Sam Shepard’s 1979 Pulitzer-winning play, Buried Child, is a choking, claustrophobic drama about menace, secrets, incest, insanity, and estrangement. Staged with five antagonists in an Illinois farmhouse, Buried Child is a lyrical powder keg of suppressed shame and sin. It’s a pity, then, that Third Eye Theatre is in far over its head, even as […]
Chas Bowie
Posted inBooks
Grotesque
by Natsuo Kirino
Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque has a cool enough dust jacket that people frequently stopped me to ask how the book was. “I’m not sure yet,” I’d say. “I’m only on page 85.” Later I’d tell a coworker, “I can’t really tell if I like it or not.” I was over 250 pages in at this point. […]
Posted inMovies & TV
So A Dimwit Robs A Bank…
The Lookout: Another Neo-Noir Psychodrama!
It’s one of those plot devices that gives screenwriters involuntary erections: Chris (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, of 3rd Rock from the Sun and Brick) was a star athlete in a small Kansas town until a tragic accident left him with a mysterious cognitive dissonance. (Dummy tries to open a tin can with a garlic press!) And what […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Coming to America
Sudan’s Lost Boys in God Grew Tired of Us
There’s a heartbreaking moment early in God Grew Tired of Us that beautifully demonstrates the power of documentary filmmaking. Three young men have just been notified that they will be moving to America from their wilderness refugee camp in Kenya. The men are among the “lost boys” of Sudan; in the 1980s, a civil war […]
Posted inMusic
The Kid Is All Right
Neither Transcendent nor Shitty
In trying to validate their own careers and produce interesting copy, music writers hardly ever label things “just okay,” preferring instead to radically over-praise or demolish whatever comes across their desk. Thus, you probably won’t hear a lot about Willy Mason’s latest album, which exhibits flashes of both brilliance and tedium. Massachusetts-based Mason was only […]
Posted inArt
Mariana Tres
Nothing Is Lost
For Nothing Is Lost, ex-Portland photographer Mariana Tres set down her own camera and invited people from all over the world to help create her solo show at Newspace Center for Photography. It’s a pervasive trend at the moment—”crowdsourcing” as a friend recently tagged it. Relying on a “wisdom of the crowds” wiki-sensibility, artists are […]
Posted inArt
Jason Fulford
Aquick trip to the photography section of Powell’s Books, or repeated visits to enough photo-centric art galleries, will make one thing abundantly clear to you: That creating casual, color photographs of mundane objects appears to be so effortless that young artists from all over the world have gorged themselves on the trend. The once-revolutionary (c. […]
Posted inMusic
Robert Pinsky on Poetry & Music
(He’s That Poet Who Was on The Simpsons)
It’s no accident that the former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky appears in our music section this week, rather than with all the other book events. Few living authors of any stripe have dedicated themselves so tirelessly to the musicality of language, striving to demonstrate that poetry is a purely sonic experience. “A poem ‘happens’ each […]
Posted inMovies & TV
The Month of Matt
Local Filmmaker Matt McCormick Is Having a Very Busy March
Even by his own hyper-productive standards, experimental filmmaker Matt McCormick is having a busy month. This First Thursday, March 1, future so bright opens at the formidable Elizabeth Leach Gallery. It’s McCormick’s first solo art show, featuring a complex new film work accompanied by a series of recent photographs. The lanky local artist won’t be […]
Posted inArt
Reed Arts Week
One of Portland’s best-kept secrets is Reed Arts Week (RAW), the university’s weekend-long multi-disciplinary art festival run entirely by students. Past RAWs have included big-deal performers like KRS-One and Miranda July, and while this year’s festivities don’t pack as much star power, there are still plenty of good events to fill your weekend culture quota. […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Reno 911! Miami: Funnier Than the Previews
But Still Not as Funny as the Show
The first season of Reno 911! occupies an almost impossibly high place in my personal pantheon of television comedy, sitting comfortably alongside shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Da Ali G Show, and The Office. A mostly improvised spoof of Cops, featuring a crack cast of hilarious actors as racist, incompetent, and nearly retarded Reno sheriffs, […]
Posted inMusic
Don’t Call Me Wigger, Whitey
Can White Audiences Ever Truly “Get” Hiphop?—An Interview with Jason Tanz
In Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America, Tacoma-born writer Jason Tanz scours the country to examine the complex love affair that white audiences have with rap music (and vice versa). From New York’s controversial Kill Whitey dance parties to Snoop-bumpin’ radio stations in Wisconsin, Tanz turns a curious eye to […]