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WILLAMETTE WEEK PORTLAND’S NEWSWEEKLY
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BY
HENRY STERN
WE ASK THE MAYOR ABOUT HIS FUTURE, POT, COP SHOOTINGS, LEAF FEES, THE ECONOMY, BIKES AND MEDIA COVERAGE OF HIM. WE ALSO ASK WHAT HAPPENED TO “MIKE AND JEAN.” HE ISN’T HAPPY ABOUT THAT. PAGE 18
C H R I S R YA N / W O N D E R F U L M A C H I N E
Anita Manishan Bankruptcy Attorney
PAGE 7
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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
CONTENT
COUNTY CASH: Which member of the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners spent the most money in 2010? Page 8.
NEWS
4
DISH
30
LEAD STORY
18
MUSIC
35
CULTURE
26
SCREEN
49
HEADOUT
27
CLASSIFIEDS
58
CANNONDALE | SPECIALIZED | BIANCHI | GARY FISHER GT | SCOTT | FUJI | KESTREL | GLOBE | VIRTUE | RALEIGH AND MORE TO COME
534 SE BELMONT ST.
STAFF Editor-in-Chief Mark Zusman EDITORIAL Managing News Editor Henry Stern Arts & Culture Editor Kelly Clarke Staff Writers Nigel Jaquiss, James Pitkin, Beth Slovic Copy Chief Kat Merck Copy Editors Matt Buckingham, Peggy Perdue, Sarah Smith Special Sections Editor Ben Waterhouse Screen Editor Aaron Mesh Music Editor Casey Jarman Assistant Music Editor Michael Mannheimer Editorial Interns Stacy Brownhill, Kevin Davis, Rachael DeWitt, Rebecca Jacobson, Jessica Lutjemeyer, Tiffany Stubbert. Nikki Volpicelli CONTRIBUTORS Stage Ben Waterhouse Classical Brett Campbell Dance Heather Wisner Visual Arts Richard Speer
Erik Bader, Ruth Brown, Nathan Carson, Shane Danaher, Robert Ham, Whitney Hawke, Jay Horton, AP Kryza, Nilina Mason-Campbell, John Minervini, Katrina Nattress, Rebecca Raber, Alistair Rockoff, Jeff Rosenberg, Anika Sabin, Matt Singer, Chris Stamm, Mark Stock PRODUCTION Production Manager Kendra Clune Art Director Ben Mollica Graphic Designers Soma Honkanen, Adam Krueger, Carolyn Richardson, Dylan Serkin Production Intern Christa Connelly, Jessica Stambach ADVERTISING Director of Advertising Jane Smith Display Account Executives Sara Backus, Alisha Barnes, Maria Boyer, Carrie Hinton, Janet Norman, Kyle Owens Classifieds Account Executives Michael Donhowe, Jennifer Lee Advertising Assistant Ashley Grether Marketing and Events Manager Jess Sword Marketing and Promotions Coordinator Brittany McKeever
Our mission: Provide our audiences with an independent and irreverent understanding of how their worlds work so they can make a difference. Circulation: 90,000 (except during holidays and school vacations.) Though Willamette Week is free, please take just one copy. Anyone removing papers in bulk from our distribution points will be prosecuted, as they say, to the full extent of the law. Willamette Week is published weekly by City of Roses Newspaper Company 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Main line phone: (503) 243-2122 fax: (503) 243-1115 Classifieds phone: (503) 223-1500 fax: (503) 223-0388
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Willamette Week welcomes freelance submissions. Send material to either News Editor or Arts Editor. Manuscripts will be returned if you include a self-addressed, stamped envelope. To be considered for calendar listings, notice of events must be received in writing by noon Wednesday, two weeks before publication. Send to Calendar Editor. Photographs should be clearly labeled and will be returned if accompanied by a selfaddressed, stamped envelope. Questions concerning circulation or subscription inquiries should be directed to Robert Lehrkind at Willamette Week. postmaster: Send all address changes to Willamette Week, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Subscription rates: One year $100, six months $50. Back issues $5 for walk-ins, $8 for mailed requests when available. Willamette Week is mailed at third-class rates. A.A.N. Association of ALTERNATIVE NEWSWEEKLIES This newspaper is published on recycled newsprint using soy-based ink.
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3
INBOX WWEEK.COM READERS COMMENT ON “LIGHTS, CAMERA, TAX BREAK,” FEB. 9, 2011
Now open every day-- Mondays, too!
“The question in the article asks why the state is underwriting moviemakers’ expenses. Answer: simple math. For every dollar of incentive money, four more dollars come into the state. As a film worker I spend thousands of dollars a week in Oregon, at Oregon businesses that pay for schools and other state services. As a tax-paying citizen, the funding also comes back to the state through the taxes I pay to the state. I’m excited about a larger rebate. It needs to be enough to keep the local industry working. Last year I was one on thousands of film workers that travelled to Detroit due to the country’s largest incentive package. But they have to pay out-ofstate crew because they have exceeded what they can supply. Obviously we have not done that with our current incentive (I know dozens of other Oregonians who chased incentive-driven productions to help build other states’ economies and infrastructures).… I’m not a fan of industry playing states against each other for sweeter financial deals, but it is the world we live in. If Oregon can provide billions in tax breaks to keep the corporate heavyweights here, then this ‘drop in the bucket’ is a precious one; worth every penny.” —Drew Pinninger “Because of the work these incentives bring to the state, our family has been able to pay our mortgage & bills, buy groceries, and ( just barely!)
I’m sure WW readers noticed OPB radio suspended its pledge drive while the Egyptians were revolting. OPB seemed pretty proud of itself, but weren’t officials just following NPR’s decision? —Helen Highwater If you think the Egyptians were revolting, you should meet my ex-wife. Ba-da-BOOM! But seriously, folks, Helen’s question reflects the popular misconception (popular with me, anyway) that OPB’s pledge drive is part of a monolithic National Pledge Week during which all public radio stations badger you for cash simultaneously. If you think about it (rather than just guiltily switching to KGON), it’s an easy mistake to make. I always assumed that NPR did a special pledge-week edition of All Things Considered with extra-long gaps between stories, to be filled with the local talent’s breathless, slightly hysterical haranguing. But according to OPB radio VP Lynne Clendenin, the station doesn’t 4
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
keep our heads above water even during these rough economic times. For us, it has made the difference between making it, even if on a modest scale, and not. Like many of the commenters have noted, the cast, crew and services hired by out-of-town production companies are local, and can hardly be described as ‘fat cats.’ The major question raised in this article is the actual effect of these dollars on everyday Oregonians—Nigel’s reporting is usually excellent, but his failure to seek comment from any of the numerous folks actually living here and working in the field is a big disappointment. There are so many local people who derive all or part of their income from this industry—grips and electricians, camera and sound people, actors, wardrobe, transportation, providers of craft services & catering, etc. etc...you would be hard pressed to find any of them who consider the work these incentives bring to be a waste of money. A thriving film and video industry not only generates much needed employment for Oregonians and revenue for local businesses, it also raises the profile of our beautiful state. I think that the cast & crew members from this area are some of the hardest working people around, and believe that they play an important role in Oregon’s economic revitilization. This investment is worth every penny!” —Rachel Carpenter LETTERS TO THE EDITOR must include the author’s street address and phone number for verification. Letters must be 250 or fewer words. Submit to: 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Fax: (503) 243-1115, Email: mzusman@wweek.com
follow a coordinated “drive week.” Which means it’s breaking into the regular shows. So, how come OPB never cuts back to the national feed mid-sentence? Is there some mystical, Taos-like hum that warns the initiated when Robert Siegel is about to speak? Probably, but that’s not how they do it. “Typically, we edit programs like ATC in order to add breaks during the [pledge] drive,” says Clendenin. Remember, ATC is only live on the East Coast, so OPB has a brief window to get an edited version together. Still, it sounds pretty hectic, especially when you consider public-radio folks aren’t exactly the type to have reliable meth connections. But to return to the question you actually asked (rather than the different one I found interesting), it was OPB’s call. “[We] decided to halt the drive for special coverage,” says Clendenin. “There was no question.” The noble spirit of journalism? You bet. Now pay up. QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com
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OPINION: Should Portland rejoin Terrorism Task Force? LEGISLATURE: Plastic bag vs. paper bag. LABOR: Powell’s jobless dish on their employer. POLICE: Why a prominent cop plans to sue.
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Legislative leaders are still considering a Feb. 4 request from former state Sen. Vicki Walker (D-Eugene) and ex-Rep. Tim Knoop (R-Bend) that a portrait of former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt be removed from the Capitol’s fourth-floor library. The former lawmakers’ request follows the Jan. 16 death of Elizabeth Dunham, whom Goldschmidt sexually abused when she was a young teenager. Robin Maxey, spokesman for Senate President Peter Courtney (D-Salem) says his boss is seeking legal advice and will make the call with House co-speakers Bruce Hanna (R-Roseburg) and Arnie Roblan (D-Coos Bay). Change is hard: Although the 2011 Legislative session opened with talk of completely remaking Oregon government, a highprofile effort by Rep. Jules Bailey (D-Portland) to abolish the troubled Oregon Department of Energy and distribute its functions got a stony reception last week. Part of the issue is the agency’s extraordinary efforts at self-preservation—a department rep called industry lobbyists together and cautioned them against supporting Bailey’s House Bill 2900. And part is the inertia that makes taking on even a small (fewer than 100 employees) bureaucracy. “It is very clear that the idea of total dismantling of ODOE is not in the cards,” says veteran lobbyist Len Bergstein, who represents renewableenergy companies. Meanwhile, Gov. John Kitzhaber, who has pledged to shake up Salem’s ossified culture, has still not hired a natural-resources or energy adviser. A bipartisan bill that would provide in-state tuition for undocumented Oregon students at all public state universities has been introduced in the Legislature. Senate Bill 742, the state-level version of the DREAM Act that failed at the federal level, is “huge,” says state Rep. Michael Dembrow (D-Portland). “[Undocumented students] have aspirations to continue, but their futures are foreclosed by having to pay out-of-state tuition,” says co-sponsor Sen. Frank Morse (R-Albany). “The opposition to the bill is opposition to illegal immigration.” A campaign kicks off next week to extend TriMet’s current bus and MAX transfer tickets to three hours. Current bus transfer times are one hour from the end of the route on weekends and two hours on weekends and holidays, and two hours from the time of fare purchase for MAX and WES. Bus Riders Unite! begins its campaign Monday, Feb. 21, at 6 pm at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church (1131 SE Oak St.).
PHOTO: JASON McHUFF
Hoodie
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J O N AT H A N H I L L
OPINION
suspicion that any criminal or terrorist element was associated with…or likely to be present at the event.” BY M A R K Z U S M AN
mzusman@wweek.com
In 2005, led by then-Mayor Tom Potter, Portland became the only U.S. city to pull out of the Joint Terrorism Task Force over civil-liberties concerns. The City Council should not reverse that decision when it considers the issue Feb. 24. In fact, both for practical and symbolic reasons, we think Portland should remain outside the federal task force. Those clamoring to rejoin the JTTF, notably City Commissioner Dan Saltzman and the editorial board of The Oregonian, argue that the alleged plot by a 19-year-old Muslim man to bomb Pioneer Courthouse Square the day after Thanksgiving is reason enough. But this plot was stopped without Portland’s full participation in the JTTF, which is a coalition of federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The current agreement, forged in 2005, says Portland cops can cooperate with the JTTF on specific investigations but will not join the JTTF in an ongoing capacity. In the case of alleged bomber Mohamed Osman Mohamud, Portland police were brought into the investigation in September 2010, about three months before the JTTF arrested the young man. Potter’s objections in 2005 were that he would be forced to relinquish the city’s supervision of Portland officers if he allowed them to fully join the JTTF. His specific concern then—and now—was that officers reporting to him might violate citizens’ rights without his knowledge. Potter is no stranger to law enforcement. He’s a former police chief. “I needed to have oversight of resources under my control,” he said recently. “And I didn’t.” Potter sought a compromise. He asked to receive top-secret clearance so he could review his officers’ work. The feds said no. (Although it is rare for a
mayor to have top-secret clearance, the FBI confirmed that at least one mayor in a city with a JTTF does have such clearance.) Potter’s concern was not hypothetical. The expansion of law enforcement authority and its ability to operate in secret has become one of the troubling postscripts of 9/11. Ironically, those who criticized the Bush administration for curtailing civil liberties are willing to give President Obama a pass, even though there is little daylight between the two administrations on this matter. Witness the Obama administration’s attempt to extend provisions of the Patriot Act, extensions a majority in the U.S. House shot down last week. We’ll admit to being emotionally engaged in the JTTF question. Even now, seven years later, we are still raw from witnessing the treatment of Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who happened to be a Muslim. Mayfield’s phones were tapped and his house searched. He ultimately was arrested—falsely—for the bombing of a train in Madrid, because of a botched fingerprint identification. The feds later apologized and gave Mayfield a couple of million dollars. But that is small comfort to the rest of us concerned about the thin line between an aggressive security apparatus and a police state. The Mayfield case is hardly unique. In September 2010, the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice found that the FBI was willing to toss away civil liberties in its fever to find terrorists. In repeated breaches of what JTTF opponents claim are the feds’ “new” marching orders, the FBI investigated members of advocacy groups (peaceniks, animal-rights activists, enviros) without any evidence of a crime. In one typical example, at a Pittsburgh antiwar rally, the inspector general said the FBI investigation was “extremely troubling on its face. It described no legitimate purpose for the FBI to attend the event…. It supplied no evidence or even
Former FBI Special Agent Mike German, who now advises the ACLU, adds weight to our concerns. For more than a decade, German infiltrated domestic terror groups on behalf of the FBI. He says Portland would be crazy to join the JTTF. German points out that the attorney general’s rules for what is required before federal law enforcement can open an assessment—the lowest level of an investigation, yet one that allows an agent to do physical surveillance and secure some phone records—have become too lax. “When I was an agent, the standard was [higher],” he says. “You had to have reasonable suspicion that a crime was [in the planning]. Now you can open an assessment on someone with nothing.” And the Obama administration has done nothing to change that. In 2007, German wrote a book called Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent. The premise is simple—that one of the goals of sophisticated terror groups is “to get government to step over the line and violate civil liberties and create real discontent.” “The notion,” German says, “that trading off civil liberties is necessary for more security is simply a false paradigm.” Although we oppose rejoining the JTTF, there are paths that could change our view. Certainly the man leading the campaign to rejoin, U.S. Attorney Dwight Holton, promotes transparency that gives us more comfort than we’ve felt with any Oregon U.S. attorney in 30 years. And were the feds willing to grant the mayor top-secret clearance, we might support such a move. But until then, we believe Portland should stay on the sidelines. We’re not naive enough to believe Portland’s decision, on its own, will alter how the feds fight the “war on terror.” But protests begin with one voice. In the war on terrorism, one city in this country needs to stand up for civil rights. That city should be Portland.
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
7
NEWS
MULTNOMAH COUNTY
EXTRA CREDIT
WHILE THE COUNTY STRUGGLED, COMMISSIONERS SPENT MONEY ON PROFESSIONAL FEES, TRAVEL AND THEIR FAVORITE CHARITIES. BY JA M E S P I T K I N
jpitkin@wweek.com
In his first “State of the County” speech, Multnomah County Chairman Jeff Cogen recently described his government’s financial woes. “Multnomah County is digging deep to change the way we do business to be as efficient as possible,” Cogen told the City Club of Portland on Feb. 4. “In the short run, this means doing everything possible to preserve our most critical services.” Yet at a time when the county may be laying off dozens of managers and line staff, a WW examination of hundreds of purchases by elected commissioners and their staffs in 2010 revealed these expenditures of your tax dollars: Commissioner Judy Shiprack used county money to pay her annual Oregon State Bar dues. The price: $492. (Shiprack now says she’ll pay back the county.) Commissioner Diane McKeel and her staff spent more than $5,000 traveling to three conferences on human trafficking and more than $1,000 attending City Club of Portland events. Cogen, the most frugal of the bunch, spent more than $1,200 on new furniture after moving up from being one of four elected commissioners to the county chair’s office. County Auditor Steve March is in the middle of auditing policies and practices for credit-card use. County rules allow staff and elected officials to use the cards to pay for work-related expenses and travel. March will consider whether the county should have firmer guidelines. “It’s a little bit of a gray area,” he says, “particularly when it comes to electeds.” Cogen acknowledged he pays out of his own pocket for many events—such as charity fundraisers and City Club talks—that other commissioners charge to taxpayers. But he declined to criticize his elected colleagues’ spending. “They are focused on what’s best for Multnomah County,” Cogen says. “Different people can make different calls about what that is, but I know it’s all coming from a good place.” The $39,000 spent is small change compared with the total $374 million discretionary county budget. But the commissioners’ credit-card spending would be enough to provide free immunizations to about 1,300 school kids. (Commissioner Loretta Smith is not included, because she didn’t take office until January 2011.)
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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
COGEN
spent Including the three months he nbegi the at r ione as a commiss ths ning of 2010 and his nine mon t spen en Cog , rman as county chai g less than any of his other sittin the colleagues. Speaking of sitting, h $1,226 for furniture includes plus com the all to ors seating for visit new missioners’ offices, plus a set of staff conference chairs for Cogen’s and two other departments. p,” “All that stuff was really chea Cogen says. on Cogen’s office spent only $80 nd City Club events—all of it to atte s former Chairman Ted Wheeler’ Cogen State of the County address. paid to attend other City Club events from his own pocket, but his he did spend county money for of the staff to attend his own State County address this month.
Kafoury and her staff spe nt $535 attending fundraisers for gay-rights organizations, including $150 for the Basic Rights Oregon dinn er, $300 for BRO’s Basic Rights Edu cation Fund and $85 for the Ore gon Gay and Lesbian Law Associa tion. Other events sponsored by loca l nonprofits Kafoury supported with county money included Neighborh ood House ($200) and Human Solu tions ($50). “It is part of our job to go to these events [and] to sup port these organizations, most of whi ch contract with the county,” Kaf oury says. “They’re in line with the missions of my office and the project s that I’m working on.”
KAFOURY
SHIPRACK
March, the county audi tor, says Shiprack’s decision to spend $492 county mon of ey in 2010 to pay her dues did no bar t violate co unty rules. Shiprack sa ys it was th e second ye in a row sh ar e charged her bar du to the coun es ty—a move she justified because of her work fo r promotin public safe g ty. After W W asked ab the expend out iture, Shipra ck says she decided to return the money. “The are hard ti se mes,” she says, “so I’m reimbursin g that.” Shiprack an d her staff also spent $540 of pu blic money attending fundraisers for Basic R ights Orego and other ga n y rights grou ps. She also supported Oregon NA RAL ($125) the Cascade and AIDS Projec t ($200). “What [the se organiza tions] do to take care of vulnerab le people in the com munity is ve ry reflectiv of the coun e ty’s mission and values Shiprack sa ,” ys.
lighted human McKeel has spot for r work, lobbying trafficking in he r fo ing sh s and pu tougher penaltie tion. en ev pr rd wa to more resources ,160 ff racked up $5 She and her sta confering ck ffi tra nattending huma tle gton, D.C., Seat ences in Washin e. and Newport, Or d r traveling helpe McKeel says he brought , ion at isl leg l pass new federa ty Multnomah Coun grant money to she sees at wh on s nd and focused mi . as a critical issue er and her staff The commission 2 attending City also spent $1,00 all 10. At six events, Club events in 20 mco ac s er ff memb three of her sta panied McKeel. rtant that my “I think it’s impo at’s going on,” wh th wi staff keep up McKeel says.
MCKEEL
MUSIC LISTINGS page 35
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
9
Due date 2-11 Run date 2-16
Join us at Lewis & Clark Events are free unless otherwise noted. Parking is free after 7 p.m. and all day on weekends. Through March 13 Tuesday-Sunday 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art
February 17 4 p.m. Miller, Room 105
EXHIBITION
Cara Tomlinson and Robert Miller The 2011 Faculty Art Exhibition features the work of Robert Miller and Cara Tomlinson. Miller will give a gallery talk on February 17 at noon, and Tomlinson will give a gallery talk on February 22 at noon. BLACK HISTORY MONTH EVENT
Learning From Black Resistance to School Desegregation Charise Cheney of the University of Oregon, a leading scholar in African American popular and political cultures, examines the question of what was lost with Brown v. Board of Education and school desegregation.
February 18 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. Pamplin Sports Center
February 22 4 p.m. Templeton Campus Center, Thayer
WOMEN’S AND MEN’S BASKETBALL
Senior Night The Pioneers take on the University of Puget Sound in their final regular season home basketball games. BLACK HISTORY MONTH EVENT
Black Identity in a “Color Blind” Society Student, faculty, and community panelists discuss the politics of racial identity and what it means to be “Black” today.
February 23 4 p.m. Miller, Room 105
BLACK HISTORY MONTH EVENT
What Is Black? Too Black? Not Black Enough?: A Scholarly Perspective on the Film Black Is…Black Ain’t Rudolph Byrd ’80 is director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University. He will explore the complexities of defining “blackness” in America.
February 24 7 p.m. Templeton Campus Center, Council Chamber
ADDRESS
Civil Liberties and Policies in the War on Terror: From Portland to Guantanamo and Beyond Steven T. Wax, a federal public defender, discusses the erosion of civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks through the stories of two men he represented—American lawyer Brandon Mayfield and Sudanese aid worker Adel Hamad.
February 25 1 p.m. John R. Howard Hall, Room 102
ADDRESS
Prohibiting Plunder: How Norms Change Professor Wayne Sandholtz of University of California at Irvine will trace the emergence of international rules against wartime looting of cultural treasures and explore how anti-plunder norms have developed over the past 200 years.
Lewis & Clark 0615 S.W. Palatine Hill Road Portland, Oregon 97219
www.lclark.edu 10
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
NEWS W W S TA F F
LEGISLATURE SUBSECTION
BLOWING IN THE WIND
tion standards, perhaps the most compelling argument in Oregon for plastic is that a paper bag generates as much as two times the greenhouse gases generated by making a plastic bag. Numerous studies have found plastic superior from an emissions perspective. David Allaway, a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, says paper bag makers have refused to share data with federal scientists that they say disputes plastics’ greenhouse gas superiority. “The plastic bag has a lower carbon footprint than a paper bag,” Allaway says. Nonetheless, BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS njaquiss@wweek.com DEQ supports the ban because it wants to reduce litter, eliminate the headache that plastic bags Anybody who has ever watched a tree-bound cause for recyclers by gumming up machines, plastic bag flapping in the Columbia Gorge wind and shift consumers toward reusable bags. or glimpsed one bobbing in a coastal wave underThose same three considerations were at play stands the visceral appeal of a proposed plastic in 2010, when a plastic bag ban bill died quickly bag ban now before the Oregon Senate. in a special legislative session. But, in fact, the feeling inspired by that What’s different now is that the grocers, then proposal—Senate Bill 536—may be a lot stronger a bitter opponent, now support a ban. Their evothan the factual case for removing about 1 billion lution on the issue results from both a carrot and plastic bags a year from Oregon grocery stores. a stick. “It’s difficult to combat emotion with fact,” The carrot is that SB536 allows grocers to says Mark Daniels, a vice president at Hilex Poly, charge at least a nickel but as much as they want a South Carolina-based plastic bag maker and for paper bags. recycler. Former legislative counsel Greg Chaimov says Hilex and the rest of the plastic bag industry he can think of only one other Oregon statute (the are playing defense in a state where they employ minimum wage)that specifies what companies may very few workers and have seen a vital business pay or, in the case of the bag ban, get to charge. group—the Oregon Grocery Association—defect “It’s very unusual,” Chaimov says. to the environmental side. Grocers also will make extra While passage of the bag FACT: Cotton requires so much water money selling tens or hundreds ban is far from certain, propo- and energy to produce that a 2009 of millions of plastic bags to study found a shopper would nents’ success in marshaling Finnish replace those that consumers have to reuse a cotton bag 180 times bipartisan legislative support before it became environmentally will no longer have lying around demonstrates the return of the superior to a plastic bag. the house, and also by selling environmental lobby, which reusable grocery carriers. underperformed with failures on priorities such “This bill’s a big moneymaker for the grocers,” as a ban on the chemical Bisphenol A from baby says Hilex’s Daniels. beverage containers and a cap-and-trade mechaThe stick is the local bag bans that cities such nism despite large Democratic majorities in the as Portland and Eugene stand ready to implelast Legislature. ment should a statewide ban fail. The grocers “I think it says something about our matura- have said they don’t want to have to deal with tion as a lobby,” says Sue Marshall, who represents different policies in every city. Willamette and Tualatin Riverkeepers in Salem. The bag ban has a lot of friends, including coThe bag ban is advancing in the face of plas- sponsor Sen. Mark Hass (D-Beaverton), who has tic’s advantages over paper. Plastic bags are put in many hours since the bill’s failure in 2010. lighter, cheaper and more waterproof than paper But one of most notable differences is the leaderbags, for starters. Plastic bags are also more ship of Oregon League of Conservation Voters versatile than paper bags, and even though they executive director Jon Isaacs, who was a political may seem ubiquitous, studies in California and strategist long before he became an enviro. Washington show plastic bags make up less than “The difference now is, we’re trying to work 2 percent of all litter in those states. with major business groups instead of always And in a state that is among the nation’s lead- against them,” Isaacs says. “We’re trying to be ers in adopting aggressive greenhouse gas reduc- more pragmatic.”
WHY THE BAG BILL SAILS FORWARD DESPITE SIGNIFICANT WEAKNESSES.
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NEWS J E S S I C A S TA M B A C H
CITY HALL
STREET STRIFE: Are buskers part of Portland’s harmony?
DOWN ON THE CORNER
BUSKERS AND THE CITY REVISIT A 15-YEAR-OLD DEAL. BY STACY B R OW N H I LL
sbrownhill@wweek.com
Fifteen years ago, then-Mayor Vera Katz, police, business associations and musicians signed an agreement that dictates when, where and how bucket drummers, fiddlers and human statues can perform in Portland. The distance a saxophonist’s notes travel, the length of time a juggler occupies his corner, and the rights of a store owner who’s angry with a bagpiper on his sidewalk are all spelled out in that Street Musicians and Performers Partnership Agreement. For instance, buskers may only perform in one spot for an hour at a time. Musicians must space themselves out at least one block apart and should not be heard more than 100 feet away. Businesses also face stipulations, such as not interrupting a performance or resorting “to threats or intimidation.” Whether any of these parameters are being respected is another matter. At a forum last week, city Noise Control Officer Paul Van Orden and City Commissioner Amanda Fritz heard musicians complain that one hour was an inadequate performance time and that police officers frequently harassed them for no reason. Buddy Bee Anthony, a keyboardist who plays at Southwest Morrison Street between 9th and 10th avenues, asked at the Feb. 10 forum, “Why do we refer to music as noise?” Anthony said that a guard outside City Hall once told him he would turn on the sprinklers unless he moved his piano playing. Store owners griped that buskers often harm business; representatives of neighborhood associations voiced concern about music floating up to high-rise apartments downtown. Saturday Market vendor Kristine Cheeseman said some less-than-talented buskers “ruin her livelihood” by playing near her stall. Van Orden, who used to be a band booker, says his office issues at most 15 $250 violations to street performers per year, mostly to bucket drummers, who usually pay them with community service. The only enforceable law, says Van Orden, is the 100-foot ordinance. But he says the collaborative agreement helps keep Portland “organic” and avoids the city busker fees charged by some music havens like Seattle and New York. Despite some tension at the Feb. 10 meeting, all agreed street performance is a vital vibe, and there needs to be more education about the agreement. Halley Weaver, a bicycling street harpist with PDXBusk. org, estimates 90 percent of the city’s 50 to 75 buskers don’t know the agreement. Fritz’s office is ambivalent about scheduling additional meetings or enacting changes, says Fritz policy assistant Sara Hussein. The office is still deciding what steps to take next. Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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LABOR
SHELVED THE STORY OF POWELL’S LAYOFFS, ACCORDING TO AFFECTED WORKERS. BY REBECCA JACOBSON
rjacobson@wweek.com
Powell’s Books employee Sheila Ashdown said her heart started pounding when she got the email last week from her employer announcing plans to lay off 31 workers. “People were depressed, teary-eyed, anxious, I think a little shocked,� says Ashdown, who had worked at Powell’s since September 2007.
Though Ashdown was not axed in the initial sweep announced in the Feb. 8 email, she lost her job the next day through a bumping process that allows laid-off workers at the venerable bookseller to take the jobs from employees with less seniority. This round of 31 layoffs—about 7 percent of the workforce—was the company’s biggest since 1991. Management cited the swiftly changing industry, saying in its email to workers that new book sales were in steep decline, and that Powell’s was “losing sales to electronic books and reading devices.� The company also cited the economic downturn and rising healthcare costs. (Powell’s president, Emily Powell, didn’t return WW’s messages seeking further comment.) But in the shelves of the Gold Room at
LABOR PAINS: Union rep Ryan Takas and ex-Powell’s employees Megan Benton and Sheila Ashdown dispute the company’s rationale for layoffs.
C H R I S T A C O N N E L LY
NEWS
Powell’s Burnside location, Brian Booty and programming projects seemed stable, says he heard only occasional conversation says Megan Benton, who had been at Powamong shoppers about e-readers. Booty ell’s since October 2006 and made $16.92 was initially laid off from the science- an hour in the programming department. “We were constantly moving forward fiction section but subsequently bumped to the customer-service desk at the Bea- on projects, and we’d just launched Google eBooks, so sales on that were building,� verton store. “We didn’t really see it in the trenches,� says Benton, who, like Ashdown, lost her says Booty, who has worked on and off at job through the bumping process. “It didn’t Powell’s since 1997 and has held his most seem like we were doing that badly.� recent $11.37-an-hour post since July Ryan Takas, a union representative for International Longshore 2009. “I didn’t think it was and Warehouse Union Local enough to warrant layoffs, FACT: The wage range for but apparently it is.� 5, says these layoffs could employees who lost their Since December, Powell’s jobs at Powell’s was $10.34 have been averted, and he noted no managers were laid has offered Google eBooks to $16.92 per hour. for sale on its website. But off. Last year at this time, Ashdown, a $16.92-an-hour marketing the company and the union worked to coordinator at the Northwest Indus- avoid layoffs through schedule reductions, trial warehouse, says the company cannot voluntary leaves of absence and the transblame the layoffs simply on digitization ferring of workers. Three weeks ago, the of the book market. She says Powell’s lags union proposed a vote on a wage freeze. in technology, such as placing e-book bar- Company management never responded, codes on the shelves so customers can buy Takas says. “I think it was infinitely avoidable,� digital manuscripts on the spot. “If they were that concerned about Takas says. “There were many alternatives e-books, maybe they should have done that could have been exhausted before this something about it,� Ashdown says. outcome was ultimately decided.� Messages left for Emily Powell were not Though the company’s Feb. 8 email had said Powell’s sales were down, marketing immediately returned.
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15
POLICE COURTESY OF DOUG JUSTUS
NEWS
TV TURN: Doug Justus (left) filmed a news special about human trafficking with Dan Rather in 2010.
