The night before writing this article, I had a dream about my interview with Jana Hunter. In the dream, Hunter went to great lengths to stress that she wasn’t an old-timey singer. She was entirely contemporary, she told me, and she was tired of music writers pegging her as a throwback to haunted AM radio […]
Chas Bowie
Posted inMusic
Ghostface Taught Me
Life and Death is Like Peanut Butter and Jelly
IT’S JUST A NORMAL Thursday afternoon—normal, except for the fact that Ghostface Killah is totally chewing my shit out! All I did was ask him why RZA was nowhere to be found on Ghost’s new album, Fishscale. “I don’t need RZA every time I do an album,” he tells me. “I’m tired of telling fucking […]
Posted inNews
Can 5,000 Evangelical Teens Be Wrong?
Chas Bowie’s Report on “Acquire the Fire,” the New Vanguard of Teen Christian Revivals
Five thousand teens are on their feet in the Memorial Coliseum as their host, Joel Johnson, a preacher in blue jeans and tennis shoes, talks about the necessity of endurance. In doing so, he’s used the word “endurance” about 60 times in the past four minutes. Johnson is in his late 20s, and looks like […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Between Baltimore and Kenya
Following the Journey of The Boys of Baraka
The Boys of Baraka opens with a montage of inner city nihilism—a policeman chases a man through the streets; a drug deal goes down in broad daylight; two men fight on a street corner. It’s Baltimore, Maryland, where we learn that fewer than 25 percent of the city’s African American males will graduate from high […]
Posted inMusic
Kimya Dawson’s Wasteland
Madame Bovary Among the McNuggets
THE NOTES ON KIMYA DAWSON that I jotted down this afternoon include Madame Bovary, R.E.M., T.S. Eliot, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and He-Man. Usually when I scribble adjectives about bands, I come up with words like “airy” or “cartoon-y vocals.” But Dawson is a different story. Her folk-punk anthems are fully realized miniature universes of friendships […]
Posted inBooks
Ethan Clark’s Stories that Care Forgot: An Anthology of New Orleans Zines
While Hurricane Katrina transformed New Orleans into the most empty, evacuated city in American history, Ethan Clark could only watch in horror from Asheville, NC. Clark had just moved there from New Orleans, and felt desperate to give something back to the city he loved. He turned to what he knew best—its zine culture—and commenced […]
Posted inArt
The Little Art Festival That Could
Reed Arts Week Lays Low, but Comes Out Swinging
More than any city we know, Portland loves to get its art fix in concentrated, multi-vitamin bursts of festivity. PICA’s Time-Based Art festival is the leading example, of course; it boasts two year’s worth of programming stuffed into barely more than a week, and draws a far bigger audience than PICA’s more traditional performing arts […]
Posted inVisual Art
Marina Abramovic
Tuesday night, the “grandmother of performance art” (her own designation), Marina Abramovic will tell Portland about her life’s work, which has married highbrow art, self-mutilation, behavioral psychology, and religious asceticism for more than 30 years. While other similarly intense performance artists of her era have retired to less punishing practices, Abramovic continues to push the […]
Posted inMusic
No Adjectives Needed
Animal Collective “Just Plays, You Know?”
IT’S RARE TO GET more than three sentences into a story about Animal Collective before stumbling across the words “weird” or “freak.” Yet, as I spoke to Dave Porter, AKA Avey Tare, by telephone from New York, he sounded neither weird nor freaky. In fact, he sounded perfectly normal, just sleepy and resigned to a […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Heart of Old
Snoozing through Neil Young’s Heart of Gold
Let’s break it down like this: If you own more than two live Buffalo Springfield bootlegs, take issue with Neil Young’s 2003 biography, Shakey, or can name three characters from his operetta Greendale, there’s no need for you to read this review. Just get your ass down to Cinema 21 and enjoy Neil Young: Heart […]
Posted inBooks
The Best People in the World
Seventeen-year-old Thomas led a walled-in life. Literally. In the Kentucky town he grew up in, the Army Corps of Engineers built an enormous floodwall to protect sleepy Paducah from the Ohio River. Instead of looking out into a horizon of infinite possibilities, Thomas saw nothing but concrete walls. So he ran. The Best People in […]
Posted inBooks
I Love You More Than You Know
I Love You More Than You Know By Jonathan Ames (Black Cat) Ames will appear at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, Fri Feb 10, 7:30 pm Jonathan Ames is a very funny dude with some great autobiographical stories and an easy-going, conversational writing style. So his new book of essays, I Love You […]