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WWEEK.COM
VOL 37/21 03.30.2011
THE TRUTH HAS SET HER FREE
WHAT OREGON’S “RESIDENT CONTRARIAN” SAYS ABOUT POLITICS, RACE AND BATTLING DEPRESSION: AN EXCERPT FROM AVEL GORDLY’S MEMOIR. PAGE 16
C H R I S R YA N / W O N D E R F U L M A C H I N E
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Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
OWIN3870_BeaverCreek_WW_9.639x9.152_B.indd 1
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CONTENT
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LEGISLATURE VS. LAP DANCERS: Oregon lawmakers try to crack down on lingerie shops, a.k.a. “jack shacks.” Page 7.
NEWS
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FOOD & DRINK
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LEAD STORY
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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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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, Nathan Gilles, Tiffany Stubbert. Nikki Volpicelli CONTRIBUTORS Stage Ben Waterhouse Classical Brett Campbell Dance Heather Wisner Visual Arts Richard Speer
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Erik Bader, Ruth Brown, Nathan Carson, Shane Danaher, Robert Ham, Whitney Hawke, Jay Horton, Matthew Korfhage, AP Kryza, Nilina Mason-Campbell, John Minervini, Katrina Nattress, Rebecca Raber, Alistair Rockoff, Jeff Rosenberg, Anika Sabin, Matt Singer, Chris Stamm, Mark Stock
DISTRIBUTION Circulation Director Robert Lehrkind
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
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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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Willamette Week welcomes freelance submissions. Send material to either News Editor or Arts Editor. Manuscripts will be returned if you include a self-addressed, stamped envelope. To be considered for calendar listings, notice of events must be received in writing by noon Wednesday, two weeks before publication. Send to Calendar Editor. Photographs should be clearly labeled and will be returned if accompanied by a selfaddressed, stamped envelope. Questions concerning circulation or subscription inquiries should be directed to Robert Lehrkind at Willamette Week. postmaster: Send all address changes to Willamette Week, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Subscription rates: One year $100, six months $50. Back issues $5 for walk-ins, $8 for mailed requests when available. Willamette Week is mailed at third-class rates. A.A.N. Association of ALTERNATIVE NEWSWEEKLIES This newspaper is published on recycled newsprint using soy-based ink.
CANNONDALE | SPECIALIZED | BIANCHI | GARY FISHER GT | SCOTT | FUJI | KESTREL | GLOBE | VIRTUE | RALEIGH AND MORE TO COME
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Due date 3-25 Run date 3-30
Join us at Lewis & Clark Events are free unless otherwise noted. Parking is free after 7 p.m. and all day on weekends.
April 1-May 8 Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art
April 2 Pamplin Sports Center
EXHIBITION
Senior Art Exhibition Opening reception, 5 to 7 p.m. on April 1, begins a showing of senior projects by Lewis & Clark art majors. Regular exhibition hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. LU‘AU
Annual Hawai‘i Club Lu‘au Enjoy a celebration of Hawaiian culture with food, dance, and music. Tickets prices for dinner, which begins at 5 p.m., vary. The performance, which begins at 7 p.m., is free. For more information, e-mail hc@lclark.edu.
April 3 4 p.m. Evans Music Center
CONCERT
April 3 8 p.m. Evans Music Center
CONCERT
Faculty Chamber Music Members of the music department faculty will perform works by Rebecca Clarke, Beethoven, and Brahms.
“Celebrating Sondheim!” A Musical Theater Workshop Lewis & Clark’s musical theater performance will feature song and dance from musicals written by Stephen Sondheim.
April 4-6 Templeton Campus Center and Agnes Flanagan Chapel
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS SYMPOSIUM
INBOX THE KIDS, NOT TEACHERS, ARE F’D I am an elementary-school teacher and I work in a high-poverty school. I’m dismayed at the national tone toward teachers unions and teachers in general. I don’t think that the article “Your Teacher is F’d” [WW, March, 23, 2011] adds any constructive information to the dialogue. Of course teachers need a strong union with political backing. It doesn’t seem like there is anyone else calling attention to the good work we are still doing. I have a classroom with 26 students. Onethird of them speak a language other than English at home. Another third have single parents who work full time. Add to this mix students who have various clinically diagnosed psychological issues, from ADHD to post traumatic stress disorder to oppositional defiance disorder. These students have trouble navigating life, not to mention passing high-stakes testing. When I hear that Governor [John] Kitzhaber is going to tie school funding to outcomes in testing, these are the kids I think of. Instead of making this into a fight…how about teachers and lawmakers come together and create a system that works better? John Harrison Lincoln Park Elementary WWEEK.COM READERS COMMENT ON “DOUCHEBAGS NOT ALLOWED”: “I can understand Knox’s desire for an upscale establishment. But he’s a moron for opening up one in a Section 8 area across the street from homeless missions. Their dream of a European alley sounds like a great plan to ask for spare change.” —Dan
“How of the moment, really. Bar undoubtedly patronized by white folks raised in the suburbs who smugly congratulate themselves for living the ‘big city experience’ seeks to exclude the suburban troglodytes they go great pains to distance themselves from. And for the record, there are many, many born & bred Portlanders flooding the downtown bars who fit the description of the stereotypical ‘Beaverton douchebag.’ Apparently, this is a fact that escapes Mr. Pitkin and the cultured circles he surrounds himself with.” —Jake “The rules upon entrance are fine; it’s his business, he can make the rules. However, if a businessman wants to close a city street so he can sell more of his food, that isn’t cool. Understand that he is trying to use a public right of way changed so that he can do more business. That, ladies and g ents, is what a douchebag would do.” —Downtown Brown “...Look, no one likes meathead-esque people, but this city is going to break its arm patting itself on the back if it’s not careful. I mean, he opened a bar at that location and is annoyed that it’s not the French Riviera. Get over yourselves, people....” —Mike Ed. Note: For an update, turn to Murmurs, Page 6. 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
Lines in the Sand: The Ebb and Flow of Borders, Power, and Information Scholars, journalists, politicians, and professionals from the armed forces will debate issues including foreign aid, government transparency, and international media. go.lclark.edu/international/affairs/symposium
April 8 10 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.
April 10 4 p.m. Agnes Flanagan Chapel
PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION
Symposium and Installation Ceremony Join us to celebrate the inauguration of Barry Glassner as the 24th president of Lewis & Clark. Visit www.lclark.edu/offices/ president/inauguration for more information and to register, or watch the live webcast of the installation ceremony at www.lclark.edu, 3:30 p.m. CONCERT
Fauré Requiem This performance of Fauré’s Requiem will feature the Lewis & Clark College Community Chorale and Orchestra. Tickets cost $10.
Lewis & Clark 0615 S.W. Palatine Hill Road Portland, Oregon 97219
www.lclark.edu 4
Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
A colleague gave me this “WWsomething” rag, and I had the misfortune of opening it to your column. So, there was a big coastal earthquake 300 years ago, huh? How do they know? Who was in Oregon in roughly 1711 to know there was “a big one”? —Bill T. Jeez, Mr. Rude—you kiss your mother with that tongue? Lucky for you, the answer to your question involves such a triumph of science that I’ll overlook your desperate need to get laid and answer it. Geologists believe our friendly neighborhood bringer of apocalypses, the Cascadia subduction zone, has produced seven magnitude-8-plus quakes in the past 3,500 years, with a periodicity ranging from about 210 to 910 years. They can tell this by the geological record, though of course the actual dates are approximate. However, the particular quake you so brazenly doubt can be dated with a bit more accuracy: It happened on Jan. 26, 1700, at around 9 pm. The
date was determined in a landmark 2005 paper, “The Orphan Tsunami of 1700,” by University of Washington paleoseismologist Brian Atwater, et al. As a tsunami authority, I imagine Atwater has been, um, deluged with media requests lately, which may be why he didn’t return my emails. (Then again, maybe he just doesn’t like penis pictures—who can say?) Either way, his research shows how a well-documented tsunami in Japan—one whose parent quake was previously unknown—had to have been caused by a Cascadia subduction quake, right here in what would eventually become our back yard. Boom! Science: 1; mean letter writer: 0. And to those who think I give too much play to the coming quake: Say what you want, but I’m pretty confident that when our Sendai-level event actually happens, everybody will agree it’s worth some ink. Till then, I’m just trying to beat the rush. QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com
Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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CITY HALL: Why your water bill keeps climbing. DAVID WU: Congressman lives outside his district. SPORTS: Patty Mills’ thoughts on riding pine. WWEEK.COM: Oregon lawmakers on Obama’s Libya decision.
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Let the speculation commence for Portland’s 2012 City Hall elections. Eileen Brady, who co-founded New Seasons Market with husband Brian Rohter, is considering a run against Mayor Sam Adams. Brady, who in 2007 briefly flirted with the idea of challenging then-U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), says many Portlanders have encouraged her to run. In other elections news, also considering a run for a seat on City BRADY Council is Shelli Romero—a former chief of staff for then-Multnomah County Commissioner Maria Rojo de Steffey and now a public policy and community affairs manager at the Oregon Department of Transportation. City Commissioners Randy Leonard and Amanda Fritz face reelection in 2012, but neither has announced their re-election plans, creating the possibility of at least one open seat on the Council.
I heard 21st Avenue is having a sale. Everything was on sale before , but now its even More On Sale !!!
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Karol Collymore, who ran an unsuccessful campaign to join the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners last year, is stepping down from her job as an aide to Multnomah County Chair Jeff Cogen. Her last day in her $67,000a-year job is Thursday, March 31. As previously reported at wweek.com, Collymore earlier in March shut down some followers’ access to her Twitter account after Collymore tweeted at work, in a possible violation of county policy. “She has decided to pursue interests outside county government,” Cogen said in a prepared statement. “Karol will be missed, but we’re excited about her future endeavors.” Collymore did not return a phone call seeking comment.
21 st Avenue Bicycles 916 NW 21st Ave. Portland, Or 97209 p. 503-222-2851 21stbikes.com 6
10-6 M-Sat, 12-5 Sun April 1st through 10th Everything in the store is 10% or more on SALE.
Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
City Hall is on board with bar owners’ efforts on Southwest Ankeny Street to improve nightlife in downtown’s so-called “Barmuda Triangle” (see “Douchebags Not Allowed,” WW, March 23, 2011). The same day WW’s story hit the streets, Portland Bureau of Transportation head Tom Miller met with Central bar owner Dustin Knox to discuss Knox’s plan to close Ankeny to cars between Southwest 2nd and 3rd avenues. Knox said Miller supports making the block car-free if there’s no cost to the city, and if cops and the Oregon Liquor Control Commission agree. “It sounded like he just wanted to be an advocate for what he felt would be a revitalization of the downtown situation,” Knox says. Miller could not be reached for comment.
For More On the Sale, do the thing with the box.
The imam whose plans last summer to build an Islamic community center two blocks from ground zero in New York City set off big debate will be in Portland next month. Feisal Abdul Rauf will be one of the speakers at the Q Gathering, a national conference about the church’s role in society that ABDUL RAUF this year will be at the Crystal Ballroom from April 27-29. Conference organizers say the imam will likely be part of a panel on the relationship between Islam and Christianity in the West. Read more news about 20 Oregon House lawmakers’ concerns over the Columbia River Crossing, and an update on an election complaint against Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder.
Portland, OR 97209 (P.) 503-222-2851 10-6 M-Sat, 12-5 Sun MORE ON SALE. MORE ON SALE.
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JACK SHACK ATTACK THE LEGISLATURE TAKES ON OREGON’S PROLIFERATING LINGERIE SHOPS.
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The Legislature has tried repeatedly to give cities the right to zone sex shops. But changes to the state constitution require voter approval, and voters defeated three such measures, in 1994, 1996 and 2000. The last two tries came BY JA MES PITKIN ajpitkin@wweek.com closest to success—both times, 52 percent of voters said no. “They’ve made it clear that they do not want the govYou’ve seen them along Northeast 82nd Avenue and ernment to decide what they read, see and hear,” says lining the suburban strips of Washington County. With Andrea Meyer, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties names like Hotties, Pussy Cats and Private Rendezvous, Union of Oregon, which opposes any such measures. they advertise services from fetish fulfillment and Jell-O But state Sen. Mark Hass (D-Raleigh Hills) says the lingerie shops have now proliferated, and voters are sick of wrestling to rubdowns and shower shows. They first sprang up more than 15 years ago. Now, one them in their neighborhoods. He attended rallies last fall operator estimates more than 15 exist in the Portland against a string of shops on Canyon Road. “This isn’t your average neighborhood protest,” he metro area alone. Euphemistically called lingerie shops, they’re also sometimes referred to as “jack shacks.” recalls. “They filled up a church in Raleigh Hills that held “Those are pretty much considered to be a front for about 250 people, six weekends in a row. It was jammed to prostitution,” says Jeff Barker, a retired Portland cop the gills. These are Democrats and Republicans who are just fed up with these places.” turned Democratic state representative from Aloha. In summer, the shops in Washington County feature Others could argue they’re merely venues for adults to have a harmless good time. Now an effort to rein in the bikini-clad women in wading pools outside beckoning passing motorists, Hass says. shops has become what some activists see “What happens on Take Your Child to as a danger to Oregon’s vaunted free-speech FACT: A public hearing on Work Day?” asked state Sen. Suzanne protections, which rank among the stronthe House bill to change Bonamici (D-Beaverton) at a March 21 Sengest in the nation. the state constitution is set for Friday, April 1, at 1 ate hearing. After neighbors protested a string of such pm in front of the House “Another question from a child going by businesses in Washington County last year, Judiciary Committee. Barker and a few legislative allies are trying today might be, ‘Mommy, what’s a full-friction lap dance?’” said Portland lawyer Hal to contain the industry with several bills— including two constitutional amendments that could go Scoggins at the same hearing. before Oregon voters in 2012. Lawmakers are trying two different proposed con“It’s about fucking time. You can quote me on that,” stitutional amendments. Hass and Rep. Tobias Read says Jeannie Timpke, a lingerie-shop owner in Port- (D-Beaverton) are the prime drivers of both, and Hass land. “Things are out of control.” insists the intended targets are lingerie shops, not tradiTimpke owns two locations, one next to a tional strip clubs. McDonald’s on Northeast 82nd Avenue and The first, a Senate bill, would try again to carve out a the other on Southwest Barbur Boule- specific exception to free speech in Oregon—this time, for vard. She says she strictly forbids live nude entertainment only, not porn shops. prostitution. Cameras runBut that effort is a three-time loser at the polls, so Hass’ ning in the private rooms allies have a backup plan—a House bill that would simply keep the workers safe and replace Oregon’s free-speech clause with the First Amendclients on the up-and-up. ment to the U.S. Constitution. But she says women who Other states, like neighboring Washington, let their cithave worked in other ies zone strip clubs. But the Oregon Supreme Court ruled shops tell her things are the Oregon Constitution applies here, because it provides different elsewhere. greater protection of speech than the U.S. Constitution. “These women are being brainPortland City Commissioner Randy Leonard says he washed,” Timpke says. “They’re welcomes the chance to keep the clubs away from schools being taught to do things that and neighborhoods. just aren’t right. Any regulation, I “We don’t allow petroleum plants near a grade school,” will celebrate it.” Leonard says. “It’s a reasonable function of government.” One way to curb the industry But the ACLU’s Meyer says swapping Oregon’s powerwould be to let cities limit the ful free-speech provision could scrap decades of estabshops by zoning where they can go. lished case law and roll back other liberties, including But that’s impossible now because media rights and commercial speech. of a unanimous 1987 Oregon “We don’t know the consequences of such a broad proSupreme Court decision. The court posal,” Meyer says. “But I think it goes well beyond what ruled against the City of Portland for the sponsors intended and certainly has unintended conraiding a porn shop, saying it violated sequences.” the free-speech clause of the Oregon Photos of lingerie shops on Northeast 82nd Constitution. Avenue. Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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DIGGING FOR DOLLARS: City Auditor LaVonne Griffin-Valade’s new analysis looks at spending by city utility bureaus.
HOSE FESTIVAL Introducing The Marylhurst Green MBA.
THE CITY AUDITOR SAYS SPENDING ON UNRELATED PROGRAMS MAY BE SOAKING WATER AND SEWER RATEPAYERS. BY B ETH SLOV IC
Make a difference. Today’s world of business is changing. You need to care about more than quick profit. You need to consider long-term, sustainable interests of your stakeholders. Marylhurst understands this. That’s why we created our new on-campus MBA in Sustainable Business to complement the online program we launched a year ago. It’s a rigorous program uniquely crafted for today’s business leaders who think about more than their financial bottom line. And the accelerated pace of our program means you’ll graduate sooner and start creating the green business solutions of tomorrow, today.
INFO SESSIONS are held monthly
next dates: April 7, May 5 & 12 time: 6:30 pm info: mba@marylhurst.edu, 503.675.3960 or 800.634.9982, ext. 3960
Summer term begins June 20, 2011
www.mar ylhurst.edu/greenmba 17600 Pacific Highway (Hwy. 43) – 1 mile south of Lake Oswego Accredited by: Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, International Assembly for Collegiate Business Education
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Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
bslovic@wweek.com
A new audit questions recent decisions by the Portland City Council to spend funds collected from water and sewer users on city programs such as scholarships and model homes. Taken together, these discretionary budget items are mere drops in the bucket of the Water and Environmental Services bureaus’ combined annual budgets of $478 million. In addition to the scholarship program for high-school graduates to attend community college, and an energy-efficient model home to show off water conservation methods, the ratepayer money also has been spent on a program to police off-leash parks so dog excrement doesn’t run into streams. All of these programs may constitute sound public policy, City Auditor LaVonne GriffinValade notes. But funding for several of them bypassed the city’s complete budget process, city auditors concluded in their report released Wednesday, March 30. That is a concern, but not because the dollar amounts on the projects are huge. “There’s less of a chance for public scrutiny,” says Drummond Kahn, director of audit services. The report also found that the mayor and city commissioners don’t always pause to explain to ratepayers the rationale behind their spending decisions. That leaves ratepayers—who last year saw their water and sewer bills increase 12 percent and 6 percent, respectively, and this year are expected to face increases of 14 percent and 6.5 percent—to wonder whether the budget moves were appropriate. A move last year to support the Bicycle Plan for 2030 with funding from Environmental Services (often called the “sewer bureau”) serves as one example. “While the total dollar amounts in this category are relatively small, we found an increasing number of Council policy choices to spend
ratepayer money where the benefits and costs to ratepayers were not well defined,” the report says. Finally, city code, state law and bond covenants require that ratepayer money go toward ratepayer services. When it doesn’t, money collected from water and sewer users for purposes unrelated or loosely related to the utilities could be considered an “unauthorized tax,” GriffinValade writes in the 28-page report. The takeaway, according to the auditor? “This is a considerable risk for the city,” Griffin-Valade says, citing the prospect of legal challenges to such spending. The projects she highlighted in her report would be familiar to close observers of the news. In 2009, Commissioner Randy Leonard crafted a deal with the Portland Rose Festival to lease a city-owned building on the waterfront to the festival’s foundation for $1 a month (see “City of Thorns,” WW, Jan. 14, 2009). The exchange included a deal to renovate the building, formerly McCall’s Waterfront Cafe. The audit says that cost more than $1.5 million. The festival foundation has agreed to repay what it and the city decided was the foundation’s portion of the bill over the next 25 years, a sum of $200,000. The auditor points out that ratepayer money will fund future maintenance at the building. (In a response to the audit, Leonard said most of the renovation costs were employee salaries, which the Water Bureau would have paid regardless of whether the remodel occurred.) A scholarship program from Mayor Sam Adams to send high-school graduates to Portland Community College has drawn 139 applicants for fall 2011. But money for the grants, which will come in part from the budgets for Portland’s Water and sewer bureaus, never underwent scrutiny from either bureau’s budget advisory committee. In fact, the program wasn’t included in either bureau’s original budget. Between 2006 and 2011, the amount of money parks and planning programs received from the city’s sewer bureau grew from $200,000 to $1.3 million, though the public benefit of using ratepayer money for the programs—to control invasive plant species and to police dog parks— was ill-defined, the audit says. Unlike other programs, these spending decisions did go through the normal budget vetting, however. Among the report’s recommendations: that commissioners develop a process for assessing new projects’ impact on water and sewer rates in the future. A spokesman for Adams says the mayor hasn’t had a chance to discuss that proposal.
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HOUSE OF DAVID DAVID WU DOESN’T LIVE IN THE 1ST CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT. BY B E TH SLOV IC
bslovic@wweek.com
Last year, when U.S. Rep. David Wu crashed his rental car into a parked vehicle in Northwest Portland, he gave a police officer the home address of a close friend rather than the address on his Oregon driver’s license. Because the Portland cop wasn’t issuing Wu a citation, the Democratic congressman did nothing wrong when he provided the officer the address of his friend Stuart Cohen, who happens to live a few blocks from the scene of Wu’s February 2010 crash (see “Asleep at the Wheel,” WW, March 16, 2011). But by telling the officer he considered Northwest Portland his home, the seven-term congressman did make a startling admission. That home is not in the district Wu represents, but in the district of fellow Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer. In fact, when Wu returns to Oregon from Washington, D.C., it appears that the Democrat does not often live in his home district, which stretches from Southwest Portland to the Oregon coast. That is based on what he told the police in February 2010, what a longtime neighbor of Wu’s told WW this week, and what his own spokesman said. Wu owns a home in his district, an 1,800-square-foot house in Portland’s Southwest Hills. He’s registered to vote at that home, which property records show he’s owned since 1989. Wu’s driver’s license is registered to that address. But at least since announcing his separation from his second wife in December 2009, Wu hasn’t regularly lived in the home. Jim Park, who lives across the street from the home Wu owns, considers the house unoccupied. “There isn’t anyone you could consider a permanent resident [there],” says Park, a Democrat. “About twice a year someone comes and cleans up the front yard.” Curiously, it’s not against the rules for congressmen to live outside their districts. To run for the Oregon Legislature or Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, one must live in the district one wants to represent. To run for Congress in Oregon, one must only live somewhere in Oregon. Is Wu committing voter fraud if he votes in one district but resides in another? Probably not, if his relocation is only temporary, which is how a spokesman for Wu characterized Wu’s practice of staying with Cohen. Elections officials weigh several factors when determining where someone should vote, and an elector’s intent figures heavily in the equation. Wu’s “intent” could be to return to his Southwest Portland home eventually. “Voters should know Congressman Wu has lived in the district for decades and will continue to do so going forward,” says Wu spokesman Erik Dorey.
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CIVIL RIGHTS
SAME-SEX MARRIAGES FROM 2004 CELEBRATED. A BALLOT MEASURE TO RESTORE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE RIGHTS? NOT SO FAST. BY AIL I N DA R L I N G
adarling@wweek.com
Last weekend, First Unitarian Church of Portland marked the seventh anniversary of the brief moment in 2004 when Multnomah County issued marriage licenses to more than 3,000 same-sex couples. The church’s “Politics of Love” weekend of events culminated in anniversary celebrations March 27 for about 50 of those gay and lesbian couples, regardless of the Oregon courts having invalidated their licenses in 2004. And the celebrations come as Basic Rights Oregon this week launches a threeweek statewide TV ad campaign for samesex marriage rights. The BRO campaign, which includes direct mail to Portland-area households, is stressing the chance to make Oregon the first state in the nation to vote in same-sex marriage rights. (Five states and Washington, D.C., legally recognize gay marriage as a result of court rulings or legislative action).
