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WWEEK.COM
VOL 37/18 03.09.2011
P. 44
H AW K K R A L L
BACK COVER
NOW OPEN FOR LUNCH
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Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
CONTENT
BAD WESTERN: Read how this week’s Rogue, state Rep. Tim Freeman, is wasting time in Salem with a “Code of the West” resolution. Page 16.
NEWS
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MUSIC
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CULTURE
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MOVIES
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HEADOUT
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CLASSIFIEDS
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FOOD & DRINK
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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 Ailin Darling, Kevin Davis, Rachael DeWitt, Rebecca Jacobson, 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 Interns Christa Connelly, Jessica Stambach ADVERTISING Director of Advertising Jane Smith Display Account Executives Sara Backus, Maria Boyer, Michael Donhowe, Drew Harrison, Janet Norman, Kyle Owens Classifieds Account Executive Jennifer Lee Advertising Assistant Ashley Grether Marketing and Events Manager Jess Sword Marketing and Promotions Coordinator Brittany McKeever
DISTRIBUTION Circulation Director Robert Lehrkind WWEEK.COM Web Production Brian Panganiban MUSICFESTNW Executive Director Trevor Solomon He Slices, He Dices Dan Winters OPERATIONS Accounting Manager Andrea Manning Credit & Collections Shawn Wolf Office Manager & Receptionist Nick Johnson Office Corgi Bruce Manager of Information Systems Brian Panganiban Publisher Richard H. Meeker
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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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Hi, about your Rogue of the Week, the USPTO [U.S. Patent and Trademark Office]”: I just wanted to point out to you the irony of a bunch of perpetually offended leftists—leftists who are responsible for getting government into the business of determining what is and isn’t offensive to minorities, getting offended when the government determines what is and isn’t offensive to minorities. Do you really want the U.S. government giving its imprimatur to “The Slants”? Try to imagine how many slants will be lined up in front of the PTO picketing for more sensitivity, outraged that the government would approve a slur on Asian peoples everywhere. And you would be right with them. It doesn’t matter what the Slants think of the name. It matters what the Slant Community thinks, as a whole. You idiots made your bed. Have fun sleeping with your same-sex partner in it. —Jim Born
WWEEK.COM READERS COMMENT ON “LOAN WOLF”
“[Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems] has some serious problems. Unravelling it will start to get at the huge mess that was built during the housing bubble. At the same time, I don’t see what it solves, or how it is fair to a majority of homeowners, to let people like Ms. Lind keep houses they haven’t paid for. It isn’t even her primary residence.” —Schemes “I’m not sure why this isn’t being discussed, but Lind purchased a RENTAL HOUSE—why didn’t she put enough down? Twenty percent
Like most downtown construction sites, the one near my office is dominated by a very tall, very slender crane. In an earthquake, these things seem like they’d keel right over. Should I duck? —Son of Arlee Come on, you should know this drill by now. It’s the sturdy, solid-looking things that kill you in an earthquake: brick buildings, cathedrals, Roman aqueducts. Flimsy, wobbly things, engineers assure us, are the ones that survive an earthquake without a scratch. (Apparently, the absolute safest place to be in an earthquake would be under a boulder balanced on a drinking straw. You first.) The cranes you’re talking about are called tower cranes, and in fairness to their designers, it’s not like they just throw them up there and get the fattest guy on the crew to hold the bottom steady. The base of the crane is fixed in a concrete pad, which is in turn usually anchored to bedrock. As for the tower itself, the mystic power 4
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
is standard for non-owner-occupied property! Or did she abuse her position as a mortgage lender? Property rental is a business. If she’s not making the payments, then the house should be taken away and her business fails.” —Joe “Regardless of how Ms. Lind got the mortgage loan—which is a discussion for another time—my issue is that IF the legal documentation was not executed to transfer ownership of the mortgage, then, in my opinion, there is a problem. Why would anyone advocate overlooking a key process like transfer of ownership in favor of MERS? If in fact MERS does NOT legally own the mortgage, I don’t see how they should be given rights that they legally don’t have after the fact.… My point is that if lenders were lazy and sloppy when it came to selling and reassigning mortgages, they need to be treated like anyone else who stupidly doesn’t ‘dot the I’s and cross the T’s’ to protect their position.” —hartsf CLARIFICATION: Last week’s story “Serving Two Masters” may have given the impression that economist Joe Cortright stated David Evans and Associates’ interests diverged from the state of Oregon’s interests. Cortright was quoted accurately when he said he couldn’t think of another instance in which a gubernatorial adviser was paid by a contractor, but he expressed no opinion on the relative interests of the two parties. 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
of wobblitude takes care of that. “During normal operations, a 260-foot-tall tower crane can move up to three feet off of centerline in any direction,” says Gaytor Rasmussen, a Washington crane inspector and former operator who actually has a blog called Tower Crane Accidents. (God, I love the Internet.) “As an earthquake hits, it isn’t likely to move the crane further.” In other words, the thing is already swaying so sickeningly—even in the best of times—that not even the Big One can make it any more terrifying. Granted, there was a major earthquakerelated crane accident in Taipei in 2002. But if it’s any consolation, the roughly 250 large crane collapses that have happened since then all took place on stable ground—they were caused by good, old-fashioned human error and negligence. I’ll bet you feel better already. QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com
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LEGISLATURE: Will prepaid and Internet calls get taxed? 9 LIBYA: The view from refugees living in Portland. 15 ROGUE: One time- and money-wasting state lawmaker. 16 WWEEK.COM: Joint Terrorism Task Force decision delayed again.
WE’RE ALWAYS IN A GOOD PLACE. Longtime Portland marijuana activist Paul Stanford (see “King Bong,” WW, Dec. 12, 2007) has been arrested on charges of tax fraud. The Oregon Department of Justice said Tuesday that Stanford faces two counts of failure to file personal income taxes for 2008 and 2009. Stanford, who heads a nationwide chain of medical-marijuana clinics, has a reputation as a controversial figure in pot activist circles. The IRS last year revoked the tax-exempt status of Stanford’s Portlandbased clinic, the Hemp and Cannabis Foundation. Stanford did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment. Ultimate fighter and former Republican candidate Matt “The Law” Lindland faces a $122,880 lawsuit alleging he stole six pot plants. As first reported on wweek.com, the suit filed last week in Multnomah County Circuit Court claims Lindland offered to let Gonzalo Aldana Gamboa grow pot last year under the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program on Lindland’s Eagle Creek property. The March 3 lawsuit alleges Lindland helped move the mature plants to his shed to dry, but when Gamboa returned a month later, Lindland would not give him the harvest. Lindland, who lost a 2008 run for state House District 52, did not reply to email and phone messages seeking comment.
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Some big news about the proposed plastic bag ban came out of Oregon Republicans’ annual Dorchester conference last weekend. Rep. Vic Gilliam, co-sponsor of the proposed bag ban, said Senate Bill 1009 will only get out of committee if its proposed 5-cent fee for paper bags is removed. That fee helped earn support for the bag ban from the powerful Northwest Grocery Association, led by Gilliam’s brother, Joe. Grocery interests have given $13,000 since December 2009 to Vic Gilliam, a Salem Republican who earned a 24 percent rating for the 2009 legislative session from the Oregon League of Conservation Voters. Vic Gilliam was unavailable for comment.
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The churn continues in Mayor Sam Adams’ office ahead of his expected 2012 re-election bid. Adams this week hired former WW culture editor Caryn Brooks to be his “policy coordinator,” at a salary of $50,000. And his ex-economic development director, Kimberly Schneider Branam, whose husband is former City Council candidate John Branam, began at the Portland Development Commission. The transfer nearly doubled her pay from $69,000 in Adams’ office to $135,000 at PDC. That hike comes at a time when PDC is preparing to lay off about 20 staffers because of declining revenue from urban renewal districts.
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Commissioner Amanda Fritz plans to open Portland’s newly proposed Office of Equity by this summer. And she plans to conduct a national search to find a new director for the office, one of Mayor Sam Adams’ midterm initiatives. Other aspects of the new bureau remain uncertain. In 2008, then-Mayor Tom Potter created the Office of Human Relations to address racial inequality FRITZ and other forms of discrimination. Fritz says the new equity office probably will take on those tasks as well as subsume the Office of Human Relations, whose current director may step down.
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NEWS
SPEED RACERS: Portland Public Schools and its teachers union reached a new labor deal quickly compared with the last round of negotiations.
FAST TALKERS THE PORTLAND SCHOOL DISTRICT AND TEACHERS REACHED A SPEEDY LABOR DEAL. BUT IS THAT NECESSARILY A GOOD THING? BY BE T H S LOV I C
bslovic@wweek.com
The School Board on Monday night hailed Portland Public Schools’ new labor contract with teachers as collaborative, fair and potentially game-changing in terms of how principals evaluate teachers going forward. “The approval of this contract is a turning point,” CoChairwoman Pam Knowles said before she and her colleagues voted 5-1 to approve the deal. “It is a relationship built on collaboration, not conflict.” Yet the new, two-year agreement calls for higher labor costs and at least 40 fewer high-school teachers next year. So why are most School Board members cheering? Unlike previous contract negotiations between the school district and the Portland Association of Teachers, which represents about 3,200 teachers, the latest talks lasted only a matter of months. And they came to a resolution well before the current contract expires in July. By comparison, negotiations on the existing contract stretched to almost two years, and Portland teachers worked for months without one in place. “It’s difficult for morale when teachers are working without a contract,” says Rebecca Levison, president of the teachers union. As voters in the Portland district weigh two multimillion-dollar money measures for schools in May, teachers’ morale takes on special importance. The school district,
get those pay increases in both years of the contract. And in the second year of the deal, Portland Public Schools has agreed to add a new step to the salary schedule. As a result, a teacher with a master’s degree and more than 12 years of experience who is already at the top pay level of $62,940 per year will see his or her salary increase by 2 percent to $64,199. Taken together, these step increases will cost the which wants voters to approve both a $548 million con- district $2.4 million in the first year of the contract and struction bond and a $57 million-a-year operating levy, $6.8 million in the second year, for a total of $9.2 million. To help pay for these raises, the school district and needs teachers to help campaign for the measures. The new contract also cements a deal to improve the the teachers union agreed to change how the district way principals evaluate teachers, a process that hasn’t been allocates funding to high schools. Right now, the district updated in 30 years. That new plan hasn’t been hammered assigns teachers to high schools on the assumption they out entirely, but both sides have committed to putting will teach five out of seven classes in a school day. Going an improved method in place by September. Only then forward, the district will budget teachers to teach six out can outsiders judge whether the new of eight classes. That means the district will need fewer evaluations have helped teachers. David high-school teachers next year. PPS Wynde, a two-term member of the FACT: Board member Martín González was the lone vote against estimates that will save $4 million a year board, said that would give the district the deal, saying it didn’t do enough going forward. But that will also mean ample time to make sure the new system to improve education for vulnerable 40 high-school teachers—or about 8 is implemented properly. “That’s not students, especially immigrants. He didn’t object specifically to the percent—will lose their jobs. kicking the can down the road,” he said. financial terms. The new contract does not spell out The deal also provides some finanhow individual high schools will arrange cial certainty for the district. The new contract offers no cost-of-living increases in the 2011-12 their schedules, however. Both the school district and the or 2012-13 school years, when Portland Public Schools is teachers union say those specifics will be determined on a projected to face back-to-back budget holes of $40 million school-by-school basis. School Board member Trudy Sargent missed Mona year due to shrinking state support for schools. day night’s last-minute meeting that approved the deal. The full implications of the deal for Portland classrooms Although that meant she couldn’t vote, she expressed strong won’t be known for weeks to come as the district continues disagreement with the board’s action in written testimony. to grapple with its budget. If either money measure fails “In this difficult economy, with high unemployment or both do, the contract’s financial impact on the district’s and depressed wages in our city and our state, this district budget will worsen and the district will have to lay off as faces a serious shortfall in revenue that will require deep cuts to balance the budget,” she wrote. “Our duty to our many as 200 more teachers. Although the contract offers no across-the-board students and our taxpayers requires us to hold the line on raises, teachers who are eligible for automatic pay raises all costs to maintain the quality of the education we are based on years of experience (raises known as “steps”) will providing for our students.” Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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LEGISLATURE C A R O LY N A N N . N E T
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GROWTH OF PREPAID CELL PHONES SHORTS OREGON’S 911 SYSTEM. IS A SALES TAX THE ANSWER?
paid and Internet callers to join in paying the tax. Both groups say that change is only fair. “If fixed interconnected [Voice-over-Internet] and prepaid telecommunications service are not required to contribute, the surcharge for their customers’ access to 911 emergency services BY N IGEL JAQU ISS njaquiss@wweek.com will continue to be paid by landline and wireless ratepayers,” Oregon PUC program manager Jon Prepaid mobile phones could threaten your Cray told lawmakers. safety. Adam Grzybicki, president of AT&T Oregon, No, not because prepaid phones are often the testified, however, that the proposed solution communications tool of choice for criminals. of deducting the monthly fee from prepaid But because consumers are dumping tradi- accounts is tricky and not done elsewhere. tional cell service in favor of prepaid phones. “If folks know they’re going to be taxed,” he And that rapid shift in consumer prefer- said, “of course...[they] want to avoid that tax.” ences threatens a vital source of funding for Just how the tax would be collected brings the Oregon’s 911 system—the 75-cents-per-month- otherwise obscure issue in contact with large and per-phone line that provides a major chunk of powerful corporations and the two words that funding to ensure your emergency call gets a are the third rail of Oregon politics: “sales tax.” timely response. The big prepaid cell-phone providers do not Lawmakers will hold a work session on the want the hassle of collecting the 75 cents per relevant measure, House Bill 2075, on March 14. month fee. But in recent testimony Those who use prepaid before the House Revenue Comphones do not pay monthly FACT: The 911 system is already undermittee, Laura Wolfe, a senior going a massive change—the shift from bills, so administering their management analyst with the land lines to cell phones. In 2005, City accounts is more complicated. Portland figures show, 42 percent City of Portland’s Bureau of of The telecom companies of the 1 million 911 calls city operators Emergency Communications, received came from cell phones. Now, want the big retailers such as 67 percent of such calls come told lawmakers that about one about Walmart, Target and Costco, from cell phones. in five cell calls comes from a which sell most prepaid prepaid line. Some surveys show phones, to collect the tax that 20 percent of contract users plan to switch to when they sell the phones. prepaid phones this year alone. But advocates for the 911 system say setting The problem arises, Wolfe and others testi- up a point-of-sale system to collect the money fied, because there’s currently no mechanism would cost as much or more as it brings in. for the state to collect the monthly 75 cents from And even if such a system were feasible, they either prepaid phones or Voice-over-Internet say, collecting something from Oregon consumProtocol (Skype, for example). ers that looks like a sales tax is political suicide. “This lack of support by the prepaid wireless “We aren’t like other states and we don’t look phone industry has deprived the Oregon 911 like other states when it comes to point of sale program of an estimated $6.8 million in 2009,” systems,” said Rep. Vicki Berger (R-Salem), coWolfe testified. chair of the House Revenue Committee. Currently, the monthly fee generates about Rep. Matt Wand (R-Troutdale) echoed that $40 million a year for the state’s 911 program. sentiment. Two groups—the Special Districts Association “This really strikes me as a sales tax,” Wand of Oregon, which represents fire departments told the phone company reps. “I won’t vote for a and other public safety clients, and the Oregon sales tax.” Public Utility Commission—are pushing for pre-
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TAMIM ANSARY AFGHANISTAN-BORN AUTHOR WILL TELL PORTLANDERS ABOUT ANOTHER HISTORY—ONE THAT’S ISLAMIC-CENTERED. WW: What’s the best example of how an Islamic-centered world narrative differs from a Eurocentric one? Tamim Ansary: The Western world is what came out of the many societies that emerged from around the Mediterranean. This other world is the world that emerged out of the many intertangled caravan and trade and invasion routes that sewed together Persians, Turks, the people of Northern India, Afghans and on into the Middle East, encompassing finally the Arabs. I’m saying that’s a world, too. If you look at the history of the world with the Mediterranean-centric point of view, it seems as if the Muslims were important in the Dark Ages and maybe a little bit in the time when the European colonialists first went across the
a workable and fairly peaceful kind of society. Now some of these terrible things that we see in Afghanistan in these last 20 or 30 years, it isn’t an expression of Afghan culture. It’s an expression of Afghan culture’s post-traumatic syndrome after 2 million people were killed, 8 million were rendered refugees and the entire countryside was bombed to slivers and the cities were destroyed by the post-Soviet civil war infighting. And what are Americans’ biggest misconceptions about Islam? It’s a misconception to equate Islam with Islamism. There is a movement in the world which is, I think, anti-colonialist in its routes or anti-imperialist that goes back about 200
“THERE IS A TENDENCY FOR AMERICANS TO THINK OF AFGHANISTAN AS BEING A NATION OF SINISTER MEN WITH BEARDS.”
BY T I F FA N Y ST UBBE RT
tstubbert@wweek.com
Tamim Ansary captured wide notice in the United States after 9/11, when his email to friends declaring his hate for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden went viral. The Afghanistan-born Ansary followed up that email by publishing a memoir in 2002, West of Kabul, East of New York, exploring the cultural divide between his life growing up in Muslim Afghanistan and moving to America at age 16. Ansary, whose books dealing with Islam and the West include his 2009 Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, will be speaking this week at the World Affairs Council in Portland. It’s a city he knows well from an eight-year stretch starting in 1968, when he studied literature at Reed College and wrote for the underground newspaper Portland Scribe. Now living in San Francisco, the 62-year-old author and lecturer is planning his first trip in nine years to Afghanistan this fall. WW spoke with Ansary before his March 11 lecture and before a U.S. House committee holds hearings March 10 on “radicalization” of U.S. Muslims.
world. But I’m saying it’s perfectly viable for people that live in that area as seeing theirs as being the heart of the world. And if you do, then the influx of colonialism and the emergence of the West instead of being the central event of history, is something that was happening to you, from the peripheries. And that’s the story that I want to tell. What are Americans’ biggest misconceptions about Afghanistan? There is a tendency for Americans to think of Afghanistan as being a nation of sinister men with beards. And to think Afghan women are timid, oppressed, cowering creatures. That misses that there are different demographics within Afghanistan. There are millions of people who live in the big Afghan cities and want to develop the country. They want to be part of the world. And there’s also a failure [by Americans] to realize that, in the old traditional Afghanistan of the rural countryside, there is a whole social system in which everybody has a certain part to play. In the old days that was
years. And that’s a movement that has chosen to adopt Islamic discourse, mythological references, ideas as a platform for pursuing a political program. That’s a movement that can loosely be covered by the term “Islamism.” I think most Muslims are not Islamists. Most Muslims, what Islam means to them is, you try to perform your five daily prayers, you give some of your money to charity, you try to go to Mecca if you can, at least once. And you observe the fast in the month of Ramadan. And you testify that there is only one God.… Islam is not as Christianity is: a plan for the salvation of the individual person. In its very essence Islam is, in part, a plan for the building of a just and harmonious community. Islam directs itself a lot toward the question of how can Muslims be at peace with one another. And it’s up to Muslims to enlarge that to inquire as to how Muslims can be at peace with non-Muslims. CONT. on page 13
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Sant Baljit Singh, the spiritual Master teaches meditation on inner Light & Sound to anyone who is searching for a deeper meaning in life.
HOTSEAT CONT.
NEWS
How religious are you? I’m not religious. I’m a secular guy. What’s your best guess as to how Afghanistan will be different, if at all, in 20 years? It will be different, there’s no question of that. Time doesn’t stop, and the difference will depend on how the configuration of world power c h a n g e s. B e c a u s e Afghanistan has always been the nexus of the competition of the great global powers: between the Soviets and the U.S.-dominated bloc of the Cold War, between the British and the Russians in the 19th century, between the U.S. and the punitive Jihadist enterprise to destroy Western civilization, of al-Qaida, right now. I don’t think as some do they’ll always be fighting. Whatever this thing is, it’s going to be resolved in five or six years. There just might be some terrible moments along the way. And I don’t know if there is a way to really avoid those. I hope there is. What do you think about the current American approach to Afghanistan? If you were to ask Petraeus and Obama what they think they’re doing, I think they’d say they are putting in enough troops to rescue the population from the Taliban. And at the same time, they’re trying to train the Afghan army and security apparatus to take over that job so that we can leave and Afghans can take care of themselves. The shortcoming there is that the presence of American troops in the most troubled parts of Afghanistan creates the insurgency that we are in Afghanistan to fight. We are not quelling the insurgency by being there. We’re inflaming it. I think there’s also a component of the American strategy which is to plug these so-called provincial reconstruction teams into Afghanistan and help with rebuilding Afghanistan, in the hopes that by building a civil order that will cut the insurgency. I think the idea there is great. That would have been a great and workable thing that would have done wonders if it had been pursued from the start by the Bush administration. I think it’s a little late to come in with that now, but I do hope it works. What’s your take on American diplomatic efforts to engage the Taliban? Well, it isn’t clear what the diplomatic efforts are right now; you know there are a lot of things going on in Afghanistan. It isn’t that specific as to who the Taliban is. The Taliban is just the cover for all sorts of insurgencies that are active in Afghanistan. Taliban—it does refer to an attitude, an orientation; it’s associated with rural, religious, conservative fundamentalism in Afghanistan. And you know, if there is a reconciliation process that puts the Taliban back in charge of Afghanistan in some way, then I think you are going to see some results for Afghans that certainly urban, progressive Afghans like myself will be pretty uncomfortable with. There will be a reactionary backlash to the advances made by women in the times since the Taliban were overthrown. On the other hand, there is no military solution to this. So in some form or fashion there is going to have to be some diplomatic process that’s going to end the fighting there. GO: Ansary’s lecture, “Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes,” is at noon Friday, March 11, at the World Affairs Council of Oregon, 1200 SW Park Ave., 3rd floor. $5 members, $10 nonmembers. Preregistration required; go to worldoregon.org/events/registration/tamim_ansary.php.
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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WWEEK.COM/EATMOBILE Learn More about Your Academic Future March 28 in Santa Barbara This special program on Monday, March 28 is a comprehensive overview of Pacifica’s Graduate Degree Programs in Depth Psychology, the Humanities, and Mythological Studies: • Sit in on typical classroom sessions • Attend information meetings about each of Pacifica’s degree programs • Explore both of Pacifica’s campuses, located between the coast and the mountains near Santa Barbara, California • Interact with Pacifica students, alumni, and faculty members.
Pacifica Graduate Institute offers accredited M.A. and Ph.D. Programs framed in the Jungian tradition of Depth Psychology The $75 registration fee for this day-long program includes continental breakfast, buffet lunch, and a $25 gift certificate good at the Pacifica Bookstore. The $60 Application Fee will be waived for attendees.
