News from South of the Border

Spent an eventful weekend in Portland, Seattle's smaller and cooler sister city.

Stopped by the Black Rose Anarchist Bookstore which is still standing, despite all odds. The North Portland neighborhood which has been home to the Black Rose (and the excellent non-profit North Portland Bikeworks) for many years is rapidly gentrifying, and the big-hearted ramshackle bookstore may not be long for this world. The two tenants who used to share the store space (including Portland Books for Prisoners) have moved out, leaving the collective bookstore to shoulder the entire burden of rent. The volunteers who run the place are talking about staging a series of benefit concerts to keep their project alive.

For my part, I picked up a copy of Guiomar Rovira's first hand journalistic account of the revolution in Chiapas, and a pretty new notebook created by local independent publishers Eberhardt Press.