But BRO is not committing itself to a statewide ballot measure campaign in 2012, despite trends in multiple national polls that reflect growing approval of gay marriage rights. BRO executive director Jeana Frazzini says a continued public-education campaign over the next six to eight months must precede any final decision to seek a 2012 ballot measure to reverse the ban on gay marriage that Oregon voters approved in 2004. “Given the expense of mounting a ballot measure campaign, we need to have a reasonable expectation of success,” Frazzini said. “We’re really in a place where conversation about a 2012 ballot measure is a conversation for another day.” At the First Unitarian anniversary celebrations last Sunday, the conversation— amid couples enjoying Champagne, cake and a slide show of their ceremonies from 2004—was more urgent. “The couples who were married [in 2004] were told, ‘Not now, not yet,’” Rev. Bill Sinkford said in his Sunday morning sermon. “We will not accept ‘not yet’ as a final answer.” Rev. Thomas Disrud, an associate minister who is gay, recalled performing about 18 same-sex wedding ceremonies
C H R I S T A C O N N E L LY
THE SEVEN-YEAR ITCH
NEWS
LOVE AND MARRIAGE: Gary Burnett (left) and Kevin Lawson (right) stand last weekend at First Unitarian Church to have their anniversary as a wedded couple be recognized.
over a week’s period in 2004. “We recognize the bittersweet dimensions of this anniversary as well,” Disrud told about 150 people. “Sometimes the pace of change seems so terribly slow.” Ann Zawaski and Helena Lee were among those who raced to get their licenses in Multnomah County in 2004. The couple didn’t even wait to invite their families before getting married. “I actually felt legal challenges would pre-
vail, and felt the need to rush,” says Zawaski. And Zawaski and Lee, who celebrated their anniversary Sunday at First Unitarian, say they haven’t given up on their dream of a legal marriage right here in Oregon. “It’s time we were able to marry,” Zawaski says, “without the need to travel hundreds of miles for that opportunity.” Oregon’s ads.
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SPORTS
PATTY MILLS
NEWS
THE BLAZERS’ RECENT RUN OF VICTORIES HAS MEANT NO PLAYING TIME FOR ONE OF FANS’ FAVORITE PLAYERS. IS HE BUMMED? C R A I G M I TC H E L L DY E R
WW: So, what exactly do you do with a night off in Oklahoma City, the entertainment capital of...Oklahoma? Patty Mills: Oh, mate, nothing [laughs]. The last few times we’ve been through we’ve just hung out at the hotel, had dinner and caught up on some rest. Doesn’t your mood hinge at all on the minutes you’re getting? No. We’ve had an unbelievable season, if you consider all the injuries and trades and all the stuff that has happened. So whether I contribute on the court or not, we’re winning games. So I’ve been happy…for being where I am and being part of this great team and for just having fun with my teammates. I understand the role I’m in and what I have to do if I’m given opportunities. But if not, there are other ways I can contribute off the court.
BY C AS E Y JA R M A N
It seems like one of your roles has been gelling this team—have you felt close with this team since you first got here? No, I wouldn’t say I’ve always been tight, and I wouldn’t say it’s a role of mine, either, because I’ve never been asked to do it. It just happened naturally. That’s just my character. The way I act around people is to have fun, and I’m laid back and I go with the flow. It’s such an underrated
cjarman@wweek.com
When Patty Mills is on the court, he’s a pinball. The 22-year-old Trail Blazer from Australia hoists up three-pointers without hesitation, hurtles his body into the lane and plays hyperactive, nose-to-nose defense against some of the NBA’s best players (a few of whom have been known to cut past Mills to the basket, or to post up the bearded dynamo generously listed as 6 feet tall). The second-year point guard spent much of this season as the Blazers’ mid game energy boost, though rotation changes stemming from the midseason acquisition of Gerald Wallace have all but eliminated the 10 to 20 minutes per game shifts Mills saw back in January. Despite living on the bench these days, Portland’s favorite Aussie import remains one of the Blazers’ most indispensable chemistry guys, a tireless morale booster and towel waver from the sidelines who kick-started the “three-goggles” hand-sign trend with teammate Rudy Fernandez. When he’s got downtime, Mills just keeps on rolling: He conducts interviews for the Blazers’ in-house streaming Internet channel, and he drives around the city and state selling the T-shirts he helped design as a fundraiser for Australian flood relief. Though he’s only played five minutes in the past three games, Mills was upbeat and personable on Saturday afternoon via phone from Oklahoma City.
having family and friends directly affected in both the disasters, that’s what keeps me wanting to push this even more. Has it been hard to keep people’s focus on Australia with the disaster more recently in Japan? Well, look, mate, it’s not a race. It’s not wanting to get more attention than another thing. They’re both major disasters. It’s not like Japan’s disasters are taking thunder from my shirts—it’s not like that at all. Both disasters are up there together, and I hope everyone helps out to do all they can for both of them. Have you seen any money off the threegoggles campaign? No, we haven’t got anything off that. We didn’t know how big it was going to be at the time. It was just a little personal joke, but it’s kind of taken off. It seems like the marketing department owes you a hat tip, at least. No question, mate. They’ve run with it. I’d imagine you usually haze the new guys, but can you really mess with a dude as big as Gerald Wallace? I mess with him all the time, mate. He’s big and
“IT’S ABOUT TIGHTENING THE SCREWS AND GETTING A LITTLE MORE CRISP.” aspect of the team game here in the NBA—that camaraderie between guys off the court. You’ve been selling and signing T-shirts for Australian flood relief on your own time. What keeps you pushing that cause two months afterward? Being in America and not being where the disaster happened was really hard. I know if I was there, I’d be the first one to put out my hands to help clean up and do all the dirty work or whatever it may be, so I was just feeling helpless here. I think that determined attitude about not being in Australia and the impact of
mean on the court, but he’s really soft off the court [laughs]. I think he’s feeling right at home, and you can see it by the way he’s playing. How far can this team go? We play solid basketball and we’ve proven it throughout the season. The main thing with us is being consistent with it. We need to be as close to perfect as we can be to beat top teams. But we’ve shown that we can hang with the big guys like San Antonio, Lakers, all those people. It’s about tightening the screws and getting a little more crisp. We can do something special with this group.
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THE TRUTH HAS SET HER FREE WHAT OREGON’S “RESIDENT CONTRARIAN” SAYS ABOUT POLITICS, RACE AND BATTLING DEPRESSION: AN EXCERPT FROM AVEL GORDLY’S MEMOIR. CHILDHOOD I have a memory of having something of a nervous tic. I used to bite my upper lip in a way that would leave a mark on my skin…. Something was literally eating me inside, being chewed away, and my habit made it visible on the outside…. I know my parents wanted “good girls”; the main definition of “good,” however, was “obedient” and this equation proved disastrous when I was being sexually abused by my uncle. It happened more than once and it always happened in the same place: my brother’s empty room, a space already haunted by loss and violence. This uncle was my mother’s youngest brother. He was not particularly liked by my dad, who thought that he was kind of a ne’er-do-well. Later in life he got involved with drugs and went to prison. When I worked in corrections, I actually saw him in prison. In our adult relationship, I never said, “Clarence, I forgive you.”... Connected to the struggle with Clarence is a memory of a friend of my father’s who used to come by the house when we were little girls. This man used to like to have my sister and me sit on his lap. I never felt comfortable doing that and always felt there was something not quite right about it. I spoke about it in the family, but nothing happened because he kept coming over and we were expected to be polite and not fuss. His behavior was “normalized” in our home. Looking back, I felt especially that silencing myself around my uncle’s sexual abuse has shaped everything else in my life…. When I was fifteen or sixteen I tried to take my life with an overdose of aspirin. It happened in the bedroom that my sister and I shared. I remember a very painful period of just wanting to go away. I don’t know if I became ill and then someone found me: I have no memory of exactly the sequence of events. My family knew something happened to me but they just didn’t talk about “it.” CONT. on page 18
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Gordly speaks at Powell’s City of Books (1005 W Burnside St.) 7:30 pm Monday, April 4. Book collaborator Patricia Schechter’s husband is city Commissioner Nick Fish, who praises Gordly as Oregon’s “resident contrarian.”
COURTESY OSU PRESS
As the first African-American woman elected to the Oregon Senate, Avel Gordly has a unique perspective on politics in a state that’s only had eight African-Americans serve in the Legislature during its 152-year history. Growing up in a city that’s had a historically small African-American population—6.3 percent in the latest census—Gordly also has a unique perspective on race in Portland. Gordly, a 64-year-old associate professor of black studies at Portland State University, has drawn on all those experiences—as well as her own personal battles with depression—in her 176-page memoir, Remembering the Power of Words (Oregon State University Press, $18.95). This Monday, April 4—the 43rd anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination— Gordly will be at Powell’s City of Books to sign copies of the memoir she collaborated on with PSU associate history professor Patricia Schechter. Here are excerpts from Gordly’s book, the first in a “Women and Politics in the Pacific Northwest” series of books from OSU Press.
Gordly graduated in 1965 from Girls’ Polytechnic School, which no longer exists. She got her bachelor’s degree from Portland State University in 1974 and went to work as a parole and probation officer for the state corrections department.
C H R I S R YA N P H O T O . C O M
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CONT. COURTESY OSU PRESS
AVEL GORDLY
YOUNG FIGHTER: Gordly speaking more than two decades ago in Portland against South Africa’s apartheid regime.
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But back then I made poor choices that came out of low self-esteem. Richard was a former drug abuser Extremely important to me was finding language and during our marriage he started up using again. to discuss taboo subjects like skin color and hair I found evidence of his use around the house…. texture. In Black Studies these subjects actually I came to a point in that relationship where I came up in our classes! One professor asked us realized that he was probably going to die of an students: “Does skin color matter in the Black overdose. And that is exactly what happened. community?” and “How does that issue get After we had been separated for a few years I got talked about in the Black community?” a call that he had been found in the street. WhoI remember a huge discussion around skin ever he was with when he OD’ed had just left him color and my relief at being able to discuss color there dead, making me a widow…. consciousness. I was able to make much clearer I experienced a lot of self doubt and deep, deep, connections about assumptions I’d grown up with, deep depression to the point of contemplating suilike my mom’s light skin and features and how she cide. I even checked myself in for a couple of weeks was always talked about as a beautiful woman. In to the Providence psychiatric unit. I was not able to Black Studies classes we analyzed how these judg- tell anybody what was really going on with me in ments get played out in the community at large. part because of shame. My mom had an awareness So in a historical sense and that something was going on; she Gordly went back to school, also in a personal sense I contried to get through to me and talk attending PSU, a few years nected historical references to to me but I just could not connect after giving birth to a son darker-skinned women as being with her. During my hospitalizaas a teenage mom in 1966. “less than” or part of a certain tion I started to wonder how being social class and women with lighter skin as part of molested in my childhood had contributed to where another social class. I now understood that these I was and how my life experiences of physical and judgments were tied to real status issues like club sexual violence were all connected. I’m still dealing memberships and other social privileges. with issues around self-esteem, worthiness, and shame rooted, I believe, in the experience of being molested by a family member. It was a really dark, ABUSE AND DEPRESSION dark passage. In 1980, the year that Mt. St. Helens A complicating factor in my years in corrections blew its top, so did I…. was my relationship with Marvin McKinley, who There were counselors, therapists, and was also a student at PSU. It was a hot and heavy professional people around trying to get me to relationship for a while, but it had a really bad participate in a group. I was acutely conscious ending. Today we would call it domestic violence. that everyone was white. But I checked myself At one point he actually held a live gun to my head into the hospital because I couldn’t function. At and threatened to kill me. He also raped me. one point in my hospitalization, I collapsed on It was an emotionally and physically abusive the floor of the bathroom. I found out later that relationship. It was horrible and had a horrible I had been given the wrong medication. The ending. The situation traumatized me in ways that matter was never named or dealt with, much less I wasn’t even aware of for many years. Things got resolved. My poor treatment became part of the so bad that I finally told my father and my brother trauma of it all. what was going on. The two of them confronted Marvin and I believe threatened him with his life WORKING THE LEGISLATURE FROM THE OUTSIDE in order to make him stop. Willamette Week I married 4 unit Square Richard Mayfield in August of 1979. As my African activism touched the state legislaRev. John Jackson, pastor of our family church, ture, I learned several political lessons. In Salem Ad Size: 3.772 x 6.052 Mt. Olivet Baptist, performed the ceremony in I discovered the meaning of the old saying: “No Tomy Run: 3/30 mom and dad’s living room. Years later I said permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only to Rev. Jackson about the wedding, “That was a permanent interests.” Designer: Tara Powers terrible idea.” And he said, “Oh, you thought so Representative Margaret Carter was the first 503-417-0623 too!” And I said, “Well, why didn’t you tell me!” He African-American woman legislator in Oregon, Client: Tracy in Wenckus laughed a way that told me he was in my corner. elected in a so-called Black district as a product 503-321-5250
AVEL GORDLY COURTESY OSU PRESS
CONT.
SWORN IN: Gordly taking the oath of office in 1991.
of community organizing. She won her seat by WORKING THE LEGISLATURE FROM THE INSIDE defeating a number of Black and white men who The fear was about using my voice out loud in also wanted it. Jim Hill had been elected in a very different district, Salem, which is predominantly public; it was about being public. It involved self white. I did not live in Carter’s district but she questioning: Did I know enough? Was I smart hired my sister Faye Burch to serve as her legis- enough? Why me? Am I ready to do this? Am I lative assistant for a time…. really prepared?... I wasn’t a product of Democratic Party poliI did encounter opposition in the capitol. We really wanted to push Governor Neil Gold- tics. I didn’t have a precinct person’s experience schmidt on divestment. We had a conversation or party meeting attendance in my background.… The party could recommend three to five people in Rep. Carter’s office in which she asked us not to do that. We couldn’t make that promise. I to the county commission, whose members then remember being surprised at her push back. She selected one from that group after a presentation cautioned us about embarrassing the governor. and a vote. I was one of the candidates forwarded by POSAF [Portlanders Organized for Southern the party. In my presentation to the commission, I emphasized how community-based activities had African Freedom] didn’t see it that way. We wanted him to be more aggressive regard- prepared me to work collaboratively in the legislaing divestment. While a tive process, especially around human services. I received vote for divesture was not a Before being appointed to a state House seat in 1991, Gordly worked four of the five votes. The vote I career-breaker for any Oregon for the Urban League and was didn’t get was [then-Commislegislator at the time, I was still active with Portlanders Organized sioner] Gary Hansen’s. Gary surprised that Carter, our Black for Southern African Freedom, a community’s representative, voted for his attorney. This group working to get government bodies to divest themselves of seemed to be more concerned scenario was my introduction investments in the apartheid to ethics in politics.... about protecting the governor regime of South Africa. After I received the appointthan taking even a symbolic A vacancy in the state House ment, I asked newly elected stand for Black Freedom. Even created by the retirement of Governor Barbara Roberts to more prominent in my mind Rep. Ron Cease (D-Portland) led perform my swearing in cerat the time was Goldschmidt’s Gordly to seek appointment to that seat from the Multnomah emony. Initially, she said yes. very troubling public stateCounty Board of Commissioners. Then I heard that she changed ment about the leadership of the Black United Front. her mind. The story was that He commented that the BUF leadership— Barbara’s then husband, the late state senator Frank meaning Ronnie Herndon—needed to be Roberts, intended to support Tom Novick, another “squashed.” Goldschmidt used those exact words sitting member of the legislature, for the District 19 at a time when Ronnie was getting death threats. House seat the next year (with redistricting coming He and his family were afraid and a governor’s up!)…. Roberts was also getting advice from her words carried power. Moreover, some saw Gold- chief of staff, Patricia McCaig, to the effect that, if schmidt as responsible for patronage, and he the governor swore me in, it could be seen as giving took it upon himself to signal which Black folks me a political advantage compared to Novick.... The next summer, the governor called the were OK or not. His reputation among some Black folks was divided. Some saw him as an ally. legislature into special session to consider her There were others who saw through his charisma revenue reform package.… The Democratic caucus and said no, there’s something else going on here meetings during that special session were my first. and it’s called paternalism. We’re not going to The doors to the meetings were closed. There were play that game and we don’t need a guiding hand no media and no public in there; nobody except the members…. Those who spoke—and they were for our agenda. Carter was loyal to Goldschmidt; I don’t know mostly male—expressed anger because they had that I’d ever even met him up to that point in not had enough “face time” with Roberts and time. But the incident was my first real encoun- had instead met with McCaig. Tom Novick was ter with raw politics, the politics of covering for and protecting people. CONT. on page 21 Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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CONT. C H R I S R YA N P H O T O . C O M
AVEL GORDLY
FRIENDS AND COLLABORATORS: Author Avel Gordly, photographed at a signing event last weekend for her memoir. With Gordly is Patricia Schechter, who collaborated on the oral memoir.
Q&A: AVEL GORDLY
FOOD & DRINK: REVIEWS, EVENTS & GUT REACTIONS PAGE 24
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WW: How hard was it to do honest appraisals of people you know and in some cases like and respect? Avel Gordly: For me, the whole process of telling my story was a healing journey working with Patricia [Schechter, who collaborated with Gordly on her memoir]. What was important for me was to reflect and speak the truth as I experienced it. But wasn’t it hard to speak aloud and then read on the page your memories of being molested as a child and raped as an adult? I can’t say it was painful compared to the way I actually endured those things. I come back to the word “healing.” What surprised you as you looked back? I won’t use the word “surprised.” What I celebrate is I had, and have, the ability to invest trust in Patricia in telling the story. We clicked. That was a real blessing. You mention your son Tyrone Waters in the book, but never discuss a judge sending him to the Oregon State Hospital for treatment after he pointed an unloaded pellet gun at police and police shot him with a beanbag round. Why leave that out? It’s his story to tell. He’s shared it. When I do the second book, the emphasis will be on living with mental health challenges and there will be more of the story here. There was no decision not to tell his story. His story has been told in his own words. Do you ever think about getting back into politics? No. You didn’t even hesitate about that answer. (Laughs) The way I think about it is I’m encouraging others to get involved in public service. Politics is a feature of that. There’s a whole host of emerging leaders out there who need to be encouraged not only to think about running for office, but to do it. Take the risk, run for the school board, the county commission, Metro, the Legislature, run for mayor. I’d like to use any influence I have in encouraging others. There’s no shortage of talent, creativity and genius in our community. What we have is kind of a malaise. We’ve settled for mediocrity, for kind of a good-
old-boy, good-old-girl mode of politics. We’re better than that. We must do better. Who are some of those leaders to watch? Tricia Tillman [state director of multicultural health], Charles McGee, Johnell Bell [McGee and Bell co-founded the Black Parent Initiative], Nichole Maher [executive director of the Native American Youth and Family Center], Carmen Rubio [executive director of Latino Network]. There are a whole host of young ones who are involved in public service now. When I say opening up opportunities, I think about the Metro opening that just occurred. They finally decided that [ex-Gov.] Barbara Roberts would be their compromise choice. I love her, I respect her and she has much to bring to the position. But it was a missed opportunity to look around for an emerging leader and bring that person on board. We have to be “intentional” about bringing in new leadership. So why don’t you have the taste for being in politics anymore? I’ve come to understand my role at this stage of my life is one I enjoy. It’s teaching through my work at Portland State University—I’ve developed a course on black leadership, public policy and community development. That’s where I find my joy. But you got involved in the second attempted recall last year of Mayor Sam Adams. The recall was about integrity and character. I was deeply troubled that we had a situation where an adult in power in an elected role asked a young person to lie for him. That was just totally unacceptable. The fact we live in a city where most of the people are willing to give that a pass deeply troubled me. I got the sense from reading your memoir that you grew tired of being the requisite go-to person when somebody wanted to get the “black perspective” on something. It was frustrating to be kind of pigeonholed. People assume you are capable of talking about issues of race, and certainly I can talk about that. But my interests are much more varied than that. —Henry Stern
CONT.
AVEL GORDLY
part of the caucus, so was Mike Burton. Vera Katz was there, and Margaret Carter. I looked around the room and I saw these other women.… Some members wanted to “show her” who was in charge on the first vote. After that first procedural vote to show the governor who was really running things, then, on the second vote, the caucus would vote for the package and carry the day.
LARGER THOUGHTS ON THE LEGISLATURE Most people in the legislative process do a lot of talking. I can remember any number of times sitting in a party caucus meeting with the same two or three wonderful people droning on with their Type A behavior, personality, and opinions…. What also impressed itself upon me in the legislature was nepotism and how it blocks equal employment opportunity. Oregon statutes require the state, including the legislature, to be a leader in modeling equal employment opportunity. How can we do that, I started to argue, if elected officials hire their relatives—husbands, wives, cousins, girlfriends, boyfriends—to work in the capitol? Questioning nepotism put me in a very awkward and uncomfortable place with my colleagues…. While I understood the argument that members don’t earn enough money and that hiring family members helps them make do and keep their families together I disagreed with the principle. My disagreement made it really difficult to raise the issue with Margaret Carter. We come from the same community but practice a different set of principles. She hired her daughters and other relatives. Gordly won election to the House in 1992 and was I sat in caucus, trying to make an reelected in 1994. She ran argument against nepotism and successfully for a state back in the community and my Senate seat in 1996 and was reelected in 2000 and 2004. district, I got a reputation for not going along just to get along, so to Gordly changed her party speak. It was very, very awkward affiliation in 2006 from and isolating at times…. Democratic to Independent because of her distaste for It was difficult being compared partisanship. She rejoined the to Margaret Carter in media setDemocratic Party in 2008 tings and elsewhere. Difficult in so she could vote for Barack Obama in the party primary. the sense that I wasn’t Margaret Carter. Our styles were very difGordly in 2010 was the ferent. She’s more outgoing and a chief petitioner and spokeswoman in the second recall wonderful singer. Singing is part campaign of Mayor Sam of her ministry and she has used Adams. That campaign and her voice effectively in that manits predecessor both failed to ner. I think we’re both personcollect enough signatures to put a recall on the ballot. able but in different ways. I don’t sing. It didn’t surprise me—but it surprised me—that folks in Salem expected me to sing…. But I also respect Margaret Carter for who she is. She is the first African-American woman to serve in the Oregon legislative assembly and she had to invent a way of being in that setting. Her role models were white women who were trying to outdo the white men in order to be effective in their role. They had to cuss as hard as the men and “develop balls.” There were old boys and these were the new old girls. That’s what I observed and that’s where Carter was coming from. I came to respect that but I also knew that model was not who I am. I refused to allow people to project onto me some behavior or expectation that was just not me. Once I was walking from one chamber to the other in the capitol. I would look up in the gallery on the House side. As I was walking, a group tour came through. The guide said: “Oh, there is Senator Carter,” adding, “She’s the one who sings for us all the time.” She was referring to me. And I said, “Oh no, no. I’m Gordly.” And she said, “No, you’re Carter.” And I said, “No, I’m Gordly.” And a third time—a third time!—she told me that I was Carter. The people on the tour had looks of disbelief on their faces. Later, I ran into one of the men who witnessed this scene, Joe Uris, who had been in Salem lobbying for higher education. He said to me: “How do you stand this? Does this happen often?” His words acknowledged the pain and shame of that moment, all-too-frequent feelings for me since so many white people in Oregon simply haven’t had experiences working with Black people or even knowing any, anywhere in their lives.
UPCOMING IN-STORE PERFORMANCES TONIGHT!! SOUTHEAST ENGINE WEDNESDAY 3/30 @ 6PM
Southeast Engine is Adam Remnant (lead vocals, guitar), Leo DeLuca (drums), younger brother Jesse Remnant (bass) and Billy Matheny (piano, organ, banjo, guitar). Their brilliant new album, ‘Canary,’ tells the stories of a single Appalachian family holding on through the violent deprivations of the Great Depression. While it just as easily could have been recorded six decades ago, it is replete with ghostly resonances to our contemporary lives.
SONGWRITERS CIRCLE MONDAY 4/4 @ 7PM
Michael Charles Smith, a marimba soloist, composer, and teacher, has been performing his original compositions for the past 12 years throughout the Pacific Northwest. This gifted musician and inspired composer recently completed a long awaited album of twenty of his original compositions titled ‘Melodies for Wooden Children.’ Will West polished his live performances in the Portland open-mic scene and released several Folk/Americana CDs. Will West & The Friendly Strangers recently released a new full-length album, ‘Take this Moment.’ Jack McMahon is a performing songwriter as well host and organizer of the Music Millennium Songwriters’ Showcase. He has also fronted some of Portland’s more notable bands (Tracks, The Chameleons, Jack McMahon & Friends).