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Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com 3-28 Intro Day Ad.indd 1
2/25/11 12:17 PM
NEWS DARRYL JAMES
INTERNATIONAL
FROM THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI THREE GENERATIONS OF LIBYAN WOMEN LIVING IN PORTLAND VOICE THEIR FEARS FOR THEIR HOMELAND.
and 30s—she believes they were protesters—were unloaded and led through the airport to an unknown location. She does not know their fate. Finally, about 9 pm, she boarded a flight to Spain. She then traveled to Portland via Milan, and is now BY AIL I N DA R L I N G adarling@wweek.com staying with her daughter. Last Friday, March 4, she attended When the insurrection against Libyan a rally with about 50 people in Pioneer leader Moammar Gadhafi spread to Tripoli Courthouse Square to plead for U.S. supa few weeks ago, Lutfia Zarrugh could hear port in ending Gadhafi’s 42-year regime. endless gunshots from her home in the She wasn’t the only demonstrator with fears about Libya’s future. hills outside the capital. Zarrugh, 67, originally fled Libya in Amna Shevani fled with her family from GADHAFI PROTESTER: Libyan refugee Amna Shevani says her relatives back 1980 with her husband, an anti-govern- Gadhafi’s rule in 1980, when the dictahome “are being killed by this person who is supposed to be protecting them.” ment activist. She became a Canadian tor began to convert the country’s high citizen in 1990 and had returned to her schools into mandatory army camps, mak- “They are being killed by this person who Like most of their fellow protesters, all homeland before being forced to flee again ing it impossible for parents to send their is supposed to be protecting them.” daughters to school. Another demonstrator, 21-year-old Lina three women still have loved ones in Libya. last month. She arranged to leave with a group of Cana- FACT: Portland is home to “That’s when my father Tarhuni, was born in Portland. However, At the protest, they shared stories of tear actually decided that this she says her family’s roots in Libya have gas and cut phone lines. dian workers Feb. 18. When an estimated 200 Libyans. “Every single person here has at least she arrived at the airport in was not for him,” says She- always been an important part of her life. Tripoli, Zarrugh found she was one of hun- vani. “He took us all out, and we ended up When the revolts began, she and her family one family member back there,” says Tarhuni. She last spoke to her family Wednesdid not hesitate to get involved. dreds desperate to get a flight anywhere. in Canada as refugees.” Shevani, like Zarrugh, became a Cana“Here we are safe in our homes,” she day morning, March 2, just as news broke Several promised flights were canceled. Then, she says, “Gadhafi’s people,” dian citizen and moved to Portland 15 says. “The least we can do is educate peo- that the Libyan military had bombed the ple, let them know what’s going on.” oil port town of Brega. “You think [your armed with guns, surrounded her and years ago when she got married. others. Later in the afternoon, a big truck Shevani’s eyes shone with emotion as 9.639"Tarhuni helped organize the rally, along family] is going to be OK,” Tarhuni says, pulled up to the front of the airport. A she described what her relatives are facing. with her father, Jamal, “an elder” in the “and all of a sudden you realize they’re living in a war zone.” “They have suffered so long,” she says. local Libyan community. group of handcuffed civilians in their 20s
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing READING / DISCUSSION / BOOK SIGNING Monday, March 14th, 7PM 12000 Southeast 82nd Avenue Portland (503) 786-3464 After the real Thursday Next disappears, the desperate Council of Genres calls upon her fictional counterpart to travel up the treacherous Metaphoric River to solve a border dispute—and save BookWorld—in this inspired sixth installment of the entertaining series.
Get more info and get to know your favorite writers at BN.COM/events. All events subject to change, so please contact the store to confirm.
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ROGUE W W P H OTO I L L U S T R AT I O N
NEWS
ROGUE OF THE WEEK
REP. TIM FREEMAN NO YEE-HAWS FOR THIS YAHOO. On his website, state Rep. Tim Freeman (R-Roseburg) says “reducing state spending and improving government efficiency and accountability” are top priorities. Noble goals as the 2011 Legislature hunts for every last dollar to provide money for schools, social services and corrections. So the Rogue Desk finds it a notable waste of effort and money that Freeman has squandered legislative staff time on House Concurrent Resolution 14, which would adopt the “Code of West as model of conduct in State of Oregon.” He has company in this frivolity. The resolution’s co-sponsors are Reps. Kevin Cameron (R-Salem), Margaret Doherty (D-Tigard), Andy Olson (R-Albany), Kim Thatcher (R-Keizer), Matt Wand (R-Troutdale) Jim Weidner (R-Yamhill), Gene Whisnant (R-Sunriver), Matt Wingard (R-Wilsonville) and Sen. Jeff Kruse (R-Roseburg). The average measure costs about $1,000 to prepare, according to Legislative Counsel. One Salem insider pegged the preparation cost of Freeman’s one-page measure at about $400. HCR 14 is scheduled for a March 21 hearing in the House Rules Committee. Of course, the wasted money is a pittance in the context of a $16 billion general fund budget. And many bills introduced during the 2011 Legislature are misguided. But each of this resolution’s co-sponsors has mouthed some version of the “efficiency and accountability” claim that Freeman touts on his website. And using state resources to convert the “Ten Principles to Live By” compiled by James P. Owen, author of the book Cowboy Ethics, into a Code of the West resolution is especially ridiculous since it violates at least three of the book’s principles. No. 4: “Do what has to be done.” No. 6: “When you make a promise, keep it.” And No. 8: “Talk less, say more.” Freeman says he got the idea when House members worked out rules to govern the historic 30-30 partisan split. “The idea is to raise the public’s opinion of the Legislature,” Freeman says. “I find it hard to believe it cost $400 to prepare it, but I think spending $400 out of a $60 billion [all fund] budget is worth it to affect public perception.” But when considering the expenditure of state dollars, proponents of such frivolous measures should keep in mind the final principle in the Code: “Know where to draw the line.” GOT A ROGUE NOMINATION? Send it to hstern@wweek.com. 16
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MARK ZUCKERBERG WILL BUY YOU A BIG HOUSE. PIE HIGH: Salem’s Straight From New York Pizza appears to have applied for a liquor license for one half of the former Dixie Mattress Co. building—two doors down from where It’s A Beautiful Pizza closed last year. Belmont will be pie-less no longer.
The rest of the season is yours! SkiHood.com
PIE HIGHER: Speaking of pizza: Scoop just got word that Chef Brian Nakamura of Portland’s Slice Brick Oven Pizza cart nabbed sixth place in the Western Division of the 250plus competitor World Pizza Championships in Las Vegas on Sunday. Nakamura brought the flava with his “Mushroom SLICE’S BRIAN NAKAMURA Madness” pizza, which combines Willamette Valley chardonnay cream sauce, fontina, Oregon mushrooms and white truffles. You can get a truffle-less version of the winning pizza at Slice’s cart at the D Street Noshery pod (Southeast 32nd Avenue and Division Street). STATUS UPDATE: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was spotted out and about in Portland last weekend. Twitter spies had him at Stumptown Coffee, the Saturday Market and the PBJs Grilled peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich cart. Why the hell is he here? Well, according to gadfly Byron Beck (byronbeck.com), rumor is that Zuckerberg recently purchased a place in the Pearl District. BRIDGE UP: BridgePort Brewing’s Ale House will close for four weeks for what it is calling a “modest renovation”: revamping its look, menu and entire staff. Ale House employees recently received three weeks’ notice of termination and severance pay, a representative from BridgePort Brewing Company told WW in a statement. After reopening in mid-April, the Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard joint will cease its lunchtime service, opening at 4 pm six days a week with a new menu featuring “old favorites and new standouts.” “Sometimes it becomes evident that a restaurant just needs a fresh start,” the company wrote. “That being said, we have informed the staff that we will give anyone who wished to reapply in April at the very least an interview in advance of anyone else who might apply.”
Daily operations scheduled thru May 1, 2011 subject to change. Check SkiHood.com for operations and events schedule.
DOWN UNDER GIVETH, DOWN UNDER TAKETH AWAY: Just when we think Australia is Portland’s ally—we’re pretty proud of fuzzy-headed Trail Blazer Patty Mills and cartloving alt-weekly writer Ruth Brown—the country that bred the Bee Gees goes and ruins everything. Scott Garred, who has wowed Portland in a very understated fashion these past nine years as Super XX Man, is moving down under (yes, that’s how bad the U.S. economy is). The top-notch local singer-songwriter will SCOTT GARRED play his final Portland show of the foreseeable future Thursday, March 17, at the Alberta Street Pub. We honestly couldn’t be any sadder—this is like Rocco’s Pizza closing down. Wait, what!? Rocco’s Pizza closed too!? Portland is so over.
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WILLAMETTE WEEK
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK IN ARTS & CULTURE
WEDNESDAY MARCH 9 [COMEDY] MICHAEL SHOWALTER The other Michael from Stella and Michael & Michael Have Issues comes to town in support of his book, Mr. Funny Pants. He is indeed. Mission Theater, 855-227-8499, cascadetickets.com. 9 pm. $12-$14. 21+.
THURSDAY MARCH 10 [MUSIC AND FOOD] SNACK ATTACK! What’s better than watching Guidance Counselor and Forbidden Friends tear up Holocene? Eating snacks, of course! Show up early to see Wampire, Operative and Ilyas Ahmed hold live “cooking shows” onstage. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $5. 21+.
FRIDAY MARCH 11 [MUSIC] THIRD ANGLE The new-music ensemble performs three classic works by Steve Reich: Violin Phase, New York Counterpoint and the magnificent Drumming. Montgomery Park Atrium, 2701 NW Vaughn St., 331-0301, thirdangle.org. 8 pm. $10-$35. [MUSIC] ETERNAL TAPESTRY, MOUNT EERIE The Artistery is closing (boo!), but tonight’s show is still a celebration, with the psychedelic, towering drug-rock of Eternal Tapestry and the hushed beauty of Phil Elverum’s Mount Eerie project. The Artistery, 4315 SE Division St., 803-5942. 8 pm. $7 (or $6 with canned food donation). All ages.
MONDAY MARCH 14 [MOVIES] DOGTOOTH The Greek foreign-language nominee about richy-rich island madness may not have won an Oscar, but nothing can take away its giant scissors. Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave., 223-4515. 7 and 9 pm. $6-$9.
TUESDAY MARCH 15 NOSTRANA AND CHEF GABRIELLE HAMILTON MAKE MEMORIES OUT OF BLOOD, BONES AND BUTTER. Gabrielle Hamilton has a childhood memory of her French, balletdancer mother traipsing across the yard of a New Jersey dairy farm in heels and a silk scarf, smoking a cigarette, as she purchased her family’s massive weekly supply of fresh milk. Sure, her mother and artist father were chaotic parents, but they were masters of the kitchen—it’s no wonder Hamilton ended up a restaurateur. She was a waitress by age 13, a server at a disco club in 1980s New York, a starving backpacker who survived by cooking at restaurants in Greece and France, and an MFA fiction student at University of Michigan. Then, in 1999, Hamilton transcribed her biography into the menu of her very own restaurant, the massively popular Prune, in New York’s East Village. She tells her life story through memories of food in her vividly written new book, Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.
This Sunday, Hamilton’s memory of her father’s springtime lamb roasts will be re-created at Portland Italian restaurant Nostrana. Hamilton and Nostrana chef Cathy Whims are old friends, and both are known for their localized versions of southern European cuisines. So, in honor of the New York chef/author’s visit to Portland, Nostrana is hoisting an entire Cattail Creek lamb up onto the spit. Hamilton will read from her unconventional memoir while lucky locals slurp Bloody Marys, Negronis and Prosecco, and gorge on food described in the book, from lamb to bites of Gouda and “sardines on Triscuits.” RACHAEL DEWITT. GO: Blood, Bones and Butter at Nostrana, 1401 SE Morrison St., 234-2427. $60 ($86 with copy of book). 1-4 pm Sunday, March 13. Info at nostrana.com.
[MUSIC] THE EX Amsterdam’s the Ex might not be the best punks, but the band’s schizo take on classical, avant-garde and European folk is just as wild as any snotty London punk outfit. Doug Fir, 830 E Burnside St., 2319663. 9 pm. $15. 21+. [DANCE] ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER If you only see one dance company in your lifetime, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater would be a fine choice. The show ends with the company’s signature piece, Revelations, which is so packed with emotion that it is known for moving even confirmed stoics to tears. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 248-4335. 7:30 pm Tuesday-Wednesday, March 15-16. $22-$70. Info and tickets at whitebird.org. Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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C H R I S T A C O N N E L LY
Genoa’s March Dinner Series
Genoa on a budget? Every Wednesday in March, Belmont’s Italian classic offers a “Pick 3 Prix Fixe” meal of antipasti, pasta or salad plus an entrée and dessert at half the price of its daily fivecourse meal cousin. Thank kitchen co-conspirators David Anderson and Daniel Mondok for the deal. NIKKI VOLPICELLI. Genoa, 2832 SE Belmont St., 238-1464. Regular dinner hours. $35 per person. All ages.
FRIDAY, MARCH 11 21st Annual Buckman Elementary Art Show & Sell Buckman Arts Elementary School hosts its 21st annual Art Show & Sell—its largest ever—with more than 140 artists and craftspeople and a flood of food carts (Addy’s Sandwich Bar, Da-Pressed Coffee, Koi Fusion, Garden State) outside. A percentage of sales will go to save the school’s arts program. NV. Buckman Elementary School, 320 SE 16th Ave., 233-4380. 5-9 pm Friday, 10 am-5 pm Saturday, March 11-12. $5 Friday (kids free), $2 donation Saturday.
TUESDAY, MARCH 15 Wine Dinner with Mark Bitterman
Thirst Wine bar & Bistro puts together a pretty amazing menu with the help of Mark Bitterman, owner of local salt/chocolate specialty store the Meadow. We’re excited about getting our hands on a Kona-salt-and-cocoa-rimmed rum cocktail and the duck-liver pâté with Iburi-Joi cherry salt, a Japanese sea salt that’s smoked over cherry wood. Now we’re hungry (and thirsty). NV. Thirst Wine Bar & Bistro, 0315 SW Montgomery St., 295-2747. 6:30 pm. $68. Call for reservations or reserve online at thirstbistro.com.
ROUNDUP: CHILI (AND DOGS) FOR ALL Chili Pie Palace
The house speciality of this “palace” (a.k.a. cart) of downhome Texan cookin’ is Frito pie: big baskets of corn chips covered in spicy housemade chili, grated cheese, onions, a generous glob of sour cream and the pièce de résistance, seriously heat-packing house-pickled jalapeños. It’s all vegetarian, but my devoutly carnivorous dining companion said he
The Fried Onion
Our favorite lunch these days is a Red Hot Chicago hot dog with a big scoop of scalding hot chili from the Fried Onion. Throw on some cheese and onions at no extra charge for a real heartburn special. BEN WATERHOUSE. Southeast 3rd Avenue and Alder Street, 961-2534, thefriedonion.com. Lunch MondayFriday. $.
Nick’s Famous Coney Island
Nick’s may not be the same windowless beerhole it used to be—the ceiling’s raised, the lights bright, the bartender friendlier than family—but the chili recipe hasn’t been fiddled with since 1935. So whether you’re slopping through an ample Single Coney or the insanely mammoth Home Run, it’s the same all-meat chili and dogs they fed to those myriad politicians and sportsmen whose signed mugshots pad the walls. It’s history on a bun. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. 3746 SE Hawthorne St., 235-3008, nicksfamousconeys.com. Lunch and dinner daily. $.
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couldn’t tell as he wolfed down an entire serving. RUTH BROWN. Chili Pie Palace, Southeast 32nd Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard, facebook.com/chilipiepalace. Lunch and dinner Tuesday-Sunday. $.
Delivery & Shipping Available
Open Daily for Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
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Taste the Difference
Varieties of Gourmet Tamales
Bombshell CASA DE AVintage R LE S AU
M TA
Let us know if you saw us in WW and get a free dessert!
Y
ARAGU S A SP
AR
Now offering cooking classes call for info
Bombshell Vintage DISH EVENTS THIS WEEK
Beer & Wine
PRICES: $: Most entrees under $10. $$: $10-$20. $$$: $20-$30. $$$$: Above $30. Editor: KELLY CLARKE. Email: dish@wweek.com. See page 3 for submission instructions.
JUST ADD BEER: Robb Sloan makes his Really Good Food.
Now Serving
AN T
811 E. Burnside
CAN B
FOOD & DRINK
Vegan & vegetarian tamales
503.654.4423 10605 SE Main St. Milwaukie, Or Look for our weekly specials
REST
www.CanbyAsparagusFarm.com
3 FREE
MONTHS OF OMSI MEMbERSHIp
Robb’s Really Good Food
When Robb Sloan was laid off from his job 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 barbecue sauce with beer from the pubs and drives them over for the pub to heat and serve. Sloan opened his kitchen in a cart to save money. 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. BW. Southeast 52nd Avenue and Foster Road, 724-8384, twitter.com/ RobbsGoodFood. Lunch and dinner Tuesday-Sunday. $ Inexpensive.
Zach’s Shack
Every hot dog has its day in this hole-in-the-wall gem with the charm of a dive bar and much better food. Excellent fries make a perfect complement to the tasty hot dog recipes that represent every region—like the Chicago Dog with sport peppers and a pickle spear, the New York chili dog, and even a Los Lobos Dog with salsa, sour cream and jalapeños. BRITTANY ROGERS. 4611 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 233-4616, myspace.com/dogswithasnap. Lunch, dinner and late-night daily.
Get 15 months of OMSI membership for the price of 12 and win a 16GB iPad 2! We’ll select a winner from every 100 new members until April 15! Enjoy premiere exhibitions Lost Egypt: Ancient Secrets, Modern Science and Game On 2.0! For complete rules and membership benefits, visit www.omsi.edu/willamette-week. Offer ends April 15, 2011.
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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JUST DO WHAT’S RIGHT ON SALE $12.99 CD
Portland’s Brothers of the Baladi take world music to a new level, fusing rock and pop with traditional music and instruments from the Middle East,Medieval England, and Gypsy Spain plus politically and socially charged lyrics. Includes six original Baladi songs and six Arabic, Tunisian, Persian, Anglo Saxon, and Spanish Classics. Also includes songs by Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Chris Rea. Features gorgeous traditional instruments and vocals in French, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, Old Anglo Saxon, and English. Guest artists include kanoon master Ishmael, Egyptian violin master Youssef Boutros, and John Smith, cofounder of 1980’s pop group Nu Shooz.
FIRST AID KIT
THE BIG BLACK AND THE BLUE ON SALE $8.99 CD LP ALSO AVAILABLE
First Aid Kit is comprised of Swedish sisters Klara (16) and Johanna Söderberg (19) who wrote and played most instruments and designed the artwork. To some extent, their pitch-perfect, folk-inflected tunes are indicative of the uncanny, rather primitive bond between siblings. And while still relatively inchoate, First Aid Kit utilize this partnership better than most.
“A sound that knows no borders.” — LA Times
STONES
BRUCE COCKBURN
SMALL SOURCE OF COMFORT ON SALE $12.99 CD
‘Small Source of Comfort’ is Cockburn’s first studio album in six years – a rhythmic and highly evocative collection of 14 new tracks inspired by his renowned unusual and diverse muse - recent trips to Afghanistan and ponderings on the re-incarnation of Richard Nixon, to road trips and unreturned phone calls. The album boasts some of the best musicians recording today, including violinist Jenny Scheinman, former Wailin’ Jenny Annabelle Chvostek, and long time collaborators Gary Craig, Jon Dymond and producer Colin Linden.
Offer Good Thru: 3/22/11 22
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
MUSIC
MARCH 9 - 15 Q&A
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
VIVIANJOHNSON.COM
Prices listed are sometimes for advance ticket sales. At-the-door increases and socalled convenience charges may apply. Event lineups are subject to change after WW’s press deadlines. Editors: CASEY JARMAN, MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, go to wweek.com/submitevents and follow submission directions. All shows should be submitted two weeks or more in advance of event. 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, mmannheimer@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9 The Shivas, SexyWaterSpiders, Errata Note
[TWO-FACE ROCK] Landing somewhere between a bounding pop quirk akin to the Kinks and the lucid psychedelia so common with Portlandian trip-folk acts, the Shivas’ identity crisis works to the local quartet’s advantage. Even on the band’s more sedate forays into off-kilter lullabies, there’s a rock animal ready to bare its teeth and slam forth with a feral intensity. Likewise, riff-driven pop bouncers seem ready to take a nap at any point. The duality allows the Shivas to sucker punch their audience, keeping listeners on guard at all times. AP KRYZA. Backspace, 115 NW 5th Ave., 248-2900. 9 pm. $5. All ages.
Tapes ’n Tapes, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., Themes
[WOULD-BE KINGS] It used to be that when people talked about bands getting “chewed up and spat out” by the music industry, the implication was that huge multinational corporations were the ones doing the masticating. These days, major labels don’t hold that kind of power. The Internet does. Minneapolis’ Tapes ’n Tapes know exactly how it feels to get ground through the post-millennial hype machine. Its debut, The Loon, arrived in 2005 on a wave of tremendous buzz, with Internet tastemakers praising its classic indie-rock moves and preparing to anoint the group the next Modest Mouse. By the time of 2008’s Walk It Off, though, several other “Next Big Indie Things” had come and gone, and the album was met with shrugs. And so T’nT retreated to its hometown, putting out last year’s Outside on its own label. While it didn’t exactly reignite critical interest in the band, it does sport the enthusiasm that made folks take notice in the first place. MATTHEW SINGER. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 2319663. 9 pm. $15. 21+.
Fergus & Geronimo, Cheap Time, Idle Times, Dead Meat
Unlearn, the debut record by Denton, Texas, duo Fergus & Geronimo, it’s crazy to think that the band started out as something of an in-joke. Supposedly named after the rival gang leaders of Irish children from the film gem War of the Buttons, Fergus & Geronimo combine all sorts of forms of garage rock (Nuggets-style pomp, Mothers of Invention psychedelia, and fake Motown longing) into a mix of humor and pathos that’s refreshing in a world where most bands just seem too serious. Jason Kelly and Andrew Savage might get lumped in with Woods and Blank Dogs, but their sound is much more indebted to indie bands like Yo La Tengo, which understand that a song can be good and humorous at the same time. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. East End, 203 SE Grand Ave., 232-0056. 9 pm. $10. 21+.
EVERYTHING MUST GO: Aaron Shepherd talks shop at the Biz, the record store attached to his venue, the Artistery.
New York Rifles, The Ax
[SHOTGUN EXPRESS] Exploding Hearts is long gone, but the band’s spirit continues to haunt clubs throughout Portland. New York Rifles aren’t fully indebted to the Hearts’ beloved power punk—there are liberal amounts of gutter-glam sleaze and strutting hard rock in the band’s sound as well—but there is more than a passing resemblance in the group’s commitment to loose-limbed catchiness. Singer Scott Young has a voice that’s alternately snarling and seductive, exuberant and accusatory, and the band can shift from barreling, bar-room rock ’n’ roll to psych-spiked slow jams without losing sight of what matters most: the great pop hook. MATTHEW SINGER. Plan B, 1305 SE 8th Ave., 230-9020. 8 pm. $5. 21+.
