Well, here’s something lovely to brighten your Friday afternoon: Portland’s own land-based synchronized swimming team, the Olivia Darlings, were invited to take part in America’s Got Talent, but had some qualms about the contract AGT would be making them sign—and no wonder, the contract has raised concerns about performers’ privacy and decision-making about their acts. […]
Artsy
Posted inTheater & Performance
This Week in Art: The Boatmaker, Outsider Art at Adams & Ollman, and The Night Alive
Adams and Ollman ARNOLD JOSEPH KEMP’S “What Actually Happens (See Black Say Red),” at Adams and Ollman. JOHN BENDITT, THE BOATMAKER—Joe Streckert plunged into John Benditt’s spare and true prose in The Boatmaker: The unadorned prose gives the entire reading experience a blank, strange feeling; without descriptive language, Benditt creates the kind of eeriness evoked […]
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Reed Arts Week’s Archival Fixation
Reed Arts Week With spring’s onslaught of eyeball-pleasing arts happenings, Reed Arts Week (RAW) starts today, with an opening reception at 5 pm. The theme of Might Now, the centerpiece exhibition in this year’s student-curated festival of art is an archival one, highlighting works that engage with “the concepts inherent in the words trace, archive, […]
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Clown About Town: Anthony Hudson’s Drag Clown Carla Rossi
Photo: Aaron Lee THE FIRST TIME I saw Carla Rossi perform, I was charmed by her awfulness. Like a combination of Grey Gardens‘ Little Edie and Lucille Ball, she’s hungry for fame and celebrity, but foiled by the fact that she is a clown who always puts her foot in her mouth. Artist Anthony Hudson […]
Posted inFashion
Diamond in the Rough: Noriko Kikuchi at RAW
I’ve always regarded events that are part of the RAW: Natural Born Artists franchise with caution. Firstly, because they’re a franchise, based in Los Angeles, that hosts events in over 60 locations around the world to promote emerging local arts in each locale, which tells you something about how plugged in they are to your […]
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The Top 10 Portland Album Covers of All Time
Next week, local design and display company Plywerk is hosting a party for their new line of Vinny products, which are handcrafted juniper displays for vinyl record albums. The Vinny line includes a record display stand, a storage/travel crate, and a mountable frame to easily display your favorite album covers. “You can’t hang an MP3 […]
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Your New Arts & Culture Guide for Spring is Here!
Carson Ellis FOLLOW THIS BUSINESSMAN’S GREAT EXAMPLE and go see some art. The print version of Mercury‘s Spring Arts & Culture Guide is out now—you’ll know it by Carson Ellis’ cover art—and you might want to pick up a copy, or else you’ll miss out on a full page of upcoming arts events to have […]
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Talking About Horrible Things with Portland’s Foremost Tonya Harding Expert
Photo: Aaron Lee SARAH MARSHALL has made a literary career out of writing about horrible things. So it’s appropriate that our meeting is over coffee on a dark, rainy day, and that the first thing we talk about is The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, which, like some morbidly curious book club, it turns out […]
Posted inBooks
Portland Poet Mary Szybist To Judge One of This Year’s PEN Literary Awards
Graywolf Press ‘GRATS! To Mary Szybist. With the internet much too focused on one particularly irrelevant quaint awards ceremony that transpired this week, why not turn our attention to a better another one, the 2015 PEN Literary Awards! The Awards won’t be announced until June after an onerous long list -> short list -> finalist […]
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A Skillet, a Hoodie, Lil Wayne, and Real Tears: Keyon Gaskin at PICA
Physical Education Keyon Gaskin’s in the upper left square. Saturday’s release party at PICA for Lynne Tillman’s Weird Fucks (New Herring Press) was four hours long, which on paper seems like a terrible idea. Who wants to sit through a four-hour reading of, you know, anything? In practice, though, it worked incredibly well—Tillman’s reading was […]
Posted inBooks
Tonight: The Cult of Lynne Tillman Comes to PICA
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? What would Lynne Tillman do? Last year, this question was mysteriously wheat-pasted on posters all over Lower Manhattan, giving a visual aid to many an art student’s obsession with author Lynne Tillman. Tillman flies under the radar. Her first book, Weird Fucks, can be found almost nowhere (Amazon has one […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
This Week in Art: Lynne Tillman, Tribes, and Arch Literary Heroines
PICA Short stories that are actually good, profanity-laden conceptual art, brave new theater—here’s what’s happening this weekend in art: LYNNE TILLMAN: Tomorrow evening, Lynne Tillman, plus a small army of local and less local interdisciplinary artists, will celebrate New Herring Press’ reissue of her first book, Weird Fucks, at PICA. Why should you care about […]