MISSING JUSTUS
A PORTLAND COP SAYS HE WAS FORCED OUT OF HIS JOB OVER A HUMAN-TRAFFICKING CASE. BY JAMES PIT KIN
jpitkin@wweek.com
The Portland Police Bureau’s former point man on the issue of human trafficking has put the city on notice that he intends to sue his former supervisor for gender harassment. Sgt. Doug Justus, who represented the police bureau on the Oregon Human Trafficking Task Force for three years, abruptly retired last month and left his position on the police union’s executive board (see Murmurs, WW, Feb. 9, 2011). In a tort-claim notice filed with the city Jan. 3, Justus claims he faced repeated discrimination based on his gender from Lt. Rachel Andrew, his supervisor in the bureau’s detective division. “This discrimination has occurred in the form of loud, repeated bouts of abusive and vulgar language directed at my client along with the successful attempt to force him back to the
“DISCRIMINATION HAS OCCURRED IN THE FORM OF LOUD, REPEATED BOUTS OF ABUSIVE AND VULGAR LANGUAGE.” —KEVIN KEANEY, ATTORNEY FOR DOUG JUSTUS street on patrol,” writes Justus’ attorney, Kevin Keaney, in the tort-claim notice. “We believe Lt. Andrew, the PPB and the City of Portland are engaged in these behaviors in order to force my client into retirement,” Keaney continues. The Police Bureau referred questions to the city attorney’s office, which has a policy against commenting on litigation. Justus, a 24-year veteran, tells WW that Andrew was assigned to the detective division in August last year to oust him after Justus was involved in a controversial case where he butted heads with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Portland. “Obviously it was connected to that,” Justus says. The case was detailed in a lengthy Dec. 20 story in The Seattle Times. According to the Times story, in January 2008 Portland police arrested 16-year-old Kelsey Collins for prostitution. She told Justus she was willing to turn on her pimp, who she said shuttled her from Seattle to Portland. Justus turned the case over for prosecution in March 2008, to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. But more than a year passed without an indictment. In the meantime, Collins’ family told the Times, the girl was offered no protection from her pimp. In May 2009, Collins disappeared and hasn’t been seen since. The U.S. Attorney’s Office told the Times the delay came because prosecutors were waiting on the police. “That is a lie,” Justus says. “They had every [police] report they needed to go to a grand jury by April 2008.” 16
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
Remembering James Beard James Beard was a living encyclopedia of culinary lore and history. Born in Portland, OR, Beard is considered the father of American cooking. He authored 22 cookbooks, had the ďŹ rst television cooking show, and taught national cooking classes with Julia Child. The James Beard Foundation recognizes and encourages talent at the forefront of the culinary world, culminating in the annual awards. James Beard in Oregon: A Celebration of Superstars and Master Chefs
Sunday, March 20, 2011 4 p.m. - 7 p.m. Multnomah Athletic Club 1849 SW Salmon St. Portland, OR 97205 General Admission tickets sold out
VIP Tickets still available: Email - BeardinOregon@lanepr.com
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
WE ASK MAYOR SAM ADAMS ABOUT HIS POLITICAL FUTURE, MARIJUANA, COP SHOOTINGS, LEAF FEES, THE CRAPPY ECONOMY, BIKES AND MEDIA COVERAGE OF HIM. WE ALSO ASK WHATEVER HAPPENED TO “MIKE AND JEAN.” HE WASN’T HAPPY ABOUT THAT LAST QUESTION. BY HEN RY STER N
hstern@wweek.com,
PHOTOS BY CHRIS RYA N
This Friday, Feb. 18, Mayor Sam Adams will go before the City Club of Portland to deliver his annual State of the City address. Typically, Portland mayors use this event to lay out a laundry list of achievements and policy objectives over a Friday lunch even blander than the speech, and then everybody goes home for the weekend. But as Adams passes the midpoint of a tumultuous four-year term, this year’s remarks will be much more closely watched than usual. CONT. on page 21
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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CONT.
SUM OF SAM
C H R I S R YA N P H O T O . C O M
“This will be his platform,” says former Commissioner has another view, informed by Adams’ yanking the Police city’s stubbornly high unemployment rate. The interview Mike Lindberg, who served on City Council from 1979 Bureau away from him in May 2010, firing then-Chief has been edited for brevity and clarity. through 1996. Rosie Sizer and promoting Mike Reese (a favorite and The closer scrutiny comes as Adams is expected to face bandmate of Leonard’s). That abrupt move so angered WW: Before we get to the policy stuff, let’s deal with a tough re-election fight in 2012. Saltzman, the Council’s senior member, that he’s consid- whether you’re going to run again. “He did a significant amount of damage to himself out ering challenging Adams next year. Mayor Sam Adams: I haven’t decided. The tradition is, of the blocks. Is he vulnerable to losing? Yes,” says PortHe’s not alone. Other potential mayoral challengers are toward the end of this calendar year. I’m not devoting land pollster Tim Hibbitts. “[But] is he a viable candidate former commissioners Charlie Hales (a lock to run) and energy to the issue of whether I’m running or not because for re-election? Yes.” Jim Francesconi (given his disastrous 2004 mayoral run, there’s just so much to do. The damage at the outset was the Beau Breedlove scan- another campaign is highly unlikely). dal that surfaced in the first month of the mayor’s term. Current pols who might run besides Saltzman (hard With what’s happened politically and personally over Two recall efforts surfaced and fell short. to imagine him wanting such a gladhanding role, but he’s the past two years, will it be harder for you to raise If you strip away the personal scandal, which become a more familiar face lately at neighborhood money? raised real questions about his integrity, associations) are Multnomah County Chairman I’ve raised significant amounts of money for the schools and simply consider how well Adams has Jeff Cogen (a former City Hall chief of staff for [Portland Public Schools is campaigning for a $547 million performed as mayor and how well he has Saltzman, but who would have to give up his bond measure this May, as well as asking voters to renew Adams’ executed on his campaign promises, the county seat to run for mayor) and Demo- a five-year levy], so I’m not finding it to be an issue. I’m political action committee, as record is mixed. cratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer getting a lot of encouragement to run again. But I’ve told of Feb. 14, had a On policy questions over the past (fewer cross-country flights for the former everybody I’m not going to make a decision until toward deficit of $139.19 and two-plus years, the mayor gets credit city commissioner and unsuccessful 1992 the end of this calendar year. hadn’t recorded a contribution since for carving out a projected $3.5 milmayoral candidate, more neighborhood Oct. 28, 2010. lion surplus in the upcoming budget sewer meetings). If you weren’t mayor, what would be your dream job? by making cuts early in his tenure via a And, of course, there are wild cards, such When I was growing up, I wanted to be a farmer. hiring freeze, attrition in city positions and raising Growing what? revenues with unpopular I don’t think I thought it moves like increased through that much. parking-meter rates. And the city has maintained its Think this medicalAAA credit rating. marijuana thing is about But for a guy who seems to take off ? to relish being called a The medical-marijuana “policy wonk,” Adams has thing has not been part of proven to be surprisingly my farming ambitions. maladroit at initiatives both large and small. He What do you think about botched an attempt to medical marijuana? move the Portland Beavers I’ve been supportive of to the Rose Quarter, comthe medical-marijuana pletely failed to prepare initiative. the public for his bold initiative to use sewer dolHow about legalization? lars to supplement bicycle It would have to be done infrastructure, and in a in an incredibly smart more recent, smaller-bore manner. My answer to that example, largely whiffed right now is really colored on a poorly thought-out by the fact we have so little effort to implement a leafmoney going to schools removal fee. and so much money going For a guy who has been to incarcerate nonviolent involved in politics virtudrug offenders. I think it ally his entire adult life, would be a lot cheaper to ADAMS: “I’m not devoting energy to the issue of whether I’m running or not because there’s just so much to do.” Adams seems to lack an have them in recovery proability to execute, relying grams. Instead, we’re just instead on a now-tired warehousing them withhabit of naming large task forces that meet endlessly and as a never-was pol like Steve Novick (who the hell knows out sufficient services. And we’re just starving our decide nothing. what he’s ever going to do?). schools. I don’t see legalization of marijuana And there’s no evidence yet in the middle of a recession But none of them—or us—should forget that happening anytime soon. In the meanthat Adams will meet his previously stated goal of 10,000 the 47-year-old mayor is the ultimate polititime, the reforms I believe are needed In 2004, new jobs by 2014. In fact, in one sign of the city’s fragile cal creation. are around the sentencing guidelines Adams ran for job base, Adams hightailed it to Spain last week because Adams started as a Salem political for nonviolent drug offenders. city commissioner and of concern that wind-farm company Iberdrola’s North operative for House Democrats in the defeated Nick Fish, who four years later won a difAmerican headquarters might be leaving Portland and late 1980s and has been in City Hall for You could tax marijuana to ferent Council seat. In 2008, taking 350 jobs with it. nearly two decades, first as chief of staff raise money for schools... Adams defeated a dozen It also doesn’t appear Adams will succeed in another to Mayor Vera Katz, then as a city comI just don’t see that as a panacea candidates in the mayor’s race, with more than ambitious goal he set out to achieve by 2013—halving the missioner and now as mayor. He is, by right now. And I don’t see it as very 58 percent of non-completion rate for students in Portland high schools. all accounts, tough and willing to do anydoable right now. the vote. Other Adams achievements come with a flip side. thing to preserve his position. (Whether He and Commissioner Randy Leonard led the charge Adams could raise the estimated $500,000 What grade would you give yourself to convert PGE Park into a stadium that enables Major to $750,000 to run a successful re-election camso far as mayor? League Soccer to begin play here in April. But the cost of paign is another question.) The teacher gives the grades, not the stuupgrading soccer resulted in the loss of baseball in PortAdams’ speech should preview the case Adams will dent. In this case, the teacher is the public, the press and land, as Adams aborted his effort to get a minor-league muster when he announces—most likely later this year— everyone else. I’m not about to give myself a grade. I’m baseball stadium in the Rose Quarter. Meanwhile, rede- that he will run for a second term. working hard. I’m working to earn an A, but it’s up to othvelopment of that area remains moribund. In advance of the City Club event, WW sat down with ers to decide whether or not I’ll be graded an A. When I Commissioner Randy Leonard, who has served under Adams for an hour Feb. 4 in the Starbucks at the Governor look over the past two years, we’ve accomplished more three mayors, says Adams is by far the most collaborative Hotel to talk about his mayoral term so far. We asked him mayor he’s worked with. Commissioner Dan Saltzman about everything from police and leaf fees to bikes and the CONT. on page 23 Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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CONT. than most any other mayor that I kept track of over the last two years.
What’s improved on your watch? We’re one of the few cities in the United States that actually has a budget surplus. We did that by cutting early, assuming revenues lower than staff presented to me, and a lot of luck. This City Council worked harder to cut earlier than we had to, deeper than recommended by the financial staff. Employees had to forgo raises, and we made significant improvements in our employee contracts. The other thing I would say is, on the jobs front. I think we were bleeding 25,000 jobs when I was sworn in. We now have an economic development strategy. We’ve got a long ways to go and a lot more to do.
office in January 2009. As of December 2010, the most recent period for which statistics are available, the rate was 10.2 percent. In the same time frame, the national rate went from 7.6 percent to 9.0 percent.
Is there a city you look to as a template for that economic diversity? Our challenge is to be one of the smallest, most successful global cities in the world. Cities like Toronto, Vancouver, B.C.—those are bigger cities than we are, but they’re close. You have
examples of something you started and finished in your first two years. There’s the economic development strategy, reform of the Portland Development Commission. There’s the reorganization of city government. We took on the chronic dysfunction in city government where you had two housing bureaus. Done. We took on the chronic dysfunction of the permitting function of the city, where you have eight different permitting organizations, physically spread out over the entire city and driving people insane. That was co-located. I said when I ran I wanted to infuse sustainability into all the work of the city, not just have it be sort of a boutique thing that sort of jumps up and down just to get people’s attention. I can go down the list if you want. I’ve increased funding for arts and culture. I didn’t know that I would actually get the opportunity to talk about actual accomplishments. This is rare. Let’s see if it actually shows up in the actual newspaper.
C H R I S R YA N P H O T O . C O M
Would you say better than Vera’s first two years? I wouldn’t. She’s my friend. They are completely two different times in Portland’s history. I understand that you want to get me into all kinds of trouble. But I don’t compare like that.
has been a chronic, not-very-well-understood vulnerability of our city, our economy. The strength of our quality of life is not matched by the strength of our economy. We really do risk becoming an economic suburb of San Francisco and Seattle unless we really put Metro some effort and investment into Portland’s unemployment rate was 9.6 strengthening and diversifying our percent when Adams took economy.
How do you find time to be on Twitter so much? There’s a lot of in-between time when you have this kind of a job. Tweeting, because it’s 140 characters, doesn’t take a lot of time. Do you ever have any tweets you regret? Oh, I’m sure there are, but I can’t think of any. Because then you’ll ask me which one. Like I haven’t been through these interviews before [laughs].
What about the leaf-removal fee? Is that going to be back next year? We’ll see. I’m polling on it.
In your 2009 State of the City speech, you set a goal of 10,000 new jobs by 2014. Can you give us a sense of any progress made toward that goal? Well, we’ve lost jobs since then, obviously. The national recession has gone on longer than anyone anticipated. But I’m not giving up on that goal. And it’s an important organizing goal for my work. This is something that
Any regrets for not taking the Police Bureau when you started as mayor in 2009? I did not assign myself the Police Bureau because of the economic plight that the city was in. And I wanted to have enough time and focus to do a quality economicdevelopment strategy. Do Commissioners Dan Saltzman and Amanda Fritz have enough to do? Amanda tells me she definitely has enough to do. I read in the paper that Dan might want more things to do, although he’s never asked me for that. At the end of the budget process, I’ll be looking at bureau assignments and potentially making changes.
The budget surplus you cited of about $3.5 million is only for this upcoming year. The same forecast you’re referring to predicts that in five years we will face deficits. Is our future financially sustainable? You asked me what I was proud of. And we have a budget surplus. A one-time budget surplus. We’re in a very different position than most major cities in the United States and most of the governments around us. And we did it the hard way. We didn’t have massive increases in taxes like most cities around the United States have had. We’ve had to raise some fees. But general taxes, we didn’t do that.
Is polling a way to decide? I was, I think, appropriately criticized for not doing enough public outreach. We’d been talking about [the leaf fee] for three years. But people didn’t realize this was the year we were going to do it. It’s not the only measure in which we will make a decision, but I think that outreach is important.
SUM OF SAM
How’d you find time to be in a Portlandia episode? That took an hour and 10 minutes on a Saturday. I think I look appropriately like a total goofball. I had 11 years to practice being the mayor’s assistant. Having been the mayor ’s assistant, what’s been the biggest surprise actually having the job of mayor? When Vera was mayor, she was very good at being polite. But she was very good at making her way down the sidewalk to the grocery store and back. And when I became mayor, I realized there’s a lot more visibility. People are great, don’t get me wrong. I get great ideas and great feedback from being out and about by myself. But it can be hard sometimes to make your way through, like, the grocery store. So you know the visibility
INCOMPLETE: The mayor says he’s “not about to give myself a grade” but that he’s accomplished a lot so far.
cities like Geneva, which is an international city that has hundreds of years of a head start on us. But what I’m going to be talking about in the State of the City is a new template. It’s a small, agile, global city. And, it’s building on our strength. We’re already the third or fourth region in the United States with the most trade per capita. So, you know the meme that’s out there that you’re too distracted to finish anything? Give us a couple
CONT. on page 24 Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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SUM OF SAM
CONT.
is going to be more, but to actually live that visibility is a big adjustment.
what needs to get done. The big wild card is funding.
past two years? I think Barack Obama answered this exact question really well. In my own words, “working hard, getting a lot of good stuff done and, you know, taking a lot of fire.”
What are you going to say in that speech about the Let’s switch to discussing whether Portland police Rose Quarter and why it’s taken so long to redevelop? officers should be part of the federal Joint Terrorism You mean for 16 years? The biggest reason is that no one Task Force. What’s the best argument you’ve heard would make a decision about Memorial Coliseum and that Speaking of Obama, when he came to Portland last against rejoining when the Council votes later this it’s eight square blocks. October, why weren’t you on the airport tarmac to month? greet him? The best argument I’ve heard so far is that there’s Do you ever wish you had stuck with the plan Because I wanted to see how we did presidential visits. a huge unknown between local efforts and to put a minor-league baseball stadium I’ve met many presidents, I’ve sat with many presidents. Washington, D.C. There’s a big bureauIn this case I wanted to see it from the same place [Police there for the Beavers? cracy between that. [There are] conNo. [Commissioner] Randy Leonard Chief ] Mike Reese and his incident commander see it. Also up for recerns about accountability, oversight, always wanted it in East Portland. I election in 2012 will transparency, which inherently always pushed him and others to look Did anybody ask you not to be there? be Commissioners Randy is part of their work. It’s lack of at the Rose Quarter. But I did that No. Leonard and Amanda Fritz. Neither has said whether he transparency. Concerns that our without the knowledge we’d have or she will seek re-election. And legal rights could be abused and we You seem to be especially upset with The Oregonian in to tear down Memorial Coliseum. there’s some buzz that potential wouldn’t know. recent weeks. Do you feel they treat you fairly? mayoral hopefuls like Jeff Cogen and Steve Novick may prefer So, what do you say on a warm I just want the same thing newspapers want, to be treated to run for an open Council Interim U.S. Attorney Dwight summer day or night to people fairly. And you know…certain newspapers have a different seat instead of challengHolton told us recently that who took their families to Bea- starting point. WW is “news with an edge.” The Oregonian ing an incumbent mayor. things are better under the vers games at PGE Park now that sets itself up as a paper of record. When we asked for corObama administration. Are you at it’s been remodeled as a soccer rections and, you know, we’re told by the editor-in-chief, all empathetic to that argument? “Don’t give me that Journalism 101 bullshit”…. Rarely stadium? I didn’t trust the Bush administration to First off, it isn’t just about the Beavers. over the years—until The Oregonian changed their style— balance the legal rights with the necessities of It’s about the Winterhawks. So, you tear down I wouldn’t complain. I mean, you all have a tough job to intelligence gathering. This is a different administration. Memorial Coliseum and they’re going to have to be play- do. But we asked what is their corrections policy, [and] I have a lot more trust in it. But it’s still, for me, an open ing Sunday at 2 pm in the Rose [Garden] or, you know, after being turned down every single time, [Editor] Peter question because I’m going into it with an open mind. Thursday at 11 pm. Did we work hard to keep the Beavers Bhatia wrote back, “Don’t give me this Journalism 101”—I here? We looked at 21 different places. We couldn’t make think he said—“bullshit.” Have the past year’s spate of five fatal police shoot- it work. ings been a statistical anomaly, or is there a systemic What was the issue? problem in the Police Bureau? You just named your longtime chief of staff, Tom It was a series of things that we had asked them to correct There are too many, regardless of whether it’s a statistical Miller, to head the city’s Bureau of Transportation. or explain…[Bhatia] said, “Just meet with me.” So Tom anomaly or some sort of operational trend. [But] I think What are his qualifications? [Miller] met with him. And then more stuff came out it’s a couple of things. We that was just not based on have a lot more people that the facts. So we finally just are down on their luck, or said, give us a copy of your “PEOPLE ARE REALLY STRUGGLING OUT THERE.” —SAM ADAMS mentally ill, or addicted in corrections policy. And he some way and on the streets. wrote back, “Don’t give me There are such holes in the safety net now that people that He was chief of staff to the transportation commissioner this Journalism 101 bullshit.” used to have significant treatment are now on the street. for six years. No one has ever had that kind of experience [Editor’s note: A copy of the email exchange provided in helping to manage a transportation bureau. How much of a cultural hurdle is there in the Police by Adams’ office does not include Bhatia using the word Bureau along the lines of “I’m a cop, I’m not a social But at a 50 percent pay increase to $150,000 a year? “bullshit.”] worker”? That’s what bureau managers get paid, and they We have to change that. Every police bureau has had to earn it. Because they have to work really In your 2010 State of the City speech, you transform from a paramilitary organization to community hard. I’m a demanding boss. mentioned “Mike and Jean” as average policing. But now, the next step is—whether we like it or Portlanders you’d met, and we were skeptical they existed. Did you ever not—much more of a social one. We have great folks in the There was a comment on a BikeThe November 2012 Police Bureau. see them again? Portland.org post a while back ballot is likely to ask voters to repeal Oregon’s No. Why did you guys go crazy over from a cyclist who likened you ban on same-sex marriage. Are gangs a problem in Portland, or is it overblown to the “Greg Oden of Portland that? You are really in a bubble. You Adams, who is gay, could by the media? need to spend a day with me. I was politics”—in essence, that you benefit from a high turnout by liberal Portlanders It’s a significant problem for African-Americans and for can’t deliver for them. What on the corner here, and a woman— motivated to return their Asian-Americans. African-Americans constitute about 4 would you say to that person? an artist—was talking with me about ballots because of that percent to 5 percent of the population. But they constitute That’s just not true. what she needs in terms of support for gay-rights question. about 40 percent of the victims of violent gang crime. So, the arts. I get this all day long. These it is a big problem. Asian-Americans, it’s less of a disparity. Are you surprised you get critiare tough times for people. And I’m very But one is too many. recognizable and they approach me with cism from some cyclists for not doing their needs and wishes and hopes and comenough? Let’s move on to education. You said you hoped to I’m the mayor. You get criticized by every facplaints. All day long. And I love it. Except Sunday cut the non-completion rate by students in Portland tion of the community. If you don’t get any criticism, I can afternoons. It’s kind of like you guys thought that was so high schools by 50 percent by 2013. How’s that com- guarantee you it’s a mayor that’s not doing a good job. unusual that we would have to make things up. We were ing along? all laughing our asses off in the office because it shows Great. We’ve merged the Portland Schools Foundation, What is the biggest misconception about you among you have no idea how bad things are for people out there. the education cabinet, leaders roundtable. We have the the public? You thought we would have to make up somebody. I could school districts countywide all agreeing on what it means I think you’ve asked me that like six times since you’ve choose, just in my day today, like a half a dozen [people]. to have a continuum of education. And now we’re inven- interviewed me. I don’t spend a lot of time on issues like The fact that you guys thought that says something about torying the community. We know the best interventions that. I spend time on getting stuff done, and my track your trust in me. I get that. But you need to get out more. for a third-grader who is deficient in their test scores, and record in the last two years shows we’ve gotten an amazing People are really struggling out there. now we’re looking at who in the community provides the amount of work done. Do people know about it? No, not : Video clips of this interview. services necessary for that virtuous intervention. We are necessarily. I’m trying to set up systems that are always work[ing] now to get this bond measure passed. seeking to improve, and are here when I’m gone. But has the rate improved? You’ll see in my State of the City speech where we have made some amazing progress to move much quicker in terms of 24
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
We ask reporters pitching a story sometimes to summarize the story in two sentences. Indulge us. What would your two-sentence story summary be for the
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Live Music
FOOD & DRINK: Really Good chili and drippy French dips. 30, 31 MUSIC: Holcombe Waller gets back to making records. 35 THEATER: Gruesome gore of Inishmore. 45 MOVIES: Don’t let the sunshine spoil your rain. 52
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GRAMMY LADY: Diehard fans of that cherubic Canadian waif Justin Bieber are outraged that the singer lost the Best New Artist Grammy award to Esperanza Spalding, a jazz bassist and singer who, in addition to being a hell of a musician, is also a native Portlander. Spalding was born here in 1984, attended the private downtown arts high school Northwest Academy, was at one point concertmaster of the Chamber Music Society SPALDING of Oregon, and claims as an influence local trumpeter Thara Memory. She is the first jazz artist and the first Portlander to win the award, which places her in the company of such greats as, uh, Hootie & The Blowfish and Evanescence. Guess the Grammys are finally trying to class it up. The New Yorker ran an excellent profile of Spalding last year (which now resides behind a paywall, unfortunately), and she is playing a sold-out show at the Newmark Theatre on Feb. 25.
PINBALL & PLANTAINS: Food cart favorite Caraqueña—a.k.a. Michelle’s Amazing Venezuelan Kitchen—which won over many local hearts and stomachs with its delicious Venezuelameets-Pacific Northwest vittles before suddenly disappearing late last year, has rematerialized in a most unlikely location. Owner and chef Michelle Rossington is moving into the kitchen at divey pinball and rock bar Slabtown, bringing Caraqueña’s menu with her. Beginning this Friday, CARAQUEÑA EATS AT SLABTOWN Feb. 18, with the Showdown at Slabtown pinball tournament, Rossington will be serving up dishes like guava beef arepas, fried plantains, bacon and cheese empanadas, and maple beef cheese fries with horseradish sauce. SHACK SHAKEUP: The Po’ House has closed. The most recent tenant of the kiosk at Southeast 44th Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard that birthed both Zach’s Shack and the Whole Bowl should soon reopen as something called Sparkle, according to an OLCC application filed by property owner Marianne Braun. In other booze news, local whiskey expert Stuart Ramsay has applied to open a bar in the former Alba Osteria space on Southwest Capitol Highway, and East Portland dance club Whiskey City Rock Bar is becoming the Jungle. 26
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
VIVIANJOHNSON.COM
PORTLANDIA, PART 2: Good people who put birds on things, rejoice. As reported by pretty much everybody, cable’s Independent Film Channel has renewed Carrie Brownstein’s contract to dumpster-dive into Portland absurdities, renewing the sketch-comedy series Portlandia for a 10-episode second season. But you’ll have to wait a while to continue your dream of the ’90s: The second season won’t air until January 2012. (Based on last year’s production schedule, that means you can expect to see a wackily dressed Fred Armisen start shooting sometime this summer.)
HEADOUT
WILLAMETTE WEEK
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK IN ARTS & CULTURE
THURSDAY FEB. 17 [COMEDY] LAUGHTERGLOW Whitney Streed hosts a showcase of stand-up comedians (Virginia Jones, Anthony Lopez, Iris Gorman), sketch performers (Tactics Ogre) and music (Annie Vergnetti). Weird Bar, 3701 SE Division St., weirdbar.com. 9 pm. $5. 21+. Martin Van Buren: “He was distinguished by a crown of unruly white hair and great side whiskers. He spoke rapidly with crisp enunciation, but when he became excited, it is said, a touch of Dutch accent crept into his speech. His natty appearance often was the subject of scorn in the press.”1 1. Degregorio, William A. The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents. New York: Wings Books, 1993.
FRIDAY FEB. 18 [VARIETY] LIVE WIRE! The radio variety show has a particularly good lineup at this week’s taping: Timbers owner Merritt Paulson, writer Karen Russell (Swamplandia!), Meadow owner and “sel-melier” Mark Bitterman, poet Moe Bowstern and music from Langhorne Slim and the Cave Singers. Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., livewireradio.org. 7:30 pm. $18-$20. [MOVIES] UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES PIFF presents hot catfish love from Thailand. Also: ghost monkeys! CineMagic, 2021 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 276-4310. 9 pm. $9-$10.
James Buchanan: “The only single (and perhaps gay?) president, he was celebrated for serious drinking. He chided his liquor merchants for delivering Champagne to the White House in small bottles. He would use his Sunday ride as an excuse to visit the Jacob Baer distillery in Washington and pick up a 10-gallon cask of ‘Old J.B. Whiskey.’ It would amuse him when White House guests mistook the initials J.B. for his.”2 2. Quoted from doctorzebra.com and Boller, Paul F. Jr. Presidential Anecdotes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
[MUSIC] YO LA TENGO Tired of seeing the same old indierock bands? Well, Yo La Tengo plays indie rock, and it’s kinda old, but the band still rocks and it’s bringing out the big guns for the “Spin the Wheel” tour. Cross your fingers and hope the wheel doesn’t land on “Act out a Seinfeld episode”! Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 2848686. 9 pm. $17 advance, $20 day of show. 21+.
SATURDAY FEB. 19 [MUSIC] THE DECEMBERISTS Portland’s biggest band (a Billboard No. 1 don’t lie, baby) finally plays a local release show for the lovely The King Is Dead. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 248-4335. 8 pm. $39.50. All ages. [BEER] ZWICKELMANIA Cheers! More than 55 breweries will participate in this statewide open house and tour this year—29 of them in Portland proper, from Amnesia and Upright to Rogue and Hair of the Dog. And the Oregon Brewers Guild is even being kind enough to provide shuttle buses to help boozers reach many of the boozing points. 11 am-4 pm. Pay as you go. Plan your trip at oregonbeer. org/zwickelmania.
NOTHING GOES BETTER WITH PRESIDENTS THAN PORK. What do you usually do to celebrate Presidents Day? Oh, that’s right, nothing. Well, not this Monday, Feb. 21. Right now one patriotic Portlander is saluting our nation’s leaders with pork and oil paint. Local artist Bijijoo’s The Presidential Ham—meticulously over-the-top portraits of all 44 presidents, each of whom proudly embraces a large, pink leg of cured meat—is on display at Powell’s City of Books’ Basil Hallward Gallery throughout February. In honor of the U.S.’s head honchos (including President Obama, who will be in town on Friday, Feb. 18, to talk education at Intel) we asked Bijijoo to name his three favorite portraits. RACHAEL DEWITT & KELLY CLARKE.
SUNDAY FEB. 20
GO: Presidential Ham at Powell’s City of Books, Pearl Room, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. Regular store hours. Free. More info and POTUS trivia at presidentialham.com.
Rutherford B. Hayes: “I love his beard! He seemed like a very sweet man. His last words were: ‘I know that I’m going where Lucy [his deceased wife] is.’”3 3. Barnard, Harry (1954, 2005). Rutherford Hayes and His America. Newtown, Conn.: American Political Biography Press.
[TRIVIA] CLASH OF THE TRIVIA TITANS ShanRock’s legion of trivia fiends go head to head in an epic tourney of boozing and knowledge. “Triviology virgins” welcome. The Spare Room, 4830 NE 42nd Ave., 287-5800. 5 pm registration. $5 per player, five people max per team. Info at shanrockstrivia.com.
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
INTERVIEW
PETER D. RICHARDSON
CULTURE
PETER RICHARDSON
HUNTER RICHARDS
A FILMMAKER SHOWS HOW TO DIE IN OREGON.
PETER D. RICHARDSON (TOP); SCENES FROM HOW TO DIE IN OREGON BY AA R O N MES H
amesh@wweek.com
For a 31-year-old, Peter D. Richardson has spent an uncommon amount of time pondering—and filming—the end of life. Last month, the Portland director’s movie How to Die in Oregon was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The film examines how physicianassisted suicide is practiced for terminally ill patients in this state, the first in the U.S. to legalize it, in 1994’s Death With Dignity Act. But that’s a clinical description of a painfully intimate project: To make the film, Richardson spent 10 months with Cody Curtis, a 54-year-old OHSU faculty member, as she, her husband Stan, and her two grown children grappled with her recurring liver cancer—and her decision, in 2009, whether to give herself a lethal dose of Seconal. How to Die in Oregon makes its local premiere this weekend at the Portland International Film Festival, and shows on HBO May 26. Richardson spoke with WW last week from the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Montana—a state weighing whether it will join Oregon and Washington in legalizing physician-assisted suicide.
WW: If you faced a terminal illness, would you choose physician-assisted suicide? Peter D. Richardson: I truly believe that it’s impossible to know what you would do in that situation until you’re actually confronted with it. There’s a character in the film named Ray Carnay. He was a radio announcer and he’s been a singer—an opera singer—and he’s been diagnosed with throat cancer and the only treatment he can receive is to have his voice box removed. And of course, his voice is his identity, and so he chooses not to have it removed. I film with him going to a recording studio and he actually goes to record his own eulogy that’s going to be played at his own funeral. Ray was very conservative politically and vehemently opposed to the law ever since Oregon enacted the law, and then once he received his terminal diagnosis he completely changed his mind. Can you describe one of the shadings on this issue that doesn’t get discussed politically? A really great example is something that’s called “the law of double effect” or “terminal sedation,” and that’s the practice of someone who has unmanageable pain, and the only way to manage that pain is to give them a high enough dosage of a painkiller, probably morphine, that will ultimately end their life. The primary intent of the administration of the medication is to stop their pain. But the secondary effect, the double effect, is that it ends a person’s life.... It’s [enough of ] an accepted practice that even organizations that are vehemently opposed to assisted suicide, like the Catholic Church, for instance, accept terminal sedation because of the intent at play. There are researchers who argue that terminal sedation is a more objectionable or barbaric practice than physician-aided dying, because a lot of times when someone’s in a situation [where] they are unconscious, they’re not the ones making the decision. How well did you get to know Cody Curtis before you were there for her death? We first met in February of 2009 and then she took the medication Dec. 7 of 2009. So I got to
know her and her family, I would say, very well over that time period, and I’m still keeping in close contact with them.... It was really uncertain up until the very end whether in fact Cody would take the medication.... In her own words in the film she says, “I’d rather just drift off...I’d rather let nature take its course.” But then it became clear, I think, as her condition really took a turn for the worse, really dramatically, that she wasn’t going to be able to drift off. Over the course of editing a film like this, is it strange to watch, over and over, the death of someone you knew? Maybe not so much the death because of the way it was filmed—[I’m] not actually in the room when the person ingests the medication. But really at different times when I’m watching it, even now after having seen it so many times, different moments will sneak up on me emotionally. The last 10 months of Cody’s life, I don’t think her family would describe it as a sad or tragic time...[it] was as much about living as it was about dying for them. I understand you got one of the oncologists to go on film by showing her pictures of your cat. How did that work? [Laughs.] Well I certainly would not say that Dr. [Katherine] Morris is someone who would make such a serious and important decision simply based on a shared affection for cats.... She’d never prescribed someone before Cody, and she was concerned about how participating in the film and speaking about this incredibly controversial topic would affect her practice, and how her other patients felt about her, and if she’d be able to provide any of them the care that she wanted to. So she thought long and hard about whether to be included in the film. I don’t know how much the cats were a part of that, but I guess anything helps. SEE IT: How to Die in Oregon screens at the NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave., at 5:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 19, and at Regal Broadway Cinemas, 1000 SW Broadway, at 9:30 am Sunday and 7:30 pm Monday, Feb. 20-21. Richardson will attend all three screenings. Visit wweek.com to read a longer Q&A.