Point Juncture, WA; Karl and the Jerks; The Beauty; Gepetto; Sam Humans
[ONCE TASTED, EVER WANTED] You heard it here first: The new Point Juncture, WA album is recorded, mastered and ready for consumption. Though there’s no concrete release date just yet, multi-instrumentalist and producer Skyler Norwood told me last month to expect new PJWA this summer, and I’m holding him to it, dammit. Until then, the best way
[NEW LINE SWINGERS] Listening to
TOP FIVE
CONT. on page 27
BY M IC H AEL SHOWA LTER
TOP FIVE BANDS TO WRITE TO. Stereolab It’s like a blanket of sound; hypnotic. It drowns everything out. Neko Case Her music is melancholy, beautiful, witty and lush. It’s like a cup of coffee in music form. Radiohead Similar to Stereolab in that there’s so much sound it’s trance—like, good for focusing. Sort of like a white-noise machine but instead of white noise it’s really good music. Wilco Wilco is to music what sweaters and wool socks are to clothes—warm, layered, covered in bark. The Rolling Stones If beef stew were music it’d be the Stones. Nothing goes better with writing than a big bowl of really hearty beef stew. SEE IT: Michael Showalter comes to the Mission Theater on Wednesday, March 9, in support of his new book, Mr. Funny Pants. 9 pm. $14. 21+.
STATE OF THE ARTISTERY AN IMPORTANT PORTLAND ALL-AGES VENUE SAYS GOODBYE (AND GOOD LUCK). BY CASEY JA R MA N
cjarman@wweek.com
Five years may not seem an awfully long time, but for a Portland all-ages music venue, it’s an eternity. So in the half-decade that the Artistery has been open on Southeast Division Street—it has considerably longer roots as an underground venue and Christian artists collective that began in 2001 in the Brooklyn neighborhood with sponsorship from the Imago Dei church—it has endeared itself to more than one generation of music fans and artists. What’s even rarer than the Artistery’s lifespan is its self-sufficient financial structure: In addition to the basement-level venue, the house—nondescript but for a large painted “A” on its side—holds nine artist studios. Those artists, in addition to paying rent, must volunteer at the venue on show nights. The communal nature of the venture not only lends the club character, it has kept it alive. For the past eight years, Aaron Shepherd has been the ringmaster for the Artistery circus. On his watch, he’s seen it go from an insular art experiment to a thriving (entirely secular) venue. In January, 32-year-old Shepherd learned that the Artistery building had been sold to a large developer (the club’s final string of shows is slated for this week) that wanted the building’s tenants out immediately. Behind the counter at his invenue record store, the Biz, Shepherd is cheery despite a chest cold and the pending demolition of a community he has been instrumental in creating. “You never know where life’ll take you,” he says. WW: Were you surprised to be kicked out on such short notice? Aaron Shepherd: It was a surprise. First, [the landlord] asked us if we could get out in 30 days. I didn’t see any way it could happen, and it didn’t make any sense. All of a sudden there’s a “closed” sign on the door? Maybe [the Artistery] isn’t the most incredible thing Portland’s ever seen, but it meant something to some people. So he ended up giving us 60 days, and we planned the last week of shows.
How did that last week come together? I’m extremely nostalgic, and so I remembered what I considered the golden years of this place. And I just started calling bands. And everybody said, “Of course.” The type of people I wanted to be here were the type of people who wanted to do it. That felt good. Were you ever shut down by the cops in the early days? At the [Brooklyn neighborhood] house we were really lucky—we had really loud shows down there, but no one ever complained. So it was kind of a shock when we moved here and cops would show up. The neighborhood just wasn’t used to us. There are a lot of stresses running a place like this. If we get shut down, it’s not just a venue, there are nine people using studio space here. So it’s irresponsible to say, “Yeah, screw it, who cares?” Do you see a silver lining for all-ages music in Portland? Absolutely. I mean, it takes a while for you to turn 21 [laughs]. That seems like a very long time when you’re in high school or junior high or whenever it is that you decide you want to see live music, and I hope that’s motivation for people to start something. There are places that are doing this sort of thing while supporting themselves with alcohol sales—Backspace, Branx—I don’t look down on that at all. Art should be available to everyone, so however you can make that happen is cool. It’s hard to say that the Artistery is the model, because it’s not. It’s just a thing that happened for a period of time. Do you have advice for people who want to start something like Artistery? I think you just figure out what you want to do, decide if it’s a good thing to do or not and then do it. It’s so straightforward to me! What else are we here for if not to just go for it? That’s what we did. We didn’t have a blueprint for this place; it just evolved, and we let it evolve. That’s important, too: Don’t hold on too tightly to your ideals. Just pick the important ones and stick to those. SEE IT: The Artistery hosts four final shows this week. See music calendar, page 37, for details. Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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MUSIC
MAKE IT A NIGHT Present that night’s show ticket and get $3 off any menu item Sun - Thur in the dining room
K R Y S T E N H AY E S
PROFILE
DOUG FIR RESTAURANT + BAR OPEN 7AM - 2:30AM EVERYDAY
SERVING BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, LATE-NIGHT. FOOD SPECIALS 3-6 PM EVERYDAY COVERED SMOKING PATIO, FIREPLACE ROOM, LOTS OF LOG. LIVE SHOWS IN THE LOUNGE... THE RETURN OF JAGGED NEO-PUNK FROM MINNEAPOLIS
TAPES 'N TAPES
WEDNESSDAY! WEDNE
A CD RELEASE/TOUR KICK OFF CELEBRATION FOR LOCAL PSYCHE MASTERS
THURSSDAY! THUR
MORNING
TELEPORTATION YOURS
+THE PINK SNOWFLAKES DALE EARNHART JR. JR.
+THEMES
WEDNESDAY MARCH 9 •
$15 ADVANCE
THURSDAY MARCH 10 •
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A CO-HEADLINE AFFAIR WITH TWO SKILLED SONGWRITERS
DAY!
DAN MANGAN
STUNNING INSTRUMENTAL MINIMALISM FROM AUSTIN
BALMORHEA AY!
SEAN FLINN
& THE ROYAL WE
SATURDAY MARCH 12
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AVANT ANARCHO-PUNK FROM DUTCH LEGENDS
IN MUSIC WE TRUST PRESENTS THEIR MONTHLY THROW DOWN
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ST. EVEN FRIDAY, MARCH 11
HERE COME DOTS
SUNDAY MARCH 13 •
$5 AAT THE DOOR
GOOD TIME HAWAII-BASED ROOTS REGGAE COMBO
the GREEN
TUESDAY MARCH 15
•
$15 ADVANCE
LATINO-INSPIRED INDIE FOLK FROM PDX ENSEMBLE
+TH
WEDNESDAY MARCH 16
THURSDAY MARCH 17 •
$10 ADVANCE
ANTHEMIC ROOTS ROCK FROM SF HIPSHAKERS
THE MOTHER HIPS
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FRIDAY MARCH 18
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MUCH BELOVED ORCHESTRAL INDIE ROCK FROM CANADA
DESTROYER 13 ADVANCE
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A LOG LOVE SUNDAY ROCK_STRAVAGANZA
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SUNDAY MARCH 20
POP PERFECTION FROM CHILLWAVE LUMINARY
TORO Y MOI BRAIDS
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$6 ADVANCE
DAY MARCH 25
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$10 ADVANCE
A HYPERACTIVE AFFAIR WITH THE TALENTED
LIAM FINN
+THE LUYAS
MONDAY MARCH 28
THE PIPETTES 4/ 4/30 on sale 3/11 BATTLES 5/4 JAMES BLAKE - 5/2 5/ 0 - on sale 3/12 SALLIE FORD & THE SOUND OUTSIDE 6/3 + 6/4
•
BRENDAN PERRY/ ROBIN GUTHRIE6/10 on sale 3/11 $12 ADVANCE
All shows on sale Friday at Ticketfly.com
WHAT HEARTS 3/23 • ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE 3/26 • THE PARLOTONES 3/27 HA HA TONKA 3/29 • SHARON VAN ETTEN 3/30 • O’DEATH 3/31 • JETPACK MISSING 4/1 WEINLAND 4/2 • BRITISH SEA POWER 4/3 • RON SEXSMITH 4/4 • THE DODOS 4/5 AADVANCE TICKETS AT TICKETSWEST 503-224-TIXX - www.ticketswest.com, MUSIC MILLENNIUM, JACKPOT RECORDS • SUBJECT TO SERVICE CHARGE &/OR USER FEE ALL SHOWS: 8PM DOORS / 9PM SHOW• 21+ UNLESS NOTED • BOX OFFICE OPENS 1/2 HOUR BEFORE DOORS • ROOM PACKAGES AVAILABLE AT www.jupiterhotel.com
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Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
[SINGER-SONGWRITER] The story of how Steve Hefter came to Portland, and recorded his first album under the new name St. Even, has all the raw material of a secular redemption testimony—except for the part where Hefter believes in anything so simple as a redemption story. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,” he says, sipping an IPA at Morrison Hotel. “I don’t feel that grown up. I’m 33. I probably should start feeling grown up. Or at least pretend I do.” Yet two years after arriving in Portland from Baltimore, Hefter has recorded a gorgeously grown-up record, Spirit Animal, that’s filled with irony—the real stuff; the sensitivity to double meanings. “I haven’t seen that blinding love in a long time,” he sings in a lilting baritone on “Blinding Love,” the album’s first track. “You know the kind that makes you go blind? I haven’t seen it in a long time.” Over a foundation of Magnetic Fields-inflected chamber pop, Spirit Animal sparkles with precisely worded thoughts that disintegrate into uncertainty. It’s the story of his life. Hefter arrived in Oregon in 2009 on what he describes as a crest of euphoria, touring on his record Selma, attending a friend’s wedding in San Francisco and driving up to Portland “on a whim.” Here, he ran out of money, spending his last $400 to rent a guest room. Then he fractured his foot playing tennis—“and also walking from Dekum Street, because I didn’t know the city, all the way down to Holocene to try to catch a band, in flip-flops.” He had no job, and no medical insurance. “I think part of being creative,” he reflects, “is being able to tap into some slightly grandiose places, because you are assuming that people Steve Hefter’s love is not blind.
want to hear your philosophies and your musings. And I think when you step back with a broken foot and no money, you’re like, ‘Wow, I’m a real jackass. Nobody gives a shit, and now I’m in the middle of nowhere, not knowing anybody, with no money.’” But he found work at a mental health service in Beaverton, then spent 10 months in a studio with Kimya Dawson producer Jake Kelly, recording his St. Even debut. Spirit Animal, though “way more disciplined and thorough” than Hefter’s Baltimore home recordings (and fleshed out with lush piano, trombone and strings), remains in a lonely place, peppered with questions—especially about God. Hefter was raised in a Messianic Jewish home, where his parents subscribed to the magazine Jews for Jesus, and he’s only recently noticed how much his songwriting reflects the choruses of Pentecostal praise-and-worship music as much as those of Leonard Cohen. But St. Even’s best songs—“Long Distance Calls,” “Whatever It Is You Well Up With”—rejoice in the acceptance of doubt. “I’d like to celebrate simplicity,” Hefter sings, “but things remain complicated/ I’ve waited, waited and waited/ For the power of God to be demonstrated.” So Hefter rejects the idea that Spirit Animal represents a resolution. “The songs on the record,” he says, “tend to be about my father, trying to understand the powers that be in the universe, and the girls I’m no longer with. I don’t think any of those three things will ever be resolved in my mind, unless I’m really crazy.” AARON MESH. SEE IT: St. Even plays a double record release show with Leonard Mynx Friday, March 11, at the Woods. 9 pm. $6. 21+.
WW ’s got a
nose for news Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
MUSIC
Since 1974
Never a cover!
CHRIS BURDICK
WEDNESDAY - THURSDAY
Buffalo gap We d n e s d ay 3 / 9 • 9 : 0 0 p m
“Buffalo Bandstand” presented by: live artist Network
GET OFF MUH LAWN: Leonard Mynx plays the Woods on Friday. to hear the new material is to see Portland’s best popgaze outfit (seriously, I dare you to listen to 2008’s Heart to Elk and not be blown away) at the first of the Artistery’s “closing week” shows. I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate the beloved all-ages club. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. The Artistery, 4315 SE Division St., 8035942. 8 pm. $7 ($6 with canned food donation). All ages.
released third album, The Rock and the Tide, bothers to vaguely up the tempo and kick out the flimsiest of jams in service of the same old twaddle. Radin goes electric shan’t deliver any new listeners, and he’ll only irritate the most adult of contemporary fans. First, as they say, do no harm. JAY HORTON. Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 225-0047. 8 pm. $16.50 advance, $20 day of show. All ages.
Datarock, Atole
Morning Teleportation, Yours, The Pink Snowflakes
[EU-PHONY] Embracing the kitsch and technological circumstance of early ’80s electropop should be a reflexive pose across the continent, but Datarock’s immersion in the creepier tinges of Commodore 64-era American adolescence, 2005’s breakthrough single “Computer Camp Love,” blends outdated rock and dance idioms for the nodding approval of folks who do neither. Norwegian nerdchic duo Fredrik Saroea and Ketil Mosnes aren’t really here for the music, as evidenced by upcoming release and (self-described) most extravagant single in history “Catcher in the Rye”: a USB drive containing concert footage, 20 videos, 110 songs, and 1,500 photographs hidden inside the designer toy. People always clap for the wrong things. JAY HORTON. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 8 pm. $13 advance, $15 day of show. All ages.
THURSDAY, MARCH 10 Cower, Numb, Grandfather
[SALOON METAL] It’s hard to underestimate how much fun Cower is having. The quartet, now in its fifth year, plays metal with the sloppy virtuosity of a bar band and the thundering volume of a daisy cutter. Think Motörhead; think Every Time I Die. Much like that latter slop-metal institution, Cower is found frequently listing toward the power ballad, and joyously so. Last year’s Land Before Time (available, like all the group’s recordings, for free) lays into its titanic waves of noise with a nearly biblical gravity. This month is slated for the release of the group’s fourth recorded compilation—Burn the Banks. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. SHANE DANAHER. Backspace, 115 NW 5th Ave., 248-2900. 8 pm. $5. All ages.
Joshua Radin, Cary Brothers, Laura Jansen
[RIFF-BRAFF] Ever since Scrubs’ tastemaker selected Joshua Radin’s “Winter”—his first songwriting effort, reportedly, and a perennial set closer—as appropriately unsubtle accompaniment seven years back (thereby introducing his mellifluous whisper and utterly uncomplicated muse to Gray’s Anatomy producers and fans of smock-driven emotive montages the world over), the Ohio singer-songwriter has whittled himself a decent enough career eternally replicating the same tune. It’s something of a surprise, then, that Radin’s recently
See album review, page 28. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $10. 21+.
Damon Fowler
[GUITAR MAN] Having chops isn’t enough. Sure, there’ll always be a certain class of music geek that waits patiently through excruciatingly clichéd verses for that thundering guitar solo: Most of us, though, want a little meat in our rock sandwich. Enter Damon Fowler, who can pack a shit-ton of shredding—and a patient, cohesive, clever narrative—into a song like “Devil Got His Way,” that clocks in well under three minutes in length. On his sophomore record of the same name, Fowler flawlessly balances crunchy blues-rock for the Black Keys set (“Cypress in the Pines”) with soulful ballads à la Otis Redding (his moving, understated cover of Chuck Prophet’s “After the Rain”) and old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll (“Once in a While”). The fact that Fowler can shred with the best of them is really an aside to the fact that the man knows how to deliver a wellrounded song and, for that matter, album. CASEY JARMAN. Duff’s Garage, 1635 SE 7th Ave., 2342337. 9 pm. $8. 21+.
Hugh Cornwell, Vicious Kisses
[SAME OLD BEAT] It’s been two decades since Hugh Cornwell quit his post as frontman of British punk band the Stranglers—far longer since the band did anything of note—but many will be surprised to learn that he’s still kicking on, touring and recording. Many of his solo albums aren’t half-bad, either. Cornwell was never the strongest vocalist, but he has a good knack for turning out ear-pleasing power pop with great guitar breaks. His latest album, Hoover Dam, was released free online, which is nice, but sadly, you get what you pay for: 10 dated, unremarkable tracks. Ironically, the album’s best song is titled, “Banging on at the Same Old Beat,” containing the lyrics: “So give me one more hit/ Can’t get enough of it/ And if you’re tired of it/ Well I don’t give a shit.” At least the Stranglers’ snarky arrogance lives on. RUTH BROWN. East End, 203 SE Grand Ave., 2320056. 8 pm. $8. 21+.
Snack Attack 2011: Guidance Counselor, Forbidden Friends, Unkle Funkle
[NOM NOM MUSICAL GOODNESS]
CONT. on page 31
T h u r s d ay 3 / 1 0 • 9 : 0 0 p m
James Sasser
(folk americana) f r i d ay 3 / 1 1 • 9 : 0 0 p m
Matthew price (folk americana)
S at u r d ay 3 / 1 2 • 9 : 0 0 p m
ambush party (acoustic rock)
T u e s d ay 3 / 1 5 open Mic Night • WIN $50 Sign up @ 8:30 | Music @ 9pm Hosted by: Scott Gallegos 6835 SW Macadam Ave | John’s Landing
PORTLAND COLLECTOR CAR AUCTION
Saturday March 26th Portland Expo Center
Gates 8am, Bidding 10am
150 CARS EXPECTED!
$8 Admission • Free Bid Pass • Buy Fee 8% Visit Silver’s Website for Bidding Details
Consign Your Car Today!
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For More Info 800-255-4485 • www.SilverAuctions.com Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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MUSIC
DATES HERE
ALBUM REVIEWS
ETERNAL TAPESTRY BEYOND THE 4TH DOOR (THRILL JOCKEY)
[SACRAMENTAL VISIONS] It must be devastating for other bands to hear albums like Beyond the 4th Door. They rehearse their songs into the ground, stressing over every note and beat. Then here comes Eternal Tapestry tossing out ingenious impromptu psychedelic jams at the drop of a blotter tab of acid. The improvisational mastery of this quintet is a testament to its instrumental acumen and the long stretches of time it took to find the core of its spacious approach. Eternal Tapestry has gone through a variety of lineups since forming in 2005, and its sound has evolved with each of those changes. But one of its most exciting and productive stretches was when the group comprised the core trio of Nick Bindeman, his brother Jed, and Dewey Mahood. And with that paring down came a honing of their attack. Even with the addition of two new members last year—bassist Krag Likins and Ryan Carlile on sax and keyboards—the heart of the band’s sonic explorations is still the wending interplay between Mahood and Nick Bindeman’s guitars and Jed Bindeman’s slowmoving drum beats. By this point, the new guys have become essential parts of the equation. Likins’ wandering sax lines sound amazing looping around the lost-in-space vocals on the epic “Reflections in a Mirage.” And some low end, no matter how fuzzy, helps ground tracks like “Galactic Derelict” before they get too lost in the ether-frolicking haze. Since almost all the tracks were edited down from long jam sessions recorded in the band’s home studio, there’s a good chance the groaners and plodding moments have been left on the cutting-room floor. But what Eternal Tapestry has left us is a near-masterpiece of sun-baked, hallucinatory anthems that will turn even the pinkest of brains inside out. ROBERT HAM.
MORNING TELEPORTATION EXPANDING ANYWAY (GLACIAL PACE) [THE LONESOME CROWDED NORTHWEST] Ever since moving to Portland in 2008, Morning Teleportation has been tagged the Next Big Thing. Its pedigree is peerless—handpicked by Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock to jump-start his label, Glacial Pace, the band has opened for the Flaming Lips, wowed New York Times critic Jon Pareles, and destroyed local stages with a chaotic live show highlighting its penchant for genre-hopping and boundless energy. But on its debut album, Expanding Anyway, Morning Teleportation is a band without an identity. Expanding Anyway attempts to channel the band’s frantic energy into a cohesive full-length with varied results. The album is named perfectly: Almost every track is a maximalist construction of excess, with instruments piled higher than Brock’s post-“Float On” bank account. It’s hard to fault a young band with so much ambition, but most of the record tries too hard to be wild and trippy. The band frequently ruins a song by striving for weirdness—does opener “Boom Puma” really need a squealing talk box guitar solo and a barroom piano breakdown within its first two minutes? Coupled with the grunts and gibberish howls of lead singer Tiger Merritt, it sounds like a drug trip gone very bad. Not everything veers into Enter the Void territory: The title track is Modest Mouse-y in the best way possible, with Merritt’s endearing wails fronting a great melody and a rollicking backbeat. Morning Teleportation fares best when it keeps things simple, as on acoustic-picker “Day Dream Electric Storm” and the bouncy “Eyes the Same.” Merritt’s got a killer voice when he really opens up and sings—I just wish it wasn’t hidden behind a cacophony of disparate sounds. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. SEE IT: Eternal Tapestry releases Beyond the 4th Door on Friday, March 11, at the Artistery. 8 pm. $7 ($6 with canned food donation). All ages. Morning Teleportation releases Expanding Anyway on Thursday, March 10, at Doug Fir. 9 pm. $10. 21+. 28
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MUSIC
JUSTINE MURPHY
THURSDAY - FRIDAY
THRILL OF THE HUNT: Wizard Rifle plays Plan B on Friday. Snacks are good. Dancing, ALSO good. Snacking while dancing? Great, provided you keep your bingeing to a minimum and dodge a food coma so you can hit the dance floor with light feet. Local bands Wampire and Operative and free-form noise musician Ilyas Ahmed will play chefs tonight (each act holds a live “cooking show” spot) while Guidance Counselor, Forbidden Friends (the Thermals plus Kill Rock Stars’ Maggie Veil on bass) and Unkle Funkle perform. Stick around for a dance party hosted by DJ Snakks (Zack Osterlund of Breakfast Mountain). He’s only spinning songs that sound like they taste good. NIKKI VOLPICELLI. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $5. 21+.
Snow Bud and the Flower People, Chloroform, Zmoke
[PSYCH OPS] As stoner ventures go, legendary Northwest frontman Chris Newman’s (Napalm Beach) psychedelia side project and multimedia-vehicle Snow Bud and the Flower People was always remarkably productive—sharing bills with Green River and the Pixies; releasing cassettes through Sub Pop and Tim Kerr; accompanying Newman’s Snow Bud comic within High Times. Still, nearly two decades since the band was a going concern, expecting much from its silver anniversary seemed, well, a pipe dream, but one apparently shared by grunge architect Jack Endino. The producer of seminal albums from Nirvana to Soundgarden brought the local trio to his Seattle studio to re-record a sampling of its fuzzed-out classics (plus new single “Stoner Girl”) for the soon-to-be-released Flashback. JAY HORTON. Plan B, 1305 SE 8th Ave., 230-9020. 8 pm. $3. 21+.
Grouper, The Tenses, Johnny X and the Groadies, Why I Must Be Careful, Ghost to Falco
[THE LONG GOODBYE] As the Artistery breathes its unfortunate last breath, there are few musicians more appropriate to eulogize the occasion than Grouper. This is not only because Grouper’s tunes tend to sound like eulogies in the first place, but also because Liz Harris—minimalist maven behind Grouper’s elegant soundscapes—perfectly encapsulates the Artistery’s twin focuses on the politely outré and the geographically local. Joining Ms. Harris will be other quietly experimental institutions such as the fantastic Ghost to Falco and the Tenses—reformed members of Portland underground noise collective Smegma. SHANE DANAHER. The Artistery, 4315 SE Division St., 803-5942. 8 pm. $7 (or $6 with donation of a can of food). All ages.