THE REFUGEES FRIDAY 4/1 @ 6PM
The trio of women that is The Refugees emerged on the music scene as a verifiably unmatched force of talent, diversity, and experience. Each successful in her own right as a solo artist, Cindy Bullens, Deborah Holland and Wendy Waldman formed their unique and innovative group in 2007. On their debut release, ‘Unbound,’ the talented trio plays all of the instruments on the recording including guitars, dobro, bass, mandolin, harmonica, accordion, and percussion. The Refugees will also be performing at the Alberta Rose Theatre at 8:00 PM on April 1st.
NIAYH WEDNESDAY 4/6 @ 6PM An acronym for “Now Is All You Have,” NIAYH is a Portland based band comprised of Christopher Worth, Adolfo Cuellar, David Rueda, Kenton Clow, Morgan Quinn, and Val Haddix. Since forming in 2007, NIAYH has released one full-length record (‘Hope’) and is currently recording their next album. They have just released ‘The Flowers Of Creation Grow From Our Decay,’ a pre-album sampler.
RON SEXSMITH /CAITLIN ROSE MONDAY 4/4 @ 6PM
For his 11th album, ‘Long Player Late Bloomer,’ Ron Sexsmith has paired himself with fellow Canadian Bob Rock (Metallica, Mötley Crüe,The Cult). The reassuring news for Ron’s loyal international fanbase is that Bob Rock’s production does full and eloquent justice to another wonderful collection of Sexsmith songs.
Caitlin’s full-length debut, ‘Own Side Now,’ is sheer perfection, drawing on her love for the female greats such as Linda Ronstadt and Stevie Nicks as well as those from a pure Country lineage such as Patsy Cline, and firmly places her in the same league.
HELLO MORNING THURSDAY 4/7 @6PM
Hello Morning was born in 2007 when Kevin Breuner (Smalltown Poets) and Ben Sims (Sappo) began a new music project that would fulfill of their creative needs. They soon brought in Peter Swenson (Boy Eats Drum Machine, Chris Robley) to work with them. They knew they were on to something special but they needed the perfect singer to round out the band. Enter Henry Curl (Jonah), a highly lauded local talent who gave their ideas just the right melodic sheen they needed.
EXCERPTED with permission from Remembering the Power of Words: The Life of an Oregon Activist, Legislator, and Community Leader by Avel Louise Gordly with Patricia A. Schechter, published by Oregon State University Press, 2011. Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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FOOD & DRINK: A late-night slice that rocks. MUSIC: The Dodos stop making stupid noises. CLASSICAL: Beyond Bolero. MOVIES: Throw Gyllenhaal from the train.
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SCOOP WE DIDN’T SEE SUCKER PUNCH, EITHER. HANDSOME FAMILY: It has been 16 months since the beginning of the Great Daniel Baldwin Experiment, in which the fearlessly tweeting Celebrity Fit Club veteran promised to bring Portland a television studio, complete with reality shows and movies. In that time, no reality shows or movies have been announced. But last week, we received the first tangible product of Baldwin’s stay here: a hip-hop single, “Club Life,” tied to another local studio’s zombie movie, Stripperland. Though the song is called “Club Life,” most of the video seems to have been shot in a Sauvie Island field. Baldwin performs under the rap moniker “Double D,” a name that works on two levels—the name of the bus; tits—and would work on three levels if his name were Daniel Daldwin. Most memorable lyric: “Check the raven/ You know, the one from Poe/ He was DANIEL BALDWIN weak and weary of every ho.”
LIVE MUSIC FULL BAR FOOD FUN
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NEW NOSH: Two gastronomical Portland icons opened new doors this week: The long-awaited second location of beloved Thai eatery Pok Pok has finally arrived at 1469 NE Prescott St. The tiny takeout-focused space has only 11 indoor seats and offers a pared-down menu of dishes from its big brother’s lunch and dinner menu, including khao soi soup, baby-back ribs and its famous fish sauce wings. And RingSide Steakhouse returned to its West Burnside digs after 10 months of renovations. The makeover includes an additional 2,500 square feet of space, a 10,000-bottle wine cellar and a private dining room. The restaurant’s temporary home at Fox Tower will be turned into a seafood restaurant, creatively titled RingSide Fish House, slated to open in the summer. HANDSOME FAMILY: Local dream-pop noisemakers—and WW favorite—Point Juncture, WA, spent the winter months holed up in its brand-new home studio, and the band is ready to share the results with the world. PJWA’s new record, Handsome Orders, is out May 17 via Seattle’s Mt. Fuji Records, and multi-instrumentalist Skyler Norwood couldn’t be more stoked about the results. “We feel the songs all have an urgent feel, probably because of the sudden burst of energy we felt going into recording,” Norwood says of the album, half of which was written in the studio. “It was a very unifying experience— just the four of us, with minimal guests, bonding and doing what POINT JUNCTURE, WA we love.” CARTIVORES HUNGRY FOR EAT MOBILE: As of press time, two-thirds of the general admission tickets and half the VIP admissions to WW’s fourth annual Eat Mobile food cart festival had already sold. We expect to be sold out by the end of the weekend, so head over to wweek.com/eatmobile right away if you want to get your eating pants on with street snacks from 40 of the city’s best carts.
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WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK IN ARTS & CULTURE
WEDNESDAY MARCH 30 [MUSIC] SHARON VAN ETTEN Last fall, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten was such a hit that the Doug Fir filled up an hour before her 9 pm opening slot. Now back as a headliner, Van Etten brings another highly touted opener, Little Scream, fresh off tons of SXSW love. Doug Fir, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $12. 21+.
THURSDAY MARCH 31 [MUSIC] SEASICK STEVE Authentic blues music played on weird, mutated guitars called “Three-String Trance Wonder” and “One-String Diddley Bow” and that has Jack White’s stamp of approval? Yes, please. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 9 pm. $12 advance, $13 day of show. 21+. [COMEDY] UCB TOURCO The touring branch of Upright Citizens Brigade—the comedy troupe that launched the careers of Amy Poehler, Rob Corddry, Ed Helms, et al.—hits town for one night at Curious Comedy. Curious Comedy, 5225 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. 9 pm. $15.
FRIDAY APRIL 1 [MOVIE] HEARTBEATS The most visually arresting dispatch from Canada’s young, beautiful and prowling since Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the second feature from 21-year-old director Xavier Dolan is a slow-motion plunge into a flood of pheromones. Living Room Theaters, 341 SW 10th Ave., 971-222-2010. Multiple showtimes. $6-$9.
SATURDAY APRIL 2 [THEATER] FRANKENSTEIN For the latest installment of its National Theatre Live series, Third Rail presents a screening of a new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, written by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle, starring Benedict Cumberbatch (of the BBC series Sherlock) and Jonny Lee Miller (Eli Stone) as the doctor and the monster. World Trade Center Theater, 121 SW Salmon St., 235-1101. 2 and 7 pm Saturday-Sunday. $15-$20.
BALL BUSTERS
ART-GOLF AND COCKTAILS COMBINE TO FILL A GAPING CULTURAL HOLE.
Portland! We lead the world in pinball bars, artery-clogging street food and impractical bicycles. Our dominance in childish pursuits for adults is so universally renowned that it’s generated dozens of New York Times stories, an IFC miniseries, and multiple New York Times stories about that miniseries. And yet, in one crucial area, we lag behind. How can a city this dedicated to combining fond memories of preadolescent birthday parties with liquor have only one adult miniature golf course? I mean no disrespect to Glowing Greens, but where’s the variety? Seattle, apparently: Last year, Smash Putt golf, the lunatic creation of artists/rogue roboticists Jeremy Franklin-Ross and Mike McCracken, took over the bottom floor of the Acropolis Hotel. Putt-putt-deprived Portlanders showed up in droves to down cocktails and test their
skills on 14 next-generation holes, incorporating catapults, an enormous pachinko machine, air cannons and power tools. This week, Smash Putt is back for another six weeks of art-golf hijinks and new holes including an “experimental Scratch ’n’ Sniff Hole.” Say what? “The basic concept behind that one is going to be a sort of roulette wheel with scratch ’n’ sniff,” says Smash Putt’s local coordinator, Ken Brotherton. “You’ll spin that and try to identify the smell and then shoot for the hole of the scent you think it is. If you guess right you get an easy route, if you’re wrong it’s harder.” So bring decongestant. BEN WATERHOUSE.
[JAPAN] BAKE SALE FOR JAPAN Amateur and professional bakers come together at Ristretto Roasters and Barista to sell delicious doughy treats to raise money for those affected by the Japanese earthquake. Guilt-free gluttony from the likes of Alma Chocolate, the Sugar Cube and Little T American Baker. Ristretto Roasters, 3808 N Williams Ave., 288-8667, and Barista Pearl, 539 NW 13th Ave., 579-6678. 10 am-2 pm.
HIT IT: Smash Putt, 1719 W Burnside St., smashputt.com. 6 pm-2 am Fridays-Saturdays, 6 pm-midnight Saturdays through May 8. $10-$15. 21+. Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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FOOD & DRINK = WW Pick. Highly recommended. PRICES: $: Most entrees under $10. $$: $10-$20. $$$: $20-$30. $$$$: Above $30. Editor: KELLY CLARKE. Email: dish@wweek.com. See page 3 for submission instructions.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30
Catfish & hushpuppies
Brewers for Boobs
Brewers from New Old Lompoc, Burnside, Coalition and more compete to see who can sell the most beer and make the most bucks for Making Strides Against Breast Cancer, a program that spreads awareness and fuels promising research toward cancer cures. NIKKI VOLPICELLI. East Burn, 1800 E Burnside St., 2362876. 7 pm-midnight. $7. All ages.
FRIDAYS
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 entree and dessert at half the price of its daily, five-course cousin. NIKKI VOLPICELLI. Genoa, 2832 SE Belmont St., 238-1464. Regular dinner hours. $35 per person. All ages.
SATURDAY, APRIL 2 28th Annual St. Josef’s Winery Founders Day
Join St. Josef’s Winery in Canby as it celebrates its arrival in the Northwest 28 years prior. Hungarian goulash and other European-style foods will be served to celebrate the winery’s heritage, while the Portland Gypsy
Jazz Project will perform to keep things swinging all weekend. NV. St. Josef’s Winery, 28836 S Barlow Road, Canby. 503-651-3190. Noon-6 pm Saturday-Sunday. $5. All ages.
SUNDAY, APRIL 3 Sustainable Seafood Sunday Series
Bouillabaisse, a traditional fish stew from Marseille, overflows with fishies and veggies. Paley’s Place is kicking off its new weekly dinner series with a family-style meal chock full of the stuff. A crudo bar, salad and appetizers will also be available. NV. Paley’s Place, 1204 NW 21st Ave., 243-2403. 4:30 pm & 7:30 pm. $65-$85, reservations by phone.
MONDAY, APRIL 4 Springtime Dim Sum Yum Yum
Nab some new treats and old favorites from Pix Pâtisserie during this dim sum-style tasting. Sip beer, sparkling and dessert wine tastings as silver platters holding sweet samples like edible flower pots filled with raspberry-rosemary ganache and 10-year-old tawny port ice cream circulate the room. NV. Pix Pâtisserie, 3402 SE Division St., 232-4407. 8-11 pm. $1-$3 per dessert. All ages.
BREAKFAST SERVED ALL DAY
ALLISON E. JONES
EAT MOBILE
PIG OUT: The Gaufre Gourmet’s crunchy, meaty maple-bacon creation.
GAUFRE GOURMET
3 Days
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Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
2 - 5 pm, Mon. - Fri. Open 8am - 5 pm
128 NE 28th 503-517-0347
I know you love FlavourSpot—so do I. But Gaufre Gourmet, a little waffle cart on the graveled edge of Chinatown, is a whole other sweet and savory beast. Chefs Charlene Wesler and Michael Susak specialize in Belgian Liège waffles, which eschew batter for a yeasted briochestyle dough and pack every BEST BITE: Try the savory specials: a meatball sub waffle ($6.50) bite with crunchy bits of translated to a gut buster of spicy pearl sugar. Yeah, different. marinara and giant savory balls, luxuriating on a bed of cheesy bread And positively wonderful: griddled in the waffle iron. T h e s u g a r- b a l l - st u d d e d CHEAPEST BITE: The plain Liège dough lends the waffles a with powdered sugar ($2.50) is sweet perfection. chewy, caramelized texture that forms an excellent base for everything from bittersweet mocha chocolate sauce to goat cheese with honey-roasted pistachios ($5.75-$6). And Gaufre’s maple-bacon waffle ($4.50) is just plain ridiculous, like a Voodoo Doughnut creation with exponentially more crunchy edges. KELLY CLARKE. EAT: Northwest 4th Avenue and West Burnside Street, gaufregourmet.com. 7 am-3 pm Tuesday-Friday, 10 am-2 pm Saturday, 9 pm-2:30 am-“ish” Friday-Saturday. $ Inexpensive.
FOOD & DRINK But again, this isn’t really where you want to go for a whole pie (especially when most of the 18-inch pizzas cost upward of $22). Sizzle Pie’s real strength is as an East Coast-style slice joint—with a Northwest bent. The counter features a rotating lineup of eight different thin-crust pies ($3 to $3.75 per slice, or $6 with a side salad), which are revived for a few minutes in the pizza oven before being slapped hot and saucy onto metal trays by grungy servers. The crust is nothing special, but it’s a perfectly serviceable salver for the toppings: soft yet chewy, with a nicely crispy cornicione. Our whole pies came disappointingly lacking in char, while the pre-made slices had plenty. The basic cheese pizza is adequate, but it’s the local, left-of-center toppings Sizzle Pie really rocks. Far better is the “Wino,” which replaces the house red sauce with a rich Oregon pinot noir marinara. Or “The New Deal,” which features locally distilled New Deal vodka in an awesomely boozy vodka cream sauce. Either of these forms the basis for a pretty foolproof slice. Add martini olives to the vodka cream sauce and you’ve got “The Bender.” With whole cloves of roasted garlic and splotches of tangy goat cheese, it’s the excellent “Rudimentary Penne.” The booze fridge is also skewed toward local, packed with 18 nearby brews, including Ninkasi and Hopworksbombers for a reasonable $5 to $6. Salads ($5 small, $8 large) are fresh, well sized and nicely balanced. The “Word Salad,” scattered with red onion, pepitas and pink peppercorns and a light, zippy vinaigrette, is a great contrast to a fatty, sloppy slice. SLICE SLICE, BABY: Late-night diners devour slices with a side of grunge at Sizzle Pie. An unexpected highlight is Sizzle Pie’s seemingly dubious weekend brunch service. Six bucks scores your sorry point: PDX has had no good late-night slice joint until now. hungover ass a slice of breakfast pizza with a small yet Tucked into a narrow shopfront on lower East Burnside, sozzling bloody mary, a mimosa or a 22-ounce bottle of stumbling distance from Rontoms and the Doug Fir, Sizzle Oakshire Espresso Stout. Pie is pure rock ’n’ roll. The gray brick walls are decorated The best slice is the “Skate Goat”— a thick smear of with photos of axe-wielding legends; creamy basil pesto topped with goat the jukebox is packed with punk, rock Order this: The “Italians Do It Better” cheese and cracked eggs. The “Wake BY R U T H B R OW N rbrown@wweek.com and hardcore classics; pizzas bear is essentially pizzafied eggplant and Bake” also comes garnished with delicious way to enjoy the names like “Napalm Breath,” “Spiral Parmesan—a eggs, offset by lots of salty pancetta American bastardization of two Italian With no real indigenous pizza style to call our own, Port- Tap” and “Holy Diver”; and the late- dishes at once. cubes. It’s not bad, but ours was cryland’s late-blossoming pizza scene is often defined by its night bouncer sports non-ironic Alice Best deal: A brunch slice and an ing out for some cheese. Both pizzas torchbearers—the fancy-pants pies fired up by the likes of Cooper guyliner. Only a few months Oakshire Espresso Stout ($6). would have been vastly improved if pass: Any of the vegan pizzas topped Ken’s Artisan Pizza and Apizza Scholls. Craveable crusts, old, this place is pumping out piping I’ll the egg were cracked and cooked fresh with salty chunks of dehydrated soy DOC cheeses, hard-to-pronounce Italian words, real nap- hot slices to a large, double-denim- protein. You know what is a delicious to order, rather than left to coagulate vegan pizza topping? Vegetables. kins. It’s tough not to mentally evaluate and rank all new- clad crowd until 4 am every weekend. under a warming lamp. comers in comparison to these heavyweights. The full-sized pie menu offers 41 It’s a far cry from Mother’s, but So let’s get this out of the way straight up: Sizzle Pie, the choices—16 omnivorous, 17 vegetarian and seven vegan— sometimes it’s better to stop judging food for what it isn’t latest addition to Portland’s pizza world, does not belong as well as a create-your-own pizza option. There are the and just be happy for a genuinely original brunch option, in this elite class. It will not be your savior from the long classics like Margherita (“Queen”), pepperoni (“Ace of where you can chow down for cheap while playing PacSpades”) and Hawaiian (“6 inches of Kevin Bacon”), in Man and listening to Bad Brains. lines outside the aforementioned institutions. Sorry. It is, however, a great place to guzzle beer and polish off addition to plenty of schmancy toppings like white-truffle a few good slices at 2 am. And in that regard, it blows the oil, artichoke hearts and dried cranberries. And for deep- EAT: Sizzle Pie, 624 E Burnside St., 234-7437, sizzlepie.com. Lunch, dinner and late night 11 am-3am Sunday-Thursday, competition out of the water. Granted, the competition is dish devotees, there are two double-decker pies, sandwich- 11 am-4 am Friday-Saturday, brunch 11 am-5 pm Saturdaybasically just Dante’s (now that Rocco’s closed), but that’s the ing cheese between two crusts. Sunday. $ Inexpensive.
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MUSIC
MUSIC
MARCH 30 - APRIL 5 PROFILE
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
M A R K H O LT H U S E N
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 30
THURSDAY, MARCH 31
Wretched, Son of Aurelius, Last Chance to Reason, Ocean of Mirrors, Southgate, Dusks Embrace
Zoe Keating
[COMPUTER METAL] I sort of cringe at the term “technical metal,” but there are very few other ways to describe the precision-timed assault that is Son of Aurelius. The Santa Cruz-based quintet allows some Swedish influences to bleed into its playing, but the group’s two foremost muses are more likely a can of Red Bull and a spreadsheet. Drummer Spencer Edwards is capable of laying down double-bass drum at 290 BPM; bassist Max Zigman walks up and down his instrument as if its fretboard were butter. Having only formed in 2009, the group has already released a mercilessly technical LP, The Farthest Reaches, and is launching into touring as if it were born for the duty, which, hell, may well be the case. SHANE DANAHER. Branx, 320 SE 2nd Ave., 234-5683. 7 pm. $10 advance, $12 day of show. All ages.
Sharon Van Etten, Little Scream, Sonny Pete
[MIDMORNING FOLK] Most of what Sharon Van Etten is doing has been done before—and done well, at that. Yet, the Brooklynite’s melancholy folk is holy-shit-can’t-look-away interesting, and I would place the credit for that at the feet of Van Etten’s maturity as a songwriter. It’s not just that she sings about heartbreak on the cheekily named Epic, it’s that she invests songs like “I Can’t Breathe” with such rank faith in their own emotions that the clichés double back on themselves and remind us why they became clichés in the first place. Not bad for a band composed more or less entirely of acoustic guitar and moxy. SHANE DANAHER. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $12. 21+.
White Fang, Mean Jeans, BOOM!, Therapists, DJ E*Rock
See album review, page 33. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $5. 21+.
Milagres, The Seedy Seeds, Wild Ones
[PLUCKY POP] The Seedy Seeds’ debut album, Verb Noun, is a chipper hodgepodge. Let’s say it borrows the light side of Starfucker and marries it to the Blow’s vocal inflection. Oh, and it adds a healthy amount of what can legitimately be referred to as “rock banjo.” The Cincinnati trio (along with frequent third-party infusions of violin and harp) makes pop that maintains its frisky clip with only an occasional diversion into the more cloying realms. What is most fun about the Seedy Seeds is their ability to juggle their bouncing menagerie of instruments without ever seeming to feel the weight. SHANE DANAHER. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. $8 advance, $10 day of show. 21+.
Green Noise Records Night: The Prids, Crypt of the Grave, DJ Ken Dirtnap
[MOHAWKS] Brought to you by the good folks at Green Noise Records, tonight’s show at the Know features local post-punk and thrash acts the Prids and Crypt of the Grave. The former, rifling off tracks from 2010’s Chronosynclastic (which features Northwest guitar god Doug Marstch), is pure, surging, well-dressed clamor not entirely unlike, say, the Vaselines. The latter, a menacing, gravel-throated band of ceaseless power distortion, plays the soundtrack to the Alberta Street venue itself, making music that is bleak, bruised and boisterous. MARK STOCK. The Know, 2026 NE Alberta St., 473-8729. 8 pm. Cover. 21+.
[O SOLO CELLO] The forward-looking solo cellist and composer (whose day job was in software) was crafting fascinating sounds with her laptop, cello and looping pedal, and drawing crowds to San Francisco warehouse concerts long before she won renown through self-released CDs boosted by social media. Now she performs in all sorts of nontraditional venues more suited to indie rockers than classically trained cellists, creates atmospheric film and dance scores, and works with everyone from Imogen Heap to DJ Shadow to Paolo Nutini. She’s an ideal match for cellomaniacal Portland’s altclassical fans. BRETT CAMPBELL. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 234-9694. 8 pm (minors accompanied by parent). $15. All ages.
Talib Kweli, Fashawn, Animal Farm, T&E
[HIP-HOP] After more than 15 years in the rap game, most MCs are either burnt out, selling out or dead. Not Talib Kweli. With a New York state of mind and a tongue-twisting spit flow to back it all up, the Black Star founder sits on a throne of indie-rap royalty alongside collaborator Mos Def, proving rappers can remain conscious and innovative while throwing out club bangers that keep asses dropping. Touring to support his excellent, self-produced Gutter Rainbows, Kweli returns to PDX for the second time this year, another dose of genius from a true genre prophet. AP KRYZA. Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 2250047. 9 pm. $18 advance, $20 day of show. All ages.
O’Death, Helado Negro, Lee Corey Oswald
[ROOTS OF EVIL] The Devil might have gone down to Georgia, but apparently he spent some time in New York, dipping his pointy tail in enough cauldrons to spawn O’Death, a quintet of utterly insane purveyors of Americana who make Charlie Daniels sound like a choir boy. With sing-songy choruses booming and hellfire fiddle slicing through the air like a smoldering sickle, O’Death ups the ante for dark roots music with gleeful abandon. It’s all laced with a playful giddiness, making the group’s embrace of evil all the more compelling—and just a little more psychotic. AP KRYZA. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $10 advance, $12 day of show. 21+.
Sorted: Kid Hops, Lincolnup, Ben Tactic
[POSITIVE VIBRATIONS] During my brief sojourn in Seattle a couple of years ago, I got to know Kid Hops fairly well every Saturday morning when he would take to the airwaves on KEXP and play three hours of dub and reggae. But Hops would spend his evenings moonlighting in the clubs of the Emerald City, spinning every kind of electronic sounds under the sun. House, dubstep, jungle...the man could and does do it all. Hops is making a quick trip down to our fair city to spin some tunes alongside two of our best local club DJs, Lincolnup and Ben Tactic. ROBERT HAM. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 9 pm. $3. 21+.
