Cormac McCarthy’s stunning new novel of the apocalypse, The Road, is not for the faint of heart, nor for those who turn to literature for pleasant flights of the imagination. The Road is savage and grotesque, bleak and terrifying, inhumane but ultimately compassionate. The setting is the end of the world, in which Earth has […]
Chas Bowie
Posted inArt
New Embroidery: Not Your Grandma’s Doily
A local art instructor recently told me about a student who was complaining about a hole in her childhood experiences. The student’s mother had apparently never taught the girl how to sew, and now the young woman held her mom responsible for this gap in her worldly knowledge. When I was in art school a […]
Posted inMusic
Who is Regina Spektor?
Actually, it Couldn’t Matter Less
ONE OF THE GREATEST side effects of the file-sharing revolution is that music is finally free just to be music again. Cover art is a lost art to me, as are liner notes, potentially cheesy band photos, thank yous to former tourmates, and everything else that might suggest who, exactly, the music’s target audience might […]
Posted inBooks
Richard Ford
Reading from The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
Bascombe is back. It’s been 20 years since Richard Ford introduced the world to Frank Bascombe in his acclaimed novel, The Sportswriter. The story of a man trying to navigate adulthood in the aftermath of a divorce and the death of his son, The Sportswriter was an astonishingly mature and captivating book about conducting life […]
Posted inBooks
Richard Ford Interview
Ford will be reading from The Lay of the Land (Knopf) at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, Tues Oct 24, 7:30 pm Last week, I had the pleasure of talking to Richard Ford about his new novel, The Lay of the Land. It’s the third in a cycle of books narrated by protagonist […]
Posted inBooks
McSweeney’s Roundup
Alot of people we talk to have had similar experiences with the McSweeney’s franchise: Six years ago, the journal felt like the best thing to happen to the printed word in ages. They published stories about talking dogs and meta-articles lampooning stuffy literary journals, and did so with an incredible and irreverent sense of design—booklets […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Dreams Deferred
49 Up and the Intimacy of Strangers
“I suspect that why this program is compelling and interesting for viewers is because, really, it’s like Big Brother or I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. It is actually real-life TV with the added bonus that you see people lose their hair, grow old, and get fat. Fascinating, I’m sure. But does it […]
Posted inMusic
Beirut’s Mournful Stomp
World Music from a World that Never Existed
WITHOUT KNOWING ANYTHING about Beirut’s debut CD, Gulag Orkestar, the following things came to mind during my first month of incessant listening: elephants, gypsies, rusty tubas patched with duct tape, crowded street markets, intoxicated drumlines, dust being kicked up by bare, shuffling feet, and ballads of Old World lament. It opens with the title track, […]
Posted inNews
Manly Tears
Chas Bowie Cries in Public; Public Largely Uninterested
“Think about your parents dying,” I scolded myself silently. “Imagine your wife leaving you. Remember watching TV on the morning of 9/11. Think about your cat dying.” With that, something behind my eyes broke, and a trickle of tears squeezed out past my eyes. I pushed the Fun-Size Tootsie Roll across the counter with a […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Tongues and Chicken-Men
Lunacy: Just Another Day with Jan Svankmajer
Few directors deserve the adjectives “visionary,” “disturbing,” and “surreal” more than Jan Svankmajer, the 72-year-old Czech puppetmaster and conductor of nightmarish stop-motion hallucinations. Banned from making films in his native country for several years, Svankmajer plumbs the dark side of the contemporary psyche with subversive and uncanny interpretations of texts like Faust, Jabberwocky, and Alice […]
Posted inArt
Harrell Fletcher
It helps if you don’t take Harrell Fletcher as an Artist, which can be a tricky mental shift, seeing as how he is, in fact, Portland’s most high-profile artist. But when conventional academic or artistic standards are applied to Fletcher’s social interventions, the point of his work is often lost. Fletcher is less an Artist […]
Posted inMovies & TV
You Say You Want a Revolution?
Look Somewhere Else
Immediately after seeing The US vs. John Lennon, I reported back to my editor that the movie was perfectly okay, and that “I certainly wouldn’t dissuade anybody from seeing it.” Now, eight days removed, I can’t think of a single compelling reason to encourage anyone to watch it—nor can I summon up any particularly compelling […]