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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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HEADOUT
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STAFF Editor-in-Chief Mark Zusman EDITORIAL Interim Arts & Culture Editor Ruth Brown Interim Managing News Editor Beth Slovic Staff Writers Nigel Jaquiss, James Pitkin Copy Chief Kat Merck Copy Editors Matt Buckingham, Sarah Smith Special Sections Editor Ben Waterhouse Screen Editor Aaron Mesh Music Editor Casey Jarman Editorial Interns Ailin Darling, Kevin Davis, Nathan Gilles, Ashley Gossman, Karen Locke, Evan Sernoffsky CONTRIBUTORS Stage Ben Waterhouse Classical Brett Campbell Dance Heather Wisner Visual Arts Richard Speer
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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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INBOX WWEEK.COM READERS COMMENT ON OUR ENDORSEMENTS OF THE PPS BOND AND LEVY
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“This is an important and difficult vote. PPS knows it can pass the levy and bond if few people vote. PLEASE VOTE. PPS is betting on parents voting with their hearts. However, some PPS parents plan to vote with their heads and will vote NO on the bond. It is the wrong size, at the wrong time with the wrong priorities. Only two of 15 schools rated highly likely to collapse in an earthquake would receive seismic upgrades. Schools with low enrollment are slated to be rebuilt. Even with the increased local option levy, PPS will have insufficient funds to operate its 85 schools. Wealthier districts around us are consolidating their schools in order to maintain quality education. PPS needs to make those hard decisions and then come to us with a bond for sensible investments. Until then; YES on the Levy, No on the BOND. PLEASE VOTE.” —PPS Mom “If this really directly benefited the kids and kept more teachers employed, I’d vote yes in a heartbeat—the additional $300-$400 per year doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is that PPS is a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy with its own very stupid agenda. In reality, they waste a great deal of $$$ on outdated, lengthy, expensive processes that no
one needs. This is a measure that only benefits a handful of schools—many of which are regularly tinkered with, receive more money than many other schools and regularly fail. From personal experience, I can tell you that PPS will never simply make a direct simple decision—instead one must jump through hoops, fill out many forms and have it reviewed by a variety of people whose salary you pay. No matter how basic and simple the request. All this is time consuming (for both parent and district) and expensive. Vote NO for paper pushers and Carole’s ‘I can do whatever I want to’ agenda.” —Zumpie “There are poor families in the county who will be out on the street if their landlords raise the rent. The high cost of the school funding issues ensures a lot of rents will be raised. Therefore, the trade-off is, patch the school leaks and we create more homeless. These proposals, coming in the midst of the wreckage of the worst economic train wreck since the 1930s, are a bludgeoning of the poor who’ve been bruised and bloodied sufficiently the past few years. Enough, already! We helped Packy and the fish back when times were good. Times aren’t good anymore. The schools will have to wait.” —Tim 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
Take your dreams. Add in a rigorous and relevant education, engagement with other serious adult students and working instructors who help you think critically and broadly. Bring it all together and what does it equal? You becoming whatever you want be.
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Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
I’ve seen at least three white bicycles adorned with flowers tethered to poles around Portland and Milwaukie. What gives? Do the bikes represent a location where a cyclist was hit by a car? An art installation? Or just one person’s attempt at being whimsical? —JoyGirl Unless you’re the sort who finds pictures of stillborn infants “festive,” describes Berlin Alexanderplatz as a “romp,” and considers Pol Pot a “party animal,” you probably wouldn’t characterize the stark memorials known as ghost bikes as “whimsical.” “Somber, bordering on eerie” might be more le mot juste. As you’ve correctly guessed, each bike commemorates a bicyclist who was killed at that location. To be frank, I’ve always found the bikes’ purpose to be painfully obvious, but—lucky for you, darling readers—there’s more to the story. First, it turns out that, as Portland-y as they
seem, ghost bikes weren’t our idea. They began in 2003, in St. Louis, and apparently touched a nerve worldwide: New York-based ghostbikes. org now records the memorials in 150 cities spread over 22 countries, including 20 here in Portland. (There’s even a map, in case you want to plan a rather depressing tour.) While Portland can’t take credit for inventing ghost bikes, we may take some consolation in the fact we’ll be in the movie: Meaghan Wilbur, a New York filmmaker so indie she didn’t immediately answer emails from the press, is in post-production with the Ghost Bikes Film Project, which includes footage shot in Portland last summer. Information about exactly where and when the film might be released is currently only being made available to the project’s Kickstarter backers. This strikes me as a hell of way to run a railroad, but what do I know? Maybe if we keep looking both ways at every intersection, we’ll see it coming. QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com
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NEWS FROM BEYOND ABBOTTABAD. Mayor Sam Adams’ proposed $408 million general-fund discretionary budget includes a provision to keep the city’s controversial leaf-removal fee. The $15 to $65 fee riled some Portlanders last year when the mayor introduced it without a great deal of notice. Adams will also keep the opt-out program. “If you clean the leaves in front of your yard, you don’t have to pay a thing,” Adams announced. “We think this is a good value for Portlanders.”
503 285 3620
Even as lawmakers work to eliminate more than 100 exemptions from Oregon’s Public Records law (see page 8), Sen. Diane Rosenbaum (D-Portland), at the behest of City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, is seeking to shield recordings of 911 calls from disclosure. That legislation, Senate Bill 346, currently sits in the Senate Rules committee, which Rosenbaum chairs. Fritz says she wants callers—not public employees—to be able to veto the release of 911 audio. “It’s a patient privacy issue,” Fritz says. Sen. Mark Hass (D-Beaverton), a former television reporter, disagrees. “I have voted against this concept before and will do so again,” Hass says. “Disclosure is a good check and balance to see how 911 operators handle the cases we’ve entrusted to them.” Speaking of Rosenbaum…. As Senate majority leader, she is the Legislature’s top-ranking woman and widely mentioned as a possible successor to Brad Avakian as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor and Industries. Both are up for re-election next year, but Avakian has announced he’ll try instead to unseat U.S. Rep. David Wu in the 1st Congressional District’s Democratic primary. “I’m really concentrating on being Senate ROSENBAUM majority leader right now, and will be through the end of session,” Rosenbaum says. “But I care a lot about BOLI and its mission to help workers and administer important programs like the minimum wage.” A recently retired Portland cop is taking a novel path to try to secure discipline for the lieutenant he claims forced him out of his job. The retired sergeant, Doug Justus, says he’ll file a complaint at City Hall’s Independent Police Review against Lt. Rachel Andrew. Justus says Andrew, his supervisor, subjected him to repeated verbal abuse in an attempt to hound him out of his former position as the police bureau’s point man on human trafficking (see “Missing Justus,” WW, Feb. 16, 2011). “That’s pretty rare,” says IPR Assistant Director Constantin Severe, adding that he can’t recall an instance where a cop has put his name to an IPR complaint against a fellow officer. Justus tells WW he turned to IPR because he doesn’t trust the police Internal Affairs Division.
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Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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What doesn’t Adams’ budget include? The River Patrol for one. At his annual State of the City address In February, Adams proposed that the city take over Multnomah County’s function of performing rescues on the Willamette and Columbia rivers. This caught county Sheriff Dan Staton by surprise, even though Adams said it was intended to save the county money. As a result, talks about the proposal are ongoing. “It’s going to take longer,” Adams says.
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AIDAN KOCH
NEWS
DIRT UNDER THE NAILS A BEAUTY TREND OREGON TAX COLLECTORS DISLIKE. BY BE T H S LOV I C
bslovic@wweek.com
It often seems that the only thing more common than coffee shops on Portland street corners are neighborhood nail salons. It’s a domain of manicures, pedicures and shellac, and it’s populated by immigrants: Vietnamese nail technicians could account for about one-third of all new licensed nail techs in the state. The Oregon Health Licensing Agency keeps track of the number of licensed nail technicians in the state, and it counts almost 14,000 in Oregon—with nearly half in Portland. Until 2009, the state agency offered licensing exams in Vietnamese. That year, when the special test was dropped for fairness reasons, 30 percent of test takers took advantage of the Vietnamese-language exam. An audit this year of one salon by Oregon’s Department of Consumer and Business Services offers a rare glimpse into that working world. It also reveals a disturbing trend for cash-strapped Oregon. The audit looked at the Nail Studio at Lloyd Center, next to the mall’s Northeast Halsey Street parking garage. According to the audit, Dave Lam, the owner and a Vietnamese immigrant, employed seven technicians whom he called independent contractors. He charged each technician $800 a month for her nail station, where customers could get $15 manicures with polishes like “A Good Man-darin is Hard to Find” and “I’m Suzi and I’m a Chocoholic.” This arrangement, according to the audit, was a mischaracterization of employees. By calling his workers independent contractors, an employer avoids expenses like unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance. The practice of declaring a worker his or her own boss also costs Oregon an unquantifiable amount each year in unpaid or late payroll taxes. “Because of today’s troubling economic climate, [this practice] seems to be on the rise,” says Derrick Gasperini, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Revenue. And Gasparini thinks that it is likely that many more nail salons are erroneously treating employees like independent contractors. To legally qualify as an independent contractor, a nail technician has to be “free from direction and control” by an employer. But the audit suggests Lam not only handled customers’ payments but determined how much technicians could charge. Compare that with an independent hairdresser who sets her own hours and prices, for example. She would probably qualify as an independent contractor. Lam says he simply didn’t know any better and that he ran into trouble because he adopted the practices of the previous owner when he bought the Lloyd Center salon about a year ago. He has since dropped the practice of
charging his nail technicians for their workspace, he says. After getting slapped with a $3,800 fine for not having workers’ compensation insurance, Lam says he now complies with Oregon law. “This is my first business,” says Lam. “We had to learn the hard way.” It’s not just the state’s bottom line that’s hurt when employers misclassify workers. Employees miss out on benefits like unemployment payments if they lose their jobs and their bosses didn’t pay unemployment insurance. And they’re still on the hook for Social Security taxes, among others, if their employers fail to withhold them. “They can unwittingly be incurring tax debt for themselves that they will have to pay later,” Gasperini says. The Rev. Joseph Santos-Lyons, a coordinator for the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, says Vietnam-
ese nail salon workers get little attention, though they are part of a fast-growing group of Oregonians. “Asian Pacific workers in general are really isolated,” Santos-Lyons says. “In Portland, they’re still pretty invisible.” A new coalition of health regulators and advocates for immigrants has emerged in Oregon to begin to address this. Another concern for nail salon technicians—and those who are immigrants and uneducated, in particular—springs from uncertainty about the possible health impact of the chemicals typically found in nail salons. P.K. Melethil, one of the organizers with the Oregon Collaborative for Healthy Nail Salons, says the group will begin to collect personal stories from workers this summer to get a better sense of what other barriers they may face. “This particular sector is in need of some support,” Melethil says. Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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LEGISLATURE
TRANSPARENCY PAPERS THE ATTORNEY GENERAL’S BID TO MAKE PUBLIC RECORDS MORE OPEN MEETS HOSTILITY FROM CITIES. BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS
njaquiss@wweek.com
Last year, Stephanie Stewart, land-use cochair of the Mount Tabor Neighborhood Association, requested records related to the Water Bureau’s reservoirs. Stewart says the Water Bureau billed her $57.82 for having an official watch her read eight pages—then would not give her copies. “If a person can’t read a public record without being charged for the time it takes her to read the public record, citizen oversight is dead,” Stewart told WW via email. That’s just one example of how government can thwart the intent of Oregon’s landmark 1973 public records law. As the Legislature moves toward adjournment next month, however, Attorney General John Kroger’s high-profile effort to modernize that law is hitting resistance. Oregon’s Public Records Law embodies the idea that “the public is entitled to know how the public’s business is conducted,” according to the Attorney General’s Public Records and Meetings Manual. Unfortunately, more than 400 exemptions and the indifference of some records’ custodians have undermined the law’s effectiveness. Last year, Kroger and his staff held public meetings around the state to assess the law’s effectiveness. They got lots of complaints. Sometimes records custodians use high cost estimates to deflect requests; other times they hide behind exemptions. Yet other times they use long delays to avoid disclosure. “There is a significant problem, and that’s a total lack of certainty which creates suspicion and animosity for some people,” says Tony Green, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Justice. In response, Kroger’s team produced a giant of a bill—77 pages long in its current version—designed to eliminate loopholes and make response time and cost more
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Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
standard and more reasonable. That gesture won Kroger cheers from the media—helpful to a politician of Kroger’s ambition—but got him crosswise with the state agencies and local governments that the bill would hold to a higher standard. While state agencies grumbled privately about the costs of compliance, the Oregon League of Cities attacked the bill directly. Oregon League of Cities lobbyist Scott Winkels offers a number of objections to the bill, starting with its premise. “I don’t know that anybody’s actually made the case that there’s a problem with transparency in this state,” Winkels says. He also says many cities lack the staff to respond to records requests as quickly or fully as Kroger’s bill requires. And records requests can be frivolous in some cases and overwhelming in others. “Somebody asked the City of Tigard for every document related to land use going back to 1983,” Winkels says. “That’s a lot of records.” While Kroger makes a strong case for reducing delays and streamlining the “actual cost” public bodies charge for records, some of his adversaries question how committed he truly is to transparency. In one pending disagreement, Marc Abrams, president of Local 1085 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents lawyers in the state Department of Justice, argues that Kroger’s own team is sitting on a public record. And in the ongoing legal skirmish over records related to a DOJ investigation into contracting practices at the Oregon Department of Energy, Kroger’s attorneys are now arguing that certain records it deemed public in January should now be withheld. “Although the state initially stated that the materials would all be subject to disclosure under the public records law, it no longer believes that to be true,” DOJ attorneys stated in a Marion County court filing in the case last week. Green says neither example conflicts with Kroger’s desire for transparency. In the first instance, he says, DOJ anticipates
being sued by an employee, and the document Abrams wants is relevant to DOJ’s legal strategy and therefore exempt from disclosure. In the ODOE investigation, Green adds, the agency mistakenly made public four employees’ records that it should not have, and is now seeking to rectify that error. “It was our mistake, and we are seeking to remedy that,” Green says. The fate of Kroger’s Senate Bill 41 now lies with the Senate Rules Committee, which includes one of Kroger’s biggest critics, Senate Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli (R-John Day). Ferrioli thought Kroger stonewalled his 2010 requests for records relating to a former DOJ attorney’s controversial work on liquefied natural gas. “Based on my experience with him, I’m not sure he’s interested in transparency at all,” Ferrioli says. “This bill is misdirection by a masterful political magician.” After two work sessions and three hearings, even one of SB 41’s strongest proponents, the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, is losing faith. “There’s now a lot of stuff in the bill that’s pretty bad,” says ONPA board member Tim Gleason. “The ‘timely response’ section is so convoluted, you won’t get records any faster.”
W W P H OTO I L L U S T R AT I O N
NEWS
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COURTS
TEEN SEXT A BILL TO LIMIT PENALTIES FOR GRAPHIC PICTURES HITS A SNAG. BY BE T H S LOV I C
bslovic@wweek.com
Among the many new laws the Oregon Legislature is considering this session, a revision to penalties for “sexting” between teenagers is proving unexpectedly contentious. Senate Bill 678 would put Oregon in the company of 20 other states that have tried to address the unintended consequences for teens of anti-child pornography rules aimed at adults. Sen. Floyd Prozanski (D-Eugene), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which introduced the bill, says he’s confident the legislation will prevail. But district attorneys in the state have challenged one provision in the bill related to judicial discretion. In Oregon and elsewhere in the country, 1980s-era laws against the dissemination of sexually explicit images of children have ensnared not only child pornographers but young people themselves (see “Sext Crimes,” WW, Dec. 1, 2010). And because taking and sending sexual photographs of minors is a felony in Oregon regardless of the age of the photographer, some teens
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in Oregon have faced stiff 70-month sentences as a result of Oregon’s 25-year-old law. Conviction also carries with it the requirement to register as a sex offender. If approved, SB 678 would treat sexting teens more like foolish kids than perverted adults by creating a new misdemeanor crime of “inappropriate use of a sexual image.” In cases in which the photographer is under 18 and the subject of the photo is less than three years younger than the photographer, sexting would not be a felony. The proposed changes are driven by Measure 73, a voter-approved ballot measure from November 2010 that greatly increased the punishment for certain repeat sex offenders (as well as repeat DUII offenders). Under Measure 73, a teen who sends two sexually explicit images of another teen on two separate occasions could be charged as a repeat offender. The punishment? A minimum sentence of 25 years instead of 70 months. After Measure 73 went into effect in December, prosecutors argued there was little chance a 17-year-old boy who sends text messages with images of his 15-year-old girlfriend’s breasts would be railroaded into a 25-year prison sentence. But SB 678 was designed to make sure not even the threat of such an extreme sentence was possible. Now district attorneys are worried about another extreme—wayward teens who maliciously spread embarrassing photos of other young people and then get off easy under the new proposal.
VIVIANJOHNSON.COM
NEWS
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: Antjuanece Brown was the subject of a December WW cover story about sexting and Oregon’s laws to address it. She was not convicted of that crime.
Brad Berry, district attorney for Yamhill County, is also chairman of the legislation committee for the Oregon District Attorneys Association. Berry says Oregon does need to address sexting, since it’s so common among young people. But the district attorneys association objects to one provision of the bill. That is the portion that gives discretion over sentencing to judges in cases in which the victim is under 12 and the perpetrator is under 18. The district attorneys association says
discretion should be with prosecutors. Berry offers an example: A 17-year-old boy takes a series of suggestive pictures of an 11-year-old girl. The girl doesn’t object. Then the boy gets in a fight with the 11-year-old’s older sister and sends the photos to the entire high-school football team, whose members spread the images. “Now where are we?” Berry asks. “It fits under the common understanding of sexting, but it’s certainly uncommon behavior.”
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NEWS
ELECTION
SHUT UP AND VOTE!
Gerding Theater at the Armory 128 NW Eleventh Avenue
503.445.3700
pcs.org
YOUR GATEWAY DRUG TO CIVIC INVOLVEMENT. Last week, WW issued its endorsements for the May 17 special election. Here again are our recommendations: Portland Public Schools Measure 26-121: Yes. What it does: The $548 million construction bond would pay for full rebuilds at nine campuses. It would also pay for significant upgrades, such as new covered playgrounds, improved roofs and seismic retrofits, at all of the remaining 76 campuses. What we said: “[O]ur schools are too crucial to the health of our city to defer this needed maintenance any longer. Portland is a city that raises taxes for elephants, fireboats and salmon. We ought to be a city that teaches its children in schools that aren’t raining ceiling tiles.” Portland Public Schools Measure 26-122: Yes. What it does: This local-option levy would raise $59 million a year starting this year to pay for teachers’ salaries at a time of dwindling state support for public education. It would renew a current levy that generates about $40 million a year. What we said: “The new levy would protect a total of 600 teaching jobs—or 200 more than the currently levy.” WRITTEN BY AND STARRING
Portland Public Schools Board of Education
Lauren Weedman | DIRECTED BY Allison Narver
“A horrific hilarious journey into prison hell and LA fluff…” —Seattle Times
ADKINS
MORTON
REGAN
Zone 1: Ruth Adkins. A Yale graduate, Adkins works for the Oregon Opportunity Network, an affordable housing group. Painfully quiet in 2007 (when she first won election to the School Board), Adkins speaks more forcefully now. We’re glad. Zone 2: Matt Morton. Morton offers budget experience that will be lacking on the board. Zone 3: Bobbie Regan. Regan is a knowledgeable board member who deserves another shot. Portland Community College
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Position 5: Gary Hollands. A small-business owner who hauls junk. Position 6: Doug Montgomery. A smart and highly qualified candidate who taught public policy at Portland State University. Position 7: Kevin Spellman. Spellman has a strong understanding of budgetary issues and policy.
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Band Best New
2011
THE 10 LOCAL ACTS PORTLAND’S MUSIC INSIDERS ARE TALKING ABOUT (AND LISTENING TO).