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DISH = WW Pick. Highly recommended. PRICES: $: Most entrees under $10. $$: $10-$20. $$$: $20-$30. $$$$: Above $30. Editor: KELLY CLARKE. Email: dish@wweek.com. See page 3 for submission instructions.
SATURDAY, FEB. 19 Mañana and El Relingo Tasting with Sergio Barajas
Sip blanco, anejo and reposado tequilas with the spirit scholar himself, Sergio Barajas. The owner of the Jalisco-based brand El Relingo will pour a lineup of his tequilas while rehashing the history of the family-owned company and answering agave-inspired questions. Mañana Tequila will also be on the late-afternoon lineup. Cha will provide light snacks, but you still won’t remember anything you learned tomorrow. NIKKI VOLPICELLI. Cha Taqueria & Bar, 305 NW 21st Ave., 295-4077. 3 pm. $40. Reservations and pre-payment are required.
Zwickelmania
Cheers! More than 55 breweries will participate in this statewide brewery open house and tour this year—29 of them in Portland proper, from Amnesia and Upright to Rogue and Hair of the Dog. And the Oregon Brewers Guild is even being kind enough to provide shuttle buses in Portland, Eugene and Bend to help boozers reach many of the boozing points (plan your own trip at oregonbeer.org/zwickelmania). Be sure to take a tour of Deschutes’ Portland brewery, as this is the only day of the year it lets you in the inner sanctum. The Portland shuttle bus takes off from Green Dragon at 11 am. NV. 11 am-4 pm at breweries around Oregon. Pay as you go.
Now Serving
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Varieties of Gourmet Tamales
CASA DE
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February 25, 26, & 27
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Taste the Difference
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Milwaukie, Or
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Trekkies beware: This “intimate” dinner with Mr. Sulu isn’t an invitation to squeeze into your best Star Fleet onesie. The Japanese actor joins Oregon Nikkei, a Japanese migrant/descendant group, at an Oregon Endowment Fundraiser, where he will speak about his career in film and work with the Human Rights Campaign. Please have some respect and don’t jabber at him in Klingon. NV. Marriott-Waterfront, 1401 SW Naito Parkway, 226-7600. 5-7 pm. $100. Purchase tickets by Wednesday, Feb. 9, at oregonnikkei. org or at 224-1458.
Migration Brewery One-Year Anniversary
The statewide Zwickelmania beer celebration holds extra importance to the crew at Migration Brewing. Feb. 19 marks the first anniversary of the operation and its introduction to the Zwickel bill. To celebrate, the Northwest Portland brewery invites DJ Queezy and Tribe of Benjamin to play and offers ginger cream ale and Russian imperial stout to drink. Molly Barnes of the neighboring Magpie Glassworks will be on hand selling custom hand-blown pints for the occasion. NV. Migration Brewery, 2828 NE Glisan St., 753-7572. 11 am-4 pm. Pay as you go.
Sunday Family Dinner Series at Kenny & Zuke’s
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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
Grant Butler NW VEG Presentation and Potluck
Join The Oregonian’s Grant Butler as he guest hosts a Northwest VEG vegan potluck. The columnist will discuss the “one-month experiment” that turned him on to a lifestyle of plants and the importance of vegan coverage in the news. This potluck series is meat- and alcoholfree. Of course it is. NV. West Hills Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 8470 SW Oleson Road, 246-3351. 5 pm. $2-$5 donation.
FOOD ROUNDUP: FIVE GREAT GRILLED CHEESE AND TOMATO SOUP COMBOS The Grilled Cheese Grill
These two school-bus-cum-foodcarts offer myriad variations on the
The Country Cat
Among rib-sticking, Southern-style goodies like chicken-fried steak and whiskey custard French toast on this Montavilla neighborhood favorite’s brunch menu, it’s hard to imagine anyone actually ordering the humble-sounding grilled cheese and smoked tomato soup ($9), but anyone who does is in for a happy, hearty surprise. The generous ramekin of soup is super savory, with a real, rustic smoky flavor. Bonus points for a nice plop of sour cream floating in the middle. It’s matched with an equally impressive sandwich, composed of two huge slabs of buttery, dense, housemade potato bread held together with a mild, creamy ooze of cheese. Possibly a bit too mild—it completely disappears against such a bold soup—but
EAT MOBILE
Intimate Dinner with George Takei
SUNDAY, FEB. 20
*For dine in only. Must present this coupon at time of ordering to receive discount. Not valid with any other offer or promotion. Max $13. For 2 or more customers only, max. 3 coupons per table. Valid M - F 11:30am to 2pm through Mar. 3, 2011.
St., 222-3354. 4:30 pm and 7 pm. $19.75-$39.50. A 50 percent deposit is required upon calling for reservations, and no cancellations will be accepted within 72 hours of dinner.
ALLISON E. JONES
DISH EVENTS THIS WEEK
classic soup-and-sandwich. “The Gabby” ($4.75) comes with cheddar, Swiss, mozzarella and Colby Jack on Portland French Bakery white and is so much more than the sum of its parts—a big, stretchy, gooey, multilayered melted mess, oozing out between slices of obscenely buttery bread. We wish we could say the same about the soup—a small cup of canned with some onion and fresh tomato added in. It’s too hot, too thin and no way worth the additional $2.50. RUTH BROWN. 113 SE 28th Ave. and 1027 NE Alberta St., 206-8959, grilledcheesegrill.com.
Ken Gordon makes a lot of sandwiches. His restaurant (with co-owner and occasional WW contributor Nick Zukin) churns out corned and roast beef daily. But Gordon gets out of his sandwich rut with his famed monthly familystyle dinners. Sunday’s is a collection of more than 14 tapas, including lamb meatballs and chorizo-stuffed mushrooms with rustic bread, as well as dark chocolate, olive oil and sea salt for dessert. NV. Kenny & Zuke’s Delicatessen, 1038 SW Stark
THE ROLLING STOVES GIMMIE SANDWICH
Nichole Petterson looks tired. She was up until 2:30 am roasting beef in a local commissary kitchen this morning, prepping for her cart’s third day on the lot at the Refuel North Station pod. But her face breaks into a big smile when I order a French dip au jus ($5)—the lone offering on her tiny menu besides Tim’s chips and sodas. “Tell me if you like the jus. I don’t know about it yet,” she says. “Somebody said it wasn’t salty enough.” They were wrong. The jus is great, an herbaceous pandrippings broth that sings with Best deal: French dip with gooey Swiss cheese and grilled unexpected little notes of roseonions ($7), plus a sample of mary and thyme (and it’s just salty whatever she’s working on. enough). The meat is equally good, Cheap deal: French dip sans la toppings ($5). a generous mound of juicy, mild beef she dunks in the jus before plopping it inside a crusty, buttered French roll. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s an excellent, messy stomach-warmer on a cold day and one of the few dips in town that won’t put you into a food coma. Petterson, who spent her days looking after her three kids (ages 1, 2 and 15 years old) before opening her cart, is the kind of cook who wants your help in the kitchen. On my visit she was tinkering with a recipe for pretty tasty “baked” potato salad laden with bacon and scallions. Undoubtedly she’ll want your opinion on it, too. KELLY CLARKE. GO: The Rolling Stoves Gimmie Sandwich is located at Refuel North Station pod at the corner of North Killingsworth Street and Greeley Avenue, twitter.com/gimmesandwich. Open for lunch and early dinner 11 am-7 pm Tuesday-Sunday. $ Inexpensive.
DISH on its own, it will make even your fried-bacon-ordering dining companions envious. RB. 7937 SE Stark St., 408-1414, thecountrycat.net.
Bunk Bar
It’s already well established that Bunk Sandwiches—and its nocturnal offspring, Bunk Bar—serves up some of the best sandwiches in Portland, but its reputation is built on gut-busting hunks of saucy, sloppy meat. What happens when there’s no animal protein to hide behind? The soup ($2) is, ironically, the best part: thick, creamy, slightly sweet and served with a good garnish of Parmesan and black pepper (it also pairs brilliantly with the bar’s riff on a Michelada; just FYI). The bread is, as always, perfectly selected—big, thick, soft and well-toasted. But the sandwich itself ($5) is pretty underwhelming compared with Bunk’s more notable creations—that plastic, orange glob of cheddar is starting to feel depressingly familiar by now. The soup is available as a side for any of the far more interesting sandwiches, so, y’know, do that. RB. 1028 SE Water Ave., 894-9708. bunkbar.com.
Savor Soup House
At $5.50 for a cup of soup and half a sandwich (plus extra bread and butter), this must be the best value combo in town. The house-
made tomato soup from this tiny cart is so flavorful—full of fennel and orange and topped with Parmesan and herby croutons—it puts almost every sit-down establishment to shame. The standard grilled cheese features more of my old friend Tillamook cheddar (though you can add in everything from truffle oil to smoked bacon. We would humbly suggest some Gruyère), but it comes on Grand Central’s fantastic, chewy Italianstyle Como bread, which elevates it from just a dipping device into— dare we say it—an adult dish. RB. 1003 SW Alder St., 750-5634, savorsouphouse.com.
Catfish & hushpuppies
FRIDAYS
Elephants Deli
This long-standing lunchtime standby is already well-known for its excellent tomato orange soup— full of butter and cream with a subtle citrus tang, it’s a thick, comforting winter bisque ($3 for a halfpint) that is served up in seconds (with free crackers!). The grilled cheese is a different story. After several minutes waiting, this sadlooking sandwich comes squashed flat as cardboard, and with similar flavor and texture. Bland, butterless white bread cemented around a modest serving of cheddar, its sole redeeming quality is as a conduit for getting the soup into your gob. RB. Multiple locations, 546-3166, elephantsdeli.com.
C H R I S T A C O N N E L LY
EAT MOBILE
WWEEK.COM/ EATMOBILE GOOD, FOR REALS: Robb’s Pale Blond chili and muffins.
ROBB’S REALLY GOOD FOOD “The cart was an accident,” says Robb Sloan. A tall, muscular man with a gentle demeanor, Sloan grew up in San Diego and moved to Oregon two years ago to work at a nursery. (“I’m a plant fanatic,” he says.) When he was laid off in 2009, four months after arriving in town, he decided to develop his passion for cooking with beer into a business, selling pulled pork and chili to brewpubs that lack the facilities or desire to make their own. He makes custom batches of his chilis and barOrder this: Chipotle BBQ pork becue sauce with beer from sandwich, $6.50. the pubs and drives them over Best deal: All orders come with a sweet, chewy muffin Sloan makes for the pub to heat and serve. by combining cornmeal with spent (You can try his pulled pork grains (oats and barley) from Migration Brewing. in a sandwich at Migration Brewing; more clients are on the way.) Sloan opened his kitchen in a cart to save money. “As a side benefit, I get to meet all these nice people,” he says. The cart also gives us more opportunities to eat Sloan’s excellent Pale Blond chili, a scorching concoction of chicken, jalapeño and hominy, and his rich, Texas-style Beefed Up, which packs a strong beery flavor underneath the chile bite. Best of all, though, is Sloan’s sweet, chipotle-spiked pulled pork sandwich, which we downed in four bites. The sign does not lie—it was really good. BEN WATERHOUSE. EAT: Southeast 52nd Avenue and Foster Road, 724-8384, twitter.com/RobbsGoodFood. 11:30 am-8 pm Tuesday-Thursday and Sunday, 11:30 am-9 pm Friday-Saturday. $ Inexpensive. Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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F E B R U A RY 18TH – 27TH
ESPERANZA SPALDING FRIDAY 2/26 @ NEWMARK THEATER 7:30PM
Centuries ago chamber music was the music in which people from nearly every segment of society could find meaning and relevance. Esperanza Spalding takes a contemporary approach to this once universal form of entertainment with ‘Chamber Music Society.’ Backed by drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and pianist Leo Genovese, Esperanza creates a modern chamber music group that combines the spontaneity and intrigue of improvisation with sweet and angular string trio arrangements.
ECM COMES TO JAZZ FEST!
E1 KNOWS GREAT JAZZ
ANAT FORT TRIO
AND IF ON SALE $13.99 CD SATURDAY 2/19 @ WINNINGSTAD THEATER 7:30PM
CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY ON SALE $13.99 CD
Israeli pianist Anat Fort creates music that subtly hints at her geographical origin. As a young performer in Tel Aviv, Fort was frequently compared with Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. Now based in the United States, Anat Fort has become an important presence on the NYC alternative jazz scene.
NIK BARTSCH’S RONIN
REGINA CARTER
REVERSE THREAD ON SALE $13.99 CD SATURDAY 2/26 @ CRYSTAL BALLROOM 9:30PM
THE BAD PLUs NEVER STOP ON SALE $12.99 CD
JELLY ROLL MORTON
JELLY ROLL MORTON ON SALE $22.99 5 CD SET
50TH ANNIVERSARY OF IMPULSE JAZZ! SAVE 20% OFF ALL IMPULSE TITLES BY THESE ARTISTS:
JOHN COLTRANE
A LOVE SUPREME ON SALE $8.99 CD
SUN RA
SPACE IS THE PLACE ON SALE $11.99 CD
JOHN COLTRANE & JOHNNY HARTMAN ON SALE $8.99 CD
GABOR SZABO
SPELLBINDER ON SALE $8.99 CD
THESE VERVE ARTISTS ARE ALSO ON SALE: LOUIS ARMSTRONG FRED ASTAIRE
COLEMAN HAWKINS BILLIE HOLIDAY ANTONIO CARLOS JOBIM RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK DIANA KRALL GENE KRUPA LEONARD COHEN: I’M YOUR MAN RAMSEY LEWIS NELLIE MCKAY JOHN MCLAUGHLIN WES MONTGOMERY GERRY MULLIGAN ANITA O’DAY CHARLIE PARKER OSCAR PETERSON ARTHUR PRYSOCK PUPPINI SISTERS DJANGO REINHARDT NINA SIMONE JIMMY SMITH ART TATUM MEL TORME TROMBONE SHORTY SARAH VAUGHAN DINAH WASHINGTON BEN WEBSTER JOE WILLIAMS TONY WILLIAMS LIZZ WRIGHT LESTER YOUNG
DJANGO REINHARDT
MUSETTE TO MAESTRO 1928-1937 ON SALE $22.99 5 CD SET
CANADIAN BRASS / DAVID BRAID SPIRIT DANCE ON SALE $12.99 CD
MACK AVENUE JAZZ KIRK WHALUM
EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING: THE MUSIC OF DONNY HATHAWAY ON SALE $13.99 CD
DUKE ELLINGTON
DUKE ELLINGTON MEETS COLEMAN HAWKINS ON SALE $8.99 CD
OLIVER NELSON
THE BLUES AND THE ABSTRACT TRUTH ON SALE $8.99 CD
There could be no better standard bearer for Donny Hathaway’s work than tenor saxophonist Kirk Whalum, whose work has similarly crossed the boundaries between R&B, gospel and jazz. ‘Everything is Everything’ includes arrangements by Gil Goldstein and John Stoddart, with contributions from contemporary jazz masters Rick Braun, Jeff Golub and Christian McBride, as well as pedal steel scorcher Robert Randolph.
PROVIDENCIA
ON SALE $13.99 CD
ALL FOR YOU ON SALE $13.99 CD
ORAN ETKIN
KELENIA ON SALE $12.99 CD
ORAN ETKIN
WAKE UP CLARINET! ON SALE $11.99 CD
CHARLES MINGUS
THE BACK SAINT AND THE SINNER LADY ON SALE $13.99 CD
Clarinetist and saxophonist Oran Etkin and his group Kelenia have crafted an extraordinary blend of modern jazz, African, klezmer, and Israeli music that honors tradition while forging a completely distinct path. ‘Wake Up Clarinet!’ is an extension of Oran’s popular Timbalooloo music education classes, which are designed to introduce young children to different instrumentation, musical styles and musical concepts.
CELEBRATING 40 YEARS OF SAVE 20% OFF ALL CTI RECORDS 4OTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION TITLES
CTI RECORDS: THE COOL REVOLUTION
DANILO PEREZ
DIANA KRALL
WATER • ON SALE $10.99 CD IN-STORE MUSIC MILLENNIUM PERFORMANCE FRIDAY 2/18 @ 6PM - JAZZ FEST SATURDAY 2/19 @ TONY STARLIGHTS 8PM & 9:30PM
MUSIC MILLENNIUM IN-STORE PERFORMANCE FRIDAY 2/25 @ 6PM JAZZ FEST THURSDAY 2/24 @ THE ART BAR 9PM ALSO: “TIMBALOOLOO” JAZZ WORKSHOP FOR YOUNG CHILDREN FRIDAY 2/25 @ PORTLAND CHILDREN’S MUSEUM
Swiss/Zen/Ritual Groove Music best describes the highly theatrical, Zurich based Nik Bartsch’s Ronin. Multi-keyboardist Bartsch incorporates funk, rock, western classical and Japanese traditional music in his compositions balanced with pure jazz improvisation.
ROY AYERS CHET BAKER COUNT BASIE ART BLAKEY BOSSA NOVA BRASIL CLIFFORD BROWN BROWN/ROACH REGINA CARTER CHICK COREA COSTELLO/TOUSSAINT JAMIE CULLUM MILES DAVIS PACO DELUCIA BLOSSOM DEARIE PAUL DESMOND GEORGE DUKE BILLY ECKSTINE DUKE ELLINGTON BILL EVANS TAL FARLOW ELLA FITZGERALD MELODY GARDOT ERROLL GARNER STAN GETZ GIL/BEN ASTRUD GILBERTO DIZZY GILLESPIE STEPHANE GRAPPELLI CHARLIE HADEN LIONEL HAMPTON HERBIE HANCOCK JOHNNY HARTMAN
GREGORY PORTER
Gregory Porter has a voice that can caress or confront, embrace or exhort, exhibiting such an incredible degree of vocal mastery that he garnered a 2010 Grammy nomination for his debut recording, ‘Water.’
LLYRIA ON SALE $13.99 CD FRIDAY 2/25 @ ALBERTA ROSE THEATER 8:30PM
ALBERT AYLER GATO BARBIERI ART BLAKEY MICHAEL BRECKER ALICE COLTRANE JOHN COLTRANE COLTRANE/HARTMAN COLTRANE/SHEPP DUKE ELLINGTON ELLINGTON/HAWKINS GIL EVANS CHICO HAMILTON JOHHNY HARTMAN COLEMAN HAWKINS KEITH JARRETT DIANA KRALL YUSEF LATEEF RUSSELL MALONE CHARLES MINGUS OLIVER NELSON SONNY ROLLINS PHAROAH SANDERS ARCHIE SHEPP SUN RA GABOR SZABO MCCOY TYNER
HAS SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE
‘Providencia’ crosses streams of jazz, classical and Latin American folk music, which Perez refers to as ‘hearing music in three dimensions.’ The birth of his daughters and his ongoing commitment to education and social change through music spark his desire to make music that matters - music for all to enjoy and hopefully draw inspiration from its vivacity.
ALSO ON SALE:
KEVIN EUBANKS - ZEN FOOD $13.99 CD STEVE COLE – MOONLIGHT $13.99 CD
ON SALE $39.99 4 CD SET
CHET BAKER – SHE WAS TOO GOOD TO ME GEORGE BENSON – WHITE RABBIT KENNY BURRELL – GOD BLESS THE CHILD RON CARTER – ALL BLUES DEODATO – PRELUDE PAUL DESMOND – PURE DESMOND JIM HALL – CONCIERTO FREDDIE HUBBARD – RED CLAY MILT JACKSON – SUNFLOWER ANTONIO CARLOS JOBIM – STONE FLOWER HUBERT LAWS – MORNING STAR STANLEY TURRENTINE – SUGAR
CALIFORNIA CONCERT: THE HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM
ON SALE $13.99 2CD
VISIT THE MUSIC MILLENNIUM BOOTH AT JAZZ FEST FOR AUTOGRAPH SIGNINGS WITH THE FOLLOWING ARTISTS AFTER THEIR SETS: RANDY WESTON – FRIDAY 2/18 @ 9:15PM WINNINGSTAD • ANAT FORT – SATURDAY 2/19 @ 9:15PM WINNINGSTAD • DAVE FRSIHBERG - SUNDAY 2/20 @ 9:15PM WINNINGSTAD • DON BYRON – THURSDAY 2/24 @ 9:15PM NEWMARK • ESPERANZA SPALDING – FRIDAY 2/25 @ 9:15PM NEWMARK • PONCO SANCHEZ FRIDAY 2/25 @ 11:15PM CRYSTAL • BLUE CRANES – FRIDAY 2/25 @ 9:30PM NEWMARK • NIK BARTSCH - FRIDAY 2/25 @ 11:45PM ALBERTA ROSE • ANAT & YUVAL COHEN – SATURDAY 2/26 @ 3:45PM CRYSTAL • DAVID CHEVAN & WARREN BYRD - FRIDAY 2/26 @ 5PM CRYSTAL • SFJAZZ COLLECTIVE – SATURDAY 2/26 @ 9:15PM NEWMARK JOSHUA REDMAN – SUNDAY 2/27 @ 3:45PM NEWMARK • MACEO PARKER - SUNDAY 2/27 @ 9:15PM NEWMARK
OFFER GOOD IN STORE ONLY THRU: 3/15/11 32
FOR MORE INFO & FULL SCHEDULE PLEASE VISIT: WWW.PDXJAZZ.COM
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
FEB. 16 - 22 PROFILE
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
K AVA G O R N A
MUSIC
Prices listed are sometimes for advance ticket sales. At-the-door increases and so-called convenience charges may apply. See more at wweek.com. Editors: CASEY JARMAN, MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, enter show information at least two weeks in advance via email at mmannheimer@wweek.com. Press kits, CDs and especially vinyl can be sent to Music Desk, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Please include show or release date information with all physical mailings. Email: cjarman@wweek.com Fax: 243-1115.
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 16 Nightclubbing: Austra, Onuinu, Linger & Quiet
[GOTHTRONICA] Time to invest in plastic bats, black lipstick and fishnets—it’s officially a boom time for goth (or darkwave or synth-gaze or whatever the hell people are calling it)! Last year, there was Zola Jesus, then Esben and the Witch, now here’s Austra, the latest project from Torontobased artist Katie Stelmanis. Her previous work under her own name had a similar tint of darkness, but it fell more closely in line with the fantasy pop of associate Owen Pallett. This new stuff, of which there are only a few examples floating around online prior to the spring release of the band’s debut, Feel It Break, uses icy synthesizers that slowly unravel over Stelmanis’ big, belfry-rattling voice. It’s cold and enigmatic, but filled with enough blood and soul to keep it from being isolating. MATTHEW SINGER. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 9 pm. $5.
The David Friesen Quintet
[TELEPATHIC JAZZ] Playing Portland for the first time in two years, this stellar local aggregation led by one of jazz’s greatest bassists also features guitarist extraordinaire Dan Balmer, drummer Charlie Doggett, and horn men John Gross and Rob Davis, playing original compositions from their CD Five & Three. So telepathic and skilled are these veteran collaborators that they intentionally eschew rehearsal, receiving only skeletal music parts before each performance, the better to maintain the “in the moment” spontaneity and close mutual listening that makes this group special. Friesen and Gross also have performances at the Globe on the 18th and Camellia Lounge on the 19th, before heading off to the latest of his many European tours, though April. BRETT CAMPBELL. Jimmy Mak’s, 221 NW 10th Ave., 295-6542. 8 pm. $10. All ages.
Night Surgeon, Search Party, Dropa, A Gentlemen’s Picnic
[DARK ELECTROPOP] I can totally understand why Patric Replogle and John Boyd would want to start a band that sounds inescapably similar to Depeche Mode and New Order. Portland duo Night Surgeon seems dedicated to the cause: While its synthesizers are a bit of an upgrade from what the aforementioned ’80s synthpop acts had at their disposal, the spirit remains the same—melodramatic, dark and vaguely sexed up. Admirably, though, Replogle and Boyd avoid tribute band territory. Replogle’s vocals seem shaded by DM’s Dave Gahan and the Cure’s Robert Smith, but he finds his own, slightly nasal tone and avoids feigning a Morrisseyesque boozy swagger. The whole package comes together pretty well on new release Day for Night, even if Night Surgeon has some work to do in the lyrics department. Not that uninspiring lyrics have ever kept anyone from making it big. CASEY JARMAN. Someday Lounge, 125 NW 5th Ave., 248-1030. 8 pm. $5. 21+.
P.R.O.B.L.E.M.S., Dark Country
[HIDDEN PUNK WORLD] When Mogwai decided to name its new album Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, a legion of hardcore punk fans across the country probably raised their fists and let out a collective “meh.” True hardcore has always existed in the underground, at sweaty dive bars and in basements of teenagers too angry to write a proper ballad. Local punk quintet Dark Country must know this, as its brand of fury rivals the brainy screaming of Fucked Up without settling for anything too commercial. Of the singles online, “Take Shape” and “Dark Country” rattle at the fastest clip, which means the live show will slay—or at least be entertaining—at the Know. Plus, one of the guys looks like Pau Gasol, so you have my endorsement to toss a beer in his face. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. The Know, 2026 NE Alberta St., 473-8729. 8 pm. Cover. 21+.
CONT. on page 36
TOP FIVE
BY C AS E Y JA R MA N
PORTLAND JAZZ FESTIVAL ARTISTS WE WANT TO SEE. Randy Weston They don’t get much more authentic than this NYC-based piano player. Weston’s oft-Afro-centric jams are smart, soulful and lots of fun. Esperanza Spalding She’s a hometown girl and she just won a Grammy. Dang! Two weeks ago you were still calling her “Esmerelda,” weren’t you? Pretty damn savvy of the Jazz Fest to book her just before she took over the world. Nik Bärtsch Dude calls all of his (sprawling, experimental) songs “Modul 1,” “Modul 2,” etc., all with a number attached to them. Is that not reason enough to see him?! Maceo Parker / Regina Carter You really want us to choose between a great jazz violinist and a longtime James Brown sideman? No chance—we choose both. The Three Cohens Anat, Avishai and Yuval hit the Crystal Ballroom together in what should prove to be a wicked triple bill. The only way this gets better is if Leonard drops by for a surprise visit. SEE IT: The Portland Jazz Festival runs Feb. 18-27 at various venues. See music calendar, page 41, or see pdxjazz.com for details.
LOOK WHO’S TALKING HOLCOMBE WALLER FINDS SOME DARK PLEASURE IN A PAINFUL BUSINESS. BY JEFF R OSEN B ER G
243-2122
“I just want to talk less and less,” says Holcombe Waller. “It’s like, conversations walk by and I have all these ideas of things to say, and I just sit there and let them go because I’m like, I don’t really need to say that. And the same thing’s been happening with music.” Despite this, Waller engaged in a long exchange last week via phone and email (during his vacation in Hawaii), and finally, in person Saturday afternoon at an East Burnside coffeehouse. Happily, his mindset hasn’t kept Waller from at last releasing Into the Dark Unknown, the long-anticipated follow-up album to 2005’s masterful Troubled Times. Waller’s not exactly been idle in the interim. The Portland songwriter has been busy staging the show Into the Dark Unknown: The Hope Chest, which created most of the material collected on the new CD. He performed the show not only in Portland and Seattle (it was a joint commission of PICA and Seattle’s On the Boards), but New York, Anchorage, San Francisco and foreign locales like Zagreb and Croatia (he plays exotic Bozeman, Mont., next month). Before that was another multimedia production, Patty (Heart) Townes, featuring Waller as an inebriated angel performing surprising, string-laden arrangements of songs by Townes Van Zandt and Patty Griffin. Making a record was a more difficult process. Early passes at recording the new material featured a sparser instrumental approach than the lush sound of Waller’s present release. A delicate early version of the title song posted online (recorded on my own KBOO radio show, thank you very much) drew unexpected interest from celebrated singer Antony Hegarty, who hipped others to Waller’s work and even offered to help come up with a running order. “And I don’t know what the hell my problem is,” confesses Waller, “’cause, looking back, oh my god—what an opportunity that would have been to have him sequence the record.” But Waller’s aforementioned ambivalence about bringing another collection to market—fueled
by a skepticism of (and distaste for) the music industry—intervened. “I worked really hard making Troubled Times and then trying to self-release and promote it, and it got really good reviews, but sold maybe 2,000 copies. So I wasn’t itching to jump into another vastly money-losing enterprise. And I was really excited by all the support I was getting and how much fun I was having, frankly, with other projects.” Waller digs in and lets loose: “It’s like, here’s this one world that’s completely embracing me—not only embracing me, but funding me. I’d get these grants, I’d execute the work, I’d perform the work, promoters would promote it, audiences got to see it. Whereas in the music world, I make these albums, no labels express any interest, no one really avails themselves to show up to help do anything...There’s this whole world of performing arts that’s like, ‘Yes, yes, come over here,’ and then there’s the music world which is, like, a bunch of assholes who I don’t like anyway, and they drink and smoke and they’re out of shape and just, like, reject me. And I thought, well, that’s dumb, I don’t want to sleep with these people anyway.” Eventually, though, with the help of his simpatico ensemble, the Healers—anchored by longtime friend and collaborator Ben Landsverk—Waller saw his way through to finishing Troubled Times’ troubled follow-up. Audible on the record is the personal and musical growth that took place during the time it took to complete the project. The minimal but effective production touches of Times—tape manipulation, treated sounds and a soupcon of electronica that subtly evoke the lyrics’ often bleak outlook, suggesting a porous boundary between the singer and the world outside him. By contrast, the new disc features a warmer, natural, live sound. (Indeed, four tracks are concert recordings, including two from the Doug Fir.) The voice, both literal and literary, is not as fragile. It sounds as though those boundaries have been repaired, and the healed artist can now focus his compassion—and his Healers—outward. Even if he doesn’t feel like saying much. SEE IT: Holcombe Waller releases Into the Dark Unknown on Sunday, Feb. 20, at Alberta Rose Theater. 7:30 pm. $20. All ages (minors must be accompanied by parent). Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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MUSIC
THURSDAY - SATURDAY
S E A C AV E S M U S I C . C O M
dour’s best work. Melodic Americana drifters the Don of Division Street take on Ragged Glory, the 1990 opus that featured “Fuckin’ Up” and “Country Home”; psychedelic folksters the Minus 5 tackle the rocking 1975 Crazy Horse classic Zuma; and the Lewi Longmire Band attacks 1970’s After the Gold Rush, the album that gave us the classic Lynyrd Skynyrd-infuriating “Southern Man.” It’s a daring project, but one that should bring out the best in each group. AP KRYZA. Dante’s, 350 W Burnside St., 226-6630. 9:30 pm. $10. 21+.
Water & Bodies, Archeology, The Dimes, UHF
home if you’re nestled into a long-term relationship, don’t have much tolerance for uncontained noise, and seek a subtle domesticated-bliss soundtrack. Which isn’t to say the nomadic among us can’t get down to this New Jersey trio’s oft-sensuous amplifier gush ’n’ thrush; in fact, we highly recommend checking out Matador Records’ answer to the Grateful Dead, who are touring with a split set that includes a “Spin the Wheel” segment that could see YLT play cover songs under its Condo Fucks guise or act out an entire episode of Seinfeld. RAY CUMMINGS. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 9 pm. $17 advance, $20 day of show. 21+.
See album review, page 39. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. $5. 21+.
Rocky Votolato, Michael Dean Damron, Kasey Anderson
HULKAMANIACS, UNITE: Sea Caves play Rontoms on Monday.
