The Mercury covers culture & art because we think all its various forms are—quite plainly—how people understand one another. Conversations about food, music, performance, and “weird” installation art provide touchstones to deepen friendships, create new connections, and better understand our world. If you appreciate the Mercury’s interesting and useful news & culture reporting, consider making a small monthly contribution to support our editorial team. (WE HAVE TOTES NOW?!) Your donation is tax-deductible. Oh, do you not like reading this on every article? Then read the guide IN PRINT.

Hello, and welcome to a very special Trash Report. I usually write this newsy gossip column for the internet, but the top brass at Mercury HQ let me out of the computer to write–in print–because, what is a free alt-monthly if not a report, that eventually becomes, how you say, trash? (Or recycling, obviously, but you know what I mean.) I’m qualified to write about art because as a writer, I technically am an artist, and lucky for all of you, my preferred medium is silliness on newsprint. Let’s get this art show on the road!

Film

Warner Bros. is officially working on a sequel to beloved local classic film The Goonies, a full 40 years after its initial release. Thus far, they’ve hired Potsy Ponciroli to write the script, so we know next to nothing about the plot, or if any of the stars from the original film will return, but there’s a lot of shitty news in the art world right now (keep reading to get depressed!), so this is a nice treat for all of us. It’s as if we are all chained up in a tiny room, and then someone throws a Baby Ruth at our head—this news is that metaphorical Baby Ruth.

Fashion

Saturday Night Live hosted some fancy parties for their 50th anniversary show—a very glamourous affair for such a famously scrappy production. The fashion queen of the night was Emma Stone, who wore a red Louis Vuitton gown she subsequently personalized by filling the giant decorative hip flaps with popcorn that she munched on throughout the evening. This is such a welcome departure from celebrities carrying purses so tiny that it can’t even hold a phone, much less a granola bar and some string cheese. There should be more snack pockets on clothes! Stop right there, I know you’re thinking “what, cargo shorts?” NO. I don’t care how far back into the ’90s we move in fashion, those ugly knee bags shall never grace my legs. We need more chic pockets, like what Emma gave us. Or maybe we bring back bustles, but they double as compartments for string cheese and pistachios.

In other fashion news, did you know that the oldest shoes ever found in the world were found right here in Oregon? It’s true! Despite being over 10,000 years old, they didn’t disintegrate with time because they were left in a cold, dark cave. Think of this in contrast to our knock-off Temu crocs, which will not disintegrate with time because they are cut from unholy plastics that are probably giving us toe cancer. Imagine what future civilizations will see when they find those in an ancient trash heap. Probably something along the lines of “…yikes.”

Food

The Flock, a bright sparkly new food hall in the ground floor of the Ritz-Carlton hotel finally opened in February, a year and some change after its projected opening of November 2023. We still think it’s weird that the local entrepreneurs behind the ritzy cafeteria never did any research into the name they chose—never reached out to give so much as a “hey, how are you” to the preexisting Flock, a deeply legit local dance studio. Aside from a few stray emails, Flock’s founder Tahni Holt said they don’t really care about the name imitation, “I have to assume they had no idea (but they should have done some homework).” Holt went on to say, “it is a good name. In dance, ‘flocking’ together is a sensitivity practice where whomever is in front is the leader, and the leader is always changing, depending on the direction of the flock.”

Music

President Trump installed himself as the chair of the Kennedy Center (despite being the tackiest man alive), and the center promptly canceled a scheduled performance by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington. It’s no coincidence that Trump’s administration has been targeting Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs nationwide, and that the National Endowment for the Arts killed its Challenge America program, which provided arts-focused grants to underserved communities. In response, the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus is standing tall and singing out, joining forces with other LGBTQIA+ arts groups who refuse to be silenced for a concert called “Our New World” at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on March 30. If you’re disgusted by the degradation of the arts, put your money where your mouth is and support them locally!

Isn’t it wild that a president can just change stuff unilaterally because he feels like it? I would not be shocked if somewhere on the same list of taking over the Kennedy Center and renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Ketchup Steak, or whatever, there’s also a line item like “make the national anthem ‘Memory’ from Cats!” And now we all have to think about whether that would actually be worse than “The Star-Spangled Banner” (a trash song if I’ve ever heard one).

Literature

The Trump administration is going after the immigrants, the gays, and the watchdogs, but did you know they’re also going after the gingers? Specifically, a children’s book written by actress Julianne Moore called Freckleface Strawberry that has been removed from Pentagon-run schools. The Department of Defense announced that it’s reviewing all its materials to make sure they conform to new rules on “gender ideology” and “racial indoctrination” which means that some suits in Washington are having meetings right now on whether or not the federal government wants to encourage acceptance of children with red hair and freckles. There’s funding for those guys, but not the ones who keep planes in the sky.

Speaking of writing, as I am writing this column, a little icon keeps popping up to ask me if I’d like to use AI to do the writing for me. WHILE I’m writing about art, it is asking to write for me about art, which will eventually ruin art. It’s infuriating, and makes me want to throw this computer into the sea, except I need it to do the creative work it wants to steal from me—and it sucks! Why can’t AI stick with the boring stuff we don’t want to do like taxes? I can’t help but feel like it’s some sort of cosmic payback for all those times when we made our calculators write BOOBS. Then the machines got smarter and are now like, “guess what? Now we will write, and YOU have to do math, so who’s BOOBS now?” And machines haven’t developed self-awareness yet so they don’t know what a ridiculous sentence that would be, except that just by me writing it right now, it’s become something written by a human, which makes it something that can be human-passing as AI. And if the machine wants to be a human so badly, I know that eventually they will throw me into the sea.

Until that time, I’m glad to be alive in the same timeline as all of you, even if it is a rough one. Thanks for picking up this paper, for supporting local journalism, for supporting art, and for being a human.

Love,