David Byrne Speaks: A Visual Language Portland Art Museum, 226-0973, March 4, 8 pm, $35 David, Have you received my e-mails? I haven’t heard from you. I know it’s not you who’s kept us apart. Your publicist said you were only giving one interview per town, but I don’t think she’s really doing her job. […]
Chas Bowie
Posted inArt
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Grossology @ OMSI, 1945 SE Water, through May 1 Poo poo. Pee pee head. Doodie eater. There. Did I make you laugh? Yeah? Then maybe the show Grossology is for you and perhaps there’s a position available for me at OMSI, where this painfully bad exhibition was conceived. The premise is self-explanatory, as is the […]
Posted inMovies & TV
I’m Staying Home
Growing Up
Have you ever gazed upon the cherubic face of a seven-year-old and envisioned what an insufferable pain in the ass they’ll be as a grownup? That phenomenon is at the heart of The Up Series, an ongoing British documentary project that began in 1964, and is now available on a five-disc DVD set from First […]
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Media Lobbies
A Reluctant Meta-Critique of the Reception Areas from Portland’s Three Largest Non-Daily Newspapers I was informed this week that my editors were being replaced by two dudes from the Portland Mercury Users’ Group Yahoo! Group (PMUGYG), who decided I needed a little direction in life. “Chas,” they told me. “We’re doing a sort of meta-critique […]
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Photoshopped Crime Photos
My mind wanders in large crowds or in department stores. “What is the worst thing anybody here has ever done?” I wonder. “Murder? Multiple murders?” The companion conjecture to these thoughts is proximal: “What is the worst thing that has ever happened in this room?” Last week, the Toronto Bureau of Investigations put an uncanny […]
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Web Video Round-Up
With an unusual dearth of beheading and celebrity porn videos circulating on the web, it’s come to our attention that other, non-pussy and -terrorist driven videos exist on the internet. Until the Ashlee Simpson or Bill Cosby videos blow up on the web, here are a few to pass the time at work. Mind Trix […]
Posted inNews
Baby… You Nasty!
Is a Midget Wrestler from St. Johns the Best Entertainer in Portland?
“I think you’d like this! In fact, I know you’d like this.” The man was leering at her, fingering his waistband. “See how she’s smiling? Ooooh, she wants this!” The woman in question was my wife, and the man yelling at her was dressed in tiny red trunks, boots, and a purple feather boa. In […]
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What Are You Looking At: Talking Album Cover Art with E*rock Last November, local artist/musician/ designer/DJ/ E*rock started a blog called Light and Sound (www.urbanhonking.com/lightandsound) where he began to post scans of his drawings and collages. His work exhibits a liveliness and confidence, featuring bold, Magic Marker waves, collages of friends and plastic googly eyes, […]
Posted inBooks
Harold’s End
Harold’s End by J.T. Leroy (Last Gasp) It’s not surprising that before J.T. Leroy allowed himself to be photographed and interviewed, many people conjectured that he was actually an alias for Los Angeles “homo-noir” novelist Dennis Cooper. Leroy’s characters could easily be friends with Cooper’s–mumbly, dejected gutterpunks who suck dick but wouldn’t necessarily call themselves […]
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We’re All Into Doodling Now
A friend of mine once told me how she sees the art world as a much shallower place than people usually give it credit for. “It’s always looked at as some intensely profound and personal arena, but the way I see it, it’s very trendy and image-oriented–like fashion,” she said. She cited the concurrent rise […]
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Adbusters: The Big Ideas of 2005
Perhaps the time has come for a reevaluation of Adbusters Magazine. When we likely left the magazine, it was the mid-late ’90s, nobody was even daydreaming about a Pixies reunion yet, and we were all wise to the Adbusters game. The anti-consumerist, anti-media-distortion glossy read like Mad Magazine for the Clinton-era socially conscious. In almost […]
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This is So Last Year: The Best of 2004 acdickson: eBay Powerseller–Portland’s most famous thrift-shopping advocate of self-employment continues his quest of all-too-serious/is-he-serious global domination by running away with the TBA Fest, starting a blog that we pray turns into a book someday, and planning to lose his mind and move to Los Angeles. Rem […]