ON JUNE 25, 2003 Portland lost two of its best when Angela Leazenby and Spooky Dance Band leader Orion Satushek were struck and killed by a repeat drunk driver. Every year, on or around the anniversary, Angela and Orion’s friends get together to celebrate their legacy. This time it’s going down at the Artistery as […]
Adam Gnade
Posted inMusic
The Scene Report
Local Music News
Happy 10th anniversary to Jonny X and the Groadies, local purveyors of beautiful, fucked experimental heaviness. Send them candy-grams, cakes, and roses. A lot of bands lose their energy and give lackluster, limp, boring shows after 10 years. How do you keep it passionate and fun? DJ INVISIBLETOUCH: Practical answer—being conscious of bands that mellow/burn out after […]
Posted inZINES
We Published the Frog
Found Magazine‘s Davy Rothbart in Portland
DAVY ROTHBART builds documents of America. His Found magazine and book series, now in its fifth year, publishes discarded letters, Post-it Notes, photographs, drawings—you name it—and creates a crowded, alive-feeling thing that’s chillingly voyeuristic, hilarious, and—quite often—crushingly heartbreaking. Built upon submissions from all over the US, the recently released second Found book is a dizzying […]
Posted inExtras
Sleater-Kinney Breaks Up!
Seminal Northwest Band Calls it Splits. Check out all the latest music and political news in Blog Town, PDX!
Posted inMusic
The Immoralist
Cex Wants to Liberate You
“I TURNED HER OVER and went for that ass. It’s always hard to tell how a girl’s gonna react to having her shitter licked, so I asked her first if it’d be okay. Tyler was into it. My kind of broad.” And so goes the collection of short erotica showcased in the CD book to […]
Posted inMusic
Comfortably Free
Pink Mountain, Confident Amid Disorder
IT GETS CONFUSING. In the same music scene—psychedelic independent rock, subphylum semi-hippie experimental, more or less—there’s Pink Mountaintops and Pink Mountain. The former is Stephen McBean from Black Mountain doing trippy, hypersexual country rock. (“Everything is murky and sinister and rotting in the meth-drenched moonlight,” wrote Jamey Bainer in a recent Mercury story.) The latter […]
Posted inMusic
The Scene Report
Local Music News
Last week I reported on Lauren K. Newman’s (AKA LKN) near fatal head and spine injury. While her recovery has been a slow go, there are a shit-ton of good people pulling for her, including the folks behind helplkn.com, a site set up to help assuage her medical bills. Also, Lauren’s label, Greyday, has put […]
Posted inMusic
The Scene Report
Local Music News
First off, this shit is fucked. GreyDay Productions recording artist LKN (Lauren K. Newman) was seriously injured recently. Says Newman’s friend Jason DuMars, “Lauren fell face first down a flight of stairs and fractured her skull, seriously damaged a major blood vessel, and herniated a disc in her back. Doctors said it’s amazing that she […]
Posted inMusic
The Scene Report
Local Music News
Doug Fir assistant booker Nicole Warren recently left for law school. Meet her replacement, Julia Fernandez. What did you do before you got the Doug Fir job? I worked for Greyday, a local label run by my friend Todd [Berry]. My official title was in-house booking agent, but I tried to lend a hand wherever […]
Posted inMusic
Obscurity Now!
Locals Open Underground Record Store
VALENTINE’S restaurant down on 232 SW Ankeny has been putting on some of Portland’s best shows lately, and shit’s just getting better. This Thursday (June 1), local music-makers Tom Greenwood and Pete Swanson unveil Clouds, a staunchly underground record store based in the restaurant’s upstairs loft. But when I say underground I don’t mean your […]
Posted inMusic
Not of This World
The Constantines’ Everyman Reality
THE CONSTANTINES COME complete with an anxious shiver, a jitter of guitars, or one of the singers’ voices quavering out when you least expect it. And it’s familiar—an uneasy, mild paranoia that feels like movies about coke or dark ’80s pop songs or Karen O bristling along with her band’s wind-tunneling howl. It also has […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Bad Sound, Great Story
Beyond the Promised Land with Free Zone
WHAT A BEAUTIFUL, smart, sad film—and what a beautiful, smart, sad film pissed upon by bad sound. Set almost entirely in the front seat of a car, Free Zone shows Jewish American Rebecca (Natalie Portman) and Hanna (Hana Laszlo), a middle-aged Israeli, road tripping across Israel’s desolate, scorched desert-scape. Hanna, serious and hardened by war […]