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Matt Baume
Posted inComedy

Comedian and Search Party Star John Early Brings His Delightfully Silly Song & Dance Show to Portland

Prepare to see a different John Early—but one that’s just as funny.
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You probably know John Early from his role as Elliott Goss on Search Party, as Logan from multiple Wet Hot American Summer adventures, or from any one of dozens of “Oh hey, look, it’s John Early” pop-ups on a dizzying array of talk shows, variety shows, cartoons, and comedy specials. John’s one of the hardest-working […]

Posted inBooks

David Sedaris Is Coming and Wants to Know Where He Can Find a Dead Body

“Whenever I Smell a Dead Deer or Something in the Woods I Get So Excited. Oh, It’s Finally My Time!”
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Look out, world, David Sedaris is back. After a long pandemic hiatus, the famed writer is returning to the road with a new collection of essays and he’ll be swinging by the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Tuesday, November 22 for a reading. You may know him for The Santaland Diaries or Me Talk Pretty One […]

Posted inNews

Everything You Need to Know About Monkeypox—and Not Just You Gays

What It Is, How to Stop It, Where to Get Vaccines, and the ~Discourse~ on Preventing Stigma
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This article was first published in The Stranger, the Mercury’s sister publication.      Like an insistent, annoying customer trying to cut in line at the coffee shop, here comes monkeypox to butt into our lives. We were full-up on viruses before this new one came along, thank you very much, but now we have […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Everything Everywhere All at Once Review: You Will Remember Where You Were When You First Saw It

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Courtesy A24 Evelyn Wong has come unstuck in the multiverse, and you are invited to join her. The literally-otherworldly Everything Everywhere All at Once is not merely a film but something like a neurological experiment. Or perhaps the last hundred years of cinema was an experiment leading up to this? You will remember not just […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Film Review: Cyrano Is a Musical, but Why? Nobody Nose

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COURTESY METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER The most astounding thing about Cyrano is not that this film, based on a French comedy from the 1890s, begins with Peter Dinklage performing a sword-fighting rap battle. It’s that this is, in fact, how the original play began. The original play introduces Cyrano as a large-nosed, charismatic, obnoxious, lovable, bombastic poet who […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Scream (2022) Review: A Horror Film About Horror Films About Horror Films

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“Weird… what’s this knife doing here?” Courtesy Paramount Pictures Scream and its sequels have always felt like those “Learn Conversational French” videos, where you learn a language by watching stilted interactions between people who speak in the simplest of sentences (“j’adore les blue jeans”), except that in Scream, the language you’re learning is that of […]

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