THURSDAY, FEB. 17 Jonathan Coulton, Mike Phirman
[BIG DEAL ON THE INTERNET] Sitting somewhere between Weird Al and They Might Be Giants, Jonathan Coulten is the troubadour of the geek world, penning earnest-sounding ballads and dad-rock songs about code monkeys, robots and super villains. He also wrote the hilarious end-credit song for the video game Portal. Oh shut up, you know the one. In January, he organized a six-day Caribbean cruise, with concerts by himself and other nerdy Internet celebrity artists every day. To some, this will sound like an extreme form of torture even the Bush administration wouldn’t go near. To others, it’s a call to put some actual pants on and spend two hours away from World of Warcraft to worship at the feet of your musical messiah. RUTH BROWN. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 2349694. 8 pm. $22 advance, $24 day of show. All ages.
Saucy Yoda, Mythological Horses, The Shivas
[DAGOBAH HIP-HOP] Nerdcore, it is, and it’s not just a man’s world. Portland duo Saucy Yoda specializes in a synthy, intentionally obnoxious style of hip-hop, a tongue-in-cheek alternative universe in which rhymes about sucking dicks are paired with rants about zombies, MySpace, Garbage Pail Kids, fucking, fighting and dorking out. Think of them as a lighter version of the faux-posturing divas of Sistafist— and equally polarizing. As with most joke rap with generic beats, Saucy Yoda can wear pretty thin as it goes on…but occasionally, the shit-talking sisters nail it with poindexter prowess. AP KRYZA. Dante’s, 350 W Burnside St., 226-6630. 9 pm. $5. 21+.
Brainstorm, Archers, Hausu
[EVIL CITY MUSIC] Portland, Ore.: The city of collaborations. If you don’t need another example of how much the bands in this city heart their fellow musicians, then stop reading right now. Experimental-pop duo Brainstorm doesn’t have much in common with Archers’ angular, drunken indie rock, but that didn’t stop the band from recording a single with Archers’ Chris Cantino a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, Archers just keeps on getting better, and new song (and set closer) “Evil City Music” is the band’s finest moment yet, channeling Lou Reed via the Soft Boys and praising Portland in less than three minutes of pure garage-punk fury. Let the collaborations live on! MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. Free. 21+.
Gang of Four, Hollerado
[DAMAGED GOODS] Although it’s
36
becoming increasingly rare to feel shocked when the music of a supposedly “underground” band appears in a TV commercial these days, it was a bit jarring to hear Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” hawking Xbox Kinect in an ad last year. This was a group that built its career on radical polemics and a distaste for capitalism now directly participating in consumer culture, but even Marxists have to sell out sometime, apparently. It would count as only a minor misstep if the dulling of the band’s edges didn’t also carry over to the recently released Content, the group’s first album of new material in 15 years. Maybe it’s unfair to expect any outfit to remain potent after three decades of having its once-singular sound—jagged guitars over funk rhythms—diluted by everyone from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but the record is astonishingly toothless. And who wants to watch a bunch of old men gumming at the past?. MATTHEW SINGER. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 9 pm. $24 advance, $25 day of show. 21+.
FRIDAY, FEB. 18 Serge Severe, Manimalhouse, Destro and L Pro, Mic Crenshaw, more
See profile, page 38. Ash Street Saloon, 225 SW Ash St., 226-0430. 9 pm. $5. 21+.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Pierced Arrows
[CANUCKS REDUX] This mysterious, instrumental, anarchistic ensemble from Montreal last made a recorded impression on 2002’s Yanqui U.X.O. and remained dormant from 2003 until last year. But lthen folks from the U.K. version of All Tomorrow’s Parties invited GY!BE to re-form and curate last December’s Nightmare Before Christmas festival, which included acts as disparate as Cluster and Weird Al Yankovic. In the interim since the band ceased touring, its myth has grown by magnitudes. Words like “majestic” and “symphonic” and “cathartic” do little to describe the actual onstage sound this irreverent eight-piece collective (plus a projectionist for this tour) conjures. And if you aren’t a member of the cult that already bought tickets, you’re not about to find out. Nathan Carson. Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 225-0047. 9 pm. Sold Out. All ages.
Neil Young Tribute: The Don of Division Street, The Minus 5, Lewi Longmire Band
[CRAZY HORSES] Last year’s tribute to nasally rock god Neil Young featured acts taking on a song or two by the legend. This time around, things are more ambitious, with three bands taking on full albums of the trouba-
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
[SO PRETTY] It’s been eight years and six albums since Seattle’s Rocky Votolato branched off from far harderrocking band Waxwing to do his own thing back in the day, and while he hasn’t exactly taken the indie world by storm, he’s done pretty well. He has a pretty voice that manages to be simultaneously sweet and earthy. He writes pretty alt-folk ballads that all sound a bit familiar but never overly derivative. He’s pretty enough to make college girls go weak at the knees. His latest album, True Devotion, saw him lose the slightly country twang of his earlier works; unfortunately, he hasn’t replaced it with anything else. It’s still pretty good—just not great. RUTH BROWN. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. $12 advance, $14 day of show. 21+.
Golden Motors, Peter Wilde, The Fasters
[FOLK ROCK PUNK POP] Two beloved Eugene songwriters have released “My Name Is John Smith,” a split 12-inch single—six inches each by Dan Jones and Peter Wilde. Wilde is a longtime favorite of socially conscious folk fans, though his sense of humor and heart were always too big for that niche. His laconic vocals, in the style of nonfalsetto Neil Young, deliver a pair of good-natured love songs here. Jones brings his brand of brainy, bouncy punk pop, like a cuter Hüsker Dü (one of Jones’ bands, the Golden Motors, performs tonight). The pair’s old friend Chris Funk produced and plays all over the record, his enthusiastic participation further bolstered by PDX MVP Lewi Longmire on guitars and organs, pop-savvy bass by Adam East, and solid drummer Jivan Valpey. The EP is downloadable, but that’s way less groovy than the clear vinyl, 45 RPM edition—purchase of which includes downloads of the EP tracks, a Wilde anthology and a live Jones album. JEFF ROSENBERG. The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian, 426 SW Washington St., 228-3669. 10 pm. $5. 21+.
Randy Weston
[WITH THESE HANDS] I have a theory that jazz music has restorative properties for one’s mental and physical health. Just look at the number of septuagenarian and octogenarian players still touring and creating these days: Jack DeJohnette, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, and one of the spotlight artists at this year’s Portland Jazz Festival, Randy Weston. At the age of 84, Weston is still full of surprises, such as the 2009 album The Storyteller on which he rearranged and reinvigorated some of his African-inspired postbop jams. Weston’s body may move a little slower getting to the piano, but his fingers are as nimble as ever, eking delicate tones and furious runs out of his chosen instrument. ROBERT HAM. Winningstad Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 248-4335. 7:30 pm. $25$40. All ages.
Yo La Tengo, The Urinals
[A MELLOW JERSEY MAELSTROM] Here’s the best way to explain postElectr-O-Pura Yo La Tengo to the uninitiated: The band is a codependently contented Sonic Youth. Translated, this means low-upfront-impact, highresidual-impact indie pop that’ll hit
SATURDAY, FEB. 19 The Decemberists, Mountain Man
See album review, this page. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 248-4335. 8 pm. $39.50. All ages.
YOB, Rabbits, Norska
See album review, page 39. Branx, 320 SE 2nd Ave., 234-5683. 9 pm. $10 advance, $13 day of show. All ages.
Young the Giant, Mother Mother, Kitten
[POPULAR SCIENCE] I hate to make Young the Giant the poster band for everything I hate about life, but fuck: Just one listen to the band’s self-titled album makes me want to quit writing
REVIEW
THE DECEMBERISTS THE KING IS DEAD (CAPITOL RECORDS) [FOREFATHERS OF TWEE] Upon the release of the Decemberists’ The King Is Dead, we ran 10 writers’ takes on the album’s 10 songs. The idea was to see the full range of responses, from hatred to fawning adulation, that the folk-pop outfit—perhaps Portland’s most divisive band—generally elicits. Instead, most of our writers reacted with relatively uniform lukewarm praise. That’s because, unlike rock opera The Hazards of Love before it, The King Is Dead plays things safe. It’s the album the band should have made two albums ago—a stylistic stepping stone that does away with some of frontman Colin Meloy’s showier lyrical indulgences and blurs the ensemble cast of fine Portland musicians behind him into a warm and fuzzy musical quilt. Not a dumbing down, exactly, but certainly a dialing down of all the things that made the haters hate the Decemberists with such passion. That doesn’t mean the band has lost ambition. While The King Is Dead has been widely hailed as a “return to form,” it’s more a return to a palatable early-’90s alt-pop era that was derailed by the splintering tastes of the American consumer—think of the Replacements at the height of their commercial appeal or (more obviously given Peter Buck’s widely publicized involvement in the record’s production) Automatic For the People-era R.E.M. These influences haven’t been easy to spot in the Decemberists’ early records, which had more in common with the Pogues and Neutral Milk Hotel than with ’80s jangle-pop—but they have long been identified as some of Meloy’s influences (shit, he wrote a book about the Replacements’ Let It Be), and it’s refreshing to hear Meloy and company wear those influences on their collective sleeve here. In finding their place in America’s pop lineage, the Decemberists haven’t returned to form so much as they’ve realized their early potential: It turns out there’s a whole country—a legion of bookish Decemberists die-hards among them—ready to propel a savvy collection of acoustic-guitar-led radio rock to the top of the charts. And then there are the haters—those who found something disingenuous about Meloy’s nasal balladeering from the start and those locals for whom the Decemberists are, like zoobombers and baristas, somehow an inaccurate and over-hyped representation of the Portland they know and love. For those of us in the lukewarm middle, this album is largely a step in the right direction. “Calamity Song” is a fine jangle-pop cut with just the right balance of Meloy’s descriptive, silly-syllabic lyricism (he describes California slipping into the sea) and the band’s in-pocket groove. “Rise To Me” and “Dear Avery” are easily two of the finest, most authentic Decemberists slow-burners to date. Though Meloy’s sharp, over-enunciated couplets (“Once upon it/ yellow bonnet” being my least favorite) and occasionally challenging vocabulary words are hung out to dry against the newly toned-down instrumentation, his strokes of genius—see “January Hymn,” which reminds of Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”—are presented cleanly and respectfully. Free of the clutter of pan flute or xylophone or whatever other twee shit might have once spoiled a fine tune. Only two songs—the needling “Rox in the Box” and the Christianradio-sounding “This Is Why We Fight”—in the collection prove cringeworthy. Scattered among the other eight tracks are plenty of examples of a hometown band that made good without making overt concessions. It’s hard not to be proud of them for that. CASEY JARMAN. SEE IT: The Decemberists play Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Saturday, Feb. 19. $39.50. 8 pm. All ages.
MUSIC
CHEUNG MING
SATURDAY
THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMM: Randy Weston plays the Winningstad Theatre on Friday. about music forever. Easily palatable to a fault, smeared of anything that could come off as offensive or original or, hell, interesting, it’s bland rock music for boring people to have bad sex to. Young the Giant is only “indie” or “alternative” to record-label executives who are trying to market a stale hipness to ex-jocks who couldn’t make it halfway through the Broken Bells record. Seriously! But, popular is popular, and this show was moved from Mississippi Studios to accommodate even more noobs. Yep, I’m an asshole, but at least I have good taste. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 225-0047. 9 pm. $5. All ages.
Tango Alpha Tango, Light for Fire, Tiger House
[GEEK POP] It’s a boundless, spastic energy that drives Portland’s Tiger House in concert, and that same energy the quartet has captured on the five-song Doom Pop EP, a skittering collection of half-polished, half-messy dance-pop tunes often strewn with ’80s-era keyboards and that familiar hi-hat-reliant disco beat. And while Tiger House’s energy inspires, its sound is still a work in progress. Weezer-esque guitar lines, widescreen John Hughes pop sentimentalism and a bleeding heart Death Cab confessional tone don’t always meld together so seamlessly. Tiger House is certainly clawing at something really satisfying on the new EP, but it seems to be having trouble deciding whether to take itself seriously and play reserved emo-pop or just tear the roof off and throw a shithot dance party. I know no one asked, but my advice is that they abandon the former and throw themselves wholeheartedly into the latter. It’s cold and wet and the people want to dance. Tiger House is just hyperactive enough to make that happen—but it’s time to let the cat out of the bag. CASEY JARMAN. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $7. 21+.
Best Coast, Wavves, No Joy
[CALIFORNIA LOVE] There are, in truth, quite a few parties like a Best Coast party. Shorn of the harmonies that fleshed out the Los Angeles duo’s tastemakerbeloved full-length debut, Crazy for You, songwriter-frontgal Bethany Cosentino’s ditties regarding cats, crushes, and a weed habit can’t help but sound a tad trifling, however winsome her voice and lovely her melodies, and the surrounding retro surf garage suffers live from the same minimal presentation. ’Tis the point of most of her songs, true, but she just sounds so alone out there. JAY HORTON. Hawthorne Theatre, 3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 233-7100. 8 pm. $17 advance, $20 day of show. All ages.
Mighty Ghosts, Stellarondo
[BIG-SKY SONGS] Stellarondo came all the way from Missoula to record this year’s self-titled full-length with Adam Selzer, but the record still sounds—thanks to country strumming, Western horns, sharp strings and one very mournful pedal steel—like Montana. Caroline Keys’ vocals remind of Breeders frontwoman Kim Deal, were she played by Shelley Duvall in a biopic. Keys’ songwriting slips between pretty, descriptive narratives (“What I Know”) and more impressionistic pieces (“The March Brute,” which finds Keys singing: “Backstage at a funeral/ All I can do is hiss/ My teeth don’t fit together anymore/ Behind these lips”). All of it sounds lush and well-plotted, if a bit quirky—an adjective that fits Montana and Portland as well as it does Stellarondo. KEVIN DAVIS. LaurelThirst, 2958 NE Glisan St., 232-1504. 9:30 pm. $6.
Ezra Holbrook, Casey Neill, Redray Frazier, Susie Blue
[DON’T KEEP IT LIKE A SECRET] Local songwriter Ezra Holbrook is like our version of celebrated
CONT. on page 38 Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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L.A. producer-songwriter Jon Brion: He’s immensely talented, can play a number of instruments, and too often hides in the shadows of other acts. So while Holbrook has lent his keen ear to everyone from the Decemberists to the Minus 5, he’s still not a household name, and that’s a damn shame. New fulllength Save Yourself is just flat-out gorgeous, a jazzy, hushed bedtime masterpiece that flirts with genres like a talented high-school kid who can play every position on the football field. The title track sounds like a missing song from Brion’s soundtrack to the Adam Sandleras-a-loner vehicle Punch-Drunk Love, while other songs like the poppy “Heart Off Your Sleeve” are more uptempo but no less affecting. These are movie-credit ballads done the right way. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Secret Society Lounge, 116 NE Russell St., 4933600. 9 pm. $10 day of show. 21+.
Anat Fort
[SWEET & LIGHT] Anat Fort’s Web site is covered in childlike renderings of the young jazz pianist at her chosen instrument and brightly colored buildings, as well as an “About” page that reads like something from an episode of Portlandia: “I hug my cat (at least 188 times).” But it’s also a fair representation of the sound of Fort’s playing. The albums she has released to date beam with sunlight and cheer, and a lightness of tone that some might dismiss as flighty but actually masks a deep well of technique and skill. Fort comes to town as part of the Portland Jazz Fest, bringing along her longtime trio, which includes bassist Gary Wang and drummer Roland Schneider. ROBERT HAM. Winningstad Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 248-4335. 7:30 pm. $25-$35. All ages.
Ryan Bingham & the Dead Horses, The Silent Comedy, Liam Gerner
[EARLE TIMES] Following an Oscar for Crazy Heart’s theme song, “The Weary Kind,” and an Americana Music Award for Artist of the Year, Ryan Bingham with his infamous rasp—it’s a measure of the new Nashville that Bingham’s drinking and smoking arouse as much interest as his origins as rodeo bull rider—has attracted an audience well outside the rougher fringes of the No Depression circuit. On latest album Junky Star, with his Crazy Heart cohort T Bone Burnett adding manfully restrained production, the still (though only just) twentysomething Texan plods the same terrain with laconic licks and wounded-critter howl, but bringing full band on tour, tempos rise to enlist newcomers on climbing far rockier slopes. JAY HORTON. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 8 pm. $17 advance, $20 day of show. 21+.
SUNDAY, FEB. 20 An Evening with Holcombe Waller and the Healers
See profile, page 35. Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., 7196055. 7:30 pm. $20 advance, $25 day of show. All ages.
Telekinesis, The Love Language, Black Whales
[GEEK LOVE] Quick question, music nerds: Who is your favorite powerpop drummer? Don’t spend too long making the list. Of every quirky genre of pop music, power pop’s reliance on Starburst melodies and driving guitar hooks often makes the guy keeping time sort of irrelevant, which makes Telekinesis’ Michael Benjamin Lerner all the more impressive. Lerner just happens to be a singer-songwriter who also plays the drums, and his sense of rhythm (and the bass guitar he recently purchased) helps push the new Telekinesis album, 12 Desperate Straight Lines, past the sea of A.C. Newman imitators. This is a much beefier record than anything Lerner
PROFILE M YS PAC E .CO M /S E R G E S E V E R E
MUSIC
Live Music, Music, Cabaret, Cabaret, Burlesque Burlesque & & Rock-n-Roll Rock-n-Roll Live Live Music, Cabaret, Burlesque & Rock-n-Roll
SERGE SEVERE FRIDAY, FEB. 18 [THROWBACK HIP-HOP] Sergio de Barros doesn’t bring his considerable onstage swagger to interviews. He is an imposing figure—with big hands, broad shoulders and an ever-furrowed brow—but he’s soft-spoken and thoughtful in conversation, even a little shy. “I’m definitely more comfortable on stage than anywhere else,” he says. He’s the kind of guy who sits quietly at the back of class all year, then shocks everyone with a next-level class presentation on the last day of school. Back on My Rhymes, de Barros’ latest release as Portland MC Serge Severe, is one hell of an A-plus presentation. Because while his classmates were out partying, Serge has been seeing a tutor— specifically, producer-DJ Universal Sect, a longtime vinyl junkie and music geek with whom Serge has built every track on Severe’s last two records. Sect’s straightforward, throwback beats—strewn with cracking jazz and funk samples that remind of Premier and Dilla—allow Severe the room to balance his rap-game gusto with an old-school party sensibility and a burgeoning social consciousness. In short, Sect’s production has led Severe to find a voice. That voice is inspired by past masters—LL’s power, Guru’s tactful restraint and Ghostface’s breathless, chamber-emptying flow are all evident. But music was in Serge Severe’s life long before he tripped out on Pete Rock and CL Smooth. His father, an immigrant from Nicaragua, fled to the U.S. to pursue a career in music. That’s an inspiration, too. “He knew he wanted to be a musician when he was 15,” Severe says. “So he saved up his money, and he left. He had to break into [the U.S.].” Severe laughs, in awe. “Hearing that, it’s like, what’s my excuse? What’s my struggle?” Still, Severe’s journey to the forefront of Portland’s hip-hop scene has been difficult. He admits to having underestimated the commitment it would take to get noticed in a city flush with MCs and lacking in resources. So he has played to his key strength—his old-school commitment to making complete records in the studio and his blue-collar work ethic on stage. In the latter setting, the low-key de Barros disappears and a commanding figure—Serge Severe—emerges. He takes stagecraft seriously, making demands of his audience and returning their energy at full force. Skills or no, it takes a whole community to raise an MC. And after years in the wilderness, Severe has settled in with a crew over the past few years. Portland MC, producer and promoter Gen. Erik (a.k.a. Erik Abel) has proven to be a master networker of acts both local and national. Later this year, his group Animal Farm—of which Serge is the newest member—will release a full-length with guest appearances by hip-hop institutions like Rob Swift and Talib Kweli. Animal Farm has already garnered considerable collegeradio airplay, giving the group some legs outside the Northwest. This year, it will again head to South By Southwest, where both Animal Farm and Serge Severe will push new albums. “It’s good to have somebody like Erik speaking for me,” Severe says. “If you’re just promoting yourself, it’s really hard to know who’s listening.” The same goes for making hip-hop in Portland, a city defined by a wealth of talent and very few success stories. So it’s no wonder Serge tempers his ambition with a little healthy skepticism. “I want to make it,” Severe says. “Whatever that means.” CASEY JARMAN. If an MC finds his voice in the forest, will anyone hear it?
SEE IT: Serge Severe plays the Ash Street Saloon (with live instrumentation) on Friday, Feb. 18. 9 pm. $5. 21+.
SUNDAY - TUESDAY has done before, relying less on ringing acoustic guitars and more on low-end and atmosphere—two things that make songs like “Please Ask for Help” and “50 Ways” sound like the Cure instead of Death Cab for Cutie. Lerner’s got a ways to go before he passes Bun E. Carlos in cool points, but hey, at least he’s not that dude from Fountains of Wayne. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 2319663. 9 pm. $10. 21+.
Justin Townes Earle, Dawn Landes
[AMERICAN ROOTS] A tall glass of Cumberland River water, Justin Townes Earle has talent rushing though his veins. Son of country giant Steve Earle, Justin never had to chase folky inclinations. So instead of moving to Nashville like so many artists and hoping for a muse, he listened to his rootsy genes and packed Tennessee with him. Hence, a naturally fruitful career planted in Mississippi mud and adorned in straw. Before he hits the road in support of the Decemberists, Earle brings the Harlem River Blues to our grateful city. Let’s give him the welcome he deserves. MARK STOCK. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. $15 advance, $17 day of show. 21+.
Sea Caves, Andy Combs and the Moth
[POST-PROG] I’d be happy enough if Sea Caves were just “that band that sent us the press photo of two dudes making out,” but considering last year’s impressive Slow Wave album, I should give the Portland outfit more credit than that. The disc highlights the band’s considerable chops—fluttering, jazzy drumming; mathy guitar licks; off-kilter vocal harmonies—and its ear for writing pretty epic pop songs that balance a Rush-style geekiness and an early Minus the Bear-style love of harmonics and precise noodling. We haven’t heard much from the band as of late, so hopefully this show— alongside the churning carnival-pop of Andy Combs and the Moth—is the first of many. CASEY JARMAN. Rontoms, 600 E Burnside St., 2364536. 9 pm. Free.
Dave Frishberg
[OLD-SCHOOL COOL] It shouldn’t be big news that one of Portland’s best-known jazz musicians has a PDX Jazz Festival showcase in his hometown. But although he’s been nationally known for decades for his witty lyrics (“My Attorney Bernie” ) and wry, Mose Allisonwith-a-Chicago-accent delivery, when he plays in Portland, Frishberg seldom sings, preferring the pianist-sideman role. So the fact that we’ll get to hear one of jazz’s cleverest songwriters actually singing his songs and playing his characteristically cool piano makes this a special treat indeed. He’ll also participate in a jazz conversation at 6:15 pm Saturday at the PCPA’s Art Bar. Frishberg unleashed!. BRETT CAMPBELL. Winningstad Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 248-4335. 7:30 pm. $25-$40. All ages.
TUESDAY, FEB. 22 Beans, Hurtbird, Hostile Tapeover
[BLASTS OF BROOKLYN] Of Antipop Consortium fame, Big Apple rapper Beans sports a blistering new project called End It All, comprising 13 tracks in just 33 minutes. Collaboration is king on Beans’ fourth record, which features a different guest producer on every track. And while the likes of TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe and Four Tet impart varying musical flavors, Beans’ relentless rhymes and brooding beats lurk in every song. We can only hope that a partnership with fitting label Anticon (Themselves, WHY?, Josiah Wolf) means Beans is sticking around for a while. MARK STOCK. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 2319663. 9 pm. $11 advance, $13 day of show. 21+.
MUSIC
ALBUM REVIEWS
WATER & BODIES LIGHT YEAR (EYOS RECORDS) [ALT-ROCK WILL NEVER DIE] Now that the Decemberists have hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, the idea that a local group can go from a practice space on East Burnside to the top of the world is not just a juniorhigh pipe dream. But it’s the way that band achieved the historic success that should provide an ample blueprint to any hardworking Portland songwriter—start slowly, build a fan base and never compromise your sound to cash in. Local quartet Water & Bodies is obviously very far from storming the pop-music charts. Still, listening to the debut full-length, Light Year, makes it seem like the band desperately wants to re-create a sound that translated to a major-label offer and gold record...15 years ago. Water & Bodies is basically the platonic form of an alternative rock band: Light Year is all about the big lighter-in-the-air chorus and chugging bass lines that dominated KNRK and KUFO over a decade ago. Take “The Return,” a song that begins with a promising string intro and guitars that pop like sparklers but then dives into a lead vocal so overly emotive and “passionate” that you could blink and think you’re watching an early round of American Idol. “He was a good man,” singer Christopher James Ruff belts out (like he’s standing at the edge of a cliff, wind whipping at his bangs). “At least he’s on his way home.” Home, for Water & Bodies, unfortunately sounds like a Placebo song. And while that’s not a bad thing, per se: Songs like “Celebration Song” and “Light Year” are catchy, hummable and enjoyable bites of radio fluff. Knowing that three of the band’s members have already traveled down that path (previous progmetal outfit Kaddisfly played the side stage at the Warped Tour and sniffed label success) makes me think it’s time for the band to find a path less traveled. Everything that glitters in the altrock world isn’t gold, you know. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER.
A neighborhood pub for all of Portland. 1101 East Burnside • 503-233-1743 • www.theguildpub.com
RABBITS LOWER FORMS (RELAPSE) [PDX SLUDGE] Scan the liner notes of local metal outfit Rabbits’ new record, Lower Forms, and you’ll find a surprising note: Lower Forms was recorded at Type Foundry studios. For the uninitiated, this is somewhat of a shock: as Type Foundry (run by Norfolk & Western’s Adam Selzer) is Portland’s premier haven for all things folk rock, and Rabbits’ heavy, low-end thwack is about as far from cute and cuddly as humanly possible. Still, a few spins of the record immediately quell any suspicion the band has gone soft. Despite Rabbits’ name, its music is loud and punishing, and Type Foundry (plus producers Jeremy Romagna and Lauren K. Newman, a.k.a. LKN) acts as a perfect foil to the band’s intensity. Lower Forms is a metal-punk record of the highest fidelity: The whole thing is mixed clean and to the front, so you can hear every tumbling drum fill and monstrous, slow riff. It’s a step up from the band’s early 12-inches and split singles, and it rivals seeing one of its ear-splitting live shows. It also succeeds in establishing one mood, an overwhelming sense of dread that’s not the type of thing every music fan can get behind. All 10 tracks on the album are steeped in the same thick grime and molten rhythms, and grounded by singer Josh Hughes’ howling growl. But a few songs stand out, including opener “Burn, Sun, Burn” and “Invisibugs,” which plods along with a quick stop-and-start beat and a particularly heavy bit of guitar feedback. Along with Red Fang, Rabbits is redefining how Portland hard rock bands should sound and act. So, who’s recording at Type Foundry next? MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. SEE IT: Water & Bodies plays Friday, Feb. 18, at the Doug Fir, with Archeology, the Dimes and UHF. 9 pm. $5. 21+. Rabbits plays Saturday, Feb. 19, at Branx, with YOB and Norska. 9 pm. $10 advance, $13 day of show. All ages.
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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
MUSIC CALENDAR = WW Pick. Highly recommended.
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Open Mic
Editor: Michael Mannheimer. TO HAVE YOUR EVENT LISTED, enter show information at least two weeks in advance via email to mmannheimer@wweek.com. Press kits, CDs and especially vinyl can be sent to Music Desk, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: mmannheimer@wweek.com. Find more music: reviews 35 | clublist spotlight 42 For more listings, check out wweek.com
WED. FEB. 16 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars: Tab Benoit, Anders Osborne, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, Cyril Neville, Johnny Sansone, Waylon Thibadeaux, Johnny Vidacovich
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. Opera Theater Oregon
Alberta Street Public House
1036 NE Alberta St. Suck My Open Mic with Tamara J. Brown
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Toshi Onizuka
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Slutty Hearts, The Harvey Girls, Pheasant
Backspace
2201 N Killingsworth St. Shug Mauldin & Riders in the Round
Beauty Bar
111 SW Ash Street Baby Ketten Karaoke
Good Neighbor Pizzeria
800 NE Dekum St. Open Mic
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge
Biddy McGraw’s
625 NW 21st Ave Laura Ivancie
Blue Monk
1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
6000 NE Glisan St Stringed Migration (9 pm); Little Sue (6 pm) 3341 SE Belmont St Arabsque Bellydance
Brasserie Montmartre 626 SW Park Ave. Kit Taylor
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Buffalo Bandstand
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Jedi Mindf*ck
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Suburban Slim’s Blues Jam (9:30 pm); Chris Olson’s High Flyers (6 pm)
Ella Street Social Club
714 SW 20th Place The Underscore Orkestra, Pearl McCabe
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Eluveitie, 3 Inches of Blood, Holy Grail, System Divide
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Nightclubbing: Austra, Onuinu, Linger & Quiet
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The David Friesen Quintet
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave Cronin Tierney
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Sleepy Bell
Rotture
315 SE 3rd Ave. Nightshift: Start Fires, The Sexbots, Spesus Christ, Weather Exposed, Skeleton Music
Someday Lounge
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Duover, Rat Bite Fever
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Billy D
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Neva, Anthony Floyd Brady (9:30 pm); Singers & Stompers (4 pm)
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Symmetry/Symmetry, Secret Codes, Yoya, Greenhorse
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Midnight Expressions
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Shook Twins, Left Coast Country, Hymn for Her
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Sleepy Eyed Johns
Portland Prime 121 SW 3rd Ave. Randy Porter
125 NW 5th Ave. Night Surgeon, Search Party, Dropa, A Gentlemen’s Picnic
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave Karaoke: Danny Chavez, Rock’n Raymond and You
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Shirley Nanette
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Symbol Six, By An inch, Soul Thrash, Eric Tonsfeldt
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Symbol Six, By an Inch, Soul Thrash, Eric Tonsfeldt
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. P.R.O.B.L.E.M.S., Dark Country
The Warehouse Cafe 3434 SE Milwaukie St. Open Mic
Twilight Cafe and Bar
Tim Conor, Wes Swing, Macy Bensley
Arthur Moore’s Harmonica Party
Ezra Holbrook
Vino Vixens Wine Shop & Bar
Biddy McGraw’s
2929 SE Powell Blvd. 6bq9
6000 NE Glisan St Hard Corn (9 pm); Morgan Grace (6 pm)
2099 SE Oak Grove Blvd. Open Mic
White Eagle Saloon
Blue Monk
836 N Russell St. Unfiltered Showcase: Just Lions, Westfold, On the Stairs
Wilf’s Restaurant
800 NW 6th Ave. Ron Steen, Nancy King, Dave Captein, Steve Christoferson
3341 SE Belmont St Quintillion
Brasserie Montmartre 626 SW Park Ave. Darin Clendenin
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Jamalia, Otis Heat
Chapel Pub
Oak Grove Tavern
Original Halibut’s
2525 NE Alberta St. Terry Robb
Portland Prime 121 SW 3rd Ave. Bill Beach
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Ace of Spades
Rotture
430 N Killingsworth St. Steve Kerin
315 SE 3rd Ave. Light House, Wilderness, Dweomer
Aladdin Theater
Dante’s
Sellwood Public House
Alberta Street Public House
Doug Fir Lounge
1036 NE Alberta St. Will West, Lara Mitchell, Rob Stroup, Nate Talbot
830 E Burnside St. The Coronas, Chris Margolin and the Dregs, Jamestown Revival
Andina
Duff’s Garage
THURS. FEB. 17 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Jonathan Coulton, Mike Phirman
1314 NW Glisan St. Matices
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Tigress, Robots on Crack, Monstress
Backspace
350 W Burnside St. Saucy Yoda, Mythological Horses, The Shivas
1635 SE 7th Ave. Brothers Todd (9 pm); Portland Playboys (6 pm)
Ella Street Social Club 714 SW 20th Place Massive Moth, De La Warr, All the Apparatus
115 NW 5th Ave. The We Shared Milk, Starparty, The Vernons, Cat Stalks Bird, Sarah Q
Goodfoot Lounge
Beaterville Cafe
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge
2201 N Killingsworth St.
1420 SE Powell Blvd
2845 SE Stark St. Mars Retrieval Unit, High Ceiling
625 NW 21st Ave Karaoke Kings
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
CASEY JARMAN
115 NW 5th Ave. Proper Respect, Lyriseez, King D Amar of A.L.B., Cashis Game, Jlew, JRitz&Saywords, Jerz Fiveothree, Ryder Records
Beaterville Cafe
[FEB. 16 - 22]
1503 SE 39th Ave. Savoir Faire Burlesque
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Invisible Allies, Bluetech, Kilowatts
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Mel Brown B3 Organ Group with Dan Faehnie
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave Cronin Tierney
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Lewi Longmire Band
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
8635 N Lombard St. Hurts to Laugh, The Cheap Meats
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave Spare Room Jam: Jim Mesi and Ed Neumann
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Johnny Martin Trio
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Purple Heart, Steak Knife
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. Squalora, Age of Collapse, Cull
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Olivia’s Pool, The Kinky Brothers, Russell Turner
Twilight Cafe and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd After Nothings End, Defeating the Purpose, Unknown Artist
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Nick Foltz, Maria Catherine Callahan (8:30 pm); Will West and the Friendly Cover Up (5:30 pm)
Wilf’s Restaurant 800 NW 6th Ave. Peter Boe Trio
Wonder Ballroom
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
128 NE Russell St. Gang of Four, Hollerado
Mississippi Pizza
Aladdin Theater
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Billy Kennedy 3552 N Mississippi Ave. Rabbit, Rabbit (9 pm); SloeGinFizz (6 pm)
FRI. FEB. 18 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Tommy Emmanuel
Alberta Rose Theatre
Mississippi Studios
3000 NE Alberta St. Live Wire! Radio
Mock Crest Tavern
1036 NE Alberta St. Mikey’s Irish Jam
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
1036 NE Alberta St. Lucky Jumping Voices
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Brainstorm, Archers, Hausu 3435 N Lombard St. Folk and Spoon
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd 7th Planet Picture Show
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Lonnie Bruhn
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. The Meditations, Solidity, Jagga Culture
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Lauren Sheehan
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St.
