This is the last weekend of the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival at the NW Film Center, and if you’ve been saving up your movie chips, now’s the time to cash them in. The next couple days are packed with some of the most impressive films to have ever come out of the region. Seriously! Tonight my […]
Portland
Posted inFashion
The New Stores Keep Coming: Machus and Siljan
Portland retail continues to roll along its merry way this week. Over the weekend, the new outpost from the people who were among the first to define Portland’s independent boutique scene with Local35, softly opened its doors. Called Machus, it’s taken up residence in the big corner space of the BSide6 building at 542 E […]
Posted inPortland
DIY: Your Own Holiday Pop-Up
Now that this year’s downtown holiday pop-up projects (in which unleased storefronts downtown are “activated” by temporary shops during the big shopping season thanks to a concert of private and government agencies, at minimal cost to the shops) are up and running, I’m already thinking about next year, and maybe you should be too. Curious, […]
Posted inPortland
Check Out Our Wizard’s Guide to Northside
In certain special issues of this week’s Mercury, there’s a hidden surprise! It’s, to our knowledge, the first-ever comprehensive guide of Portland’s Northside—for Wizards. That’s right: It’s a handy guide for Portland’s North and Northeast quadrants, with tons of listings, places to eat, shops, and more—and it’s specially tailored just for wizards. Talented Mercury intern/cartoonist […]
Posted inPortland
Spot the Fake Homeless Person!
Which homeless person in this picture is a fake homeless person? The answer may surprise you! The answer after the jump. •••It was a trick question: THEY’RE ALL FAKE HOMELESS PEOPLE! The new NBC show Grimm is shooting outside our offices this morning, and when one of our staffers momentarily stopped to look, a production […]
Posted inPortland
Of Pop-Ups New and Olde
The 2011 round of holiday pop-up shops that I keep going on and on about are poised to make their debut. On Wednesday Nov 9th, at 1 pm, Mayor Sam Adams and “a surprise guest from the North Pole” (ha, dorks) will officially kick open the doors to Boys’ Fort, Trillium Artisans, Downtown Artistry, and […]
Posted inPortland
Downtown Retail’s Holiday Cheer
Yesterday I attended a media tour of all that’s new in the downtown retail zone, including the holiday pop-up shops. In years past, the pop-ups have been dominated by fashion and clothing, but this year the organizers got a heartier response from a crowd that’s more focused on craft and home decor. The one not […]
Posted inPortland
Inside Boy’s Fort
Yesterday I was lucky to get a sneak preview of one of this year’s downtown holiday pop-ups, Boy’s Fort. The work of Jake France and Richard Rolf, who also have an interior design firm called the Kenton Collective, have created a huge, wonderfully eclectic shop that’s essentially a home store, but geared towards men (women […]
Posted inPortland
New Portland Business Alliance Poll Claims You Hate Sam Adams, Bicycles, Equal Rights
The O is reporting the results of a new poll taken by the Mayor Sam Adams-hating Portland Business Alliance that shows… surprise! Nearly half the people polled hate Sam Adams! Okay, fine. Forty-nine percent had a “unfavorable impression” of Adams. However, what I thought was interesting were these two paragraphs from the O article: The […]
Posted inPortland
Fuuuuck!!! A GIANT CLOWN ON INLINE SKAAAAATES!!!
Okay, so this video says it was originally uploaded back in 2009—which is a goddamn good thing, because if this were a recent video? All you would see is my empty office chair spinning while I got the FAWK out of town! Anyway, apparently there was this GIANT CLOWN who used to love racing around […]
Posted inPortland
I Went to the Premiere of Grimm and It Was Not Terrible!
Melanie “The Intern” Johnson I’m not sure which came as a bigger surprise—that there were 500 people wrapped in a line around the Portland Art Museum when I arrived for the local premiere of Grimm, or that those people were friggin’ psyched. Outside, a man near the front of the line said he’d been there […]
Posted inPortland
Art Detective
This post is so charming. Cafe Unknown sets out in search of an “underground sculpture” described on a mid-’70s Portland walking tour map. (h/t)