Drive-By Truckers, Heartless Bastards
[FAULKNER ROCK] The latest album from Southern rock heroes Drive-By Truckers, Go-Go Boots, sees the band withdrawing from
the gonzo live spirit of recent records, a period chronicled in last year’s fine documentary, The Secret to a Happy Ending. The studio allows the band to explore the subtleties, and expand on the possibilities, of its sound as newest Trucker Jason Gonzalez’s keyboards slip more comfortably into the mix. One regrettable development is the continued abstention of Mike Cooley—loosely, the Lennon to Patterson Hood’s McCartney—from songwriting duties, with only three songs on this record as on the last; the band’s least-experienced songwriter, bassist Shonna Tucker— more Ringo than George—can’t pick up the slack. Fortunately, Hood’s prolificacy suffices as the Truckers roll on to glory. JEFF ROSENBERG. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 9 pm. $22 advance, $24 day of show. 21+.
FRIDAY, MARCH 11
Join us for a St. Patricks Day & weekend celebration! 3/11- 3/12 & 3/17 @ Blitz Ladd 3/11 & 3/17 - Live Celtic music by Jeba
7-11pm
3/12 - Robert Richter and Jessica Hitchborn 7-11pm no cover
If Celtic music isn’t your thing, join our party at Blitz Pearl on St. Patricks day! DJ Sovern-T 10-close no cover Come see the Killians Girls @ Ladd on 3/12 from 8-10 pm
LADD: 2239 SE 11th I 503.236.3592 PEARL: 110 NW 10th I 503.222.2229
www.blitzbarpdx.com
Iris Dement, Rachel Harrington
[AMERICANA] Beloved of British Isles audiences and music critics—earning four-star reviews and comparisons with Gillian and Emmylou—Rachel Harrington has thus far been a prophetess less honored in her homeland. Her potent third album, Celilo Falls, could go some distance toward redressing that. Like the titular Columbia River feature long submerged by the Dalles Dam, Harrington says, “A lot of this record is, for me, about what lies beneath.” But she recognizes the duality of progress and past—after all, her grandparents met while building the dam; “if it weren’t for [the dam],” she says, “I wouldn’t be here.” If it weren’t for beloved headliner Iris Dement, Harrington wouldn’t be at the Aladdin tonight, but since the anti-prolific Dement has no new product to hawk, concertgoers should shell out for Harrington’s worthy work. JEFF ROSENBERG. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 234-9694. 8 pm (minors accompanied by parents). $25 advance, $28 door. All ages.
Rainbow Arabia, Spoek Mathambo, Atole, DJ Lifepartner
[MECHANICAL MULTICULTURALISM] The husband-and-wife duo known as Rainbow Arabia refers to its sound as “ethnotronic,” which I suppose is shorthand for the fact that its music is made via transistors and LCD screens and inspired by acts from South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Africa. As a descriptor it mostly works, but leaves out the pastelcolored New Wave pop that is smeared across the band’s latest album, Boys and Diamonds, like bright blue eyeliner. Whatever the hell anyone wants to call it, this is music for dancing yourself into a sweaty heap. ROBERT HAM.
CONT. on page 32 Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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LIVE MUSIC FULL BAR FOOD FUN
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Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
Branx, 320 SE 2nd Ave., 234-5683. 9 pm. $10 advance, $12 day of show. All ages.
Umphrey’s McGee, Big Gigantic
[JAMTASTIC] Chicago’s Umphrey’s McGee is a jam band. Its fans say otherwise, but Umphrey’s is now, always was and will always be a jam band—and one of the best fucking jam bands on the scene, as evidenced by 2009’s excellent Mantis. Not content to jerk off onstage like so many others, the band instead goes psycho, busting out ample death-metal licks with prog-rock innovation, hints of electronica and butt rock to go along with its trademark psychedelic rock explosions. Umphrey’s might be a jam band, but it’s among the sole survivors of the genre that remind us what a largely improvised live experience should be—invigorating. AP KRYZA. Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 225-0047. 8 pm. $20 advance, $25 day of show. All ages.
Barrington Levy, Detour Posse
[DANCEHALL DUKE] “I’m broader than Broadway!” Jamaican dancehall legend Barrington Levy bragged in his 1985 U.K. hit “Here I Come.” Although he was probably talking about his penis, a more savory interpretation would also have been accurate. Although never really breaking the U.S. market, Levy has been one of the most enduring figures in reggae. Since arriving on the dancehall scene at age 12, he released his first single at 14, and has since amassed some 26 albums, including collaborations with Bounty Killer and Snoop Dogg. Now 46, Levy’s smooth, scatting vocals remain as rich as ever. RUTH BROWN. Mount Tabor Theater, 4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. $20. 21+.
Wizard Rifle, Rabbits, Woe, Valkyrie Rodeo
Reptilians
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BACK TO THE FORE: L Pro plays Mount Tabor Theater Saturday.
[PHILOSOPHERS AND PLOUGHMEN] Is the rise of metal here in Portland a knee-jerk reaction to the long reign of pensive folk and laptop electronica in our city’s clubs? Whatever the reason, the number of amazing heavy bands that are crawling out of the dank corners of the woods is something to crow about. One group that is just starting to catch some buzz is Wizard Rifle, a proggy, dry ice and goat’s bloodimbibing duo. Tonight’s show is the kickoff for this young band’s first tour, heading all the way to Maine and back. Surely the band will leave a trail of scorched earth and swooning women in its wake. ROBERT HAM. Plan B, 1305 SE 8th Ave., 230-9020. 8 pm. $7. 21+.
Eternal Tapestry, Mount Eerie, White Fang, Ô Paon, Pete Swanson See album review, page 28. The Artistery, 4315 SE Division St., 8035942. 8 pm. $7 ($6 with canned food donation). All ages.
Wow & Flutter, Brittle Bones, Monster Sized Monsters
[MELTERS OF EAR PLUGS] I do love to witness the success of a worthy Portland band. Fuzzrock art-punksters Wow & Flutter is such a band, mirroring early Interpol’s ruminating guitar swipes and spooky, monklike vocals. Last fall, W & F joined Seattle label Mount Fuji Records (the Maldives; Point Juncture, WA) to release Equilibrio, a stunning record that showcases the band’s best material yet. The record offers maturity and comfort in the form of darker, less-obstructed works. The trio has always been prone to explosive onstage breakouts, but this is the first W & F record in which that lovable volatility is truly captured— at least without scalding the hands of the beholder. MARK STOCK. The Know, 2026 NE Alberta St., 4738729. 8 pm. Cover. 21+.
Leonard Mynx, St. Even, Petoskey
[SONGWRITER-SINGER] Yeah, I know, the preceding term is usually written in reverse. But Portland’s own Leonard Mynx’s greatest strengths lie not in singing—where he struggles to keep his naturally conversational delivery from slipping into a very convincing Bob Dylan impression—but in crafting powerful songs. In the latter arena, Mynx is decidedly old-school: He’s dropped the melodramatic sadness of his previous work on new album Son of the Famous So and So, but he still deserves Leonard Cohen comparisons for songs like the apocalyptic “Empty Men” and the sweeping 5 1/2-minute album standout “Ball of Fire.” He’s a writer who thinks long over each verse, and it shows. Famous So and So doesn’t just have Mynx’s graceful pen in its corner, though—it has production help from one of Portland’s finest knob-twiddlers, producer Adam Selzer, and an A-list of Portland guest musicians including Laura Gibson, Rachel Blumberg, Decemberist Nate Clark and Carcrashlander’s Cory Gray. With some of the best musicians in Portland already in his corner, it’s probably your turn to give him a listen. CASEY JARMAN. The Woods, 6637 SE Milwaukie Ave., 890-0408. 9 pm. $6. 21+.
SATURDAY, MARCH 12 Khaira Arby & The Sway Machinery
[SAHARA BLUES] Yet another amazing desert blues belter from the musical mecca of Mali, the Timbuktu-based singer Khaira Arby follows her cousin and mentor Ali Farka Toure in mixing traditional Berber sounds and instruments (calabash, ngoni) with the electric Western descendants (guitar, bass) so indebted to them, along with touches of reggae, violin and more. Whether singing traditional
CONT. on page 35
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UPCOMING IN-STORE PERFORMANCES DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
CHILDREN’S WIN PASSES TO THE OREGON
THURSDAY 3/10 @ 4PM
Far more than on any of the Drive-By Truckers’ previous albums, ‘Go-Go Boots’ rises like smoke from the old Muscle Shoals country-and-soul sound. Having recorded with Bettye LaVette and Booker T. Jones, and having spent a lifetime listening to classic soul albums by Bobby Womack, Tony Joe White, and especially Eddie Hinton, it was inevitable that the Truckers eventually produce this album.
LEVATOR SATURDAY 3/12 @ 5PM
Levator was founded by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Sky Lynn, and includes Rando Skrasek on drums, synthesizer and effects and Nate Henry on sax, synthesizer and effects. They’ve drawn comparisons to PJ Harvey, Mazzy Starr and Sonic Youth, and during a recent tour were christened as “dream-core.”
DOUG MACLEOD MONDAY 3/14 @ 6PM
GOOD FOR ANY PERFORMANCE IN THE 2010�2011 SEASON GO TO WWEEK.COM/PROMOTIONS
True blues. These two words define in style and commitment the acoustic music composed and played by Doug MacLeod, a singer-songwriter in the American tradition. On his new release, ‘Brand New Eyes,’ MacLeod presents 11 original songs. In a genre often reliant on old standards, he is the rare traveling artist who writes and sings original songs that are based on his own life and experiences.
WW’s Cheap Eats $7 Deals Bingo. Complete a bingocard pattern and win a $50 gift certificate to Sunset Bingo and dinner for two.
SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY EVENT! RON ROGERS & THE WAILING WIND RICH LAYTON & THE TROUBLEMAKERS TUESDAY 3/15 @ 6PM Texas-bred singer-songwriter-guitarist Ron Rogers knows how to tell a story. The 11 Rogers-penned songs on ‘Country & Eastern’ are testaments to the hard life, injustice, the dark side, and tough living, set to a raw and edgy roots/Americana soundtrack. His band is comprised of some of Portland’s finest – Dave Grafe on pedal steel guitar, Don Campbell . eap a buck ’s Ch year certifisave go this and vocals, and drummer Chris Bond. Each is a musical journeys to on bass ft effort out in a $50 gi n). ls Bin r ab u a e ia h yo D rote ut wit ran u for o his se (I we w ight in ts $7 d yo Hou own right who fits seamlessly with Rogers’ music. eals man rewar p Ea in a n ss m abob
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Growing up in Houston, Rich Layton learned to play in bands that worked a rough and tumble circuit of clubs, dance halls and roadhouses along Interstate 10. Rich moved to Portland in 1997 and felt the tug of his Gulf Coast roots so he set out to deliver the sound of an East Texas roadhouse, harmonica-fueled and swampified. The five-piece lineup emerged as Rich Layton & The Troublemakers, serving up original roots rock, blues, honkyER EPP OP tonk and more to a growing local and regional HIT R audience. WE SHIS
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SATURDAY - TUESDAY praise songs or protesting colonialism, female genital mutilation, or war and social injustice, Arby is one of African music’s most compelling voices. She’ll also sit in with Brooklyn’s Sway Machinery, featuring Balkan beat boxer Jeremiah Lockwood and musicians from Arcade Fire and Antibalas, which discovered Arby during a gig in Mali and collaborated with her on its latest album. BRETT CAMPBELL. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 234-9694. 8 pm (minors accompanied by parent). $15.
L Pro, Tope, Soul P, Destro Destructo, Serge Severe, Eddie Valiant
[HIP-HOP] It has been a minute since we’ve heard from L Pro, whose 2008 full-length, Chronicles, delivered on promise that the veteran Portland MC had been exhibiting on area stages for years. If Chronicles didn’t go quite far enough in proving that L Pro’s skilled, Guru-meets-Biggie flow had merit, new EP Equilibrium certainly does. There’s an old-school swagger that permeates the fivesong disc, a sound that is indebted to both L Pro’s melodic flows (his half-sung verses on “Fluid” and the knack for natural dialogue he exhibits on “Conversation” both add immeasurable charm to the collection) and producer 5th Sequence’s boom-bap beats. L Pro makes back-to-school rap that never stopped studying—it’s a pleasure to have him back. CASEY JARMAN. Mount Tabor Theater Lounge, 4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. 9 pm. Cover. 21+.
Little Wings, White Rainbow, Hive Dwellers, Rob Walmart
[GREEN GROW THE RUSHES] Kyle Field, the bearded truthsayer who releases music under the name Little Wings, has always been something of an eccentric genius. This is a man who wrote a song, “Look at What the Light Did Now,” that is as powerful as anything produced in the past decade, three minutes of stark simplicity so beautiful that Feist not only sang its praises but covered it for television cameras. And though Field was super-prolific for most of the aughts, his latest record, Black Grass (and first for Rad, an imprint of Marriage Records), is his first in over four years. Fortunately, the record ditches his Grateful Dead fetish for minimal, organic arrangements that highlight his warm croak and acoustic guitar, with sparse hints of percussion and rumbling bass lines inspired by Mike Watt and Kirra Roessler’s double-bass outfit DOS. It’s a beautiful, seasonal record, perfect for fireside listening and a spot next to the Silver Jews in your vinyl collection. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. The Artistery, 4315 SE Division St., 803-5942. 8 pm. $7 ($6 with canned food donation). All ages.
AZ, Sapient, Philly’s Phunkestra, DJ Yo Huckleberry
[HIP-HOP] A lyrical innovator who helped shape the course of modern hip-hop, AZ crafted some of the ’90s best rap records. While the death-obsessed rhymes of his 1995 breakthrough album, Doe or Die, would bum out the palest of goths, the Brooklyn-bred MC’s musical range impressed listeners as much as anything. AZ proved he was as adept at dark, streethustle coke rhymes that remind of Wu-Tang’s debut just two years before (“Uncut Raw”) as he was comfortable cribbing from the De La Soul playbook on the Pete Rock-produced classic “Gimme Yours.” AZ’s 1998 follow-up, Pieces of a Man, was another impressive, if slightly brighter, effort—and his disappearance from the mainstream rap world had more to do with the growing superstardom of NYC contemporaries like Jay-Z and (frequent collaborator) Nas than it
MUSIC
Real Food. Real Drinks. Real Music
did with any sharp fall-off from AZ himself. Still, the MC is intent on giving the people what they want: He’s been talking about crafting Doe or Die 2 for the past couple of years. CASEY JARMAN. The Crown Room, 205 NW 4th Ave., 222-6655. 9:30 pm. $5. 21+.
SUNDAY, MARCH 13 Little Wings, Michael Hurley, White Rainbow
See Saturday listing. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $5. 21+.
Marisa Anderson, Ilyas Ahmed, Tara Jane O’Neil
[INSTRUMENTAL BEAUTY] There are few things as comforting as the sound of an instrumental electric guitar record. On The Golden Hour, local guitarist Marisa Anderson (she’s lent her hands to Evolutionary Jass Band and the Dolly Ranchers) continues in the tradition of John Fahey and Leo Kottke by laying down 12 gorgeous, improvised solo tracks that creak and moan like an old train track. At times bluesy, always expressive, and never showy, Anderson’s playing is simply a pleasure to listen to. Tonight she brings her amazing fret skills to Valentine’s for a bill with two other giants of the experimental scene, Tara Jane O’Neil and Ilyas Ahmed. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Valentine’s, 232 SW Ankeny St., 248-1600. 9 pm. Free. 21+.
UNLIMITED
SPRING
PASS $139
639 SE Morrison • star-bar-rocks.com
The rest of the season is yours! SkiHood.com
TUESDAY, MARCH 15 Heavy Nova, Dorian Macmillan
[SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE] Finally, the return of everyone’s favorite Robert Palmer tribute band, Heavy Nova! Not that there are a lot of other Palmer imitators out there, but I have no doubt that Heavy Nova would destroy anyone else taking on “Addicted to Love” in a formal Battle of the Bands setting. Despite losing guitarist Ben Whitesides this fall (Whitesides moved back east for work), the band is still rocking the famous suits and cover songs, with a new axman (Ryan Stowe) and the same set of Palmer Girls, who have yet to crack one sly smile during any of the group’s performances. Be sure to put this on your calendar—singer Jake Morris teases that this might be the last Heavy Nova show for a while. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Bunk Bar, 1028 SE Water Ave., 894-9708. 10 pm. Free. 21+.
APRIL 3, 2011 Join more than 5,000 runners and walkers for half-marathon, 10k and 5k races. Meet at the Oregon Convention Center for breathtaking views, fast, accurate courses and—most importantly— the opportunity to give back to the community.
The Ex, Death Sentence Panda
[AFRO-ANARCHO] Amsterdam’s the Ex doesn’t have the iconic status in the punk lexicon of its British counterparts Crass, but it does have the edge when it comes to staying power. Thirty years and roughly 20 gazillion albums, EPs and collaborative projects (with the likes of Tortoise and Sonic Youth) since it first emerged, the band—which has seen dozens of members pass through its ranks, with only guitarist Terrie Hessels representing the original lineup—is still pushing its left-wing socialist agenda, albeit with a sound completely unrecognizable from that of its earliest records. Truth be told, the group always defied the narrow definitions of punk, experimenting with traditional European folk, industrial noise and even avant-garde classical music. Its latest, Catch My Shoe, bracingly mixes the serrated guitar of Gang of Four with the buzzing African rhythms of Congotronics. No wonder these guys never became popular among homeless punk kids. MATTHEW SINGER. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 2319663. 9 pm. $15. 21+.
RACE4THEROSES.ORG
Daily operations scheduled thru May 1, 2011 subject to change. Check SkiHood.com for operations and events schedule.
Albertina Kerr serves children, adults and families who face mental health challenges and developmental disabilities.
424 NE 22nd Ave, Portland, OR / 503-262-0175 / AlbertinaKerr.org
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
MUSIC CALENDAR = WW Pick. Highly recommended. Editor: Michael Mannheimer. TO HAVE YOUR EVENT LISTED, send show information at least two weeks in advance on the web at wweek.com/submitevents or (if you book a specific venue) enter your events at dbmonkey.com/wweek. Press kits, CDs and especially vinyl can be sent to Music Desk, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. lease include show or release date information with all physical mailings. Email: mmannheimer@wweek.com. Find more music: reviews 23 | clublist spotlight 38 For more listings, check out wweek.com/music_calendar
[MARCH 9 - 15] O’Connor’s Vault
Point Juncture, WA; Karl and the Jerks; The Beauty; Gepetto; Sam Humans
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
The Globe
7850 SW Capitol Highway Kit Garoutte on guitar
2314 SE Division St. Billy Kennedy
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. New York Rifles, The Ax
WED. MARCH 9 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Punch Brothers featuring Chris Thile
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. PDX We Got Next 2K11: Rose Bent, Jlew, Roulette Delgato, Stevo, Black Businezz, S.G.A.
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. The Shivas, SexyWaterSpiders, Errata Note
Beaterville Cafe
2201 N Killingsworth St. Lowell John Mitchell
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St A Simple Colony (9 pm); Little Sue (6 pm)
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Buffalo Bandstand
Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave Gold Dusk
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Tapes ’n Tapes, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., Themes
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Suburban Slim’s Blues Jam (9:30 pm); Chris Olson’s High Flyers (6 pm)
East End
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Laura Ivancie
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Laura Ivancie
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Whitechapel, The Acacia Strain, Veil of Maya, Chelsea Grin, I Declare War
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Cloaks, Ghost Mom
Jade Lounge
Ella Street Social Club
Jimmy Mak’s
714 SW 20th Place Ape Machine, Cuts United
2346 SE Ankeny St. Title Will Come, Margo May, Ugly Flowers, Colin
Fire on the Mountain East
221 NW 10th Ave. The Mel Brown Quartet with vibraphonist Chuck Redd
Good Neighbor Pizzeria
112 SW 2nd Ave Tom May
1706 E Burnside St.
800 NE Dekum St. Open Mic
Kells
LaurelThirst
Press Club
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
Pub at the End of the Universe
2126 SW Halsey St. Seth and May
Mississippi Pizza
Hawthorne Theatre
203 SE Grand Ave. Fergus & Geronimo, Cheap Time, Idle Times, Dead Meat
Jolie Holland, Michael Hurley (9 pm); Mike Midlo, Ezza Rose (6 pm)
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Sam Cooper, The Petite Beats, The Inkrementals, Girls Doing Embroidery
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Diamond Rings, PS I Love You, Mnemonic Sounds
Mount Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Midnight Expressions
Mount Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Miss Kennedy’s Cabaret
Mudai
801 NE Broadway Vox Populi Karaoke
Muddy Rudder Public House
2958 NE Glisan St.
8105 SE 7th Ave. Stumbleweed
2621 SE Clinton St. Swing Papillon
4107 SE 28th Ave. Benecio and Walker, Byron and Shelley, Jason Walker
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Open Mic with Mr. Plow
Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery 206 SW Morrison St. Luv Tap
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. Empire Rocket Machine, Wizard Boots, Glass Elevator, The Pink Snowflakes
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave. Karaoke
TeaZone and Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave Gold Dusk
The Artistery
4315 SE Division St.
2045 SE Belmont St. Ashes vs. Leaves
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar
1001 SW Broadway Karla Harris with Randy Porter
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. CC Swim, Blue in the Face, This City Defects
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. Class M Planets, The Grapefruit League
Thirsty Lion
71 SW 2nd Ave Big Electric
Tiger Bar
317 NW Broadway The Dandelion Club
Tony Starlight’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Torch and Twang
Vino Vixens Wine Shop & Bar 2929 SE Powell Blvd. 6bq9
Wonder Ballroom 128 NE Russell St. Datarock, Atole
626 SW Park Ave. Chance Hayden
Camellia Lounge
THUR. MARCH 10 Alberta Rose Theatre
3000 NE Alberta St. Portland Youth Jazz Orchestra & Trombone 8 Winter Concert
Alberta Street Public House 1036 NE Alberta St. Will West Songwriter Showcase
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Greg Wolfe
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Tall as Rasputin, The Dirty Words, The Autonomics
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Cower, Numb, Grandfather
Bagdad Theater & Pub
3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd. James Mercer
Beaterville Cafe
2201 N Killingsworth St. No Tomorrow
Vino Vixens Wine Shop & Bar
Biddy McGraw’s
2929 SE Powell Blvd. 6bq9
6000 NE Glisan St Redwood Song (9 pm); The Old Yellers (6 pm)
White Eagle Saloon
Blue Monk
836 N Russell St. Aces Up, Left Coast Country
Brasserie Montmartre
3341 SE Belmont St Curtis Salgado/Alan Hager Duo
510 NW 11th Ave David Matthew Daniels
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St. Joshua Radin, Cary Brothers, Laura Jansen
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Morning Teleportation, Yours, The Pink Snowflakes
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Damon Fowler (9 pm), Portland Playboys (6 pm)
East End
203 SE Grand Ave. Hugh Cornwell, Vicious Kisses
East End
203 SE Grand Ave. Wildildlife, Drunk Dad, Kotten Dik
Ella Street Social Club 714 SW 20th Place Quinn Allan, Margo May, Chad Hinman
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Merrill Lite
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Karaoke Kings
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
1503 SE 39th Ave. Savoir Faire Burlesque
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Civil Twilight, A Silent Film, Water & Bodies ADAM KRUEGER
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Snack Attack 2011: Guidance Counselor, Forbidden Friends, Unkle Funkle
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Mel Brown B3 Organ Group (8 pm); The Mount Hood CC Jazz Band (6:30 pm)
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave Tom May
Kennedy School
5736 NE 33rd Ave. King Perkoff Band
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Jimmy Boyer Band
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Seth and May
McMenamins Grand Lodge 3505 Pacific Ave. Larry Wilder Trio
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Eastern Sunz, Ambassador Slim and His Evil Twin (9 pm); Mo Phillips with Johnny and Jason (6 pm)
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Kaki King, Washington
Mock Crest Tavern
3435 N Lombard St. Claes Almroth, Steve and Emmalee of the Blueprints
Mount Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Moonalice, Lost Creek Gang
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Lauren Sheehan
THE FEARLESS FREAKS: Snow Bud and the Flower People play Thursday, March 10, at Plan B.