Franz Nicolay, David Dondero, Barton Carroll
[THE MUSTACHE STANDS ALONE] You’d expect Franz Nicolay to make cartoonish rock because, well, he looks like a cartoon. Bedecked with a handlebar mustache and Edwardian ward-
CONT. on page 29
FLIGHT OF THE DODOS THE DODOS RETURN TO PORTLAND AND FIND THEIR MOJO. BY MICHAEL MANNHEIMER
mmannheimer@wweek.com
Most of the time, as the story goes, a band cleans up its sound to lead to a bigger audience. But when San Francisco frantic-folk duo the Dodos were recruited by noted Northwest indie-rock producer Phil Ek (Built to Spill, the Shins, Fleet Foxes) to record their potential 2009 breakthrough, Time to Die, the exact opposite happened. The record, despite containing a few of the band’s best songs, was received with a critical shrug and a crowd peeved that the band traded in its unstoppable energy for a neutered, safe sound. So instead of playing it safe again, the band— guitarist-singer Meric Long and drummer Logan Kroeber—reconnected with an old stable: Portland producer and friend John Askew. “The understanding that we have between each other is crucial,” Kroeber says of the Dodos’ relationship with Askew. “We got lost making weird, stupid noises. We allowed ourselves the time to goof off more, and sometimes us goofing off on something that didn’t sound so promising at the beginning ended up being a really killer song.” The collaboration yielded No Color, the San Francisco band’s third album recorded in Portland and easily its most insistent. While Time to Die traded the band’s signature sound—a bluesy, expansive kind of folk pop where Kroeber’s rattling percussion battles Long’s acoustic finger-picking for breathing room—for a spot on a Starbucks countertop, No Color successfully advances the Dodos’ sound while retaining the raw intimacy of its past glories. Long and Kroeber (plus vibraphonist Keaton Snyder, who was mostly edited out of the sessions) spent the tail end of summer in town, recording at Type Foundry and Askew’s own Scenic Burrows studio by day and riding bikes and crashing on friends’ couches at night. That laid-back spirit carries over to No Color. There’s nothing quite as immediate as “Fools,” the quasi-hit that earned the Dodos some advertising money after it was featured in a spot for Miller Chill,
but it features Long’s sturdiest—and most aggressive—songwriting to date. Opener “Black Night” climbs toward the rafters on Kroeber’s relentless pounding and a newfound commitment to guitar feedback, finally segueing into the gorgeous “Going Under” after four minutes. “Good” and “Hunting Season” transition from stomping verses to pretty, melodic choruses, and Long’s singing is now a perfect balance of sincere and menacing. Half of the record also features Neko Case on backing vocals, but her brassy voice never gets in the way of the band’s uncomplicated arrangements. No Color is also amped up by the addition of electric guitar and an increased reliance on rhythmic interplay. “Our songwriting key is finding something
“WE GOT LOST MAKING WEIRD, STUPID NOISES.” —LOGAN KROEBER that feels good and sounds good and just playing it for a really long time,” Kroeber says, chuckling. “This one was all about figuring out ways to expand that basic groove.” Only one track on the album slows things down: Penultimate song “Companions” eschews volume for restraint, finger-picking, and a series of surprising but notable harmonies. The juxtaposition between folk traditions and experimentation has always lain at the heart of the band. Before Kroeber and Long met in 2005 in the Bay Area, Kroeber was mostly involved with heavy-metal projects, and Long dabbled in West African Ewe drumming. Though only traces of the duo’s past exist in the Dodos’ current setup, its vast musical training leads to sounds that constantly push the boundaries of what a “folk” band can do. “When Meric started doing all these crazy [guitar] leads and adding harmonies in the studio, I thought, ‘This isn’t shaping up how I imagined it,’” Kroeber says. “I think we made a prog-folk record, and we’re both really stoked to say that.” SEE IT: The Dodos play Tuesday, April 5, at Doug Fir with Reading Rainbow. 9 pm. $15. 21+.
Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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Recommended Music For Spring
J MASCIS
LADYTRON
THE SOUNDS
SEVERAL SHADES OF WHY
BEST OF 00-10
SOMETHING TO DIE FOR
ON SALE
$10.99 CD
ON SALE
$10.99 CD
$19.99 2CD DELUXE
LP ALSO AVAILABLE
In the 25 years since he founded Dinosaur (Jr.), J Mascis has created some of the era’s signature songs, albums and styles. ‘Several Shades of Why’ is J’s first solo studio record. Nearly all acoustic, the album was created with the help of a few friends including Kurt Vile, Sophie Trudeau (A Silver Mount Zion), Kurt Fedora (long-time collusionist), Kevin Drew (Broken Social Scene), Ben Bridwell (Band of Horses), Pall Jenkins (Black Heart Procession), Matt Valentine (The Golden Road), and Suzanne Thorpe (Wounded Knees).
Consistently placing songcraft and innovation over any confining aesthetic, the foursome of Daniel Hunt, Reuben Wu, Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo fashioned four albums of deliriously buzzing, whip-smart electro-pop that have kept them ahead of the curve, apart from the fads and in a league of their own. ‘Best Of 00-10’ is a celebration of 10 years with all the key tracks and two brand new songs. The 2 CD Deluxe Version will include band favorites and an 80-page photo book for collectors.
HOT TUNA
DANA FUCHS
STEADY AS SHE GOES
LOVE TO BEG ON SALE
$12.99 CD
ON SALE
$13.99 CD ‘Steady As She Goes’ is the first all-new Hot Tuna studio album since 1990 from Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady. The album was produced by Grammy-winning producer Larry Campbell at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock. Jorma and Jack have alternated between electric and acoustic personas over the years and this recording covers both sides of the waterfront but with an emphasis on the rocking!
HOW TO BECOME CLAIRVOYANT AVAILABLE 4/5 ON SALE CD
ON SALE
$9.99
CD LP ALSO AVAILABLE 4/12 When it comes to sassy, confident, feel-good rock ’n’ roll Sweden’s The Sounds are the gold standard. Even as they’ve evolved markedly since their 2002 breakthrough debut, ‘Living In America,’ the Malmö-based quintet has remained true to their New Wave soul, delivering that perfect mix of sass and smarts, old and new, electric and electronic every time. ‘Something To Die For’ is one hundred percent The Sounds. Not only did the band produce the album themselves, but they wrote and recorded it in their very own studio over much of 2010.
$12.99
LP ALSO AVAILABLE 4/16 ON RECORD STORE DAY
Robbie Robertson’s new release ‘How To Become Clairvoyant’ is his fifth solo album and first record in more than 10 years. Guitar virtuosos Eric Clapton (who co-wrote three tracks with Robertson), Tom Morello and Robert Randolph guest on the album, which Robertson co-produced with Marius de Vries. The album also features Steve Winwood, Trent Reznor and vocalists Angela McCluskey, Rocco Deluca, Dana Glover and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes. Bassist Pino Palladino and drummer Ian Thomas lay down the groove throughout.
ALELA DIANE
THE KILLS
ALELA DIANE & WILD DIVINE
BLOOD PRESSURES AVAILABLE 4/5 ON SALE CD
AVAILABLE 4/5 ON SALE CD
$9.99
$11.99 SEE DANA LIVE WEDNESDAY 4/27 @ ALBERTA ROSE THEATRE Dana starred in the film ‘Across the Universe’ alongside Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Bono, Eddie Izzard, Joe Cocker, Salma Hayek, and more. She has also opened for Joe Cocker, Dickie Betts, Ray Davies, and Etta James. Dana has even been featured as a guest vocalist sitting in with Gov’t Mule and Bob Weir live in concert. Her new album is titled ‘Love To Beg.’
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LP ALSO AVAILABLE
ROBBIE ROBERTSON
LP ALSO AVAILABLE
Let it be known; this is not your typical Alela Diane record. There is no banjo plucked and drenched in ghostly reverb, no violin wielded like fine china at your chest cavity, no chiffon blowing curiously in the wind and most importantly, nothing vaguely freaky going on that goes beyond the inevitable waxing and waning of the moon. Rather, there comes a time when artistic pursuits warrant a new approach-one that reflects personal growth and its continued path--and therein lies the root base of the expanded sounds of ‘Alela Diane & Wild Divine.’
With their basic sound intact – searing guitars, driving rhythms and sexually charged lyrical savvy – ‘Blood Pressures’ finds The Kills embracing a fuller sound and becoming more adventurous in the studio. The lyrics are honest, heartfelt and sometimes just plain heartbreaking. Departing from the sparse, angular sound of ‘Midnight Boom,’ the duo explores complex textures with heavier instrumentation and layered, huge sounding harmonies.
Text: Record to 27299
Offer Good Thru: 4/30/11
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OUTDOORS IN EUGENE!
ON SALE FRIDAY! (Performing multi-platinum album “Meantime” in its entirety)
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DUMPSTA PHUNK
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DOORLY • SIR KUTZ April 15th • roselAnd • 8:30pm • All Ages
THURSDAY - FRIDAY robe, the ex-Hold Steady keyboardist looks like he wandered away from a circus, and when he alights on the keys, you expect the instrument to bloom with mild hokum, rather than the earnest rawk Nicolay seems to prefer. Since his break with the Hold Steady, Nicolay has been trying to fight this would-be pigeonhole, and he has had mixed success. Last year’s Luck & Courage tries its hand at earnestness (“This Is Not a Pipe”) but still trends inevitably toward the theatrical. SHANE DANAHER. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. $10. 21+.
Pegasus Dream, Ryat, CC Swim, Nucular Aminals
[ELECTROMAGNETISM] Pegasus Dream wants to sleep in your brain, and to do so the Portland electronic trio is prepared to employ the riffy artiness of Of Montreal and the Zoloft-infused meltdowns of Ween at its most lucid. Curiously, it all works, with the synth-and-guitar pair shelling out jagged hunks of catchy rock pulse alongside mellower fare that can feel like a midafternoon acid flashback in the best possible way. The combination of the two sounds makes Pegasus a standout, a group with the ability to shift gears without jarring listeners out of their own personal head space. AP KRYZA. Rotture, 315 SE 3rd Ave., 234-5683. 9 pm. $6. 21+.
Seasick Steve
[DOG HOUSE BLUES] If you were lucky enough to stumble upon Jack White’s Rolling Record Store at SXSW a couple of weeks ago, you might have also heard a quick and dirty performance of bowel-shuddering blues courtesy of a man that goes by the name Seasick Steve. The newest signing to White’s Third Man Records is a phenomenon in his adopted home of the U.K., but is just catching fire here in the States via his growling vocals and fugue stateinducing playing on his “Three-String Trance Wonder” guitar or his bizarre and beautiful “One-Stringed Diddley Bow” (an amplified 2-by-4 with one string, played with an old screwdriver as a slide). Steve also has an upcoming full-length, You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks, out later this year, which should only add to his growing myth. ROBERT HAM. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 9 pm. $12 advance, $13 day of show. 21+.
FRIDAY, APRIL 1 Wow & Flutter, Virgin Islands, Cafeteria Dance Fever
[MATH ROCK] Wow & Flutter is a Portland institution. Unfortunately, it’s a Portland institution that much of Portland knows nothing about— kinda like the Driftwood Room or the Vacuum Museum. Sure, being safely stashed up this city’s sleeve has its advantages: Wow & Flutter’s latest record, Equilibrio!, is a fantastic release precisely because the band has had over a decade to nail down its exacting rock sound (and ditch any trace elements of self-serious pretension from the early days) undisturbed by popular opinion. But really, Portland, you’re sleeping on these guys, and it’s time you woke up. Tonight’s showing with similarly overlooked/rocking Seattle labelmates the Virgin Islands and Porltand maniac rockers Cafeteria Dance Fever is a really great opportunity to do so. CASEY JARMAN. Backspace, 115 NW 5th St., 2482900. 9 pm. $5. All ages.
Salem, Dangerous Boys Club, The Soft Moon, Vice Device, DJ Nightschool [MUMBLECORE] Any critical beatdown of so-called “witch house” innovators Salem must include a few quotes from the Michigan trio’s greatest detractor, rock writer Chris Weingarten. In an article for the Village Voice, Weingarten declared the group “the worst new band” of 2010, as well as “talentless fuckups” and “the living, breathing, American Apparel-clad definition of white
privilege.” He’s more or less correct, but he probably wouldn’t have been so vitriolic if the band hadn’t become one of the Great Indie Hypes of last year. Its lobotomized mix of chopped-and-screwed Southern hip-hop, shoegaze and atmospheric noise intrigued the blogosphere, and admittedly it’s a beguiling description on paper. In practice, however, those genres are stitched together with a laziness bordering on apathy—an attitude borne out in its barely conscious live performances. As Weingarten concludes, “There’s like a million great bands you should probably be listening to instead.” MATTHEW SINGER. Branx, 320 SE 2nd Ave., 234-5683. 9 pm. $10 advance, $13 day of show. All ages.
The Confidentials, Thin Man
[C’MON, TRUST A BAND OVER 30] The Confidentials may have been a blip on the Portland radar in 1981 (and may exist as an even smaller, almost untraceable blip today—a wildly compelling live video for the band’s song “Heartache” is about all we could find) but they did make an impression. Local rock historian SP Clarke writes in his indispensable history of this city’s rock scene that the trio was the first real challenge to the rock supremacy of Billy Rancher’s Unreal Gods—a very big deal at the time. The fleeting evidence of the band’s heyday shows a unruly, passionate and good-looking squad of young punks poised for extended radio airtime alongside the Replacements and the Clash. The Confidentials never made it big, but we’re guessing they’ll make it loud again tonight. CASEY JARMAN. Dante’s, 350 W Burnside St., 2266630. 9:30 pm. $10. 21+.
Jetpack Missing, Crown Point, Greenlander, Ruby Hill
[DOMESTIC ROCK] The genre “popular rock” pretty much sums up Portland’s Crown Point. The trio celebrates the release of its debut EP, Wolves, a six-song collection of
MUSIC
premeditated tunes and lead singer Jon Davidson’s high-wire, Brandon Boyd-lite vocal style. And while CP tends more toward the background music for a WB sitcom about outcasts, the polished act may reserve its creative side for the live stage. After all, there are bright spots (the thrilling “Lethal Dose,” for example) when the band substitutes the tough-and-tame model for a more stripped-down, less derivative batch of hooks and measured hollering. MARK STOCK. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $8 advance, $10 day of show. 21+.
Welcome Home Walker, Biters, Booze, Lordy Lords
[PARTY IN THE U.S.A.] Can Welcome Home Walker please get some love? The Portland quartet is, simply put, the most fun band in town, a group of former punks who have learned to embrace bubblegum pop and prime ’60s songwriting to create one of the most infectious sounds in town. Following up the hyper singles collection Suds!, WHW is releasing a fulllength, Duds!, that continues down the same path, with plenty of singalong anthems and two-minute blasts of sugary-pop goodness. From “Krang’s Gang” to the sublime “Good Gravy”—which takes advantage of a killer “ooh la la” chorus— WHW delivers the goods, and I dare you to find a better record of straight-ahead garage pop in 2011. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. East End, 203 SE Grand Ave., 232-0056. 9 pm. $8. 21+.
Shandong cuisine of northern china
fresh ingredients • prepared daily • a new look at classic dishes open daily 11-2:30 lunch 4-9:30 dinner happy hour specials 4-6
3724 ne broadway portland or 97232 503.287.0331 shandongportland.com
“Dependably delicious” – WW Cheap Eats Traditional Belly Dancing Friday Evenings
Katchafire, The Israelites
[SHEEPAFARIANS] Reggae: It’s not just for Jamaicans and white college students anymore! New Zealand’s Katchafire put a particularly Pacific Island spin on its skank, giving a sunny and smiling take on the music that was once the music of a poverty-stricken people trying to rise above (and rage against)
PRIMER
Enjoy Lebanese family recipes (vegan & gluten-free, too)
221 SW Pine • 503-459-4441
CONT. on page 30
BY CASEY JA R MA N
HELMET Formed: 1989 in New York City Members: Page Hamilton (guitar, vocals), Dan Beeman (guitar), Kyle Stevenson (drums), Dave Case (touring bassist) Sounds like: A very loud construction site; a rock yacht being tossed on the stormy seas; the carnival. For fans of: Nirvana, White Zombie, Paw, Foo Fighters, Snapcase, AC/DC, Hüsker Dü, Fugazi Latest release: Seeing Eye Dog, a hit-and-miss collection of supercrunchy, start-and-stop tunes that feels looser than Helmet fans are accustomed to. Why you care: Because, for a while there, Helmet was the model of measured, mathy and smart hard rock (or hardcore or alt-metal... whatever you want to call this stuff ) that did away with the usual testosterone of its genre. The band’s formula—blue-collar, drop-D guitar chugging that moves in and out of phase with the popping drums—left room for bright, melodic moments, and frontman Page Hamilton used restraint in delivering his half-spoken, Zenfor-dummies lyrics. All of this came together on the band’s three excellent early-’90s releases: Strap It On, Meantime and Betty. But by 1997 release Aftertaste, the band seemed to have grown tired of its old formulaic approach to hardcore and, in stretching out its sonic legs, stumbled considerably—though songs like “Renovation” and “It’s Easy to Get Bored” hinted at a big, pretty side of Helmet that could have brought the band back to the fore. The band would go on to embrace its raunchy-sounding metal side instead, and Helmet’s feedback-sick post-’90s output has found Hamilton trading his understated speak-sing for a gravelly bar-rock delivery that makes it all too easy to lump Helmet in with the uninspiring nu-metal pack. SEE IT: Helmet plays Thursday, March 31, at the Roseland Theater. 7 pm. $18. All ages.
Drag Show (on Glisan) 6pm Th - Sat • Happy Hour 5 -6:30 pm daily 1639 NW Glisan • 503-473-8758 • sweetbasilor.com
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29
MUSIC
FRIDAY - SATURDAY
MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME: The Confidentials play a 30-year reunion show on Friday, April 1, at Dante’s. oppression. If that makes it sound a bit trite, well, it kind of is, but it’s at least more credible than the American hippie version. And after conquering its home country, the group has managed to bring itself to a wide national audience. Its 2010 album, On the Road Again, is a testament to its touring grind, something few stoned trustafarians have the energy to commit themselves to. So that’s worth something. MATTHEW SINGER. Hawthorne Theatre, 3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 233-7100. 8 pm. $20 advance, $23 day of show. All ages.
Dom, Heavy Hawaii, Jeffrey Jerusalem, DJ Copy, New Dadz DJs
[HYPE KILLERS] Was there a more unlikely collaboration in 2010 than when Gucci Mane remixed and spit over a Dom track? It’s not like the bleeding of hip-hop with underground rock is that odd (it’s almost expected now; see the recent Weeknd mixtape, which finds the mysterious Canadian R&B band singing over Beach House), but in the never-ending search for electro-tinged beats, it’s weird that a song as dull as Dom’s “Living in America” found the Gucci stamp of approval. It’s not like the young Massachusetts band is terrible— it’s just that Dom’s warped brand of chillwave already sounds stale and uninspiring. The cleaned-up Sun Bronzed Greek Gods EP has some promising moments, so let’s hope that the band finds a better batch of songs before RZA asks for a track. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $8 advance, $10 day of show. 21+.
Kaia Wilson, Rebecca Gates
[GRRRLS GONE ‘90s] If you ask Kaia Wilson, there was a dream of the ‘90s, and she lived it. In fact, the ex-Team Dresch/Butchies singer-guitarist, who established herself as one of Portland’s finest singer-songwriters in the middle of that oft-misunderstood decade, says she never left the ‘90s at all. That would explain tonight’s show, wherein both Wilson and similarly legendary Spinanes frontwoman Rebecca Gates take the Mississippi Pizza stage (just squint and imagine it’s La Luna or 17 Nautical Miles or something) to play songs from the decade that brought us grunge, Power Rangers and MAX trains to Beaverton. Wilson will be playing selections from her first solo record, Kaia (which, as its on-album inscription of “Finally, a dyke album for the whole family!” would suggest, is actually one of the prettiest, least angsty records 1996 Portland had to offer), and Gates is going all out with a set of ‘90s covers. Word on the street is that the show will include a very, very special guest...and flash cards. CASEY JARMAN. Mississippi Pizza, 3552 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3231. 9 pm. $5. 21+.
And And And, The Woolen Men, The Blast Majesty
See album reviews, page 33. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9:30 pm. Free. 21+.
My Chemical Romance, Neon Trees, The Architects
[SUPERHERO PUNK] In 2004, My Chemical Romance filled an important void. Well, important for the Hot Topic corporation, anyway. At that time, the pop-punk superstars of the post-grunge ’90s were on the wane. Of the many bands vying to take their place, only MCR had the right combination of exuberant tempos, guyliner and a knack for exploding minor teenage traumas into widescreen melodrama to truly challenge for the title of Stadium Emo Kings. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, the New Jersey group’s second album, nearly got them there. But then Green Day re-energized with American Idiot, introducing the grand arena-sized gesture to mainstream punk, and the band responded by remaking itself into a mall-goth Queen, with mixed results. Despite its ridiculous title, last year’s Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys saw the quintet returning to earth a bit—and, subsequently, smaller venues. As long as lonely comic-book nerds need to feel like somebody real is in their corner, however, MCR will always have a reason to exist. MATTHEW SINGER. Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., 219-9929 (Grill), 2242038 (Theater). 8 pm. SOLD OUT. All ages.
SATURDAY, APRIL 2 Weinland, Quiet Life, Ravenna Woods, mbilly
[BEARD ROCK] On a preliminary listen, it’s easy to lump Portland’s Weinland in with the typical altcountry folk sound that makes up a fundamental slice of our greater indie landscape. Frontman Adam Shearer sounds like a cross between Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold and Neil Young. Even the instrumentation exists in the same folk-rock skin as those big names. But it’s Weinland’s moving parts that make for an individual body which is capable of walking in its own direction. Though the band’s compositions favor hallmarks like lap steel guitar, organ, banjo, glockenspiel and piano, the technique in which Shearer and crew find ways to line up those usual suspects creates some truly catchy and endearing melodies on both 2008’s Breaks in the Sun and new tracks like “Los Processaur” that will hopefully appear on a new full-length. All the acts supporting Weinland are roughly of the same cut: equally talented and all local,
CONT. on page 33 30
Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
july 6th • cuthbert AmphitheAter • 7pm • All Ages
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Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
SATURDAY - SUNDAY tonight’s show is a strong showing of the more mature, beard-friendly local scene. KEVIN DAVIS. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 2319663. 8:30 pm. $11 advance, $13 day of show. 21+.
Peelander-Z, Anamanaguchi, Lee Corey Oswald, Girlfriends
[THE DREAM OF THE NINETIES] Back when the jerry-rigged economics of independent distribution still trumped online immediacy and hipsterdom was first recognized as a career choice—and, with startling unanimity, alternative nation marched lockstep behind a crucial Things-the-Beastie Boys-FoundCool aesthetic—the sanctified kitsch of Asian children’s shows (along with Mexican wrestling, Caribbean dub casualties, and factorydamaged junk culture from across the globe) singularly brightened homegrown doldrums beset by the self-referential and proudly difficult. Ploughing the same pop inscrutability for more than a decade, and known far more for Mighty Morphin color schemes and safely frenzied stagecraft than its ska-tinged gob-along punk jingles, the DayGlo pageantry and choreographed anarchy of Peelander-Z belongs less to another country than a different time. JAY HORTON. Someday Lounge, 125 NW 5th Ave., 248-1030. 8 pm. $12. 21+.
Beats Antique, Eskmo
[GLOBAL GROOVES] Two refugees from the classical music world, Tommy Cappel and David Satori headed abroad to explore the music of other cultures, including the musical hotbeds of Bali, West Africa and Serbia. But it’s mostly Middle Eastern music, including belly-dance rhythms and a performance by dancer Zoe Jakes, that forms the foundation of their Bay Area-based band Beats Antique’s danceable fusion of glitchedout electronica, dubstep-laden world beat, and pop sounds. Another Bay Area-based electronica artist, Eskmo, opens. BRETT CAMPBELL. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 2848686. 9 pm. $18 advance, $20 day of show. All ages.