I BELIEVE IN YOU: Lewi Longmire Band plays Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush on Friday at Dante’s.
8132 SE 13th Ave. Open Mic Night
Alberta Street Public House
Alberta Street Public House
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Na Mesa
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Serge Severe, Manimalhouse, Destro and L Pro, Mic Crenshaw, Level Headed, Diction, Universal DJ Sect
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Stone The Murder, Icon Saint, A Killing Dove
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave.
CONT. on page 42 Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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SPOTLIGHT
VIVIANJOHNSON.COM
MUSIC
The Sho, Bad at Best, Cuntagious, The Vagines, Krix
Heartbreak Hotel: Shawn Hawkins and the Offenders
Sellwood Public House
Biddy McGraw’s
8132 SE 13th Ave. Russell Thomas
Slabtown
1033 NW 16th Ave. Showdown at Slabtown III
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
8635 N Lombard St. The Autonomics, The Neverdowells
Someday Lounge
Beaterville Cafe
2201 N Killingsworth St. Beth Willis Rock Duo
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St Colleen Raney (9:30 pm); Billy Kennedy
Bipartisan Cafe
7901 SE Stark St. Worn Out Shoes
Blue Monk
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Double Tap
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Karaoke
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
3341 SE Belmont St Off Beat Belly Dance
1503 SE 39th Ave. Stephanie Selcza
Brasserie Montmartre
Hawthorne Theatre
626 SW Park Ave. Mike Winkle Trio
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Broken Soviet, HEMA
Carefree Bar & Grill
10209 SE Division Equal Kings, T. Ray and the Shades
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Pierced Arrows
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Neil Young Tribute: The Don of Division Street, The Minus 5, Lewi Longmire Band
Doug Fir Lounge
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Faire Du Surf, Rotating Superstructure, Jake Powell, Kopath Bear, Ghevont
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Michael Allen Harrison
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave Tom May Band
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Sassparilla
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Mike Apinyakul, Henry Hill Kammerer, Andy Ferguson
830 E Burnside St. Water & Bodies, Archeology, The Dimes, UHF
McMenamins Hotel Oregon
Duff’s Garage
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
1635 SE 7th Ave. DK Sextet (9 pm); Joy & Her Sentimental Gentlemen
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. DK Stewart Sextet (9 pm); Joy and Her Sentimental Gentlemen
East End
203 SE Grand Ave. Sick Jaggers/No Thoughts Zine Party
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310 Northeast Evans St. Lynn Conover Duo
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road The Wiyos
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Melao de Cuba (9 pm); Camaro Island (6 pm)
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Rocky Votolato, Michael Dean Damron, Kasey Anderson
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
Mock Crest Tavern
3435 N Lombard St. Sneakin’ Out
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Fez Fatale
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Andrew’s Ave.
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Jesta
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Thad Beckman
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St. Gregory Porter
Nel Centro
1408 SW 6th Ave. Mike Pardew with Tom Wakeling and Dave Averre
Oak Grove Tavern
2099 SE Oak Grove Blvd. Karaoke
Original Halibut’s
2525 NE Alberta St. Shirley Nanette
2026 NE Alberta St. El Rey, Axxicorn
The World Famous Kenton Club
2025 N Kilpatrick St. Ohioan, Guests
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. ED To Shred, O.U.T., State of Balance, Splintered Throne
Twilight Cafe and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd Mudpuppy, Cicada Omega, Right On John
Press Club
2621 SE Clinton St. Michael Hurley
Proper Eats Market and Cafe 8638 N Lombard St. Stumptown Jug Thumpers
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave.
722 N Sumner St. Miss Massive Snowflake
Winningstad Theatre
Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway Randy Weston
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. Yo La Tengo, The Urinals
SAT. FEB. 19 Agenda
2366 SE 82nd Pinehurst Kids, Bad Territories, The Wolfman Fairies
Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. House of Floyd (Pink Floyd Tribute)
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. Opera Theater Oregon
Alberta Street Public House 1036 NE Alberta St. Russell Turner
1036 NE Alberta St. Rainstick Cowbell 1314 NW Glisan St. Toshi Onizuka
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 1037 SW Broadway The Decemberists, Mountain Man
Artichoke Community Music 3130A SE Hawthorne Blvd. Renegade Minstrels
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Awol One, Ceschi Ramos, Cars & Trains, Demune
Beaterville Cafe
2201 N Killingsworth St.
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Soul Vaccination
Mudai
801 NE Broadway Brotman And Short, Primary Colors, Vice Device, Terraform, Party Killers
8105 SE 7th Ave. Greg Clarke
3158 E Burnside St. Trevor Ras
Nel Centro
1408 SW 6th Ave. Mike Pardew with Joe Manis, Dave Captein, Randy Rollofson
O’Malley’s
Crystal Ballroom
Oak Grove Tavern
205 NW 4th Ave. Club Crooks 1332 W Burnside St. Young the Giant, Mother Mother, Kitten
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. The Mutaytor, Adrian H and the Wounds
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Tango Alpha Tango, Light for Fire, Tiger House
Duff’s Garage
East End
800 NW 6th Ave. Greta Matassa
Mt. Tabor Theater
6535 SE Foster Road Eastside Speed Machine, Go Ballistic, Bombs Away
White Eagle Saloon
Wilf’s Restaurant
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
Crown Room
5242 N Lombard St. The Special Purpose 836 N Russell St. Beautiful Lies, Focus! Focus!, All the Apparatus (9:30 pm); Reverb Brothers (5:30 pm)
The Know
3435 N Lombard St. Alan Benson Experience
Music Millennium
1635 SE 7th Ave. Cajun Love Brigade, New Iberians (CD release show)
Twilight Room
Mock Crest Tavern
Carefree Bar & Grill
Cherry Sprout Produce Market
The Know
LaurelThirst
Muddy Rudder Public House
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian 426 SW Washington St. Golden Motors, Peter Wilde, The Fasters
The Friendly Skies, Armed With Legs, Ports Will Call, Design. Drift. Distance.
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Bathtub Toasters, Solid State, LaRhonda Steele
Buffalo Gap Saloon
1001 SW Broadway Bobby Torres Trio
Plan B
121 SW 3rd Ave. Mia Nicholson
626 SW Park Ave. Tim Willcox Quartet
10209 SE Division The Shatterbrains, The Bittersoundfase, Gordon Avenue
Andina
Portland Prime
320 SE 2nd Ave. YOB, Rabbits, Norska
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Anna Gilbert
Peter’s Room
1305 SE 8th Ave. Wayne Gacy Trio, Ninja, Clackamas Baby Killers
Branx
Spare Room
Alberta Street Public House
8 NW 6th Ave. Smoov-E (CD release)
3341 SE Belmont St The Knuckleheads
Brasserie Montmartre
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar
Tango Alpha Tango, Abernethy Road, Bird and Rocket
Blue Monk
125 NW 5th Ave. Chicharones, Living Proof, Spaceman, Raise the Bridges, IAMe, DJ Spark 4830 NE 42nd Ave Cool Breeze
DRINK AND THINK: Doesn’t it seem like all the new bars in Portland are fighting to out-boring each other? We’ve traded building elaborate booze cathedrals for yawn-inducing booze monasteries. Which is fine when you’re with a group of friends—Coalition Brewing (2724 SE Ankeny St., 894-8080, coalitionbrewing.com) has fine beverages (the Wu Cream ale, in addition to having a great name, is a smooth drink that goes down like a slightly lighter version of Smithwick’s; the maple stout is smoky and rich and sticks in your mouth for a while after the first gulp) that spruce up the distractionless wood-and-concrete watering hole. It’s just not the kind of place hyperactive folks like me would go alone (though I’m sure things get more lively in summer, when the garage door slides open). So while I may well drop by Coalition for a $14 growler of Mr. Pig’s Pale, I’ll probably stick to nearby joints like the Standard and Holman’s for my post-work pint. I need a pinball, a jukebox, a movie—anything! CASEY JARMAN.
6000 NE Glisan St Drunken Prayer, Chris Marshall (9:30 pm); Twisted Whistle (5 pm)
Mississippi Studios
203 SE Grand Ave. Cleveland Confidential Book Tour: Cheetah Chrome (Dead Boys), Mike Hudson, Bob Pfeifer with Loose Values and Chemicals
Ella Street Social Club 714 SW 20th Place The Old Town Bohemian Cabaret
Goodfoot Lounge 2845 SE Stark St. McTuff, Skerik
2099 SE Oak Grove Blvd. The Shatterbrains, The Bittersoundfase, Gordon Avenue
121 SW 3rd Ave. Mel Brown Trio
Press Club
2621 SE Clinton St. Pete Krebs Swing Trio
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Vampirates, Chase the Shakes, Xaggerations, The Ascendents, Junio Muere
Refuge
116 SE Yamhill St. Threshold: Random Rab, Solovox, Manoj, Barisone, Plumblyne
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave. Next Big Thing Tour
Rotture
Hawthorne Theatre
Secret Society Lounge
221 NW 10th Ave. The Linda Hornbuckle Band
6910 N Interstate Ave. Hairspray Blues, Watch It Sparkle, Taxi Boys
116 NE Russell St. Ezra Holbrook, Casey Neill, Redray Frazier, Susie Blue
Sellwood Public House 8132 SE 13th Ave. Tom Arnold
Kells
Slabtown
LaurelThirst
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
112 SW 2nd Ave Tom May Band 2958 NE Glisan St. Tree Frogs
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Mighty Ghosts, Stellarondo
McMenamins Hotel Oregon
310 Northeast Evans St. Y La Bamba
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Will West
Mission Theater
1624 NW Glisan St. Miz Kitty’s Parlour
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Alex Arrowsmith, The We Shared Milk, Massive Moth (9 pm); Underskore Orkestra, Mr. Crab Feathers (6 pm)
2025 N Kilpatrick St. Lopez, Fruit of the Legion of Loom, Minoton, Cougar, Gay Marriage
Tiger Bar
317 NW Broadway Delaney and Paris, Gusto Brothers, Sabrina Chap, Hopeless Jack
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Catsup & Mustard
Twilight Cafe and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd The Dirty Words, The KOS, Pocket Panda
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Gunfighter, Loaded For Bear, Silent Numbers (9:30 pm); The Student Loan (4:30 pm)
Wilf’s Restaurant 800 NW 6th Ave. Greta Matassa
Portland Prime
Saratoga
Jimmy Mak’s
The World Famous Kenton Club
Wonder Ballroom
1305 SE 8th Ave. Beringia, Blood on Baleen, Aranya, Into the Storm
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Best Coast, Wavves, No Joy
3120 N Williams Ave. Strangled Darlings
Winningstad Theatre
315 SE 3rd Ave. Supernature: Arohan, Pinata, DJ BJ, DJ E*Rock, DJ Copy
1503 SE 39th Ave. Carlos Severe Marcelin
The Waypost
Plan B
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Karaoke
2026 NE Alberta St. Kohosh, Ire Adrift, Andelitas
1033 NW 16th Ave. Showdown at Slabtown III 8635 N Lombard St. Jimi Hardin and Hip Deep Soul Review
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. Forever Growing, Minds Align
Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway Anat Fort 128 NE Russell St. Ryan Bingham & the Dead Horses, The Silent Comedy, Liam Gerner
SUN. FEB. 20 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Blues For MS: Robbie Laws, The Strange Tones, Lisa Mann, The Ty Curtis Band, Billy D
Alberta Rose Theatre
3000 NE Alberta St. An Evening with Holcombe Waller and the Healers
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Danny Romero
Ash Street Saloon
The Artistery
4315 SE Division St. Gashcat, Elephant Apple, Ghost Mom, SexyWaterSpiders
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St.
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Justin Townes Earle, Dawn Landes
Mudai
801 NE Broadway Wax Edison, White Fang, DJ Matt Scaphism
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Irish
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St. Holcombe Waller
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. Alaric, Atriarch, Deathrock DJs
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. ORDM Free Metal Sunday
Rontoms
600 E Burnside St. Sea Caves, Andy Combs and the Moth
Rotture
315 SE 3rd Ave. MartyParty, Freq Nasty, Opiuo, Nicky Mason
Slabtown
1033 NW 16th Ave. Showdown at Slabtown III
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. Karaoke That Doesn’t Suck Presented by Down Under Rock
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Great Wilderness, Gashcat, Elephant Apple, Monkey Puzzle
Twilight Cafe and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd Driftwood, De La Warr, Nathan Rivera, Michael Cantino
Valentine’s
836 N Russell St. Open Mic/Songwriter Showcase
3341 SE Belmont St Portland Jazz Festival Showcase: Trio Subtonic, The Quadraphonnes
Brasserie Montmartre 626 SW Park Ave. Ramsey Embick
Center for Self Enhancement
3920 N Kerby Ave. Community Gospel Brunch with the SEI Sounds of Soul Choir
Crow Bar
3954 N Mississippi Ave. Seffarine
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Sinferno Cabaret: Larry and His Flask, Ether Circus
Doug Fir Lounge
Duff’s Garage
5441 SE Belmont St. Andy Stein
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Adults Only Truth or Dare (9 pm); Scott Browning (6 pm)
Blue Monk
St. Francis Church Dining Hall,
TaborSpace
Mississippi Pizza
232 SW Ankeny St. Michael Hurley and Castanets
830 E Burnside St. Telekinesis, The Love Language, Black Whales
330 SE 11th Ave. Kung Pao Chickens
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Elizabeth Nicholson
225 SW Ash St. Levi, Kids Like Color, Rocket Panda, The Modern Golem
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave Cool Breeze
2958 NE Glisan St. Billy Kennedy & Tim Acott
1635 SE 7th Ave. Fiona Boyes (5 pm)
Ella Street Social Club 714 SW 20th Place Crooked Bars, Pancakes
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave Eric Tonsfeldt (9 pm); Irish Sessions (6 pm)
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Freak Mountain Ramblers
White Eagle Saloon
Winningstad Theatre
Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway Dave Frishberg
MON. FEB. 21 Alberta Rose Theatre
3000 NE Alberta St. Lauren Kinhan Quartet, Portland’s Future Voices of Jazz
Alberta Street Public House 1036 NE Alberta St. Marry Me Lazy Eye
Ash Street Saloon 225 SW Ash St. Open Mic
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Battery Powered Music Ensemble: Jim Woodring’s Frank cartoons
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St Eric Tonsfeldt
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St Renato Caranto’s Funk Band
Brasserie Montmartre 626 SW Park Ave. D.K. Stewart
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St.
Karaoke From Hell
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Jared Mees, Jon Garcia, Joshua English, Kelly Masigat, Quinn Allan
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Big “D” Jamboree (8:30 pm); James Sasser Band (6 pm)
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Sonic Forum Open Mic Night
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Murs, Tabi Bonney, Whole Wheat Bread, Ab-Soul, DJ Foundation
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Dan Balmer Band
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave Pat Buckley
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Little Sue & Lynn Conover
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Kung Pao Chickens
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Larsen Vegas Starr-Free Rock ‘N’ Roll Show
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave Karaoke Night with Danny Chavez
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. The Incapacitators, All Eyes Closed, Lee Dennis
Twilight Cafe and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd SIN Night
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. Doubleplusgood, Leather Tom and the Dirty Dudes, Mattress
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Sunbeam, Norman, Joel Swenson
TUE. FEB. 22 Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. JB Butler
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Nods to Nothing, Save Amos, Monkey Puzzle, Sunny Travels
Brasserie Montmartre 626 SW Park Ave. Vince Frates
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Bob Shoemaker
Buffalo Gap Saloon
Mississippi Pizza
Bunk Bar
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Mississippi Shoot Out (8 pm); Portland Spelling Bee (6:30 pm)
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Lloyd Jones
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St. Stellarondo
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Open Mic Night 1028 SE Water Ave. Celilo, Jon Lindsay
Doug Fir Lounge
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Dover Weinberg Quartet (9:30 pm); Trio Bravo (6 pm)
Ella Street Social Club 714 SW 20th Place Brother Nature, Memory Boys
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Scott PembertonTrio
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. Rock Band 2 with MC Destructo
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Merrill Lite
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Open Mic
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Bobby Brackins, YG, Ty$
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Mel Brown Septet (8 pm); The Alex Milsted Quintet (6:30 pm)
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Mel Brown Septet (8 pm); The Alex Milsted Quintet (6:30 pm)
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave Pat Buckley
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Jackstraw
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
830 E Burnside St. Beans, Hurtbird, Hostile Tapeover
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Open Bluegrass Jam
Duff’s Garage
Mississippi Pizza
1635 SE 7th Ave. Dover Weinberg Quartet (9:30 pm); Trio Bravo (6 pm)
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Baby Ketten Karaoke (9 pm); Margo May (6 pm)
Mississippi Studios
Rock Yr Baby #3: DJ Vision Quest, DJ Stoned Werewolf
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Philly’s Phunkestra
Mock Crest Tavern
SAT. FEB. 19
3435 N Lombard St. Jeff Jensen Band
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. The Family Funktion featuring Average Leftovers
Plan B
WED. FEB. 16 Crown Room
205 NW 4th Ave. Crush Drum and Bass
1305 SE 8th Ave. All Eyes Closed, The Autonomics, Benecio and Walker
East End
Rotture
511 NW Couch St. Mike Gong, Bliphop Junkie
315 SE 3rd Ave. Saything, The Burning of Rome, Boo Jays
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
8635 N Lombard St. Open Mic with host Derek W
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave Danny Chavez Karaoke Show
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Flesh Lawn, Statewide Emergency, Ugly Flowers
Twilight Cafe and Bar
1420 SE Powell Blvd Open Mic Night Featuring House Band: The Roaming
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. Hornet Leg, Karen
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St. Will West and the Friendly Strangers
Wilf’s Restaurant 800 NW 6th Ave. Karioki
203 SE Grand Ave. DJ Smooth Hopperator
Ground Kontrol
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ Papi, DJ Animal Stitches
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. Rude Dudes
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. DJ Valkyrie
THURS. FEB. 17 Beauty Bar
111 SW Ash Street DJ Rob Graves
Crown Room
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Lorifice
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ Maxamillion
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. DJ Cuica, DJ Spencer D
Yes and No
20 NW 3rd Ave. DJ Linoleum, DJ Dan Stallone
FRI. FEB. 18 Beauty Bar
111 SW Ash Street Legendary Fridays: Slimkid3
Crown Room
205 NW 4th Ave. WIldlife: Salva, Danny Corn, Graintable, DJ Lifepartner, Tyler Tastemaker, DJ Cin
Fez Ballroom
316 SW 11th Ave. Decadent 80s
Goodfoot Lounge
Fez Ballroom
511 NW Couch St. DJ Epor
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. Free Play Party: Grand Reopening Party
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. The Fix: Rev. Shines, KEZ, Dundiggy
111 SW Ash Street Girls Night Out!
Fez Ballroom
316 SW 11th Ave. Twice as Nice
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. DJ Etbonz
Lola’s Room at the Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St. Jai Ho Bollywood and Bhangra Dance Party
Star Bar
205 NW 4th Ave. Blast Thursday: 12th Canvas, D.Poetica, DJ Horse Horse 316 SW 11th Ave. Shadowplay with DJ Horrid, DJ Ghoulunatic, DJ Paradox
Beauty Bar
2845 SE Stark St. DJ Aquaman’s Soul Stew
Ground Kontrol
Lola’s Room at the Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St. ‘80s Video Dance Attack
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. Honest John
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St.
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ Spoken For, DJ OBGYN
TUE. FEB. 22 Alberta Street Public House 1036 NE Alberta St. Metal VJ
Crown Room
205 NW 4th Ave. See You Next Tuesday: A Weekly Dubstep Party with Kellan, Avery
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. Music With Loud Guitars: DJ Raze Regal
Tiga
639 SE Morrison St. French Invasion: DJ Cecilia Paris
1465 NE Prescott St. Mild Child
Tiga
20 NW 3rd Ave. Idiot Tuesdays: DJ Black Dog
1465 NE Prescott St. Hostile Tapeover
Yes and No
SUN. FEB. 20 East End 203 SE Grand Ave. DJ Stuffed Crust
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. Hive: DJ Owen
MON. FEB. 21 East End
203 SE Grand Ave. Heavy Metal Ladies Night with DJ Nate C
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Queer Night: DJ Hufnstuf, DJ Lunchlady
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. Into the Void: DJ Blackhawk
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
43
“Soul-stirring... Haunting... Full of breathtaking moments.” Grant Butler, The Oregonian “A daring fusion of musical styles... A moving story of characters on both sides of a cultural divide.” Marty Hughley, The Oregonian
JANE a theater company presents A Marv Ross Production
A MYSTERY. A LOVE STORY. A MUSICAL LIKE NO OTHER.
Winner of 8 PAMTA Awards including Best Production
March 4 - March 12 9 performances PCPA Newmark Theatre Directed by Greg Tamblyn
On sale now at the PCPA Box Office and all Ticketmaster outlets. Call Ticketmaster at
800.745.3000 or online at Photo: David Straub
www.ticketmaster.com.
To see the trailer for The Ghosts of Celilo visit www.ghostsofcelilo.com Generously supported by The Spirit Mountain Community Fund, The Portland Center for the Performing Arts, Roundhouse Foundation, and The Marie Lamfrom Foundation
A RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY for people with SCHIZOPHRENIA and their FAMILIES VOLUNTEERS ARE NEEDED FOR A STUDY
that examines whether reduced skin sensitivity to methyl nicotinate (a niacin derivative) is a heritable condition among patients with schizophrenia or their family members. This is for a research study. It does not involve any treatment.
You may be eligible to qualify if you have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and have a brother, sister or parent who may also be interested in participating. Volunteers should be in good physical health, and should not be taking medications for high blood pressure, aspirin, or other pain medications.
The study involves being interviewed, and then measuring the skin’s blood flow response to a skin-permeable drug derived from niacin. The niacin derivative solution will be dissolved in water and will be placed on the forearms for five minutes. The skin’s blood flow will then be measured painlessly, using reflected light. Volunteers will have the option of donating a small blood sample for genetic analysis. The study will require
two visits to the Portland VA Medical Center. The first visit will last about four hours. The second visit will last about one hour.
If you are interested or have questions, please contact Dr. Erik Messamore at (503) 220-8262, extension 51864. Participants will be paid $40 for each visit, and $40 for donating a blood sample. Aside from these payments, there are no other benefits to you for participating in this study. You may participate even if you are not a veteran.
This study is being conducted by Dr. Erik Messamore at the Portland VA Medical Center 3710 SW Veterans Hospital Road, Portland, OR 97239 44
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
UPCOMING IN-STORE PERFORMANCES EZRA HOLBROOK
THURSDAY 2/17 @ 6PM Ezra has played in many different bands (the Decemberists, the Minus 5, and Dr Theopolis) and produced/engineered a great number of records for various northwest artists (Little Sue, Casey Neill, Redray Frazier, etc.). During that time he also continued writing, recording and performing his own material, culminating in the release of his brand new record, ‘Save Yourself.’
TREVOR RAS
SATURDAY 2/19 @ 5PM Whether playing solo as a duo, trio, or with his full band, Boomerang Summer, Trevor combines superb musicianship and good songwriting with a special energyan honest, interactive, light-hearted approach that connects audience and performer. Trevor just finished his second solo album, ‘Blue Sky,’ which he recorded with two of his best friends and Portland musical stalwarts, Dave Milne (Dave Milne Group, Debra Arlyn) and Michael Herrman (Buoy Larue).
STELLARONDO
MONDAY 2/21 @ 6PM Stellarondo emerged in Missoula, Montana during winter 2010 when Caroline Keys responded to a challenge by writing and recording an album of original music during the month of February. Keys’ project quickly evolved to include a full band of stalwarts from Missoula’s music scene, including players from Broken Valley Roadshow (Caroline Keys and Angie Biehl), Tom Catmull and the Clerics (Travis Yost and Gibson Hartwell) and Wartime Blues (Bethany Joyce). Stellarondo’s lush, dreamy alt-folk debut was recorded in Portland by Adam Selzer at Type Foundry and Scenic Burrows.
R E C O R D R E L E AS E EV E N T ! THE BUILDERS AND THE BUTCHERS FRIDAY 2/25 @ 7:30PM
Joining up with Adam Selzer (The Decemberists, M. Ward, She & Him) and engineer Dylan Magierek (Mark Kozelek, Starfucker, Thao Nguyen) the band created their third album ‘Dead Reckoning’ using the recording style of the 1950s and 1960s, where the magic of a song was captured by the band playing together live and with minimal overdubbing. The Builders went into the studio with the idea of peeling back layers to where the essence of the song lies, and to try and finally fully encapsulate their raucous, impassioned live show.
FEB. 16-22
= WW Pick. Highly recommended. Most prices listed are for advance ticket sales. At-the-door increases and so-called convenience charges may apply, so it’s best to call ahead. Editor: BEN WATERHOUSE. Stage: BEN WATERHOUSE (bwaterhouse@wweek. com). Classical: BRETT CAMPBELL (bcampbell@wweek.com). Dance: HEATHER WISNER (dance@wweek.com). TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, submit information at least two weeks in advance to: bwaterhouse@wweek.com.
THEATER 20 Erotic Shorts
The Working Theatre Collective presents 20 short plays on erotic themes by local writers. Eff Space, 333 NE Hancock St., Studio 14, 893-9075. 8 pm Feb. 17-20. $10-$15 sliding scale.
Ana en el Trópico
Miracle Theatre Group presents the Spanish version of Nilo Cruz’s 2002 drama about the lives of the employees of a mom-and-pop cigar factory in 1929 Tampa. The factory employs a lector, or reader, whose job it is to read to the workers while they roll tobacco, and the play begins when a new lector arrives from Cuba with a copy of Anna Karenina in hand. The novel serves as a metaphor for the obvious, facile conflicts going on in the factory. The play won a Pulitzer, but, with its obviously evil villain and gooey sentimentality, I can’t imagine why. This production is executed pretty well, with some enjoyable performances and a predictably nice lighting design by Peter West, but you can still see the disappointingly easy ending coming from the middle of Act I. BEN WATERHOUSE. Miracle Theatre, 525 SE Stark St., 236-7253. 7:30 pm Thursdays, 8 pm Fridays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays through March 5. $14-$25.
Ann Bogart
[LECTURE] The artistic director of SITI Company gives a talk, titled “What Are We Doing?,” on the meaning and methods of contemporary theater. Reed College Theater, Southeast 28th Avenue and Botsford Drive, info.reed. edu/theatre/tix.taf. 7 pm Friday, Feb. 18. Free. Reservations recommended.
The Comedy of Errors
Philip Cuomo directs the students of Portland Actors Conservatory (plus a few guests) in the lesser of Shakespeare’s mistaken identity comedies. It ain’t Twelfth Night, but it’s still pretty great. Portland Actors Conservatory, 1436 SW Montgomery St., 274-1717. 7:30 pm ThursdaysSaturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes March 6. $13-$25.
Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre?
Fret not—though billed as a mixedmedia performance, Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theater? is nowhere near as intimidating as that might sound. It runs as a fairly straightforward theatrical performance, with periodic musical interludes and a constant spool of images projected onto the back wall of the stage. This approach is a bit unfortunate—the images, painted in 1941 by Salomon, a 24-year-old German Jewish refugee hiding in southern France, are the show’s most compelling component, yet they’re relegated to scenery. Salomon, who died in Auschwitz, had a richly evocative style, with the bold colors and strokes of German expressionism and elongated figures reminiscent of Modigliani. But Jewish Theatre Collaborative’s adaptation of her proto-graphic novel (many of Salomon’s 700 paintings are overlaid with text) feels heavy-handed. Salomon’s vivid images are stirring in their own right, rendering the overwrought theatricality unnecessary and sometimes downright jarring. REBECCA JACOBSON. Disjecta, 8371 N Interstate Ave., 512-9582. 8 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 18-20. $15-$20.
Diary of a Worm, a Spider and a Fly
Portlandia script-writers, take note: Youngsters arriving early for this enviro-friendly Oregon Children’s Theatre musical can spend time in the lobby fashioning objects out of foam, cardboard tubes and old DVDs. Yes, the setting has a greener-than-thou,
spoof-friendly vibe. But the worldpremiere musical itself is a charming tale with clever staging and colorful costuming that gets giggles from kids (the ideal age range is somewhere between 4 and 10) by playing to the punny over the preachy and the sight gag over the serious. As with most musicals there’s the thinnest of plots connecting story lines and providing an excuse for catchy tunes—in this instance the separate stories of, well, a worm, a spider and a fly, each with their own worries as they go to school. Along the way, the audience learns cool stuff like the fact that a worm is a hermaphrodite and flies eat with their feet. BEN AND HENRY STERN. Newmark Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 228-9571. 2 pm Saturday-2 pm Sunday, Feb. 19-20. $13-$26.
Futura
In Jordan Harrison’s dystopic sci-fi drama, a future where the flow of information is controlled by corporations begins with a lecture on the history of typography, delivered with the aid of beautiful slides (designed by Luke Norby) by an acerbic professor (Lori Larsen) to a class of students who have never beheld paper. The lesson was greeted with smug giggles by the audience of design snobs, who grew quiet abruptly at the beginning of the second act, as the play takes a violent and disquieting turn when the professor encounters a terrorist group bent on restoring to humanity its literary birthright. The play is philosophical fiction in the tradition of Farenheit 451 and Brave New World, and Harrison’s premise is as farfetched, and much of his dialogue as blatantly didactic, as those of his predecessors in the genre. But he fully commits to his vision of a world without writing, which is brought vividly to life by director Kip Fagan in this world-premiere production at Portland Center Stage. With the help of Mimi Lien’s origamilike scenic design and Casi Pacilio’s buzzing soundscape, Fagan achieves the solidity of place that so often evades theatrical sci-fi. BEN WATERHOUSE. Gerding Theater, 128 NW 11th Ave., 445-3700. 7:30 pm Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturdays-Sundays, noon Thursdays, except March 17 and 24. $20-$40.