CONT. on page 38
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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MUSIC
SPOTLIGHT
VIVIANJOHNSON.COM
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Heal, AM Interstate, This Not This, Patrimony
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. Jamie Leopold and Karyn Patridge
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Lloyd Jones, The Atlas Horns
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave St. James’ Gate
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Conjugal Visitors, Scott Law & Tye North Duo (9:30 pm); Woodbrain (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
EVERY DAY IS LIKE SUNDAY: “I’ll buy a free drink for anyone who sings an Erasure song!” yells the bartender, her face hidden behind dry ice and a series of red and green laser lights straight out of a televised Muse Christmas special. Welcome to Sundaynight karaoke at The Lovecraft (421 SE Grand Ave., 971-270-7760, thelovecraftbar.com), Portland’s new “horror-themed tea shop and bar” and definitely the only place I’ve ever been where Goth kids and aging Trekkies meet to serenade their loved ones over Kate Bush and New Order hits. With black lights on the ceiling and artificial cobwebs dotting nearly every corner, the Lovecraft—named after H.P., if the quotes in the men’s room mean anything—feels like you’re drinking in a haunted house, or at least at a dance party where everyone is a member of the Bruce Campbell fan club. Here’s your new home. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER.
2126 SW Halsey St. Muriel Stanton
3158 E Burnside St. Drive-By Truckers
Oak Grove Tavern
2099 SE Oak Grove Blvd. Open Mic
Original Halibut’s
2525 NE Alberta St. Terry Robb
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
2314 SE Division St. Jen Howard, Andrew Orr
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. Snow Bud and the Flower People, Chloroform, Zmoke
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Worm Rot, Oden, Fall From Zero, Heathen Shrine, Nekro Drunkz
Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery 206 SW Morrison St. Tony Smiley (9 pm); Beth Willis (7 pm)
Sellwood Public House 8132 SE 13th Ave. Open Mic Night
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. River Twain
TeaZone and Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave David Matthews Daniels
The Artistery
4315 SE Division St. Grouper, The Tenses, Johnny X and the Groadies, Why I Must Be Careful, Ghost to Falco
The Globe
2045 SE Belmont St. The Vernons
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Johnny Martin
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. Ramblin’ Fever, DJs Pancho and Lefty
Thirsty Lion
71 SW 2nd Ave Audio Syndicate
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd.
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Spittin Cobras, Lost City, Decora with Luke Valley
Tony Starlight’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Cabaret Chanteuse
Twilight Café and Bar
1420 SE Powell Blvd Tigress, The Ragged Jubilee, Robots on Crack
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Poncho Luxurio (8:30 pm); Will West and the Friendly Cover Up (5:30 pm)
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. Drive-By Truckers, Heartless Bastards
FRI. MARCH 11 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Iris Dement, Rachel Harrington
Alberta Rose Theatre
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St The Quadraphones
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Rainbow Arabia, Spoek Mathambo, Atole, DJ Lifepartner
Brasserie Montmartre 626 SW Park Ave. Toni Lincoln Duo
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Matthew Price with Joy Pearson Guarles
Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave Negara
Canvas Art Bar & Bistro
1800 NW Upshur St Acoustic Open Mic with host Steve Huber
Clyde’s Prime Rib
5474 NE Sandy Blvd. LaRhonda Steele
3000 NE Alberta St. Tyler Stenson Live DVD Recording, Redwood Son CD Release, Matt Hopper and the Roman Candles
Crystal Ballroom
Alberta Street Public House
350 W Burnside St. Jerry Joseph and the Jackmormons
1036 NE Alberta St. Mikey’s Irish Jam
1332 W Burnside St. Umphrey’s McGee, Big Gigantic
Dante’s
Doug Fir Lounge
Andina
830 E Burnside St. Balmorhea, Benoit Pioulard, Helios
Ash Street Saloon
Duff’s Garage
1314 NW Glisan St. Sambafeat Quartet 225 SW Ash St. Mr. Black Presents Jessica G. Benefit III: The Dragonflies, The Pretty Deep, LID
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Icarus Kid, Ghost Motor, Larold Will
Beaterville Cafe
2201 N Killingsworth St. Loose Change Trio
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St Rob Stroup and the Blame (9:30 pm); Billy Kennedy and Jimmy Boyer (6 pm)
Bipartisan Cafe 7901 SE Stark St. Emily Stebbins
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
1635 SE 7th Ave. Billy D and the Hoodoos, Radio Giants (9 pm); Joy and Her Sentimental Gentlemen (6 pm)
East Burn
1800 E. Burnside Rare Monk
East End
203 SE Grand Ave. Hornet Leg, The Reservations, Big Black Cloud
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge
625 NW 21st Ave Brian Odell, Karaoke
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Hi Fi Mojo
510 NW 11th Ave Negara
The Artistery
4315 SE Division St. Eternal Tapestry, Mount Eerie, White Fang, Ô Paon, Pete Swanson
The Globe
2045 SE Belmont St. Lew Jones (8 pm); Macy Bensley (6:30 pm)
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Naomi LaViolette
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. The Lordy Lords, Sons of Huns
The Know
McMenamins Grand Lodge
2026 NE Alberta St. Wow & Flutter, Brittle Bones, Monster Sized Monsters
McMenamins Hotel Oregon
1422 SW 11th Ave. The Northwest Horn Orchestra
3505 Pacific Ave. Matt Meighan
310 Northeast Evans St. King Perkoff Band
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Loaded for Bear, Bradley Wik and the Charlatans (9 pm); The Helping Hands (6 pm)
Mississippi Studios
The Old Church
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. Leonard Mynx, St. Even, Petoskey
Thirsty Lion
71 SW 2nd Ave The Dirty Syncapators
Tonic Lounge
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Ferron
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Dirty Mittens, Strong Killings
Mock Crest Tavern
Tony Starlight’s
3435 N Lombard St. Bordertown
Music Millennium
TeaZone and Camellia Lounge
Mount Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Hivemind Club Night
Mount Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Barrington Levy, Detour Posse
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Reverb Brothers
Oak Grove Tavern
2099 SE Oak Grove Blvd. Karaoke
Original Halibut’s
2525 NE Alberta St. Lisa Mann
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
2314 SE Division St. Lynn Conover
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. Wizard Rifle, Rabbits, Woe, Valkyrie Rodeo
Press Club
2621 SE Clinton St. Pete Krebs’ Swing Trio
Project Grow
2124 N Williams Ave. Solid Gold: Krunkle
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Iron Circus, Perserverance, Ashen Relic
Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery 206 SW Morrison St. Big City Smile
Sellwood Public House 8132 SE 13th Ave. Zaxx Vandal
Slabtown
1033 NW 16th Ave. Vascilators, Mrs Esterhouse, The Flailing Inhalers
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
8635 N Lombard St. Otis Heat, Damn Dirty Apes
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. Audiodub, Search Party, A Love Like Winter
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. The Tony Starlight Show
Twilight Café and Bar
1420 SE Powell Blvd Fox Piranha, The Beat Jackers, Cody Weathers, Pink Noise
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd Cody Weathers, Fox Piranha, Beat Jackers, Pink Noise
Twilight Room
5242 N Lombard St. Maca Rey
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Massive Moth, Stan McMahon Band, Office Diving (9:30 pm); Reverb Brothers (5:30 pm)
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. Greensky Bluegrass, Seth and May
SAT. MARCH 12 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Khaira Arby & The Sway Machinery
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. Jill Sobule & Julia Sweeney
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St Wy’East
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Proven, Droplaw, Separation of Sanity, Indelible Terror, Life’s Ill
Brasserie Montmartre 626 SW Park Ave. Rhythm Dogs
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Ambush Party and “Head South” with Joe Randolph
Camellia Lounge
510 NW 11th Ave Renaissance Cocktail
Clyde’s Prime Rib
5474 NE Sandy Blvd. Ocean 503
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Polerotica Finals, Dragstrip Riot
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Dan Mangan, Sean Flinn and the Royal We, Goldfinch
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Shanghai Woolies
East Burn
1800 E. Burnside Michael Pan
East End
203 SE Grand Ave. Western Hymn, Dead Ghost, Purple Rhinestone Eagle
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Karaoke
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Katie Carlene
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. Cory Dauber and Macy Bensley
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Soul Vaccination
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave St. James’ Gate
LaurelThirst
Levator
Oak Grove Tavern
2099 SE Oak Grove Blvd. Live Classic Rock Exclusive: Stepchild
Plan B
Blue Monk
2525 NE Alberta St. Robbie Laws 1305 SE 8th Ave. Last Empire, Tenderizor, Order of the Gash, Dark Black
Ponderosa Lounge
10350 N Vancouver Way The B-Stars
Press Club
2621 SE Clinton St. Matt Brown, Michael Jodell, Mary Tebs
206 SW Morrison St. Glass Bones, Mer
Sellwood Public House 8132 SE 13th Ave. Wicky Pickers
Sherman Clay/Moe’s Pianos
131 NW 13th Ave. Elizabeth Rusch and pianist David Saffert
Slabtown
1033 NW 16th Ave. Therapists, Homostupids, Condomindium, White Wards, Organzied Sports
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. Business Suit Guy
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. The Velvet Teen, Themes, Symmetry/Symmetry, Duck Little Brother Duck
Beaterville Cafe
2201 N Killingsworth St. Billy’s Dance Party
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St Power of County (9:30 pm); Twisted Whistle (5 pm)
3435 N Lombard St. NoPo Mojo
Mount Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd L Pro, Tope, Soul P, Destro Destructo, Serge Severe, Eddie Valiant
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Alan Hagar
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St.
1001 SE Morrison St. Little Wings, Michael Hurley, White Rainbow
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. Shoeshine Blue, Zak McLongstreet, Michelle Van Kleef
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave Irish Sessions
LaurelThirst
Star Bar
Mississippi Pizza
639 SE Morrison St. The Strange Sugar Bomb, DJ Flightrisk
The Artistery
4315 SE Division St. Little Wings, White Rainbow, Hive Dwellers, Rob Walmart
The Crown Room
The Globe
2045 SE Belmont St. Matty
1001 SW Broadway Barbara Lusch
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Andy Combs and the Moths, Levator
The Know
71 SW 2nd Ave Holding Out
Mock Crest Tavern
Holocene
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
4830 NE 42nd Ave. The Kinky Brothers
Mississippi Studios
3130A SE Hawthorne Blvd. Andrea Algieri
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Born of Osiris, Darkest Hour, The Human Abstract, As Blood Runs Black, Regiment 26, Gaia
Spare Room
125 NW 5th Ave. Richard Shirk, Jason Seibert, Karyn Pattridge
Andina
Artichoke Community Music
Ella Street Social Club
2958 NE Glisan St. Billy Kennedy & Tim Acott (9:30 pm); Freak Mountain Ramblers (6 pm)
The Secret Society Ballroom
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Monarques, Black Whales, No Kind of Rider, Holly Newsom
830 E Burnside St. To the Sea, Little Beirut, Here Come Dots
Someday Lounge
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Z’Bumba (9 pm); Three Finger Jack (6 pm); Lorna Miller’s Little Kid’s Jamboree (4 pm)
1314 NW Glisan St. Toshi Onizuka
Doug Fir Lounge
Hawthorne Theatre
Alberta Street Public House
Mississippi Pizza
350 W Burnside St. Sinferno Cabaret, Third Seven
Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery
310 Northeast Evans St. Mark Alan
1036 NE Alberta St. Peter Wild, Danny Shafer, Dan Jones (9:30 pm); Milford Academy (6:30 pm)
Dante’s
714 SW 20th Place Noorwood Chapman Live Recording & Taping solo set
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Titarius, Harness, Deep Sea Vents
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar
McMenamins Hotel Oregon
3341 SE Belmont St Michal Angela Wilson
Red Room
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
3505 Pacific Ave. Lynn Conover
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Pirate Pirate Motorhome, Gender Roles, Mr. Frederick
205 NW 4th Ave. AZ, Sapient, Philly’s Phunkestra, DJ Yo Huckleberry
McMenamins Grand Lodge
1314 NW Glisan St. Danny Romero
Original Halibut’s
2958 NE Glisan St. Portland Country Underground: Michael Hurley, Morgan Geer, Lewi Longmire, Darrin Craig, Justin Powers (9:30 pm); Tree Frogs (6 pm)
2126 SW Halsey St. Matt Meighan
Andina
2026 NE Alberta St. Its Radiant Light, Fast Takers, Marital Impulses
116 NE Russell St. Chervona
Thirsty Lion
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Perfect Zero, Stellakinesis
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Brownish Black, The Schills, Mark Twain Indians (9:30 pm); The Student Loan (4:30 pm)
SUN. MARCH 13 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Fear No Music: DJ Gabriel Prokofiev
2126 SW Halsey St. Scott Gallegos Band
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Smiley, Get Dressed (9 pm); The Ericksons (6 pm)
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Train Whistle Fest: On the Stairs, Sea Bell, Kelly Blair Bauman, Huck Notari, Jarad Miles, Brian Kunkel with Jon Williams
Mudai
801 NE Broadway Rolling Through the Universe, Timmy the Terror and the Wintercoats
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Irish
NEPO 42
5403 NE 42nd Ave. Open Mic with Fred Stephenson
Rotture
315 SE 3rd Ave. Leaders, Police Teeth, Victory & Associates, Jr. Worship
Secret Society Lounge
116 NE Russell St. Hanz Araki, Cary Novotny
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. Karaoke (That Doesn’t Suck)
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. The Phoenix Variety Revue
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. Young Artists Workshop #2
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. Marisa Anderson, Ilyas Ahmed, Tara Jane O’Neil
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St. Open Mic/Songwriter Showcase
CALENDAR MON. MARCH 14 Alberta Street Public House 1036 NE Alberta St. Artichoke Songwriters Sound
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Scott Head
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St Eric Tonsfeldt
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St Renato Caranto’s Funk Band
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Karaoke From Hell
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Doug MacLeod (9 pm); James Sasser Band (6 pm)
East End
203 SE Grand Ave. Heavy Metal Ladies Night
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. Jaime Leopold
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Joey DeFrancesco Trio with the Dan Balmer Band
Kells 112 SW 2nd Ave Pat Buckley
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Kung Pao Chickens (9 pm); Little Sue and Lynn Conover (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
Ash Street Saloon
2126 SW Halsey St. Skip vonKuske
225 SW Ash St. Aux. 78, The Bumpin Nastys, Blue in the Face
Classic: Underground and Old School HipHop Joints - DeeJay Be Lo
Mission Theater
Beaterville Cafe
Hawthorne Theatre
1624 NW Glisan St. Mud Jam: Redwood Son, Acoustic Minds, Tim Snider and the Sound Society, Krista Herring
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Bumpin Nastys (10 pm); Marie Schumacher (8 pm)
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Lloyd Jones
2201 N Killingsworth St. Fredrick’s Nordic Thunder
Brasserie Montmartre 626 SW Park Ave. Vince Frates
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Open Mic
Bunk Bar
1028 SE Water Ave. Heavy Nova, Dorian Macmillan
Camellia Lounge
Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery
510 NW 11th Ave Weekly Jazz Jam
Spare Room
1332 W Burnside St. Jack Daniel’s Studio No. 7 Private Event
206 SW Morrison St. Tasha and Kaloku 4830 NE 42nd Ave. Karaoke
The Globe
2045 SE Belmont St. Hank Hirsh’s Jazz Jam and Open Jam
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Rev 0, Harcore Party People, The Off Time
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Joshua English, Deepest Darkest, Kelly Masigat
TUES. MARCH 15 Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. Amy Cervini, The Julians
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Neftali Rivera
Crystal Ballroom
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. The Ex, Death Sentence Panda
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 Deklun and Pace, The Weak Knees
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Kent Smith
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave Open Mic
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave.
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Fair to Midland, Periphery, Scale the Summit, Karmedy, guests
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Mel Brown Septet (8 pm); Metropolitan Youth Symphony Jazz Orchestra (6:30 pm)
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave Pat Buckley
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Succotash
Memorial Coliseum 1401 N Wheeler Ave. Disturbed, Korn, Sevendust, In This Moment, Stillwell
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Baby Ketten Karaoke
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Arbielle
Mississippi Studios
MUSIC
2314 SE Division St. Paul Brainard’s Fun Machine
Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery
206 SW Morrison St. Ian James
Secret Society Lounge
116 NE Russell St. Dominic Castillo
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave. Karaoke
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. Tronix: Maximum Electronica with DJ-808
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Sugar Plum
The Crown Room
205 NW 4th Ave. Crush Drum and Bass
Tiga
The Globe
Thirsty Lion
232 SW Ankeny St. Cowboys From Sweden
2045 SE Belmont St. Steve Hall Quintet 71 SW 2nd Ave Singer-Songwriter Night
Tony Starlight’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. The Tara Williamson Show
Tugboat Brewing 711 SW Ankeny St. Damien Erskine
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd Open Mic Night Featuring House Band: The Roaming
Mock Crest Tavern
White Eagle Saloon
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. The Family Funktion featuring Average Leftovers
WED. MARCH 9
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ F and Rhienna
Valentine’s
Mount Tabor Theater
1332 W Burnside St. Jai Ho! The Ultimate Bollywood and Bhangra Dance Party
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Shane Tutmarc, Dead Peasant, Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs 3435 N Lombard St. Jeff Jensen Band
Lola’s Room at the Crystal Ballroom
232 SW Ankeny St. Toning, The Woolen Men 836 N Russell St. Brad Creel and the Reel Deel
Valentine’s
THUR. MAR. 10 Fez Ballroom
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. DJ Lakisa Falta
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. 8 1/2 DJs: Holocene AllStar DJ Night with DJ Copy, DJ Zac Eno, DJ E*Rock, more
125 NW 5th Ave. The Fix: Rev. Shines, KEZ, Dundiggy
Tiga 1465 NE Prescott St. Sweet Jimmy T
FRID. MARCH 11 Fez Ballroom
316 SW 11th Ave. Decadent ‘80s
Valentine’s
Mississippi Studios
Rotture
Ella Street Social Club
3939 N Mississippi Ave. MRS, DJ Beyonda 315 SE 3rd Ave. Live and Direct: Rev Shines, Slimkid3, DJ Nature, Starchile
Langano Lounge
Someday Lounge
1465 NE Prescott St. Count Lips
East End
1332 W Burnside St. ‘80s Video Dance Attack
1465 NE Prescott St. Rndm Noise
315 SE 3rd Ave. I’ve Got a Hole in My Soul with DJ Beyonda
Tiga
232 SW Ankeny St. DJ Carlita
Star Bar
Rotture
116 SE Yamhill St. Megabounce: Heyoka, DJ Assault, Wanderlust Circus, Pegacorn
Lola’s Room at the Crystal Ballroom
316 SW 11th Ave. Shadowplay with DJ Horrid, DJ Ghoulunatic, DJ Paradox 1435 SE Hawthorne Blvd. New Jack City
Refuge
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Ikon
Tiga
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. DJ Nikki C
Yes and No
20 NW 3rd Ave. DJ Miss Prid
SUN. MARCH 13 203 SE Grand Ave. Anok4uok, DJ Alex
714 SW 20th Place DJ Bramble, DJ Eclecto
MON. MARCH 14 Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Rocks’off: DJ Rick Elvis, DJ Danny Rock, DJ Pete Roll
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. I’m Dynamite
TUES. MAR. 15 East End
SAT. MARCH 12 Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Fallout III: FGFC820, DJ Rexx Arkana, DJ Missionary Non Adamnation
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. DJ Destructo
203 SE Grand Ave. DJ Mike V and James P
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Smooth Hopperator
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ Ramophone
Yes and No
20 NW 3rd Ave. Idiot Tuesdays: DJ Black Dog
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
39
JUDITH JAMISON
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Masazumi Chaya
ASSOCIATE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Robert Battle
Linda Celeste Sims. Body art by Dante Baylor. Photo by Andrew Eccles
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR DESIGNATE
1/2 PRICE student/ senior RUSH at door!
THIS TUESDAY & WEDNESDAY
MARCH 15 & 16 Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 7:30pm www.whitebird.org
1-800-745-3000 and PCPA Box Office Info/Groups 503-245-1600 ext. 201 40
SPONSORED BY
DARCI H. SWINDELLS
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
Alvin Ailey - WW 4 Square WEEK OF SHOW.indd 1
2/28/2011 10:39:33 AM
PERFORMANCE
MARCH 9-15
= 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 Attempts on Her Life
[NEW REVIEW] Defunkt Theatre stages Martin Crimp’s very odd 1997 play, which consists of many scenes describing a woman named Annie, or Anne, or maybe Anya, whom we see only in projected photos, taken from behind. She’s a terrorist, or a suicide, or an artist, or a survivor of war crimes, or maybe a new car. The show is at once funny and grim, entertaining and unsettling. The script names no characters and has no stage directions, much like Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, which Grace Carter also directed in an excellent production at Defunkt in 2010. Unlike that play, though, Attempts on Her Life is about 40 percent writerly twaddle, and your tolerance for such will determine how much you like the play. I’m very fond of twaddle, and so I enjoyed Crimp’s outrageously morbid riffs on art criticism, love and violence of all stripes. Grace Carter’s attempts to impose order on Crimp’s rambling succeed intermittently—Matthew Kern and David Bellis-Squires share a few very engaging scenes—but her experiments with live video feel superfluous. While the show should be a winner among fans of Nick Cave and Martin McDonagh, less macabre souls may find it disappointing. BEN WATERHOUSE. The Back Door Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 4812960. 8 pm Thursdays-Sundays. Closes April 9. $10-$15.
Bloody Poetry
In the summer of 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron shared the company of Mary Shelly and her sister, Claire Clairmont. The free-loving poets gathered on the shore of Lake Geneva, argued about politics and wrote some legendary works. Northwest Classical Theatre Company’s Bloody Poetry enacts the adventures and dramas of those historic poets’ summer. Between conversations of Plato and the French Revolution, Mary Shelly starts to daydream of a monster lurking in the nearby mountains, sowing the seeds for her novel, Frankenstein, while the two men narrowly survive a stormy sailing adventure. On the narrow Shoe Box Theater stage, in notquite-believable English accents, the show’s six actors present Shelley and Byron as heroic revolutionaries, valiantly spreading love and beauty through an otherwise bleak universe. RACHAEL DEWITT. Shoe Box Theater, 2110 SE 10th Ave., 971-244-3740. 7 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes March 20. $15-$18.
Chamber Music
Oregon Children’s Theatre Young Professionals perform a comedy by Arthur Kopit about the women’s ward of a 1930s mental hospital. Oregon Children’s Theatre Young Professionals Studio Theatre, 600 SW 10th Ave., 228-9571. 7 pm Friday, 6 pm Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, March 11-13. $5-$10 suggested donation.