Quick! Name your 350 favorite Portland bands. Yeah, it’s kind of a tough one. But that number represents the shared wisdom of the 161 local music experts— journalists, bookers, promoters, ex-BNB winners, venue owners, producers and the like—who responded to our eighth annual Best New Band poll. They came up with just over 350 artists they thought deserved recognition as one of Portland’s best (as always, we remind you that the words “best,” “new” and even “band” are all subject to the interpretation of those who responded to our poll—you can see their ballots and get a breakdown of our point system at wweek.com). It’s a staggering number—but what’s more impressive is how many of those bands actually are really good. Each year, Portland’s music scene grows—with new bands from within the city limits and imported groups from around the country—and yet, somehow, the music community remains jam-packed not just with awesome artists but awesome people. Shouldn’t things be getting a little cutthroat out there? Shouldn’t bands be firebombing each other’s vans for headlining slots at Mississippi Studios and Doug Fir? For whatever reason, civility remains in place and Portland remains one of the best places in the country to see live music seven nights a week. While we stand firmly behind these 10 fantastic acts, we also know they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Our hope is that you’ll venture out and find your own local favorites, and involve yourself in a music scene that is truly historic. This year, like every year, I remain humbled by Portland’s awesomeness. It really is way too much awesomeness for one man. So, hopefully—if the awesomeness doesn’t kill me where I stand—I will see you at a show real soon. —Casey Jarman, music editor
1. And And And 2009 Tyler Keene, Nathan Baumgartner, Jonathan Sallas, Ryan Wiggans, Berg Radin, Bim Ditson SOUNDS LIKE: A refined, orchestrated version of Wowee Zowee-era Pavement made by kids who grew up listening to hip-hop instead of the Fall. FORMED:
MEMBERS:
And And And is talking shit. We’re in the parking lot of the Care Medical & Rehabilitation Equipment building in Northeast Portland, and singer-guitarist Tyler Keene is feeling confident. “I think we could take any band in Portland in a game of three-on-three,” he says, grabbing a beat-up red, white and blue basketball from inside drummer Bim Ditson’s 1993 Ford Aerostar van. Multi-instru-
to the sport of “rigsketball” that it will challenge anyone, anywhere—so long as it can find adequate street light. After a particularly gloomy spring, tonight is feeling almost balmy—it’s T-shirt weather when the shots start going up and the words get fierce. Bassist Jonathan Sallas ties his long brown locks in a ponytail and rolls up his pant leg to reveal one high sock (like an indie-rock Kerry Kittles); Ditson sheds his leather jacket and takes two long strides, leaps off the van’s back door, and attempts a “bumper jam” on the janky rim. Co-frontman Nathan Baumgartner fires a wild jump shot that barely grazes the side of the wooden backboard, and the band yells in unison, “Chip the wood!” Multi-instrumentalist Berg Radin rolls on the ground in laughter. The cops drive by twice, slowing down on the corner of Northeast Hancock Street and 7th Avenue, but never stopping. This is how And And And rolls on a Saturday night.
AND AND AND, BRAINSTORM AND WILD ONES PLAY THE EIGHTH ANNUAL mentalist Ryan Wiggans joins Ditson on the back bumper, carefully lifting the collapsible basketball hoop attached to the top of the van—a 10-foot-high monstrosity one has to see to believe—into an upright position. You read that right: And And And, the wildest thing to hit Portland since Rasheed Wallace donned a Blazers jersey, is so committed 14
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The band has every reason to be cocky. In less than two years, And And And—named after a line in the 1991 film The Commitments—has gone from playing empty shows at outer-Portland dives like the Red Room to headlining local showcases at the hip Mississippi Studios. Those early gigs are still things of legend: The band was kicked out of
TYLER KOHLHOFF
118 POINTS its first show by the sound man; another one was almost shut down after Radin decided to climb the balcony at Valentine’s. To combat crappy sound systems and minimal crowds—and perhaps to cover the fact that the band was still finding its sound—And And And made sure every set was utter chaos. It was the only way to get noticed. “When we were playing at clubs like Ella Street we
we’re still playing at small clubs being noisy and dumb.” The story behind the band’s origin is almost as ridiculous. Keene, who grew up in Michigan and lived in New York for five years, moved to Beaverton to design packaging labels for Intel in 2009. Baumgartner was his next-door neighbor, but they met through their significant others— Keene’s wife was walking her dog and ran into Baumgart-
he played in the Eugene dance-rock group Superdream with Radin, Sallas and Wiggans, so he called up his pals to come practice at Bongo Fury, a 24-hour rehearsal space in Beaverton. Initial sessions were just as loud as the early gigs—they were surrounded by metal bands, and quickly realized that their quieter songs should be saved for the recording studio. But a group can’t survive on volume alone. So And And And turned to another gimmick, earning its street cred by becoming one of Portland’s most prolific bands. In an era of overnight Internet fame, And And And gets by on oldschool hustle: Since March 2010, the six-piece outfit has released two full-length albums (We’ll Be Better Off With the Plants and sophomore effort A Fresh Summer With And And And), four EPs, and Life Ruiner, a split cassette tape with friends the Woolen Men. For most bands, 50 songs is a legacy—for And And And, it’s just another year. “I think we release music like all the rappers Tyler likes do,” Radin says. “It’s like, we could just hold onto this material, or we can just go out and hustle, drop demos for free, and release songs as we finish them. We would love to release Lil Wayne mixtapes forever.” Amazingly, quantity has not trumped quality with And And And. Most of the band’s material strikes a perfect balance between dueling aesthetics: feverish, frantic lo-fi punk and cleverly arranged and orchestrated pop aided by trumpet and harmonica (and, oddly, the clarinet—perhaps the least-punk instrument in the world). Keene and Baumgartner trade off lead vocals, but they have similar vocal approaches that have more in common with Isaac Brock’s early Modest Mouse yelps than the bottled intensity of current lauded indie-rock singers like Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug. While And And And’s latest material has grown professional and assured, the vocals are still raw and half-drunk, mixed with so much reverb that it’s often hard to tell just what the hell these guys are singing about. It’s fitting, then, that the cover of Life Ruiner (which, like most of the band’s discography, was released on cassette) is a mosaic of Old German beer cans: And And And is one of the best drinking bands to hit Portland in years— a caustic and unpredictable live act from post to wire. Onstage the band switches instruments while Keene and Baumgartner howl above the wreckage. During a recent outdoor set at WW’s Eat Mobile food-cart festival, the band took the stage as a train chugged by 20 feet in the background; instead of waiting for it to pass, they yelled, “Train whistle!” and launched into a particularly noisy version of live staple “The 2nd Proposition,” one of the standout songs from A Fresh Summer. That tune is one of six songs And And And recently rerecorded with Eric Earley and Michael Van Pelt of Blitzen Trapper. The goal is to put out one “real” album and look for a label, while simultaneously readying more new songs for a future mixtape. “The sessions have been songs we’ve already written and done, but we want to release them as a proper album that’s professionally recorded and actually marketable and might appeal to people who don’t want to listen to a tape,” Baumgartner says. Back by the hoop, things are starting to get serious: Keene and Sallas, both over 6 feet tall, are dominating inside, scoring at will on a series of post-ups and offensive rebounds. Ditson can’t stop talking about the summer rigsketball tournament he’s organizing, where 32 local bands will play three-on-three ball in an NCAA-style bracket. In each matchup, the band with fewer MySpace hits will pick where to park the van and its attached hoop. It’s a pretty egalitarian move on And And And’s part, but it shows that beneath all the band’s loud-mouthed ego, it will always identify with the underdogs. “The original idea behind
BEST NEW BAND SHOWCASE ON FRIDAY, MAY 6, AT MISSISSIPPI STUDIOS. 9 PM. FREE. 21+. were never able to hear ourselves sing, so we sang way too loud,” Keene says, his voice still hoarse from shouting on the court. “We had to scream at the top of our lungs just to make it past the clutter of noise.” Baumgartner chimes in. “I think we still emulate those early shows. It created the whole thing we go for—it’s like
ner’s girlfriend, and a casual conversation revealed that both men were bashful songwriters. “From the beginning we really liked the idea of having co-lead singers,” Baumgartner says. “But we didn’t just want it to be a songwriter-based thing—we wanted a full band.” When Baumgartner attended the University of Oregon
the whole thing was to have ‘big’ bands play with ‘little’ bands,” Ditson says between shots. “Popularity doesn’t matter to us—you have to bring it on the court, wherever that is.” MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. BEST NEW BAND CONT. on page 16 Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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CONT.
2. AgesandAges 2009 Tim Perry, Graham Mackenzie, Adam Thompson, Johanna Kunin, Sarah Riddle, Daniel Hunt, Rob Oberdorfer. SOUNDS LIKE: The Kinks’ Munswell Hillbillies as performed by the Polyphonic Spree. FORMED:
MEMBERS:
Listening to AgesandAges’ debut album, Alright You Restless—a bright, shiny disc that mixes gentle Shins-esque vocal experimentation with Southern rock riffage—one gets the distinct impression that this is the happiest band on Earth. But when I meet AgesandAges at frontman Tim Perry’s house in North Portland, no one’s smiling. It’s 6 pm under a smattering of storm clouds and there’s a heated argument unfolding over how many backpacks and suitcases are too many to cram under the seats of the band’s modified 12-passenger van. From behind, the back doors ajar, the Ford E-350 15-passenger van already looks like a screenshot of a near-complete game of Tetris, and only four of the group’s seven members have shown up to load their bags. But somehow, over the course of the next half hour, everything (including me: I’m following AgesandAges for the first few hours of its five-week tour) has found its place. The loaded van pulls away from the house and moves about eight blocks before Perry pulls over. “OK, I forgot my sunglasses,” he says. A few miles down I-5 and there’s no sign of the tensions that flared earlier. Everyone’s eating messy cheeseburgers and fries from Bar Bar and joking about the band’s first tour stop: Corvallis. That’s right—the first show of the band’s epic national tour is an hour and a half from Portland, at a restaurant that may or may not have a stage, a PA system or a sound guy. The original club fell through, and no one is quite sure what to expect from its replacement. It’s perhaps not an ideal way to begin, but then AgesandAges’ own origins are just as packed with happenstance. In 2008, as Perry’s longtime rock band Pseudosix was disintegrating, he ran into drummer Daniel Hunt—who had moved to Portland from Seattle earlier that day—on the street near his house. They talked about Fela Kuti and made loose plans to play together. Soon after, Perry’s oldest friend, Graham Mackenzie—who sang in Seattle-area choir groups as a kid—told Perry he was intent on leaving New York. Perry suggested Portland, where Mackenzie could join his band— a band that was still largely hypothetical. But one by one,
puzzle pieces came together that fit into Perry’s dream of starting a joyful, choral, apathy- and drama-free rock group. If that project sounds like wishful thinking—well, maybe it was. But after years of slugging it out with unimpressed rock audiences, Perry says he just wanted to make songs that felt good to play and made people move. AgesandAges is unapologetically groovy in ways that fell largely out of fashion somewhere in the mid-’70s. “Lyrically and thematically, our music is about isolation from the rest of the bullshit,” Perry says. Alright You Restless focuses single-mindedly on the idea of moving to the middle of nowhere and roughing
are clear roles: Somebody counts the money, somebody keeps track of the T-shirts. But Perry says much of the band bullshit he and other members have been through before doesn’t exist with AgesandAges, especially when the band is on the road. “Our personalities kind of cancel each other out—in a good way,” Perry says. “I don’t think there is ever a moment where anybody feels singled out. And we’ve all done this before in some capacity. We’re all older.” The challenge for AgesandAges is to be both a practical, cohesive touring unit offstage and to live up to its own irony-free, gung-ho mythology onstage. “In the beginning, I was leaving it all onstage in a way where 33 shows in 35 nights would not have been possible,” Mackenzie says. “To figure out how to do the show for those who came to see it, and still do it tomorrow, it’s tricky.” The Corvallis stop is one a lesser band might not give its full attention. When the van pulls up around 8 pm, the venue, a restaurant and bar called Cloud 9, is in the throes of a dinner rush. Well-dressed diners laugh and slowly pick at their plates. “You can’t judge a place by the way it feels at 7 or 8 o’clock,” Perry says. “Sometimes it fills up. And sometimes it doesn’t.” By 9 pm, the dinner crowd has cleared and college-aged kids begin to show up in pairs, and when AgesandAges takes the stage, around 10:15 pm, the crowd has peaked. AgesandAges starts a little awkwardly—Mackenzie thinks there’s blood on his microphone (the sound man insists it’s just rust), and Perry’s guitar seems to detune suddenly on the second song, the live favorite “No Nostalgia.” Mackenzie takes over on vocals while Perry tunes, and at the song’s midpoint, which finds everyone singing and a barroom piano entering the mix, the band is firing on all cylinders. Someone in the crowd lets out a “Whoo!” By the next tune, AgesandAges has the 50 or so folks in attendance hanging on every riff. 71.5 POINTS “It’s so great to be here in the home of the Oregon Ducks,” Mackenzie deadpans it with one’s closest friends. It’s a theme that has resonated before launching into the album’s title track. The crowd with Portlanders, perhaps because Portland itself has a bursts into laughter and applause. reputation for being a magical rock-’n’-roll Neverland—or, After AgesandAges’ set, the band members order appeas Portlandia would have it, “the place where young people tizers and watch their tourmates, Olympia’s Lake, play a chill go to retire”—but the band’s acceptance is still a bit of a sur- set to a now-seated (and slightly chatty) crowd. Perry, noticeprise, given that it was a rejection of an apathetic Portland ably relaxed after his band’s warm Corvallis reception, sinks rock crowd that inspired the group in the first place. into a corner booth and picks at some mac ’n’ cheese. Then Of course, AgesandAges isn’t the hippie commune it he offers the most practical explanation of AgesandAges to sings about on Alright You Restless. Members have day jobs, date: “We just wanted to write songs where we wouldn’t hear laptops, girlfriends, boyfriends and their own apartments. people talking over us.” CASEY JARMAN. With most of the band’s members in their early 30s, this isn’t a naive group of kids, and even within the band there BEST NEW BAND CONT. on page 19 ALICIA J. ROSE
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3. Brainstorm 2008 Adam Baz, Patrick Phillips. SOUNDS LIKE: A Corona- and rum-soaked dance party under overcast skies. FORMED:
MEMBERS:
The Smith & Bybee Wetlands Natural Area in North Portland is buzzing. The nicest weather in weeks has brought out kayakers, cyclists, and a surprisingly large number of bird watchers, binoculars around their necks and dog-eared bird guides poking out of their back pockets. “I come here at least once a week,” says Adam Baz, walking along the paved path that cuts through the wetlands. The drummer-keyboardist-vocalist for Brainstorm is a self-admitted “bird nerd,” who spends three months a year in the Sierra Nevadas counting birds for a nonprofit organization. “There’s so many microhabitats right next to each other, and so much…” Baz stops short, walks back a few steps, and raises his binoculars, fixing them on the woods nearby. “I hope you guys don’t mind me geeking out on this for a minute. I think I just saw a hermit thrush or a Swainson’s thrush, and I’ve never seen one of those before.” Baz’s bandmate, guitarist-tuba player-vocalist Patrick Phillips, takes this in stride. “When we tour, he does this constantly,” he says, laughing. “I’ll fall asleep in the car and then wake up and we’ll be stopped. And there would be Adam on the side of the road, looking through his binoculars, and playing bird songs on his iPhone.” Bird watchers and enthusiasts use the word “lifer” for moments like this—when they see a particular species for the first time. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, is that your lifer?’ ‘Was that one a lifer for you?’” says Baz. Although we music geeks don’t have a word like that to describe the first time we hear a band, like most obsessive pursuits, the principle is exactly the same: We always remember. My “lifer moment” with Brainstorm came during last year’s PDX Pop Now! Festival. Playing on the outside stage in the early evening, the duo was a captivating presence. Phillips bounced and bobbed around the stage as he sent long, African-inspired guitar lines floating into the open air. Baz switched between a furious, math-rocklike attack on his drum kit to more measured beats, taking time out to throw in a trilling melody on a small keyboard. It was a positively joyous set that, amazingly, sent the all-ages crowd into a dancing frenzy.
“That was a real turning point for us,” Phillips remembers of the PDX Pop show. “It was definitely the biggest audience we’d ever played to by that point.” At PDX Pop, Brainstorm was only two years old. Baz and Phillips met as members of the freewheeling country-esque pop group Ohioan and Native Kin. The two bonded over their mutual love of boundary-pushing duos like Lightning Bolt as well as artists from Northwestern Africa and Southeast Asia. “The idea from the beginning was to try and seam those things together,” Baz says. Since then, the band has been making steady strides. It released a fantastic full-length (2009’s Battling Giants) and a pair of 7-inch singles. The popular Portland-based Into the Woods video project (intothewoods.tv) filmed the group performing in its practice space in Baz’s house for part of the project’s “Feels Like Home” series— playing the ecstatic, world pop-inspired “Beast in the Sky” in the band’s quilt-padded practice space. As of late, Brainstorm has been scoring some choice opening-act spots for groups like Akron/Family and Typhoon. As the two wander through the wetlands— with Baz pointing out different bird songs and Phillips spotting a morel mushroom poking up out of the ground—they each contemplate the future of Brainstorm. First is how to maintain the momentum they’ve been gathering to this point and build on it. “Portugal. The Man says they’d love to tour with us,” Baz says. “But we have to jump through all the hoops to get their management to approve it.” The duo has sent out demos of its next album to 30 or so labels in hopes of scoring a deal. Baz and Phillips are also trying to work out the future of Brainstorm’s sound, including the potential of adding a third member to the mix. “Two people onstage is an undeniable formula,” Baz says, “but we’d love to have a woman’s voice for tripartite harmonies and to try out some polyrhythm effects.” And they’re ready to write new material, some of which may mix in Baz’s dual interests in music and birding. “We’re thinking of writing some guitar parts based on bird song,” he says, pulling up the iBird Explorer app on his iPhone. He plays a few sparrow calls that he and Phillips vocalize as if playing them on guitar. Why those bird songs in particular? Says Phillips: “Sparrows shred!” ROBERT HAM. BEST NEW BAND CONT. on page 20
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w ww.por tlandmusiccompany.com Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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CONT. NILINA MASON-CAMPBELL
BEST NEW BAND Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Red Lion Hotel 2525 N. 20th Avenue, Pasco, WA 99301 5:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Doubletree Hotel 1000 NE Multnomah Street, Portland, OR 97232 5:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is hosting public hearings to obtain comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Disposal of Greater-Than-Class C (GTCC) Low-Level Radioactive Waste (LLRW) and GTCC-Like Waste (Draft GTCC EIS). The hearings will be held at the locations and dates listed above and will begin at 5:30 p.m. with an informal poster session and opportunity to sign-in to provide verbal comments. A formal presentation by DOE officials will start at 6:30 p.m. followed by public comments.
48.5 POINTS
The Draft GTCC EIS provides information on options for the disposal of GTCC waste, including disposal of up to 12,000 cubic meters of waste. DOE does not have a preferred alternative for disposal of this waste, and is soliciting public input to help inform the development of preferred alternative(s) for the Final GTCC EIS. GTCC LLRW consists of a small volume of LLRW generated as the result of Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Agreement State licensed activities, including production of electricity from nuclear power plants; the production and use of radioisotopes for diagnostics and treatment of cancer and other illnesses; oil and gas exploration; and other industrial uses. “GTCC-like” waste consists of DOE owned or generated LLRW and potential non-defense transuranic waste which is similar to GTCC LLRW and for which there is currently no available disposal capability. Additional information on the Draft GTCC EIS can be found at the GTCC website http://www.gtcceis.anl.gov. A Federal Register Notice was published on February 25, 2011, which announced a 120-day public comment period, ending on June 27, 2011. Written comments on the Draft GTCC EIS should be submitted by June 27, 2011, to: Mr. Arnold Edelman, GTCC EIS Document Manager, Office of Regulatory Compliance (EM-43), U.S. Department of Energy, 1000 Independence Avenue, SW., Washington, DC 20585-0119, or via fax: 301-903-4303, e-mail at gtcceis@anl.gov, or via the GTCC website. Please mark envelopes and e-mails as “GTCC EIS Comments.”
4. Wild Ones FORMED:
2010 (though Wild Ones played its first show this February) MEMBERS: Danielle Sullivan, Thomas Himes, Clayton Knapp, Andy Parker, Nick Vicario. SOUNDS LIKE: The dance party at the end of the rainbow.
NEWS
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In 2007, the sky seemed like the limit for Portland’s Eskimo & Sons. The band was playing increasingly packed houses and locking in its sound, as demonstrated by a stellar sophomore EP. It was singer Danielle Sullivan’s voice—shockingly clear and controlled with a little-kid innocence—that first grabbed listeners, but the tight and nuanced instrumentation, combined with frontman Dhani Rosa’s brilliant songwriting, made it stick. Then, in mid-2008, with little explanation (Rosa would say he was “done with sad shit”), Eskimo & Sons called it quits. “We were all pretty young,” keyboardist Thomas Himes says. “But it was drawn out over two years—we always wanted to keep believing we were going to come out with a record.” The band re-formed briefly as Congratulations, but its momentum was lost, and Rosa was self-critical to the point of paralysis. Rosa would eventually move to Mexico to write and record, leaving the rest of his band—close friends who kept in touch throughout the band drama—in Portland. Eager to make music again, Himes and Sullivan—neither of whom had ever been in bands outside of Rosa’s—plotted a recording project. Himes, who dabbled in ambient music while in college, began emailing Sullivan electronically produced tracks to sing over. Slowly, something took root. “It felt like jumping off a cliff into the unknown,” Sullivan says now. “I’ve always been terrified to write on my own. I don’t even write in a diary. I write lists—grocery lists.” But after enough “poking and prodding” from Himes, Sullivan wrote parts that brought the songs to life. The pair decided to call on an old friend, E&S bassist Clayton Knapp, to join the band for recording sessions. Drummer Andy Parker and bassist Nick Vicario, who had toured with Eskimo & Sons with their respective bands Dirty Mittens and the Bustling Townships, would join next. It felt like a reunion, the band’s members say, but Wild Ones had just been born. The group’s debut EP, You’re a Winner—released via CD and Internet download earlier this year—mixes crunchy electronic pop elements with lush live instrumentation and Sullivan’s crystalline, multitracked vocals. Considering its shared members, the group can’t help but remind of Eskimo & Sons, but—true to its name—Wild Ones is more playful and genre-defying. Early live shows have shown even more potential than the recordings: Wild Ones pulls off quiet numbers and full-on dance jams alike without the help of digital backing tracks, and it’s clear to the audience just how much fun this band is having. “We were all ready for it,” Parker says of the young group’s enthusiasm. “These are guys I’ve loved and known for years, and we were all ready for something new.” That’s true on a number of levels: Before Wild Ones came together, both Himes and Vicario had concrete plans to leave Portland. The band kept them here, and all members say they’re in it for the long haul. “We’ve been in bands for too long to never have released a full-length,” Himes says. “This time it’s going to happen.” CASEY JARMAN. BEST NEW BAND CONT. on page 23
Here is the ad that The Oregonian refused to publish. Last week, The Oregonian solicited an ad from Portlanders for Schools. After the space was purchased and the ad was accepted, the Oregonian’s publisher refused to print it — even though the content of the ad was accurate and factual in every detail. Below is the ad that The Oregonian refused to print. PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISMENT
Why is the Portland School Bond so important?