The Hollow
Lakewood Theatre stages Agatha Christie’s 1946 murder mystery set in the well-to-do English countryside. The incestuous Angkatell clan invites the bickering Christows over for weekend distraction, complete with all the eccentric love triangles and Gatsby-esque plights of the disgustingly rich. Things are going swimmingly enough until John Christow is shot dead and—you guessed it— everyone seems equipped with an alibi and a motive. STACY BROWNHILL. Lakewood Center for the Arts, 368 S State St., Lake Oswego, 635-3901. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 18-20. $24-$27.
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Broadway Rose kicks off its 20th season (wow! already?) with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s second big hit, which was actually penned before Jesus Christ Superstar. Broadway Rose New Stage Theatre, 12850 SW Grant Ave., Tigard, 6205262. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays through March 13. $28, $20 for viewers 25 or younger.
Kid Simple
CoHo Productions presents an homage to the radio serials of yesteryear by Jordan Harrison, running concurrently with the playwright’s latest, Futura, at Portland Center Stage. Tom Moorman directs. The CoHo Theater, 2257 NW Raleigh St., 205-0715. 8 pm Thursdays-
Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes March 26. $20-$25.
Live Wire!
The radio variety show has a particularly good lineup at this week’s taping: Timbers owner Merritt Paulson, writer Karen Russell (Swamplandia!), Meadow owner and “sel-melier” Mark Bitterman, poet Moe Bowstern and music from Langhorne Slim and the Cave Singers. Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., 427-8201. 7:30 pm Friday, Feb. 18. $18-$20.
Oh, Coward!
Lakewood Theatre Company presents a very short run of a musical revue of the words and music of Noel Coward. Lakewood Center for the Arts, 368 S State St., Lake Oswego, 635-3901. 7 pm Friday-Saturday, Feb. 18-19. $20.
land made up of puns and sight gags, under siege by the sinister forces of the Black Dog King. Her manic adventures over the following hour share an obsession with puns and a childish delight in violence. While many are enjoyable, most of these scenes, which Neilson created with the help of a troupe of improvising actors, are far too long and loud. At intermission I told my wife I thought it would take a sharp tonal shift to save the evening from being a total waste. That shift came more abruptly than I’d imagined: I won’t spoil the surprise, but suffice it to say that my suspicions that Dissocia was just too nutty to be serious were not baseless, and that Dissocia mostly justifies its mania. BEN WATERHOUSE. World Trade Center Theater, 121 SW Salmon St., 235-1101. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 18-20. $32, $15 students.
Over the River and Through the Woods
Hoboken boy Nick wants to take a job in Seattle, but his grandparents try to use a dame named Caitlin to get him to stay in this comedy by Joe DiPietro. Magenta Theater, 606 Main St., Vancouver, 360-635-4358. 7:30 pm Thursday-Fridays Feb. 17-18 and 24-25; 2 and 7 pm Saturday, Feb 19; 2 pm Saturday, Feb. 26. $12-$15.
COMEDY Doug Benson
The comedian does a live recording of his podcast, Doug Loves Movies. Helium Comedy Club, 1510 SE 9th Ave., 888-643-8669. 7:30 pm Monday, Feb. 21. $20-$25.
The Ed Forman Show
The manic talk show hosts Willamette Week movie critics Aaron Mesh and AP Kryza for “The EDDIES.” A film-themed drinking game is promised. Dante’s, 350 W Burnside St., 226-6630. 9 pm Tuesday. $3.
Laughterglow
Whitney Streed hosts a showcase of stand-up comedians (Virginia Jones,
CONT. on page 46
REVIEW OWEN CAREY
PERFORMANCE
Robin Hood
Northwest Children’s Theatre premieres a new take on the Hood by James Moore. NW Neighborhood Cultural Center, 1819 NW Everett St., 222-4480. 7 pm Friday, 2 and 7 pm Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 16-20. $18-$22.
The Scene
Portland Playhouse presents an entertainment-industry satire by Theresa Rebeck. Portland Playhouse, 602 NE Prescott St., 205-0715. 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes March 13. $16-$21.
Sherman: A Jazz Opera
A new musical by Thara Memory and S. Renee Mitchell about the life of legendary Portland sax man Sherman Thomas and the ’50s jazz scene on North Williams Avenue. Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center, 5340 N Interstate Ave. 7 pm Fridays-Sundays. Closes Feb. 27. $10-$15.
Steel Dragnolias
Key Productions, Live On Stage and Triangle Productions! present a reading of a parody of Steel Magnolias with drag queens. Darcelle XV, 208 NW 3rd Ave, 239-5919. 7 pm Sunday, Feb. 20. $5-$7.50.
Thief River
The latest installment of Profile Theatre’s ongoing project to bring nine Lee Blessing plays to life, Thief River, set in a small Midwestern town, is about two men’s love for each other as they are pulled apart and brought together over the course of their lives. The audience is shuttled back and forth between young Gil and Ray’s initial separation in 1948 and their two subsequent meetings, in 1973 and 2001. Six cast members convincingly represent 12 characters in a single set—a dilapidated house outlined by rafters suspended from the ceiling. Though middle-American homophobia is a common dramatic topic (from Angels in America to Glee), Thief River is surprising, challenging, and absolutely free of cliché. RACHAEL DEWITT. Theater! Theatre!, 3430 SE Belmont St., 242-0080. 7:30 pm Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes Feb. 27. $28, $15 students.
The Wonderful World of Dissocia
This bizarre comedy by English playwright Anthony Neilson contains, among other oddities: a musical dance number featuring soft-shoe, hip-hop and high kicks; a flying car, a speaking goat and polar bear and an accordion-playing hotdog. That is to say, it’s quite the departure from Third Rail’s usual fare. Maureen Porter stars as Lisa, an English musician who is visited by a creepy Swiss gent who tells her the reason she’s been feeling out of sorts: During an international flight, she somehow lost an hour. To get it back, she must travel to Dissocia, a
TODD VAN VORIS AND NATHAN CROSBY
THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE (ARTISTS REP) Martin McDonagh is a prop comedian. Sure, the Irish playwright knows how to put an obscenity to good use, writes excellent punch lines and is a master of the twist ending. But the real reason he’s every hipster’s favorite dramatist is, I am certain, his penchant for onstage mutilation. He’s Gallagher by way of Saw, with human heads standing in for watermelons. McDonagh’s bloodlust is most evident in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a scathing satire of Irish nationalism with a total of six onstage murder victims, two of whom are cats. It’s a hilariously funny script, but most of the laughs come in response to its characters’ blasé reactions to the carnage. Anyone familiar with McDonagh’s work is as eager to be shocked as he is amused, and this production, directed by Jon Kretzu, delivers on the former while neglecting the latter. Thomas Stroppel stars as Padraic, an unhinged second lieutenant for a splinter group of the IRA (from which he is considering splintering yet again) who becomes even more deranged than usual when he hears that his only friend in the world, his cat, Wee Thomas, is ill. Stroppel, tall and muscular, looks like a younger version of Tahmoh Penikett, who played Helo on Battlestar Galactica, and sadly is just as wooden a performer. He dulls Padraic’s astronomical mood swings to a shouty middle ground. Wee Thomas is in fact dead, bludgeoned by forces unknown, but Padraic’s father (Todd Van Voris) and teenage neighbor (Nathan Crosby) are desperate to conceal the fact. They are the fools to this tragedy, incompetently daubing shoe polish on a Wee Thomas stand-in, tormented by the neighbor’s psychotic teenage sister and an assortment of bumbling terrorists, and they are excellent. Whenever they were offstage, I longed for them to return. Where Kretzu has allowed the show’s tension to lag and jokes to fall flat, he has not neglected the gore. Blood spurts, limbs are shattered and bodies pile up with a perverse attention to detail. I have never laughed so hard at the sight of a bloodied cat corpse, and suspect I never shall again. BEN WATERHOUSE.
Come for the laughs, stay for the body-chopping.
SEE IT: Artists Repertory Theatre. 1515 SW Morrison St. 241-1278. 7:30 pm Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2 and 7:30 pm Sundays through March 13. $26-$42, $20 students. Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
Improv comedy inspired by police procedurals, with puppets. The Unscriptables Studio, 1121 N Loring St. 8 pm Saturdays and Friday, Feb 25. Closes Feb. 26. All shows are “pay what you want.”.
The Liberators
The Liberators consistently outperform most of their many colleagues in Portland’s crowded improv comedy community. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 8 pm Friday, Feb. 18. $10-$14.
Miz Kitty’s Parlour
The variety show features comedy by the Bellini Twins. Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 223-4527. 7 pm Saturday, Feb. 19. $12.
Brian Posehn
What I love about Brian Posehn is that he is the polar opposite of the pampered hack comedians who can fill up the Rose Garden (I’m looking at you, Dane Cook). He actually seems like one of us: He collects comic books, loves heavy metal and has a physique he describes as looking like “a bag full of farts.” It helps that he’s one of the funniest comics working today, willing to cart his own missteps and nerdiness as a platform for the amusement of others. ROBERT HAM. Helium Comedy Club, 1510 SE 9th Ave., 888-643-8669. 8 pm Thursday, 7:30 and 10 pm Friday-Saturday, Feb. 17-19. $15-$20.
Your Place or Mine
The Brody crew turn the entire theater into a fourth wall shattering improv performance. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 8 pm Saturdays through Feb. 26. $10, $7 students.
CLASSICAL Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble
This Friends of Chamber Music concert brings soloists from the venerable British chamber orchestra to play music written by a trio of youngsters, including the radiant Octet Felix Mendelssohn composed as a teenager. When another musical kid, Marin Alsop, encountered another work on the program—this one written by a twentysomething Brahms—she said, “for the first time in my life I understood that music has this extraordinary power to move us, to change us, to free us in ways that almost no other experience can match.” It set her on the path to becoming one of today’s most famous conductors. The program also contains another precocious teenager’s work, Shostakovich’s 1925 Prelude and Scherzo. Who says classical music is for old people? Kaul Auditorium at Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock
Blvd., 224-9842. 7:30 pm Friday, Feb. 18. $30-$45.
Choral Arts Ensemble
The Ensemble performs jazz legend Dave Brubeck’s seldomheard choral music in time for the Portland Jazz Festival. Along with Brubeck’s setting of Langston Hughes’ poetry, Hold Fast to Dreams, the concert includes music by Duke Ellington, Arthur Cunningham, Billie Holiday and Cole Porter. First Unitarian Church, 1011 SW 12th Ave., 488-3834. 7:30 pm Saturday, 3 pm Sunday, Feb. 19-20. $10-$15.
Opera Theater Oregon
The company, dedicated to bringing new vitality to classic operas, takes a break from comedy with Jules Massenet’s 1887 weeper, Werther. Opera Theater Oregon artistic director Katie Taylor’s original production is inspired by the glossy, downy-focus lens of 1950s Hollywood melodrameister Douglas Sirk. Directed by Jennifer Wechsler, this new version moves the language to English, the obsessive story to the 1950 Korean War and 1954 New England, and the music to a 15-piece chamber orchestra conducted by Erica Melton. It also includes period news footage and inaugurates the company’s Opera Cinema Strike Force to interpolate Technicolor-style film footage (by Wechsler and Ian Probasco) with the live stage action. Alberta Rose Theatre. 3000 NE Alberta St. 4278201. 7:30 pm Wednesday-Thursday and Saturday, Feb. 16-17 and 19. $15.
Nick Crosa and Evan Solomon
Pink Martini violinist Crosa pairs up with Juilliard School pianist Solomon to perform music by Tartini, Strauss, Bizet, Korngold and Rossini. Kaul Auditorium at Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., 790-2787. 3:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 19. $15-$30.
Oregon Symphony
Resident conductor Gregory Vajda, who gave us a glimpse of his prolific compositional output at a Third Angle concert last year, will conduct his own band, the Oregon Symphony, in another original: 2004’s Duevoe, inspired by his Hungarian homeland’s gypsy music. The orchestra will also play Samuel Barber’s magnificent monument of 20th-century American romanticism, his passionate 1941 Violin Concerto, with one of today’s most compelling fiddlers, Jennifer Koh, returning to town to star. She’ll also play Bartók’s striking 1928 Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra. Then the Europaleoromantics who can’t stand the 20th century, much less the 21st, can remove the earplugs for Dvorak’s dark Symphony No. 7. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 228-1353. 7:30 pm Sunday, 8 pm Monday, Feb. 20-21. $20-$90.
Portland Baroque Orchestra
Ton Koopman helped put the dance back in Baroque music. Like other
pioneers of the historically informed performance movement, the Dutch conductor/organist/harpsichordist returned to the tunings, instruments, and performance styles intended by 18th-century composers. But compared to his predecessors, Koopman’s interpretations excelled in the ornamentation that actual performers would likely have applied to the skeletal scores and the dance rhythms that informed much Baroque music, resulting in lively, vigorous performances by the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, which Koopman founded in 1979. Koopman mentored the Portland Baroque Orchestra in the 1980s and early ’90s before turning over leadership of the orchestra to his star Amsterdam violinist, Monica Huggett. Now one of the world’s preeminent interpreters of Baroque music, he returns for the first time in two decades with his wife and fellow clavier player Tini Mathot to perform the double harpsichord versions of J.S. Bach’s magnificent concertos BWV 1060 and 1062, along with Mozart’s tribute to Bach, the Adagio & Fugue K. 546, and music of Samuel Scheidt and Pietro Locatelli. First Baptist Church, 909 SW 11th Ave., 205-0715. 7:30 pm FridaySaturday, Feb. 18-19. $18-$59.
Portland Columbia Symphony Orchestra
This program of British-influenced works by non-Brit composers begins with Aussie Percy Grainger’s setting of an Irish tune. Mendelssohn’s trip to Scotland’s misty moors inspired a couple of major works, including the German composer’s 1842 Symphony No. 3. Another German romantic composer, Max Bruch, won fame as a conductor in pre-pre-Beatle Liverpool, and it was England’s rapturous reception that vaulted his 1868 Violin Concerto (this weekend’s soloist: JiYun Jeong) to the fame it still enjoys. First United Methodist Church, 1838 SW Jefferson St., 2344077. 7:30 pm Friday, Feb. 18. $10$30.
Portland Opera to Go
Locals get three shots at the company’s touring, kid-friendly production of Donizetti’s endearing The Elixir of Love, hitherto confined to schools and hinterlands. Featuring young local singers, this production, translated, directed and adapted by Kristine McIntyre, is set on a Depression-era farm. Portland Opera Studio Theater, 211 SE Caruthers St., 241-1802. 7 pm Friday, 1 and 4 pm Saturday, Feb. 18-19. $5-$10.
Third Angle
When David Lang won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for music, it marked a turning point. Both for American music, whose establishment finally acknowledged the value of “classical” music influenced by nonacademic, popular sounds after missing the boat with jazz and minimalism for decades, and for Lang, whose gentle winning composition departed from the brash rock and dissonant and minimalist influences he was hitherto best known for. It also symbolized the triumph of the one-time insurgents represented by the New York composers collective Lang co-founded, Bang on a Can, which channeled the creative vitality of rock and other popular influences to win new, broader, younger audiences who cared less about musical categories than musical power. With the composer in attendance, the Northwest’s own preeminent new music ensemble will perform the West Coast premiere of Lang’s surprisingly delicate child, a mesmerizing major work from 2001 that looks back to his childhood, as well as music by three of Lang’s former students, giving us a glimpse of postclassical music’s promising future. Lincoln Hall, Portland State University, 1620 SW Park Ave., 3310301. 7:30 pm Thursday-Friday, Feb. 17-18. $10-$35.
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VISUAL ARTS
FEB. 16-22
= WW Pick. Highly recommended. By RICHARD SPEER. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, submit show information—including opening and closing dates, gallery address and phone number—at least two weeks in advance to: Visual Arts, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: rspeer@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115. Emailed press releases must be backed up by a faxed or printed copy.
NOW SHOWING Mosa Musi
In the exhibition, Mosa Musi, Nicholas Knapton invigoratingly fills an entire wall with a grid (10 paintings across, five down) of paintings built around the motif of rectilinear abstraction. The geometric rigor of Construction Collage Series is counterbalanced by the sensuality of the beeswaxdipped paper upon which the compositions were painted. On an adjoining wall, Matt Leavitt’s prints of sumi-e ink drawings integrate gesture and whimsy. A small tree motif sprouts from each gesture, reminding us that an artist’s ability to create a meaningful gesture is as organic as a tree or flower sprouting from the earth. ANKA, 325 Northwest 6th Ave., 2245721. Closes Feb. 25.
Yoko Hara and Seiichi Hiroshima
Following a bizarrely beautiful exhibition of intaglio prints by Japanese artist Yuji Hiratsuka, Augen shows prints from Japanese printmakers Yoko Hara and Seiichi Hiroshima. Hara’s works are ethereal and abstract, while Hiroshima’s prints incorporate animals such as frogs, dragonflies and crickets, superimposing the creatures’ forms atop elegant vertical columns. Augen DeSoto. 716 NW Davis St., 546-5056. Closes Feb. 26.
Carol Benson
Carol Benson’s works walk the line between painting, sculpture and fashion. With shreds of acrylic paint pieced together like a tattered quilt, many of the works are hung up like Renaissance tapestries or ceremonial Asian robes. Because the forms repeat throughout the show, each individual piece becomes a focal point of color palette rather than form: variations on black/white, black/red, periwinkle/ aqua and rust/sienna. The works on tattered canvas are more effective and polished than Benson’s oil-on-muslin works, which come across as gimmicky. Blackfish, 420 NW 9th Ave., 224-2634. Closes Feb. 26.
Matt Eich, Mark Cohen
Matt Eich’s Carry Me Ohio introduces us to the habitués of a depressed mining town: shirtless youths roaming the streets, stray dogs and lots of people burning trash in their back yards. The show makes for a tidy comparison/contrast with its companion exhibition, Mark Cohen’s Grim Street, which documents the city of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Although the environs are similarly lackluster, Cohen’s pre-focused, arbitrary “grab shots” have a Pop Art-like glamour that is
miles away from Eich’s documentarian dirges. The most artful of Cohen’s prints, Lillian Salting, shows a shaker sprinkling salt into a pot of boiling water, the steam and salt crystals merging midair, glitterlike, to romanticize an otherwise prosaic task. Blue Sky, 122 NW 8th Ave., 225-0210. Closes Feb. 27.
Martha Wallulis
inFORM
Six recent graduates from art programs in Chicago, Canberra and London use kiln-formed glass to create diverse aesthetic visions in inFORM. The schools—Art Institute of Chicago, Australian National University and the Royal College of Art—are renowned for their programs across a variety of media, including glass. One notable inclusion is longtime Portlander Abi Spring, who has returned to the Northwest after a multi-year sojourn to Australia to study at A.N.U.’s worldclass glass workshop. Before she left, Spring was known for her minimalist works in crushed marble and other materials, which she exhibited most prominently at Chambers. It will be intriguing to see how she has translated her vision into the medium of glass. Bullseye, 300 NW 13th Ave., 2270222. Closes April 9.
Frank Hyder
Philadelphia-based artist Frank Hyder is treated to a mini-retrospective of artwork spanning from 1988 to 2011. Much of the work was inspired by a mid-1990s trip to the Amazon rainforests of Venezuela. The fierce visages that inhabit his paintings on Plexiglas are neo-primitivist depictions of indigenous tribespeople, enlivened with a multi-layered presentation which imparts an aquatic or jewellike appearance. Hyder’s more recent work focuses on koi, with silver leaf and resin conveying a sense of depth. Butters, 520 NW Davis St., 248-9378. Closes Feb. 26.
Daido Moriyama
Clad only in a flimsy skirt or negligee, a young woman runs barefoot up a dingy alleyway. Trash and jagged metal threaten to lash her feet and legs as she is illuminated by the crude light of a camera flash. Is the girl in photographer Daido Moriyama’s print, Yokosuka, running to someone or from someone? The undercurrent of danger and the unknown permeating the piece extends into many other works in the well-curated Photographs from Five Decades. The Tokyo-based photographer is at his strongest when he trains his lens on subject matter in which everyday settings and actions take on sinister symbolic overtones. Charles A. Hartman, 134 NW 8th Ave., 287-3886. Closes Feb. 26.
Winter Group Exhibit
When she paints figuratively, painter Martha Wallulis often incorporates archetypal imagery, sometimes borrowing from the ancient mythology of her Greek heritage. Her gifts for color and miasmic atmospherics, however, shine most brightly in her abstract compositions. In an untitled acrylic house-paint painting on panel, she overlays a chartreuse background with counterintuitive horizontal drips and a central nucleus in vivid maroon. There is a swooning, wavelike quality to the work, which beckons the eye further into the picture plane. Darras, 625 NW Everett St., No. 115. Closes Feb. 28.
Stephen O’Donnell’s oil painting Plus Féroce que ce qu’on Pourrait Croire numbers among the highlights in the gallery’s annual winter group show. The subject of O’Donnell’s portrait, dressed in Baroque finery and elaborate wig, dares the viewer to quibble with the piece’s title, which, translated from the French, means “tougher than he looks.” Meanwhile, Laura RossPaul’s Night Light portrays a female figure seemingly juggling fire. Wellcomposed and imaginative in RossPaul’s classic myth-meets-mysticism style, the painting glints and shimmers with metallic paint embedded in a waxy finish. Froelick, 714 NW Davis St., 222-1142. Closes Feb. 26.
Boomshakalaka
On the heels of Compound Gallery’s January exhibition focusing on all things Trail Blazer, Land Gallery mounts the invigoratingly entitled Boomshakalaka: A Show Celebrating the Portland Trail Blazers. Thirty artists, designers, illustrators and photographers contribute their unique takes— some serious, others irreverent—on the athletic and civic phenomenon the Blazers have become. Land Gallery, 3925 N Mississippi Ave., 451-0689. Show runs Feb. 18-March 13.
For more Visual Arts listings, visit
REVIEW
CHRISTINE CLARK/JAY STEENSMA NINE GALLERY/PULLIAM GALLERY
Donne poems. Like the incremental progression of life itself, Clark’s exacting forms are both romantic and tragic. They are ciphers and shells, wiry and porous; even the ones that look like vases or pitchers When you look at the bric-a-brac collecting dust could not for a second hold water. They are empty at your pad—those tacky souvenirs from your trip inside, save for the associations, symbols and sentito Mexico, family photos you inherited when Aunt ments we fill them with—until we have forgotten Betty died, books you bought years ago but never got their meanings, or are ourselves forgotten. Impermanence is around to reading— also a theme in the do you find yourwork of the late Jay self wondering, Steensma (1941“ Why do I have 1994) at Pulliam this crap?” Artist Gallery. Steensma Christine Clark often painted on poses that question, paper bags, turning in a fashion, in her this highly disposelegant installation, able material into Collective Object, at timeless reflections Nine Gallery. Clark on landscape, animal has fashioned 62 life and nature itself. objects out of powSteensma’s paintings der-coated steel of birds exude eerie wire, welded into charm, rendered shapes resembling CHRISTINE CLARK’S COLLECTIVE vases, decanters, OBJECT AT NINE GALLERY iconically in a crude but effective neosculptures, gourds and masks—the sorts of things you’d Two Portlanders con- primitivist style. His mountainscape, Love Butte, speaks to the simultanekeep in a curio cabinet for years, gradu- front impermanence. ous reverence for, and fear of, nature. ally forgetting where you bought them, when and why. Each of Clark’s objects—immacu- Confident, mysterious and sinister, these works lately white and lined up side by side on white, wall- demonstrate why Steensma earned a place in the mounted shelves—looks similar to the object to its pantheon of historic Northwest artists alongside right and left, but there’s enough variation between Morris Graves, Guy Anderson and their ilk. We are the pieces such that, once you get 10 or 11 objects here but for a moment, his talismanlike paintings in either direction, each shape has transmogrified seem to whisper, but the mountain remains for an into something unrecognizable from its original eon. RICHARD SPEER. reference point. There is something simultaneously poetic and scientific about the relentless, stepwise progression from one form to the next, something that puts one in mind of Platonic ideals and John
SEE IT: Christine Clark at Nine Gallery, 122 NW 8th Ave., 225-0210. Closes Feb. 27. Impermanence at Pulliam Gallery, 929 NW Flanders St., 228-6665. Closes Feb. 26.
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FEB. 16-22
= WW Pick. Highly recommended. By RACHEL DEWITT. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, submit lecture or reading information at least two weeks in advance to: WORDS, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: words@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115.
FEB
16 J. A. JANCE / Fatal Error (Touchstone)
Buffalo gap We d n e s d ay 2 / 1 6 • 9 : 0 0 p m
Buffalo Band Stand T h u r s d ay 2 / 1 7 • 9 : 0 0 p m
Jamalia & otis Heat f r i d ay 2 / 1 8 • 9 : 0 0 p m
Broken Soviet & HEMa S at u r d ay 2 / 1 9 • 9 : 0 0 p m
anna gilbert & Caleb paul S u n d ay 2 / 2 0 • 5 : 0 0 p m
West Coast Songwriters
Hosted By: Daniel Work T u e s d ay 2 / 2 2 open Mic Night • WIN $50 Sign up @ 8:30 | Music @ 9pm Hosted by: Scott Gallegos 6835 SW Macadam Ave | John’s Landing
Another pulse-pounding tale of suspense in the Ali Reynolds series. WED / 16TH / 7P
CEDAR HILLS
JOSEPH O'CONNOR / Ghost Light (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The author of Star of the Sea returns with a vivid narrative that moves from 1907 Dublin to 1950s London via New York. WED / 16TH / 7:30P
DOWNTOWN
GINA OCHSNER / The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (Mariner) Oregon Book Award-winning novel about a crumbling apartment building in post-Soviet Russia with a ghost who wonít keep quiet. THU / 17TH / 7P
CEDAR HILLS
URBAN WAITE / The Terror of Living (Little Brown) A new suspense novelist debuts with this Puget Sound-set thriller. THU / 17TH / 7:30P
HAWTHORNE
WALTER COLE AND SHARON KNORR / Just Call Me Darcelle (Createspace)
A memoir about a shy boy from Linnton who grew up to become Portlandís beloved female impersonator. THU / 17TH / 7:30P
DOWNTOWN
KAREN RUSSELL / Swamplandia! (Knopf)
Debut novel from the author of the universally heralded short-story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. FRI / 18TH / 7:30P
DOWNTOWN
MICHAEL SCHEUER / Osama bin Laden (Oxford University) From the first head of the CIA's bin Laden Unit, a closely reasoned portrait of this notorious figure. Cosponsored by the World Affairs Council of Oregon. SUN / 20TH / 7:30P
DOWNTOWN
JONATHAN EVISON / West of Here (Algonquin) A story set in a fictional Washington town, recreating and celebrating the American experience. MON / 21ST / 7:30P
DOWNTOWN
SHARON SALZBERG / Real Happiness (Workman)
KPSU.ORG
Renowned teacher demonstrates why a daily meditation practice results in more resiliency, creativity, peace, clarity, and balance. TUE / 22ND / 7:30P
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DEBORAH HARKNESS / A Discovery of Witches (Viking) Richly inventive debut, equal parts history and magic, romance and suspense. WED / 23RD / 7P
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CEDAR HILLS
MATTHEW MILLER / Fortunate Sons (W. W. Norton) Remarkable tale of boys sent by China to learn the ways of the West. Cosponsored by the Institute for Asian Studies at PSU.
KPSU.ORG 48
WED / 23RD / 7:30P
DOWNTOWN
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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 16 Mountain Writers Series
On the third Wednesday of each month, Portland literary series Mountain Writers brings together two local writers to read at the Press Club. Lee Montgomery and Pauls Toutonghi are this month’s chosen scribes. Montgomery is the author of The Things Between Us: A Memoir and the current editorial director for indie press Tin House Books. Toutonghi teaches at Lewis & Clark and was awarded a Pushcart Prize for his short story “Regeneration.” Good wine and good writing to help you over the midweek hump. Press Club, 2621 SE Clinton St., 233-5656. 7:30 pm. $5 suggested donation.
THURSDAY, FEB. 17 Gina Ochsner
The past and present are intertwined in Ochsner’s new novel, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight. A ticket-taker at a Moscow art museum, Olga is troubled by the ghost of her deceased husband who haunts her crumbling apartment, and elevated by a young, hopeful coworker at the museum. Nationally recognized author Ochsner is a two-time Oregon Book Award winner and recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction. Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd., Beaverton, 228-4651. 7 pm. Free.
FRIDAY, FEB. 18 Karen Russell
Just before her appearance on Live Wire! at the Alberta Rose Theatre, Russell—author of beloved shortstory collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves—will read from her new novel, Swamplandia!, set in Florida’s Everglades. The story follows Ava Bigtree as she tries to save her family, which is slowly sinking into the surrounding swamp. According to the Powell’s website: “A luminous and enchanting exploration of grief, love and family, Swamplandia! is an original and gorgeous read from an incredibly talented young author.” Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm. Free.
SATURDAY, FEB. 19 Aaron Renier and Jason Shiga
“Walker Bean never wanted to be a high-seas pirate waging a pitched battle against the forces of the deep. It just worked out that way.” Aaron Renier’s newest comic, The Unsinkable Walker Bean, is about a scrawny guy’s involuntary pirate voyage. Jason Shiga’s latest comic, Empire State: A Love Story (Or Not), is about a heartbroken young man’s desperate attempt to win back his girlfriend by reliving the skyscrapertop confession of love from Sleepless in Seattle. Renier and Shiga appear at Reading Frenzy to sign comic books and talk about their newest works. Reading Frenzy, 921 SW Oak St., 274-1449. 7 pm. Free.
Cleveland Confidential Book Tour: Cheetah Chrome, Mike Hudson and Bob Pfeifer
The news of a musician becoming a writer is hardly groundbreaking, but when the musicians in question are Cheetah Chrome (Rocket From the Tombs, Dead Boys) and Mike Hudson (the Pagans), their stories might actually be worth listening to. The two are joining former Human Switchboard leader Bob Pfeifer for what is being dubbed the Cleveland Confidential Book Tour. The three
will read pieces from their respective books, and hopefully we’ll get to hear some stripped-down renditions of their classic tunes as well. The highlight though will surely be the bawdy, sordid tales of the early days of the U.S. punk scene, anecdotes both hilarious and cautionary. Show includes performances by Loose Values and Chemicals. ROBERT HAM. East End, 203 SE Grand Ave., 232-0056. 9 pm. $6.
TUESDAY, FEB. 22 Oregon History Night:
John Reed and Louise Bryant
Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty fall in love, move to Russia, and find themselves in the middle of a revolution in the communist love story Reds. The real husband-and-wife journalist duo, John Reed and Louise Bryant, first fell in love in Portland in 1914. Oregon Encyclopedia, the online database of Northwestern info, is kicking off its Oregon History Night series by telling their story. Retired political science professor and Portland resident Michael Munk will present a lecture titled, “’I’ve Found Her at Last’ The Love Affair of 20th Century Portland: John Reed and Louise Bryant.” McMenamins Edgefield, 2126 SW Halsey St., Troutdale, 669-8610. 6:30 pm. Free.
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REVIEW
WALTER COLE JUST CALL ME DARCELLE “The first time I put on a dress, I was 37.” That’s a surprising statement coming from female impersonator Walter Cole, better known as Darcelle XV, doyenne of the West Coast’s longest-running drag show and Portland’s unofficial welcome wagon for the past four decades. The Oregon-born Cole turned That’s no lady; that’s Darcelle. 80 last year and the slim volume Just Call Me Darcelle (Createspace, 134 pages, $14.95), written with Sharon Knorr (the director of his 2010 one-man show of the same name), chronicles the meandering path a shy, “four-eyed sissy boy” took from living as a suburban Southeast Portland married father of two to riding atop a stagecoach in feathers as the grand marshal of Portland’s Gay Pride Parade 2010. Cole is not a born writer. The memoir reads like a plainspeak transcription: pinballing between his memories of his family and poor childhood in Linnton and his first experiences in drag; his days in the Army during the Korean War to meeting his loving longtime partner and creative collaborator, Roxy. Despite book’s the bland tone, the value of Cole’s staggering 75 or so years’ worth of recollections of PDX culture and nightlife are incalculable. His descriptions of slurping pork noodles in Old Town while eyeballing Chinese merchants in traditional garb with his mom in the 1930s, or memories of Magic Garden as a lesbian club in the 1960s, are fascinating. In one passage, he remembers the Hoyt Hotel’s Roaring 20s club, a grand ballroom in Northwest Portland that had a full-time harpist for the ladies’ room and a 12-foot-long trough urinal decorated like a rock grotto for the men, festooned with fake forest animals with targets on their heads. (“[There was also a] life-sized replica of Fidel Castro...” Cole remembers. “If a gentleman could hit that open mouth, lights would flash, sirens would go off and a huge waterfall would flush the entire urinal.”) Although Darcelle is best known for her larger-than-life persona (“sequins on the eyelids, lots of feathers, big hair, big jewels, and lots of wisecracks,” as Cole puts it) what emerges from the book is a portrait of an energetic businessman whose desire for a life less ordinary catapulted him from a job at Fred Meyer to become the proprietor of a counterculture coffee shop, an after-hours jazz club, a rough-’n’-ready “dyke bar” and, finally, a nationally known drag revue, without ever leaving Portland. It’s tough to read Just Call Me Darcelle without yearning for more thoughtful commentary on Portland’s gay community at large. Huge issues, like the fight over Oregon’s anti-gay Measure 9 in 1992, are glossed over in a single paragraph. But, then again, Darcelle and her flock of roller-skating, bawdy-talking dames have always primarily been about putting a smile on locals’ faces. Why should her book be any different? KELLY CLARKE. GO: Cole reads from Just Call Me Darcelle at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Thursday, Feb. 17. Free.
