Art school is nothing if not a fun, silly-ass place. You’re encouraged to stretch your imagination, look at the world upside-down, and to push every half-baked idea to its furthest possible conclusion. The price of this free-wheeling experimentation, though, is that you’re also expected to justify everything intellectually, even if “everything” includes masturbating onto blank […]
Chas Bowie
Posted inMusic
Apeshit Star Power
My Day with Rihanna
“THIS IS SOME KIND of clusterfuck,” the man says, unprompted, over the cacophony of impatient, unsupervised teenagers. No matter how old I get, it’s still startling to hear high school teachers swear on the job. We were backstage in the auditorium of Benson High School, where about 150 students—and no teacher, aside from this defeated-looking […]
Posted inBooks
A.M. Homes and Jonathan Safran Foer
Two Amazing Authors Are Coming to Town; We’ve Got Interviews with Both of Them
A.M. HOMES by Chas Bowie A.M. HOMES has been igniting and inciting the literary world since 1989, when her debut novel, Jack, appeared. In her ensuing novels and short story collections, she’s brought a dark humor and disturbing realism to the lives of arsonists, crack smokers, child molesters, and other wayward humans. Her new novel, […]
Posted inMusic
Bring Back the Jheri Curl
It’s the Only Hope for Ice Cube
THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, a gangsta named Sampson reigned supreme over the cities of the Philistines. He drank heartily of wine; he set fire to the tails of 300 foxes and sent them running through ramshackle villages; he slew over 1,000 Philistines with only the jawbone of a donkey. And then, Sampson fell off. Under […]
Posted inMovies & TV
The Worst Day of My Life
United 93 Will Seriously Fuck You Up
“It’s a really weird day, actually. I just saw United 93, that 9/11 movie, and it’s truly fucked my day up.” I was standing in line at Trader Joe’s, where the cashier had asked how my day was. My response, though, was an odd understatement. In nearly 30 years of watching movies, I’ve left theaters […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Firing on All Cylinders
PDX Film Fest: Your Underground Mix Tape
Portland has enough film fests, twee retro film nights, half-baked amateur movie competitions, and ass-numbing exercises in avant-garde tedium to choke a flock of large donkeys. On any given weekend, you can relive the banality of Short Circuit 2, rub elbows with the blue hairs at a Hungarian film fest, witness what a bunch of […]
Posted inBooks
Take a Look, It’s in a Book
Wordstock—Like Reading Rainbow… for Adults
Screw LeVar Burton. We don’t need that proto-Urkel anymore. We’ve got Wordstock now. Now in its second year, the first-class lit fest has slimmed down to a svelte three days of writerly awesomeness. This year’s event has more authors than we could possibly list here (for instance: Charles D’Ambrosio, Christopher Moore, Donald Hall, Ariel Gore, […]
Posted inArt
Richard Ross
I spent the past weekend on assignment photographing rummage and estate sales for a fluffy, glossy magazine. Simple enough, right? Walking around, snapping photos of people’s letter-deficient Scrabble boxes and adolescent bed sheets? Not so. At the sight of my camera, I was followed, glared at, and from one Gresham house, ejected. In this era […]
Posted inBooks
Anne Lamott
It’s always startling to find a Christian who’s pro-choice, anti-Bush, and is as refreshingly neurotic as your crazy Aunt Mae. That’s why Anne Lamott is such a breath of fresh air: She’s a left-wing hippie who curses liberally and has a non-dogmatic relationship with the spirit she once described as “Jesus the Friendly Ghost.” Lamott […]
Posted inArt
The Best (And Worst!) from Our Easter Coloring Contest!
Reviews by Mercury Art Critic
EDITOR’S NOTE: When the Mercury debuted our very first Easter Coloring Contest three weeks ago, we had no idea how many artists there were in Portland! As it turned out, hundreds of bohemian artsy types took crayon, acrylics, and watercolors (and even their own blood!) in hand to complete our black-and-white drawing of the Easter […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Cold Kickin’ it Live
Surprise! The Beastie Boys Bring It!
I’m pretty sure that Fannypack could out-rap the Beastie Boys at this point—but that was never the point, was it? For young white men in the late ’80s and ’90s, the Beastie Boys were about far more than just their music. They were arbiters of cool who straddled the line between black and punk cultures, […]
Posted inMovies & TV
One Man and a Baby
A Thug Learns to Love in Under Two Hours
Tsotsi, the 2006 Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Picture, is a marvelously directed, skillfully acted, and sumptuously shot film about nihilism and hope amidst abject squalor. It’s also as contrived and hackneyed as any formulaic tripe coming out of mainstream Hollywood. Set in the hopeless slums outside of Johannesburg, Tsotsi is shot in gorgeous, […]