VARIOUS ARTISTS God Bless America (Columbia) **1/2 It would be very funny if Celine Dion sang so hard while performing “God Bless America” that she actually choked on her own vomit, because I’m choking on mine just listening to her. And besides, she’s from Canada. Thank god, however, that the booze-cured corpse of Ol’ Blue […]
Jeff DeRoche
Posted inMusic
Mopey Blue Stars
The Unbearable Lightness of Robert Wratten
Trembling Blue Stars w/ Rollerball, Papillon Fri Nov 16 Dante’s Alive to Every Smile, the new Trembling Blue Stars release, is not as obsessed with Annemari Davies (TBS frontman Robert Wratten’s ex-girlfriend/bandmate) as the band’s past records have been, but Davies is still all over this one. Alive is very much about grief–just what fans […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Wholly Moments
Waking Life’s Brave Hits and Misses
Waking Life dir. Linklater Opens Fri Nov 9 Cinema 21 Underground Filmmaker Caveh Zahedi appears in “The Holy Moment,” one of the 37 vignettes in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Zahedi’s performance is beautiful, and that beauty is overshadowed by the creativity of the visual artist who enhanced it. Waking Life is rotoscoped, a process wherein […]
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All for You
Getting Inside of Janet Jackson
Janet Jackson, 112 Sat July 7 Rose Garden Arena Janet Jackson’s latest album, All for Love, may play like R&B club music, but it fucks like Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly–one spin of this disc and everything down to basic grammar begins to feel obsolete: “You whisper words/Your fantasies in my ear/You know this I like/Just […]
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Suckin’ the Bone
Chicken Necks with a Friend
Food was never very important to my family when I was growing up, so my relationship to it has always been functional: I eat when hungry, and I don’t care whether I’m sharing the experience with anyone else. In fact, I never knew how important food was to some people–much less that people actually bonded […]
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Music Bio
Matthew Troy
WHO: Guitarist and vocalist for Track Star. BECAUSE: Track Star plays the Meow Meow with Aden and the Arch Angles on Fri March 23. So, you’re playing but the new record isn’t out? “Right.” Why do you tour so much without releasing records? “It’s just sort of worked out that way. We would get asked […]
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Heartland + Smiths = Baby
We’re Naming it Aveo
It’s likely that Seattle’s Aveo will play Portland again after this show, but I advise you to go see this band now. The next time Aveo plays, you may find yourself frustrated, somewhere in the back of a much larger venue, standing tip-toed because you can’t see over the heads of the overzealous mob of […]
Posted inBooks
Whose Song? and Other Stories
Book Review
Whose Song? and Other Stories by Thomas Glave Powell’s Books 3723 SE Hawthorne 7:30 pm March 13 Three young men are violently raping a teenage lesbian. The narrative reveals that each of the rapists is experiencing at least some form of homosexual panic within. The girl is probably on her back, or at least that’s […]
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What Feels Right
Conor Oberst is Not a Liar
“I get the feeling that people worry about me,” 21-year-old Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes tells me. “It’s nice in one sense. It’s sweet of people. I just wish they didn’t.” But they do, and there’s a reason for it. Oberst radiates tragedy. His voice is wide open and reckless, always on the verge of […]
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Sentimental Tyranny
Stephin Merritt Is a Big Gay Composer
FILE THIS ONE UNDER Big Gay Record–not surprising from a songwriter who publishes under the moniker Gay and Loud, but then Stephin Merritt has never been the most flamboyant of people. On the previous 6ths album, Wasps’ Nests, a deliberately “indie” record upon which Merritt asked indie rock luminaries like Barbara Manning and Lou Barlow […]