Chas Bowie [Pep Rally Time! We sent Chas Bowie to Blazers Media Day on Monday. Here’s his tipsheet.—eds.] Monday was the Portland Trail Blazers Media Day and, wanting to get my Insta-jam on, I managed to con both the Portland Mercury AND the Blazers office into letting me crash the party. Now that the sugar-buzz […]
Chas Bowie
Posted inMovies & TV
Psyche Killer
Making Sense of Stop Making Sense
Making sense of Stop Making Sense.
Posted inBooks
Avoiding Eye Contact
John Elder Robison talks about living with Asperger’s
John Elder Robison talks about living with Asperger’s.
Posted inMovies & TV
Zidane: A Time-Based Portrait
Douglas Gordon ranks among the preeminent artists of our generation to take the malleable idea of time as a central object of inquiry. The Scottish artist, who garnered both the prestigious Turner Prize and a mid-career retrospective at MoMA before his 40th birthday, is best known for his film work, which deconstructs cinematic conventions via […]
Posted inTBA
Tiago Guedes: Materiais Diversos and Um Solo
In the least successful line of Bob Dylan’s otherwise devastating “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” the narrator, while describing the hallucinatory events he’d witnessed, reports that he “met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow.” Never a sentimentalist, it’s hard to determine how Dylan intended this rendezvous with Roy G. Biv’s altruistic, feminine purity to […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Mike Kelley: Day is Done
“I really dislike popular culture in most cases,” Mike Kelley told a PBS camera crew in 2001. “I think it’s garbage, but that’s the culture I live in and that’s the culture people speak. I’m an avant-gardist. We’re living in the postmodern age, the death of the avant-garde. So all I can really do now […]
Posted inArts
Delirium and Donkey Basketball
Visual Art and Film at TBA:08
Pullout: The Mercury’s Essential Guide to TBA:08
The highlights of TBA’s visual arts lineup.
Posted inMovies & TV
Electroma
Daft Punk’s Electroma is C-3PO and R2-D2’s favorite art film.
Daft Punk’s Electroma is C-3PO and R2-D2’s favorite art film.
Posted inArt
Every Picture Tells a Picture… Or at Least Is a Picture
In what disappointingly turns out to be small A projects’ final show in Portland, artists Chris Johanson and Jo Jackson have assembled an exhibition of contemporary photography that’s occasionally patchy, but largely refreshing. In the goofily named Every Picture Tells a Picture… Or at Least Is a Picture, the local artists highlight the work of […]
Posted inArt
Roger Ballen
In 1999, I was a peon at a photography organization, charged with running the slide projector at the meetings where artists were selected for exhibition. In one unforgettable session, after clicking through hundreds of uninspired transparencies, an image of two drooling idiots appeared on the screen. Twins, the brutes with elephantine ears faced the camera […]
Posted inMovies & TV
A Legendary Killer
Charles Burnett’s Cinematic Resurrection
One of the inherent pitfalls of lost or forbidden phenomena—film or otherwise—is that it often develops a near-mythical status that’s impossible to live up to. Anticipation, rumor, and our yearning for the unattainable all conspire to elevate the “rarely seen” to the supposed level of “phenomenally mind-blowing,” making the ultimate consummation an inevitable disappointment. Few […]
Posted inArt
Al Souza
It’s nothing new to refer to young artists as being part of a “DJ generation,” even if they don’t know crossfading from crosshatching. That artists are creating pastiches from asynchronous bits of popular culture is often remarked on by professors and curators who keep in regular contact with the younger set. Al Souza would represent […]