Portland Mercury

Readers Pick

Chris Crites: America

If Seattle artist Chris Chrites' new exhibit America had a sensationalist headline, it would be: Sexy Pin-up Found With Guns, Ex-Cons. Chrites knows popular imagery, and paints a collection of vintage pictures of three of its centerpieces—firearms, criminals, and naked ladies—onto brown paper bags. Try doing that with a reusable tote.

Readers Pick

Everyone Who Looks Like You

Hand2Mouth's Everyone Who Looks Like You is a freefall through childhood memories and adult perceptions, a collage of movement, sound, and sentiment that explores the dimensions of family life. But for all the clarity and humor the show offers, there's a fair amount of noisy, grating chaos as well; by the end of the just-too-long show, Everyone's backward focus feels both cloying and claustrophobic. AH $15

Readers Pick

Fat and Sassy II: One Size Fits

The fat empowerment movement takes to the stage, with a musical about "women of substance, and who's getting rich off America getting fat." Thursday & Friday shows will take place at the Rose City Presbyterian Hall at 44th & Sandy. $10-12

Staff Pick Readers Pick

Friendly Fires, The XX and Holly Miranda

Ghostly soul music with electro overtones. $12-14

Readers Pick

Street Wise

Chris Haberman, whose last solo show was an illustrated companion to Alice in Wonderland, switches gears for this exhibit in conjunction with local literary festival Wordstock. He teamed up homeless and transitional youth involved with p:ear artistic programs to apply an exponential amount of imagination to the topic of Portland's wordy culture.

Readers Pick

Negative Bulge!

The zine Negative Bulge!, is a riff off a drawing jam session last July between Luke Ramsey, Blaise Larmee, Kinoko, Sean Christensen, and Theo Ellsworth. You can check it out, check them out, and peruse the newest zine offerings from the Islands Fold art collective at the November First Thursday launch and art party.

Readers Pick

Outlook: PSU Art Graduates 2005-2009

PSU grooms its recent graduates for the external art world with this juried show, spotlighting their work. James Yood, established critic and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, curates the local menage.

Readers Pick

The Control Freaks, El Swampo and Whipcord

Readers Pick

Sci-Fi Authorfest III Booksigning

So many sci-fi writers in one place, there will either be an uprising of delusional adherents or an inter-faith battle of the fantasy universes. Definitely one of the two though. The sci-fi deluge includes Lilith Saintcrow (Flesh Circus); Jay Lake (Green), Thomas Harlan (Land of the Dead); David Levine (Space Magic); Brent Weeks (Beyond the Shadows); Camille Alexa (Push of the Sky); Barb and J. C. Hendee (In Shade and Shadow); Devon Monk (Magic in the Shadows); Brenda Cooper (Wings of Creation); Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Diving into the Wreck); Dean Wesley Smith (numerous Star Trek novels); Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Fall of Light); Mike Shepherd (Undaunted); A. M. Dellamonica (Indigo Springs); Alma Alexander (Cybermage); Louise Marley (the Singers of Nevya series); Ru Emerson (the Bard's Tale series); and Pyr senior editor Lou anders.

Readers Pick

Open Mic: Scott Gallegos

Readers Pick

Tom May

Readers Pick

Bingo with the Indians

Adam Rapp, award-winning playwright and finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, staged a dry run of his play Bingo with the Indians at the Portland Playhouse this summer (when his brother Anthony Rapp of RENT fame was around to star). This winter, the Playhouse brings Bingo back for an extended, un-dry engagement. The play follows four sketchy New York City characters as they hatch a scheme to hold up a bingo game so they can fund their next production, "a scatological spin on Chekov's Three Sisters." Bingo with the Indians is a less cerebral, more raucous, show than the Portland Playhouse has been offering lately, but there should still be enough theater imitating life, imitating theater to satisfy Portland's thinking masses. (November 20th performance is a $10/ticket preview). $14-$19

Readers Pick

Broadcast

Accuse the artists featured in Broadcast of being overly aggressive (e.g. Chris Burden, who hijacked a TV interviewer at knifepoint in 1972) or hard to watch (like the spliced, repeated video clips that Dara Birnbaum or Paik Nam June offer up); that’s understandable. But what they lack in a comfortable viewing experience they make up for in relevance. Broadcast spans forty years of artists’ attempts to tease out the pervasive influence of television and radio. Two main tacks are taken to challenge these mediums, either to engineer (create or crash in on) a new broadcast, or “rebroadcast” an old one, editing or juxtaposing it to rewrite its message. Christian Jankowski’s Telemistica captures his calls to Venetian TV psychics, while Dara Birnbaum uses real news coverage of a notorious kidnapping in 1977 Germany. The consensus is that you’ve got to disrupt dominant narratives, subvert them, and/or break them apart in some way, in order to figure them out. Broadcast includes work from the late 1960s to today. Look for submissions from (in chronological order) Nam June Paik, Chris Burden, TVTV, Doug Hall, Chip Lord & Jody Procter, Gregory Green, neuroTransmitter, and Siebren Versteeg. JC FREE

Readers Pick

The Lying Kind

A slapstick Christmas comedy - hilarious! $22-$29

Readers Pick

The Man Who Came to Dinner

Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman's comedy about the worst house guest ever, a curmudgeonly New York film critic who imposes himself upon the wealthy Stanley family for six weeks (hey, that actually sounds like fun). The Lakewood Theatre Company revives the 1939 play just in time for the season of impositions. $26