SUNDAY, APRIL 3 Madeleine Peyroux, Sunny War
[NOUVEAU CHANTEUSE] In her 15-year career, contemporary chanteuse Madeleine Peyroux has demonstrated impeccable taste in both repertoire and collaborators. The copyright credits on her albums include such names as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Edith Piaf and one Steven Paul Smith—better known as Elliott. And she’s worked with players like neo-hard-bop saxophonist John Carter and Living Colour’s avant-guitarist Vernon Reid, all in service of her signature jazzy cabaret sound and vocals emulating Billie Holiday. But that’s been changing lately; her ’09 album, Bare Bones, featured all original songs, and for her forthcoming Standin’ on the Rooftop she moves into rootsier turf. But with a Beatles cover and Me’shell Ndegeocello on bass, her good taste remains a constant. JEFF ROSENBERG. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 234-9694. 8 pm (minors accompanied by parent). $38.50 advance, $41 day of show. All ages.
British Sea Power, A Classic Education
[THE BOUNCE IN SPRING] Recording in an empty farmhouse during Britain’s coldest winter in three decades is bound to rub off on a record’s sound. Hence, Valhalla Dancehall’s restless, bright, tired-ofhibernating optimism. British Sea Power, a delightfully titled English sextet in its 11th year of existence, flexes its veteran ways on this 2011 release, offering classic U.K. introspection and swollen, untethered art rock. For fans of Pixies, Pavement and all things audibly abstruse, this
CONT. on page 34
MUSIC
ALBUM REVIEWS
AND AND AND LIFE RUINER (APES TAPES) [LO -FI BREAKTHROUGH] On my last count, local frenetic-pop sextet And And And released 45 songs in the past year. I’m probably a little off—does a mixtape count as one track?—but the sheer amount of music the band has recorded in 12 months is staggering. Touching on everything from rowdy, drunken rock jams to punk raveups to sparse and acoustic folk singalongs, And And And has proven that it’s just as adept at writing a tearjerker as starting a riot. And now, after countless MP3s and lo-fi experiments and a few clunkers, the band finally has a signature song. “All We Can Do Is Raise the Dead” isn’t just the clear highlight of AAA’s new cassette, Life Ruiner—it’s the effortless, knockout, set-closing pop song co-frontman Tyler Keene always had in him. Though Life Ruiner (a split tape with fellow lo-fi pop merchants the Woolen Men) runs together as one single 30-minute piece, “All We Can Do Is Raise the Dead” immediately stands out from anything the band has done before, both sonically and from a composition standpoint: Instead of burying his voice in swirling layers of sound, Keene puts it at the front of a song with a breezy swing that’s somewhere between the Kiwi pop of the Go-Betweens and the ’80s nostalgia of Wild Nothing. Life Ruiner, like most of the band’s material, splits the songwriting almost evenly between tracks penned by Keene and Nathan Baumgartner, and both singers come out firing. Baumgartner’s takes (especially the raucous “I Want More Alcohol”) tend to stomp, with his fiery-preacher voice dominating the mix, while Keene’s songs are more subtle slow burners that unravel after a few listens. There’s still some weird shit here—warped acoustic song “The Flood,” drummer Bim Ditson’s contribution, gets lost in the mix—but it’s only a matter of time before And And And gets nods for being Portland’s best band, not just its most prolific. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER.
WHITE FANG GRATEFUL TO SHRED (MARRIAGE RECORDS) [HIGH AND MIGHTY] I probably don’t need to mention that White Fang’s new record, Grateful to Shred, sounds like shit. That’s par for the course, and it’s a good thing. The band has spent the entirety of its short career putting itself at a commercial disadvantage— releasing albums on cassette (well before that was in fashion); playing destructive, 15-minute sets at sweaty basement venues (or getting too wasted to play said basement venues). But more interestingly, it has kept a blurred line between the epic, youthful punk-power-ballads that have grabbed Portland fans’ interest and the jokey, disjointed weed jams that White Fang just gets a huge kick out of playing. The less-poignant numbers on Grateful to Shred (the jangly, Motown-esque “Can’t Find Our Weed” and the Black Flag-style “Fuck Up a Fascist [I’m Down],” for example) sometimes seem like filler, but they’re always delivered with a lingering wink and a flash of frontman Erik Gage’s mischievous toothy smile. Then White Fang turns around and writes fucked-pop gems like “Not Listening” and “Small Amp.” And then, just to prove it can, the band drops a masterpiece at the end of the tape: “Momma” sounds like the zombie of Gram Parsons fronting the Misfits. Closer “Feeling Shitty” is just as majestic, if just as stubbornly immature as any of the album’s joke tracks. The truth is that if you want fist-pumping, ass-kicking melodic punk songs that ring true on the topic of youthful isolation, you’d best be prepared to take them alongside some cribbed Elton John riffs and a doo-wop song about losing weed. White Fang is documenting the gnar life as it comes at them, and their transmissions come in the form of both little in-jokes and towering sonic achievements. It’s all starting to sound good to me. CASEY JARMAN. SEE IT: White Fang plays Wednesday, March 30, at Holocene. 8:30 pm. $5. 21+. And And And plays Friday, April 1, at Mississippi Studios. 9:30 pm. Free. 21+. Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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MUSIC
SUNDAY - TUESDAY MILES KERR
DATES HERE
MEG AND JACK APPROVE THE COLOR SCHEME: Franz Nicolay plays Mississippi Studios on Thursday. show is not to be missed. MARK STOCK. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $12 advance, $14 day of show. 21+.
Archers, Sun Angle, The Golden Hours
[THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE] Can we give a hand to Mississippi Studios for booking so many awesome free shows lately? It seems like Archers has been involved in a few of these things, which is never a problem—the quintet is simply one of the best live bands in the city right now; a caustic, wild act that merges the Soft Boys’ primitive energy with healthy doses of ’90s guitar rock. But the openers here are also worthwhile: Sun Angle is the brand new project of Charlie SalasHumara (Panther, Astrology, etc.) and Papi Fimbres (Paper/Upper/ Cuts, O’Bruxo), and the phenomenal Golden Hours are back after a short hiatus to show the world that a messy, noisy R&B-inflected group can cover the Wipers and Motown. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. Free. 21+.
Pete Yorn, Ben Kweller, The Wellspring
[MAYER GONE TO HEAVEN] For theoretical fans of Pete Yorn—of whom there are far more than you’d suspect ’midst the tastemaker circuit, his 2001 debut among the guiltiest pleasures— his fifth and most recent release promised the long awaited rewards for a decade’s ever wavering faith that the captivating, melodically blessed, all-but-hopelessly banal troubadour would at last fulfill the all but unlimited songwriting potential suggested from that first batch of tunes. With no less than Frank Black helming production and cleaving Yorn’s most searing and complex popcraft of saccharine tendencies, the self-titled and artfully shabby disk (held back more than a year so Yorn could indulge Scarlett Johansson’s Serge Gainsbourg fantasies through vanity duet project and tour) all but guaranteed some trace of musical or emotional development. Or so one would think: Opener Ben Kweller’s dedicated his career toward interminably evoking the most embarrassing phase of adolescence, and, however limited pubescence is as a muse, he still seems the relatively mature artist. JAY HORTON. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 9 pm. $23 advance, $26 day of show. All ages.
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Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
MONDAY, APRIL 4 Ron Sexsmith, Caitlin Rose
[FOLK BOB ROCK] Ron Sexsmith is what you’d call a songwriter’s songwriter, as evidenced recently by other artists’ awed reception of his songs on Elvis Costello’s Spectacle and PBS’s Legends & Lyrics. Unfortunately, none of his nine albums has made him what you’d call a record-buyer’s songwriter, hampered by production by the likes of Mitchell Froom and Steve Earle that failed to match the creativity and complexity of his melodies and words. Thankfully for true believers, his recent release, Long Player Late Bloomer, finally satisfies, due to an unlikely collaboration with Metallica and Mötley Crüe producer Bob Rock. Featuring Beach Boyish harmonies, Beatlesque touches (McCartney has long been one of Sexsmith’s melodic idols), hints of honky-tonk and ’70s pop, this is an album that could finally invite the previously unconverted to come in and listen. JEFF ROSENBERG. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $12. 21+.
TUESDAY, APRIL 5 Henry Rollins
[RV PARTY] There was a notably muted response when the grand old man of hardcore strode past the half-century mark late last month—Henry Rollins outpacing Sid Vicious and Darby Crash combined with calendar enough to spare the entirety of his essential, transformative, Brando-in-Streetcar tenure with Black Flag—but, then, he does little more nowadays than rage against the dying of the light. Outsized emotive trademarks inevitably fall to shtick, and, for all the intrinsic flaws bleeding through this most baffling of second acts (imagine a motivational speech about nuance), Rollins’ spokenword routine somehow separates the legend and the cartoon while extending his guiding ideology to the logical conclusion: profit. Even as the angriest of young frontmen, embracing a thrombotic and uncomplicated aggression, Rollins preached transcendence through DIY labors alone, and, it seems this century, a reputation for artlessness, work ethic and riot mongering equals media empire. JAY HORTON. Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., 719-6055. 8 pm. SOLD OUT. 21+.
The Dodos, Reading Rainbow
See music feature, page 27. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $15. 21+.
DUMPSTA PHUNK
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july 6th • cuthbert AmphitheAter • 7pm • All Ages
April 15th • roselAnd • 8:30pm • All Ages
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Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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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 27 For more listings, check out wweek.com/music_calendar
Wed. March 30 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Abigail Washburn
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. En Francais, De Temps Antan, Padam Padam
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. Faithless Saints, Secnd Best
Backspace
2201 N Killingsworth St. Beaterville Pickin’ Party with Matt Pearlman and Guests
Beauty Bar
111 SW Ash St. Baby Ketten Karaoke
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St. Little Sue
Anton Emery
County Cork Public House 1329 NE Fremont St. H. Araki, K. Claire, M. Rotchford
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Jedi Mindf*ck, Steel Tigers of Death
Doug Fir Lounge
Branx
Duff’s Garage
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Buffalo Bandstand
Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave.
2126 SW Halsey St. The Radical Revolution
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Gabby Holt, Monkey Puzzle
830 E Burnside St. Sharon Van Etten, Little Scream, Sonny Pete
320 SE 2nd Ave. Wretched, Son of Aurelius, Last Chance to Reason, Ocean of Mirrors, Southgate, Dusks Embrace
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
Mississippi Pizza
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Arabsque Bellydance
Old Flames (9 pm); Mike Midlo, The Schook Twins (6 pm)
1635 SE 7th Ave. Suburban Slim’s Blues Jam (9:30 pm), Chris Olson’s High Flyers (6 pm)
Ella Street Social Club
714 SW 20th Place A Season of Tanagers, The Suitcase Junket, Matt Boney
Good Neighbor Pizzeria
800 NE Dekum St. Open Mic
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Asher Fulero’s Dot.organ
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. White Fang, Mean Jeans, BOOM!, Therapists, DJ E*Rock
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Mel Brown Quartet
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Danny O’Hanlon
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St.
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Milagres, The Seedy Seeds, Wild Ones
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. The Student Loan, Left Coast Country, World’s Finest
Mudai
801 NE Broadway Vox Populi Karaoke
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Lost Creek
Music Millennium
Billy Kennedy
Press Club
2621 SE Clinton St. Swing Papillon
Pub at the End of the Universe
4107 SE 28th Ave. Music on Mars Showcase: Fanno Creek, Folk and Spoon, Kent Smith
Southeast Engine, Riviera, Drunken Prayer
Thirsty Lion
1036 NE Alberta St. Gold Dusk with Chris Bigley, Chervona
Tonic Lounge
Andina
71 SW 2nd Ave. Merrill Lite 3100 NE Sandy Blvd. The Weekly Recurring Humor Night: Whitney Streed
225 SW Ash St. The Alphabetically, The Neverdowells, Moisture Farm
Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery
Vie de Boheme
Backspace
Rotture
Vino Vixens Wine Shop & Bar
Beaterville Cafe
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Open Mic with Mr. Plow
206 SW Morrison St. Luv Tap
315 SE 3rd Ave. Jumping Sharks, Power of County, White Indian, Freddy Trujillo
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave. Karaoke
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Barbara Lusch 1530 SE 7th Ave. LaRhonda Steele, The Rob Scheps Big Band
2929 SE Powell Blvd. 6bq9
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Midlo, Mike Coykendall, Evan Way
Thur. March 31
O’Connor’s Vault
The Know
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Zoe Keating
The Woods
3000 NE Alberta St. Old Town Bohemian Cabaret: Shanghai Spectacular
2314 SE Division St.
Ash Street Saloon
Tony Starlight’s
3158 E Burnside St. Southeast Engine
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
1314 NW Glisan St. Na Mesa
Red Room
426 SW Washington St. The Mustaches, Voodoun Moi
7850 SW Capitol Highway Kit Garoutte on guitar
Alberta Street Public House
2026 NE Alberta St. Green Noise Records Night: The Prids, Crypt of the Grave, DJ Ken Dirtnap 6637 SE Milwaukie Ave.
Aladdin Theater
Alberta Rose Theatre
115 NW 5th Ave. Monoplane, Hooker Pilot, Youth 2201 N Killingsworth St. Andre St. James
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St. Biddy’s Open Bluegrass Jam (9 pm); The Old Yellers (6 pm)
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Alan Jones Quintet
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Our Last Night, Attila, Arsonists Get All the Girls, Across the Sun, A Bullet for Pretty Boy, Armor for the Broken
cont. on page 38
adam k rue g er
115 NW 5th Ave. Towering Trees, Michael the Blind, Padraic Finbar Hagerty-Hammond
Beaterville Cafe
[March 30 - April 5]
birthday party: Henry Rollins performs at the Alberta Rose Theatre on Tuesday, April 5. Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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CALENDAR
PAU L WO L D
MUSIC
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. And And And, The Woolen Men, The Blast Majesty
Mock Crest Tavern 3435 N Lombard St. The Chancers
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd WSUP
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. The Quick and Easy Boys, Yogaman Burning Band
Mudai
801 NE Broadway Tiny Knives, Old Wars, The Happening
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Never Strangers
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
2314 SE Division St. Lynn Conover
Plan B
BLUES FOR THE SOUL: Seasick Steve plays Thursday, March 31, at the Wonder Ballroom. Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave. Evrim
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St. Talib Kweli, Fashawn, Animal Farm, T&E
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Japan Tsunami Benefit
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. O’Death, Helado Negro, Lee Corey Oswald
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Lucy Hammond Band
Ella Street Social Club
714 SW 20th Place Height With Friends, Hollywood Tans, Sun Mar
Fuel Cafe
1452 NE Alberta St. Ben Johnson
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Damien Erskine Project, Farko Collective
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave. Karaoke Kings
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
1503 SE 39th Ave. Savoir Faire Burlesque
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Mel Brown B3 Organ Group
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Danny O’Hanlon
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Billy Jack, Billy Kennedy, Jack Hofman, Tim Acott, Chris Hutton (9:30 pm); Lewi Longmire Band (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Jaime Leopold
McMenamins Grand Lodge 3505 Pacific Ave. Billy D
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Jumpin’ Sharks (9 pm); Lost Creek (6 pm)
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Franz Nicolay, David Dondero, Barton Carroll
Mock Crest Tavern 3435 N Lombard St. Aunt Martha
38
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd 7th Planet Picture Show
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Rose’s Pawn Shop, 4 On The Floor
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Lauren Sheehan
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
2314 SE Division St. Andrew Orr, Jen Howard
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Half the Battle, Ergot, Shane Stepper
Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery 206 SW Morrison St. Tony Smiley
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave. Helmet, Saint Vitus, Crowbar, Kylesa, Red Fang, Howl, Atlas Moth
Rotture
315 SE 3rd Ave. Pegasus Dream, Ryat, CC Swim, Nucular Aminals
Sellwood Public House 8132 SE 13th Ave. Open Mic Night
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
8635 N Lombard St. Back Porch Revival, Wendy and the Lost Boys
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Rallyway, Twisted Whistle, Lew Jones
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. STLS, Hungry Ghost, Neal Morgan, DJ Shawn Creeden
Thirsty Lion
71 SW 2nd Ave. Beth Willis
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. The Food, Pitchfork Motorway, Mollybolt
Tony Starlight’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Pete Petersen Septet
Twilight Café and Bar
1420 SE Powell Blvd. Rev O, After Nothings End, The Bumpin Nastys
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Garcia Birthday Band (9:30 pm); Will West and the Friendly Cover Up (5:30 pm)
Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. Seasick Steve, Hillstomp
FRI. APRIL 1 Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. The Refugees
Alberta Street Public House 1036 NE Alberta St. Mikey’s Irish Jam
Alberta Street Public House
1036 NE Alberta St. Renegade Minstrels, The Whiskey Sours
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Front Toward Enemy, Oden, Drowning Poseidon, Veio
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Wow & Flutter, Virgin Islands, Cafeteria Dance Fever
Bar Mestizo at Andina 1314 NW Glisan St. JB Butler
Bipartisan Cafe
7901 SE Stark St. Shicky Gnarowitz
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Eddie Martinez
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Salem, Dangerous Boys Club, The Soft Moon, Vice Device, DJ Nightschool
Brasserie Montmartre 626 SW Park Ave. Toni Lincoln Duo
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Jordan Harris, Tyler Stenson
Canvas Art Bar & Bistro
1800 NW Upshur St. Acoustic Open Mic with host Steve Huber
Clyde’s Prime Rib
5474 NE Sandy Blvd. Muthaship
Crystal Ballroom
Paris Slim, Barbara Healy, Jerry Zyback, Dave Kahl, Johnny Moore, DK Stewart (9:30 pm), Joy and her Sentimental Gentlemen (6 pm)
East Burn
1800 E Burnside St. Kinder Bison
East End
1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Katchafire, The Israelites
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Dom, Heavy Hawaii, Jeffrey Jerusalem, DJ Copy, New Dadz DJs
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Intervision
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Grafton Street
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Baby Gramps (9:30 pm); The James Low Western Front (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Mark Alan
McMenamins Grand Lodge 3505 Pacific Ave. Jack McMahon
McMenamins Hotel Oregon
310 Northeast Evans St. Jack Ruby Presents
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
Dante’s
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Jon Koonce and One More Mile
Doug Fir Lounge
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Kaia Wilson, Rebecca Gates
1332 W Burnside St. Dark Star Orchestra 350 W Burnside St. The Confidentials, Thin Man
Mississippi Pizza
830 E Burnside St. Jetpack Missing, Crown Point, Greenlander, Ruby Hill
Mississippi Pizza
Duff’s Garage
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Bitch, Youth
1635 SE 7th Ave.
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Jenny Sizzler
Mississippi Studios
1314 NW Glisan St. Toshi Onizuka Trio
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave. My Chemical Romance, Neon Trees, The Architects
8132 SE 13th Ave. Adrian Martin and Annani
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. F**K! The Variety Show
St. Johns Theater & Pub
8203 N Ivanhoe St. Michael Manning and the Carolina Pump Station
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Pete Krebs
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Pony Village, Paper Brain, Tourist
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. The Angry Orts, Symmetry/Symmetry
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Groove Caboose, Ethiopia, Matthew Hunter
Tony Starlight’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Neil Diamond Tribute
Twilight Café and Bar
1420 SE Powell Blvd. Brian DiJulio and the Love Jacks, Zero Gravity Circus, Chris Juhlin
Twilight Room
5242 N Lombard St. Klickitat
Vanport Square Studio 5229 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Suite 102 Kris Woolen
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. The Defendants, Radio Giants (9:30 pm); Reverb Brothers (5:30 pm)
SAT. APRIL 2 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. UO’s On the Rocks & Groove for Thought
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. Live Wire! Radio
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd This Not This
Ash Street Saloon
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Tapwater Film Release Party
Backspace
1305 SE 8th Ave. Ninja, Dark Country, Iron Tide, Feydakin
225 SW Ash St. In Repose, Chloraform, King Ghidora
Plan B
115 NW 5th Ave. The Routine, The Last Department, The Welcome Home, Dylan Jakobsen, Sunderland
Proper Eats Market and Cafe
Beauty Bar
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Taken Outside and Shot Twice, Chase the Shakes, The Bangovers, Final Offense, Toucan
111 SW Ash St. Girls Night Out
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Saloon Ensemble
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Ill Cosby, 31Avas, Ryan Organ, Monkeytek, Josh T
Brasserie Montmartre 626 SW Park Ave. Bobby Torres Trio
Dante’s
2530 NE 82nd Ave. The Ascendents, Town and the Writ, The Jim Jams, Child Children, The Mermaid Problem
8635 N Lombard St. Jackbone Dixie
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
Mt. Tabor Theater
Red Room
Ford Food and Drink
625 NW 21st Ave. Karaoke
Andina
1036 NE Alberta St. Raina Rose, Ayurevda
Clyde’s Prime Rib
Sellwood Public House
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
1305 SE 8th Ave. Lazy Son, Ghastly Wave, Boyscout Discovery
203 SE Grand Ave. Welcome Home Walker, Biters, Booze, Lordy Lords 2505 SE 11th Rollie Tussing
Alberta Street Public House
5474 NE Sandy Blvd. Cool Breeze 350 W Burnside St. Starlets From Around the World: Ellie Darling Burlesque
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Weinland, Quiet Life, Ravenna Woods, mbilly
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. The Buckles, Delta Sisters
East Burn
1800 E Burnside St. Swing Papillon
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Fareed Haque’s Math Games, Pocket
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave. Karaoke
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Travie McCoy, Donnis, Black Cards, XV, Bad Rabbits
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Linda Hornbuckle Band
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Grafton Street
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Ridgerunner Summit: Jim Boyer, Lynn Conover & Billy Kennedy Band (9:30 pm); Tree Frogs (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Laura Ivancie
McMenamins Grand Lodge 3505 Pacific Ave. Lewis Childs
McMenamins Hotel Oregon
310 Northeast Evans St. Billy D
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Sweetjuice
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. A Simple Colony, Lara Michell, Miss Michael Jodell (9 pm); Key of Dreams, Hilst and Coffey (6 pm)
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Band of Heathens, The Tumblers, The Beautiful Train Wrecks
Mock Crest Tavern 3435 N Lombard St. Donna and the Side Effects
8638 N Lombard St. De La Warr
Red Room
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave. A Day to Remember, Bring Me the Horizon, Pierce the Veil, We Came as Romans
Savoy Tavern & Lounge 2500 SE Clinton St. Zach Zaitlin, The Local Strangers
Sellwood Public House 8132 SE 13th Ave. The Oh My Mys
Slabtown
1033 NW 16th Ave. The Satin Chaps, Les Étrangers, Wave Sauce, DJ Drew Groove
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. Dye Hippie Dye, Honeysuckers
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. Peelander-Z, Anamanaguchi, Lee Corey Oswald, Girlfriends
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Mary Kadderly, Dan Gildea, Bill Athens
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Boy & Bean, AnnaPaul & the Bearded Lady
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. Blood of Martyrs, Rolling Through the Universe, Evangelist, Phalgeron
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Zodiac Death Valley, New Mexican Revolution, The Small Arms, The Punctuals
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Danny Romero
Ash Street Saloon 225 SW Ash St. The Independents
Bar Mestizo at Andina 1314 NW Glisan St. Danny Romero
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Gary Harris Quartet
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Sinferno Cabaret, Witchburn, Antique Scream
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. British Sea Power, A Classic Education
Ella Street Social Club 714 SW 20th Place Tango Alpha Tango, Symmetry/Symmetry, Violet Isle
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Lenka, Greg Laswell, Christina Cano
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Irish Sundays with Dann O’Hanlon
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Billy Kennedy, Tim Acott (9:30 pm); Freak Mountain Ramblers (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Crown Point
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Elizabeth Nicholson and Bob Soper
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. D. Rives Curtright, Duncan Ros (9 pm); River Twain (6 pm)
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Archers, Sun Angle, The Golden Hours
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Irish
NEPO 42
5403 NE 42nd Ave. Open Mic with Fred Stephenson
Plan B
Tony Starlight’s
1305 SE 8th Ave. Hive: DJ Owen, Guests Bands
Tualatin Heritage Center
Star Bar
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. 3 Leg Torso
8700 SW Sweek Drive Kathy Boyd and Phoenix Rising, Brian Oberlin
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd. The Silent Numbers, Bryan Minus & the Disconnect, Red Ships of Spain
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Ian James, Allen Stone (9:30 pm); The Sudent Loan (4:30 pm)
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. Beats Antique, Eskmo
SUN. APRIL 3 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Madeleine Peyroux, Sunny War
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. The Bobs, Strangers in Harmony
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Tupai Spring Performance Series 2011: Duo Con Brio, Quartet Giocosso
639 SE Morrison St. Karaoke That Doesn’t Suck
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Local Music Video Showcase
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. What Hearts, Michael Hurley, On the Stairs
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Super Sonic Tonic Sunday: Burning Yellows, Hornet Leg, Forever
Tupai at Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Duo Con Brio
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Open Mic/Songwriters Showcase
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. Pete Yorn, Ben Kweller, The Wellspring
MON. APRIL 4
CALENDAR Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. Benefit for Jim Bull: Jerry Joseph, The Jackmormons, Mexican Gunfight, Freak Mountain Ramblers, Fernando, Bart Ferguson Band, Caleb Klauder, Lewi Longmire Band, Hillstomp, Little Sue, Parson Red Heads
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. The Damned Things, Hourcast, Rogue Shot, Dirtnap
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Blood Beach, Sexhair, Pleassure
Jimmy Mak’s
1314 NW Glisan St. Scott Head
221 NW 10th Ave. Terry Robb Electric Band
Ash Street Saloon
Kells
Andina
225 SW Ash St. Open Mic
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Battery Powered Music
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Renato Caranto’s Funk Band
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Karaoke From Hell
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Ron Sexsmith, Caitlin Rose
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Lily Wilde Orchestra (8 pm), James Sasser Band (6 pm)
East End
203 SE Grand Ave. The Gears, Chemicals, Confessions, Poop, Iron Lords
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Sonic Forum Open Mic Night
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
112 SW 2nd Ave. Tom May
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Kung Pao Chickens (9 pm); Little Sue, Lynn Conover (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Skip vonKuske
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Bob Shoemaker
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Tommy & the High Pilots, Keaton Collective, Otis Heat
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Keegan Smith & The Fam
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Lloyd Jones
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St. Ron Sexsmith, Caitlin Rose
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. Flamenco: La Magdalena of New York, Diana Bright, Greg Wolfe, Kethrin Lases
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Free Monday: The Roaming, The Godstoppers, Five 0
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd. SIN Night
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St. NIAYH Family Residency: Worth from NIAYH, Nuestro, Bitterroot
TUES. APRIL 5 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Dave Alvin, Chris Smither, Peter Case
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. Henry Rollins
Alberta Street Public House 1036 NE Alberta St. VJ NIghtflight
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Neftali Rivera
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Mixed Social Every Tuesday: Item 9, The Closet Monsters, Gloomsday
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Open Mic Night Hosted by Scott Gallegos
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St.