A Company of Wayward Saints
Lunacy Stageworks presents a commedia-style comedy by George Herman, about a band of aging actors, desperate to retire, who are offered a sum large enough to allow them all to quit the road for good—but only if they can give the best performance of their lives. Sellwood Masonic Lodge, 7126 SE Milwaukie Ave., 971-275-3568. 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sunday, March 13. No shows March 12 or 17. Closes March 19. $15.
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 play takes a violent and disquieting turn as the professor encounters a terrorist group bent on restoring to humanity its literary birthright. 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 Ghosts of Celilo
A revival of the 2007 musical—created by Marv Ross and a trio of Native American musicians—centered on the drowning of Celilo Falls in 1957, with much the same cast: Noah Hunt, then a high-school junior and now a singer and actor in L.A., plays Chokey Jim, a 15-year-old Native kid who’s kidnapped into the well-intentioned Christian brainwashing of an Indian school and has to escape to catch a fish and become a man before Celilo disappears forever. Newmark Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 800-745-3000. 7:30 pm Thursday-Friday, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturday, March 10-12. $25-$55.
Girls’ Guide: Dominatrix for Dummies
Eleanor O’Brien’s one-woman show relates her experiences training to be a professional dominatrix. Theater! Theatre!, 3430 SE Belmont St., dancenakedproductions.com. 8 pm Thursday-Saturday, March 10-12. $10.
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 Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, March 10-13. $28, $20 for viewers 25 or younger.
Kid Simple
Auditory intricacies take center stage in Jordan Harrison’s alternately whimsical and schmaltzy play about a plucky girl genius who invents a machine that plays impossible-to-hear sounds (such as—cue the groans—a breaking heart). As descriptions of noises are projected onto a screen, a Foley artist standing above the set provides corresponding sound effects. It’s one of the defter fanciful touches in a production that heaves with implausible plot turns and cutesy invented words. The cast is good-natured, but it’s cramped by the script’s too-brief exposition and tedious, sappy conclusion. It’s a shame—the boisterous medley of sound effects is delightful, and the twisting, fantastical plot should make for a meaty theatrical experience, but the show ultimately becomes too convoluted and precious for its own good. The CoHo Theater, 2257 NW Raleigh St., 205-0715. 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes March 26. $20-$25.
Lend Me a Tenor
Lakewood Theatre Company presents Ken Ludwig’s classic farce. Lakewood Center for the Arts, 368 S State St., Lake Oswego, 635-3901. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 7 pm Sundays March 13-April 3, 2 pm Sundays March 20-April 17. Closes April 17. $24-$27.
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
The Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s bloodlust is in full display in this scathing satire of Irish nationalism—it has 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. Thomas Stroppel stars as Padraic, an unhinged second lieutenant for a splinter group of the IRA who becomes even more deranged than usual when he hears that his only friend in the world, his cat, Wee Thomas, is ill. Wee Thomas is in fact dead, 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. Director Jon Kretzu has not neglected the gore. Blood spurts, limbs are shattered and bodies pile up with a perverse attention to detail. BEN WATERHOUSE. Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison St., 241-1278. 7:30 pm Wednesday-Saturday, 2 and 7:30 pm Sunday, March 9-13. $26-$42, $20 students.
Macbeth
Bag & Baggage presents a new adaptation of the Scottish Play by Scott Palmer, which draws on some of Shakespeare’s sources (The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland; Love’s Dominion; Maternal Elegies and The Two Noble Kinsmen). Jan Powell (of Tygre’s Heart) directs. The Venetian Theatre, 253 E Main St., 345-9590. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes March 27. $16-$23.
Mommie Queerest
A drag parody of the 1981 biopic about Joan Crawford, written by Jamie Morris. Portland Actors Conservatory, 1436 SW Montgomery St., 800-8383006. 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 5 pm Sundays. Closes March 20. $25.
On the Eve of Friday Morning
This Oregon Children’s Theatre production of overlapping stories set in Iran past and present is certainly topical, given that it begins with the modern-day arrest of a girl’s father for smuggling books. It’s both ambitious and admirable to present that modern problem—along with a parallel Persian folk tale—to an audience whose recommended age is 8 and up, but while the play succeeds in presenting a new culture to young audiences, it falls short of engaging them. The 50-minute show is slow if your youngsters are fidgety, and a bit confusing even if they’re not. BEN AND HENRY STERN. Winningstad Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 228-9571. 2 and 5 pm Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes March 20. $16-$26.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Under other circumstances, it would be the gravest of insults to say an actor was upstaged by the scenery, but in Rose Riordan’s new production of Kesey’s classic novel, it could hardly be otherwise. Here the asylum is not merely the setting but the lead antagonist: a breathing, blinking being dedicated to extinguishing the humanity of its inhabitants, with Nurse Ratched as its agent. It’s a hell of a set piece, designed by Tony Cisek and lit in a breathtaking realist style by Diane Ferry Williams, all green tile and fluorescent tubes and heavy steel doors, and it transcends verisimilitude. It glowers. Riordan’s vision draws from a long history of plays and films about haunted places, from the House of Usher to the Event Horizon, and the production is rife with horror movie tropes: flickering lights at the end of a dark hallway, haze, thunder, constant thrumming and even, at one point, distorted children’s voices. It would be cheesy if it weren’t so frightening. The human performers in Riordan’s production are very good: Tim Sampson is painfully broken as Chief Bromden; Gretchen Corbett makes an icy, baleful Nurse Ratched; and P.J. Sosko, as Randle P. McMurphy, more or less reprises his performance as Hank Stamper in Sometimes a Great Notion, which is fine by me. The best of the bunch, though, was Ryan Tresser, appearing in Portland for the first time as Billy Bibbit, the fragile youth driven to desperation by Ratched’s browbeating. BEN WATERHOUSE. Gerding Theater, 128 NW 11th Ave., 445-3700.
MICHAEL SHOWALTER (CENTER) AS DOUG, CIRCA 1993 7:30 pm Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 pm Saturdays-Sundays. Closes March 27. $33-$58.
The Scene
“It’s fantastic!” says the fallen man to the means of his ruination. “You look like that, you screw like a bunny and you have no soul! Seriously. It is aweinspiring.” Yeah, it is. He’s speaking to Clea, a 22-year-old faux-naive succubus busily fucking her way up the ladder of the New York TV business. She’s the greatest creation of Theresa Rebeck, a playwright I had previously considered more fun than frighteningly talented, and she burns a horrid swath across the lives of everyone else she encounters in this savage showbiz comedy. In Portland Playhouse’s production, directed by Tamara Fisch, Leif Norby, Ty Hewitt and Laura FayeSmith all turn in strong performances, but Nikki Weaver’s Clea commands the stage, seeming to absorb all the light in the room. Her speech is a highvelocity mess of misused adjectives, her inflection an abominable mating of Valley girl and Ira Glass, and she moves with a calculated looseness that holds the gaze even as her personality repulses. Aging actor Charlie (Norby) is especially repelled, but winds up drawn in anyway, sabotaging his career and successful marriage to a competent, affectionate professional in a nightmarish tryst. It isn’t really Clea’s fault, of course. Rebeck has a keen insight into why happily married men self-destruct—it’s all about power and pride—and a creature like Clea can only facilitate the disaster. But still— wow, is she awful. Weaver’s is the most demanding performance I’ve seen this season; you cannot look away. BEN WATERHOUSE. Portland Playhouse, 602 NE Prescott St., 205-0715. 8 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, March 10-13. $16-$21.
Stomp
That show where percussionists make music with household objects but are not painted blue comes to town for a short engagement. Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St., 241-1802. 7:30 pm Friday, 5 and 9 pm Saturday, 3 and 7 pm Sunday, March 11-13. $18.50-$69.15.
COMEDY
Kevin Nealon
Nealon was on SNL from 1986-1994 and is on Weeds at present, and he’s still very funny live. Helium Comedy Club, 1510 SE 9th Ave., 888-643-8669. 8 pm Thursday, 7:30 and 10 pm FridaySaturday March 10-12. $25-$35.
Michael Showalter
The other Michael from Stella and Michael & Michael Have Issues comes to town in support of his book, Mr. Funny Pants. He is indeed. Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 855-2278499. 9 pm Wednesday, March 9. $12-$14.
Two for the Show
A series of improv duets. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 8 pm Saturdays. Closes April 9. $7-$10.
UTV
You suggest television or movie genres you’d like to see turned into improvcomedy fodder, and the Unscriptables make it so. The Unscriptables Studio, 1121 N Loring St. 8 pm March 11-12 and 17-18. “Pay what you want.”
CLASSICAL Calder Quartet
C’est La Vegan
Comedy Is OK branches out from its usual shows at Kelly’s to present a showcase (Ian Karmel, Christian Ricketts, Richard Bain and Abbey Jordan) at Tommy Habetz’s decidedly non-vegan bar. Bunk Bar, 1028 SE Water Ave., 894-9708. 10 pm Wednesday, March 9. Free.
Laughterglow
Stand-up from Timmy Williams, Phil Schallberger, Zach Cole, Katie Brien, Grace Sadie and Whitney Streed. Weird Bar, 3701 SE Division St., 2368689. 9 pm Thursday, March 10. $5.
Mice-tro
against each other and the audience voting them off, and what do you get? A raw and clever Portland show that’s so disgustingly full of talent it reminds you why you never took theater, but love watching it. The actors take cues from the audience, asking them to shout out a hardware object (“hammer!”) or scenario (“rehab intervention!”) or sentence (“do not step on my begonias!”), which they instantly incorporate into their skits. A prompt about a union rally where each sentence starts with the next letter in the alphabet and one person is responsible for the vowels, performed in less than 90 seconds? They do it and make it look good. The competitive intimacy feels like charades at a friend’s house, except with improv geniuses and a killer bar. STACY BROWNHILL. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 8 pm Fridays through March 25. $10, $7 students.
Put 16 improv actors onstage with a voice-of-God maestro pitting them
The Los Angeles foursome has earned awards for its work with contemporary composers; its terrific Monday program includes Jacob ter Veldhuis’ Quartet No. 3, which bears the Dylanesque subtitle “There Must Be Some Way Out of Here.” (The concert also features Haydn’s jocular Op. 33 No. 2 quartet and Schubert’s epic G-major quartet, D. 887.) Tuesday’s concert boasts avant-garde guitarist and composer Fred Frith’s Lelekovice, String Quartet No. 1, along with Beethoven’s op. 95 quartet and Janacek’s poignant Quartet No. 2, Intimate Letters. Thanks to Friends of Chamber Music’s admirable community outreach, you can hear the ensemble for free at Central Library on Saturday, at the art museum Sunday and in rehearsal at PSU on
CONT. on page 42
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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MARCH 9-15
ANDREW ECCLES
PERFORMANCE
JAMAR ROBERTS OF ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER Tuesday. Collins Gallery, Central Library, 801 SW 10th Ave., third floor, 224-9842. 2 pm Saturday, March 12. Free. Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave., 224-9842. 3 pm Sunday, March 13. Lincoln Hall, Portland State University, 1620 SW Park Ave., 224-9842. 7:30 pm Monday-Tuesday, March 14-15. $27-$40. Free open rehearsal at PSU’s Lincoln Hall, 11 am March 15.
FearNoMusic, Gabriel Prokofiev
illustration by www.alliarnold.com
Never thought you’d have the chance to actually see Prokofiev in action? Sergei, one of the 20th century’s most brilliant composers, ascended to the musical pantheon in 1953, but his grandson Gabriel, also a “nonclassical” composer, has won a worldwide reputation and diverse following among fans of dance music, electronic music, hip-hop and, oh yeah, classical music, for his informal club nights that mix and match, remix and mash up classical and contemporary sounds. The London DJ and Portland new-music ensemble will play his global percussion piece Import/Export, which includes oil drum, soda bottle, plastic bags and other polluting 21st-century industrial detritus; his first string quartet, Sleeveless Scherzo for violin and dancer, featuring OBT’s Gavin Larsen; and other pieces. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 490-3170. 8 pm Sunday, March 13. $20-$22.
Friends of Rain FRANCE
tHE PERfEct wOOdEn SPOOn $8 FROM FRANCE
{ Stumptown coffee Delicious baked goods Unusual magazines
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Inspired gifts
The Lewis & Clark College faculty ensemble plays classical trespasses into jazz by Edgard Varese, Robert Beaser and the college’s own Michael Johanson. Lewis & Clark College, 0615 SW Palatine Road, 768-7470. 8 pm Saturday, March 12. Suggested $10 donation.
Garrick Ohlsson
The masterful pianist indulges in his specialty, Chopin, with a wideranging selection (etudes, mazurka, scherzo, nocturne and polonaise), with a few bonus Granados Goyescas to boot. Newmark Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 228-1388. 4 pm Sunday, March 13. $28-$54.
John Butcher and Gino Robair
The visionary London avant-saxophonist and San Francisco percussionist form a creatively combustible combo, then invite local adventurous musicians from Dragging an Ox Through Water, Why I Must Be Careful, Thicket and Golden Retriever to improvise with them. Worksound, 820 SE Alder St., myspace.com/worksoundpdx. 8 pm Tuesday, March 15. $5-$15.
Geetha Ramanathan Bennett 1740 SE Hawthorne • Portland, OR • 503-384-2160 (in the same building as Castagna restaurant)
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Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
Accompanied by violinist Anand Nadh and Shriram Brahmanandam on mridangam drum, the Los Angeles singer and veena virtuosa performs the glorious Carnatic music of southern India. Intel, Jones
Farm Campus, 2111 NE 25th Ave., Hillsboro, 531-7266. 5 pm Saturday, March 12. $15.
Oregon Symphony
The orchestra performs Debussy’s magnificent tone poem, La Mer, and Sibelius’ “The Sea Nymphs,” plus a Haydn symphony, No. 39. It’s one of his dark, dramatic, socalled “storm and stress” works, well timed for a rainy spring in recession-roiled Oregon. Latvian violinist Baiba Skride is the soloist in Aram Khachaturian’s 1940 Violin Concerto. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 228-1353. 7:30 pm Saturday, 8 pm Monday, March 12 and 14. $20-$90.
Portland Baroque Orchestra, Cappella Romana, Les Voix Baroques
Led by violin virtuosa Monica Huggett and abetted by English tenor Charles Daniels, soloists from the Montreal-based chorus Les Voix Baroques and Portland’s own superb Cappella Romana choir, Portland Baroque Orchestra brings one of Western music’s choral orchestral pillars, J.S. Bach’s mighty St. John Passion, into the 21st century by performing it on the instruments, in the style and with the forces the composer intended. Anyone who’s heard Bach’s 1724 masterpiece performed with the typical bloated choirs and anachronistic instruments will be surprised at the many new beauties revealed by the brisk, nuanced, transparent sound of agile period instruments played by expert musicians in the composer’s specified tuning, a rightsized (12-singer) chorus, and an intimate venue resembling its original setting. First Baptist Church, 909 SW 11th Ave., 205-0715. 7:30 pm Friday-Saturday, March 11-12. Kaul Auditorium at Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., 205-0715. 3 pm Sunday, March 13. $22-$64.
Third Angle
One of Portland’s finest musical moments happened a decade ago when Third Angle brought Steve Reich to town for a performances of some of his minimalist masterworks. For its 25th anniversary celebration, the group will perform three Reich classics: the mesmerizing Violin Phase, the magnificent Drumming and the brilliant clarinet showpiece New York Counterpoint. Montgomery Park, 2701 NW Vaughn St., 331-0301. 8 pm Friday, March 11. $10-$35.
DANCE Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
If you only see one dance company in your lifetime, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater would be a fine choice (actually, seeing more than one dance company in your lifetime would be a far better choice, but never mind). Ailey is one of America’s great contempo-
rary companies, in league with the groups of Martha Graham and Paul Taylor. Founded in the late ’50s in New York, the company dances the founder’s original works as well as pieces created by other top dancemakers. The company’s return visit to the White Bird series is divided into two tempting programs. Tuesday night features Matthew Rushing’s Uptown, which brings the Harlem Renaissance to life through the characters of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and the music of Fats Waller and Nat King Cole, plus Dancing Spirit, Ronald K. Brown’s tribute to elegant (and soon-to-retire) Ailey Artistic Director Judith Jamison. On Wednesday, it’s Night Creature, a Duke Ellington-backed joint, plus Robert Battle’s In/Side and new work Anointed, with music by Moby. Both nights conclude with the company’s signature piece, Revelations, along with a short documentary on the genesis of the work, which is so packed with emotion that it is known for moving even confirmed stoics to tears. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 248-4335. 7:30 pm TuesdayWednesday, March 15-16. $22-$70. Info and tickets at whitebird.org.
Dolled Up Dance Troupe Auditions
Class offerings at Tigard’s womenonly fitness facility Diva Den Studio include Boo-Ya Burlesque, Cardio Striptease and Bombshell Booty Camp. Now, the studio is starting up a dance troupe called Dolled Up, which will perform dance styles ranging from burlesque to Latin fusion to hip-hop; eventually, the company hopes to have sets choreographed and ready to perform as well as performances tailored specifically to groups or events that may hire them. If you think you have what it takes, register for the daylong audition, in which participants will learn a pop/jazz and a stiletto piece that they will then perform in front of a panel of judges. Diva Den Studio, 11959 SW Garden Place, 360-261-2646. 9 am Sunday, March 13. $10 audition fee.
In Site Performance Series
What can you do with a giant, planked walkway? If you are artist Karl Burkheimer, you can fill a gallery with it, name it In Site and call it art. If you are a contemporary dancer, you can then use it as a springboard for movement. In fact, three such artists have been asked to “respond to the altered space” through improvisational performances the coming weeks. They are TBA regular Tahni Holt (March 5), Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner collaborator Kathleen Keogh (March 12) and Performance Works NorthWest founder Linda Austin (March 19). All performances begin at 1 pm and may include other performers and musicians, depending on the whims of the dancer in charge. Disjecta, 8371 N Interstate Ave., 286-9449. 1 pm Saturday, March 5, 12 and 19. Free.
Miss Kennedy’s Cabaret
Catch sex-therapist-by-day/loungesinger-by-night Kristin Kelly at Miss Kennedy’s Cabaret. The forthcoming installment of this vaudeville-style show features the Love Lounge, in which Kelly invites viewers to participate in the Sexual Singalong, the Sexytime Question and Answer section with local experts in the sexual-science field and the SexyToy segment of the show, although how exactly you participate in that last bit may depend on how many cocktails you have consumed just prior. There will also be fire dances from Ivizia, belly dance from Gretchen Dances, clowning by Dingo Dizmal and torch singing from Miss Kennedy herself. Mount Tabor Theater, 4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. 9 pm Wednesday, March 9. $9-$12. Tickets at ticketswest.com.
For more Performance listings, visit
VISUAL ARTS
MARCH 9-15
= 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.
Matt Cosby
The painting Homestyle is the pièce de résistance in Matt Cosby’s show, Peaks & Troughs. Chromatically it begs for musical descriptions à la Duke Ellington and George Gershwin: “Mood Indigo” and “Rhapsody in Blue.” There is both a lyricism and a mathematical precision in Cosby’s imagery, which resembles undulating bolts of patterned fabric. The works are impeccably framed in aluminum and polyurethane with industrial screws, complementing the works’ precision but contrasting with the creaminess of the paint application. Cosby is equally adept working with oil paint and acrylics, an ambidexterity rarely seen in painters. Augen DeSoto, 716 NW Davis St., 546-5056. Closes April 2.
Jane Timken
Jane Timken’s floral still lifes are so by-the-book, you can almost imagine a “Paint by Numbers” grid underneath them. Smug, bland, with a facile, derivative technique, these musty, stultifyingly retro florals would have looked great in your great-grandmother’s drawing
Jeffry Mitchell
Glazed ceramic pots and cut-out paper snowflakes might make for a fun high-school art class, but Jeffry Mitchell’s drab exhibition, Pot & Snowflake, is remedial, yawn-inducing and downright depressing. Take a Prozac and a caffeine pill before you cross the Pulliam threshold. Pulliam, 929 NW Flanders St., 2286665. Closes April 2.
For more Visual Arts listings, visit
REVIEW DAMIEN GILLEY AND JORDAN TULL
NOW SHOWING
room, parlour or water closet. PDX Contemporary Art, 925 NW Flanders St., 222-0063. Closes April 2.
Mary Ellen Mark
Photographer Mary Ellen Mark’s 1978 series, Falkland Road, infiltrates and documents bordellos in Bombay, India. Her prints contrast sumptuous, sickly sweet color (saffron-dyed fabrics, indigo and teal walls) with the seedy squalor of boxy, claustrophobic spaces. The works find humanity in a profession that tends to dehumanize, even as it caters to a basic human impulse. The show is documentarian rather than moralistic, however, and asks the viewer to look without judgment. Blue Sky, 122 NW 8th Ave., 225-0210. Closes April 3.
James Pustorino
New Jersey-based artist James Pustorino creates a linear narrative experience in the graphic-novelinfluenced Universechild. Large storyboards wrap around the exhibition space, weaving a transhumanist story about a boy who finds himself in the presence of an alien intelligence, which possesses the power to either destroy him or turn him into something beyond his wildest dreams. Pustorino’s handling of the narrative is invigorating and thought-provoking. Chambers @ 916, 916 NW Flanders St., 227-9398. Closes April 30.
Jessica Curtaz
You can’t get much more pristine than Jessica Curtaz’s immaculately detailed, black-on-white drawings of flowers, crumpled bags and sweaters. She masterfully plays these objects’ shapes against the negative space surrounding them. After a while, however, the unrelenting white space and black graphite becomes tiring and oppressive, and you begin to scream inside: “Color! Please, for the love of God, color!” Charles A. Hartman, 134 NW 8th Ave., 287-3886. Closes April 2.
Kris Hargis
Kris Hargis has a gift for Egon Schiele-like portraiture. His subjects often appear wiry, grotesque and morose, but they are always rendered with a fine, expressive technique that invites the viewer into the subjects’ troubled minds. Froelick, 714 NW Davis St., 222-1142. Closes April 2.
Sherrie Wolf
For opulent, hyperrealist still lifes, it’s hard to beat veteran painter Sherrie Wolf. In Transmissions, she subtly refers to Old Masters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Rubens, alluding to their work in the backgrounds of her luscious flowers, fruit and dazzlingly reflective glass and silver bowls and plates. Hanging fabrics heighten the atmosphere of luxury, privilege and anachronism. Laura Russo, 805 NW 21st Ave., 226-2754. March 3-April 2.