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MOVIES
IMAGES COURTESY OF PIFF
FEATURE
UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES
PIFF ROLLS EAST GHOST MONKEYS, A KILLER TIRE AND OTHER PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL TREATS.
BY WW M OV I E STA F F
screen@wweek.com
Gephyrophobia: the fear of crossing bridges. This malady has longed plagued the eastside cinephile during the Portland International Film Festival. But not this year. In its second week, PIFF jumps the Willamette River to two fresh venues, CineMagic and the Hollywood Theatre. Some of the festival’s tastiest entrees play in these newly added old rooms this week—including a Palme d’Or winner and the first selection in Dan Halsted’s PIFF After Dark series (not the same movie). Here’s our handbook for what you should see, with or without traversing water.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
97 [THAILAND] I still care about movies because once in a while something extraordinary like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives comes along, and I fall in love with the medium all over again. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Canneslaureled cinematic séance is a work of terrifying beauty, a slow initiation into a spirit world of dead lovers, ghost monkeys and amorous catfish. Weerasethakul handles such outlandishness with a deadpan reverence befitting a movie that is actually about one man’s date with death; the surreal flourishes, all of them sublime, are essentially stand-ins for the universal mystery that Jeff Mangum once nipped in the bud thusly: “How strange it is to be anything at all.” It is screening twice. See it twice. CHRIS STAMM.
WH, 8:45 pm Wednesday, Feb. 16. CM, 9 pm Friday, Feb. 18.
Come Undone
21 [ITALY] Want to feel bad for two married folks who jaunt off to fuck in love motels while their families wait at home? Director Silvio Soldini sure does, and he spends the overlong entirety of Come Undone trying to make us sympathetic to pretentious adulterers depressed because they can’t kiss in public. Here’s a thought: Get a fucking divorce. Otherwise, you can cry your eyes out all the way to the beautiful Tuscan chalet where your hot, naked lover is waiting to please you. (But at least she feels bad after she comes for a third time.) AP KRYZA. BW, 9 pm Wednesday, Feb. 16 and 2:45 pm Saturday, Feb. 16 & 19. CM, 6 pm Tuesday, Feb. 22.
La Pivellina
[AUSTRIA] Like PIFF darling Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo), directors Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel are interested not in concrete narrative arcs and showy scenes, but rather in fly-on-the-wall looks at life. La Pivellina follows the story of an elderly circus performer who comes across an adorable, abandoned toddler and decides to take her into a trailer-park community until her mother comes back. There are ample moments of sweetness throughout the film, particularly in the relationships between neighboring outcasts. But unlike Bahrani’s works, La Pivellina is a tad too episodic and unfocused to burrow under the skin. AP KRYZA. BW, 9:15 pm Wednesday and 8:45 pm Thursday, Feb. 16-17. 65
Illegal
[BELGIUM] When we meet Tania (Anne Coesens), she is melting the whorls on her fingers down to blank tissue in order to avoid detection by the authorities. Things, as things are wont to do, only get worse from there: Tania, an undocumented Russian immigrant, is eventually arrested and threatened with deportation, and her refusal to name herself or her country of origin lands her in a purgatory of institutional confinement and bureaucratic grief. Although director Olivier MassetDepasse lets some light slip in intermittently, Illegal is a downbeat beatdown of a film that makes up for its predictability with truly frightening glimpses of the kind of panic only prisoners feel. CHRIS STAMM. BW, 7 pm Thursday, 6:45 pm Friday and 7:15 pm Saturday, Feb. 17-19. CM, 9 pm Tuesday, Feb. 22. 76
The Last Report on Anna
[HUNGARY] Director Márta Mészáros’s latest is irreproachably cosmopolitan, and as thickly Hungarian as “paprika potatoes from a pan”—which is pretty damn folksy Hungarian, if the film is to be trusted. It probably is: Mészáros did her time behind the Iron Curtain, and her drama about principled exile Anna Kéthly (Enikö Eszenyi) 63
THE HOUSEMAID is heartfelt. It’s worthwhile just for the vintage footage of Budapest. But it’s a creaky drama, with Eszenyi delivering most of her performance in old-age pancake makeup. AARON MESH. BW, 9:15 pm Thursday, 9 pm Saturday and 4 pm Sunday, Feb. 17 & 19-20.
My Tehran for Sale
70 [IRAN] Directed by Persian poet Granaz Moussavi, the film shows Marzieh, a young actress, struggling to emigrate, be an artist, live as a person at all amid a sort of unrelenting grayness: all haunted eyes and haunting lack of future or present. Strange that what this Iranian film should recall most for me is the East German New Wave—The AllAround Reduced Personality: Redupers, say, or Kluege’s Yesterday Girl—but the types of isolation and repression that My Tehran for Sale depicts, and the freeflowing, culturally literate society that exists underground or at the margins, do lead right back to the old Berlin in its affecting, symbolic bleakness. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. BW, 6:15 pm Friday and 5:15 pm Sunday, Feb. 18 & 20.
The Whistleblower
43 [CANADA] To remain effective, human-rights violation bloodboilers have been forced to up the ante on atrocity. The Whistleblower, a Rachel Weisz vehicle about U.N. security contractors aiding sex trafficking in Bosnia, is very effective: Enslaved teenage girls are sodomized with pipes. As sadism piled atop debasement, I began desperately hoping the movie would hop genres and become Rachel Weisz’s Death Wish. But since this is outrage porn for a better sort of audience, she reports the crimes to her superiors, then to the press. I am not a better sort of audience. “You want blood on your hands?” a peacekeeper asks Weisz. Yes yes yes yes yes. Kill ’em all, and let the U.N. sort ’em out. AARON MESH. CM, 6:15 pm Friday, noon Sunday and 5 pm Monday, Feb. 18 & 20-21.
The Housemaid
40 [SOUTH KOREA] Im Sang-soo’s tepid remake of 1960’s The Housemaid,
a nanny-vs.-wife showdown played out in the sterile spaces of the super rich, is the kind of erotic thriller they just don’t make anymore, and for good reason: The Skinemax boning is as timidly prurient as a drooling peeping tom, the women are essentially birth canals and blowjob queens, and logic is summarily dismissed in the final 10 minutes so that something interesting can finally happen. If you missed the whole Hand That Rocks the Fatal Basic Animal Instincts thing that crawled out of Joe Eszterhas’ mullet in the early ’90s, or if you are 11 and stupid and haven’t figured out how to find porn on the Internet yet, check it out. CHRIS STAMM. BW, 8:15 pm Friday, Feb. 18. CM, 8:45 pm Saturday, Feb. 19.
How I Ended This Summer
75 [RUSSIA] Constant drab light, isolation and cold lead to a sort of insanity, or so every film ever made about the Arctic summer has informed us. In How I Ended This Summer, breakdown is already assumed; young geophysicist Pavel arrives in the remote Russian north to do a tour at a meteorological station with an old hand, Sergei, who is quickly revealed to be an intolerant sadist. The film, though much of it is almost as tedious and cramped as the life it signifies— watch out for the pathetic fallacy, here—becomes much more, by its end, than the tense psychological thriller originally implied by the setup: something, perhaps, human, and ingrained deep into emotional memory by that very same tedium. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. BW, 9:15 pm Friday and 1 and 5 pm Sunday, Feb. 18 & 20.
Rubber
86 [FRANCE] Rubber is essentially a road film following the curious Robert across the scorched Arizona desert on a voyage of precocious discovery. Robert has the ability to make obstacles explode using telekinesis. Oh, and he’s a tire. Beginning with a hysterical monologue about the importance of
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FEATURE CONT. cocks a subplot about the Kenyan civil war into what is essentially a Lifetimegrade morality play about bullying and revenge; the grisly images of tribal violence—sliced bellies, dead kids, maggot-infested wounds—amount to little more than decontextualized shock tactics, nasty breaking-news reports interrupting the regularly scheduled soap opera about pubescent sadism. At least I finally know what an Iñárritu film stripped of coincidence and temporal tomfoolery would be like: still empty, only more so. CHRIS STAMM. CM, 4:45 pm Sunday, Feb. 20. BW, 7:15 pm Monday, Feb. 21.
Some Days Are Better Than Others
RUBBER nonsense in movies, director Quentin Dupieux (who provides the soundtrack under his better-known name, Dr. Oizo) has crafted an amazingly gonzo picture that loses some footing with a pretentious shtick condemning overanalytical audiences. But whenever the surprisingly engaging Robert sends brain matter flying with Cronenbergian flair, Rubber is a nutso joy. AP KRYZA. HW, 11:30 pm Friday, Feb. 18.
7 Days in Slow Motion
55 [INDIA] Ah, what’s life without a film-festival crowd pleaser? This one’s cute, full of children and in love with film and infinite possibility, and thus eminently watchable despite its stereotype-driven farce, hilariously bad acting from the token Bollywood-based white guy and implausible-to-the-point-ofretarded happy ending. But let’s not mistake what we’re dealing with, here. As for the plot? A kid loves film, and decides to make one despite the hammering of his all-too-shrewish mother about his studies, which he neglects entirely. Young Ravi’s film turns out to be sentimentally satisfying in its way— much more so, in any case, than the grimly sketchy comedy that surrounds it. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. CM, 1:45 pm Saturday, Feb. 19. BW, 12:15 and 3:45 pm Sunday, Feb. 20.
The Arbor
87 [GREAT BRITAIN] A prismatic docudrama-cum-oral history delving into the short and sad life of playwright Andrea Dunbar and the fractured family she left in her wake, The Arbor stages “interviews” with actors lip-syncing along to audio interviews with the real Dunbars. It also weaves in old BBC footage and street-theater versions of Andrea’s autobiographical play, The Arbor, for good measure. Split the difference between a profoundly depressing live-action version of Aardman’s Creature Comforts and the postmodern antics of William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm for some idea of what you’ll be getting into here. The final act veers into maudlin anti-drug PSA territory, but director Clio Barnard is performing a high-wire dance, and she earns a few sways and stumbles along the way. CHRIS STAMM. BW, 2:15 pm Saturday and 8 pm Sunday, Feb. 19-20.
Poetry
[SOUTH KOREA] How’s this for a game of exquisite corpse? The title card of Lee Chang-dong’s drama is juxtaposed against a schoolgirl’s body floating facedown in a river. Her death is quickly traced to the actions of a pack of teenage boys—one of the little rapists is the grandson of Mija (Yoon Jeonghee), a housekeeper who joins a poetry class even as she begins to forget nouns. The story line is very close to last year’s Mother—together, the two films suggest the fears of a Korean generation losing control of carelessly savage offspring—but Poetry seems designed to test an audience’s patience, with long shots of breeze on water and irresolute scenes of people trying to give voice to violent emotions. In other words, it’s a 75
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delicate turd blossom. AARON MESH. WH, 2:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 19. BW, 6:30 pm Monday, Feb. 21.
Russian Lessons
52 [NORWAY] Diving headlong onto the front lines of the bloody and brief conflict between tiny Georgia and juggernaut Russia, documentarians Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov offer an intimate look at the lives cratered by violence between neighboring countries. In addition, the film effectively calls bullshit on Russia’s media claims of casualties and causality. Pity, then, that both directors feel the need to include themselves so much in the story. With all the suffering, tragedy and humanity they uncover, it’s safe to assume the directors were affected by what they saw—but in case that was unclear, they make sure to let us know, often. AP KRYZA. BW, 4 pm Saturday and 4:45 pm Monday, Feb. 19 & 21.
How to Die in Oregon
92 [PORTLAND] If one of the afflictions of human life is being the only animal that knows it’s going to die, it is some small consolation to choose the day and the hour. Peter D. Richardson’s expertly wrenching documentary shows Oregon’s Death With Dignity in its quiet rites; it opens and closes with the sound of a spoon clinking as it stirs Seconal into a glass. In between, the doc gives an intimate but not invasive account of the final months of Cody Curtis, a gorgeous, gentle Portland woman with inoperable liver cancer. The film is devastating and eloquent, its title indicating not an instructional video, but a wish for a way we all might face the inevitable. AARON MESH. WH, 5:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 19. BW, 9:30 am Sunday and 7:30 pm Monday, Feb. 20-21.
My Joy
0/100 [UKRAINE] There has never been, even in Sam Peckinpah’s darkest moments, a movie as actively malignant, as unremittingly malevolent toward the human condition as this one. It exists only in highway transit and transience—each driver is Charon, each mile marker the Styx, each brief sign of decency, nobility, pride or respect rewarded with a gunshot or a fatal beating to the sinuses. It is a hollow, useless, awful, brutal, tedious film, hostile to all notions of the human; in the end, only the mute, Dostoyevskian idiot-god survives, fed only on murder. Until now, I had thought only the French could be this hateful, and it had certainly never occurred to me that I could hate a film this much. Also? It was maybe perfect. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. BW, 8 pm Saturday and 6:45 pm Sunday. CM, 2 pm Monday.
The Four Times
62 [ITALY] Slow as a man made out of molasses getting stuck in a syrup spill on planet Butterscotch, The Four Times examines the slow cycle of life, death and rebirth as it is very slowly experienced in a rather slow Italian village. The closest thing to a narrative here involves a tubercu-
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
lar geezer literally eating dust and a baby goat getting lost and looking all emo when night falls. Slowly. Director Michelangelo Frammartino has a sharp Tati-esque eye for widescreen absurdity, but stay away if you don’t like goats and the goat things goats do, because much of the movie involves goats doing goatlike things like standing, eating, being born, looking at stuff, breathing and being goaty. CHRIS STAMM. WH, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 19. BW, 2:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 20.
Short Cuts IV: International Ties
75 This fine survey of animated films from around the world gets off to a too-cute start with Ormie, a four-minute romp of physical comedy about a pig and a cookie jar. It’s about three minutes too long. The Expressionistic gloom of Angry Man is a welcome rejoinder to whimsy: Dedicated to “everyone who is burdened by a terrible secret,” Anita Killi’s dark fairy tale about domestic violence manages to cram real terror and earned redemption into its gorgeous 20 minutes. But the best film here is Sensology, a six-minute abstraction indebted to Oskar Fischinger that captures what a mind’s eye sees when drugs and music start playing with each other. CHRIS STAMM. WH, Noon Sunday, Feb. 20.
Katalin Varga
84 [HUNGARY] With Katalin Varga, director Peter Strickland has directed a rare marvel of a revenge thriller, a road movie in which intricately drawn characters intersect, where violence is often sidestepped in favor of depth and the morality of even the most dastardly human being is given a chance to shine. The forceful Hilda Péter traverses a medieval-looking (though contemporary) Transylvanian countryside with her son, seeking the men who raped and impregnated her years before. It’s a simple premise, but one so hauntingly conceived that it holds you captive until its abrupt and jarring conclusion. AP KRYZA. BW, 1:30 and 6:30 pm Sunday and 7 pm Tuesday, Feb. 20 & 22.
Louder Than a Bomb
72 [CHICAGO] That I did not loathe Louder Than a Bomb is rather remarkable, as it combines three of the most annoying things I can think of: high school, poetry and talented teenagers. But the competition-doc formula perfected by Spellbound and cribbed here could make even my dog’s slow death engaging and exhilarating, so I found myself rooting for these baby Baudelaires as they prepared for the titular poetry slam tournament. It’s cinematic comfort food smothered in cheese, and while it’s frightfully familiar stuff, it is a million times better than reading poetry or going to high school. CHRIS STAMM. BW, 2:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 20. WH, 5 pm Monday, Feb. 21.
In a Better World
[DENMARK] Susanne Bier’s turducken of shamelessly overwrought mixed messages goes to risible lengths to locate some salient lesson about the nature of violence. Bier even spatch21
73 [PORTLAND] Experimental documentary auteur Matt McCormick (The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal) ventures into dramatic filmmaking and, thankfully, leaves none of his obsessions behind. A study in seasonal affective disorder openly influenced by the early work of David Gordon Green, Some Days gets moving if uneven performances from James Mercer and pre-Portlandia Carrie Brownstein, but it’s more than an indie-rock mood ring: Notice the attention McCormick pays to kaleidoscopic soap-film images and condemned houses. With a lovely turn by Renee Roman Nose as a thrift-store worker who will not abandon an urn, the film clings to fragile things worth caring for. AARON MESH. WH, 7:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 20.
A Somewhat Gentle Man
60 [NORWAY] Another entry in the Scandinavian cinema of filthy snow and facial expressions rationed like sugar in wartime, Hans Petter Moland’s aging-hoodlum comedy allows some wan light to seep in. Stellan Skarsgård (have you noticed he’s become a dead ringer for Werner Herzog?) is a jailed murderer. When he’s paroled after 12 years, everybody he knows expected him to get out at some other time— Thursday, maybe?—indicating, along with the title, certain social expectations of him. There’s some marvelously unsentimentalized coitus between odd-looking folks, and it’s a wonder to see Skarsgård’s deadpan mug melt into a helplessly affectionate grin; other than that, the movie is dry ice. AARON MESH. BW, 2:15 pm Monday and 6 pm Tuesday, Feb. 21-22.
Chekhov for Children
22 [UNITED STATES] If somebody asks you if you want to see a video of them way back in their grade-school production of a Chekhov play, and you agree, you’re either a complete sucker or you’re in love with them (in which case you’re a different kind of sucker). As much significance as director Sasha Waters Freyer and onetime play director (and middling essayist) Philip Lopate try to wring from it, a poor interpretation of Uncle Vanya by a bunch of fifth-graders remains stubbornly what it is: a momentary fit of uncomprehending overacting. The only moment of entertainment or human truth comes from a former classmate who declines a phone interview and then laments that he’s depressed and doesn’t even own an operational belt
for his pants. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. WH, 2:30 pm Monday, Feb. 21.
Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
61 [UNITED STATES] Cinematographer Jack Cardiff literally changed the way we see the world. A pioneer whose career spanned more than 70 years, Cardiff became the go-to master of Technicolor and worked with everybody from Alfred Hitchcock to Michael Powell on films as diverse as The Red Shoes and Rambo: First Blood Part II. Extra-credit cinephiles should find great pleasure in Cameraman’s portrait of the artist who saw classic paintings as templates for screen bliss. Everyone else would get a better idea of Cardiff ’s genius by taking a bong rip and watching the trippy Red Shoes. AP KRYZA. BW, 5 pm Monday and 8:30 pm Tuesday, Feb. 21-22.
Short Cuts VI: Everywhere Was the Same 61 Cinema Project’s hit-and-miss miscellany of avant-garde work from around the world borrows its title from Basma al Sharif’s Everywhere Was the Same, a solemn slide show gone apocalyptic and the only film here that delivers the shocks and shivers I crave from experimental work. Also quite good: the eerie animations and tactile abstractions of Joshua Bonnetta’s elegaic Long Shadows, which only wants for the spooky Grouper soundtrack it was clearly born to be blessed by. Like Liz Harris’ melancholy compositions, Bonnetta’s film finds that sweet spot between creepy and sad and stays there just long enough to soak it all up. CHRIS STAMM. WH, 6 pm Tuesday, Feb. 22.
Honey
78 [TURKEY] Few movies this year will have so compelling an opening scene: A man throws a rope into a towering tree and climbs, only to have his supporting branch break, leaving him horizontally suspended, as they say, between life and death. He is an ultra-free-range beekeeper, and the father of the tiny protagonist Yusef (Bora Altaş), who functions as a kind of human Lassie, running to get help. The third film in Semih Kaplanoglu’s backward-running trilogy on Yusef’s life, Honey is distinguished by majestic, verdant mountainscapes, and by holding rigorously to the perspective of child, from which little happens but so much is cause for anxiety. AARON MESH. BW, 6:15 pm Tuesday, Feb. 22.
Crab Trap
35 [COLOMBIA] Daniel (Rodrigo Vélez) really, really wants to get out of a coastal Colombian fishing village. You can’t blame him. There are no fish to be caught. There is no stimulation except an occasional beachside soccer match or a romp with the local leader’s wife. Hell, within the first 10 minutes of Crab Trap, it becomes apparent that virtually nothing is going to happen, except for a few depressing slogs through a Colombian bog in search of fish. But if you like watching a dude smoke a joint while lying in a hammock, this is your movie. AP KRYZA. BW, 6:15 pm Tuesday, Feb. 22.
Portland International Film Festival Ticket Outlet: Portland Art Museum Mark Building, 1119 SW Park Ave., 276-4310, nwfilm.org. General admission $10, PAM members, students and seniors $9, children 12 and under $7, Silver Screen Club memberships from $300. BW—Regal Broadway Cinemas, 1000 SW Broadway CM—CineMagic, 2021 SE Hawthorne Blvd. HW—Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd. WH—Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave. Showtimes listed are for Feb. 16-22 only. WW was unable to screen 14 films by press deadlines and reviewed eight films showing this week in previous coverage; visit wweek.com for full listings.
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IN THEATRES IN 3D ON FEBRUARY 25 Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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MOVIES
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REVIEW
Vengeance
THEY LIVE
FOLLOW THAT BAM BEER AND MOVIE IS FOR REAL. BY AA R O N M E S H amesh@wweek .com
My first favorite movie was Follow That Bird. It starred my favorite actors at the time—a 6-foot, yellow-feathered puppet named Big Bird and his cohorts Oscar the Grouch and Mr. Snuffleupagus—plus it had songs that made me laugh and cry. For distribution reasons I’d be happy to have somebody explain, the Sesame Street motion picture played in theaters as weekend repertory filler about every six months between its 1985 premiere and its VHS release a couple years later. My parents took me to see it each time—I suspect this was the formative cinematic experience for a lot of people in the generation now entering its 30s. Beer and Movie is showing Follow That Bird on a big screen again at the Laurelhurst Theater for a week starting next Friday, Feb. 25, and I watched it again the other night. I had forgotten nothing of the opening scene: Oscar, propped in his trash can in front of the American flag (a parody of George C. Scott’s Patton speech), asking everyone to remain seated for the Grouch Anthem. I still knew all the lyrics: Grouches of the world, unite Stand up for your grouchly rights Don’t let the sunshine spoil your rain Just stand up and complain Let this be the grouch’s cause Point out everybody’s flaws Something is wrong with everything Except the way I sing By common consensus, this is the image of the critic: the grouch, the nit-picker, the unwashed kvetcher who precisely diagrams why your favorite things are secondrate. I unapologetically do a good deal of that in these 52
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
pages, which is why the following piece may be a little...um, uncomfortable? As the co-founder of Beer and Movie—the second year of which kicks into full gear this week—I help select the films, I care passionately about how they’re received, and I want as many people as possible to see them. So, take that bias into account. But I’ve learned a few lessons from working side by side with BAM’s visionary co-founder, Jacques Boyreau, and one of the biggest is that whether a movie is good or bad is possibly the least interesting thing about it, and that filmgoing is more than a qualitative evaluation. This is why it’s infuriating to watch crowds gather to laugh at a picture’s supposed incompetence, and why WW has implemented an amusingly arbitrary numerical scoring system for reviews: If you want to know whether the flick is worth your money, there it is, and we can move on to other, less boring things happening inside the art. For example, this Friday, Feb. 18, BAM begins a weeklong run of six repertory sci-fi and fantasy films at the Academy Theater: The Dark Crystal, Evil Dead 2, The Fifth Element, Ghostbusters, The Neverending Story and They Live. What these pictures share, apart from general implausibility, is an explicit recognition of implausibility, an awareness of their own status as fictions. They don’t ask you to suspend disbelief—they use disbelief as a tool. This thing they do can be as simple as The Neverending Story taking place inside a book, or more complicated, like Evil Dead 2 repeating the plot of Sam Raimi’s previous horror movie, but with the absurdity and gore ratcheted off the charts. In They Live—with apologies to Bill Murray and Milla Jovovich, it’s the Academy entry I’m most excited about—director John Carpenter starts out using artificiality as both subject and cover. (The movie’s extraterrestrial “ghouls” look like wealthy humans, and their true odium is seen only in black-and-white; as Jonathan Lethem points out in his new monograph on They Live, this is an inge-
FOLLOW THAT BIRD
nious way of skirting a special-effects budget.) But eventually Carpenter’s phoniness turns confrontational: “All the sex and violence on the screen have gone too far for me,” says a cadaverous ghoul movie reviewer. “I’m fed up with it. Filmmakers like George Romero and John Carpenter have to show some restraint.” The movie does more than pre-empt criticism—it makes critics part of its rot. Decay is also at the heart of Doghouse, a new zombie film BAM debuts Friday and Saturday, March 18 and 19, at the St. Johns Cinema and Pub. Superficially another jokey Shaun of the Dead knockoff, its gender warfare actually works to judge the quick and the undead—its misanthropy is very real. Which is why we’re showing it as a double feature with Day of the Dead, Romero’s baldest statement that zombies are just like us. Vengeance, another BAM premiere opening at the Laurelhurst on Friday, Feb. 25, even subverts the genre expectations in its title: Johnnie To’s operatic Hong Kong gun fu is a tropical remake of Death Wish, if Charles Bronson woke up halfway through with his memory suddenly wiped of whom he was targeting, and whom he was avenging. As a director, To lives in thrall to the siren song of crime movies (Le Samourai, Manhunter, everything John Woo ever made), and he just wants to find the secret chord. Which brings me back to Follow That Bird. The only thing it has in common with Vengeance (boy, they’ll make a gloriously perverse twin bill) is the most crucial thing: They both revel in their own being. The Sesame Street movie makes references to other films, sure, but mainly it’s so poignantly proud to be a movie. All the best movies are amazed to exist, and they take you back to when you were still amazed they existed, too. So, Portland, here’s my request: This month, go to the movies—BAM movies and others—with the goal of remembering what it’s like to discover a nonexistent place that makes you feel delight. Can I tell you how to get to Sesame Street? Sure: Just let a little sunshine spoil your rain. SEE IT: The Beer and Movie sci-fi and fantasy showcase screens Friday-Thursday, Feb. 18-24, at the Academy Theater. Follow That Bird and Vengeance open Friday, Feb. 25, at the Laurelhurst Theater. Doghouse and Day of the Dead screen Friday-Saturday, March 18-19, at the St. Johns Twin Cinema and Pub. Visit bamfestpdx.com for a full schedule.
FEB. 16-22 = WW Pick. Highly recommended. Editor: AARON MESH. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, send screening information at least two weeks in advance to Screen, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: amesh@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115.
MOVIES
at a very typical time in his life.. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Lloyd Mall, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Bridgeport.
Blue Valentine
Y. RE E. ARM T S SUR ESTO O A R E AL O R T NT E. UEST OLE IC Q N EMPIR A ST P E E A H F T O AND ONOR H E H T
NG, I T A OR LLED ” G I V N -FI RE! “AN I N O I ACTDVENTU A !”
T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y F OX F I L M C O R P O R AT I O N
96 In Blue Valentine’s most iconic
CEDAR RAPIDS
127 Hours
73 Danny Boyle’s new movie, 127
Hours, is in keeping with the happybummer contradictions he established in Slumdog Millionaire: It is based on the true story of Aron Ralston, a rock climber who in 2003 got his right arm pinned beneath a boulder, was stuck in a Utah canyon for five days, and ultimately survived by amputating his own limb with a dull utility tool. However appealing or appalling that premise sounds to you, the one thing that must be said for the movie is that it is never dull. The one thing that must be said against the movie is that it is never dull. Actually, a second thing should be said for 127 Hours: It’s a reminder that no matter how many other hobbies he undertakes, James Franco is primarily one hell of an actor. He’s very good at communicating not merely pain but annoyance—the crisis has all the frustrations of locking your keys in the car, except instead of his keys it’s his arm. The amputation is about as harrowing as you’d expect, but it’s over reasonably quickly—though not before Boyle deploys his insidethe-arm cam, which somehow isn’t quite so upsetting as the outsidethe-arm cam, or the inside-the-Nalgene-bottle-of-urine cam. There are a lot of cams: Boyle still loves the cacophonous montage, and often 127 Hours resembles a Nike commercial more than a drama. R. AARON MESH. Lloyd Mall, Fox Tower.
Another Year
77 “You know me. I’m very much a
glass-half-full kind of girl,” burbles Mary (Lesley Manville) at a summer picnic midway through Mike Leigh’s troubling drama Another Year. By this point, oh, we surely know Mary: We know she’s the kind of girl who cannot leave a glass half-full for long. A prodigious bibber of white wine, Mary has reached an age when another smashup of her life doesn’t feel salvageable, so she clings to her glass as if to keep from drowning—or, more to the point, like she’s trying to drown. Mary doesn’t get much real compassion from her best friends, married couple Gerri (Ruth Sheen) and Tom (Jim Broadbent), who give her refills, a guest room in which to pass out, and so many surreptitious, knowing glances of pity that any self-respecting human being would eventually be ground into a shiny pebble of shame. (Mary is, though it takes a while.) PG-13. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.
Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
Yes, these fat suits are still being made. Not screened by WW press deadlines. Look for a review on wweek.com. PG-13. Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Cinema 99, Movies on TV, Sherwood, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
Biutiful
25 In the decade since making his
sizzling debut with Amores Perros, director Alejandro González Iñárritu has been trapped with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga in a feedback loop of increasingly far-flung and outlandish coincidences. Biutiful is Iñárritu’s first film after his split with Arriaga, and the best that can be said for it is that at least all the coincidences are packed into one character. The guy’s name is Uxbal, and he is played by a goateed Javier Bardem. Living in a squalid corner of Barcelona, Uxbal is a caring single father of two children, who were abandoned by their desperate and appalling bipolar mother. He is dying of advanced-stage prostate cancer; his doctor gives him two months. He runs a black-market goods and labor ring with gay Chinese gangsters. Oh, and he can talk to the souls of the dead. Bardem’s Oscarnominated anguish—it’s an intense but strangely monotonous performance—recalls a blend of Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro’s wailings and gnashings in Iñárritu’s 21 Grams, even down to bits in which the hero goes outside and gazes mournfully upon flocks of birds silhouetted against the evening sky. 21 Grams, however, did not feature a sequence set inside a strip club where the dancers’ ass cheeks are decorated with nipples. You can’t say the filmmaker isn’t innovating new kinds of degradation. By the end of Biutiful, Uxbal and his youngest child have both developed bladder-control problems: The movie winds up with father and son both pissing themselves in the night. It’s another meaningful connection, you see. But I can’t imagine anyone seeing this film by choice. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.