The condition of our schools isn’t a problem.
It’s a crisis.
“Portland is long overdue to reinvest in its historic school buildings, and a rebuilding campaign could pay educational and economic dividends for decades to come… the need to protect Portland’s capital investment is impossible to ignore. Many schools date from the 1920s or earlier… these schools need a lot of work to preserve their value: new wiring, new pipes, better heating systems, new insulation, refinished wood, new flooring and fixtures. … The list is daunting, but the work is essential for a long-lasting building and a healthy school environment. Speaking of work, a capital bond would create jobs for construction workers and other skilled tradespeople in the Portland area. That would provide a welcome boost in a city still struggling with high unemployment… If any kind of capital plan deserves a fair hearing, it’s this one.” 11/14/2010
Money for schools cannot be delayed “Without approval of the bond measure, which appears on the ballot as Measure 26-121, school buildings and classrooms within the district will continue to deteriorate. Students will be without modern science labs and computer centers. The school district will continue to be at a disadvantage when competing with suburban schools to attract families with children…The cost to do anything about these problems will rise into the future… The sooner we get started, the better.” 4/21/2011
“A ‘yes’ vote on the Portland School Bond demonstrates our city’s commitment to its school children and to their future success. The League believes all schools should have adequate physical facilities that meet state and local safety and sanitation standards. Measure 26-121 is a prudent investment in our children and in Portland’s future.”
—The League of Women Voters of Portland “Portland’s school buildings do not have the fire safety protections they should. Few schools have fire-protection sprinkler systems, fire alarms need serious updating and there is inadequate disabled accessibility in case of an emergency. Measure 26-121 will provide badly needed repairs and upgrades that will vastly improve the fire safety of our schools.”
—Portland Fire Fighters Association “Our kids need up to date, safe schools to get the best possible start in life. Because more than half of our schools were built before World War II, these schools are crumbling – they have serious safety issues and out-of-date learning environments. We have to act right away, and that’s why the PTA supports this bond.”
—Portland Council of the Oregon PTA
We say YES on the Portland School Bond! Because We Just Can’t Wait Any Longer (partial list) • League of Women Voters of Portland • The Oregon State Council of Retired Citizens • Portland Council of the Oregon Parent Teacher Association • Portland Association of Teachers • Portland Firefighters Association Local 43 • Portland Police Association • Portland Business Alliance • Portland Schools Foundation • Community and Parents for Public Schools • Portland Parent Union • Portland Association of Public School Administrators • Amalgamated Transit Union • American Heart Association • Stand for Children • NW Oregon Labor Council • Columbia Pacific Building Trades • The Democratic Party of Multnomah County • VOIS Sustainable Business Alliance
For more information come visit the office or visit us online at www.portlandersforschools.org. Paid for by Portlanders for Schools.
And here is what Willamette Week had to say: “This election is all about education… our schools are too crucial to the health of our city to defer this needed maintenance any longer. … Portland is a city that raises
taxes for elephants, fireboats and salmon. We ought to be a city that teaches its children in schools that aren’t (4/27/2011) raining ceiling tiles.” Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
21
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BEST NEW BAND ROBERTSEN ASHMAN
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5. Kelli Schaefer She began playing solo shows in 2007. Kelli Schaefer, Kris Doty, Ryan Lynch, Jeremiah Hayden. SOUNDS LIKE: Bucolic and breezy pop with a feral and feminist spirit. FORMED:
MEMBERS:
Even though she wasn’t in Portland when the Blazers delivered their Game 4 comeback victory over Dallas last month, Kelli Schaefer and her band didn’t miss a moment of it. “We were checking our phones for the updates constantly all the way up there,” she says, recalling the drive to Seattle. The group was making the journey north that Saturday for an in-studio session at a Seattle radio station and to play an anniversary party at the High Dive music venue. Like everyone else, Schaefer assumed Portland’s team was assured a loss until its cinematic 11th-hour comeback, which began developing just as the band’s van rolled into town. The group quickly found a bar with a television to catch the final moments, then dashed back to the station to sound check for its set. Whether it was due to the elated chaos of that mad scramble between locales, or her introverted nature, 26-year-old Schaefer was initially tentative on-air. In a live context, the slight, somber-faced singer often initially exudes the cautious delivery of a young artist finding her footing. But what happened next was refreshing and unexpected. In the few minutes it took her to transition from “City Morgue,” the eighth track on her debut full-length Ghost of the Beast, to “Black Dog,” she began to convey the command of a seasoned performer, her rich alto soaring with disarming confidence over the playing of bassist Kris Doty, drummer Jeremiah Hayden and guitarist Ryan Lynch. While she’s still too green to ply audiences with the articulate power of her idols, Björk and PJ Harvey, she is traveling a trajectory that could get her playing in their league someday, a far cry from her quieter, acoustic origins. “It took me a while to get into music,” she says. As we discuss her transition from her early days as a coffeehouseacoustic folkie to the electrified, more engaging performer who has grabbed the attention of local audiences, she describes the experience of watching Jenny Lewis play at the Aladdin Theater in 2006. “That was the first time I realized that I didn’t have to play acoustic guitar and do cutesy, folky stuff—not that she was a [loud] rock star or anything, but that was what got me thinking about doing things differently.” The PJ Harvey influence came shortly thereafter, as did Schaefer’s awareness that experimentation and genre-surfing were acceptable approaches to making music. “I have a really short attention span, and I want to be able to do whatever I’m feeling at the moment…listening to [Harvey’s] records, it really doesn’t matter—her voice is the constant thing,” she says. “I want to experiment even more with vocals [on the next record] and learn more about producing myself.... I want to be able to take that leadership role in the future.” Such self-possession is a natural next step for Schaefer—one that her heroines would no doubt approve of. HANNAH LEVIN. BEST NEW BAND CONT. on page 24
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CONT.
FORMED:
BROOK BOBBINS
6. Unknown Mortal Orchestra
E M I LY B A K E R
BEST NEW BAND
2010 Ruban Nielson, Jacob Portrait, Julian
MEMBERS:
Erhlich. A young Carlos Santana shredding along to funky, battered soul 45s. SOUNDS LIKE:
For some musicians, it would be too much too soon. It has been less than a year since Ruban Nielson anonymously posted a single home-recorded track, “Ffunny Ffriends,” on the Internet under the pseudonym Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Now he has a deal with a great label, widespread blog hype and a band that tours with some of the hottest acts in indie rock. In fact, Nielson—who has a 2-year-old 41 POINTS son named Moebius and a 6-month-old daughter, Iris Honeybee—will spend nine months of 2011 on the road. Of course, Ruban Nielson has been here before. Just “I just realized that I didn’t have to make music in Portnot in America. land,” he says. “You could just live here and that would be “We were everything that was wrong with music for a cool enough—just to live here and do anything.” while,” Nielson says of the success of his punk band, the Nielson thought he’d give up on music altogether, takMint Chicks, in their native New Zealand. “Then all of ing an internship at local ad/design firm Kamp Grizzly and a sudden it just flipped, and we became accepted as the spending time with his growing family. But music crawled resident weirdos or whatever.” By 2007, the Chicks were its way back into his life. For fun, Nielson bought some the hottest band in the small country, winning five awards lo-fi analog tape recorders and began work on what he (including best album, best video and best group) at New thought would be a psych-pop record. Zealand’s equivalent of the Grammys. In the band’s redThe self-titled disc, which will see release June 21 on the carpet interview, Ruban Nielson announced that the band Fat Possum imprint (home of late bluesman RL Burnside and was leaving for America. “It’s not about Band of Horses, among others), is really making it big,” he told the cameras. an amalgamation of hip-hop, Motown“Making it big is...who cares?” era soul and psychedelic guitar-rock. Who’s got next? “We kind of became a little institu“I got into Wu-Tang before I got into tion,” he says now. And for a punk band, the Beatles,” Nielson says of his genreBest New Band Poll 2011, that kind of success can be suffocating. fucking analog aesthetic. “I really think finalists numbers 11 through 25. “We just needed to get out.” For Nielthose bands have a lot in common.” son and his brother Kody—both U.S. His live band, featuring bassist Jacob 11. Archers citizens thanks to their Hawaiian-born Portrait (who mixed the Mint Chicks’ 12/13 (tie). Radiation City mother—and drummer Paul Roper, excellent 2009 record Screens) and 12/13 (tie). The Reservations that meant re-establishing the Mint 19-year-old Portland drummer Julian 14. Golden Retriever Erhlich, made its debut Feb. 15 at Doug Chicks in Portland. The Chicks would 15. The Angry Orts Fir with super-hyped labelmates Smith last about two years here before Ruban 16. Pancake Breakfast Westerns. Nielson wore a cape. UMO and Kody’s complicated relationship 17. Wild Flag has been on the road, mostly playing hit a wall. “I felt like nobody else was 18. Guantanamo Baywatch to packed houses as a support act, ever going to pull the plug, so I pulled the 19-23 (tie). Mean Jeans since. With each show, Nielson says, plug myself,” Ruban says. “I just kind 19-23 (tie). Morning the band gets a little more comfortable. of wanted my brother back.” Teleportation It’s even been known to “jam.” Kody went back to New Zealand, 19-23 (tie). Soft Metals “For punks who actually grew up in where he’s currently dating and col19-23 (tie). Tope & Epp [the punk] era, there’s a rulebook—and laborating with notable NZ pop star 19-23 (tie). Denver guitar solos are out of the rulebook,” Bic Runga. (Ruban, sipping tea in the 24. Duover he says. Still, Nielson—who spends his Milwaukie yurt he rents from a friend, 25. Quiet Life rare free time at home with his wife shows me a newspaper article—it’s (whom he lovingly calls a “hippie”) the smiling couple gracing the cover of New Zealand’s Sunday Star Times, which calls them, and children, with chickens and dogs roaming the yard— “respectively, the most critically and commercially suc- insists he hasn’t forsaken his punk roots. “I used to use cessful New Zealand artists of the last 15 years.”) But those people that I looked up to as a gauge for what was Ruban, in love with Portland and enjoying his life out of good. Now I feel like freaking them out is the thing that lets me know I’m on the right track.” CASEY JARMAN. the public eye, stayed behind.
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32.5 POINTS
7. Lovers 2002 Carolyn Berk, Kerby Ferris, Emily Kingan. SOUNDS LIKE: Kate Bush “Running Up That Hill” to have a Black Celebration with Sade and Pema Chodron. FORMED:
MEMBERS:
With her head canted sideways, her eyes cast down, her arms engaged in some affair with the air—a Michael Stipe wave-chop, say, or a possessed preacher’s hortatory highfive to the sky—Lovers frontwoman Carolyn Berk sings as if struck anew by whatever bliss or brokenness first inspired her lyrics. It’s been a few years since Berk recruited programmer Kerby Ferris and percussionist Emily Kingan to assist in transforming Lovers’ guitar-based dolor into the vespertine electro-pop of 2010’s crushing Dark Light, and even though the band is, in Berk’s words, “a three-part collaboration,” she appears to be utterly alone up there, captivated by the sound surrounding her. Berk’s movements are awesome theater, as they convey with corporeality the skein of feelings aroused by Lovers’ recent beat-heavy and synth-laden recordings, which by pop’s ineffable magic arrive at consoling vistas of cosmic balance by first burrowing deep down into the small and bittersweet things that happen in dark rooms and between sheets. What Berk might be doing up there in that shifting stage light, then, is getting to that place where the best love songs live, that zone between bodies and minds that explodes into something like grace. “I like change,” Berk says, “progress of thought, progress of experience. So then you have to relearn the idea of the internal locus of control, otherwise you’ll just lose focus. I don’t want to live an unfocused life.” She is referring to her band’s future, but she might as well be describing Dark Light, or the 40 minutes Lovers spends attempting to turn those songs into breathing things in a room full of people: process, progress, learning, relearning, losing focus, finding focus, a whole mess of conflicting emotions going down at once, head canted sideways, eyes cast down. CHRIS STAMM. BEST NEW BAND CONT. on page 27
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PAGE 45 26
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John Miller Executive Director HOST Development, Inc. 503.331.1752 www.hostdevelopment.com
BEST NEW BAND SARAH MEADOWS
KAIJA CORNETT
ELIOT ROCKETT
CONT.
32 POINTS
32 POINTS
8/9/10. Monarques 2009 Josh Spacek, Michael Slavin, Richard Bennett. SOUNDS LIKE: A sock hop reverse-engineered by Alpha Centauri hipsters.
8/9/10. Purple & Green
FORMED:
32 POINTS
MEMBERS:
It seems less than fair that every description of Monarques, particularly any mention of the band’s hotly anticipated full-length debut—essentially complete and awaiting autumn release as unspecified powers that be circle expectantly—must belabor the immaculate confection of that thing they do. But obsessive critical focus upon the trio’s precision and restraint and bespoke instrumentation rather misses the point. “There’s not a strict regimen about authenticity. Because of the bulk of the music that we listen to, that period ends up being our reference point—but we just try to make the songs as good as we can,” says frontman Josh Spacek, former commander of rather more esoteric local act Oh Captain, My Captain. “Me, Richard, Michael—we love playing music. We recorded all the instrumental tracks live. Everything you’ll hear on the new album, besides some overdubbed vocals and a little bit of guitar, is a band playing in a room together. It’s the coolest fucking thing. Five dudes in a room playing together. We’re having an awesome time.” AM harmonies skitter and sway, casually note-perfect and thrilling because the conjoined bandmates somehow transcend kitsch or perspective, luxuriating in the bliss of immediacy. For all the intricacies of the band’s songcraft (a succession of shoulda-been singles with Motown’s surgical swagger and British Invasion effervescent cheek) or production (the specter of, well, Spector hovering above every reverb-soaked guitar stab), the Monarques are goddamn fun. “It’s honest pop rock,” insists Michael Slavin, newly minted lead guitarist. And there’s a peculiar innocence to yesterday’s bubblegum so vividly relished, plucking rapture from a handful of Gretsch. JAY HORTON.
8/9/10. Old Light 2009 Garth Steel Klippert, Charlie Hester, Patrick Finn, Todd Roper, Scott DeMay. SOUNDS LIKE: A cage match between Robbie Robertson, Jim James, Brian Wilson and Neil Young in which no winner is declared and all parties involved deny using anabolic steroids. FORMED:
MEMBERS:
“I’ll be damned if somebody’s going to tell me to stand up when I want to sit down,” Old Light mastermind Garth Steel Klippert told me in an interview last year. “And if I want to play loud, I’m going to play loud.” At that point, Klippert and company were just a blip on the radar, formed after the frontman perked ears by playing home recordings for his fares while working as a cabbie. Following the release of last year’s stellar debut, The Dirty Future, Old Light is a formidable entity in a folk-rock scene—with an emphasis on rock. Combining the old-school Americana of a stripped-down the Band with My Morning Jacket’s propensity to take a melodic jam into the mesosphere, Old Light has established a sound of its own: one that kicks back to chilled-out melodies laced with intense Beach Boys harmonies; one that gets Crazy Horse as fuck on swamp-rock anthems and throws down on quick improvised interludes. All along, the band emphasizes that Americana isn’t always rooted in plucky laments and tongue-in-cheek imitation—it can also be dirty and refreshing: Americana can embrace a musical manifest destiny, warts and all, that defies easy classification. Old Light now stands tall in a timeless, devil-may-cry category all its own—one that sits down to play loud at the same time. AP KRYZA.
2009 Justin “J Green” Johnson, Adam Forkner. SOUNDS LIKE: Futuristic, funked-up, sex&B from the remake of The Fifth Element; The-Dream recording an album for Portland’s punky Gnar Tapes label. FORMED:
MEMBERS:
Before Purple & Green ever played a show, the local R&B group had Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox’s stamp of approval. Cox, a longtime friend and collaborator of Purple & Green’s Adam Forkner, was one of the first people to witness Forkner’s new project. “I loved his advice,” Purple & Green singer Justin “J Green” Johnnson says. “He was like, ‘I don’t even want you to be good—try to be nasty.’” Watching Purple & Green onstage, it’s clear Johnson took those words to heart. Dressed in light green from head to toe (torn shirt, headband and matching scarf ) like a flamboyant Kermit the Frog, J Green is strutting around Mississippi Studios, teaching a mostly white Portland audience how to really get down. “I might have to take you to church on this one!” he shrieks, launching into the beginning of “Human Nature,” one of his group’s bouncy, synth-laced bangers. “We’re getting all Dreamgirls up in here!” In reality, Purple & Green’s story is more DIY than Hollywood. Johnson met producer-synth soloist Forkner last year when Forkner was performing with the mobile party van of Rob Walmart outside of Valentine’s. After some initial trepidation, Johnson—who has played Portland with a few acoustic and soul acts over the years—stepped up to the mic and improvised for 20 minutes, singing over a jerkin’ beat while Forkner looked on in amazement. Johnson quickly fled the scene, but Forkner tracked him down and the duo quickly began working on a style of funky, boisterous R&B that strays from his experimental past. “Psychedelic music used to be sexy, but somewhere that element got lost,” Forkner says. “There’s a lack of funk in the world, and we’re trying to bring that back.” MICHAEL MANNHEIMER.
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FOOD & DRINK: Shigezo bangs the drum. MUSIC: Dave Depper Rams on. STAGE: Lauren Weedman behind bars. MOVIES: Werner Herzog eats this cave.
31 35 49 54
SCOOP GOODBYE BIRTHERS, HELLO DEATHERS THE SEATTLE SOUND (OF TINY VIOLINS): Fleet Foxes frontman and newly minted Portlander Robin Pecknold hit out at the band’s home ground of Seattle on the Twitters last week, stating: “Both weeklies in Seattle have joke-y, belittling articles about us this week. Being a local press punching bag is one reason I moved. moved Happy now?” We suspect the two articles in question may have been a piece in The Stranger called “Actual Foxes Listen to Fleet Foxes”—in which the paper reviewed the band’s latest album by playing it to animals at the zoo and recording their reactions—and a Seattle Weekly reactions article titled “Robin Pecknold’s Most Revealing Conversation in Decades”—a fake interview using Pecknold’s tweets as answers.
Since 1974
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BEETJE GOES BIG: Brewer Michael Wright of local nanobrewery Beetje Brewery has applied for a brewpub license for a building on Southeast 10th Avenue and Mill Street. Currently sporting the working title of NW Craftworks, Wright says it’s a continuation of the Beetje project. “I’m growing the system and moving into a commercial space,” Wright told WW. “It’s quite possible the ‘Beetje’ moniker will be retired.” He plans to open the tasting and sales rooms within a few months.
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2nd Time Through
(folk rock) “Dinner Show” T u e s d ay 5 / 1 0 • 9 : 0 0 p m
opEN MIC NIgHT
Hosted By: Scott gallegos • win $50 6835 SW Macadam Ave | John’s Landing
WINNING, LOSING, COMING, GOING: WW Assistant Arts and Culture Editor Ben Waterhouse has been chosen for a fellowship at the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater & Musical Theater in Los Angeles. He will spend 11 days this June at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, under the instruction of nationally renowned theater critics, and will doubtless return even more cocksure and imperious. >>> Meanwhile, WW Assistant Music Editor Michael Mannheimer completed his last day at the paper Friday, and is moving to New York City to “make it” later this month. “His dedication to the craft, his refusal to become jaded and his endless curiosity served MICHAEL MANNHEIMER us well,” said WW Editor Mark Zusman. “Of course, he will lose all those qualities when he moves to New York. We’ll miss him.” CORRECTION: Due to reporter Aaron Mesh’s miscount, last week’s Headout incorrectly stated the number of rooms at the Crystal Hotel. There are 51 rooms, not 48. We regret the error.
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Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
M AT T W O N G
24 HOUR ARTY PEOPLE: Time-Based Art Festival favorite Mike Daisey will be returning for this year’s event with his most ambitious project yet: a 24-hour monologue aptly titled All the Hours in the Day. Daisey has been working on this for some four years, and even performed a monologue about this monologue at last year’s TBA. The performance will—understandably—be a one-off event, but the festival will run Sept. 8-18.