The Ed Forman Show, DSL Open Mic Comedy
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. The Dodos, Reading Rainbow
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Dover Weinberg Quartet (9 pm), Trio Bravo (6 pm)
Ella Street Social Club
714 SW 20th Place Peninsulas, Fort King, Ruthann Friedman, Purrbot
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Scott PembertonTrio
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. Rock Band Tuesdays: MC Destructo
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave. Open Mic
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Mel Brown Septet (8 pm), Laura Cunard Trio (6:30 pm)
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Tom May
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Jackstraw
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Caleb Klauder
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Open Bluegrass Jam
Mission Theater
1624 NW Glisan St.
MUSIC
Notes From the Underground: The Kora Band
80’s Video Dance Attack - Featuring VJ Kittyrox
Mississippi Pizza
Fez Ballroom
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Baby Ketten Karaoke (9 pm); Bridge Creek (6 pm)
Mock Crest Tavern
3435 N Lombard St. Johnnie Ward & Eagle Ridin Papas
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. The Family Funktion featuring Average Leftovers
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
316 SW 11th Ave. Twice As Nice
WED. MARCH 30 Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. Tronix: Mixed Signals with Popcorn
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. DJ DirtyNick
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Overcol, DJ Sean Moder
2314 SE Division St. Paul Brainard’s Fun Machine
The Crown Room
Plan B
Tiga
1305 SE 8th Ave. Feral Drollery, Diabolik Switches, Severed Halo
Rotture
315 SE 3rd Ave. David Hillyard and the Rocksteady 7, The Israelites, Mattie Valentine, Chad Walters
Tony Starlight’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Craig Bidondo and Friends
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd. Open Mic Night Featuring House Band: The Roaming
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St. Kory Quinn
205 NW 4th Ave. Crush Drum and Bass 1465 NE Prescott St. Gentleman Matthew Yake
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. Plaid Dudes with DJ “Chains” Crumley and Kid Midnight
THU. MARCH 31
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave. Line Dancing with DJ Glenn
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Funthousand
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ Family Jewels
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. TLC Country Night with Josh and Mike
FRI. APRIL 1 Fez Ballroom
316 SW 11th Ave. Decadent 80s
Goodfoot Lounge 2845 SE Stark St. DJ Magneto
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. DJ Magic Beans
Mississippi Studios
111 SW Ash St. DJ Sad Panda
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Video Finder Fridays: Eye Candy VJs
Fez Ballroom
Star Bar
Beauty Bar
316 SW 11th Ave. Shadowplay with DJ Horrid, DJ Ghoulunatic, DJ Paradox
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Sorted: Kid Hops, Lincolnup, Ben Tactic
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. The Fix: Rev. Shines, Kez, Dundiggy
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Paultimore
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. In The Cooky Jar with DJ Cooky Parker
SAT. APRIL 2 Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St.
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Booty Bassment: Ryan &amp; Dimitri, Maxx Bass
Rotture
315 SE 3rd Ave. Andaz: DJ Anjali &amp; the Incredible Kid
SUN. APRIL 3 Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. Black Sunday: DJ Nate C
Matador
1967 W Burnside St DJ Donny Don’t
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. DJ Flowers, DJ Dungeonmaster
MON. APRIL 4 Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. Service Industrial: DJ Tibin
TUES. APRIL 5 Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ JD Star
The Crown Room
205 NW 4th Ave. See You Next Tuesday: A Weekly Dubstep Party with Kellan, Avery
Yes and No
20 NW 3rd Ave. DJ Black Dog
Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
39
Photo by Russell Young
JUST HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO FOR LOVE?
BOOMCRACKLEFLY
A quirky new play by Charise Castro Smith Onstage through April 16, 2011
503-236-7253 milagro.org
Sponsored by Josie Mendoza & Hugh Mackworth, and The Boeing Company
$29.95 $19.45
box 200 smokes box 100 smokes
Menthol and specialty tubes extra
3738 NE Sandy Blvd Inside Hollywood Liquor (503) 284-0987 www.hollywoodsmokes.net
40
Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
PERFORMANCE
MARCH 30-APRIL 5
= 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
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. BEN WATERHOUSE. The Back Door Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 481-2960. 8 pm ThursdaysSundays. No show March 6. Closes April 9. $10-$15.
Bikini Creature Beach Feature
A rock-revue satire of vintage crap cinema, featuring a rampaging gorilla, a dune-buggy-riding pregnant wiccan, a sea monster and a lot of bikinis. Bossanova Ballroom, 722 E Burnside St., bossanovaballroom.com. 8 pm Thursday-Sunday, March 31-April 3. $12-$15. 21+.
Billy Elliot the Musical
Elton John and Lee Hall’s stage adaptation of the 2000 film about a boy who yearns to dance received gushing praise from every critic in New York and London, along with 15 Tony nominations (10 of which it won). It’s got giant dance numbers, cute kids, singing bobbies, a progressive social stance and even a little bit of flying. How have you not already ordered tickets? Get a move on! Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St., 241-1802. 7:30 pm Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 pm Sundays through April 17. $29.50-$90.
Boomcracklefly
[NEW REVIEW] Bravo to Miracle Theatre Group for producing the world premiere of this bizarre comedy. Really, I mean it—the theater is boring when directors don’t take risks, and this one is as risky as they come. Unwatchable, really. Playwright Charise Castro Smith is an accomplished actor, and this is her second play, but the work makes no kind of sense. The story involves twin acrobats, a man who builds wings to escape Havana, a cross-dressing prostitute with an imaginary grandmother, the ghost of Ernest Hemingway, a male pregnancy, the Hindu deity Shiva, a woman who grows butterfly wings, multiple apocalypses and too many scene changes. The characters’ motivations are opaque, the plot’s internal logic inscrutable and the language so dependent on clichés that I have trouble believing Castro Smith ever read it aloud. There is a lot of imagination on display here, but the script is dreamlike in the worst way—these are the restless dreams that come from downing too much cheese and Campari before bed. Director Olga Sanchez has evidently done much to force the visual flow of the play to make sense, but most of the performers, when confronted with a nonsensical line, try to force it into sense by saying it louder. Boomcracklefly is a jarring, unpleasant experience—but at least it isn’t predictable. BEN WATERHOUSE. Miracle Theatre, 525 SE Stark St., 236-7253. 7:30 pm Thursdays, 8 pm FridaysSaturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes April 16. $14-$25.
The Cocktail Hour
Portland Civic Theatre Guild reads A.R. Gurney’s play about a playwright presenting his wealthy family with the play he wrote about them. Meow! The Old Church, 1422 SW 11th Ave., 222-2031. 10 am Tuesday, April 5. $6.
Frankenstein
For the latest installment of its National Theatre Live series, Third Rail presents a screening of a new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, written by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle, starring Benedict Cumberbatch (of the BBC series Sherlock) and Jonny Lee Miller (Eli Stone) as the doctor and the monster (they swap roles nightly) and featuring some really terrifying makeup. A thousand times yes! World Trade Center Theater, 121 SW Salmon St., 235-1101. 2 and 7 pm SaturdaySunday, April 2-3. $15-$20.
Go, Dog. Go!
Northwest Children’s Theatre reprises its musical based on the book by P.D. Eastman. NW Neighborhood Cultural Center, 1819 NW Everett St., 222-4480. Noon and 3 pm March 19-20, 22-27 and April 2-3; 7 pm Friday, April 1. $13-$18.
Jack Goes Boating
Jack, a middle-aged New York limo driver with ambitions of driving for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, is a stoner with his hair twisted into halfhearted nascent dreads, who plays the Melodians’ “Rivers of Babylon” so often that the cassette has stretched and the music warbles ominously. As played by Todd Van Voris in Artists Rep’s production of this romantic comedy by Bob Glaudini (directed by Allen Nause), he comes across as a genuinely nice guy, whom you’d be happy to have haul your rich self around. When Jack is introduced to Connie (Emily Sahler Beleele), a morbid and mousy co-worker of his best friend’s wife, he begins a hesitant and clumsy courtship. Connie wants to go boating, so he learns to swim. She’d like to be cooked for, so he obsessively braises and chops. Their relationship’s slow blossoming is charming, but less riveting to watch than the troubled marriage of his best friend and fellow driver, Clyde (John San Nicolas), and his wife, Lucy (Tai Simmons). Clyde and Lucy are aspirational types, striving to obtain better coffee and better weed, as impassioned in their marriage as in their trespasses. Their exertion in their work and tendency to inflict cruelty on one another feels truer than Jack’s fumbling romance, and their persistence in the face of repeated mutual betrayal is as convincing a defense of the value of marriage as any I’ve seen. San Nicolas and Simmons convey roiling discord, absentminded intimacy and reckless affection—and what more is married life about? BEN WATERHOUSE. Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison St., 241-1278. 7:30 pm TuesdaysSaturdays, 2 and 7:30 pm Sundays. 11 am Wednesday, April 6. Closes April 15. $20-$42.
Urban Tellers
Lawrence Howard and Lynne Duddy coached a group of Portlanders in solo performance and self-discovery. Those eight will share their stories at this event. Hipbone Studio, 1847 E Burnside St., reservations@portlandstorytheater. com. 8 pm Friday, April 1. $10.
You Don’t Know Jack
This devised physical theater piece from San Francisco avant-gardists the Carpetbag Brigade is all about Jack the Giant-Killer, he of the magic beans and swift ax. In this take on the tale, Jack is the traumatized child of an alcoholic veteran, who plunges into an inner fantasy world in hopes of understanding his bizarre reality. Yeah, I’m not sure what that means either, but
you can bet the show will be visually rich and at least a little unsettling. The Headwaters, 55 NE Farragut St., No. 9, brownpapertickets.com. 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays. Closes April 9. $12-$18.
COMEDY April’s Fool
Musical theater singer Kris Woolen celebrates her birthday with a variety show. Vanport Square Studio, 5229 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Suite 102, 374-746-0743. 8 pm Friday, April 1. $10.
all on the theme of April foolery. First Presbyterian Church, 1200 SW Alder St., 228-7331. 2 pm Sunday, April 3. $10-$12.
Cappella Romana
One of the Northwest’s finest vocal ensembles marks its 20th anniversary with a performance of contemporary composer Ivan Moody’s haunting 1998
setting of one of the central works of Eastern Christianity: The Akathistos Hymn to the Virgin. By turns serene and stirring, and combining Greek and Russian musical elements, it was written especially for the Portland chorus. St. Mary’s Cathedral , 1716 NW Davis St., 223-1217. 8 pm Saturday, April 2. $18-$36.
CONT. on page 42
PREVIEW
Broditarianism
Every Saturday evening, the Brody crew improvise a religion, which they promise will be “at least as plausible as Scientology.” Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 10 pm Saturdays. Closes April 9. $8.
California Calling
Wax frontman, record-label owner and radio host Joe Sib performs his solo show about growing up in Southern California and finding salvation in punk rock. Helium Comedy Club, 1510 SE 9th Ave., 888-643-8669. 8 pm Wednesday, March 30. $10-$15. 21+.
Comedy Night at the Bagdad
Mark Saltveit headlines. Bagdad Theater & Pub, 3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 236-9234. 8 pm Friday, April 1. $5. 21+.
Curious Standup Showcase
Comedy by Ian Karmel and Gabe Dinger. Curious Comedy, 5225 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., curiouscomedy. org. 10 pm Saturday, April 2. $5.
Hilarious at the Hawthorne
Kristi Lovato hosts comedians Carmen Trineece, Kevin Clarke Strauser, Zach Cole, Jason Cramer, Belinda Carroll and Justin Lentz. Hawthorne Theatre Lounge, 1503 SE 39th Ave., 233-7100. 8 pm Saturday, April 2. $5. 21+.
The Uninvited
The Unscriptables improvise a Tennessee Williams-esque family drama—with zombies. Because, like bacon, you can never have too many zombies. The Unscriptables Studio, 1121 N Loring St., theunscriptables.com. 8 pm Saturdays through April 30. “Pay what you want.”
Two for the Show
A series of improv duets. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 8 pm Saturdays. Closes April 9. $7-$10.
UCB Tourco
The touring branch of Upright Citizens Brigade—the comedy troupe that launched the careers of Amy Poehler, Rob Corddry, Ed Helms, etc.—hits town for one night at Curious Comedy. Tonight’s Thursday-night entertainment could be tomorrow’s Daily Show regulars! Curious Comedy, 5225 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., curiouscomedy.org. 9 pm Thursday, March 31. $15.
CLASSICAL Altenberg Trio
Friends of Chamber Music brings the superb Viennese piano-violin-cello threesome for two programs. Monday’s concert features two of Haydn’s sparkling trios, numbers 12 and 23, Ravel’s gorgeous A minor Trio and Chausson’s Trio in G minor. Romantic music fans might prefer Tuesday’s program of Beethoven, Brahms and Frank Martin. Lincoln Hall, Portland State University, 1620 SW Park Ave., 224-9842. 7:30 pm Monday-Tuesday, April 4-5. $27-$40.
Liz Bacon and Jon Stuber
In this latest in the always entertaining Celebration Works series, the Julians singer and veteran pianist/organist are joined by guest singers from Portland Opera, former Oregonian scribe Margie Boulé, various guests on trumpet, keyboards, bass, and even dancers for a cabaret-style performance of jazz, musical theater, classical, opera and pop songs, standards and otherwise,
MAURICE RAVEL
“THE SPANISH HOUR” AND “THE BEWITCHED CHILD” (PORTLAND OPERA) Maurice Ravel was a childless French bachelor whose greatest inspirations were, paradoxically, children and Spain. The innovative composer’s affection for the former is evident in his magical “Mother Goose,” written for two young pianists and later orchestrated into some of the most enchanting music of the 20th century. His love for the latter derived from his Spanish mother’s Basque heritage—she used to sing him Spanish folk songs. Ravel’s two unlikely amours converge this month when Portland Opera stages both of his fabulous one-act operas, “The Spanish Hour” and “The Bewitched Child.” For the latter’s libretto, the great and notorious novelist Colette contrived a charming morality tale that would entertain her 3-year-old daughter. Ravel, who loved telling kids fantastic stories as much as he loved cats, includes a feline duet along with wallpaper that comes to life, a singing fire, talking trees and an animated easy chair—enough proto-psychedelic imagery to entertain Lewis Carroll, Ken Kesey and Terry Gilliam. “It was important that we not literally depict each character who plays a teacup or grandfather clock,” says Portland Opera general director Christopher Mattaliano. “Once you do realistic, you’ve left the audience’s imagination out.” Children wouldn’t be an appropriate audience for the other opera on the bill, one of the dirtiest and funniest in the repertoire. Premiered in Paris almost exactly a century ago and based on a satirically salacious 1904 play by Franc-Nohain, “The Spanish Hour” is a sex farce in which a bored, frisky housewife slips in a little—actually, a lot of—action on the side when her clockmaker husband is away. The unusual double bill is the Opera’s only “stretch” opera in a year when recession forced it to cut back on offbeat productions in favor of sure-bet standard fare. “I honor traditions, but I’m also very concerned about Portland Opera not getting stuck, as a number of regional companies do, recycling the same 10 or 15 standards,” says Mattaliano, who also directs both productions. Less familiar repertoire and the company’s young studio artists have in recent years proved to be far more fascinating than the warhorses that rule at the Opera’s over-capacious regular home, Keller Auditorium, which Mattaliano terms “a barn that’s not appropriate” for intimately scaled operas like Ravel’s or Mozart’s. “I think this series we do every spring at the Newmark Theatre is immensely popular because there’s a significant part of the Portland community that loves more adventurous works,” he says. “And the intimacy of the Newmark lets you get so close to the singers that it has more impact.” That may explain why all four shows sold out early, and the company added a fifth, which at press time had only a few seats available. Like Ravel, Portland’s venturesome music fans seem ready to embrace the unexpected. BRETT CAMPBELL.
The Opera breaks out with two less-performed one-acts.
SEE IT: Newmark Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, 241-1802, portlandopera. org. 7:30 pm April 1, 5, 7 and 9; 2 pm April 3. $75. Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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PERFORMANCE
MARCH 30-APRIL 5
MICHAEL BROSILOW
through in No Comment, an athletic, occasionally acrobatic ensemble piece with slides, torques, big jumps and sudden drops. It’s one of three pieces that LDP will perform during its West Coast debut at White Bird. The other two are Modern Feeling, a duet crafted from contact improv, hip-hop, breakdancing, martial arts and acrobatics; and Are You Happy to See Me?, a sextet that satirizes social conventions. Lincoln Hall, Portland State University, 1620 SW Park Ave., 242-1419. 8 pm ThursdaySaturday, March 31-April 2. $18-$28, info and tickets at whitebird.org.
New Dance Wear + Shoes
Marylhurst Art Gym Dance Exhibits
GIUSEPPE BAUSILIO IN BILLY ELLIOT
Just In Time For Spring Downtown 300 SW 12th Ave
The Kora Band
Now Featuring
Omnipresent local jazz pianist Andrew Oliver’s splendid Africaninfluenced outfit, featuring the 21-stringed West African harp played by Kane Mathis, is the latest entry in the excellent monthly series led by another terrific local jazz pianist, Ben Darwish. With a film featuring Youssou N’Dour & Friends during intermission. Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 223-4527. 8:30 pm Tuesday, April 5. $7. 21+.
Madeleine Peyroux
The affecting jazz-blues chanteuse has transcended her early Billie Holiday infatuation to offer deeper views of songs by contemporary songwriters (Dylan, Elliott Smith, Joe Henry, Walter Becker et al.) as well as torch songs and originals. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 234-9694. 8 pm Sunday, April 3. $38.50-$41.
Oregon Symphony, Classical Mystery Tour
First Motown, now the Fab Four. The classical pops concert is definitely targeting the boomer demographic these days. The orchestra joins a quartet of impostors (two from the Broadway show Beatlemania, one from the cover band Liverpool and one who’s actually English) in many of the lads’ hits, including one of those dreaded medleys—but, strangely, “Hey Jude” (which did use an orchestra) isn’t listed on the program. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 228-1353. 7:30 pm Saturday, 3 pm Sunday, April 2-3. $20-$90.
Starlight Symphony Orchestra
When conductor Allan Halbert heard that the late Portland composer Dent Mowrey’s (1889-1960) scores had gone to the county library, he checked them out and prepared actual performing editions. This concert, in the building where Mowrey had his music studio, presents the local 20th-century composer and teacher’s compositions, many of them not played in decades, including works for orchestra, band, winds, strings and women’s choir. Pacific Building, 520 SW Yamhill St., 541-386-6400. 7 pm Saturday, April 2. $7-$14; 12 and under free.
Three Leg Torso
The world-music ensemble plays selections from last year’s excellent Animals & Cannibals CD. Tony Starlight’s, 3728 NE Sandy Blvd., 517-8584. 8 pm Saturday, April 2. $10.
William Kanengiser
One of the finest classical guitarists alive, the Grammy-winning Los Angeles Guitar Quartet member
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Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
will play solo works and, abetted by the PSU Guitar Orchestra, a major ensemble piece, Concierto de Los Angeles, written for him by Shingo Fujii. First Congregational Church, 1126 SW Park Ave., 654-0082. 8 pm Saturday, April 2. $30-$49.
DANCE Carpetbag Brigade Physical Theater
The San Francisco-based company, which comes to Portland as part of a Headwaters residency, is known for employing stilts, physical theater, modern dance, circus, butoh and contact improv in its productions. Ensemble member Christopher Mankowski’s work-inprogress 5 Dances From Japan takes place 7:30 pm Monday, March 21 (a $5 to $15 donation is suggested). The Headwaters, 55 NE Farragut St., No. 9. 8 pm ThursdaySaturday, March 31-April 2 and April 7-9. $12-$18.
Columbia Dance
If Swan Lake in total seems like too much (if you are accompanied by children, say), the Spring Gala 2011 by Vancouver’s Columbia Dance might be the show for you. Columbia’s students and company members will dance excerpts from the ballet, choreographed by artistic director Jan Hurst in the style of original choreographers Petipa and Ivanov. Also on the bill: five new works choreographed by Hurst, plus one by alum Eowyn Barrett, built from classical and contemporary ballet, modern and jazz dance. Royal Durst Theatre, Vancouver School of Art and Academics, 3103 Main St., Vancouver, 360-737-1922. 2 and 7 pm Saturday, April 2; 2 pm Sunday, April 3. $10-$15.
Dance Collaborations
Dance Collaborations showcases homegrown talent in a concert featuring performances by pre-professional dance companies and schools alongside professional dancers and companies including Polaris Dance Company, Annapurna Dance Company, Dance West, Classical Ballet Academy, Legacy Dance Company and others. Scottish Rite Center, 1512 SW Morrison St., 332-2714. 7 pm Saturday, April 2. $15-$17.