Black Swan
53 Darren Aronofsky opens the Christmas movie season with a clammy, upscale horror flick starring Natalie Portman as the dancer whose metamorphosis from “frigid little girl” to ballet queen—complete with the subsuming of a dark twin—is accompanied by madness and molting. So it’s a literalization of Swan Lake, yeah. But previous stagings didn’t include the Black Swan performing hallucinatory cunnilingus on the White Swan. Aronofsky is a dom of a director, getting his jollies by brutalizing his characters. So it is a natural progression that in Black Swan he explicitly denies Portman sexual release. It’s a movie about a girl who will go crazy if she doesn’t come. Cruelty in pop directors is nothing new—Hitchcock abused his actresses, and a nasty streak fuels David Fincher—but Aronofsky delivers pummelings while exhorting us to think on higher things. He’s the Absent-Minded Sadist, and Black Swan—with its flayed skin and ominous doppelgängers—is Fight Club with feathers. Unfortunately for Portman, she met Darren Aronofsky
sequence, a love-struck Ryan Gosling positions Michelle Williams underneath a heart-shaped wreath outside a florist shop and croons the Mills Brothers’ “You Always Hurt the One You Love” while plucking a ukulele as she tap dances. It’s their first date. You see the longing, curiosity and affection in their eyes. You want it to last forever. You wish you hadn’t seen the hour that preceded it. You know you’ll soon return to the claustrophobic sex hotel where Gosling’s Dean is trying to re-spark his marriage to Williams’ Cindy. You, and they, know their love is all but dead. A film more than a decade in the making, Blue Valentine could well have been torture porn for the heart. Instead, director Derek Cianfrance has crafted a small miracle, a film that reminds us that movies are designed not just to stimulate, but to make us feel—even if those feelings are devastating. Seldom has a film had such an overwhelming sense of reality—aided by a searing soundtrack by Grizzly Bear, and by Cianfrance’s choice to film early encounters with vibrancy and the hotel scenes with frigidity and claustrophobia. It shows us how sometimes the things we love become our own Achilles’ heels, that sweetness can ultimately make the bitter sting even more. From the opening sequence to the beautifully rendered closing-credits montage, it clamps on the heart like an industrial vise, and keeps squeezing long after viewing. It’s a triumph that stings to the core. R. AP Kryza. Fox Tower.
Cascade Festival of African Films
76 Screened with a couple of
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other flicks, including a beautifully Tarkovskyesque science-fiction film called Pumzi, Saint Louis Blues is an amateurish Senegalese musical that seems all the more sincere and affecting for being amateur—it is easy to trust people who sing about their lives out of tune, who dance out of sync in large groups. Everybody is meeting in St. Louis, Senegal, for a wrestling match, and some of them are in love. I sort of felt like I was too; closer to a summer-stock School Daze or the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer than to the hyper-calculated horrors of TV’s Glee, it left me in a wonderful mood. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. St. Louis Blues screens at Portland Community College Cascade Campus’ Moriarty Building at noon Thursday, Feb. 17, and at the Hollywood Theatre at 7 pm Friday, Feb. 18. For full festival listings, visit africanfilmfestival.org.
Cedar Rapids
50 Miguel Arteta (The Good Girl,
Youth in Revolt) hosts a Midwestern potluck of current indie-comedy talent, which means Cedar Rapids is not very ambitious, and only superficially funny. Daily Show alum and Office a cappella specialist Ed Helms plays Tim Lippe, an insurance salesman for a Wisconsin firm called Brown Star—that’s an early sign of the movie’s insistently blue material. Tim leaves his hamlet for the first time to attend a business convention in the titular metropolis; the hotel, with its shabby atrium, chipped woodwork and azure indoor pool, is a marvel of production design by Doug J. Meerdink, who showed similar heartland retro flair for The Informant! Here, it’s wasted on a script that regurgitates the archetypes of The Big Kahuna (John C. Reilly and an excellent Isiah Whitlock Jr. play the loudmouth cynic and the quiet sage), the wistful mood of the convention idyll in Up in the Air, and the terror of adulthood from The 40-Year-
CONT. on page 54 Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
53
MOVIES
FEB. 16-22
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The Green Hornet
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Old Virgin. Then there are a lot of jokes about how flyover-country folks sure do love talking about God before boinking. The idea of a business conference as a grown-up sleep-away camp is a rich one—Anne Heche’s performance best captures that mood of fleeting hallway romance—and Cedar Rapids could have explored it without condescension and derivation. But then it wouldn’t be a Miguel Arteta movie. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.
The Company Men
60 “The things that make us Americans are the things we make. As a people, we do well when we make good things, and not so well when we don’t.” These are not lines from The Company Men—though similar bromides about production are uttered at regular intervals throughout this Ben Affleck layoff drama. They are from a Wieden+Kennedy commercial for the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee, a work of montage less probing than The Company Men, but more stylish and certainly more honest, since it tacitly admits nostalgia for a time when Americans were buying things. Company Men director John Wells also has fond memories of Americans making and buying things—specifically, he recalls when NBC was making ER, and audiences were watching it (and the commercials?). So he has made a big-screen episode of ER in which nobody actually has to go in to work, because their upper-management jobs were eliminated by greedy CEOs. There are good scenes—everything with ex-exec Affleck humbling himself to labor on brother-in-law Kevin Costner’s construction site has real atmosphere—but it is hard to forgive a film for wasting Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper, just as it is very difficult to engage with the selfpity of a picture that considers it a significant humiliation when a man is forced to sell his sports car. Americans made this movie. We are so going to lose to China. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Eastport, Tigard, City Center.
Dennis Nyback’s Forbidden Cinema
[ONE WEEK ONLY, REVIVAL] Local film archivist Nyback presents seven nights of banned and scandalous cinema, from silent-era girls in their undies to angry denunciations of Mickey Mouse. Clinton Street Theater, Friday-Thursday, Feb. 18-24.
The Eagle
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Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
65 Rome’s lost Legio IX Hispana, maybe massacred in Britain around 117 A.D., is suddenly a hot commodity: The Eagle is the second movie in six months about the legion’s shrouded fate, following Neil Marshall’s viscera-spattered Centurion. This one plays like Apocalypse Now: Redux for Kids. It is a far less frank or credible movie than Centurion, but I found I liked it more: Its ideas of honor and thrill are almost exactly what I fantasized about when I was 12 years old, although I was rescuing a naked girl and not a golden bird. Anyway, the movie’s final 30 minutes constitute
an especially rousing chase scene, with red ferns and men painted gray. As the officer who ventures into uncharted glens to find that metal standard and redeem his father’s legacy, Channing Tatum is characteristically stalwart, though the picture belongs to Jamie Bell (almost every picture Jamie Bell is in belongs to Jamie Bell), as a kind of live-action Tintin. He plays an enslaved tribesman whose conflicted loyalties and resourceful tracking make him The Eagle’s obvious if unacknowledged lead. It’s a funny confirmation of Hollywood tropes that the indigenous guy has to play the sidekick, even when the indigenous guy is white. PG-13. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Cinema 99, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
Every Day
Liev Schreiber in a midlife crisis. WW was unable to screen it by press deadlines; look for a review on wweek.com. R. Living Room Theaters.
The Fighter
89 The true story of Lowell, Mass., boxing half-brothers Micky and Dicky, played by Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale—no, no, c’mon, pick the paper back up! The Fighter deserves its shot: Director David O. Russell (Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees) announces his intention from the opening bell to outScorsese Scorsese with sprinting cameras, Stones songs and charismatic fuck-ups. Fleeing formula like Bale’s Dicky runs from cops, the movie is messy and darting and alive. In a film of gorgeously composed shots, Russell’s best trick is to make the fight scenes look exactly like HBO broadcasts—every DV shot halogen-bleached and chaotic. For once, boxing looks like an ugly, painful sport. Wahlberg plays Micky as intriguingly passive and speechless—though it’s hard to imagine any man getting a word in around his bevy of chain-smoking sisters and an exploitative-manager mother played by Melissa Leo. (As his girlfriend, Amy Adams goes downmarket and fierce—and somehow manages to emerge even more adorable.) But the movie belongs to Bale: I had come to suspect he could no longer attempt any role without the Batman scowl as a crutch, but as The Fighter’s drug-addict older sibling, he hops like a wallaby, breaks into off-key crooning, and generally suggests Anthony Perkins on crack. R. AARON MESH. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Mall, City Center, Bridgeport.
Gnomeo and Juliet
The Shakespeare tragedy, interpreted by cartoon garden gnomes. WW did not attend the screening. G. 3D: Pioneer Place, Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Cinema 99. 2D: Lloyd Center, Eastport, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Bridgeport, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
65 Call it a flattening of genre, or maybe just expectations: With Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet, the superhero movie and the movie about a regular guy pretending to be a superhero have become indistinguishable. The caper, from a script by Seth Rogen and Superbad buddy Evan Goldberg, chronicles insouciant layabouts (Rogen and Jay Chou) becoming casual crimefighters; appropriately, the movie is endearingly amateurish. In fact it feels like nothing so much as a “swede,” one of the backyard VHS remakes cobbled together by videostore employees in Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. The look on Rogen’s face throughout is that of a man who can’t fully believe he’s starring in a real action picture. This is pedestrian filmmaking—but it is a cheekily jaywalking pedestrian. The continuity is alarmingly slapdash (in one scene, the characters excitedly recount an act of vandalism that happens 10 minutes later) even as the screenplay blithely ignores the pieties expected from this sort of thing: Rogen’s Hornet and Chou’s Kato don their masks in a fit of petulance, ignore the copious collateral damage in their wake, and learn absolutely no lessons. PG-13. AARON MESH. 3D: Evergreen. 2D: Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Bridgeport, Cinema 99.
Handmade Puppet Dreams
[ONE DAY ONLY] A program of puppet films curated by Heather Henson, Jim’s daughter. Clinton Street Theater, 2 pm Sunday, Feb. 20.
Hood to Coast
55 While Oregon’s 197-mile Hood to Coast Relay race is run every year, this is the only wide-release documentary anybody is likely to make about it,and so contributing to the poignant mood is some regret that the movie isn’t a little better. German TV producer Christoph Baaden has brought his best HD cameramen (and apparently some helicopters) to chronicle the descent from Mount Hood to Seaside; the result is some fluidly shot and edited footage that is going to look very nice in a national park visitor’s center someday. Baaden tracks stories from four teams,including one from Laika (Lucky Lab beer is quaffed; friendly resentment toward Nike is voiced) and another group running in memory of a fallen son and husband—this latter arc is the most affecting and revealing, a reminder that physical strain can become a conduit for catharsis. But Hood to Coast isn’t really structured as a dramatic vehicle so much as an inspirational sporting record; the late Bud Greenspan used to do this sort of thing much better, and in 20-minute segments. No need for a marathon. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.
I Am
29 [DIRECTOR ATTENDING] After
Hollywood director Tom Shadyac developed suicidal leanings while suffering from “post-concussion syndrome,” he set out to heal himself and simultaneously figure out the fundamental problems of the entire world. That would seem a tall order for the man who directed Ace Ventura, Bruce Almighty and The Nutty Professor. But being responsible for Patch Adams apparently garnered him access to a lot of respected brains, yielding an unfocused documentary featuring an epic parade of talking heads from Noam Chomsky and Thom Hartmann to Howard Zinn and Desmond Tutu. The doc flits from decrying man’s separation from the natural world and our obsession with stuff (cue fat Wal-Mart shoppers) and competition to heartening encounters with experiments involving democratic herds of deer, human hearts that can tell the future and Argon atoms. The high point is watching Shadyac control the energy field of a petri dish full of yogurt with his feelings about his lawyer. As uplift-
FEB. 16-22
MOVIES
guy-gets-the-girl films, and the pair trade barbs and banter with believable chemistry. But casting isn’t the culprit here (there are also nice appearances from Nicole Kidman, singer Dave Matthews and Kevin Nealon); it’s the tortuous, tedious plot and hackneyed script wot did it. PG-13. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Cinema 99, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
Justin Bieber: Never Say Never 3D
I AM NUMBER FOUR ing as the doc aims to be, it’s as if Shadyac packed a rifle full of New Age ideologies and sprayed the shot directly at a movie screen. Any one of the ideas examined in I Am could be the solid basis for a film (or already has been). But crammed together they only lead to a headache and the knowledge that Shadyac has grasped the interconnectedness of the world by trading in his 7,000-square-foot, threehouse estate in Beverly Hills for a mobile home in Malibu. Good for him. Now will he please get back to making Jim Carrey talk through his ass cheeks again?. KELLY CLARKE. Screens at Clinton Street Theater at 7 pm Wednesday, Feb. 16, with director Tom Shadyac attending the screening. Free. Opens Friday, Feb. 18 at Fox Tower. Shadyac will also attend select screenings Friday at Fox Tower.
I Am Number Four
65 Disgraced memoirist James Frey teamed up with writer Jobie Hughes to pen this heavy-handed tale of literal—wait for it!—teenage alienation: John Smith (newcomer Brit Alex Pettyfer), displaced from the planet Lorien, hones his superhuman powers while posing as a disaffected Ohio teen. He plays the rebellious 15-year-old to Timothy Olyphant’s impossibly cool mentor figure, with the dialogue occasionally rising above clichéd “parents just don’t understand” territory. The rest of the film devolves into rank-and-file growing pain/intergalactic colonization drama: the popular kids will always heave footballs at the nerds, the ugly-as-sin enemy intruders (in this case, the Mogadorians) will manage to decimate entire planets, but still insist on waging battle on campus. In front of the hero’s requisite artsy girlfriend. Though the story’s authors put a (single) pen name to Four’s source material, Frey’s now-infamous flare for exaggeration is what makes this film most worth watching. He breaks no new ground, but the magic is in the details: the horrifyingly graphic “haunted hay ride” John Smith enjoys with his lady, or the moments of YouTube infamy that he—like so many of his human colleagues—must endure on his path to maturity. PG-13. SAUNDRA SORENSON. Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, Eastport, Division, Cascade, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Stark Street, Tigard, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Evergreen, Hilltop.
The Illusionist
78 The movie follows an aging
sleight-of-hand artist as he plies his trade through postwar Europe. Sad, wordless comedy results from this vaudeville circuit, which is giving way to television and rock ’n’ roll. It’s all in Chomet’s talent for caricature, each character defined by a single, unchanging facial expression. There is an alcoholic ventriloquist, whose lips never move from a happy smile. There is a depressive clown with—what else?—a perpetual frown. There is a beaming, effeminate boy band that is putting them all out of business. Facing rows of empty seats, the magician himself
exudes deadpan nobility, like an undertaker at his own funeral. But when the magician stays at a rural Scottish inn, the girl who cleans his room is sheltered enough to believe in his tricks. When he leaves for the city of Edinburgh, he brings her along, and she discovers more adult kinds of enchantment, like the fancy clothes in a shop window. It’s a gentler version of the story told in Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard and the Coen Brothers’ True Grit. Like those live-action films, The Illusionist creates luminous scenes of spiritual innocence. As a girl loses her faith in rabbits pulled out of hats, her faith in human kindness blossoms, and so does ours. PG. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Cinema 21.
Ip Man 2
76 Anyone looking for a realis-
tic historical biopic probably hasn’t found 2008’s Ip Man, which focused on the gentle martial arts master (an effective Donnie Yen) fighting Japanese tyrants during World War II—usually 10 at a time—and training garment workers to defend themselves against rape-crazy soldiers and marauders. This time around, Ip starts a martial arts school in 1950s Hong Kong, only to draw the ire of kung fu crook Hong (martial arts legend Sammo Hung, also the film’s fight coordinator). Ip, a kindly man who doles out free lessons while his pregnant wife lives in squalor, soon finds himself knee-deep in elaborate fight scenes with rival schools. Barely five minutes pass between melees during the first half, including one pitting Ip against dozens of knife-wielding thugs, and an eyepopper in which Yen and Hung battle atop a small desk. Like Rocky 4, Ip Man 2 is a ham-fisted piece of nationalist propaganda with a thin plot and little character development. Unlike Rocky 4, Ip Man 2 is actually kind of fucking awesome despite its bloated goofiness. R. AP KRYZA. Hollywood Theatre.
Just Go With It
32 Another eminently forgettable Adam Sandler flick to add to a pile that is growing longer and more rapidly than his jowls. In this one, Sandler plays Danny, a womanizing plastic surgeon with a wisecracking assistant (nailed by Jennifer Aniston); he picks up women by pretending to be in a loveless marriage. After falling head over dick for a leggy blonde with a heart of gold (Sports Illustrated covergirl Brooklyn Decker and her everpresent chesticles), the plot grows increasingly tiresome and convoluted, as he tries to convince her that the assistant is his ex-wife, his cousin (Nick Swardson) is a German sheep trader, and everyone ends up travelling to a giant excuse for gratuitous bikini shots (also known as “Hawaii”). There are some brief but shining appearances from the trademark absurdist humor and endearingly bizarre characters that made Sandler’s earlier films so likable, but they’re vastly outnumbered by poo jokes and “man getting hit in the nads” gags. Aniston is definitely one of the strongest female leads in his laundry list of goofy-
The Donny Osmond of our time gets his own concert film. Not screened for critics. G. 3D: Pioneer Place, Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Cinema 99, Hilltop, Wilsonville. 2D: Clackamas Town Center.
The King’s Speech
73 If it is the task of the movie psy-
chologist to tell his patient, à la Robin Williams, that distress is “not your fault”—and to convince us that, yes, that fellow’s problems are not his fault and, by golly, our problems are not our fault—then speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), despite lacking medical qualifications, does a bang-up job of telling stuttering George VI (Colin Firth) that it’s not his fault he is the King of England. The King’s Speech is the sort of awards-season tinsel that opens with a speaking engagement going mortifyingly awry—the second-born son of the House of Windsor, known to his few intimates as Bertie, cannot make it through a sentence without breaking down in heaving gulps—and ends with a heart-swelling proclamation of war. It is presented by the Weinstein Company, which means the movie and its royal dramatic society will be shoved down our throats for the rest of the winter. Yet that is not really the picture’s fault, is it? As Bertie’s tongue loosened, I felt much of my hostility melting away. The film is directed by Tom Hooper, who is just about peerless at period pieces: The Damned United was spellbinding even if you didn’t care about soccer, and The King’s Speech is compelling even if you don’t give a toss about monarchs. “What are friends for?” Lionel asks Bertie. “I wouldn’t know,” says the lonesome heir. C’mon, how are you going to resist that sort of thing?. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Cinema 99, Stark, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
From the director of BRUCE ALMIGHTY, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR and ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE
AIt’sPASSIONATE FILM. what Shadyac was saying all along in his comedies,
“
but this time he’s saying it with feeling.” -Tad Friend, THE NEW YORKER
“The film is crammed with INTRIGUING IDEAS, but Shadyac earns his keep as a filmmaker. He illustrates the serious talk with PROVOCATIVE IMAGES emphasizing our sense of connectedness.” -Patrick Goldstein, LOS ANGELES TIMES
“The transformational movement has a great friend in Tom Shadyac.
ENTERTAINING AND ENLIGHTENING.
‘I AM’ IS A SPARK OF LIGHT AND A WORK OF LOVE.” -Marianne Williamson
What if the solution to the world’s problems was right in front of us all along?
A Film By Tom Shadyac
the shift is about to hit the fan featuring
DESMOND TUTU • HOWARD ZINN • NOAM CHOMSKY COLEMAN BARKS • LYNNE MCTAGGART and THOM HARTMANN
FLYING EYE PRODUCTIONS in association with a HOMEMADE CANVAS PRODUCTION presents a SHADY ACRES FILM Associate Producer NICOLE PRITCHETT Co-Producer JACQUELYN ZAMPELLA Director of Photography ROKO BELIC Executive Producers JENNIFER ABBOTT JONATHAN WATSON Producer DAGAN HANDY Edited by JENNIFER ABBOTT Written and Directed by TOM SHADYAC
STARTS FRIDAY
REGAL CINEMAS
FOX TOWER STADIUM 10 Portland (800) FANDANGO #327
DAILY AT: 12:30, 2:40, 5:00, 7:10, 9:55 PM
Visit iamthedoc.com for more information
TOM SHADYAC IN PERSON Q&A’S AFTER SELECT EVENING SHOWS ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18
The Mechanic
70 Jason Statham is pissed
(again) and out for bloody revenge (again), eviscerating bad guys and automobiles (again) in a quest to murder the shit out of his backstabbing boss (again). Repetition be damned. Statham is official king of ultraviolent throwbacks to vintage action trash—a badass Brit with a Bruce Willis swagger (and hairline) who shoots first and asks questions never. While The Mechanic—a remake of the 1972 Charlie Bronson revenge throwaway—never attempts the lunacy of the Crank films, it’s a pleasant adrenaline shot. For 90 short minutes, Statham and sidekick Ben Foster make inventive use of garbage disposals and fire pokers, slaying enough faceless lackeys to populate a small country. It’s drooling, Cro-Magnon machismo from start to finish—in other words, perfect Statham-flavored popcorn. R. AP Kryza. Lloyd Mall, Clackamas Town Center, Evergreen.
Mel Blanc Project Screening Series
[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] Anne Richardson and Dennis Nyback continue their retrospective on the Oregon-born voice of Bugs Bunny. This program features rare vaudeville clips. The Waypost, 3120 N Williams Ave. 7 pm Tuesday, Feb. 22.
CONT. on page 56
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Publishes March 9, 2011 sPace ReseRvation & MateRials DeaDline Tuesday, March 1 at 4pm Call • 503 243 2122 Email • advertising@wweek.com Willamette Week FEBRUARY 16, 2011 wweek.com
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MOVIES
FEB. 16-22
SHORTSHD.COM/THEOSCARSHORTS
Somewhere
OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS 2011
No Strings Attached
70 In what is basically a full-length enlargement of the “We love you, Natalie!” “I wanna fuck you, too!” exchange from Saturday Night Live, Ashton Kutcher plays Adam, the besotted penis filling Natalie Portman’s Emma on a casual schedule. Directed by Ivan Reitman, No Strings Attached is a little bit granddad’s fantasy of hook-up culture (Kevin Kline even gets it on the regular), but it’s also the first feature script for screenwriter Elizabeth Meriwether, and so contains actual women asked to do more than serve as objects of desire. In fact, it’s Kutcher who’s the ogled beefcake here, and the movie offers the welcome twist of smart indie girls—Greta Gerwig, Olivia Thrilby, Mindy Kaling—taking advantage of puppy-eyed boys. R. AARON MESH. Lloyd Mall, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Cinema 99.
Nothing Personal
SCREEN GEMS PRESENTS A VERTIGO ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTION “THE ROOMMATE” ALY MICHALKA AND BILLY ZANE SUPERVISIONMUSICBY MICHAEL FRIEDMAN MUSICBY JOHN FRIZZELL DANNEEL HARRIS FRANCES FISHER PRODUCED EXECUTIVE WRITTEN BY DOUG DAVISON AND ROY LEE PRODUCERS BEAU MARKS SONNY MALLHI BY SONNY MALLHI DIRECTED BY CHRISTIAN E. CHRISTIANSEN CHECK LOCAL LISTINGS FOR THEATERS AND SHOWTIMES
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6 As Beethoven once wrote, “Duh-duh-duh-duuuuuh!” Polish filmmaker Urszula Antoniak starts off in Amsterdam, with the first of many clichés: the Damaged Divorcée Leaving Her Past Behind. Any more detail would require cultural understanding, so our nameless lady hitchhikes into Ireland and establishes her distrust of other people. But what’s this? A charming cottage! And inside? A lonely widower, with impeccable taste in cooking and compact discs! Enjoy timeless classics like the Two-Note Musical Score, the TimeLapse Sunset and, most amusingly, the Helpful Title Cards (“THE BEGINNING OF A RELATIONSHIP”). As Seinfeld once said, “’Tis a beautiful country, though. Lush, rolling hills, and the peat! Ah, the peat!”. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Living Room Theaters.
Oscar Nominated Short Films 2011
72 Let’s hope screenings of 2011’s Academy Award nominated short films don’t begin with The Confession. If it does, the audience might slip into an incurable funk for the other nine pictures. A tale of Catholic guilt as experienced by a pair of British schoolchildren, it packs a lot of soul-crushing misery into 26 minutes. Thankfully, not all the live-action nominees are so overwhelmingly dour, even when dealing with similarly heavy themes. Na Wewe, set amid the civil war between the Tutsis and Hutus in mid-’90s Burundi, manages to find subtle, absurd humor in the insanity of ethnic cleansing. And in Wish 143, the most deserving of the Oscar, director Ian Barnes gives his story (about a teenage cancer patient desperately trying to lose his virginity) a randy heart, not to mention more character development than most movies three times its length. On the animated end, all the nominees—with the exception of the one-note Let’s Pollute, which is ugly on purpose—look great, but the one that sticks is The
Lost Thing, a delightfully weird (and weirdly touching) rumination on the alienation of modern life involving a bottle cap-collecting nerd and the bizarre half-machine, halfbeast creature he discovers on a beach and decides to bring home. MATTHEW SINGER. Hollywood Theatre. Friday-Sunday, Feb. 18-20. The live-action and animated shorts programs screen separately.
Portlandia, Episode 5
[ONE NIGHT ONLY, TV] Better make your peace with Carrie Brownstein’s IFC series: It’s been renewed for a second season. Mission Theater. 10:30 pm Friday, Feb. 18. Presented by Beer and Movie. Free.
Rabbit Hole
85 Uh-oh. A drama of parental bereavement, starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart as the unlucky couple? From that premise, you might expect a strident dirge, but no. Rabbit Hole is a sensitive movie about coping, about how loss can be a badge of honor that drives people away, and a horrible private joke that brings people close. Sometimes it’s the same people. Like Christian Bale in The Fighter, Nicole Kidman is perfectly cast in a role that transcends a habit of onscreen masochism. PG-13. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Living Room Theaters.
The Rite
Anthony Hopkins beats the devil. Or doesn’t, perhaps: WW did not attend the screening. PG-13. Eastport.
The Roommate
Single White Female: The College Years. Not screened for critics. PG-13. Lloyd Center, Clackamas Town Center, Division.
Sanctum 3-D
45 It comes popping right out at you, what made James Cameron want to put his executive-producer imprimatur on this Australian spelunking thriller: He likes abysses, and he doesn’t care about acting. Win-win. Sanctum has remarkably shallow performances and impressively deep crevasses, though Cameron’s cherished 3-D does the latter no favors: It makes even real rocks look like the manufactured boulders on Big Thunder Mountain. In fact, the movie continues Avatar’s campaign to make cinema feel more like the motion-simulator attractions at theme parks. I like theme-park rides: I like them five minutes long, with the emergency exits clearly marked. For Sanctum’s 109 minutes, I mostly felt stuck or sick. Sanctum only springs to life when it’s snuffing its cast (admittedly, that’s most of the second half of the picture). It puts the lie to Cameron’s disdain for Piranha 3D: The movies function in exactly the same way (even sharing a scalping), except one adds a bogus gloss of inspiration. R. AARON MESH. 3D: Eastport, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Bridgeport. 2D: Clackamas Town Center.
87 Sofia Coppola’s latest dispatch from existential angst’s VIP room is a difficult movie. OK, this is where I explain what the movie is ostensibly about and you gag a little bit, because a plot summary of Somewhere reads like a People puff piece about some gilded dickhead’s forged redemption journey. But here goes: Famous actor Johnny Marco (played by sorta-still-famous actor Stephen Dorff) is living in the Chateau Marmont—Belushi died there, Lindsay Lohan lived there, many beautiful people have enjoyed cocaine there—while promoting his new film and sleepwalking through what appears to be a charmed life. He drinks, he smokes, he drives his Ferrari in circles, he conks out with his tongue inside a gorgeous woman. Money can’t buy happiness, etc. Enter Cleo (Elle Fanning), Johnny Ennui’s 11-year-old daughter, a part-time responsibility who becomes a full-time suitemate when Johnny’s ex-wife skips town on a vague mission of self-improvement. But disregard—or forgive—the predictable arc and sentimental revelations, because Coppola’s only using them as girders for a weightier project: rendering emotional vacancy and existential exhaustion as it is actually experienced. R. CHRIS STAMM. Hollywood Theatre, Fox Tower.
True Grit
90 The Coen Brothers’ new ren-
dering of Charles Portis’ novel of Arkansas frontier retribution is remarkable for its lack of perversity—one character voices a slightly unseemly interest in the 14-yearold heroine, and another is graphically relieved of some fingers but, by Coen standards, everybody behaves with relative civility. But it maintains something sorrowful in the story of young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfield), who seeks retribution for her dead father and talks like Laura Ingalls Wilder with a law degree. Jeff Bridges’ drunken lawman is essentially a comic turn, a sharpshooting grandpa who just wants to tell campfire stories, and it leaves the movie’s emotions to Steinfeld and Matt Damon, whose Texas Ranger is painfully aware of his own ridiculousness, and is all the more hurt that everyone else notices it too. The music is Carter Burwell’s elegiac piano settings of the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” In the movie’s culmination, Mattie is herself cradled in great arms, and the shot recalls Wayne at the end of another movie, The Searchers, where his mercy only compensates so much. To appreciate the bleak but not hopeless world the Coens are mapping, you have to recognize both how Mattie is saved, and how much she has lost. PG-13. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Lloyd Mall, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Cinema 99, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
Unknown
More terrible things happen to Liam Neeson in Europe. Not screened by WW press deadlines; look for a review on wweek. com. PG-13. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas Town Center, Division, Evergreen, Bridgeport Village, Cinema 99, Movies on TV, Sherwood, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
WildWater
[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Digital whitewater footage. Clinton Street Theater. 7 pm Thursday, Feb. 17..
The World
[THREE NIGHTS ONLY] Jia Zhangke’s 2004 film about an amusement park filled with tiny world landmarks. 5th Avenue Cinema. 7 and 9:30 pm FridaySaturday, 3 pm Sunday, Feb. 18-20..
BREWVIEWS
MOVIES
S H O R T S I N T E R N AT I O N A L P R E S E N T S
83RD ANNUAL ACADEMY AWARD® NOMINEES FOR LIVE ACTION AND ANIMATED SHORT FILM THE OSCAR® NOMINATED
SHORT FILMS 2O11 CATCH THEM WHILE YOU CAN
TWO SEPARATE PROGRAMS : BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM NOMINEES THE CONFESSION Tanel Toom / UK
WISH 143
Ian Barnes and Samantha Waite / UK
NA WEWE
Ivan Goldschmidt / Belgium, Burundi
THE CRUSH
Michael Creagh / Ireland
GOD OF LOVE
Luke Matheny / USA
BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM NOMINEES MADAGASCAR, CARNET DE VOYAGE
Bastien Dubois / France
LET’S POLLUTE
Geefwee Boedoe / USA
THE GRUFFALO
Jakob Schuh and Max Lang / UK
THE LOST THING
Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann / Australia
DAY AND NIGHT
Teddy Newton / USA
PLUS ADDITIONAL ANIMATED SHORTS! shortshd.com/theoscarshorts “OSCAR” is a trademark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (“A.M.P.A.S.”). This program is not affiliated with A.M.P.A.S.
EXCLUSVE ENGAGEMENT STARTS FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18
HOLLYWOOD THEATRE Portland (503) 281-4215
CALL THEATRE FOR SHOWTIMES
WWEEKDOTCOM ELECTRIC HEROIN TEST: If you want a glimpse of Oregon’s LSD-lit legend Ken Kesey on the big screen, skip past Milos Forman’s cutesypie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; instead, try Nick Nolte in 1978’s Who’ll Stop the Rain. Sure, Nolte was probably aping Kerouac’s road muse, Neal Cassady, but then so was Kesey, and Nolte’s Rain man is the roustabout All-American boy fighting authority with fists, wiles and even a Merry Prankster psychedelic strobe-light show. Michael Moriarty is unnerving as Nolte’s pal, a
war correspondent who turns to heroin dealing: “In a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.” The best Vietnam movie you’ve never seen. AARON MESH. Laurelhurst. Presented by Beer and Movie. Best paired with: Lucky Lab Super Dog IPA. Also showing: Tron: Legacy (Academy, Laurelhurst, Kennedy School, Mission, Valley). CHECK WWEEK.COM for full, up-to-the-minute movie times.
BY DENNIS DUGAN COLUMBIAMUSICPICTURES PRESENTS A HAPPY MADISON PRODUCTION A FILM MUSIC J “ UST GO WI T H I T ” SUPERVISION BY MICHAEL DILBECK BROOKS ARTHUR KEVIN GRADY BY RUPERT GREGSON-WILLIAMS EXECUTIVE BASED ON “CACTUS FLOWER” STAGE PLAY PRODUCERS BARRY BERNARDI ALLEN COVERT TIM HERLIHY STEVE KOREN SCREENPLAY BY I.A.L. DIAMOND BY ABE BURROWS BASED UPON SCREENPLAY PRODUCED A FRENCH PLAY BY BARILLET AND GREDY BY ALLAN LOEB AND TIMOTHY DOWLING BY ADAM SANDLER JACK GIARRAPUTO HEATHER PARRY DIRECTED BY DENNIS DUGAN
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