HEADOUT P H I L I P C H E A N E Y. C O M
WILLAMETTE WEEK
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK IN ARTS & CULTURE
WEDNESDAY MAY 4 [MUSIC] BATTLES Weirdo robot prog can be fun! New York trio Battles combines odd riffs, rhythms and sounds to make postrock you can dance to. Doug Fir, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $15. 21+.
THURSDAY MAY 5 [DANCE] BODYVOX What comes to mind when you think of home? BodyVox considers the question by staging an old favorite: A Thousand Little Cities. In a series of vignettes—many athletic, some lyrical, a few even airborne— the company evokes the times, and places, of our lives. BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 NW 17th Ave., 2290627. 7:30 pm Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:30 pm Saturday, May 7; 2 and 7:30 pm Saturdays, May 14 and 21. Closes May 21. $36-$49.
FRIDAY MAY 6 [OPERA] SORDID LIVES Opera Theater Oregon puts the soap back in opera with Sordid Lives: Live Wire!’s Pat Janowski and OTO’s Katie Taylor and John Dover contrived a silly plot involving a straying, married Wall Street banker; a scandalous pregnancy; amnesia; evil twins and other events in the days of the lives of the young and restless. The music (by famous 19thcentury composers) is delivered by the dozen plugged-in guitarists of Electric Opera Company, OTO’s Technicolor Orchestra and Chorus and members of the Flash Choir. Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 281-0295. 7 pm. $10-$12.
WHO IN THE DEVIL WAS ROBERT JOHNSON? Robert Johnson is, in many ways, an American myth. Like Johnny Appleseed’s and Billy the Kid’s, Johnson’s biography has long been obscured by fantasy—most notably, the legend that he met the devil at a crossroads and exchanged his soul for wicked blues-guitar chops and songwriting skill. The most famous photo portrait of Johnson, which finds his face frozen with a curious mixture of pained intensity and small-town naiveté, hasn’t helped him from slipping into the realm of fiction. But his recordings—the haunting “Hellhound on My Trail,” the intricate and soulful “Cross Road Blues”—cemented the blues as high art and helped build the foundation for rock ’n’ roll. Johnson died at just 27 years old, but this Saturday, one day before what would be the famed bluesman’s 100th birthday, some of those realworld songs are set to come back to life in the capable hands of Curtis Salgado, Joe McMurrian, Mary Flower, Baby Gramps and more. These songs don’t need a devilish backstory to make them compelling, but if you listen closely, you’ll hear why the tale caught on. CASEY JARMAN. SEE IT: Robert Johnson: 100 Years is Saturday, May 7, at the Alberta Rose Theatre. 9 pm. $20. 21+.
SATURDAY MAY.7 [FIESTA] CINCO DE MAYO It’s Portland’s 27th annual Cinco de Mayo Fiesta, and this year, the organizers have added lucha libre wrestling to the usual lineup of mariachi bands and piñata hitting. Four wrestlers from Mexico City will be taking on six locals and two Californians. This sounds vastly more entertaining than Rumble at the Roseland. Waterfront Park, 1020 Naito Parkway, cincodemayo.org. May 5-8, 11 am-11 pm. Adults $6, seniors $4 children $3, children under 6 free. [MOVIES] MIRANDA JULY PRESENTS THE FUTURE July, Portland’s own adorable purveyor of ennui, returns from L.A. with an advance screening of her new feature film, narrated by a shelter cat scheduled to be euthanized. I can has stay of execution? Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 493-1128. 7 and 9:30 pm. $15. [MUSIC] WANDA JACKSON Jack White might have put the White Stripes on the back burner, but so long as he works with living legends like Wanda Jackson—the rockabilly queen finally getting the widespread acclaim she’s always deserved—we won’t bitch too much. Roseland, 8 NW 6th Ave., 224-2038. 8 pm. $18-$25. 21+. Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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Now Serving
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Find us at Beaverton Farmer’s Market or Milwaukie Farmer’s Market this Mother’s Day weekend.
Varieties of Gourmet Tamales
CASA DE
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Taste the Difference
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On Mother’s Day Free Appetizers We’ll treat her like a queen.
Sunday May 8th
Enjoy Lebanese family recipes (vegan & gluten-free, too) Happy Hour all day • Belly Dancer Fri & Sat
10765 SW Canyon Rd • 503-601-8522
221 SW Pine • 503-459-4441
Call for reservations
BREAKFAST SERVED ALL DAY MOTHER’S DAY
Mimosa & Bloody Mary Specials 2 - 5 pm, Mon. - Fri. Open 8am - 5 pm
128 NE 28th 503-517-0347 30
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
FOOD & DRINK = WW Pick. Highly recommended.
REVIEW
THURSDAY, MAY 5 Cole Danehower at Metrovino
Cole Danehower, author of Essential Wines and Wineries of the Pacific Northwest, will be making a guest appearance at Metrovino’s happy hour, signing copies of his book and curating a Willamette Valley-focused wine flight. KAREN LOCKE. Metrovino, 1139 NW 11th Ave., 517-7778. 4 pm. $12. 21+.
FRIDAY, MAY 6 «LUKA» Dinners
The next installment of chef John Goddard’s Balkan supper club, «LUKA» (yeah, with the arrows), kicks off at the new KitchenCru space downtown. The first event is limited to 30 diners and focuses on Croatian food and wine, with hearty dishes like beef shoulder larded with pork belly on gnocchi and grilled sardine fillets, paired with wine from the Piquentum vineyards. KitchenCru, 337 NW Broadway, bistroluka.com. 7 pm. $50.
Mountains to Metro
More than 30 wineries from the Chehalem Mountains American Viticultural Areas are offering samples of their libations. The event includes local food from Davis Street Tavern, Fratelli, Vino Paradiso, Oba and others. Governor Hotel, 614 SW 11th Ave., 224-3400. 5 pm. $40. 21+.
SATURDAY, MAY 7 Gluten-Free Food Fair
More than 30 local and regional merchants will provide samples of gluten-free products, and healthcare practitioners will be available to answer questions. KL. All Saints Catholic Church, 3847 NE Glisan St. 11 am-2 pm. $5-$10, free for kids under 12.
Beaverton Farmers Market Opening
No more schlepping out to Portland for fresh food and fancy cheese: The Beaverton Farmers Market is back with more than 200 vendors and some new faces, like Lion Heart Kombucha, Portland Creamery, Feastworks, Eena Kadeena and Curious Farm. Beaverton Farmers Market, Southwest Hall Boulevard between 3rd and 5th streets, 643-5345. 8 am-1:30 pm. Free.
Saison Fest
There is a resurgence of saison brews happening across the U.S., and Cascade Brewing Barrel House will bring 18 of these ciders and ales under one roof. These farmhouse-style brews will come from Brasserie Dupont, Oakshire, Stillwater, Two Rivers Cider, Upright and more. KL. Cascade Brewing Barrel House, 939 SE Belmont St. 265-8603. Noon-10 pm. Free admission. Tastes for $1, full mug for $4. 21+.
Kentucky Derby at Eat
Forget going all the way to Kentucky for the Derby. Eat: An Oyster Bar is hosting a party right here in Portland. Those wearing their finest Derby attire (big hats are a plus) will get free Trumer Pils. It’ll also be the restaurant’s first Louisiana crawfish boil of the season, with Cajun-style crustacean served all day, alongside Derby drinks like mint juleps and Oaks Lily cocktails. KL. EaT: An Oyster Bar, 3808 N Williams Ave., 281-1222. 2:45 pm. 21+.
American Homebrewers Association’s Big Brew
National Homebrew Day is when thousands of home brewers from around the world all brew the same beers simultaneously. All are welcome at F.H. Steinbart, where locals will gather to brew one of the American Homebrewers Association’s special recipes. KL. F.H. Steinbart, 234 SE 12th Ave., 232-8793. 9 am-1:30 pm. Free.
C H R I S T A C O N N E L LY
PRICES: $: Most entrees under $10. $$: $10-$20. $$$: $20-$30. $$$$: Above $30. Editor: RUTH BROWN. Email: dish@wweek.com. See page 3 for submission instructions.
TAKE YOUR MOM OUT TO LUNCH SUNDAY, MAY 8 East India Co. Grill & Bar
Ditch traditional brunch options and try an Indian street-food buffet, with mutton curry, fish masala, lentil donuts and saffron jalebi. KL. East India Co., 821 SW 11th Ave., 227-8815. 11:30 am. $18 adults, $12 children 11 and under.
Pix Pâtisserie
Moms can watch their kids make messes in someone else’s kitchen. With the help of the pastry chefs at Pix, children 5 and older can create desserts from a number of provided pastry ingredients and decorations, while their mothers enjoy mimosas. KL. Pix Pâtisserie-North, 3901 N Williams Ave., 282-6539. 11 am-3 pm. $12.
The Heathman
The Heathman will offer its traditional Mother’s Day brunch and buffet. A la carte options include oxtail frittata and Portuguese sweet bread French toast, while the buffet holds roast meats, seafood, made-to-order omelettes and an epic dessert table to reward those who eat all their vegetables. The Heathman Hotel, 1001 SW Broadway, 241-4100. Brunch 9 am-3 pm, buffet seatings from 9:30 am-2 pm. Buffet $38 adults, $17 children 12 and under.
Aquariva
The south waterfront’s Aquariva will offer a special menu alongside its regular brunch offerings, including ricotta and blueberry pancakes, ham and egg tarts with herbed hollandaise, and a berry and fruit salad with minted yogurt. Aquariva Italian Kitchen + Wine Bar, 4650 SW Macadam Ave., 802-5850. 10 am-3 pm.
St. Honoré Boulangerie
Treat votre mère to petit dejeuner (which is a much more elegant way of saying “buy your mom breakfast”) at French bakery St. Honoré Boulangerie, with a special menu of egg-focused offerings, including brioche cocotte and frittata croissant. St. Honoré Boulangerie, 2335 NW Thurman St., 445-4342. 7 am-8 pm; and 315 1st St., Lake Oswego, 496-5596, 7 am-7 pm.
Morton’s
Give your mom the gift of hot, juicy meat with Morton’s $59-a-head menu. Choose from filet mignon, filet oskar, seafood dishes or chicken, along with a Mother’s Day raspberry cocktail. Morton’s the Steakhouse, 213 SW Clay St., 248-2100. From 3 pm. $59.
Pambiche
Celebrate el dia de las madres at Pambiche with a special menu, including chef John Connell-Maribona’s mother’s traditional Cuban feast and la Madre Reina (the Queen Mother), a Spanish flourless chocolate cake served with Spanish daiquiri salsa. Pambiche, 2811 NE Glisan St., 233-0511, pambiche.com. 8 am-10 pm.
Urban Farmer
The Nines Hotel’s locavore steakhouse is offering a nine-station buffet, including omelettes cooked to order, quiche, a cheese cart, and desserts like raspberry-rose French macarons. There’s also a free glass of Champagne in it for Mom. Urban Farmer, 525 SW Morrison St., 802-4900, urbanfarmerrestaurant. com. 9 am-2 pm. $49 adults, $19 children 10 and under.
Saraveza
For moms who prefer brews over bubbly, Saraveza is offering a Mother’s Day beer and cheesecake pairing. Sample six savory and sweet cheesecakes from local bakers, matched with at least eight craft beers. Saraveza’s Backspace, behind 5433 N Michigan Ave., 206-4252, saraveza.com. $30. 1-3 pm. 21+.
FLOORED: Shigezo diners in an alcove with a kotatsu table and tatami mat.
BIG IN JAPAN
nibbles) is the gyoza ($4.75), three cabbage-andpork-filled dumplings that present a delectable conundrum: You’ll want to keep sampling the thin, pan-fried crust before it has cooled enough to eat without risk of scalding. The okonomiyaki ($5.95), an egg pancake filled with pork, squid and green onions, is the most exotic starter, combining a lot of strong flavors into a griddle-seared blend, like a teriyaki seafood omelet. The skewers are less BY AA R ON MESH amesh@wweek.com impressive, though reasonably priced enough for A handmade sign hangs in the men’s room of Shig- trial and error: chicken and (especially) potato ezo Izakaya, promising the purchase of “a fancy items are worth a try, but panko-covered mozzaJapanese toilet” to match the one in the ladies’ rella ($2.95) is just an Eastern cheese stick. The entrees aren’t so wide-ranging, and don’t lavatory once the restaurant hits 50,000 customers. (The meter charting this progress is in the shape need to be. There is invention on the specials menu, of a commode seat; line-drawn cartoon men liter- with the kakuni pork finding an alchemy between ally ooh and ahh at the prospect.) In recent days, pork belly, tofu and a boiled egg yolk. But this is this fundraising effort has been overshadowed by primarily a house of rib-sticking staples. The katsu curry ($10.25), a standard other efforts, other signs: Fliers fast-food order in Japan, is promoting benefits and vigils for Order this: Tonkotsu shoyu ramen, the both massively portioned and earthquake and tsunami victims big bowl ($13.75). embarrassingly delicious, are pasted in the foyer, along Best deal: Gyoza, fist-sized cabbage the distinctively sweet stew with a donation jar. But less than dumplings, three for $4.75. topped with a panko-breaded a week after the Pacific disaster, I’ll pass: The yakiniku steak ($12.50) is but seems to be cut from an awfully chicken cutlet and heaped a group of Japanese customers fine, thin steer. with potatoes and carrots. could be seen celebrating a birth(There’s a vegetarian version day in Shigezo’s private party room—when a busboy brought out the cake, he was as well.) Only one item betters it: the tonkotsu shoyu draped in a sparkling gold kimono that made him ramen ($9.50-$13.75), with housemade noodles, a look a little like Elvis in a Vegas revue. Festivities pork-marrow and soy broth, and a slice of chashu go on; the sushi chefs still greet arriving customers barbecued pork flank so tender it melts apart at the with shouts; satisfied diners still bang a giant drum touch of a plastic soup spoon. The ramen is both homestyle and decadent, like living in a log cabin after each meal; and Shigezo will get its toilet. Shigezo is a merry place, the kind of restaurant freshly built from endangered redwoods. The genius of Shigezo is not that it does where toasts spill across aisles. Thickly hewn wooden beams—some as massive as oak trunks— something new—it’s how sublimely skilled it is at divide the dining room into the sorts of cozy resurrecting the old. (Even the obligatory miso alcoves where the tipsy businessmen in Kurosawa’s soup, $1.50, is a revelation here, so rich and subtly Ikiru might have forgotten their cares, except with flavored that each sip is distinct.) This izakaya Blazers games on the TV sets above the sushi bar. It immediately jumps onto the short list of Portland is unassuming and inexpensive for the Park Blocks: Japanese joints, up there with Yakuza and Biwa— For $15, you can get a great meal, and for $30, you but less ambitious than either of those locations, can wobble out the door not needing to eat again more interested in perfecting the kind of standby until the next night. Since the restaurant is the first dishes that accompany everyday celebrations. The continental U.S. outpost of a Japanese chain, few place deserves to be flush with business. items on the menu are a departure from the basic fare found in suburban Tokyo noodle shops; nearly EAT: Shigezo Izakaya, 910 SW Salmon St., 688-5202, shigezo-pdx.com. Lunch and dinner everything is an outrageous success. 11:30 am-11 pm Monday-Thursday and 11:30 amThe standout of the daunting appetizers menu midnight Friday; dinner 2 pm-midnight Saturday (the place is designed for drinking Kirin with and 2 pm-11 pm Sunday. $$-$$$ Moderate.
SHIGEZO CURRIES FAVOR WITH RISING SUN COMFORT FOOD.
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Cinco De Mayo & First Thursday!!! • Authentic Mexican Food & Music • Outdoor Beer Garden
• Live Art by Tasko and Other Great Artists • First Thursday’s all Summer • DJ Sovern T Spinning Live Video Playback 9-close • Countdown to Cinco De Mayo • Mexican beer specials daily
B l i t z -P e a r l
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1 1 0 N W 1 0 t h Av e n u e P o r t l a n d , O R 9 7 2 0 9
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
Make sure to try our badass burgers & queso. Burnside open ‘til midnight every night.
4225 N Interstate • 503-280-9464
1708 NE Burnside • 503-230-9464
MUSIC MILLENNIUM APPROVED
Special In-Store Events! AUTOGRAPH SIGNING STEVE EARLE SUNDAY 5/8 @ 3PM
PRE-BUY A COPY OF ‘I’LL NEVER GET OUT OF THIS WORLD ALIVE’ FOR GUARANTEED ADMISSION
SEE THEM LIVE
THE VENTURES WEDNESDAY 5/11 @ 7:30PM
SPECIAL FREE SOLO APPEARANCE!
FLEET FOXES
THE BEASTIE BOYS
HELPLESSNESS BLUES
STEVIE NICKS
$10.99 ��
THE CARS
$13.99 CD
LP ALSO AVAILABLE
‘Hot Sauce Committee Part Two’ was produced by Beastie Boys and mixed by Philippe Zdar. The new record will mark Mike “Mike D” Diamond, Adam “Ad Rock” Horovitz and Adam “MCA” Yauch’s first full-length effort since 2007’s Grammy-winning all instrumental ‘The Mix-Up.’
EMMYLOU HARRIS
$13.99 CD
ON SALE
ON SALE
$13.99 CD / $17.99 CD/DVD
LET YOUR HAIR DOWN
LP ALSO AVAILABLE
DELUXE
.99 CD / $13 $16.99 SPECIAL
AVAILABLE 5/10
$12.99 CD
‘Move Like This,’ The Cars’ first album of new music in 24 years, is a vibrant and ingenious collection that expertly extends their already extraordinary canon. Retooling innovative art rock, sleek New Wave, and punchy power pop in their own idiosyncratic image, The Cars’ groundbreaking sonic approach continues to influence artists and airwaves today.
ON SALE
‘In Your Dreams’ is Nicks’ first CD of new material since the release of her Grammy nominated ‘Trouble in Shangri-La’ ten years ago. ‘In Your Dreams’ was written and recorded at Nicks’ Los Angeles home and is co-produced by Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard. Nicks and Stewart co-wrote seven of the album’s thirteen songs.
THE STEVE MILLER BAND
HARD BARGAIN
MOVE LIKE THIS
A MOTHER’S PRAYER
ON SALE
ON SALE
LP ALSO AVAILABLE
RALPH STANLEY
IN YOUR DREAMS
HOT SAUCE COMMITTEE PART 2
ON SALE
Drawing inspiration from folk/rock from about 1965 to 1973, and Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’ in particular, ‘Helplessness Blues’ sees Fleet Foxes heighten and extend themselves, adding instrumentation (clarinet, the music box, pedal steel guitar, lap steel guitar, Tibetan singing bowls, vibraphone, etc., along with more traditional band instrumentation), with a focus on clear, direct lyrics, and an emphasis on group vocal harmonies. The album was engineered and mixed by Phil Ek and co-produced by Phil and the band.
THURSDAY 5/ @ CRYSTAL BALL12 ROOM
$12.99 CD For well over a decade now Dr. Ralph Stanley has been an iconic figure in American music. Now well into his 80’s, Ralph has maintained a steadfast dedication to the type of music he and his brother Carter created in the late 1940’s. With generous touches of old-time gospel and what is now termed “bluegrass” music, Ralph has successfully created his own unique brand of Americana, a rural sound he simply calls “Old-Time Mountain Music.”
WARREN HAYNES MAN IN MOTION
$10.99 CD
ON SALE
LP ALSO AVAILABLE
$12.99 CD
LP ALSO AVAILABLE 5/17
EDITION
Warren Haynes continues to be one of the most lauded straight-ahead rock lead On ‘Hard Bargain,’ Emmylou offers 11 origi- ‘Let Your Hair Down’ follows the number one blues album, ‘BINGO!’ as the second guitarists performing today. But with his nal songs - three of them co-written with new Steve Miller Band album of the twentylatest album his superior vocals are also Grammy and Oscar-winning composer Will fi rst century. He not only saved the bluesiat the forefront. The album features Ivan Jennings - that touch on the autobiographiest, rockingest, most guitar-playing-est Neville on organ and background vocals, cal while reaching for the universal. She tracks for the second serving, but he spent Ian McLagan on piano, Ruthie Foster on pays tribute to lost friends like her legendthe additional year between releases tweakbackground vocals, George Porter Jr. on ary mentor Gram Parsons and her frequent ing, polishing and obsessively applying bass and Ron Holloway on saxophone. collaborator, the late Kate McGarrigle and fi nishing touches that make ‘Let Your Hair also finds poignancy and fresh meaning in Down’ an even more fully realized record events both historical and personal. than its acclaimed, successful predecessor. The Special Edition features 4 bonus tracks.
NELSON/ MARSALIS/ JONES HERE WE GO AGAIN ON SALE
$13.99 CD Once in a while the stars align and something magical happens...as on the night Jazz at Lincoln Center presented a salute to the late, great bluesman, Ray Charles. Two musical iconoclasts, Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis, along with the stunning songstress Norah Jones, collectively brought their unique musical perspective to the legendary artist’s hits. The sold out performance was captured and the resulting footage expertly mixed and mastered for the brand new album.
