WITH WILCO’S follow-up to 2004’s A Ghost is Born due “sometime this year,” Jeff Tweedy and company have been gracious enough to throw fans a decent doggie bag of shwag to hold them over in the interim. After the band’s breakthrough CD, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Tweedy became a poster boy for file sharing and creative-commons […]
Chas Bowie
Posted inMovies & TV
Big Momma’s Phat! (With a “Ph”)
I Promise You This Movie’s Funny
I bet you’re all like, “Oh ho ho, the Mercury‘s loving Big Momma’s House 2 because nobody else will, and they’re being ironic.” WRONG! I’m loving Big Momma’s House 2 because that shit is funny to the bone and features the incomparable Mar’in Lawrence. Yep, I said it—Martin is capable of comedic genius, and if […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
Monster Squad’s Island Desk: My Teeny Tiny Knowledge of Nothing
As a child, Tahni Holt spent countless afternoons in her mother’s office, watching the neck-tied worker bees peck at computers, send faxes, and engage in the usual office repartee. The memory lingered into Holt’s adult life. She successfully managed to avoid working in an office herself, but her newest creative endeavor draws on these memories […]
Posted inMusic
Forever 21
The Kingdom Takes Author Back
I’VE ONLY HEARD songs from the Kingdom’s forthcoming CD once, last week, as keyboardist (and frequent Mercury contributor) Jenna Roadman played me a rough, unmixed song sampler on her Discman at a local bar. She checked her email as I sat silently listening to this preliminary draft of the as-of-yet-untitled, no-release-date CD. I’m sure that […]
Posted inMusic
Raising America’s Sweetheart
An Interview with Courtney Love’s Mother
When I told a friend that I was going to be interviewing Courtney Love’s mother, she responded, “I didn’t know she had—wait, yes, I guess I did know she had a mother.” It’s true, even Courtney Love has a mom, and her name is Linda Carroll. She is a therapist in Corvallis, and she’s just […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Film Geeks Are Creepy
Succinct Reviews for the Discerning Cinephile
Film Geekdir. WestbyOpens Fri Jan 13Cinema 21 Portland writer/director/long-time video store clerk James Westby’s Film Geek follows a robot-voiced cinephile, Scotty Pelk (Melik Malkasian) who harasses customers at the video store he works at until he gets fired. From there, he stalks a hot artist, Niko (Tyler Gannon: hot), masturbates into his sink several times, […]
Posted inMovies & TV
You Call That a Player?
Heath Ledger’s Bold Turn as a Straight Man
As it turns out, not even a gay cowboy can save Lasse Hallström from himself. Hallström (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules) has topped his career crapfest with Casanova, a film so directionless and uncompelling that it made me wish the theater would just play “The 2wenty” for the entire 108 minutes. Heath Ledger, fresh off […]
Posted inNews
20 Things Not Invited Back to 2006!
As human beings evolve, doesn’t it make sense that things should get better? Then why are there still so many annoying things annoying us? Well, we’re putting an end to all things annoying RIGHT NOW. Here’s our list of things from 2005 that AREN’T invited back to 2006! Vancouver, WA Take a drive up I-5 […]
Posted inBooks
Dugout
One of the dangers of being a versatile, genre- and media-hopping artist is that, since people don’t know how to automatically classify and pigeonhole you, you can go through life creating wildly, without gaining broad recognition in any particular field. Such is the case with Terry Allen, whom I consider one of the truly under-recognized […]
Posted inMusic
Copy This, Sucka
Copy Returns Old School IDM Beats to PDX
ONE OF THE REASONS I gravitated towards electronic music in the ’90s was that it introduced me to crazy sounds I’d never heard before. From Mr. Oizo’s stretchy balloon-fart sonic waves to sinister voice modulations and deconstructive anti-rhythms, IDM completely expanded the range of noises emanating from my speakers. Over the past several years, electronic […]
Posted inMovies & TV
The Ringer’s Retarded!
Hey—That’s Not Nice!
Watching The Ringer produced the exact effect that the organizers of the Special Olympics must have intended when they collaborated with executive producers the Farrelly Brothers: I now have zero desire to make fun of retarded people. Which is a shame, because I still have 270 words to write for this review. Johnny Knoxville plays […]