RE/ACTIVATE AT WIEDEN & KENNEDY
STAGE SETS
This month, three different shows tackle the same essential theme: the relationships between visual art and architecture. This is addressed most explicitly at the Art Institute of Portland’s Centrifuge: An Examination of Art and Architecture. Organized by the curatorial duo known as Chroma (Jennifer Porter and Martha Wallulis), the exhibition homes in on the spatial and psychological interaction between two-dimensional artwork and three-dimensional space. Heather MacKenzie’s Umbiliform concretizes this. Two wooden planes hung in a corner are linked by a gnarly, organic web, “breaking the fourth wall” and daring to invade the space between. Only a few blocks north, in the Wieden & Kennedy lobby, Damien Gilley and Jordan Tull have created an invigorating futuristic environment called RE/ACTIVATE, which functions simultaneously as large-scale sculpture, architecture, interior design and stage set. On First Thursday, dancer Rachel Tess performed throughout the environment to an eerie soundtrack by Thomas Thorson. As Tess moved within Gilley and Tull’s wooden rhombuses, orange Plexiglas, and canted fluorescent light bulbs, audience members were compelled to ponder the point at which an aesthetic object in its own right becomes merely a backdrop to human performance. This question is the crux of Karl Burkheimer’s In Site at Disjecta. The installation, which Burkheimer prefers to call a “siteresponsive object,” is an enormous, sloping wooden scaffold with a round, sunken space toward the middle. Viewers are allowed to walk on it, drink, socialize and hang out in the sunken hole. Viewers are not allowed to skateboard or roller skate on the ramp, although it would serve that purpose well. A series of dance performances have been mounted on the piece, adding to the work’s provocation: Under what conditions does an artwork slide from a purely contemplative function into the realms of the utilitarian and the social? There are no definitive answers to such questions, of course. From Marcel Duchamp onward, anyone can call anything whatever they want to; the only relevant issue is how effectively a creative endeavor expresses its creator’s aims. All three of these thought-provoking shows dispatch that task with rigor and élan. RICHARD SPEER. Three local shows ask where art ends and architecture begins.
GO: Centrifuge at Art Institute of Portland, 1122 NW Davis St., 228-6528. Closes March 31. RE/ACTIVATE in the Wieden & Kennedy lobby, 224 NW 13th Ave. Additional dance performances on March 30 and 31. Tickets, $25 or two for $40, at rumpusroomdance.org. In Site at Disjecta, 8371 N Interstate Ave., 286-9449. Closes March 26. Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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BOOKS
MARCH 9-15
= WW Pick. Highly recommended. By RACHAEL 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.
MAR
09
MICHAEL SHOWALTER / Mr. Funny Pants (Grand Central) The brainy, hysterical literary debut from comedian Michael Showalter. WED / 9TH / 6P
DOWNTOWN
ANDREW FOSTER ALTSCHUL / Deus Ex Machina (Counterpoint) PETER NATHANIAL MALAE / What We Are (Grove Press) Altschul deconstructs our notions of narrative, asking, what is the true nature of ì reality,î while Malae brings to life the pull of a departed fatherës homeland. THU / 10TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
JONATHAN BLOOM / American Wasteland (Da Capo) Sheds light on the history, culture, and mindset of food waste, while exploring the environmental and sustainable-food movements. THU / 10TH / 7:30P
HAWTHORNE
GABRIELLE HAMILTON / Blood, Bones, and Butter (Random House) Follows Hamilton through the years, from the rural kitchen of her childhood to her acclaimed New York restaurant, Prune. Join Hamilton for a reading, booksigning, and lamb roast at Nostrana. Please note: This ticketed event takes places at Nostrana restaurant, 1401 SE Morrison St. For more information or to make a reservation call Nostrana at 503-234-2427. SUN / 13TH / 1-4PM NOSTRANA
KIDSí DRAWING PARTY WITH MARK TEAGUE / LARUE ACROSS AMERICA (Blue Sky Press) Join us for this special childrenís drawing party hosted by Mark Teague! SUN / 13TH / 2P
CEDAR HILLS
DAN DEWEESE / You Don’t Love This Man (Harper Perennial) ALAN HEATHCOCK / Volt (Graywolf Press) DeWeese delivers a witty, heartfelt, and keenly observed debut novel and Heathcock a blistering collection of stories from an exhilarating new voice. MON / 14TH / 7:30P HAWTHORNE
REX PICKETT / Vertical (Loose Gravel Press) The follow-up to the blockbuster novel Sideways tracks Miles and Jack on a tour of Oregon wineries. TUE / 15TH / 7P
CEDAR HILLS
JON MICHAUD / When Tito Loved Clara (Algonquin) Does a child of immigrants have to sever ties with the past in order to move on? Michaudís debut novel answers with wit and compassion. TUE / 15TH / 7:30P
DOWNTOWN
LISA GARDNER / Love You More (Bantam)
In Gardnerís new thriller, a homicide investigation ratchets into a frantic statewide search for a missing child. WED / 16TH / 7P
CEDAR HILLS
SARA WHEELER / The Magnetic North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Wheeler journeys to the Arctic and takes stock of the most pristine ó and endangered ó place on earth. WED / 16TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
Visit POWELLS.COM/CALENDAR for further details and to sign up for our EVENTS NEWSLETTER. 44
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9 Derrick Jensen
Anarcho-primitivist Derrick Jensen thinks the advancement from foraging to agriculture wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The poet-philosopher-activist told Democracy Now!, “A lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet. It’s very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we’re doing isn’t working.” He is bringing his raging environmentalist thoughts to PNCA to deliver the Edelman Lecture, which brings one speaker each year to offer a unique way of examining three-dimensional space. It remains to be seen where art and design will fall in Jensen’s culture of resistance and if he thinks art can save the planet. PNCA Main Campus Building, Swigert Commons, 1241 NW Johnson St., 226-4391. 6:30 pm. Free.
FRIDAY, MARCH 11 Grace Krilanovich & Jarret Middleton
The little NoPo cafe/pub spotlights the works of two authors making large waves out of small presses. LA Times staffer Grace Krilanovich is the next big thing in the publishing world. Her book, The Orange Eats Creeps (Two Dollar Radio), which follows a band of teenage transients in the Pacific Northwest in the ’90s, is a finalist for The Believer’s 2010 Book Award. She shares the stage with 25-year-old Jarret Middleton, also a first-time author. His book, An Dantomine Eerly (Dark Coast Press), maps the tormented thoughts of a griefstricken young man. The Waypost, 3120 N Williams Ave., 367-3182. 7 pm. Free.
Gemma Whelan
Sigmund Freud and David Hume came to Portland author Gemma Whelan in a dream. They lured her into a bookstore aboard a moving sky train where she saw her name on one of the books. So she put down her film project and got typing. The Irish-born theater director and educator finally achieved that dream with her new novel Fiona: Stolen Child. In the book, Fiona, an Irishwoman working as a film consultant in New York, has written an autobiographical novel that estranges her from her family. When the book is optioned for a film, Fiona must connect with her family and face her guilt over her sister’s death. Tigard Public Library, 13500 SW Hall Blvd., 684-6537. 7-8:30 pm. Free.
MONDAY, MARCH 14 Jasper Fforde
British mystery writer Jasper Fforde has a new fantasy-thriller: One of Our Thursdays is Missing. The book chronicles the adventures of a writer called Thursday Next who is out to solve a mystery in BookWorld, a literary version of Alice’s Wonderland. Barnes & Noble Clackamas Town Center, 12000 SE 82nd Ave., 786-3463. 7 pm. Free.
TUESDAY, MARCH 15 The Hut Beneath the Pine
Local poet and Asia scholar Daniel Skach-Mills reads from his new collection of 32 tea-themed poems. Lan Su Chinese Garden, Northwest 3rd Avenue and Everett Street. 2 pm. Free.
Rex Pickett
The bumbling middle-aged winos from Sideways (based on Rex
Pickett’s novel) are back in action. If you loved the movie and would like to see Miles and Jack wander north through Oregon’s vineyards, you’re in luck: Pickett’s new book, Vertical, is a sequel to Sideways, set in the Willamette Valley. Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd., Beaverton, 228-4651. 7 pm. Free.
Jon Michaud
Jon Michaud has a job many a lit geek would kill for. The New Yorker’s resident librarian and regular blogger recently published his first novel. When Tito Loved Clara is about the lasting love of two Dominican immigrants raised in northern Manhattan and the havoc their midlife reunion wreaks on their separate adult lives. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm. Free.
For more Words listings, visit
REVIEW
JONATHAN BLOOM AMERICAN WASTELAND Until relatively recently—within the past 50 years, say—no one had to be told not to waste their food, and certainly not as an ecological or even public issue. It was simple common sense: Who the hell would throw away something so obviously precious? It would be like tossing money into the Fine foodstuff is a terrible thing to waste. street. As documented even in the title of Jonathan Bloom’s American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (Da Capo, 360 pages, $26), this situation has markedly changed. As the cost of food has shrunken relative to income—and as food came to be taken for granted as a convenience rather than as a difficult-to-provide, essential domestic resource—we became less worried about letting food spoil in the fridge, slosh down a disposal or sit abandoned on a restaurant table. Our eyes got bigger than our stomachs. When even fine dining comes to us as easily as slop dumped from a bucket, we all become pigs; that’s part of the moral of the Boston-based journalist’s book. It’s the dark side of all those luxury food shows on TV. But it’s not just that simple. Those very industrial agricultural efficiencies that have made food so cheap also make us inefficient in getting it to the table. Because food is shipped so far from farm to store, farms are left to toss tons and tons of produce that might not be able to make the trip; supermarkets, bent on displaying an abundance of food, toss tons more as the food withers on its shelves. The abundantly cornucopia’d food porn of a Whole Foods shelf is also a result of relentless culling; that perfectly round, spotfree tomato at your grocery store masks tens of perfectly edible, perhaps even tastier tomatoes left behind. About 10 percent to 20 percent goes lost at each stop on the chain, from the farm to the transport to the store to a restaurant or your own twilight zone of a refrigerator. Where American Wasteland really shows its value as a book, however, is not in its diagnosis but its solutions. At the level of the farm and store, Bloom’s advocacy extends mostly to gleaning (an age-old, bible-recommended practice wherein the poor pick the harvest remainders as food), supermarket food-bank donations and “pre-dumpster” gleaning (a practice favored by Portland’s own New Seasons markets, where unsalable-yet-edible food is placed in a separate box from the dumpster, for urban scavengers.) Likewise, Bloom shows any number of home and restaurant solutions for reducing waste, especially useful since neither bottom line is very far from the floor these days. (An average four-person household dumps about $40 of food each week, by his estimate.) But still, the basic message, aside from money-saving, is simple: Don’t throw away food while others starve. Or, if you prefer utter non sequitur: “Clean your plate. There are kids starving in Africa.” MATTHEW KORFHAGE. GO: Jonathan Bloom reads from American Wasteland at Powell’s on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Thursday, March 10. Free.
SPECIALIZED | CERVELO | FISHER CANNONDALE | BIANCHI | SEVEN | CIVIA WATERFORD | SANTANA | RALEIGH | RIDLEY COLNAGO | TIME | SURLY | CIELO SANTA CRUZ | IBIS | RITCHEY
MON-FRI, 10-7, SAT 10-5, SUN 12-5
Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions!
They’re Good Ones!
Show us your messiest feast and you could win the official Cheap Eats T-shirt (the one on the cover)! For more info, visit wweek.com/promotions
T-shirt printed by
See Wellness pg. 51 Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
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MARCH 9-15 REVIEW
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
IMAGE COURTESY OF POWFEST
MOVIES
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.
The Adjustment Bureau
56 Like any paranoid thriller, The
Adjustment Bureau gestures toward fighting the power—but not since Capra has a supernatural movie sided so squarely with conformism, acquiescence to authority and abdication of independent thought. Right out of the gate, U.S. Senate front-runner Matt Damon learns that his every decision is being programmed by a totalitarian brain-ray guild, and his basic response is, “Bummer, may I have my lady friend back please?” That the lady friend in question is played by Emily Blunt does not entirely excuse his surrender. “The whole world’s been turned upside down, and you’re thinking about a girl?” asks one of his more sympathetic, if baffled, handlers (Anthony Mackie). Yes, that’s pretty much all Damon’s thinking about: He boards the same bus every day for three years, looking for her, so if the mind-control dudes were trying to increase publictransit ridership, that’s a win. I find his glut of faith disturbing, but it wouldn’t be worth noting if the film weren’t reasonably entertaining for an earlyMarch studio release. It gets by on existential chutzpah and Emily Blunt’s face: not insubstantial qualities. Its tone is pitched somewhere between The Candidate and The Manchurian Candidate, and its metaphysical-doorway effects are more or less what would happen if the team behind Inception decided to put together a live-action remake of Monsters, Inc., but while everything freshman director George Nolfi does here is derivative, it’s not repellently derivative. PG-13. AARON MESH. Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Tigard, Evergreen, Bridgeport.
Barney’s Version
70 Director Richard J. Lewis’ version
of Mordecai Richler’s novel is a stylistic nullity, not so far removed from the cheapo television its hero produces in a Montreal warehouse, but I can’t hold this defect against it. I’m too fond of Richler’s singular conception of hustling Canadian Jewishness, and of Paul Giamatti’s lusty, avid personification of it. Giamatti is Barney Panofsky, serial collector of whiskey and wives, who as the movie opens is losing his past to Alzheimer’s, and tries to piece together his side of the story. His performance has surface similarities to Sideways—both Barney and Miles are blotto a lot of the time, and Giamatti instinctively understands the proud man perpetually subject to indignities—but Barney just skips past the part where he’s supposed to be mortified, too eager to see what satisfactions could arrive next. The film is no match for the character’s energy, and early on it threatens to succumb to some pungent stereotypes, but it manages to cohere for two great set pieces: a lavish wedding, where Barney marries his second wife (Minnie Driver) and meets his third (an angelic Rosamund Pike), and a very misguided weekend retreat to a lake cottage, where Barney’s closest friendship goes up in flames. The movie, with its promiscuous, liquored-up, loyal men of the tribe, is candy for me—halva, let’s say. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.
Battle: Los Angeles
Aliens invade L.A., as they are wont to do. But this time, they have to face Aaron Eckhart. PG-13. Lloyd Center, Lloyd Mall, Pioneer Place, City Center, Eastport, Cinema 99, Division, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Tigard, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Movies on TV.
Beastly
15 Supernatural mystery time! Today’s question: How was Vanessa Hudgens not fired from the set of this highschool Beauty and the Beast remake? Midway through the movie, there’s a scene where she is required to silently express surface anger disguising deeper disappointment, but
46
this common emotion is outside of her range. Instead, Hudgens conveys pensive pouting, one of the two facial expressions in her arsenal (the other: happiness), and adds some tears. At this moment, it was the responsibility of director Daniel Barnz to ask her to go home. I suspect he must have taken to despondent weeping jags in his trailer by that point, however; you can smell his despair all over the movie, which barely nods toward coherence. It opens as some kind of hyper-snide Gossip Girl knockoff, then that Burberry model from I Am Number Four (Alex Pettyfer, is it?) gets his face magically melted so he looks like Powder covered in squeezes of Aquafresh, and the tone gets more moonish, and Neil Patrick Harris plays a blind tutor, and honestly no one over the age of 18 is ever going to see a minute of this, so the kids can feel unsupervised enough to sit in the back row and give each other blow jobs or tweet or kill hobos or whatever it is they’re doing for fun these days, because it sure as hell isn’t actually watching this shit. PG-13. AARON MESH. Lloyd Mall, Broadway, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Tigard, Evergreen, Bridgeport.
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. 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. Every one of Aronofsky’s previous works torments a hero who sacrifices him- or herself on the altar of an obsession—usually a lust for the spotlight. Portman’s travails in Black Swan—which include, but are not limited to, bulimia, erotic repression by an overweening stage mother (Barbara Hershey) and the sudden onset of webbed feet—most obviously recall Ellen Burstyn abusing diet pills in delirious preparation for a gameshow appearance in Requiem for a Dream. Aronofsky is a dom of a director, getting his jollies by brutalizing his characters. R. AARON MESH. Lloyd Mall, Fox Tower, Bridgeport.
Blue Valentine
96 In Blue Valentine’s most iconic 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”
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
CONT. on page 47
I SAID I WANTED VOODOO DOUGHNUTS: Ebbe Bassey and
Nedra McClyde in Three Prayers for June.
YOU’VE GOT FEMALE
POWFEST RETURNS WITH SOME DISTURBING NEWS ABOUT BABY-MAKING. BY KELLY CLARKE
AND
RACHAEL DEWITT
243-2122
Listen, ladies, and all people who love ladies: The Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival (POWFest, for short) enters its fourth year with a range that belies its name. The guest of honor is Aussie director Gillian Armstrong, and the women seen on the Hollywood Theatre screen this weekend hail from across the globe. Here are some of the highlights.
Three Veils
Things aren’t always what they seem—in fact, for three young Middle Eastern women living in America, things are much, much worse. Virginal Leila (Mercedes Masöhn) has just agreed to an arranged marriage to geeky, God-obsessed Ali. But her romance-novel daydreams sour as Ali quickly devolves into a stereotype of misogynistic Arab manhood—jealous, grabby and dangerous. Meanwhile, Leila’s pot-smoking, day-drinking best friend, Nikki (Sheetal Sheth), copes with an awful family secret and devout Amira (Angela Zahra) channels her stifled lesbianism into Islam and a burgeoning friendship/codependency with Nikki. Writer/director Rolla Selbak quickly shifts what seems like a harmless soap opera— fervent makeout scenes, belly dancing—into darker territory, complete with marquee issues like rape and incest. Call it My So-Called Life: The Arab Years. Oddly enough, the appropriately desolate film takes a jarring, unrealistic turn for the sunny side in its last moments. It would’ve been better to have left its three heroines with broken, but realistically beating, hearts. KELLY CLARKE. 7 pm Wednesday, March 9. 54
Love, Lust and Lies
63 Little Women director Gillian Armstrong’s new documentary, Love, Lust and Lies, continues to follow three women as they age from 14 to 48—it’s the 7 Up series Down Under. It’s the fifth film in a series of documentaries Armstrong began in 1976, when she filmed the three teenagers growing up in Adelaide, Australia. Despite the film’s naked portrayal of
working-class Australia, Armstrong’s representation of the complaints and confessions of three middleaged women comes dangerously close to Oprah-style dramatic inspiration, like a First Wives Club with Adelaide housewives instead of three revenge-seeking Manhattanites. None of Armstrong’s subjects graduated from high school, and two of them were mothers by age 16. Each time Armstrong visits her protagonists they seem to have more children and new spouses. Starting with a montage summarizing the previous four films and ending with a beachside toast to the future, Armstrong offers a sentimental time-lapse portrait of three women’s march uphill. RACHAEL DEWITT. 7 pm Friday, March 11.
Shorts II Showcase
75 The short films featured in the WIF-PDX (Women in Film Portland, OR)-sponsored showcase cover a lot of ground, from Portland’s allfemale Circus Artemis in Flying High, Standing Tall to the internal battles of a young artist who suffers from muscular atrophy in Grounded by Reality. Some of the shorts have not a drop of humor, like Pussy, where two parents teach a lesson to the boy who’s been harassing their daughter. But Three Prayers for June is a very funny tale of a sophisticated AfricanAmerican woman who tries to sacrifice a rooster in her apartment in hopes that appeasing an African fertility goddess will help her conceive. The most compelling and polished film in the bunch is Amy Adrion’s Shoegazer, about a female bartender who looks after a drunk teenage girl found in the bathroom after closing. Shoegazer is Adrion’s UCLA film
thesis, and contains originality and aesthetics evocative of Miranda July. RACHAEL DEWITT. Noon Sunday, March 13.
Made in India
86 These days, India isn’t just answering your call-center queries—it’s growing custom babies on a budget for desperate Western couples. Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha’s frank, fascinating and genuinely effed-up documentary on the burgeoning international “procreative tourism” industry trails schlubby San Antonio couple Lisa and Brian in their quest for a baby—after seven years of fertility drugs and in vitro procedures the pair has turned to surrogacy, hoping to implant their own eggs and sperm into somebody else’s healthy uterus. Trouble is, American wombs are expensive. The U.S. surrogacy process costs $70,000 to $100,000, with nearly $25,000 earmarked for the surrogate mom herself. But half a world away in Mumbai, a destitute, illiterate mother of three Aasia is willing to undergo the same nine-month slog for a fraction of the cost, lying to her own husband and hiding away in a “surrogate house” when she starts to show, in order to sock the money away in a bank account for her own daughter. The filmmakers have garnered a startling amount of emotional access to all parties involved—including the enterprising California businessman brokering these overseas baby deals and the Mumbai clinic performing the medical procedures. But what becomes increasingly clear as Aasia’s due date approaches is how easily this complex new industry can become a nightmare for everybody involved—from Americans barred from seeing their genetic children by confused Indian hospital administrators to uninformed surrogates who end up carrying babies and risking their own health for less than $2,000, fleeced by the very people impregnating them. The filmmakers manage to balance their sympathy for these desperate baby-makers and babywanters with a bitter critique of an unregulated, predatory business run by people who might care more for dollars than diapers. And don’t worry if you don’t want to travel all the way to India for your outsourced newborn. We hear Panama is getting into the act already. KELLY CLARKE. 3 pm Sunday, March 13.
SEE IT: POWFest, Hollywood Theatre, Friday-Sunday, March 11-13. Visit powfest.com for full showtimes.
MARCH 9-15 B E V E R LY J O U B E R T
MOVIES
DEVOUR
THE LAST LIONS 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 respark 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. R. AP KRYZA. Fox Tower.
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-Old Virgin. Then there are a lot of jokes about how flyovercountry 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, Bridgeport.
Classic French Crime Films
92 [FOUR NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL]
So, are you a Jean Gabin person or a Lino Ventura person? I’m going to ignore your incredulous stare and continue: Me, I’m a Lino Ventura guy. Sure, they’re both great Parisian hard cases, showcased in a NW Film Center double-feature revival of two noirs they made together 15 years apart: Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (9:15 pm Friday and 7:15 pm Sunday, March 11 and 13) and The Sicilian Clan (7 pm Thursday and 9 pm Saturday, March 10 and 12). Gabin is a legend, and has great dignity behind his frowning carapace—
especially in Jacques Becker’s 1954 Grisbi, about the last stand of an aging thief. But Ventura, an Italian acting in French movies (starting with Grisbi), reminds me of De Niro, with both his menacing energy and his frustrated rage— especially in Henri Verneuil’s 1969 Sicilian Clan, where Ventura plays a grim cop with enough dry irritability to give hope to every little man stuck holding the world together from behind a desk. Nearly everything in The Sicilian Clan quickens the spirit: Made three years before The Godfather, its Ennio Morricone score sounds a trifle prescient, except for the intermittent and slightly humorous “sproing” noises of a mouth harp. Similarly, the broader picture is an authentic tough-guy movie that can’t quite conceal a touch of the ridiculous. Peep the beach scene where Irina Demick takes off all her clothes, and Alain Delon impresses her by swinging a huge, wriggling eel, and bashing its head against the rocks. Then there’s sex. Later, there’s pinball. I strongly recommend this movie. AARON MESH. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.
Cold Weather
88 Cold Weather, an unusually
observant picture, thinks about details. You might say director Aaron Katz and his protagonist share an affinity for clues: About midway through the movie, Doug (Chris Lankenau) learns his ex-girlfriend (Robyn Rikoon) has flown her motel room, and puts his detective skills to work. Katz, meanwhile, patiently feeds us information about Doug, who typifies the Portland resident as somebody whose ambition got lost by the airline on the flight out here. The private-eye-as-slacker is no new archetype—think of Elliott Gould shambling through Altman’s The Long Goodbye, or Jeff Bridges in several iterations—but Doug is the first case of a slacker mesmerized by the image of gumshoeing, and its accouterments: A Sherlock Holmes buff, he even buys a pipe to puff on while the game is afoot. Cold Weather congeals into something very close to a potboiler, but all the while the director is looking in the opposite direction. He’s studying the stirrings of empathy, as Doug starts to realize that his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn), though fathoms more mature and poised than he is, may also be a little lonely, and enjoying the company as much as the case. The movie, a small-scale triumph of humor and feeling, is the first to understand how, in an era when social supports come easily unglued, siblings are the family you get to choose. It’s elementary, Sherlock: Who needs Watson when you have a sister? AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre, Living Room Theaters.