K.D. LANG AND THE SISS BOOM BANG
DENGUE FEVER
SING IT LOUD
CANNIBAL COURTSHIP
ON SALE
ON SALE
$13
.99 CD
With ‘Sing it Loud,’ her first studio album in three years, K.D. Lang is, in one sense, revisiting her roots. She’s backed by a new full-time band, Siss Boom Bang, that recalls in spirit if not sound the exhilarating work she created at the start of her career with her original band, The Reclines. But she’s also breaking new ground as a songwriter and producer collaborating with multi-instrumentalist Joe Pisapia, previously a member of jam-band stalwarts Guster.
$11.99 CD
LP ALSO AVAILABLE
Dengue Fever, with their exotic blend of Cambodian rock, Afro grooves, surf and garage psych, returns with ‘Cannibal Courtship,’ the group’s first studio album since 2008’s ‘Venus on Earth.’ As with their previous releases, ‘Cannibal Courtship’ features songs sung in Khmer (Cambodian), but also contains more tracks in English than ever before.
LOVERBOY ON SALE
AVAILABLE 5/10
ON SALE
BRETT DENNEN
With three critically acclaimed albums behind him, Brett Dennen has been firmly es tablished as a definitive new voice in modern songwriting. He’s been called a “folk-rock revelation” by The Washington Post, a Top 10 Artist to Watch by Rolling Stone and heralded by John Mayer and Jason Mraz as the timeless voice of his generation. ‘Loverboy’ is his strongest and most sincere album to date.
THE FEELIES HERE BEFORE ON SALE
$10.99 CD
LP ALSO AVAILABLE
After a 19 year break, the Feelies are back with ‘Here Before,’ an album of all new original material. Alongside founding members Glenn Mercer and Bill Million is the Feelies lineup first featured on 1986’s ‘The Good Earth’: Brenda Sauter, Stanley Demeski and Dave Weckerman. The new album touches on different styles from the Feelies’ long history while adding new grooves and musical ideas to the mix.
OFFER GOOD THRU: 5/31/11
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
MAY 4 - 10
= WW Pick. Highly recommended. 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. Editor: CASEY JARMAN. 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. Fax: 243-1115.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 4
THURSDAY, MAY 5
M. Ward, David Bazan, The Lord’s Own Choir
Eddie & the Hot Rods, Prima Donna, Fast Takers
[RAVE ON] It’s been a minute since Matt Ward has played under his birth name. Since releasing Hold Time in 2009, Ward has put much of his energy into two “side projects” that probably equal (or overwhelm) his solo output in name recognition: She & Him, the throwback pop-loving outfit with Zooey Deschanel, and Monsters of Folk, his collaboration with indie-folk titans Jim James and Conor Oberst. And though he’s perfectly fine when sharing the spotlight with his famous friends, Ward’s songwriting is richer when he’s recording by himself, as gems like 2006’s Post-War continue to stand the test of time. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 225-0047. 9 pm. $25. All ages. M. Ward also plays the Crystal Ballroom Wednesday with Doug Martsch and the Lord’s Own Choir.
Battles, 1939 Ensemble
[NEO-PROG] If a single word can be used to describe the nebulous genre known as post-rock, it’s definitely not “fun.” Among other things, that’s what makes New York’s Battles different, and probably what’s made the band one of the leading progenitors of a kind of music that doesn’t really have a clear definition. Mirrored, the 2007 debut from this collaboration between members of Helmet, Don Caballero and Lynx, is a tangle of odd riffs, rhythms and sounds, but it never bogs itself down with bombast and—most importantly—isn’t afraid to be a bit whimsical. New album Gloss Drop, which doesn’t officially hit stores until June, is even more playful despite the departure of key figure Tyondai Braxton. Hell, the positively giddy lead single, “Ice Cream,” could qualify as a summer jam in a more perfectly warped part of the universe. MATTHEW SINGER. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $15. 21+.
Samothrace, Natur, Wilderness
[DRONE EXPLOSION] Lots of anticipation at this show as solo artists Wilderness and Natur set the stage. Wilderness is Brooks Blackhawk (of Atriarch fame) in his Cascadian synthwizard guise. When he isn’t the bikermetal dude with guyliner guarding the door at Sizzle Pie, he’s combing Goodwill outlets and Craigslist for the ultimate analog equipment. Natur is the one-woman strum outfit of recent Floridian transplant Stevie Floyd. She’s best known for her work in Dark Castle, and truly a great addition to the local metal scene. Don’t worry, there is also a full band in the house tonight: Samothrace moved its long-form Nebraska doom to Seattle and often graces Portland with its deft darkness. NATHAN CARSON. Plan B, 1305 SE 8th Ave., 230-9020. 8 pm. $5. 21+.
Junip
[SCANDINAVIAN SERENITY] From a city not unlike Portland comes songwriter José González’s latest act: Junip. The three-piece improvisational band was born in the damp and undersized Swedish town of Gothenburg. Last year, Junip released Fields, a hypnotic, Latinflaired, easygoing folk-rock record that could be filed next to Luna or Calexico. The classically minded González credits the Ethiopian music he grew up listening to for the band’s softly repetitive and Afro-percussive ways. Entrancing, diplomatic and subtle, Junip is an important artist when it comes to utilizing negative space. MARK STOCK. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 8 pm. $15. All ages.
[HARD DRIVIN’ BAND] The back-tobasics U.K.-based genre known as pub rock created plenty of iconic figures, from Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello to Graham Parker and Ian Dury. But one name that tends to get overlooked is Barrie Masters, lead singer of the group Eddie & the Hot Rods. As energetic and tuneful as his peers, Masters led his band to the Top 10 of U.K. singles charts with the fantastic “Do Anything You Wanna Do” before it collapsed due to internal struggles in 1981. Masters is now leading a reformed lineup of the Rods that is as punchy and powerful as the earlier versions. ROBERT HAM. Dante’s, 350 W Burnside St., 226-6630. 9 pm. $10 advance, $12 day of show. 21+.
Zola Jesus, Naked on the Vague, Pete Swanson, DJ Nightschool
See profile, page 37, and online Q&A with Pete Swanson. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $12. 21+.
Mogwai, Errors
[VOLUME DISCOUNT] Not to say Mogwai’s mellowing with age, but seventh album Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will—a disarming flair for titular wit ever suggests what the instrumentalists’ lyrics could have been like—finds the none-more-loud Glaswegians entering their 16th year with renewed attention to structure and dynamics and a sound closer than ever to the “post-rock” catchall genre tag they have long loathed. Finally on tour after visa problems canceled the band’s East Coast stint, Mogwai has a live assault that remains a deafening display of guitar shock and awe. JAY HORTON. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 9 pm. $22 advance, $25 day of show. All ages.
FRIDAY, MAY 6 Black Francis
[BACK IN BLACK] A solo performance by Black Francis—a.k.a. Pixies frontman and underground superhero Frank Black—can go one of two ways: He can either detachedly pluck away like a decompressed Michelin Man or bring a one-man ruckus. Hopefully the latter. But who really gives a fuck? Black is Black, and with tracks from last year’s Nonstoperotik and the B-sides collection Abbabubba at his disposal, even a uninterested Black is more interesting than most one-man shows. Plus, you’re sure to enjoy scoffing at the idiot next to you shouting “Where Is My Mind!” between every song. AP KRYZA. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 234-9694. 8 pm (minors accompanied by parent). $20. All ages.
Ladies Night: Reporter, Wampire, Arohan, Linger & Quiet
[YOU KNOW THE WORDS] Oh yes it’s ladies night, and the feeling’s right, oh yes it’s ladies night, oh what a night (oh, what a night!). Girls, y’all got one—a night that’s special everywhere, from Holocene to Branx. Oh yes, it’s ladies’ night, and Reporter and Wampire gonna sex you up right, oh yes it’s ladies night, oh what a night (oh, what a night!). Romantic lady, single baby, my sophisticated hipster mama, come on dance to Linger & Quiet, stay with me and Arohan tonight mama, all right. If you hear any noise, it ain’t the boys (unless they’re dressed in drag), because it’s ladies’ night, uh huh. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Branx, 320 SE 2nd Ave., 234-5683. 8 pm. $7 for dudes, $3 for ladies or dudes dressed in drag. All ages.
Coheed and Cambria
Q&A
Commotion, The Doo Doo Funk All-Stars
Q&A DAVE DEPPER
[REVENGE OF THE NERDS] In celebration of their 10th birthday, Coheed and Cambria are performing the entirety of their debut album, The Second Stage Turbine Blade, in 23 cities. The past 10 years have seen the prog-emo quartet create a closet industry from combining the wandering time signatures of Rush with the literary predilections of Orson Scott Card, creating albums that (supposedly) narrate a long-running, interstellar war. This has been accomplished without succumbing to so much as a solitary knowing wink or churning out even one lead single whose subject matter is drawn roughly from the goings-on of this galaxy. What might have seemed like a ridiculous pretense has turned out to be a ridiculous conviction, and for that, I say these guys have earned their victory lap. SHANE DANAHER. Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., 219-9929 (Grill), 224-2038 (Theater). 9 pm. $25. All ages.
[FUNK MASSIVE] If you’ve never been to Dookie Jam—the hybrid all-star band/open mic held down by the Doo Doo Funk All-Stars—you don’t know what you’ve been missing. And unfortunately, Dookie Jams have been hard to come by lately, so everybody loses. Lucky for us, tonight’s double bill features sometime Dookie Jam contributor/keyboardist extraordinaire Ben Darwish and his super-funky, resurgent band Commotion, joining forces with the Doo Doo crew in an all-night jam. Mark our words—the funk, and the Dookie Juice, will flow tonight. CASEY JARMAN. Someday Lounge, 125 NW 5th Ave., 248-1030. 9 pm. $8. 21+.
Bill Beach Trio, Rebecca Kilgore
[BOSS BOSSA] Beguiled by that bossa beat, the rhythmically propulsive jazz pianist Bill Beach has devoted almost a decade to studying both Brazilian music (including a trip to the source) and the notoriously difficult-to-pronounce (for non-native speakers) Portuguese, ultimately writing his own lyrics in the language, and singing it persuasively on last year’s Brasil Beat full-length. Beach’s breezy new offering, Buzios, consists entirely of original compositions and reveals a musician completely at home in the idiom. For this CD-release concert, he’ll be joined by a trio of Portland’s most accomplished veteran jazzers: singer Rebecca Kilgore, drummer Ron Steen, and bassist Dave Captein. BRETT CAMPBELL. Wilf’s Restaurant, 800 NW 6th Ave., 223-0070. 8 pm. Cover. All ages.
SATURDAY, MAY 7 The Psychedelic Furs
[OLD WAVE] Boasting pub-punk riffs and that light dusting of saxophone evidently required of pop bands by British music-industry regulations throughout the early ’80s—Thatcher has much to answer for—one imagines the Psychedelic Furs would have landed a few singles on the Top 40 regardless of their vocalist, but the honeyed croak of Richard Butler lent a memorably louche gravitas to peculiarly detailed romantic musings. Talk Talk Talk, the band’s second and best-remembered album once John Hughes transformed misinterpreted lyrics (pretty in pink means, um, naked) into Molly Ringwald vehicle, will be played in full, 30 years after release. JAY HORTON. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 234-9694. 8 pm. $30. 21+.
Robert Johnson: 100 Years
See Headout, page 29. Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., 719-6055. 8 pm. $20. 21+.
Various Presents BSI Showcase: Systemwide, Alter Echo, S Dub, E3
[ACES OF BASS] At one point in time, Portland’s BSI Records was one of the leading labels in the United States specializing in dub reggae. Although it’s no longer a functioning imprint, its legacy persists among bass fiends, including those who’ve since expanded their love of low-end into
CONT. on page 37
REDRIVERNOISE.COM
MUSIC
About a year ago, Dave Depper—best known as a super-sideman with groups like Loch Lomond, Norfolk & Western, Musée Mécanique and, most recently, Monarques—decided to step out of his usual supporting role and make his own record. But it occurred to him that, while he’d been in and out of recording studios his entire adult life, he didn’t know where to start. So, in his quest for playing and recording know-how, Depper decided to play and record an entire album—Paul McCartney’s second solo LP, 1971’s Ram—on his own (Joan Hiller, who sings backup vocals, is the only other musician on the album). He began the project early last April, recording the simplest tracks first and moving onto Ram’s more complex material as he went along. By the end of the month, he was done with Ram and—shockingly, he says—discussing releasing the album with Jackpot Records. Dave Depper’s Ram, an amazing and slightly befuddling tribute record, is out now. We had a few questions. CASEY JARMAN. WW: So, why this particular record? Dave Depper: Well, at the time I felt like I just discovered this big secret—that Paul McCartney actually did a bunch of badass stuff, and I had spent my whole life trash-talking him. So it felt like a debt of honor to this guy to bring this to light. Not that Paul McCartney needs my help…but I wanted to celebrate this amazing record. And it was a technically appealing thing for me to do. Did you have any intention to release the album? Absolutely not. I wasn’t even planning on putting it online, but I knew I had the potential to give up at some point, so I started a blog and shared it with people to hold myself accountable. It made its way to Isaac Slusarenko at Jackpot, and he emailed me right away and said that Ram had been his favorite album as a kid and he was interested in putting it out. I’m sure I would have finished it on my own at some point, but that really lit a fire under me. Did you leave room for improvisation in these songs? No. Wherever it differs from Paul’s is definitely not a personal touch, it’s more of a failure to reach my goal. There was one review I got from Europe the other day—this really hilariously written review—saying, “Why the hell did this guy do this? He doesn’t sing as well as Paul McCartney, he doesn’t play as well as Paul McCartney.” I thought it was awesome, because it’s true, I don’t! What’s your biggest aspiration for the project now? I’d like Isaac to make his money back! [Laughs] I do have a fantasy of Paul McCartney hearing it. I’d love to meet the guy. What’s the dumbest lyric Paul McCartney sings on Ram? In “Monkberry Moon Delight” there’s this line: “I know my banana is older than the rest/ And my hair is a tangled beretta.” Every time we get to that in practice, somebody starts busting up. If you had to do this again, what album would you cover? I really want to call attention to what an awesome album Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage is. This will, of course, be after I have a long and established solo career with my own work. So look for that in 2017. SEE IT: Dave Depper, backed by Musée Mécanique, will perform Ram in its entirety on Saturday, May 7, at Doug Fir. 9 pm. $10. 21+. Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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SATURDAY the realm of electronic music. For this month’s installment of Various, the city’s longest-running dubstep night, BSI undergoes a rebirth, with the first live performance in seven years from its flagship band Systemwide. Founded in 1997, the group borrowed its aesthetic from genre hybridists such as Adrian Sherwood and the Pop Group while also looking toward the digitized future before ending abruptly in 2003. Also joining in the resurrection is DJ Alter Echo, who shaped the vision of BSI by working with everyone from Jamaican legends Lee Perry and Scientist to turntable whiz DJ Spooky and local hip-hop heavies Lifesavas. MATTHEW SINGER. Branx, 320 SE 2nd Ave., 234-5683. 10 pm. $7. All ages.
Dave Depper, Lewi Longmire, Nelson Sings Nilsson
MUSIC
Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $8 advance, $10 day of show. 21+.
LIVE MUSIC FULL BAR FOOD FUN
Thursday May 5th Alan Jones - 8pm $5
Lesbian, Grayceon, Diesto, Burials
[METAL MULTIPLE CHOICE] (A) Dear Portland, don’t take Seattle metal quartet Lesbian’s name too seriously. There’s no disrespect intended, and the guys in the band are smart and sensitive. It’s just a single word that looks cool in a metal font. And more importantly, the music is a morass of crushing mathematical splendor. Gone are its days as an instrumental act now that 2010 album Stratospheria Cubensis has been unleashed. (B) San Francisco’s Grayceon is also celebrating a new album. Its third long-player, All We Destroy, was issued in March by Profound Lore
See profile, page 35. Doug Fir
(under 21 allowed until 10pm!)
Friday May 6th
Eddie Martinez - 9pm $8 Saturday May 7th Shoehorn, Free Beat Nation, DJ Cachacina, Super Moon 9pm $5 Sunday May 8th The Blue Monk and Ninkasi present:
“The Best Of Portland Independent Jazz” Blue Cranes
CONT. on page 41
(Welcome Home Party) P R I M AV E R A S O U N D
PROFILE
$3 - $7 730pm
Tuesday May 10th
Smalldoggies Reading Series PDX 8pm
(One musical guest, Three Writers performing and reading poetry, fiction and more.)
Thursday May 12th
Curtis Salgado / Alan Hager Duo
8pm $10
every wed - Arabesque & Belly Dance 8pm Now serving home made NY pizza!
MUSIC 7 NIGHTS A WEEK
ZOLA JESUS THURSDAY, MAY 5 [BROODING DANCE MUSIC] The past two years have been relentless ones for Nika Roza Danilova, the musician who calls herself Zola Jesus. In 2010 alone, the 22-yearold Wisconsin native released five records—a 7-inch, a full-length album and three EPs—of vaporous, dramatic electronic pop, all while touring the world in both headlining and supporting roles. Somehow, in the midst of that, she was able to finish her undergraduate degrees in French and philosophy and write and record another LP to be released later this year. It’s little wonder then that when I get Danilova on the phone (in her touring van, of course) she sounds a little worse for the wear. “I’m doing all right, apart from being sick,” she says of her current concert schedule. “It’s hard because I’m someone that likes to be alone and likes to be in one place. But you have to do what you have to do.” Doing what she has to do has served Danilova well considering the rapid trajectory of her career. Since the release of her first recordings only three years ago, she has picked up all manner of critical plaudits, especially in Europe, the home base of many of the artists that have fed the brooding heart of her sound—a pulsing, post-goth dance music crafted with programmed laptop beats and pensive synth sounds mixed with sepulchral live drums. Flush with all this attention and extra cash from touring, Danilova has been able to expand on the static-heavy, overmodulated haze of her earliest work. “I started with literally no knowledge of production and engineering,” she says. “It’s been all about teaching myself how to make something sound as good as possible now.” The resulting efforts, particularly the haunting Valusia EP, push her warm yet haunted vocals further into the spotlight, lending her intimate tales of fractured spirits and uncomfortable relationships added weight and poignancy. What hasn’t been able to get through to many critics and fans is just how personal all of these songs are, according to Danilova. “That’s the thing that’s confusing. That people think I’m putting on a persona because it’s not released under my own name. But the music is so important to me that to put on a different costume and try to be someone I’m not would be dishonest. That’s not what I intend with my music at all.” ROBERT HAM. Nika Roza Danilova isn’t taking you for a ride—she’s really just kind of a weirdo.
SEE IT: Zola Jesus plays Holocene on Thursday, May 5, with Naked on the Vague, Pete Swanson and DJ Nightschool. 8:30 pm. $12. 21+.
Portland’s best happy hour 5 - 7 pm and all day sunday 3341 SE Belmont thebluemonk.com 503-595-0575
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Doors 8pm, shows 9pm (unless otherwise noted)
6637 Milwaukie AVE. PORTLAND — served by bus lines 19 & 70 — all shows 21+ unless noted
thewoodsportland.com Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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Week’s
BEST
PROFILE
PROFILE STEPHANIESCHNEIDERMAN.COM
Willamette
MUSIC
BAND SHOWCASE
Friday, May 6
Mississippi Studios • 8 pm doors, 9 pm show • Free. 21+
STEPHANIE SCHNEIDERMAN FRIDAY, MAY 6
Featuring:
Love songs and antilove songs from the lady and the laptop.
[ELECTRONIC POP] Back in those heady days of the late ’90s, the electronic-music landscape was rife with groups that put a dulcet-voiced female at center stage while behind her, a gent or two turned knobs and cued up mid-tempo, bass-heavy rhythms on their laptops. It was music that fit nicely into motion-picture seduction scenes or soundtracked a cocktail bar. It’s been a surprisingly resilient sound and setup, considering the number of acts and producers that are still taking this tack today (Zero 7, Morcheeba, etc.), including one of the more recent adoptees of this creative approach, Portland singer/songwriter Stephanie Schneiderman. Schneiderman, also a member of the folk/pop trio Dirty Martini, was approached in 2007 by Keith Schreiner, a DJ/producer who helped initiate Portland into the world of electro-pop with his former band Dahlia. “It was the right time,” says Schneiderman, between sips of green tea at Townshend’s Tea Company on Northeast Alberta Street, “because I had a whole batch of songs I knew I wanted to do, but I wanted to try something completely different. We had a one-day session in the studio and it was one of those magical days where everything he touched turned to gold.” That collaboration yielded an impressive 2008 LP called Dangerous Fruit, which amped up the heat in Schneiderman’s sultry vocals with supple beats and skeins of gorgeous ambient electronics. Inspired and emboldened by their work together, Schneiderman turned to Schreiner a second time, and the results are even stronger than before. On Rubber Teardrop, you can hear the two settled into their mutual roles as artist and muse, both aware of and working with each other’s strengths to create an intimate and sexy LP that demands repeat listens just to catch up with every noise and lyric that drifts through it. “I was pushed to take more risks,” says Schneiderman. “It took me a while to embrace it, but when I did I was able to write with the studio and Keith in mind. The further I went, I was more open to that world and the broadband of sounds and textures Keith would have.” For such a personal-sounding work, it was supported in the most public of means. The sessions, mixing and mastering were all funded via a Kickstarter campaign. “We asked for $7,200, which is really a lot less than we needed,” Schneiderman remembers. “But we hit our goal and then some in 48 hours.” The intimacy of the music will be emphasized in the rewards for nine lucky backers who plunked down $1,000 or more for a private performance by the singer-songwriter in their homes. But like many a musician, it is that push-pull with putting personal matters (many songs on Rubber Teardrop feel directed at a spurned lover) out into the world for public consumption that makes Schneiderman’s work—both on her own and with Dirty Martini—so exciting. “Part of me feels resistant to that,” she says of putting her private life into her work. “But it should be a challenge. You have to give it a shot.” ROBERT HAM. SEE IT: Stephanie Schneiderman plays the Alberta Rose Theatre on Friday, May 6. 8:30 pm. $15. All ages (minors must be accompanied by parent or guardian.)
