadella (The name of the deceased was Sir Francis Bacon).
• The owner of a nonprofit feminist bookstore.
• A boad member of said nonprofit feminist bookstore.
• A photographer for the blog Eater PDX.

Like it or not, Portland may have to get used to the mocking on "Portlandia," as they're providing the writers with no shortage of episode fodder.

Click for Scandal Report: Champagne Mania Makes for A Boozy Golden Globes

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

It was the premiere of "Portlandia," the sure-fire TV hit from Fred Armisen (of Saturday Night Live fame) and Carrie Brownstein (of now-defunct rock heroes Sleater-Kinney), and everywhere we looked we were greeted with a wash of that plaid-heavy cozy super-nineties fabric, flannel.

The bartenders serving up Portland's own Rogue Ale? Wearing flannel. The caterers swooping around with balls of organic goat cheese and grass-fed beef sliders? Wearing flannel. Many of the people in the crowd from Portland or associated with Portland? Wearing flannel.

And with pine trees and giant drawing of birds lining the space, the Edison Ballroom did indeed feel redolent of that Pacific Northwest city that gets lovingly mocked in the show.

"It's like my escape," Armisen told The Observer about Portland, the place that bears more than a passing relationship to the vigilantly, outlandishly eco-conscious world of Portlandia. "I go there, and I feel really good when I'm there."

He paused to grab an hors d'oeuvre, a chicken skewer placed on a wooden tray that stated the name of the organic farm where the chicken was raised. The chicken, the sign claimed, came from Aliki Farms. This may have been a joke: in the first episode of "Portlandia," which will air on IFC this Friday, Armisen and Brownstein have to ask the waitress to hold their seats at lunch while they personally visit Aliki Farms to ensure that the restaurant was not lying about it being a suitably organic environment.

"This is an opportunity to be silly, and to explore absurdity -- things that I would never want to marry to music," said Brownstein, whose former incarnation as guitarist in Sleater-Kinney confirmed her spot in the canon of Portland rock.

Armisen's keeping his day job on SNL, so many of the castmates (including current squeeze Abby Elliott) showed up to take in the show, which consists of a series of short, uproarious skits. When they first saw each other Andy Sandberg and Seth Meyers embraced in a fully minute-long bro hug, complete with backpatting and ear-talking. Cast members from SNL's metafictional counterpart showed up as well -- Jack McBreyer, for instance, had more conversations with preening pretty girls than Kenneth has had in his entire life (though we did see him leave early and alone). 

Kyle MacLachlan was also on hand, having filmed a spot for the show in which he plays the super enthusiastic mayor of Portland. It's a casting move that's genius to anyone familiar with "Twin Peaks."

"In Fred's mind maybe I lent a little bit of, uh, authenticity to the proceedings," MacLachlan told The Observer.

Standing and chatting in an olive-green dress, Heather Graham explained how she scored her role as an unwelcome member of a journaling group at the feminist bookstore.

"[Fred] kind of pitched an idea, but it wasn't totally written out," she told The Observer, mentioning that the skits are often just improvised.

Then she complimented our outfit, insisting that we looked like "a character out of Franny and Zooey."

The organic crab cakes begat organic apple pie pastries, and many of the guests went out to claim their gift bag (You get a big bottle of Rogue! You get a big bottle of Rogue!) and depart.

But we wanted to get some hints as to what we can expect from the future of Portlandia, so we asked Fred Armisen who, if anyone, would be his ideal guest star on the show.

"I wish Prince would host," he said. "I think he could play anybody."

Mulling this over, Armisen then said he would put in a call to Prince's agent the next day.

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nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234