Laboratory Dance Project
Hip-hop may have started out in the States, but it quickly became an international phenomenon (check out the dance documentary Planet B-Boy to get a sense of its reach). South Korea’s Laboratory Dance Project is a 10-year-old contemporary company whose dancers and choreographers came from Seoul’s Korean National University of Arts, but its hip-hop influences shine
If you’ve ever left a dance performance wondering “What was that all about?” you now have an excellent opportunity to find out. The Marylhurst Art Gym is opening two exhibits that not only offer a window into the creative process but document Portland’s contemporary dance history as well. The exhibit Dance: Before, After, During will include materials, documentation and performances by local choreographers Linda K. Johnson, Linda Austin, Tahni Holt and Susan Banyas. Past Moves: Selected Archival Footage of Portland Dance Performances in the 1970s and 1980s documents the Portland Dance Theater, which, although it disbanded in the late ’70s, lived on through its members— among them Judy Patton, Gregg Bielemeier and Bonnie Merrill—who went on to choreograph and teach subsequent generations. Patton, a PSU professor, has digitized footage from those days, which should be a revelation to those of us who arrived after the fact. An April 3 opening reception for both exhibits will feature performances of new work by Johnson (3:15 pm), Austin (4 pm) and Holt (4:45 pm). Banyas will perform April 30 and May 14. A gallery talk with choreographers from both exhibitions will be held at noon Thursday, April 28. Marylhurst University, 17600 Highway 43, 699-1814. Opening reception 3-6 pm Sunday, April 3. Free.
Re/Activate
If you time it just right, you can witness a collaborative art project evolve during the month of March. Called Re/Activate, it pairs dance created by Rumpus Room cofounder Rachel Tess with a live abstract composition by composer Thomas Thorson and a sensory environment that Damien Gilley and Jordan Tull have made from mostly raw building materials. Tess is making movement steeped in ritual, repetition and confinement, with room for improv based on her changing surroundings. Designer Rachelle Waldie costumes the piece and lighting designer Jennifer Lin illuminates it. Collaborators will offer informal showings of the piece at the outset (on First Thursday) and midway through, followed by final performances at the end of the month. Wieden & Kennedy Building, 224 NW 13th Ave., 729-5364. 6 pm Thursday, March 3; 7:30 pm Thursday, March 17; 7:30 pm Wednesday-Thursday March 30-31. First two performances are free; final performances are $25 or two for $40. Seating is limited; make reservations at 729-5364.
Salon L’Orient
The latest installment of the bimonthly cabaret is themed “Rites of Spring.” Rachel Brice, a former member of the touring Bellydance Superstars, is a special guest on this bill, which also features performances by fusion troupe Nagamani, the Deviant Dance Company, East Indian Odissi/fusion dancer Yogini, Bellydance Uncorked producer Elise Morris and series founder Nagasita. The Portland Cello Project’s Ashia Grzesik provides the live music and Noah Mickens of Wanderlust Circus hosts. Fez Ballroom, 316 SW 11th Ave., 221-7262. 8 pm Sunday, April 3. $15-$20.
For more Performance listings, visit
VISUAL ARTS
MARCH 30-APRIL 5
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
M AT T C O S B Y
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: 2431115. Emailed press releases must be backed up by a faxed or printed copy.
“We’ve tried print advertising in the past, with very disappointing results. We gave Willamette Week a shot and were impressed with the results. The phones started ringing and the doors opened for several new first time homebuyers. We found that WW is very effective at hitting our target demographic – we are thankful for the response, especially in this difficult market. As we prepare to launch our second phase of green built affordable homes Willamette Week is at the top of our list for print advertising.” Thanks,
John Miller Executive Director HOST Development, Inc. 503.331.1752 www.hostdevelopment.com
MANE BY MATT COSBY AT AUGEN GALLERY
SPECIAL EVENT Twenty Seven Installations
The ambitious fledgling contemporary art center Yu pairs with Portland’s Dill Pickle Club and Publication Studio to host a book and panel discussion, Twenty Seven Installations, as part of the PDX Reprint series. The book and panel both address a pivotal institution in Portland’s visual-arts history: the Portland Center for the Visual Arts (1972-1987). PCVA installations and exhibitions included internationally renowned artists such as Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Alice Aycock and Richard Serra. On hand to discuss this rich history in panel format will be art critic/historian Lisa Radon, as well as art figures instrumental in PCVA’s trajectory, including Mary Beebe, Mel Katz, Tad Savinar and Paul Sutinen. Yu, 800 SE 10th Ave. Panel takes place 7 pm Thursday, March 31. Sliding scale free-$10. Book $35 nonmembers, $28 members. For info, visit dillpickleclub.com/events.
NOW SHOWING Sidonie Caron
With ease and eclecticism, Sidonie Caron tackles the formidable task of filling the entirety of ANKA’s front, middle and back exhibition spaces. Her chromatic arsenal is invigorating and varied, her technique often incorporating vigorous palette-knife work. Her abstractions crackle with energy. ANKA, 325 NW 6th Ave., 224-5721. Closes March 31.
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.
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
The title of Kris Hargis’ portrait show, Me and You, is apropos, given that his subjects, U.S. servicemen and women returning home from foreign combat, bear strong resemblance to Hargis’ own distinctive self-portraits. Across the body of work, he deploys his idiosyncratic technique and strong sense of line in emotionally affecting ways. Us shows a nude man standing alongside a woman who has no legs. To the Hills depicts a male figure with skeletal ribs and vaguely simian eyes, peering intently at the viewer. Hargis has a gift for betraying complex and disturbed psychologies with sensitivity and a hauntingly penetrating vision. 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. Closes April 2.
For more Visual Arts listings, visit
Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
43
Since 1974
Never a cover!
BOOKS
MARCH 30-APRIL 5
= WW Pick. Highly recommended. By WW STAFF. 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
30
JOSHUA FOER / Moonwalking with Einstein (Penguin) Foer chronicles his unlikely journey from forgetful science journalist to U.S. Memory Champion. WED / 30TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
GREG LINDSAY / Aerotropolis
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Eye-opening look at how we will live in the future. Lindsay appears in conversation with Portland Monthly associate editor Zach Dundas. THU / 31ST / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
TAMI LYNN KENT / Wild Feminine
Buffalo gap We d n e s d ay 3 / 3 0 • 9 : 0 0 p m
Buffalo Bandstand T h u r s d ay 3 / 3 1 • 9 : 0 0 p m
Siren Soul Sessions W/ acoustic Minds f r i d ay 4 / 1 • 1 0 : 0 0 p m
Jordan Harris & Tyler Stenson
(Beyond Words)
Unique, holistic approach to reclaiming the power, spirit, and joy of the female body. THU / 31ST / 7:30P HAWTHORNE
ROBERT & HANNAH LITT / A Chicken in Every Yard (Ten Speed Press) A handy guide to going local and sustainable with your own backyard birds. FRI / 1ST / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
LISA CACH / Wake unto Me (Speak) Young adult novel in which Caitlyn Monahan is pursued by recurring nightmares. SUN / 3RD / 4P CEDAR HILLS
SUSAN BEAL / Modern Log Cabin Quilting (Potter Craft) Gives a traditional quilting technique a contemporary sensibility.
S at u r d ay 4 / 2 • 8 : 0 0 p m
RCR afTER paRTY
Karaoke Sunday 4/3 • 9:00am - 1:00pm
Join us for breakfast Race for the Roses M o n d ay 4 / 4 • 6 : 0 0 p m
NCaa Championship
$16 Bucket of Wings and Bud light pitcher Specials! T u e s d ay 4 / 5 open Mic Night • WIN $50 Sign up @ 8:30 | Music @ 9pm Hosted by: Scott Gallegos 6835 SW Macadam Ave | John’s Landing
SUN / 3RD / 4P DOWNTOWN
DAN WELLS / I Don't Want to Kill You (Tor) Likable teenage sociopath John Cleaver is back. MON / 4TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
THOMAS E. KENNEDY / Falling Sideways (Bloomsbury) Sharp, funny second book in Kennedy's virtuoso Copenhagen Quartet. MON / 4TH / 7:30P HAWTHORNE
AVEL GORDLY / Remembering the Power of Words (Oregon State Univ. Press) The story of Avel Gordly, the first African American woman elected to the Oregon State Senate. MON / 4TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
EDEN KENNEDY / Let's Panic about Babies! (Griffin) Entertaining, delightfully pseudoscientific approach to pregnancy and parenting advice. TUE / 5TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
ARDEN BUCKLIN-SPORER & RACHEL PRINGLE / How to Grow a School Garden (Timber Press) Everything parents, teachers, and school administrators need to know to build school gardens. TUE / 5TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
LISA LUTZ & DAVID HAYWARD / Heads You Lose (Putnam) A hilarious tag-team crime novel in which the real mystery is: Will the authors solve the mystery or kill each other? WED / 6TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH / The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books) Issues of gender, sexuality, etc. from the point of view of a swimmer-turned-artist. WED / 6TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
Visit POWELLS.COM/CALENDAR for further details and to sign up for our EVENTS NEWSLETTER. 44
Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30
MONDAY, APRIL 4
Destination DIY on OPB Radio
Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite
OPB Think Out Loud show producer and DIY queen Julie Sabatier’s longtime Destination DIY podcast finds a temporary home on OPB Radio. The independent show (not affiliated with OPB) takes a look at an array of at-home projects and the people behind them. The twice-weekly broadcasts over the next month are part of OPB Mix, which rotates short-run series such as the Moth and Radiolab. You’ll hear about “home rabbit butchering, how a town uses local currency as a marketing strategy, what happens when people create their own rituals to mark occasions large and small, and an interview with the Oregonian who invented the collaborative wiki technology,” she promises. Noon Saturdays, 8 pm Wednesdays on KOPB FM 91.5. Free, info at destinationdiy.org.
Moonwalking With Einstein
Joshua Foer, the younger brother of Jonathan Safran (Everything Is Illuminated), trained for and won the U.S. Memory Championship in 2006. He learned that when properly activated, the human memory is astonishingly reliable. He tells about his Memory Championship experience and examines the forefront of memory-science research in his new book, Moonwalking With Einstein. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30. Free.
FRIDAY, APRIL 1 Well Arts’ Returning Heroes
For six weeks, five writers from Portland’s “nonprofit arts-in-healthcare organization,” Well Arts, have been writing plays to be performed at Concordia University’s Fine Arts Building. The writers come from Well Arts’ various writers’ groups, including the Multiple Sclerosis and Voices of Our Elders workshops. The collection of plays is titled Returning Heroes. Concordia University, 2800 NE Liberty St., 288-9371. 8 pm. Pay what you can.
SATURDAY, APRIL 2 Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators
The Oregon chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators is hosting “FLAP FLAP!— The Third Annual Authors and Illustrators Gala.” The event includes refreshments, book sales and signings, and presentations. Fourteen local children’s book creators will be in attendance, including Heather Frederick, David Michael Slater and Dawn Babb Prochovnic. Multnomah Arts Center, 7688 SW Capitol Highway, 823-2787. 2-4 pm. Author presentations from 2:30-3:30 pm. Free. All ages.
SUNDAY, APRIL 3 Classes at the Attic
If you resolved to flex your literary muscles in the new year but need a little pressure to get the words flowing, check out Attic Institute’s course offerings. The Portland writers’ workshop is kicking off its 12th year with classes that include creative nonfiction, memoir, fiction, poetry and picture-book writing. Registration is now open. For info go to atticinstitute.com/classes. Attic Institute, 4232 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Ever wonder why there are so many hypocrites in the world, and why so many people get caught doing precisely what they dissuade others from doing? University of Pennsylvania professor and founder of the Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology Robert Kurzban has applied evolutionary theory to find an explanation in his new book. Bagdad Theater & Pub, 3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 236-9234. Doors at 5 pm, event 7 to 9 pm. $3 suggested donation. 21+.
Story Time for Grownups
Ambrose Bierce fought in the Civil War and wrote realistic accounts of the war as well as gruesome Western tales often involving ghosts. He is known for telling people that
the cigar box on his desk contained the ashes of a rival critic and the skull next to it was all that remained of his friend. Local writer and performer David Loftus will read selections of Bierce’s work as part of Grendel’s Coffee House’s Story Time for Grownups series. The event coordinators warn that it “may be unsuitable for children...or grownups with a delicate sensibility.” Grendel’s Coffee House, 729 E Burnside St., 595-9550. 7:30 pm. Free.
TUESDAY, APRIL 5 Vegan Diner
Julie Hasson, owner of the Native Bowl food cart on North Mississippi Avenue, will sign copies of her new vegan cookbook. Vegan Diner: Classic Comfort Food for the Body and Soul contains 125 recipes for plantbased diner classics, from homemade sausage to creamy cheesecakes. Annie Bloom’s Books, 7834 SW Capitol Highway, 246-0053. 7 pm. Free. All ages.
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REVIEW
NANCY ROMMELMANN THE BAD MOTHER Before she moved up to Portland, author and journalist Nancy Romelmann (who has written for WW) lived in Los Angeles and gathered stories from cops, immigrants and youth. She has retold the tales in articles in The New York Times Magazine, LA Weekly and other publications, and has just published her first novel A gritty story with a inspired by the story of a real murky narrative. L.A. youth. Shuffling along Hollywood’s hot and hostile pavement, Mary carries her newborn baby, dodging the cops suspicious of her group of drug-addict friends. Rommelmann’s The Bad Mother follows Mary as she struggles for survival as a young transient. When her mother died, Mary was told to avoid social services by fleeing from San Francisco to sunny Los Angeles. In L.A., this wayward youth is dragged into a den of sin—a loft at a motel occupied by some very checkered characters who do what they can to support her and her baby. “Hollywood herself is the bad mother of the title,” says Rommelmann, but Mary doesn’t model anyone’s version of ideal parenting. Though she fears the influence of her housemates’ nasty habits on her newborn, Mary tows the baby along on adventures led by speed-addict Sofia and alcoholic MeeMee. Though the speedy dialogue and vivid descriptions risk cliché— “Dean pulled off his tank top and peeled back a bandage to show a new jailhouse tattoo on his chest, a scabbed-over patch he said was two hands in prayer”—it is easy to get swept up into Mary’s world. Rommelmann casts an excellent, gritty mood that brings the reader right into the loft, beside Mary as she watches the circus parade around her. But the attention to style comes at the sake of clarity. It’s hard to keep track of the book’s dozen characters, who enter the narrative with little pause for introduction. We aren’t told much about Mary, either, including her age, ethnicity, reasons for keeping her child, and why she stays with her abusive drunken boyfriend. But what it lacks in clarity, it more than makes up for in color. Rommelmann’s inspiration for The Bad Mother came from a young woman she met—whose all-too-common story is tragically rarely told. RACHAEL DEWITT. GO: Nancy Rommelmann reads at Ristretto Roasters, 3808 N Williams St., 288-8667. 7 pm Wednesday, March 30. Free.
SCREEN
MARCH 30-APRIL 5 REVIEW
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
12 Angry Men
[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] Sidney Lumet’s jury is deliberating some more. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Thursday, March 31.
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. PG-13. AARON MESH. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Tigar, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Evergreen Parkway, Bridgeport Village, Sherwood.
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. The movie, with its promiscuous, liquored-up, loyal men of the tribe, is candy for me—halva, let’s say. R. AARON MESH. Broadway.
Battle: Los Angeles
40 Lonely and dreaming of the West Coast, spacemen storm Santa Monica like it’s Normandy, and we endure the invasion from the POV of an Aaron Eckhart-led Marine platoon that firefights from beach house to beach house. The movie opens with explosions in the sky and music that sounds like Explosions in the Sky; as director Jonathan Liebesman lifts Peter Berg’s back-of-a-pickup Stedicam shakes, it’s Friday Night Lights: Permian Panthers vs. Aliens. As the actual title suggests, the movie’s tactical coldness feels most like a Call of Duty-brand video game and, since the extraterrestrials are the usual whirring biomechanical biped bugs, most of the tech crew’s imagination is expended on making the picture unpleasantly nerve-shattering, then just unpleasant. The soldiers vivisect a captured enemy, trying to locate its vital organs. “Maybe I can help,” says a nice lady, played by Bridget Moynahan. “I’m a veterinarian.” PG-13. AARON MESH. Broadway, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Cedar Hills Crossing, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas, Evergreen Parkway, Bridgeport, Cascade, Cinema 99, Sherwood, Wilsonville.
Beastly
15 This high-school Beauty and the
Beast remake 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. PG-13. AARON MESH. Clackamas, Cascade.
Blue Valentine
96 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. Living Room Theaters.
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 ambi-
S U M M I T E N T E R TA I N M E N T, L L C
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.
tious, 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. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.
Classic French Crime Films
[THREE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] The last of the NW Film Center’s excellent buffet of French noirs: Classe Tous Risques (7 pm Wednesday, March 30) and Jean-Luc Godard’s adored Band of Outsiders (9 pm Friday-Saturday, April 1-2). NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.
Cold Weather
88 Cold Weather, an unusually obser-
vant 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 exgirlfriend (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. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.
The Darkest Corner of Paradise
[ONE NIGHT ONLY, DIRECTOR ATTENDING] Eugene filmmaker Henry Weintraub moves out of horror movies to make a noir about black markets and ice skating. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Thursday, March 31.
Desert Flower
66 Near the end of Desert Flower,
director Sherry Horman’s biopic of Somali supermodel-turned-activist Waris Dirie, a journalist asks Dirie to discuss “the day that changed her life,” which the reporter assumes is the day she was discovered by a fashion photographer while working in a London fast-food restaurant. Dirie corrects her: The day that truly changed her life occurred at age 3, when her mother sat her on a rock and, as per custom of the nomadic tribe she was born into, had her genitals removed with a razor. The film is similarly confused about Dirie’s story. Is hers a rags-toriches tale of the highest improbability, about a woman who literally walked out of the African desert and onto international runways? Or is it something deeper, a lesson on the limit of cultural relativity when it comes to understanding a practice that brutally subjugates women? Horman wants it to be the latter, and she bookends the film with some powerful scenes— including a recreation of Dirie’s circumcision—but she loses the broader implications of Dirie’s rather incredible biography amid the Cinderella aspects of her rise to fame. As Dirie, Ethiopian model Liya Kebede gives an engaging performance that still manages to be somewhat aloof, a description that also works for the movie itself. MATTHEW SINGER. Fox Tower.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
29 Love Ramona Quimby but hate all
that pesky imagination? Would you rather see a kid lip-sync to Ke$ha on YouTube? Have I got a movie for you! To say Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules—the follow-up to the hit adaptation of Jeff Kinney’s tweener novels—is a family flick isn’t fair. Hell, saying it’s for the prepubescent set isn’t even accurate: Kids who can define puberty are too old for the story of Greg (Zachary Gordon), a meek middle schooler forced to bond with his jerkoff older brother Rodrick (Devon Bostick). They’re reluctant until mom gives them a financial incentive, and soon Rodrick is giving his brother a crash course in being a douchebag. What ensues is a series of unfunny situations involving poop, magic shows,
CONT. on page 46
POD PERSON: Jake Gyllenhaal is boxed in.
REBORN ON A TRAIN IF YOU SEE SOMETHING IN SOURCE CODE, SAY SOMETHING. BY AA R ON MESH
amesh@wweek.com
It is harder than ever, I think, to really love a movie. The big-studio releases ride a wave of marketing hype that defines the consensus on a picture before any of us have experienced it; smaller films are debuted simultaneously on multiple platforms, robbing us of the sense of private, secret discovery. As these machines grind without pause, it’s difficult to express personal allegiance to one of their products without feeling like a patsy. Meanwhile, it is now possible to literally push a pause button, and see a movie more closely than ever before: Digital formats allow us to study cinema shot by shot, no longer relying on the imprecise alchemy of memory. This combination of access and distance leaves us with a pornographic simulation of movie love: I can’t be the only person who, after one beer too many, has replayed a favorite scene over and over on YouTube, in a futile search for an instant when I felt something, saw something. The director Duncan Jones must understand this desire to recapture a fleeting experience: His alone-with-my-clone movie Moon was one of the handful of films in recent years to develop a devoted cult following, and he has returned to the same theme of multiple lives for a larger-scale sophomore feature, Source Code. Lightning has struck twice: Source Code is the best science-fiction film since Moon, and may prove the finest picture of this year. More than that, it explicitly grapples with how new technology has created in us an obsessive desire to achieve the perfect order in life we think we’ve found in DVDs and video games. But first, it is about a bomb on a train. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a soldier transported, via some mysterious computer program, into a sensory recording of the final eight minutes before a blast ripped apart a Chicago commuter line. He wakes up inside a soon-to-be-victim’s body, next to a fellow passenger (Michelle Monaghan) understandably perplexed by his alarm, and has 480 seconds to identify the perpetrator before fire and pain whisk
him back to the metal pod where he reports his data to cold superiors (Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) who digitally deploy him again. You shouldn’t know more than that going in; he doesn’t. But while Hitchcock famously defined suspense as a conversation in which the audience knows a bomb is under the table, Source Code’s adrenaline rush of slightly comic dread is one man knowing the bomb is there, and not being able to defuse it, because it already went off. It’s Groundhog Day, except instead of every day ending with a blizzard, they all end with everybody exploding. I spoke with Jones about Source Code a week ago; somehow aptly, my digital recorder never picked up the interview. But he noted a certain
LIGHTNING HAS STRUCK TWICE: SOURCE CODE IS THE BEST SCIENCE-FICTION FILM SINCE MOON. lightness in the film’s tone (the decision to shoot the train scenes in the crisp light of early morning has a lot to do with this, as does Gyllenhaal’s talent for playing confusion) and called his picture “a body-snatcher movie with a happy ending.” That’s not actually giving too much away, because Source Code builds to a tableau displaying the kind of crystalline, transitory emotional perfection we look for in the movies and in life—and then it keeps going, exploring the darkest implications of that desire for control. And even as Jones’ reconnaissance reveals logical knots that can’t be untied without messiness and death—happy endings don’t exist for anyone, by definition—it never mocks our desire to find eternal life in the movies. Source Code is André Bazin’s “holy moment” in the age of the pause button. I think I’m going to love it for a long, long time. 93 SEE IT: Source Code is rated PG-13. It opens Friday at Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Eastport, Cinetopia, Cornelius, Oak Grove, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, City Center, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Lloyd Mall, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville and Sandy.
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64 The latest from Jee-woon Kim (The Good, the Bad, the Weird), violent enough to have been initially banned from public exhibition by the South Korean government, opens with the savage murder of a pregnant woman at the hatchet of Kyung-chul (Oldboy star Choi Min-sik), a snarling brute with a thing for raping and bludgeoning women to death, then skinning them. Unlike the other auteurs of the South Korean film renaissance, Kim doesn’t find—or seem particularly interested in finding—any humanity in inhuman acts. Kim opts instead to attack simple and derivative themes with the subtlety of a pipe wrench to the pubis…an act he’s more than glad to show us in extreme close-up. AP KRYZA. Living Room Theaters.
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fake vomit, ginger kids doing conga lines, girls, senile grandparents and the requisite lesson in brotherly love. Which is fine for the peachfuzz set, but unlike most modern kid flicks, there is absolutely nothing for adults except the prospect of a home-video babysitter in a few months. Let’s hope the inevitable third installment of the sitcomy series debuts on Nick Jr. where it belongs. That way, parents can at least read a book while the kids giggle mindlessly. PG. AP KRYZA. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Evergreen Parkway, Bridgeport Village, Cascade, Cinema 99, Movies on TV, Sherwood, Start Street, Hilltop, Willsonville.
Faux Film Festival 2011
[THREE NIGHTS ONLY] The annual mockumentary bonanza returns, with a feature presentation of Bill Plympton’s Guns on the Clackamas. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm FridaySunday, April 1-3.
The Films of Charlie Chaplin illustration by www.alliarnold.com
[THREE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] The NW Film Center series concludes on a high note: After Limelight (6 pm Friday and 1 pm Sunday, April 1 & 3) and Monseiur Verdoux (4 pm Saturday, April 2), there’s a frozen Tramp in The Gold Rush (7 pm Saturday, April 2), turning his terrible dinner rolls into little dancing feet. Also, because his cabin is up really high, he can see Russia from his house. AARON MESH. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.
