“I have a competition in me. I do not wish to see anyone else succeed,” confides Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in a moment of rare candor. “I hate most people.” This is Plainview’s secret, which emerges slowly from his veneer of confident sophistication until it becomes a misanthropic force too large for any man to […]
Chas Bowie
Posted inArt
Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Hours and Ours
The art of Jessica Jackson Hutchins has been known to befuddle upon first glance: Her sculptures and works on paper can easily seem crudely unfinished or confoundingly half-baked, when seen through unsympathetic eyes. The rest of us, however, are captivated by the refreshing lack of polish with which Hutchins sends her pieces into the world, […]
Posted inMusic
Wu-Tang Forever and a Day!
(Except Where Their Live Shows Are Concerned)
It’s stunning how much power is contained in the three words “Wu-Tang Clan.” As a sort of litmus test, if somebody identifies as a fan of the Wu, it means they possess more than a base-level, superficial appreciation of hiphop. (Celebs and politicos may claim to like a little Kanye West or even some “In […]
Posted inArt
World War III Is Here
Porn, Strobe Lights, Gunplay, and Joseph Conrad Collide at North
“We are fighting for the freedom of the planet,” proclaims a mural by German artist Benedikt Ender at North Portland’s Rocksbox gallery. “The freedom of mankind,” it continues, “and the freedom of art.” This hand-scrawled rallying cry hovers next to a drawing of a reclining nude, who parts her labia for a presumably liberating moment […]
Posted inArt
Beth Campbell
I Can’t Quite Place It
The classic story about trompe l’oeil involves an ancient Greek competition to see who could create the most illusionistic painting; when the first artist unveiled his ultra-realistic painting of grapes, birds swept down to peck at his canvas. The second artist then produced his own painting, cloaked in fabric. The bird-conniver reached to pull his […]
Posted inBooks
Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters
by Alan S. Miller and
Satoshi Kanazawa
We are beasts, you and I. Total animals. As sophisticated as we might fancy ourselves, we are as zoological as dingoes, goldfish, and llamas. This empirical fact, which is the first principle of the fledgling science known as evolutionary psychology, may seem obvious, but its implications and manifestations are staggering. In Why Beautiful People Have […]
Posted inBooks
Born Standing Up
by Steve Martin (Scribner)
It can be hard, in these days of Bringing Down the House and Cheaper by the Dozen 2, to remember exactly how brilliant Steve Martin’s comedy used to be. Before the short pieces for the New Yorker, before LA Story, and even before The Jerk, there was Steve Martin the stand-up comedian in the white […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Redac-ulous
Meet Redacted: De Palma’s Insufferable Bore
It’s incredible to think that Brian De Palma is responsible for the new Iraqudrama, Redacted. Not because the film is a convincing mélange of amateur video clips, surveillance footage, TV newscasts, and webchats. (It’s not.) Rather, because it’s nearly impossible to reconcile the fact that the director of Scarface could make a movie this god […]
Posted inMusic
More than a Pretty Voice
Holcombe Waller’s Lyrical Sensibilities
Holcombe Waller’s warm, lyric tenor is a disorienting force: Gliding across three (some say four) octaves, Waller’s voice glows with a curiously organic absence of blemishes. But vocal virtuosity in itself is as unimpressive as it is attention seeking: If American Idol has demonstrated anything, it’s that the pursuit of a classically ideal timbre often […]
Posted inArt
Unwrapped: a Benefit for PICA
Featuring Reggie Watts,
DJ Othertempo
I spent the past several weeks trying to find out what Reggie Watts has up his sleeve for Unwrapped, the benefit for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). Calls were made and emails were sent in an attempt to uncover what we might expect from Watts, who was the runaway hit at this year’s […]
Posted inBooks
n+1
It’s hard to argue that we’re living in an era of anti-intellectualism; to catalog the evidence of this would be a depressing voyage into superficial mediocrity. One needs only a sidelong glance at our commander in chief to be reminded of our national celebration of faux-populist Philistinism. This collective suspension of critical thinking is an […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Meta-Rific!
Say “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” Five Times Fast
In the summer of 1968, William Greaves wrote, directed, and starred in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, a delirious Möbius strip of a film long relegated to the forgotten dustbin of history. Recently rediscovered and heralded as a classic of the American New Wave, Symbio is a cinematic hall of mirrors: a movie about a fake movie […]