The Company Men
60 Company Men director John
Wells has fond memories of Americans making and buying
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47
MOVIES
MARCH 9-15
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.
jokes involving shit, dicks and masturbation. Predictability isn’t the problem. The problem is that Hall Pass isn’t a movie; it’s a premise. Sadly, the Farrellys have forgotten what they taught us during their late-’90s golden years: that even jizz can have meaning. R. MATTHEW SINGER. Lloyd Center, Broadway, City Center, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Tigard, Evergreen, Bridgeport.
Hood to Coast
55 While Oregon’s 197-mile Hood to
Coast Relay race is run every year, this isthe 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 this 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. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.
The Housemaid
30 Im Sang-soo’s tepid remake of 1960’s The Housemaid, a nanny-vs.-wife showdown played out in the sterile spaces of South Korea’s super-rich, is the kind of
REVIEW K I M B E R LY F R E N C H
Daisies
[THREE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] Two girls frolic through the Czech New Wave. 5th Avenue Cinema. 7 and 9:30 pm Friday-Saturday, 3 pm Sunday, March 11-13.
Drive Angry 3-D
42 Nicolas Cage with a bad Art
Alexakis mullet, playing a killer who escapes from hell. Deranged cultists wielding objects that are blunt, sharp and explosive (sometimes all three). A badass ’69 Charger, dismemberment, explosions, vulgarity, impalement, rampant nudity, fist fights, fire fights, knife fights, cat fights, naked cat fights. Amber Heard’s ass. Amber Heard’s ass in slick 3-D. So how is it that the knuckle-dragging adrenalinefest Drive Angry isn’t the greatest fucking movie of all time? For starters, it’s never fun to watch someone cash a paycheck, no matter how many bodies he fells on his way to the ATM. Drive Angry should be a riot for the maniacal Cage, a chance to make his Bad Lieutenant junkie seem like Fred Rogers. Instead, he hardly seems awake, even during a scene where he engages in a gunfight without pulling out of the skanky truckstop hooker he’s banging. R. AP KRYZA. Eastport, Clackamas.
The Films of Charlie Chaplin
80 [FOUR NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL]
Sure, your kids cry at Wall-E. Wait’ll they see it reenacted (preenacted?) with real people in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (7 pm Saturday and 2:30 pm Sunday, March 12-13). The same weekend, the NW Film Center brings in another Little Tramp classic, Modern Times (7 pm Friday and 5 pm Sunday, March 11 and 13), which opens with a rightly famed sequence of Charlie in the drudgery factory, literally becoming part of the machine. Look, I won’t lie: I find Chaplin’s films a little (gulp) mawkish, especially compared with Keaton or Lloyd, and these ’30s features are where he really indulged himself in the sentiment. But these are restored 35 mm prints—hardly a gift to quibble over—complete with long shorts playing before each. In other words: Go. AARON MESH. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.
Gnomeo and Juliet
COLUMBIA PICTURES PRESENTS IN ASSOCIATION WITH RELATIVITY MEDIA AN ORIGINAL FILM PRODUCTION “BATTLE: LOS ANGELES” AARON ECKHART MICHELLE RODRI GUEZ RAMON RODRIGUEZ BRIDGET MOYNAHAN MUSIC EXECUTIVE NE-YO AND MICHAEL PEÑA BY BRIAN TYLER PRODUCERS JEFFREY CHERNOV DAVID GREENBLATT WRITTEN PRODUCED DIRECTED BY CHRIS BERTOLINI BY NEAL H. MORITZ ORI MARMUR BY JONATHAN LI EBESMAN STARTS FRIDAY, MARCH 11
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The Shakespeare tragedy, interpreted by cartoon garden gnomes. WW did not attend the screening. G. 3-D: Eastport. 2-D: Lloyd Center, City Center, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Evergreen, Bridgeport.
Hall Pass
22 Not sure if this counts as a spoiler
or not, but fuck it: Everything you think will happen in Hall Pass does, in fact, happen. It’s a film about two aging Rhode Island yuppies (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) who are granted a week off from their marriages, freeing them to go out and try to get laid. This being a broad mainstream comedy, it’s a safe bet to assume everyone winds up appreciating their spouse more in the end. And because those are the Farrelly brothers in the directors’ chairs, of course it includes
CLOAK AND DAGGER: Amanda Seyfried as…you know.
RED RIDING HOOD I’ll hand it to Catherine Hardwicke: She’s attempting to distill the essence of a teenage girl’s sexual fantasy into cinema, and she’s coming closer with every try. Sure, Twilight had its share of touchyourself-but-don’t-finish shivers, but her new Red Riding Hood is a real Bavarian cream dream, existing in a soundstage Expressionist/Freudian forest where the trees sprout thick, jutting thorns, haystacks bloom with bright blue petals, and pure snow exists for the purpose of being mottled with drops of crimson blood. Hardwicke’s visual indulgence is unlikely to meet with much critical appreciation, mostly because David Johnson’s screenplay is atrocious—both plot and dialogue are squirt-Coke-out-your-nose bad—and the swooning supernatural women’s picture is one of the last genres reviewers feel no obligation to take seriously. But a movie is more than the mere staging of a script, and there’s significantly more energy roiling here than in half of Marvel’s formulaic grabs for dude cash. It’s a backhanded compliment, but Red Riding Hood is a film that might play better as a silent, though the pagan-revel pop music is actually pretty good. Amanda Seyfreid, as the Germanic werewolf-victim/werewolf-heir/werewolf-lover Valerie (her status is ambiguous, until it’s very not), has arresting features—half innocent, half sultry—but bland, Middle American speech patterns. Hardwicke hasn’t instructed the veteran actors (Virginia Madsen and Billy Burke as Valerie’s parents, Julie Christie as her grandmother) whether to approach the material hammy or flat, and the interchangeable young hunks can’t tell the difference. But unplug your ears in time for Gary Oldman, who arrives in the village square as a hunter-turned-inquisitor straight out of the graphic novel Andrei Rublev, Wolfslayer. Bringing with him an iron elephant (probably so he can later scream the line, “Lock him in the iron elephant!”), Oldman also totes along his taste for high camp— the movie basically pauses in its tracks for Crazy Uncle Gary’s Story Hour, which is entirely welcome. Then it’s back to stoking its pubescence reveries, which get weirder and weirder, until eventually Seyfried is tied to a sacrificial altar and fitted with a cast-metal pig mask, in what can only be described as a vivid humiliation/submissive fetish scene. It brings a new meaning to the saying, “Lock up your daughters!” and suggests that Hardwicke, though limited as a dramatist, has few psychological spaces she fears to go. My, what big kinks she has. PG-13. AARON MESH.
The Girl in the Iron Pig Mask.
54 SEE IT: Red Riding Hood opens Friday at Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, City Center, Eastport, Cinema 99, Division, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Tigard, Evergreen, Bridgeport and Movies on TV.
MARCH 9-15
29 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. KELLY CLARKE. 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. PG-13. SAUNDRA SORENSON. Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Evergreen, Bridgeport.
The Illusionist
78 Sylvain Chomet’s 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. PG. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Living Room Theaters.
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
Justin Bieber: Never Say Never 3-D
The Donny Osmond of our time gets his own concert film. Not screened for critics. G. 3-D: Lloyd Mall,
AN INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY OF SURVIVAL
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Clackamas, Bridgeport. 2-D: Cedar Hills, Clackamas.
Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
The King’s Speech
“RIVETING!”
73 If it is the task of the movie psy-
– Joe Neumaier, Daily News
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
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REVIEW
DOGTOOTH
It managed to escape the attention of Portland’s film programmers last year, but Dogtooth, one of 2010’s best and strangest movies, is finally here. If you pay attention to those late-December efforts of self-congratulatory peacockery known as Year-End Top 10 Lists and adjust your Netflix queue accordingly, then you’ve probably already seen Giorgos Lanthimos’ canted portrait of one exceedingly odd nuclear family. Although it’s troubling to think that Dogtooth’s Oscar nomination (for Best Foreign Film) might be the sole reason for this welcome visit to Portland, Lanthimos’ wicked creation certainly deserves a big-screen showcase, no matter how overdue. The domestic universe of this Greek film seems to have evolved from a bedtime story gone epically awry, as if an overly paranoid parent began extemporizing a fanciful cautionary tale one night and then could not, for whatever obsessive-compulsive reason, stop spinning the yarn that would eventually imprison his children in a world of make-believe. The title refers to one of the many quasi-mystical fatherly decrees delimiting the behavior and mobility of three helplessly sheltered siblings: A child, according to the perverse pater familias, is ready to leave the house when one of his or her cuspids falls out; however, the only way to make it safely into the world beyond the front yard is by car, and a child is not ready to drive until the “dogtooth” grows back. Dad: 1, children: 0. This dental tenet is the cornerstone of a brilliantly fucked-up parenting style indebted to Texas Chainsaw’s macabre patriarchy and the precious emotional violence perpetrated by Royal Tenenbaum. The adult children, all unnamed, believe house cats are killer beasts and distant airplanes are small toys that occasionally fall into the backyard. Even language has been manipulated to shrink the world: A “phone” is a salt shaker and “excursion” refers to material used to construct floors, while a “pussy” is a big light. That Lanthimos avoids going over the top with his aria of absurdity is a testament not only to his conjuring skills and carefully chosen influences (Herzog and Korine, both masters of the oddball alternate reality, come to mind), but to the baffling and frequently batshit proscriptions that bind even the most ostensibly healthy family unit. Like the best science fiction and magical realism, Dogtooth brings it all back home again, to that moment Mom explained procreation using pennies and dimes—or was that just my family? CHRIS STAMM.
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falling head over dick for a leggy blonde with a heart of gold (Sports Illustrated covergirl Brooklyn Decker and her ever-present 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”). PG-13. RUTH BROWN. Lloyd Mall, Pioneer Place, Cinema 99, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Tigard, Evergreen, Bridgeport.
THA – SF
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 blow job 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. Living Room Theaters.
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Every time you think about leaving home, Dad kills a kitten.
93 SEE IT: Dogtooth screens at Cinema 21 at 7 and 9 pm Monday-Tuesday, March 14-15.
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MOVIES
BREW VIEWS
PA R A M O U N T P I C T U R E S
serve as objects of desire. R. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.
Orgasm Inc.
45 [ONE WEEK ONLY] Every so often,
HELLO MUDDAH, HELLO BRUDDAH: Among the many attention-and-statuette-grabbing performances in The Fighter, Mark Wahlberg’s work in the title role has been targeted as the picture’s weak link—a void in the center of the ring. But the more I let the movie sit with me, the more I find Marky Mark’s passivity resonating. The character of Micky Ward is distinguished from other boxing heroes (and other Wahlberg characters) by being a punching bag for his family’s ambitions; the way he absorbs the blows of his mom, his brother and his Irish chorus of sisters recalls the stoic confusion of other bruised toughs back to a young Nick Nolte, or even Burt Lancaster in The Killers. AARON MESH. Academy, Hollywood Theatre, Kennedy School, Laurelhurst, Mission, Valley. Best paired with: Oakshire Espresso Stout. Also showing: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (BAM@Laurelhurst). opens with a speaking engagement going mortifyingly awry—the secondborn 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. R. AARON MESH. Lloyd Center, Fox Tower, City Center, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Tigard, Evergreen, Bridgeport.
The Last Lions
77 I haven’t been able to take the
anthropomorphized animal documentary quite seriously (if I ever did) since the viral emergence of “The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger” video, which took wildlife footage of the African honey badger and added narration from a flamboyantly gay man named Randall, whose observations include, “Honey Badger doesn’t give a shit” and “look at that sleepy fuck.” After enjoying that several times a week, it’s hard to keep a straight face when Jeremy Irons pontificates over The Last Lions about how the beasts might be feeling, and what personal vendettas water buffaloes might or might not be carrying around. That said, Dereck and Beverly Joubert’s Botswana kingof-beasts footage is remarkably intimate, and sure to be more unflinching than anything in Disney’s upcoming African Cats (lions and their cubs die onscreen here, and while the imagery isn’t gratuitous, a lot of feline blood is spilled). Perhaps the most remarkable sequence shows a lioness facing off with a water buffalo in a danse macabre, with the buffalo calf at stake as a potential meal for the cubs: Both animals’ sheer persistence is captivating. But the movie makes it clear that the beasts have been pressured into smaller and smaller territory by human expansion—Africa’s lion population has collapsed from 450,000 at midcentury to fewer than 20,000 now. Honey badger, and everybody else, should definitely give a shit. PG. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.
Mars Needs Moms
28 Mars Needs Moms—a thin, sappy
treacle of a kid flick animated with
50
the same creepy overdrawn-live-actor technology as The Polar Express or the latest Christmas Carol rehash—sort of lives in the uncanny valley, in that same circle of hell with wax statues and animatronic pirates; the cartoonish Martians are somehow more expressive than most of the people, who look and move like the malevolent plasticine life forms in Doctor Who. Joan Cusack brings her usual ticky mania and stroke-victim speech patterns to the slight role of the abducted mother, but without the benefit of her beautifully contortionist features it comes off mostly charmless; as Milo, the Boy Who Saves Her, Seth Green skillfully exerts his always estimable talent for being utterly forgettable. The female Martians are in some angry, personality-free Communist beehive run by a freeze-dried nightmare of a motherin-law joke, while the men are jumpy, huggy, hippie Ewoks; neither inspire sympathy. Really, the only thing that redeems this train wreck of a film is a manic, charismatic, sweaty, subtly sad performance by Dan Fogler as Gribble, a stranded boy-man who never grew up. I can hardly blame my 4-year-old nephew for taking off his 3-D glasses halfway through and loudly begging to be allowed to wait in the hallway until the awful, awful spectacle was over. PG. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. 3-D: Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, City Center, Eastport, Cinema 99, Division, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Tigard, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Movies on TV. 2-D: Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Bridgeport.
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
Willamette Week MARCH 9, 2011 wweek.com
I wander into a movie and realize, ah, here is a picture about which I am really not qualified to intelligently comment—I knew that would be the case with Orgasm Inc., a documentary about female sexual dysfunction, about three minutes into our congress. So, facts: Orgasm Inc. makes the case that FSD is not, in fact, a disease that should be treated with medication, or really a disease at all, but a malady invented by Big Pharma to make women feel bad about their diverse sexual responses and take Viagra knockoffs. Liz Canner makes her case gracelessly but persuasively, or at least persuasively enough to make me pretty damn suspicious of Oprah Network stars Jennifer and Laura Berman shilling for all kinds of pills to give you all kinds of thrills. I will also venture that surgically plugging a cord into your body, a cord that is seriously called the Orgasmatron, is a terrible idea. The movie also contains cautionary tales about labial reduction surgery (“There was a huge gush and a huge spurt of blood”), and protests of the same, with signs: “We Demand Real Vulvas in Porn!” I would like to take this space to note that I am delighted by all kinds of vulvas in porn, and I think people should be proud of their bodies and the responses of those bodies, while still seeking pleasure, definitely, and I desperately want this review to be over, because there’s no way I’m getting out of here without somebody being really mad at me. AARON MESH. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Friday-Thursday, March 11-17. No 7 pm show Tuesday, March 15.
The Other Woman
61 Having perhaps intuited that her
ballet baby would require a postOscar hiatus, Natalie Portman is everywhere this spring: Casually shtupping in No Strings Attached, being supportive of Thor, taking off her medieval pants for Your Highness, getting her reproductive decisions criticized by Mike Huckabee in whatever backwater hole where Mike Huckabee lives, and getting her parenting decisions criticized by just about everybody in The Other Woman. This last role probably required the least effort: Portman plays a Harvard-educated career gal whose assignation with a colleague makes her a wickedly acerbic stepmother to a nervous moppet (Charlie Tahan, as sweetly awkward as a tiny Crispin Glover). It’s a nice fit for Portman, some almost-acting in an almost-movie based on some almost-literature by Ayelet Waldman. Also, there’s the pallor of SIDS, so Portman gets to cry a lot. She and Tahan achieve some lovely Central Park scenes together—prickly and tender, like the filial bonding of intellectual porcupines—but the picture, almost-directed by Don Roos, contains much somber grieving and an inexplicable number of scenes where people start yelling at each other on the sidewalk, like they’ve forgotten about the existence of bystanders, or their own big-eared little pitcher. Their vulgarity belies the movie’s toneless class. R. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.
PNCA Videofest
[ONE NIGHT ONLY] Pacific Northwest College of Art presents a wide-ranging program of video works. Clinton Street Theater. 7 pm Tuesday, March 15.
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. PG-13. ALISTAIR ROCKOFF. Living Room Theaters.
Rango
82 If there’s a criticism to lob at Gore
Verbinski’s wildly entertaining existentialist cartoon Western, it’s that he
made an existentialist cartoon Western aimed at kids. Ninety-five percent of the stuff that makes Rango so fun is going to be lost on its target demographic, unless Chinatown (from which it cribs part of its plot) and Sergio Leone flicks have suddenly become popular among grade schoolers. It’s an homage to films made decades before they were born, loaded with complicated, fast-paced dialogue and themes no child should understand until he or she is old enough to wonder if their entire life has been a fraud. Yes, Rango fails to hit the grace note Pixar plays so well, making a movie that appeals effortlessly to both adults and children without pandering to either. Y’know what, though? Not every animated movie has to be Toy Story—especially when it’s as much of a fucking blast as this one. Admittedly, there isn’t a whole lot going on beneath the surface, but again, since when did every cartoon have to make us weep? Energy and imagination go a long way, and Rango is one of the most stylishly exhilarating animated films to emerge from a non-Pixar studio in years. Verbinski’s enthusiasm for what is essentially a pastiche love letter to classic cinema bursts through the clutter. PG. MATTHEW SINGER. Lloyd Center, Lloyd Mall, Pioneer Place, City Center, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Tigard, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Movies on TV.
Singalong Grease
75 [REVIVAL, FOUR NIGHTS ONLY]
Really, when you think about it, has there ever been a screening of this 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John teen musical that wasn’t a singalong? The audience participation-enhanced reboot of Danny and Sandy’s charmingly raunchy good Aussie/bad greaser romance has been marketed as the “original High School Musical,”—a misnomer, since I’m damn sure Zac Efron has (sadly) never crooned about “pussy wagons” and making chicks cream in HSM I, II or III. The producers of this extravaganza have “improved” the original film with karaoke song captions and irritatingly cutesy hand-drawn wheels, hearts and exclamation points that pulse to the beat of numbers like “You’re the One That I Want” and “Summer Nights.” The audience often gets gussied up in Pink Lady gear and leather T-bird jackets. There is a lot of shrill screaming whenever Danny Zuko combs his hair. Those last three sentences should easily determine whether you would ever pay money for this experience. Now, there’s a good reason Grease has endured for three decades. The ‘50s style music is infectious and the lyrics are delightfully dirty. Singing along to “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee”—“lousy with virginity”— with a bunch of strangers may not be the coolest way to spend an evening, but for die-hard fans of the film, I bet it’ll end up being a lot of fun. KELLY CLARKE. Cinema 21. 7 pm WednesdaySaturday, March 9-12.
Singalong Mary Poppins
[TWO DAYS ONLY, REVIVAL] Like Singalong Grease, except nobody mentions being lousy with virginity. Cinema 21. 2 pm Saturday-Sunday, March 12-13.
Slumber Party Massacre
75 [ONE WEEK ONLY, REVIVAL] Rita
Mae Brown may be best known as a feminist activist in the 1970s and for her frank lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle. But she’s also the fevered brain behind one of the most bizarre slasher flicks of all time: 1982’s Slumber Party Massacre. That factoid creates a delicious shiver of cognitive dissonance, given that the film is basically one long, extended lip-licking leer at a lineup of hair-tossing, pot-puffing, boobie-baring high-school girls—each eventually dispatched by a heavybreathing madman bent on separating their limbs from their torsos with power tools. Truth is, Brown wrote the script as a parody of the crappy, exploitative horror movies of the era but film producers shot it as a straight-up gorefest. The result is an oddly funny, at times unsettling killfest with the brain of Ms. Magazine and a body by Penthouse. Miscommunication was never so bloody fun. KELLY
CLARKE. Hollywood Theatre. 9:40 pm Friday-Thursday, March 11-17.
Take Me Home Tonight
39 The last dance-floor twitches of
the “I Love the ‘80s” nostalgia boom, which started with The Wedding Singer and ended—let me check my watch— now, unspool in Take Me Home Tonight, which has sat on the Relativity Media shelf since 2007 and will linger in theaters for approximately another week. In fact, it’s not nearly so crass a money grope as Hot Tub Time Machine: For a lot of its middle stretch, it’s mildly charming, with pleasant performances from Topher Grace, Anna Faris (playing against type) and Teresa Palmer, and work by Dan Fogler in the Desperate Fat Guy role that isn’t any more obnoxious than what Jonah Hill would have delivered in the same spot. As the heavy in the Ralph Lauren polo, Chris Pratt of Parks & Recreation gives hints of the lunkhead sweetness he would unveil on television. The characters don’t know what to do with their lives, so they go to a couple of L.A. parties and get wasted and fall in and out of love while Kim Carnes plays, and Brett Easton Ellis probably snorted most of these people up his nose a quarter-century ago. I can’t imagine why the picture wasn’t released before its target demographic became so saturated; pretty soon, somebody’s going to make the first ’90s party-night nostalgia movie that winkingly references Can’t Hardly Wait—which, by the way, is at the exact same level of quality as Take Me Home Tonight, in that I cannot quite remember either of them. R. AARON MESH. Broadway, Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas, Evergreen, Bridgeport, Cinema 99, Sherwood, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
True Grit
90 The Coen Brothers’ new rendering
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-year-old 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. PG-13. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Bridgeport.
Unknown
75 Jaume Collet-Serra makes movies
that are not what they seem. In 2009, he directed Orphan, a killer-child movie that was not really a killerchild movie, and now he returns with Unknown, a Liam Neeson righteousvengeance picture that does not quite feature Liam Neeson gaining righteous vengeance. Billed as a spiritual sequel to Neeson’s previous Euroromp Taken (and ably assisted in that marketing by the critics), this movie is actually a rejoinder to the last film’s paranoid xenophobia, with Neeson’s fury undermined by constant uncertainty about anything that happened before his taxi cab slipped off a Berlin bridge. Suitably, most of the best performances are from German actors— Bruno Ganz, Diane Kruger—though Frank Langella’s arrival gives the film a kick of gravitas. (He and Ganz have a brilliant duet where they confirm each other’s darkest suspicions.) Like Orphan, Unknown is a silly exercise that delights in its own absurdity without overtly winking; it’s as if Collet-Serra has tapped into the tiny sliver of M. Night Shyamalan’s brain that hasn’t been deadened by selfimportance. This new talent is content to make juicy genre pictures and keep his name off the marquee. Let’s hope he stays reasonably unknown. PG13. Lloyd Center, Broadway, Eastport, Cinema 99, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Evergreen, Bridgeport.