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Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
MUSIC WAY N E B R E M S E R
SATURDAY - MONDAY
BEST
DATES HERE
BREAKFAST
WIN TICKETS TO
BURRITOS in PDX! Sundays 9:30-2:30 Our drinks are pretty awesome too.
LADIES’ NIGHT: Thao and Mirah play Wonder Ballroom on Sunday. Records—the best underground metal label of our day. (C) Diesto and Burials. (D) All of the above (hint: This is the correct answer). NATHAN CARSON. Plan B, 1305 SE 8th Ave., 230-9020. 8 pm. $8. 21+.
Wanda Jackson, Red Meat
[ROCKABILLY QUEEN] The Wanda Jackson story thus far: “discovered” by Elvis, who considered her a peer; an original architect of rockabilly; forgotten by history and relegated to the country oldies circuit; championed tirelessly by her longtime manager-husband until ultimate rediscovery in the aughts, aided by support from roots-savvy musicians like that other Elvis (Costello); a belated, richly deserved 2009 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; and most recently a graduate of Jack White’s Re-Finishing School for Twangy Septuagenarian Divas. A horn-powered upgrade of a recent Dylan bubbe-meise, a growling rockabilly retrofit of the Andrews Sisters staple “Rum and Coca-Cola” and a song-stealing take on Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” are but three highlights of the accurately titled The Party Ain’t Over—an accuracy to which witnesses of her latterday live performances can likewise attest. JEFF ROSENBERG. Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., 219-9929 (Grill), 224-2038 (Theater). 8 pm. $18-$25. 21+.
SUNDAY, MAY 8 Nate Lacy
[THE WHISPERS] I feel like most of Portland still hasn’t heard Mimicking Birds, because most of Portland just isn’t listening closely enough. The band—which released a self-titled full-length record on Isaac Brock’s Glacial Pace Records last year—excels at crafting patient tunes with twisting, semi-psychedelic lyrics delivered tenderly and softly by frontman Nate Lacy. It’s not the kind of stuff that always meshes well with the blistering indie rock bands for whom Mimicking Birds opens—but in this solo residency at Al’s Den (a new basement club that’s far more intimate than its name would imply), Lacy can be as quiet as he wants to be. Those patient enough to listen to Lacy’s finger-picking and half-whispered delivery will find his songs to be quite rewarding, melodic and lyrically fascinating. And for those who’d rather chat than listen? There are plenty of barstools upstairs—please use them. CASEY JARMAN. Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel, 303 SW 12th Ave., 972-2670. 7 pm. Free. 21+.
Vivian Girls, No Joy, Blood Beach
[FUZZ FEST] Though it fails to reach the peaks of transcendental grime first summited by Times New Viking, No Joy nonetheless abuses its shoegaze sensibility with enough distortion to create some fascinating disfigurements. Hailing from Los Angeles and Montreal and composed of Laura Loyd and Jasamine White-Gluz, No Joy has risen to prominence on the adoration of such similarly fuzzobsessed mavens as Best Coast. Ghost Blonde, the duo’s debut
long-player, sounds like Loveless as broadcast from the bottom of an empty well. But peel back something like 10,100 layers of reverb and therein lies a core of plunky, masterful pop. SHANE DANAHER. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $10 advance, $12 day of show. 21+.
C RU Z RO OM
5.13 @ CRYSTAL BALLROOM GO TO WWEEK.COM/PROMOTIONS
NE 24th & Alberta • cruzroom.com
Chris Brokaw, Mark McGuire, Allen Karpinski, Matthew Mullane, Joshua Blatchely
[ACOUSTIC GUITAR HOW LOVELY YOU ARE] The record label Vin Du Select Qualitite has been quietly releasing some of the most quietly amazing records of the past few years. The imprint sticks to a simple formula of releasing only albums of music created on acoustic guitars. Well, that’s deceptively simple considering the incredible musicians it’s brought in to participate, including Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Chris Brokaw of the New Year/ Codeine fame. This show brings together five gents who have contributed to the VDSQ series, including one of Portland’s newest residents, Mark McGuire, best known as a member of the titanic drone band Emeralds. ROBERT HAM. The Woods, 6637 SE Milwaukie Ave., 890-0408. 9 pm. $8. 21+.
Thao and Mirah with the Most of All, Led To Sea, Marissa Anderson
[PERFECT COMBINATION] When news spread early this year that Thao and Mirah, two of the most singular talents in the Northwest, would be combining forces for a two-woman supergroup, my first thought was “I hope it’s not too singer-songwriter-y!” While I love both artists, for some inane reason I pictured the two wearing turtlenecks and singing wispy Simon & Garfunkel covers to coffeehouse Ani DiFranco crowds. It was a horrible dream. But on the simply titled Thao & Mirah, the tempos are brisk, the songs are exuberant and unhinged, and the acoustic guitars flutter more than they pluck. It’s one of my favorite records of the year, with crafty production from friend Merrill Garbus (Tune-Yards) and some of the best songs of both Thao or Mirah’s career. More collaborations like this, please. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 8 pm. $15. All ages.
MONDAY, MAY 9 The Donkeys, Social Studies, Yours
[PACIFIC TWANG] San Diego slack-rockers the Donkeys are in no hurry. April release Born With Stripes is so California, strolling leisurely back and forth between Buffalo Springfield’s folk ’n’ roll and Midnight Vultures-era Beck antics. ABC liked the lads well enough to cast them as Grateful Dead spinoff band Geronimo Jackson in Lost. Composed of sandy-toed, Byrdslistening surfers, the Donkeys are more throwback than anything else. When the foursome comes to town, they’ll bring sunny, free-range, beer-swilling rock in tow. MARK STOCK. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $10.
CONT. on page 42 Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
41
MUSIC
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SUPERB NORTHWEST TALENT PERFORMING CLASSIC TUNES
DERBY
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FRIDAY MAY 6
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CITIZEN COPE
LEWI LONGMIRE
PERFORMING NEIL YOUNG’S “AFTER THE GOLDRUSH”
ADVANCE TIX SOLD OUT TIX AVAIL AT DOOR
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THE RETURN OF PERFECT POP TRIO FROM SWEDEN
PETER BJORN & JOHN
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THURSDAY MAY 12
ADVANCE TIX SOLD OUT TIX AVAIL AT DOOR
•
A CO-HEADLINE AFFAIR OF SCORCHING LYRICISM WITH GIFTED SONGWRITERS
JOE PUG
DAVE DEPPER
PRESENTS
THE RAM PROJECT
$8 ADVANCE
TWO INTIMATE EVENINGS WITH PORTLAND’S SONIC MADMEN
SUNDAY MAY 8 MONDAY MAY 9
(FT. SEAN NELSON OF HARVEY DANGER)
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•
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BACARDI PRESENTS
The
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THE LOW ANTHEM
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FRIDAY MAY 13
•
$14 ADVANCE
INFECTIOUS INDIE ROCK FROM ENIGMATIC WORDSMITH
EZRA FURMAN &THE HARPOONS
JOHNNY
FLYNN
& THE SUSSEX WIT
+CAITLIN ROSE
MONDAY MAY 16
•
$12 ADVANCE
COSMOPOLITAN FOLKTRONICA FROM UNIqUE TALENT
EMILY WELLS
$10 ADVANCE
TIMELESS COUNTRY STORYTELLING FROM TEXAS-BRED RABBLE-ROUSER
+QUIET LIFE
WEDNESDAY MAY 18 •
•
$13 ADVANCE
$10 ADVANCE
THE HERALDED RETURN OF 90S ROCK STALWARTS
BUFFALO TOM
+THE HEAVENLY STATES
THURSDAY MAY 19
•
HAYES CARLL
+TIMMY STRAW
TUESDAY MAY 17
TRISTEN
+THE APACHE RELAY
SUNDAY MAY 15
•
$17 ADVANCE
BIFFY CLYRO 5/30 SLOAN 6/5 JOHN MAUS/ PURO INSTINCT 6/20 APPLESEED CAST 6/25 OBITS 8/20
All of these shows on sale at Ticketfly.com
JAMES BLAKE 5/20 • LEWI LONGMIRE BAND 5/21 • SYSTEM & STATION 5/22 • THE LOW BONES 5/24 THE UPSIDEDOWN 5/25 • S. CAREY 5/26 • COTTON JONES 5/27 • GAYNGS 5/28 •NOAH & THE WHALE 5/29 BIFFY CLYRO 5/30 • !!! 5/31 • OLD 97s 6/1 • STORNOWAY 6/2 • SALLIE FORD & THE SOUND OUTSIDE 6/3 ADVANCE TICKETS AT TICKETSWEST 503-224-TIXX - www.ticketswest.com, MUSIC MILLENNIUM, JACKPOT RECORDS • SUBJECT TO SERVICE CHARGE &/OR USER FEE ALL SHOWS: 8PM DOORS / 9PM SHOW • 21+ UNLESS NOTED • BOX OFFICE OPENS 1/2 HOUR BEFORE DOORS • ROOM PACKAGES AVAILABLE AT www.jupiterhotel.com
42
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
Joan of Arc, Air Waves
[OH CAP’N, MY CAP’N] Joan of Arc has never been an easy band to keep track of. For the past 16 years, Chicagoan Tim Kinsella has collaborated with so many musicians under the JOA moniker that in 2009 he was moved to release Don’t Mind Control, a compilation made up of bands with members (41 of them in all) who had been in Joan of Arc at one time or another. But even on JOA’s own albums, one is never sure what one is going to get, from free-jazz-style exploration pieces to singer-songwriter fare. With Life Like, out May 10, Kinsella has reunited with Cap’n Jazz bandmate Victor Villarreal. In some moments, it sounds like the aforementioned old band— ”Love Life” is angular and slightly silly; “After Life” is familiar and melodic, if more coherent and less sloppy than any material produced in the good ol’ days—and in others, such as the largely instrumental 11-minute opener “I Saw the Messed Binds of My Generation,” we are reminded that these kids are all grown up. The disc is a nice balance of heady and emotive— there’s some shredding here, to be sure—for new fans, old fans
and really old fans, alike. CASEY JARMAN. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 9:30 pm. $10 advance, $12 day of show. 21+.
Crystal Stilts, Case Studies, Archers
[THROUGH THE WIRE] Oh, Brooklyn, you sneaky devil. It seems like every time a new lo-fi, jangly, reverb-obsessed band releases something on Woodsist there’s another one waiting in line at the blog supermarket, looking to cash in. Crystal Stilts had hype on its side in 2008, with a debut on Slumberland and a mysterious singer, Brad Hargett, who sounds like Ian Curtis singing through an egg crate. But after a few years away from the limelight, the band is back with In Love With Oblivion, a record that is more of a sidestep than a sophomore slump. There are hooks here, but you just have to search a little deeper for them: Crystal Stilts likes to hide its best material under murky production, and after a while the guitars and organs and keyboards start to run together into one fuzzed-out whole. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. $10. 21+.
The Kills, Cold Cave, The Entrance Band
[SLAY BELLS] The Kills love getting dirty. On its first two albums, the transatlantic duo reveled in a dark and dangerous sexuality, Florida-born singer Alison Mosshart celebrating the prurient rush of unhealthy relationships over simple drum programming and Brit Jamie Hince’s howlingly violent guitar. But 2008’s Midnight Boom was a different kind of sleazy, a gutter-glam dance record inspired less by fucking in back alleys than in club restroom stalls. With Mosshart spending the preceding three years as a member of Jack White’s bloozehounds the Dead Weather, the newly released Blood Pressures is something of a return to the band’s scuzzy, serrated-blues beginnings, throbbing on “DNA,” swaggering on “Nail in the Coffin” and grinding through the distorted reggae lurch of “Satellite,” always exuding the jet-black cool that’s made it one of the most consistently compelling groups of the last decade. MATTHEW SINGER. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 2848686. 8 pm. $18 advance, $19 day of show. All ages.
PRIMER
$10 ADVANCE
NU-FOLK FROM ENGLISH ACTOR, POET & SONGWRITER
[GET LONELY] Though nomadic singer-songwriter Cass McCombs has became somewhat of a household name the last few years (in indie folk circles, at least) it’s not because he’s one for these times. McCombs’ sparse songs have nothing in common with most of the folk music of the aughts, which traded simplicity for another glockenspiel. But on 2009 breakthrough Catacombs and this year’s Wit’s End, McCombs dropped the elaborate orchestrations and focused on his words and voice, framing sadsack and creepy tales around biting verses and some of the saddest acoustic songs since Elliott Smith’s Either/Or. Instead of embracing the esoteric or the excessive, he’s found a home in the liminal space, with blank noise and instrumental breaks so desolate that they say almost as much as his words. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. $12. 21+.
TUESDAY, MAY 10
THE BATTLE OF PDX INDIE-POP HEAVYWEIGHTS
FRIDAY!
MONDAY - TUESDAY
BY CASEY JA RMA N
LOUDNESS Formed: 1981 in Osaka, Japan. Sounds like: A crunchier Mötley Crüe that speaks English as a second language. For fans of: Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, Black Sabbath. Latest release: King of Pain (2010), a slightly chuggy take on the band’s driving, melodic early formula. Why you care: Because while the band’s songs—with titles like “Crazy Doctor,” “Doctor From Hell,” “Dream Fantasy,” “To Be Demon” and the befuddling “Spiritual Canoe”—contain a formidable Engrish charm, Loudness is also a completely legit power-metal machine with a tumultuous 30-year history behind it. Best known for its U.S. debut, the vastly underrated partymetal record Thunder in the East (which contains the anthemic “Crazy Nights” and its timeless lyric: “Rock ’n’ roll crazy night/ You are the hero”), Loudness’ discography is lengthy, varied and, at times, Spinal Tap-esque. Though the studded leather jackets, mascara and big hair are long gone—as is founding drummer Munetaka Higuchi, who died in 2008—all signs point to this groundbreaking Japanese group rocking even harder now than it did while opening for Mötley Crüe back in 1985. SEE IT: Loudness plays Dante’s on Saturday, May 7, with Dirty Passion and War Machine. 9:30 pm. $15 advance, $18 day of show. 21+.
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Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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CASINO
GOLF
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LODGE
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SPA
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HARD ROCK BAR 80’s & 90’s rock videos on 110” screen! Karaoke with live drums Private party rooms
UPCOMING EVENTS
CELEBRATE MOTHER’S DAY AT KAHwNEEwTA MOTHER’S DAY BRUNCH PACKAGE — SATURDAY NIGHT FOR JUST $149. OR STAY SUNDAY AND ENJOY BRUNCH OR DINING FOR TWO FOR ONLY $109. Excludes tax — for details go to kahneeta.com.
CHUCK WICKS
7901 SE Powell Blvd.
FRIDAY, MAY 20TH
Tickets available at kahneeta.com or call 541.553.1112
541w553w1112
kahneetawcom w 800w554w4786 Join us on Facebook w
(503) 777-4668
Shows 21 and over.
POOLS
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STABLES THIS
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BRAD “THE DUDE BOY” ROGERS FRIDAY MAY 6 DANTE’S TICKETS AT TICKETSWEST · CHARGE BY PHONE 503-224-TIXX
SUNDAY MAY 22 STAR THEATER TICKETS AT TICKETSWEST CHARGE BY PHONE 503-224-TIXX
1037 SW BROADWAY · PORTLAND, OR 6:30PM DOORS · ALL AGES TICKETS AT TICKETMASTER CHARGE BY PHONE 1-800-745-3000
Edwin McCain
DAVID RYAN HARRIS
On Sale
TODAY 10:00AM
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Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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& HOLLY CONLAN
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MUSIC CALENDAR = WW Pick. Highly recommended. Editor: Jonathan Frochtzwajg. 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: music@wweek.com.
[MAY 4 - 10] Billy Kennedy
B*Right, Twitchdoktor
Plan B
Beaterville Cafe
1305 SE 8th Ave. Samothrace, Natur, Wilderness
Pub at the End of the Universe 4107 SE 28th Ave. Music on Mars Acoustic Showcase
Find more music: reviews 35 For more listings, check out wweek.com/music_calendar D AV I D C O O P E R
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Open Mic with Mr. Plow
Saratoga
1001 SW Broadway Bre Gregg
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Melville, Michael Mirlas, Duncan Ros
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. Lunge, Super Sonic Piss, Sloths
Tiger Bar
317 NW Broadway Local Music Showcase
Vino Vixens Wine Shop & Bar 2929 SE Powell Blvd. Chuck Michaelson
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St. Mars Retrieval Unit
Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Savoy Brown featuring Kim Simmonds
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. Raiatea Helm, Sonny Lim, Jr.
Alberta Street Public House
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Buffalo Bandstand
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St. M. Ward, David Bazan, The Lord’s Own Choir
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Jedi Mindf*ck
Doc George’s Jazz Kitchen
4605 NE Fremont St. Karen Maria Capo
Doug Fir Lounge
625 NW 21st Ave. Ken Hanson Band
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Shanghai Spectacular: The Old Town Bohemian Cabaret
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. Chad Lee Williams
Jimmy Mak’s
1036 NE Alberta St. Suck My Open Mic with Tamara J. Brown
830 E Burnside St. Battles, 1939 Ensemble
Andina
1635 SE 7th Ave. Suburban Slim’s Blues Jam (9:30 pm); High Flyer Trio (6 pm)
Keller Auditorium
225 SW Ash St. Outland Prey, Race of Strangers, Heaven Generation
Ella Street Social Club
112 SW 2nd Ave. Cary Novotny
Beaterville Cafe
Good Neighbor Pizzeria
1314 NW Glisan St. Pete Krebs
Ash Street Saloon
2201 N Killingsworth St. Lowell J. Mitchell
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St. Colleen Raney Trio (9 pm); Little Sue (6 pm)
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St.
Duff’s Garage
714 SW 20th Place Focus! Focus!, The Welcome Home
800 NE Dekum St. Open Mic
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson Tribute: The Dust Settlers
221 NW 10th Ave. The Mel Brown Quartet 222 SW Clay St. Yanni
Kells
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Michael Dean Damron (9 pm); Michael Hurley (6 pm)
Matador
1967 W Burnside St DJ Whisker Friction
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St.
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Billy D’s Voodoo Lounge
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Jettison Bend, California Stars
Mount Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Midnight Expressions
Mount Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Pato Banton, Nuborn Tribe
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Midnite Expressions
Mudai
801 NE Broadway Vox Populi Karaoke
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Sleepy Eyed Johns
O’Connor’s Vault
7850 SW Capitol Highway Kit Garoutte on guitar
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
2314 SE Division St.
1332 W Burnside St. M. Ward, Doug Martsch, The Lord’s Own Choir
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Eddie and the Hot Rods, Prima Donna, Fast Takers
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Eddie & the Hot Rods, Prima Donna, Fast Takers
Doc George’s Jazz Kitchen
4605 NE Fremont St. Ron Steen’s Jazz Jam
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Joe Purdy, The Milk Carton Kids
Ella Street Social Club
Goodfoot Lounge
232 SW Ankeny St. Bill Portland
303 SW 12th Ave. Scott McCaughey (7 pm); Poison Waters (5:30 pm)
Crystal Ballroom
Tube
Valentine’s
Buffalo Gap Saloon
430 N Killingsworth St. Steve Kerin
714 SW 20th Place Whistlepunk!, Dogtooth, The New Mexican Revolution
18 NW 3rd Ave. Island Soundz: Ryan Organ, Ben Tactic
Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel
Buffalo Gap Saloon
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Emily Beleele
Tony Starlight’s
Lynn Conover & Jimmy Boyer
3341 SE Belmont St. Alan Jones Quintet
Chapel Pub
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge
Blue Monk
Someday Lounge
2045 SE Belmont St. Jazz Fusion First Wednesdays featuring Quintillion
Arabesque Bellydance
6000 NE Glisan St. John Ross (9:30 pm); The Don of Division St. (6 pm)
6910 N Interstate Ave. Peninsulas, Boo Frog, Head
The Globe
WED. MAY 4
Biddy McGraw’s
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Last Tuesdays First Thursday: An Open Mic Winners Showcase
125 NW 5th Ave. Velvit Hustle, Doc Ocular, Sindicate
TO DIE FOR: The Kills play Wonder Ballroom on Tuesday.