Gone With the Pope
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[REVIVAL] In 1975, a Palm Springs lounge singer named Duke Mitchell shot this exploitation picture about kidnapping the pope as a follow-up to his low-budget Godfather knockoff, Massacre Mafia Style. (He also played the lead pope-napper: “I want a dollar from every Catholic in the world.”) Mitchell never finished editing the movie, and died in 1981; Bob Murawski got his hands on the print in 1995, and it took the Hurt Locker editor 15 years to piece it together. It was worth the effort, if only as a time capsule of the Los Angeles and Las Vegas nightlife and lifers whose Dean Martin stylings are lovingly captured. (Maybe too lovingly: There’s some truly appalling offhand racism directed at a black prostitute.) As a work of drama, a surprising percentage of it authentically clicks; a guitar riff by Mitchell’s son Jeffrey gives the mob-land action extra drive. For about five minutes, it becomes first-rate art: Mitchell explains to the Pope why he’ll never believe in God, and his list of grievances against divinity is a powerful common man’s protest against deaf heaven and a blind church. It’s unfortunate that the last act dissolves into a vulgar Catholic miracle picture, that at least provides an opportunity for a perverse and unnerving final shot. Gone With the Pope somehow lives up to its name: It’s the product of several hands, but a singular sensibility. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.
Harvest
71 Life has infinitely more interesting questions than “Should I see this film?” But assuming you’re reading this review to answer that about Harvest, the answer is a qualified yes. That is, if you want to watch a drama in which people deal with equally ordinary moments in their own lives while coping with the ultimate question: Why is a loved one dying—and why is it taking so damn long? In this case, the loved one is Siv, the family patriarch (played by Robert Loggia, whose gravelly laugh has long served him in everything from Scarface to The Sopranos). And his children and grandson all spend much of the movie struggling to maintain a patina of normalcy— from golfing and cultivating a flower garden to trying to appease a painin-the-ass girlfriend and screwing siblings out of their inheritance— during the approach of that death. The film unfolds slowly at the start. And it never does fully develop the many characters circling around Siv with the exception of his daughter, grandson and oddly enough, his dementia-riddled wife. But at the end, after some gorgeous cinematography and an unfortunately cloying soundtrack, Harvest is a perfectly fine way to spend an hour and forty minutes of your life. Next question. HENRY STERN. Living Room Theaters.
Hood to Coast
55 German TV producer Christoph
Baaden has brought his best HD cameramen (and apparently some helicopters) to chronicle the Hood to Coast Relay 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.
Hop
Russell Brand voices a bunny rabbit. Not screened by WW press deadlines; look for a review on wweek. com. PG. Broadway, Lloyd Mall, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Tigard, City center, Clackamas, Evergreen Parkway, Bridgeport, Cascade, Cinema 99, Movies on TV, Sherwood, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
I Am
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 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.
Insidious
The house is haunted! No, the house isn’t haunted, your kid is haunted! Whatever: It wasn’t screened by WW press deadlines. Look for a review on wweek.com. PG-13. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas, Evergreen Parkway, Bridgeport, Cascade, Cinema 99, Sherwood, Stark Street, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
Jane Eyre
77 A word of warning for fans of
sweeping period romances: This is not the Jane Eyre you are looking for. Young director Cary Fukunaga and screenwriter Moira Buffini pull everything dark out of Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel and unleash it in all its gothic glory on the big screen. Although this version chops vast swaths of the original text, it is, in many ways, a much truer adaptation than most of the 5 trillion others, which have tended to polish away the characters’ rough edges— including casting inordinately goodlooking stars to play characters who repeatedly talk about how ugly they are. Really, most of the characters in the original novel are assholes—ugly assholes—and Fukunaga doesn’t shy away from that. Jane (who is not an asshole, but rather our painfully puritanical yet endearingly strong-willed proto-feminist heroine) is portrayed terrifically by 21-year-old actress Mia Wasikowska, whose young age and plain yet captivating, otherworldly appearance is half the point of the character. It’s a visually stunning piece of work, full of howling halls, spooky forests, fire and blood, which highlight perfectly the bleakness and isolation of a poor woman’s world in that era. PG-13. RUTH BROWN. Fox Tower.
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. PG-13. RUTH BROWN. Clackamas.
The King’s Speech
73 If it is the task of the movie psy-
chologist to tell his patient, à la Robin Williams, that distress is “not your fault”—and to convince us that, yes, that fellow’s problems are not his fault and, by golly, our problems are not our fault—then speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), despite lacking medical qualifications, does a bang-up job of telling stuttering George VI (Colin Firth) that it’s not his fault he is the King of England. The Best Picture winner is getting a re-release in a PG-13 version, which excises some “fucks.” But no actual fucking, because this picture never had any actual fucking. R, PG-13. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Lloyd Mall, Eastport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Bridgeport Village, Movies on TV.
Landscape Revisions: The Films of Thomas Comerford
[TWO NIGHTS ONLY, DIRECTOR ATTENDING] The Chicago-based media artist brings a set of short films. Clinton Street Theater. 7:30 pm Monday-Tuesday, April 4-5.
MARCH 30-APRIL 5
fantasy—you can tell because as soon as the hero (Bradley Cooper) gains extraordinary powers, he quits being a writer. But of course the director has the last word: While Leslie Dixon’s script is often cynical and glib (not to mention over-reliant on voice-over narration), Neil Burger’s surge of images and sound vaults the movie into the “more interesting than it has any right to be” canon. PG-13. AARON MESH. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Evergreen Parkway, Bridgeport Village, Cascade, Cinema 99, Sherwood, Stark Street, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
women because they miss the thrill of the hunt. These dudes can’t hunt; they can barely function. They’re not unfaithful, just ungrateful. Have they seen any of the other movies about hapless assholes just like them? This guy’s so infantile, the movie could be called Fetal Attraction. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.
The Music Never Stopped
talking about themselves? They couldn’t save the world, but dagnabbit, that’s not going to stop them from proving they can save something. In The Music Never Stopped, ‘60s nostalgia literally saves a guy’s brain. In 1986, after two decades of estrangement, an ex-flower child named Gabriel (Lou Taylor Pucci) is reunited with his parents, but a tumor has left him with severe
39 Ah, boomers. Will they ever stop
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REVIEW
The Lincoln Lawyer
67 Matthew McConaughey is a
lawyer who rides around in the back of a black Lincoln Continental with the custom license plate “NTGUILTY.” The movie is NTGOOD, exactly, but it’s NTBAD, either. A sub-Grisham potboiler, its characterizations and atmosphere are secondhand, but the courtroom machinations of its plot are enjoyably convoluted. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Evergreen Parkway, Bridgeport Village, Cascade, Cinema 99, Movies on TV, Sherwood, Stark Street, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
M
[THREE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] Peter Lorre is a child-murderer. Get him! 5th Avenue Cinema. 7 and 9 pm Friday-Saturday, April 1-2. 3 pm Sunday, April 3.
Mars Needs Moms
28 Mars Needs Moms—a thin, sappy
treacle of a kid flick animated with the same creepy overdrawn-liveactor 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 lifeforms in Doctor Who. PG. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. Eastport, Clackamas.
Metal Messiah: Born Again Sage
44 [ONE NIGHT ONLY] Local music-
video curator Nick “The Phantom Hillbilly” Wells takes his stand-up character of Sage the encyclopedic metalhead and puts him in a lowbudget feature film, where he deliberates between selling his soul to Satan and finding salvation. (The devil gets all the good music, and thus has the advantage. Plus Sage already wrote the lyrics to “Jesus Died of AIDS”; how often does inspiration like that come around?) The Laurelhurst had to turn away 100 people from the premiere, so apparently there’s an audience for this. I’m not it. But I found myself admiring Wells’ devotion to hesher antics and throwing up the horns, and I watched the picture with a smile on my face. People who get the jokes may laugh quite a bit more. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre. 7:30 pm Wednesday, March 30.
Monogamy
57 It’s a sexy title because it sug-
gests...maybe not monogamy? This promise is thwarted in all kinds of ways by Dana Adam Shapiro’s drama, which features photographer Theo (Chris Messina) sabotaging his engagement to Nat (Rashida Jones) not by straying but with a compulsive implosion that reduces him to an anti-erotic lump, literally incapable of finishing a coherent sentence. Theo’s turn for the miserable and self-defeating is inexplicable, and feels less like standard dude commitment-phobia and more like an outbreak of undiagnosed, severe mental illness. Honestly, I don’t understand the sudden glut of movies about shaggy men who won’t settle down with beautiful
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WIN WIN When the aliens arrive on this planet and ask us to explain what “indie film” is, may I suggest we show them something by Tom McCarthy? His previous two movies, The Station Agent and The Visitor, are both standouts of the genre without standing apart from it in any way. Actually, we might as well screen for them the new McCarthy picture, Win Win, which includes every significant indie-film hallmark: There’s an imperfect but loving nuclear family; a series of petty frustrations played for empathetic comedy; an unlikely bond between a frayed, middle-aged man and a silent teenager; and a quiet epiphany in the final shots—nothing earth-shattering, just a little internal shift, expressed without words. There’s also the one thing indie film does best: The recognition that worries about bills are a big motivation in everyday lives. There’s Amy Ryan and Paul Giamatti. There’s a scene in which Giamatti has a panic attack while jogging, and admits to his buddy that he’s seen a doctor about his anxiety, and his friend asks, “Did he prescribe anything for you?” Giamatti says, “Yeah, jogging.” Indie film, ladies and gentlemen! Giamatti plays Mike, a New Jersey elder law attorney and highschool wrestling coach who volunteers to become guardian for senile client Leo (Burt Young, very touching in the role), mostly so he can deposit the old man in the nursing home he dreads, then pocket the state checks. This is a venal sin, but a really shitty one. Mike’s bad deed is rewarded with the arrival of Leo’s laconic runaway grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer), who turns out to be a champion high-school wrestler. This is perhaps one coincidence too many for the movie to bear, but Shaffer’s presence redeems a lot: His blond shag of hair, long face and collected indifference recall Sean Penn’s Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. That may seem a lowbrow connection, but I suspect McCarthy’s aware of it: Ridgemont was a very populist comedy that secretly cared about disappointment and failure, and Win Win is a drama about disappointment and failure that secretly wants to be a very populist comedy. It truly loves sports, and not just as a life metaphor (though certainly as a life metaphor). It has an explosively funny performance by Bobby Cannavale as Mike’s best friend and bandwagon assistant coach, who is prone to accidentally homoerotic remarks. It even has an apparently sincere montage set to Jersey band Bon Jovi’s wondrously terrible 2005 single “Have a Nice Day.” Halfway through Win Win, Mike gives his wrestling team instructions based on Kyle’s favored mat strategy: “The move is, whatever the fuck it takes!” Again, this is a pretty obvious life metaphor (again, this is an indie movie), but it also represents McCarthy’s willingness to go all out to entertain. If we show this flick to the aliens, they’ll put away their ray guns—they’ll be too busy rooting for everybody to be OK. Indie film, ladies and gentlemen! R. AARON MESH. Fast times in New Jersey.
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SEE IT: Win Win opens Friday at Fox Tower. Willamette Week MARCH 30, 2011 wweek.com
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KENNETH TURAN,
“A PURE PLEASURE TO EXPERIENCE... An off-center human comedy at its funniest and most heartfelt.”
QUEEN BITCH: There’s something a little vulgar about preferring the overkill of Aliens to the classic purity of Alien, but I’ve always felt a helpless attraction to movies that traffic in the trope of characters begging “Please, kill me.” The urgently diseased possibility of a fate worse than death is something so upsetting that it needs to be brought out and played with in the open. Aliens fondles it at ungodly length, and then rewards the strong of stomach with the sight of Sigourney Weaver provoking a cage match with a killer queen. It’s the most openly strange this very odd franchise gets, and—in a sick way—the most fun. AARON MESH. Bagdad. 11 pm Friday, April 1. Presented by Cort and Fatboy. Best paired with: McMenamins Hammerhead. Also showing: True Romance (Laurelhurst).
amnesia. Only the music from his youth—the Grateful Dead in particular—manages to jog his memory. No one knows or seems to care what Gabriel has been doing in his 20 years off the grid, the suggestion being that getting mentally stranded in 1967 is a state of bliss most Deadheads can only wish for. PG. MATTHEW SINGER. Hollywood Theatre.
Paul GIAMATTI
Amy RYAN
Bobby CANNAVALE
Jeffrey TAMBOR
FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE VISITOR AND THE STATION AGENT
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Of Gods and Men
87 Like having sex with Cate
Blanchett or killing a man with my bare hands, believing in God is something I’ve always wanted to do but probably never will. And so it is with a perverse kind of envy and rubbernecking disbelief that I have given my love to films about faith, for although I am not a believer, I know what it is to long for the ineffable (see: Cate Blanchett) and suffer because of it. Even proud sinners need a good cry in stained-glass-tinted light. So thank God, I guess, for Bergman and Bresson and Dreyer and now Xavier Beauvois’ Of Gods and Men, a deeply serious study of devotion and doubt as experienced by a brotherhood of French monks whose quiet lives of prayer and community service (and a whole lot of puttering in the garden) are threatened by the Algerian Civil War. Beauvois evinces a deep and abiding reverence for the deliberate rhythms of ritual—the film is, at times, as slow as a Communion line at Lourdes—and although I don’t think I’ll be buying any of the Lord’s bullpucky anytime soon, Of Gods and Men builds to an affirmation of faith so stunningly transcendent that I emerged from the theater with some understanding of how grace might feel, and I liked it. PG-13. CHRIS STAMM. Cinema 21.
Paul
45 Paul is what happens when
an unstoppable force meets an immovable, albeit imaginary, object: Seth Rogen’s cavalcade of spliff-cough jokes makes its first contact with computer-generated imagery, and nobody wins. The movie sticks Rogen in the body of a little green man who looks like a Roswell figurine and behaves like, well, Seth Rogen—and the place-
ment of a reasonably detailed CGI creature in the frame means Rogen’s voice and its human counterparts are all required to stick to the script. This movie features a history-of-the-universe montage, and the only sight gag it can think to include is a shot of two aliens humping. I can’t really blame this on CGI. Paul just needs higher intelligence. R. AARON MESH. Broadway, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Evergreen Parkway, Bridgeport Village, Cascade, Cinema 99, Sherwood, Stark Street, Hilltop.
Portland Jewish Film Festival
48 [THREE NIGHTS ONLY] Judging from the novels and surrounding jottings, Mordecai Richler was anything but dull. Yet the new biodoc Mordecai Richler: The Last of the Wild Jews (4 pm Sunday, April 3), which is timed to follow the film adaptation of Barney’s Version and opens the 19th Portland Jewish Film Festival, is a deadly bore even at 52 minutes. Director Francine Pelletier has an unsure angle on her subject, and veers willynilly into tangents and trivia: We spend time at Richler’s high-school reunion (it was awkward, apparently; he said mean things about the singing act) and a whole lot of time on Quebecois nationalism and its putative anti-Semitism. This is inside baseball—inside Expos baseball, at that. La Rafle (The Round Up) (7:30 pm Sunday, April 3) is more worthwhile, and larger in scope, but no less vexed. It stars Mélanie Laurent as a pediatric nurse in Vichy France (this time she doesn’t kill Hitler, though you very much want her to) who helplessly watches as 13,000 Parisian Jews are thrown into the Winter Velodrome stadium before export to the gas chambers. (Echoes of the post-Katrina Superdome are unavoidable, but this atrocity was intentional.) As with any Holocaust drama, the sheer scale of inhumanity is dumbfounding, and the horror is not too much softened here. But Rose Bosch has Spielberg’s Little Girl in the Red Coat Problem: Make a movie about kids and the Shoah, and it is very hard to avoid sentimentality
MARCH 30-APRIL 5
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. PG. MATTHEW SINGER. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Parkway Stadium, Bridgeport Village, Cascade, Cinema 99, Sherwood, Stark Street, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Friday-Sunday, April 1-3.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
[REVIVAL] Elizabeth Taylor, as we remember her: boozy and verbally abusive. Hollywood Theatre.
The Woodmans
84 At first blush, The Woodmans
appears to be yet another wellmeaning bit of hand-wringing over some damaged family’s special brand of disarray, but director C. Scott Willis uses the sad story of Francesca Woodman, whose post-
suicide fame as an exhibitionistic photographer overshadowed an entire family of committed artists, to investigate more involuted emotional thickets. “I am so vain and I am so masochistic,” writes Francesca in her journal, speaking for pretty much anyone who has ever tried very hard to make good art; The Woodmans delicately sketches the ramifications of being so good at giving into that vanity and masochism that loved ones can only stand back to admire the sacrificial beauty of it all. CHRIS STAMM. Hollywood Theatre.
“THE SCARIEST MOVIE IN DECADES!” -Ed -EdDouglas, Douglas, COMINGSOON.net COMINGSOON.net
REVIEW MIFILIFILMS INC.
and false redemption. She doesn’t. AARON MESH. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. SundayTuesday, April 3-5. Visit nwfilm.org for full listings.
MOVIES
IN THEATERS EVERYWHERE APRIL 1 FOLLOW US ON
“A MASTERPIECE!” WINNER -David Germain, ASSOCIATED PRESS BEST FOREIGNX FILM 3.825" WED 3/30 NATIONAL BOARD 3" “SUPERB!” OF REVIEW -Lisa Schwarzbaum, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY PORTLAND WILLAMETTE WEEK L AMBERT W ILSON
54 I’ll hand it to Catherine
Sucker Punch
29 In promoting Sucker Punch, Zack
Snyder (300, Watchmen) insisted we should prepare to have our minds blown. He totally succeeds in blowing while telling the story of Baby Doll (doe-eyed and possibly comatose Emily Browning), who is whisked away to a gothic hospital for criminally hot chicks. Sucker Punch is a big, sloppy mess of a film designed solely to put the sexy women in fetish costumes straight out of a Japanese cosplay porno. But goddamn, did Snyder need to take himself so seriously while presenting what’s basically a video-game combination of Girl, Interrupted, The Matrix, Hellboy, Kill Bill, Lord of the Rings and a teenager’s wet dream? The visuals can’t make up for what isn’t just a horrible movie, but three horrible movies packed into one, a redundant mess full of shitty performances and ripoff action. Well, at least we now know that Snyder thinks about more than oiled-up Spartan warriors while wanking. PG-13. AP KRYZA. Pioneer Place, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Cedar Hills, Tigard, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Evergreen Parkway, Bridgeport Village, Cascade. Cinema 99, Sherwood, Stark Street, Hilltop, Wilsonville.
Taxi Driver
99 [REVIVAL] On the 35th anniver-
sary of its release, Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s spectacularly disturbing portrait of God’s Lonely Man gets a digital re-release. I’m not usually a great fan of the format, but here’s an exception: Any new way of looking at this nocturnal masterpiece—which ranks at the top of my personal pantheon, and usually leaves me as dazed as a few nights without sleep—is worthwhile. What are the burnt brown magentas of that final massacre going to look like now? AARON MESH. Roseway.
The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry
[THREE NIGHTS ONLY] A documentary about the reggae pioneer.
www.insidious-movie.com
AND
ALGERIA, 1996. INSPIRED BY A TRUE STORY.
Red Riding Hood
WINNER
GRAND PRIZE
CANNES
M ICHAEL L ONSDALE
OF GODS AND MEN A FILM BY XAVIER AE: BEAUVOIS (circle one:)
TALKING IN BED: Xavier Dolan (left), Niels Schneider and Monia Chokri.
HEARTBEATS French Canadians in imaginary love.
NOW PLAYING Emmett
Jay
Steve
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2" WILLAMETTE3.825" X3.772 x 6.052 There are many reasons to find Xavier WEEK PORTLAND
Dolan insufferable. His hair, for one: a ridiculous buzz-cut/pompadour that looks like Elvis halfway through his Army trim. Or his propensity for giving self-important interviews telling people how they should and shouldn’t critique his movies. But most unforgivable is his precocious talent: Heartbeats is his second movie, it gleams with skill and assurance, and he’s only 21. Twenty-one! I can feel myself dying! Better to disguise the envy with annoyance: Look at that fucking prodigy. But look closer, and notice that Heartbeats needs to be made by someone so young, so confident: It takes the nerve and narcissism of youth to dare to pit your own heartaches up against the lovesickness of Jules and Jim. The most visually arresting dispatch from Canada’s young, beautiful and prowling since Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Dolan’s new work (after the debut I Killed My Mother) is a slow-motion plunge into a flood of pheromones. A Québécois In the Mood for Love in red leopard-print pumps, Heartbeats observes best pals (Monia Chokri and Dolan) both smitten with a curly blond Adonis (Niels Schneider, ominously introduced wearing the candy-heart sunglasses of Sue Lyon in Kubrick’s Lolita). As the friends descend into silly rivalry—and somehow end up in the same bed as their mutual crush, without ever establishing his orientation; yep, he’s that horrible—their gamesmanship is scored to a French recording of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” by Dalida that eclipses the Nancy Sinatra version used in Kill Bill. That canny recycling is also evident in the costumes—a reminder that one of the advantages of making a movie about hipsters is you can take much of your look from amazing vintage racks. Dolan is both properly distanced from the blissful aches of infatuation (he divides the acts with faux-documentary interviews with wrecked victims of young romance, all of them very funny) and physically alert to them. I watched with a grin, and my toes tingling. That’s one good reason not to hate the kid: He can make you remember what it felt like to believe that requited desire would solve everything. Another reason is that his movie is the recognition that even he can’t always get what he wants—a pained admission captured before it curdles into resentment. The movie’s original title is Les Amours Imaginaires, and the movie captures the high of first idealizing a human touch in your head, and how the inevitable crash hurts like the end of a world. Heartbeats is a fresh perception of an age-old truth: Love is like a cloud, holds a lot of rain. AARON MESH. 90
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Artist: (circle one:) Heather Staci Freelance 2
Aurelio
THA – SF
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. PG-13. AARON MESH. Lloyd Mall, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Division, Bridgeport Village, Cascade, Cinema 99.
CHECK LOCAL LISTINGS FOR THEATERS AND SHOWTIMES
SEE IT: Heartbeats opens Friday at Living Room Theaters.
Run Date(s)
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WED 3/30 WED 3.30 WILLAMETTE WEEK
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WARNER BROS. PICTURES PRESENTS A KEVIN MCCORMICK/MBST ENTERTAINMENT/BENDERSPINK PRODUCTION “ARTHUR” RUSSELL BRAND HELEN MIRREN GRETA GERWIG LUIS GUZMÁN WITH NICK NOLTE AND JENNIFER GARNER MUSICBY THEODORE SHAPIRO SCREENPLAY BY
EXECUTIVE STORY PRODUCERS SCOTT KROOPF J.C. SPINK RUSSELL BRAND NIK LINNEN BY STEVE GORDON PETER BAYNHAM PRODUCEDBY LARRY BREZNER KEVIN MCCORMICK CHRIS BENDER MICHAEL TADROSS DIRECTED BY JASON WINER
April 4 • 7:00 PM ~ Portland Area To download your tickets, go to gofobo.com/rsvp and enter the RSVP code: WWEEKDNU5 This film is rated PG-13 for alcohol use throughout, sexual content, language and some drug references. Tickets are available while supplies last. Tickets received through this promotion do not guarantee admission. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. THEATRE IS OVERBOOKED TO ENSURE A FULL HOUSE. No one will be admitted without a ticket or after the screening begins. All federal, state and local regulations apply. A recipient of a ticket assumes any and all risks related to use of the ticket and accepts any restrictions required by ticket provider. Warner Bros. Pictures, Seattle Weekly, Terry Hines & Associates and their affiliates accept no responsibility or liability in connection with any loss or accident incurred in connection with use of a prize.
IN THEATERS FRIDAY, APRIL 8 www.arthurthemovie.com
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