Audition (Odishon) dir. Takashi Miike Opens Fri Oct 26 Cinema 21 Supposedly, there are vending machines in Japan where “ailing” gentlemen may purchase the dirty panties of barely legal schoolgirls. What they do with the panties is left to your imagination. But the fact is, the panties are purchasable, and that is not only nasty, […]
Julianne Shepherd
Posted inMusic
Mad About the Mouse
Jenny Toomey is One Classy Lady
Jenny Toomey Sun Oct 21 Blackbird At the risk of embarrassing myself, I’m going to put this on the table right now: I idolize Jenny Toomey. She is the reason I was introduced to independent music, through the record label she started with Kristin Thompson in 1990, Simple Machines. She’s also one reason why independent […]
Posted inMusic
Erase You
Spazzy, Tough Ladies Kick No Wave Ass
Erase Errata Sun Oct 14 Disjecta, 114 NE Russell • Tues Oct 16 B Complex No Wave is a musical genre that can be loosely defined as the emphatic union of punk aggression and dance funkiness. No Wave had a pretty nice heyday in the late ’70s and early ’80s, especially among the New York […]
Posted inMusic
A Silent Apocalypse
The Quiet Anger of the Pseudo Six
The Pseudo Six w/ The Mines, Shelterbelt Wed Oct 17 Blackbird As T.S. Eliot predicted, the world will probably end quietly, so it’s possible the correlating insurrection will be quiet as well. You’ll be reminded of this when you listen to the lyrics of The Pseudo Six; they sing in soft vibratos and pleading warbles, […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Movie Tunes
HiQi Film Series Turns Music into Moving Pictures
HiQi Film Series Oct 5-11 Clinton Street Theater Yeah, yeah. The title of HiQi Film Series: Where Music Meets Film makes it sounds about as exciting as an in-depth museum exhibit on photosynthesis. However, the film series, which runs at the Clinton Street all week, includes eight different films documenting diverse subsets of music culture. […]
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Blood, Guts, and Glamour
Get Hustle as Pulp Mystery
Get Hustle w/ Lovelife Thurs Oct 9 Blackbird Some people say the devil is a beautiful woman. Those people are probably misogynists, but the sentiment behind that statement–the dark mystery behind glamour and aesthetic–is worth exploring. The Get Hustle moved to Portland from Los Angeles, a city whose reputation as the vortex where beauty and […]
Posted inMusic
A Good Plot
The Dutch Flat Unfurls Like a Book
The Dutch Flat w/ Last of the Juanitas, Plug Spark Sanjay, The Miss Sat Oct 6 Blackbird I like it when songs are written in the same way as good stories, when they have prologues that unfold into tricky plots and end with a memorable flourish. It’s the element of suspense that’s the important part, […]
Posted inMusic
Modern Lullabies
The Cello is the Best Instrument in the World
Luke Janela Wed Oct 3 Red & Black Café When my best friend began studying classical composition, he felt an initial detachment from the music. He lamented that he couldn’t hear it as a whole anymore, that he could only hear it as a sum of each separate part. For awhile, the impact of learning […]
Posted inNews
DROPPING OUT: No More Teachers’ Dirty Looks
Dropping Out of School: Its Benefits and Responsibilities
Now that you have officially enrolled in college, it’s time to be honest with yourself. If you feel you are not benefiting from your education in any way, shape or form, you are never too young to take responsibility for your actions. If you really believe you can learn better from living your life outside […]
Posted inMusic
We Can’t Do Anything Until We Do It
Mark Andersen, Positive Force, and Dance of Days: Finding Inspiration in the D.C. Punk Scene
Mark AndersenThurs, Sept 20 Powell’s on Hawthorne It’s been almost ten years since Nirvana hit the big time. We are reminded daily about what this means to the mainstream–turn on the radio and listen to the commodification of angst in action–but it is arguably the underground that was most thrown off by Nirvana’s success. The […]
Posted inMusic
Escaping Limitations
Nice Nice: Improv You’ll Stick Around For
Nice Nice w/ The Planet The, Magic Magicians Thurs Sept 13 Blackbird One thing that stymies the advancement of modern music is the simplistic yet inevitable categorization of musical genres/bands (i.e. “pop-punk,” “electro-pop,” “emo,” or “garage”). The pigeonholing often occurs, however, because many bands don’t even listen to other types of music, much less venture […]
Posted inArt
Gallery Bink
Art Review
Gallery Bink 1416 E Burnside 233-8866 Medusa Tattoo 420 SW Washington, Suite 202 228-1008 The term “lowbrow art” refers to art based in such counter-cultural phenomena as comics, rock and roll, underground and independent pop culture. I hate the term–it makes underground art sound like it’s less important than the truly enlightened “highbrow” art that’s […]