2201 N Killingsworth St. Andre St. James
Wilf’s Restaurant 800 NW 6th Ave. Ron Steen Trio
Wonder Ballroom 128 NE Russell St. Junip
THURS. MAY 5 Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel 303 SW 12th Ave. DJ Doug Martsch
2845 SE Stark St. Marv Ellis and the Platform, Five Alarm Funk
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge
625 NW 21st Ave. Cinco de Mayo Party: Karaoke Kings (9 pm); Antonio Brady (5 pm)
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
1503 SE 39th Ave. Savoir Faire Burlesque
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Afton Presents: Amos Val, Groove Thief, Sam Greenspan, Zay Harrison, Verdelite, Cole Reese
Hollywood Theatre 4122 NE Sandy Blvd. “Sing For Your Supperclub” Vocal Contest Finals
Holocene
Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel
1001 SE Morrison St. Zola Jesus, Naked on the Vague, Pete Swanson, DJ Nightschool
Aladdin Theater
2346 SE Ankeny St. Crazy Mountain Billies
Alberta Street Public House
221 NW 10th Ave. The Mel Brown B3 Organ Group
303 SW 12th Ave. Scott McCaughey
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. KT Tunstall
Jade Lounge
Jimmy Mak’s
1036 NE Alberta St. Sara Jackson Holman (9:30 pm); Carley Baer, Elke Robitaille (6:30 pm)
Kells
Andina
5736 NE 33rd Ave. Family Frolic Series: Uncle B, Auntie E and J-Dog
1314 NW Glisan St. Tracy Kim Trio
Andrea’s Cha Cha Club 832 SE Grand Ave. Dina and Bamba Y Su Pilon D’Azucar with La Descarga Cubana
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Cinco De Mayo Mayhem: Foal, Deth Proof, Acidious Mutandis, Eulogy
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave.
112 SW 2nd Ave. Cary Novotny
Kennedy School
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Rollie Tussing & The Diminished 7, Blind Bartimaeus (9:30 pm); Lewi Longmire Band (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. The Northstar Session
McMenamins Grand Lodge 3505 Pacific Ave. Lauren Sheehan Duo
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Lynn Conover and Gravel
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Loose Change
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Y La Bamba, Grand Hallway
Cinco De Mayo Dance Party with Bobby Torres Ensemble
Vino Vixens Wine Shop & Bar 2929 SE Powell Blvd. Los Ritmos Supremos (8:30 pm); 6bq9 (6 pm)
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Bad Assets (8:30 pm); Will West and the Friendly Cover-Up (5:30 pm)
Wilf’s Restaurant
Mock Crest Tavern
800 NW 6th Ave. Mike Horsfall, Karla Harris, Todd Strait
Mount Tabor Theater
128 NE Russell St. Mogwai, Errors
Muddy Rudder Public House
Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel
3435 N Lombard St. Jackalope Saints
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Everyday Prophet, Worlds Finest
8105 SE 7th Ave. Billy Kennedy and Tim Acott
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St. NoPoMoJo
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
2314 SE Division St. Andrew Orr, Jen Howard
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. Pitchfork Motorway, The Food, Coco Cobra and the Killers, Parachutes No More
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Vamanos, Yo! Adrian, Mr. Plow, Secnd Best
Sellwood Public House
8132 SE 13th Ave. Open Mic with Two Rivers & Joe Reed
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. Equal of Kings, Alien Parachute Man
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. The Forgotten Ones
TeaZone and Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave. Green Machine
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Johnny Martin
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Symmetry/Symmetry, The Royal Bear, Dropa
The Whiskey Bar
31 NW 1st Ave. Cinco de Mayo: Ill Gates, Dannycorn, D. Poetica, Mr. Wu
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. Krist Kreuger, Soft Tags
Thirsty Lion
71 SW 2nd Ave. Chris Merrill
Tiger Bar
317 NW Broadway Karaoke From Hell
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Gumar & His Magical Midi Band, Brownbear, Citymouth, DJAO, Bone Rock, Ghost Feet, Rap Class
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. Bang A Rang
Twilight Café and Bar
1420 SE Powell Blvd. The Closet Monsters, Item 9, Sindicate
Vie de Boheme 1530 SE 7th Ave.
Wonder Ballroom
FRI. MAY 6 303 SW 12th Ave. Scott McCaughey
Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Black Francis
Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Black Francis
Alberta Rose Theatre
3000 NE Alberta St. Stephanie Schneiderman, Dirty Martini
Alberta Street Public House 1036 NE Alberta St. Executive Swede (9:30 pm); Mikey’s Irish Jam (6:30 pm)
Aloft
9920 NE Cascades Parkway Ian James
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. JB Butler Trio
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Rebel Row Triple-Feature Fashion Expo: Stone the Murder, Stonecreep, Veio
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Miss Massive Snowflake, Larry Yes, Mouth
Beaterville Cafe
2201 N Killingsworth St. No Tomorrow
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St. Lewi Longmire (9:30 pm); Billy Kennedy and Jimmy Boyer (6 pm)
Bipartisan Cafe
7901 SE Stark St. Shicky Gnarowitz
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Eddie Martinez
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Ladies Night: Reporter, Wampire, Arohan, Linger & Quiet
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. The Beautiful Train Wrecks with Fairweather
Canvas Art Bar & Bistro 1800 NW Upshur St. Acoustic Open Mic with host Steve Huber
Clyde’s Prime Rib
5474 NE Sandy Blvd. Muthaship
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Cash’d Out--Johnny Cash Tribute: Brad “The Dudeboy” Rogers
Doc George’s Jazz Kitchen
4605 NE Fremont St. The Sydney Steen Trio
CONT. on page 46 Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
45
MUSIC
CALENDAR
SPOTLIGHT
Twilight Café and Bar
LEAHNASH.COM
1420 SE Powell Blvd. The Harvey Girls, Terwilliger Curves, Marlena
Vino Vixens Wine Shop & Bar 2929 SE Powell Blvd. Jim Miller and Paris Slim
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Early Hours, On the Stairs (9:30 pm); Reverb Brothers (5:30 pm)
Wilf’s Restaurant
800 NW 6th Ave. Bill Beach Trio, Rebecca Kilgore
Wonder Ballroom 128 NE Russell St. Xavier Rudd, HoneyHoney
DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH: Blue Diamond (2016 NE Sandy Blvd., 230-9590) isn’t the kind of place you notice at first. It’s more of a curiosity. As in, “Hey, there’s a gray-haired old man out front, leaning on his walker and taking really sensual drags from a cigarette—so, what’s up with that place?” If you ever get inside, though, it feels like home in minutes. The dining section looks kind of like a pancake house—sans pancakes, though the menu is above-average bar fare—and the bar is an after-hours spot for a rotating cast of low-key middle-aged men (one of whom usually has a laptop out at the bar—which I don’t understand) who talk about...well, who knows what they talk about. I’m observant, not nosy. I just know there’s a picture of legendary Portland drummer Mel Brown on the wall, and often the real-life Mel Brown right under it. If the place is good enough for Mel, it’s good enough for me. CASEY JARMAN. Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Dan Balmer, Funky Jam Band
Doug Fir Lounge 830 E Burnside St. The Dimes, Derby, Violet Isle
Eagles Lodge, Southeast
4904 SE Hawthorne Blvd. The New Iberians Zydeco Blues Band
East End
McMenamins Grand Lodge
3505 Pacific Ave. The Northstar Session
McMenamins Hotel Oregon
310 Northeast Evans St. Jaime Leopold Trio
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Jon Koonce and One More Mile
203 SE Grand Ave. Zach Blei Art Opening: The Losers, Zack Blei and The Combine, Taxi Boys
Mississippi Pizza
Ford Food and Drink
Mississippi Studios
2505 SE 11th Rollie Tussing
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave. Karaoke (9 pm); Eric Allen (7 pm)
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke; Raquel Nasser, Kim Vestin; Ron Rogers (5 pm)
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Call Us Forgotten, Burning Twilight, Verah Falls, My Mantle, Saints and Vipers
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. The Helping Hands (8 pm); Annie Vergnetti (5:30 pm)
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Trombone 8, The Quadraphonnes
John’s Restaurant and Lounge 8608 N Lombard Me3
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Grafton Street
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Baby Gramps (9:30 pm); James Low & Western Front (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Mark Alan
46
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Saloon Ensemble (9 pm); Jenny Sizzler (6 pm) 3939 N Mississippi Ave. Willamette Week Presents: Best New Band (9 pm); Eye Candy VJs (5 pm)
Mock Crest Tavern 3435 N Lombard St. Bordertown
Mount Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Codi Jordan Band, Dirty Syncopators, Doc Brown Experience
Noho’s Hawaiian Cafe 4627 NE Fremont St. Traditional Hawaiian Music
Original Halibut’s
2525 NE Alberta St. Robbie Laws
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
2314 SE Division St. Lynn Conover
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. The Encounters, Ana Bender, The Infected, The Wobblies
Red Lion Convention Center 1021 NE Grand Ave. Richard Arnold and Groove Swingers
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Hub City, Hillbillys, Godstoppers, The Smoking Mirrors, Denizens, Royales
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave. An Evening with Coheed and Cambria
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
Secret Society Lounge
116 NE Russell St. Nick Dothee and Nothing From The Sea, Erin ColeBaker (9 pm); Rio Con Brio (6 pm)
Sellwood Public House 8132 SE 13th Ave. David Ward
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. Otis Heat
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. Commotion, The Doo Doo Funk All-Stars
TeaZone and Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave. Sunday Last
The Globe
2045 SE Belmont St. The Disappointments
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Pete Krebs
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Patina, Winterhaven
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. Diesto, Leaders, Fruit of the Legion of Loom
The World Famous Kenton Club 2025 N Kilpatrick St. The Low Bones
Thirsty Lion
71 SW 2nd Ave. Ruby Hill
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ Ikon
Tiger Bar
317 NW Broadway The Spinning Whips, Lexxi Vexx
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Ditch Digger, Jameson, Maleva, Kingdom Under Fire (9:30 pm); The Poor Sports Band (5:30 pm)
SAT. MAY 7 Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel 303 SW 12th Ave. Scott McCaughey
Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. The Psychedelic Furs
Alberta Rose Theatre
3000 NE Alberta St. Robert Johnson: 100 Years
Alberta Street Public House
1036 NE Alberta St. Wes Weddell with Alicia Healey (9:30 pm); Na Mesa (6:30 pm)
Aloft
9920 NE Cascades Parkway The Andre St. James Trio
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Toshi Onizuka Trio
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Portland Underground Zombie Fest: Tigress, William Ingrid, Holy Tentacles
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Hello Morning, The Shivers, The Janks, No Kind of Rider
Beaterville Cafe
2201 N Killingsworth St. Arthur Moore’s Harmonica Party
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St. Rob Stroup and The Blame (9:30 pm); Billy Kennedy and Jimmy Boyer (6 pm)
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Shoehorn, Free Beat Nation, DJ Cachacinha, Super Moon
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Various Presents BSI Showcase: Systemwide, Alter Echo, S Dub, E3
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Travis Petersen
Clyde’s Prime Rib
5474 NE Sandy Blvd. Cool Breeze
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Loudness, Dirty Passion, War Machine
Doc George’s Jazz Kitchen
4605 NE Fremont St. Jay Harris’ Moon By Night Soul Trio
Doug Fir Lounge
Tony Starlight’s
830 E Burnside St. Dave Depper Presents the Ram Project, Lewi Longmire, Nelson Sings Nilsson
Tube
1635 SE 7th Ave. The Sportin’ Lifers
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Neil Diamond Tribute 18 NW 3rd Ave. Hot Mess, Doc Adam
Duff’s Garage
East End
203 SE Grand Ave.
Boat, The Purrs, Rick Bain, The Genius Position
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Goodfoot All-Stars Tribute to James Brown
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave. Karaoke
Hawthorne Hophouse 4111 SE Hawthorne Larsen and Moore
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
1503 SE 39th Ave. Lloyd Mitchell Canyon
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Symphony X, Powerglove, Blackguard, Beyond the Red Horizon
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. Padam Padam (8 pm); David Ornette Cherry (6 pm)
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Alan Jones Sextet
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Grafton Street
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Garcia Birthday Band (9:30 pm); Tree Frogs (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Beth Willis
McMenamins Grand Lodge
3505 Pacific Ave. The Northstar Session
McMenamins Hotel Oregon
310 Northeast Evans St. Mark Alan
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Freak Mountain Ramblers
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Heavy Brothers (9 pm); Level 2 Music (6 pm); Professor Banjo (4 pm)
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Pete International Airport, The Pink Snowflakes, Grandparents
Mock Crest Tavern 3435 N Lombard St. Donna and the Side Effects
Mount Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Rubblebucket, Mars Retrieval Unit
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Ninjas with Syringes, Faithless Saints, Second Best, Blue Baby’s
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Johnnie Ward and Bill Uhlig
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St. Fonzarelli (5 pm); Lloyd Jones (2:30 pm)
Noho’s Hawaiian Cafe 4627 NE Fremont St. Traditional Hawaiian Music
Press Club
2621 SE Clinton St. Morgan Geer, Blind Bartimaeus
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave. Wanda Jackson, Red Meat
Saratoga
6910 N Interstate Ave. Agent Ribbons, Orca Team, The Happening
Secret Society Lounge 116 NE Russell St. The Portland Playboys
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Second Time Through
Clyde’s Prime Rib
5474 NE Sandy Blvd. Ron Steen Jazz Jam
Dante’s
Doc George’s Jazz Kitchen
1033 NW 16th Ave. Corner Culture
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
8635 N Lombard St. Art Seed Benefit: Team Evil, Hawkins Wright, Mell
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. PDX Songwriter Happy Hour
TeaZone and Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave. Tree Top Tribe
The Globe
2045 SE Belmont St. Travelers and Thieves, Alligator vs. Crocodile
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Key Of Dreams
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. Mustang Jerx, The Stims, The Beautiful Mothers, Fonzarelli, DJ Macky Ramone
The Old Church
1422 SW 11th Ave. Songs for Supper 2011: Dan Brugh, New Century Schoolbook, Shuffleshine, JBTB
The World Famous Kenton Club
2025 N Kilpatrick St. The Satin Chaps, The Moonspinners, DJ Drew Groove
Thirsty Lion
71 SW 2nd Ave. The Brian Odell Band
Tiger Bar
317 NW Broadway Hopeless Jack and the Handsome Devils
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Peddle Home, The Hollywood Tans, Chris Baron
Tony Starlight’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. The Tony Starlight Show
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd. Meca Rey, Soce, Llama Latte, Laserdrive
Vino Vixens Wine Shop & Bar 2929 SE Powell Blvd. Nattybone
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Twisted Whistle, The Oh My Mys, 4 on the Floor (9:30 pm); The Student Loan (4:30 pm)
SUN. MAY 8
2525 NE Alberta St. Sonny Hess and Lady Kat
303 SW 12th Ave. Nate Lacy
PCPA Brunish Hall
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Danny Romero Trio
Andina
1305 SE 8th Ave. Lesbian, Grayceon, Diesto, Burials
1314 NW Glisan St. Dan Balmer Trio
Portland Foursquare Church
225 SW Ash St. Aranya, Charlie Drown, Strangeletter
2830 NE Flanders St. African Marimba Concert
Star Bar
3341 SE Belmont St. Blue Cranes
Slabtown
Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel
Plan B
Blue Monk
Sellwood Public House 8132 SE 13th Ave. Mystic Canyon
Ash Street Saloon
Beaterville Cafe
2201 N Killingsworth St.
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. Donna and the Side Effects
6000 NE Glisan St. Felim Egan
350 W Burnside St. Sinferno Cabaret, Mark Growden
Original Halibut’s
1111 SW Broadway Ponta & The Big Drum
Mother’s Day Bash
Biddy McGraw’s
4605 NE Fremont St. Mother’s Day Special Evening: The Big Easy Band
Doug Fir Lounge 830 E Burnside St. Citizen Cope
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Will Coca
Hawthorne Theatre
3862 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Blind Lovejoy, Wolves, Jake Powell, The Dankmakers
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Vivian Girls, No Joy, Blood Beach
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. Brad Grossen, Brian Harrison
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Eric Tonsfeldt
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Billy Kennedy & Tim Acott (9:30 pm); Freak Mountain Ramblers (6 pm)
639 SE Morrison St. Karaoke (That Doesn’t Suck)
The Globe
2045 SE Belmont St. Rychen and Friends
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. The Phoenix Variety Revue
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. Lebanon, Salted City, Arterial Spray
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. Chris Brokaw, Mark McGuire, Allen Karpinski, Matthew Mullane, Joshua Blatchely
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Hangover Helper Comedy and Burlesque Showcase: Miss Frankie Tease, Whitney Streed
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. DJ Flowers, DJ Dungeonmaster
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. Sunday’s Best: DJ Nick Dean, DJ 60/40
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd. Elba
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. Alicia McDaid, Joe Vonappen
Vino Vixens Wine Shop & Bar 2929 SE Powell Blvd. Groove Revelation
White Eagle Saloon
Matador
836 N Russell St. Open Mic Songwriter Showcase
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
128 NE Russell St. Thao and Mirah with The Most of All, Led To Sea, Marissa Anderson
1967 W Burnside St Next Big Thing: DJ Donny Don’t
2126 SW Halsey St. Billy D
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
Wonder Ballroom
MON. MAY 9
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Irish Sundays: Hanz Araki and Kathryn Claire
Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel
Mississippi Pizza
Aloft
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Kids Like Colors (9 pm); Folk & Spoon (6 pm)
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Tim Reynolds & TR3, Marcus Eaton
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Irish
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St. Steve Earle
NEPO 42
5403 NE 42nd Ave. Open Mic with Fred Stephenson
PCPA Brunish Hall
1111 SW Broadway Ponta & The Big Drum
Peter’s Room
8 NW 6th Ave. Federico Aubele
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. Hive: DJ Owen
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Foal, Ritual Healing, Raw and Order
Rontoms
600 E Burnside St. Ocean Age, Archaeology
Secret Society Lounge 116 NE Russell St. Hanz Araki and Cary Novotny
303 SW 12th Ave. Nate Lacy
9920 NE Cascades Parkway Martini
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Scott Head
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. Citzen Cope
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Papa Dynamite
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Sonic Forum Open Mic
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. The Donkeys, Social Studies, Yours
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Dan Balmer Band
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Tom May
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St.
CALENDAR Kung Pao Chickens (9 pm); Little Sue & Lynn Conover (6 pm)
Purple and Green, Magic Mouth, Jeau Breedlove
Shriners Hospitals for Children Benefit: Sara Evans, Stealing Angles
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
White Eagle Saloon
Duff’s Garage
2126 SW Halsey St. Skip vonKuske
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Bob Shoemaker
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Cass McCombs, Frank Fairfield
Mount Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Keegan Smith & The Fam
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Lloyd Jones
Roseland Theater
836 N Russell St. Buoy LaRue
TUES. MAY 10 Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel
303 SW 12th Ave. Nate Lacy
Alberta Rose Theatre
1635 SE 7th Ave. Dover Weinberg Quartet (9 pm); Trio Bravo (6 pm)
Ella Street Social Club
714 SW 20th Place Upsidedown Astronaut, Toiletooth, Renfield
Goodfoot Lounge
3000 NE Alberta St. Stereovision, Midlman, Dropa
2845 SE Stark St. Scott Pemberton Trio
Alberta Street Public House
511 NW Couch St. Rock Band Tuesdays
1036 NE Alberta St. Coty Hogue
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Danny Romero
Ash Street Saloon
Ground Kontrol
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave. Merrill Lite
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge
8 NW 6th Ave. Atmosphere, Blueprint, Grives with Budo, Sab the Artist, DJ Abilities
225 SW Ash St. Cool Nutz, Maniac Lok, Illmaculate, Mikey Vegaz, Dubble OO, Arjay
625 NW 21st Ave. Open Mic
Spare Room
Backspace
Jade Lounge
4830 NE 42nd Ave. Danny Chavez Karaoke Show
The Globe
2045 SE Belmont St. Hank Hirsh’s Jazz Lounge and Open Jam
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Roads, Karyn Patridge
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. Forsorcerers, Stag Bitten
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd. SIN Night
Valentine’s
115 NW 5th Ave. Ron Pope, Ari Herstand, Zach Berkman
Beaterville Cafe
2201 N Killingsworth St. Oilskins
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Small Doggies Reading Series PDX
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Open Mic Night
Bunk Bar
1028 SE Water Ave. The Golden Hours
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St.
