(Welcome to my new, not-very-regular blog column Two Page Minimum, wherein I take a new book out to happy hour and give it a few minutes to grab my attention. Two Page Minimum is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.) Who’s your date today?Lara Vapnyar’s short story collection Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and […]
Alison Hallett
Alison Hallett served nobly as the Mercury's arts editor from 2008-2014. Her proud legacy lives on.
Posted inMusic
PRA to Move to Leftbank
When I blogged about the Leftbank building a couple weeks ago, the identities of future tenants were still shrouded in secrecy–but now the worthy folks at the Portland Radio Authority have announced that they’ll be moving into the building come September: After years in our cozy down town studio, the PRA is about to upgrade […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Bunny Chow
A South African Road Trip
A South African road trip movie? Now I’ve seen everything!
Posted inBooks
Apocalypse Nerd
by Peter Bagge (Dark Horse)
You probably missed signing up for the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Graphic Novel Intensive Program (GNI), a nine-day workshop series about writing and publishing comics and graphic novels, but it’s not too late to explore some of the comics-y action happening in conjunction with the program before it wraps up on June 29. Powell’s, […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Assassins Gone Wild
Wanted: Naked Pictures of James McAvoy
Wanted makes us hate loving James McAvoy.
Posted inArtsy
Tonight: Pints for PICA!
Get it? Hey there, alkie art boosters: Friendly reminder that tonight at the Lowbrow Lounge (1036 NW Hoyt) from 5 pm until close is the summer edition of Pints for PICA, at which a portion of all food and drink sales go to the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art—including 100% of the sales of Full […]
Posted inPortland
Leftbank
Amy and I got a tour of the 66,000 sq ft Leftbank building this morning (here’s a post with more background)—originally three separate buildings that have been built together to form one rambling multilevel structure, the space has at various points housed a restaurant and bakery, MultiCraft Plastics, and a short-lived illegal jazz club called […]
Posted inCats
Oh Hello, Cat Friday!
Yesterday I got a phone call from Erik, who works in the next room. He said, “You need to come in here immediately.” I’m not in the habit of taking orders from men who collect action figures, but it sounded important and so I went and looked out his window and OMG kittens!! Somehow every […]
Posted inBooks
Readings! Listenings! Talkings!
Why is everything happening tonight? I just want to go see Frightened Rabbit. (Is anyone else absolutely having a relationship with The Midnight Organ Fight?) But I can’t. Because: 1. Inspired by San Francisco’s Porchlight, the Back Fence PDX storytelling series commences tonight. Because Melissa Lion is hard to say no to, I will be […]
Posted inBooks
The Garden of Last Days
by Andre Dubus III (W.W. Norton)
In a piece about Don DeLillo’s 9/11 novel Falling Man in the New York Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan took DeLillo to task for his inability or unwillingness to put a human face on the event, to “bring us to know what might have been going through the minds of the hijackers as they met […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
The Last Five Years
Stumptown Stages at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center
With The Last Five Years, the plight of the Self-Obsessed Urban Hipster has officially been documented in every medium known to Shins fans. Whether the world needed a musical version of Annie Hall is a question I won’t even attempt to answer here: My job is simply to assess how well Stumptown Stages handles Jason […]