- Graywolf Press
If you’re looking for a definitive history of the Who’s first decade, Ned Lannamann has found it. He writes of Mark Blake’s Pretend You’re in a War: The Who and the Sixties: “There’s no shortage of Who biographies on the market, but Blake’s level of research in Pretend You’re in a War is exemplary. Persistent myths surround the band to this day; many, in fact, were perpetuated by the group over the years. Blake aims for concrete facts and firsthand accounts of pivotal Who moments—such as Moon’s notorious audition for the band, or the first show where Pete Townshend smashed his guitar.”
After years of writing about terrible things, poet/critic/scholar/essayist/??? Maggie Nelson has written a book about being happy. This wasn’t easy, she told me, because “Think how you feel when a friend is telling you how happy she is; are you always happy for her? I doubt it!” The Argonauts is a genre-destroying, Slavoj Zizek-dismissing, warm, beautiful look into queer family-making, sex, love, and academia, all in Nelson’s singularly lyrical, spare, cutting-to-the-quick prose. It’s the first book of 2015 that I really think everyone should read. I can’t stop raving about it.
It’s not every day your city sees a regional premiere of a soon to be classic opera that just so happens to have been designed by a big-deal artist. But that’s exactly what happens this week, when The Rake’s Progress opens at the Portland Opera,with design by the artist David Hockney. Jenna Lechner took a look at Hockney’s concept art, and sat in on a dress rehearsal of the opera. The result? “The sets feel surreal and appropriately psychotic,” writes Jenna. “The props are rendered in vivid linework, mimicking the intense crosshatching in Hogarth’s original engravings. Stravinsky’s dramatic, spiking score also inspired Hockney. His patterning is gorgeous, with exacting stripes in a simplified palette of red, blue, green, and black.”
In other art news: I interviewed Katie Brien of Down To Funny about being a sober comic but not being the sober comic. Nationale’s latest gallery show is an onslaught of color and riffs on digital art. Promising new Northwest literary magazine Moss launched earlier this year, and they’re back again with a new issue featuring Oregon writers Miriam Cook and Steven Moore.