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Suzette Smith is the arts & culture editor of the Portland Mercury. Go ahead and tell her about all your food, art, and culture gripes: suzette@portlandmercury.com. Follow her on Twitter, Bluesky, and Letterboxd.
Sarah Glidden explores conflicts in the Middle East and ethics in comics journalism.
Kenneth Huey For a while, I lived in a Detroit mansion. It had three stories, two wings, 10 bedrooms, and a ceiling that was falling in. The mansion was rife with haunts. One guest saw a woman in white running down a hall (from the corner of her eye). Windows opened mysteriously. Weather got in. […]
“If you filmed it on VHS, it was just a little bit more intriguing to us,” says Nini Liedman of the 250 movies she and her husband, co-founder Bryan Liedman watched while curating the North Portland Unknown Festival. The Liedmans have a love for experimental, lo-fi, and just plain weird films—and the festival is their […]
Barbara Holm Suzette Smith Early on covering the All Jane Comedy Fest, I made a hash mark list in my notes of the times a comic sad-jawed over being single and lonely. I’ve noticed that joke working less and less. (Other than perhaps its intended purpose of getting the comic in question laid. I’m sure […]
Portland’s newest festival features VHS, two-minute shorts, and more.
Maria Bamford’s Lady Dynamite is one of pop culture’s best, most honest, and very surreal portrayals of depression and anxiety. Natalie Brasington Sick of sausage-party stand-up lineups and bro-centric Comedy Central fare? Get excited for this week’s All Jane Comedy Fest, which is practically a Portland tradition at this point, the one time a year […]
From Maria Bamford to Irene Tu, here’s what not to miss.
CHELSEA PETRAKIS In June, I profiled a series of short pieces presented for Risk/Reward’s Festival of New Performance. Known onstage as audacious drag clown Carla Rossi, Anthony Hudson presented a piece that stood out for its exciting exploration of Native American cultural assimilation via Cher’s Half Breed and the 1954 Peter Pan Broadway musical number […]
It’s Anthony Hudson’s hilarious cabaret about Native American identity.
Dame Darcy is an irrevocable part of comics history. I dare those French comics dads to ignore her now. Dame Darcy Last January, Angoulême, the second largest comics festival in Europe, made a crazy misogynist blunder. Of 30 nominees for the Grand Prix prize for lifetime achievement in comics, they neglected to name even one […]
The world is catching up with her—just in time for The Meat Cake Bible.
Allie Hankins performs a love dance for a member of the audience. Suzette Smith My introduction to Allie Hankins as a performer was her 2012 TBA dance Like A Sun That Pours Forth Light But Never Warmth where she quietly covered herself in gold leaf for an extended period of time then leapt unbelievably—half nude […]
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