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Joan of Arc, Air Waves 2346 SE Ankeny St. Mathew Zeltzer
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Mel Brown Septet (8 pm); The Reed College Jazz Band (6:30 pm)
Kells
112 SW 2nd Ave. Tom May
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Jackstraw
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. The Old Yellers
232 SW Ankeny St.
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Open Bluegrass Jam
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Baby Ketten Karaoke (9 pm); Poor Boy’s Soul, T. Jones (6 pm)
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Crystal Stilts, Case Studies, Archers
Mock Crest Tavern 3435 N Lombard St. Jeff Jensen Band
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
2314 SE Division St. Paul Brainard
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. Christian Mistress, Gypsyhawk, The Guild
Secret Society Lounge
116 NE Russell St. Dominic Castillo
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
8635 N Lombard St. Open Mic with Derek W
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave. Danny Chavez Karaoke Show
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Smooth Hopperator
TeaZone and Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave. Weekly Jazz Jam
The Crown Room
205 NW 4th Ave. See You Next Tuesday: Kellan, Avery
The Globe
2045 SE Belmont St. Steve Hall Quintet
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
Ground Kontrol
426 SW Washington St. Fjord, Mr. Plow, Ninja
511 NW Couch St. DJ Etbonz
Holocene
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. Cloudland Canyon, Eternal Tapestry, Rene Hell
The World Famous Kenton Club 2025 N Kilpatrick St. Countryland
Thirsty Lion
71 SW 2nd Ave. PDX Singer-Songwriter Showcase
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Besties, Charts, Shapes
Tony Starlight’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Ayars Vocal Showcase
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. Tubesday: Ronin Roc, Doc Adam
Twilight Café and Bar
WED. MAY 4 Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel 303 SW 12th Ave. DJ Sam Huff
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. TRONix: Bryan Zentz
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. DJ DirtyNick
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. Cover This! with DJ TJ
The Crown Room
205 NW 4th Ave. Crush Drum and Bass
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ Rat Creeps
THURS. MAY 5
1420 SE Powell Blvd. Open Mic with The Roaming
East End
Valentine’s
Ground Kontrol
232 SW Ankeny St. Pelican Ossman, Pool of Winds, Love Menu
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St. The Shook Twins
Wilf’s Restaurant
800 NW 6th Ave. Ellen Whyte with Jean Pierre
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. The Kills, Cold Cave, The Entrance Band
Yes and No
20 NW 3rd Ave. DJ Black Dog
MUSIC
DJ Stargazer
203 SE Grand Ave. New York Night Train’s Soul Clap and Dance-Off 511 NW Couch St. First Thursday: Strategy (10 pm); DJ Brokenwindow (7 pm)
Rotture
315 SE 3rd Ave. DJ Pan the Labrinyth, DJ Twinkletits, Illuminati Steele
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. The Fix: Rev. Shines, KEZ, Dundiggy
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. DirtBag: DJ Gutter Glamour
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ Golden Wilson
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. DJ E*Rock
FRI. MAY 6 Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel
303 SW 12th Ave. DJ Hwy 7
Goodfoot Lounge 2845 SE Stark St. DJ Magneto
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. DJ CHIP
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. 8 1/2 DJs: Holocene AllStar DJ Night
Kennedy School
5736 NE 33rd Ave. ‘80s Prom with The Radical Revolution
Lola’s Room at the Crystal Ballroom 1332 W Burnside St. ‘80s Video Dance Attack
Rotture
315 SE 3rd Ave. DJ Ill Camino, DJ Trans Fat
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Paultimore
The Woods
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. In The Cooky Jar with DJ Cooky Parker
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. DJ Carlita
SAT. MAY 7 Al’s Den at the Crystal Hotel
1001 SE Morrison St. Booty Bassment: Ryan & Dimitri, Maxx Bass
Rotture
315 SE 3rd Ave. Anjali and the Incredible Kid
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. Go French Yourself! with DJ Cecilia Paris
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. Endless Sumler
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. DJ Maxamillion
SUN. MAY 8 Ella Street Social Club
714 SW 20th Place Forever Film Night: DJ Eclecto, DJ Bramble
Mount Tabor Theater 4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. 51 Fifty
MON. MAY 9 Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. Service Industrial Night: DJ Tibin
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. Into the Void with DJ Blackhawk
Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ Old Frontier
TUES. MAY 10 Tiga
1465 NE Prescott St. DJ One Crate
303 SW 12th Ave.
©2011 COORS BREWING COMPANY, GOLDEN, CO Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
47
MAY
04
MARK & TALIA KURLANSKY / World without Fish (Workman) A book for kids about whatís happening to the oceans and our environment. WED / 4TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ / A Jane Austen Education (Penguin Press) An Austen scholar turns to the authorís novels to reveal the remarkable life lessons hidden within. WED / 4TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
FIRST THURS: CLAUDIA PORTER ì Barbieî features a collection of digitally painted works of the iconic character. THU / 5TH / 6:30P DOWNTOWN
CHRISTOPHER FARNSWORTH / The President’s Vampire (Putnam) The sequel to Blood Oath, a novel about the Presidentís Vampire. THU / 5TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
KATIE ARNOLD-RATLIFF / Bright before Us (Tin House Books) Explores the journey toward adulthood, the nature of memory, and the limits to which we are driven by grief. THU / 5TH / 7:30P HAWTHORNE
JON KATZ / Meet the Dogs of Bedlam Farm (Henry Holt) A childrenís picture-book version of Katzís adult book A Dog Year. FRI / 6TH / 7PM CEDAR HILLS
DEMETRI MARTIN / This Is a Book (Grand Central)
An original book of humor. FRI / 6TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
CAROLYN CONAHAN / The Big Wish (Chronicle)
Join us for this special childrenís drawing party hosted by Conahan. SAT / 7TH / 1P CEDAR HILLS
ROBERT PENN / It’s All about the Bike (Bloomsbury) Explores the culture and history of the bicycle. SUN / 8TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
CHARLAINE HARRIS / Dead Reckoning (Ace) The creator of the irresistible Sookie Stackhouse series ó the basis for HBOís True Blood ó is back! NOTE: Tickets available at the Bagdad Theater, the Crystal Ballroom, CascadeTickets.com, or by phone at 855-227-8499. Books distributed at the event.
COMMUNITY LAW WEEK May 2-7 THE MULTNOMAH BAR ASSOCIATION YOUNG LAWYERS SECTION PRESENTS ...
MON / 9TH / 7P BAGDAD
KARA GOUCHER / Kara Goucher’s Running for Women (Touchstone) Packed with tips and advice for the female athlete. MON / 9TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
PLAZM ANNIVERSARY READING Plazm magazine celebrates its 20th anniversary. MON / 9TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
JONATHAN HAYES / A Hard Death (Harper)
Forensic pathologist Edward Jenner reveals the seamy underbelly of a Florida coastal community. TUE / 10TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
MICHAEL PARKER / The Watery Part of the World (Algonquin) Follows the daughter of Aaron Burr, who by many accounts was captured by pirates.
7pm FREE
FRIDAY, MAY 6TH AT THE HOLLYWOOD THEATER
TELL IT TO THE JUDGE Lloyd Center Mall May 7 12 to 4 pm
Throughout the week we have these Legal Information Booths set up: LOCATION Human Solutions Loaves & Fishes Elm Court Center Portland Impact Hillsdale Library Human Solutions Lloyd Center
48
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
DATE May 2nd May 3rd May 4th May 5th May 6th May 7th
TIME 9:00-11:00am 10:30-12:30am 11:00-1:00pm 3:00-5:00pm 2:00-4:00pm 12:00-2:00pm
www.mbabar.org/public
TUE / 10TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
Visit POWELLS.COM/CALENDAR for further details and to sign up for our EVENTS NEWSLETTER.
SUGGESTED CAN FOOD DONATION FOR OREGON FOOD BANK
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER SPONSORS: Davis Wright Tremaine Holland & Knight Miller Nash Stoel Rives
BANNER SPONSOR: Barran Liebman Cosgrave Vergeer Kester
CLW SPONSORS: Ater Wynne Barran Liebman Cosgrave Vergeer Kester Garvey Schubert Barer
Gevurtz Menashe Larson & Howe Hiefield Foster & Glascock Pacific Northwest Paralegal Association Perkins Coie
Samuels Yoelin Kantor Schwabe Williamson & Wyatt Stoll Berne Wyse Kadish
MAY 4-10
= 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 The Adding Machine
Do you feel oppressed by technology? Do you worry that your ceaseless toil will never be rewarded by your employer? These may seem like prompts from the writers’ room at The Office, but Elmer Rice addressed them all in 1923. Jane Bement Geesman has dusted off this classic expressionist comedy and given it a Fritz Langesque masque-theater production for the final show of Theatre Vertigo’s season. Despite its age, the show feels unsettlingly contemporary; but for the Jazz Age slang, it could have been written by Sarah Ruhl. Gary Norman, with all his usual hangdog charm, plays Mr. Zero, a colorless functionary at a department store who spends his days doing endless sums and lusting after his assistant (Jenn Hunter). When his boss informs him he’ll be laid off after 25 years of labor and replaced by an adding machine, Zero murders him. He is executed, and mopes his way through undeath, the Elysian Fields and some kind of mechanical hell. If you think of the expressionists as a humorless bunch, The Adding Machine will surprise you. Rice wraps his message (“don’t be a tool”) in bizarre deadpan humor, and you’ll chuckle right through the downer finale. Theater! Theatre!, 3430 SE Belmont St., 306-0870. 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays. Closes May 7. $15. Thursdays are “pay what you will.”
The Cherry Orchard
With the premiere of Richard Kramer’s commissioned adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, Artists Repertory Theatre and director Jon Kretzu have completed the project of four new Chekhov adaptations they began six years ago. Kramer’s take maintains the tug-of-war between sorrow and wit that dates back to the show’s first production, when Constantin Stanislavski turned what Chekhov meant to be farce into tragedy, but adds sitcomesque humor. Uncomfortable cruelty and profound loneliness are peppered with conspicuous laugh lines that swing between flavorful and tasteless: The affluent Yermolay (Tim Blough) is announced to have stepped in crap, and the rotund Pischik (Todd Van Voris) claws at the air with a long “meowww” when Varya (Val Landrum) turns her back. As Pischik, Van Voris epitomizes the play’s farcical notes with impeccable comedic timing and blabbering kiss-assery. Michael Mendelson brings delectable sass to the stage as Leo Gayev, while Landrum balances her Varya’s wannabe-nun severity with the occasional deadpan gibe. Also enjoyable is the detail given to the play’s set and props, down to the individually crinkled bills thrown at a blood-coughing Chekhov (Jeffrey Jason Gilpin) as he stumbles, covered in rags, through his own play. Kramer isn’t the first playwright to pull the audience self-consciously into the adaptation process, but he does so without cheapening the performance. NATALIE BAKER. Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison St., 241-1278. 7:30 pm Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2 and 7:30 pm Sundays. Closes May 22. $20-$42.
Cymbeline
Northwest Classical Theatre Company presents Shakespeare’s very strange, flawed fairy tale, in which King Cymbeline’s daughter, Imogen, is abused by her stepmother, courted by her stepbrother and secretly married to her childhood best friend. Shoe Box Theater, 2110 SE 10th Ave., 971-2443740. 7 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 15. $15-$18.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Beaverton Civic Theatre stages the classic Sondheim comedy. Beaverton City Library Auditorium, 12375 SW 5th Ave., Beaverton, 754-9866. 8 pm Fridays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 14. $5-$15.
Grand Guignol 3: Ménage à Trois
Another year, another evening of gory horror vignettes from Third Eye Theatre. The Back Door Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 970-8874. 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays through June 4. $12-$15.
How I Became a Pirate!
Mack, in his best performance I’ve yet seen) are characters you can chew on for hours. The band’s scenes are the show’s best. When Rainey does show up, in stunning regalia, things begin to falter. Johnson gave an excellent performance on opening night, but Jones can’t seem to figure out what to do with Rainey’s stuttering nephew or vamping flapper girlfriend. I can’t either—the characters are superfluous. Jones recovers from the midshow lag powerfully, though: Levee’s reaction to Sturdyvant’s rejection of his music is terrifying. BEN WATERHOUSE. Portland Playhouse, 602 NE Prescott St., 205-0715. 8 pm WednesdaysSaturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 29. $20-$25.
No One Wants to See the Wires
Impetus Arts presents autobiographical stories by deaf and disabled artists, with ASL interpretation. The Mouth, Inside Zoomtopia, 810 SE Belmont St., 971-275-0794. 7 pm Friday, 2 pm Saturday-Sunday, May 6-8. $15.
Third Rail Rep closes its season with Steven Dietz’s 2004 play about traumatized Vietnam vets reliving their war memories in a polluted trailer park. World Trade Center Theater, 121 SW Salmon St., 235-1101. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 29. $15-$32.
Lazarillo
Road House: The Play!
I Left My Heart
Broadway Rose Theatre Company presents “a musical salute to the music of Tony Bennett.” Fred Bishop, Yohannes Murphy and Todd Tschida each play Bennett at a different stage of his very, very long career. BEN WATERHOUSE. Broadway Rose New Stage Theatre, 12850 SW Grant Ave., Tigard, 620-5262. 7:30 pm ThursdaySaturday, 2 pm Sunday, May 5-8. $20$35.
Last of the Boys
Miracle Theatre presents a world premiere by Carlos Alexis Cruz, a hiphop- and circus-influenced take on La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de Sus Fortunas y Adversidades. Haven’t read it? You should—the anonymous text about the misadventures of a vagabond servant and his various corrupt masters was the first picaresque novel, and arguably the first novel of any sort. Given Cruz’s background in exceptional physical theater, this should be a fascinating show. Miracle Theatre, 525 SE Stark St., 236-7253. 7:30 pm Thursdays, 8 pm FridaysSaturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 28. $14-$25.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Having enjoyed great success in 2010 with August Wilson’s final play, Radio Golf, Portland Playhouse now returns to the playwright’s work to end its season with his first. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a better play than Radio Golf, its language more lyrical and characters better formed, but this production (directed by Kevin Jones), while good, doesn’t match the taut excitement of last year’s hit. The fascinations with music, family and insecurity that appear throughout Wilson’s work are already evident here: The entire play takes place in 1923 in three rooms of a Chicago recording studio (neatly stacked back to front in Daniel Meeker’s set), where white record producer Sturdyvant (Bruce Burkhartsmeier) is preparing for a session with blues singer Ma Rainey (alternately Julianne Johnson and Marilyn Keller). The problem: Ma Rainey has not shown up. The musicians, who gather in the studio’s rehearsal room, manage very little rehearsing between a lot of first-rate bullshitting: Cutler (Wendell Wright), Slow Drag (Jerry Foster), Toledo (Wrick Jones) and Levee (Victor
[title of show]
Triangle Productions presents a musical about a couple guys writing and producing a musical—specifically, this musical. Greg Tamblyn directs an excellent cast: Joe Theissen, Dale Johannes, Pam Mahon, Erin Charles and Susannah Mars. The Sanctuary at Sandy Plaza, 1785 NE Sandy Blvd., 2395919. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 29. $15-$35.
Trailing Colors
Portland playwright Gretchen Icenogle premieres a new show set in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. It has elephants. The Headwaters, 55 NE Farragut St., No. 9, 800-8383006. 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 29. $10-$15. Thursdays are “pay what you will.” Proceeds from Thursday and Saturday performances benefit charities working in Rwanda.
The Vagina Monologues
Revive your inner college sophomore at the Q Center with Eve Ensler’s
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REVIEW
Opus
This is a story of four men and a fiddle. And a woman and a viola, too, but let’s not complicate matters overly. Michael Hollinger’s very funny chamber-music drama is all about the experience of playing in a string quartet, which, if Brendon Fox’s production for Portland Center Stage is to be believed, is like really amazing sex with an irremediably crazy, emotionally abusive partner. When we meet the Lazara String Quartet, the crazy has boiled over. Lead violinist Elliot (Chris Coleman) has fired violist Dorian (Matthew Boston), who is also his exboyfriend. The drama unfolds slowly, in flashbacks interpolated with the addition of Grace (Sarah Stevens), Dorian’s young replacement, to the quartet one week before the group is scheduled to perform at the White House. The basic elements of the story are the same as any sports movie—the team must face down extraordinary odds before the big game—but the game is Beethoven’s Op. 131, and the odds are bad tempers, broken hearts and cancer. BEN WATERHOUSE. Gerding Theater, 128 NW 11th Ave., 445-3700. 7:30 pm Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturdays-Sundays, 12 and 7:30 pm Thursdays. Closes May 8. $33-$58.
Oregon Children’s Theatre presents a musical version of a book about juvenile piracy. Winningstad Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 228-9571. 2 and 5 pm Saturdays-Sundays through May 22. $17.50-$33. All ages.
of incest, murder and eye-gouging. Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center, 5340 N Interstate Ave., 800-4948497. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 3 pm Sundays. Closes May 29. $20, $10 Thursdays.
OWEN CAREY
PERFORMANCE
Everybody loves Road House, the super-trashy 1989 film in which Patrick Swayze plays a throat-rippin’ bouncer who takes on a small-town crime boss, but most of us wouldn’t think to adapt it for the stage. Shelley McLendon, who performs around town with the Liberators improv troupe, is not like most people. She and her co-adapter, Live Wire! host Courtenay Hameister, have assembled a cast of some of the city’s top improvisers (Tony Marcellino, Nicholas Kessler) and radio talent (Ted Douglass, Sean McGrath) to bring the script, with original songs, to the Armory’s Ellyn Bye Studio. Gerding Theater, 128 NW 11th Ave., 445-3700. 10 pm May 6-7, 12-13 and 20-21. $18 in advance, $22 at the door.
The Secret Garden
Kirk Mouser and Alan D. Lytle direct the musical adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel at Lakewood Theatre. Lakewood Center for the Arts, 368 S State St., Lake Oswego, 6353901. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays; 7 pm Sunday, May 8; 2 and 7 pm Sundays, May 15 and 22; 2 pm Sundays May 29, June 5 and 12. $20-$32.
Singlehandedly!
Portland Story Theater’s solo-performance fest continues (see the full schedule at portlandstorytheater. com/2011solo/index.htm). This week: Ryan Wolf Stroud, Brad Clark and Enrique Andrade on Friday; Sharon Knorr, Augi and Niko Moe on Saturday. Hipbone Studio, 1847 E Burnside St., 793-5484. 8 pm Friday-Saturday, May 6-7. Festival continues through May 13. $15 per night.
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
Compass Repertory Theatre reaches way, way back for its second production: John Ford’s 1629-ish drama
BUST (PORTLAND CENTER STAGE) On any given day, the Los Angeles County jail system holds over 18,000 men and women in custody—160,000, all told, in 2010. Seven or more men share cells built for four in buildings so foul that, according to Lauren Weedman’s autobiographical play about volunteering there as an inmate advocate, visitors are warned “not to touch the walls or railings [because] there is staph infection everywhere.” Weedman’s story is about more than inhumane jail conditions, weaving her visits to the jail with the humiliation of commercial auditions, the publication of a terrible personal story in Glamour and the general frivolity of the lives of the not-quite-famous. It is riotously funny and also quite dark and unsettling. The stories of the inmates she meets reach beyond the failings of the justice system, probing the nature of shame and deceit. But it is the sense of overpopulation that lingers long past Weedman’s 90-minute performance, perhaps because the work itself teems with life. Where a lesser performer might fall back on narration to convey her reaction to all this horror, Weedman, a veteran of The Daily Show and Reno 911, never once breaks character. She is a remarkable observer of behavior, and every person she encounters, in the jail and health spa and audition room, appears fully realized, conveying entire biographies through voice and stance, each of them immediately recognizable, never bleeding into one another. Most of the inhabitants of Weedman’s world are more believable, indeed, than her portrayal of herself as a compulsive blabbermouth, at once insecure and self-obsessed, who tells the other women at the volunteer orientation that she wants “to do something not about me” and then spends five minutes babbling about her own problems. “Lauren” is insufferable and unable to control her need to crack jokes, even at the most inappropriate times, to draw attention to herself. I assume the character is exaggerated to the point of fiction—it is impossible to imagine that anyone could be both this egoistic and so sensitive to the manners and desires of the people around her. BEN WATERHOUSE.
Lauren Weedman gets the jailhouse blues.
SEE IT: Gerding Theater, 128 NW 11th Ave., 445-3700. 7:30 pm Tuesdays-Wednesdays and Fridays, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturdays and Sundays, noon and 7:30 pm Thursdays, through June 19. $18-$40. Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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PERFORMANCE
MAY 4-10
Oregon Symphony
Charles Ives’ brief, enigmatic masterpiece, The Unanswered Question, sets an appropriately pensive mood for this concert. The orchestra’s first recording in far too many years (and first under music director Carlos Kalmar) features the splendid baritone Sanford Sylvan singing the disquieting to anguished to ultimately comforting setting of Walt Whitman’s great antiwar poem, The Wound Dresser, written for him by composer John Adams. Echoes of Aaron Copland, especially in the trumpet passages, haunt this poignant paean, which was composed in 1989 while Adams’ mother was caring for his dying father, and while AIDS was devastating his Bay Area arts community. The elegiac theme continues in Benjamin Britten’s moving Sinfonia da Requiem, and the all-20th-century program concludes with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 4. The orchestra will take the program to its showcase at Carnegie Hall next week. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 228-1353. 7:30 pm Saturday, 2 pm Sunday, May 7-8. $20-$90.
Portland Columbia Symphony Orchestra
CHANTERS OF ST. PANTELEIMON three-hour ode to hoo-has. Q Center , 4115 N Mississippi Ave., 234-7837. 7 pm Friday-Saturday, May 6-7. $10-$12.
Women of Hope: Stories of Love and Healing
Portland Storytellers Guild tells stories. Kennedy School Community Room, 5736 NE 33rd Ave. 6:30 pm Saturday, May 7. $5, $10 per family.
A decently funny motormouth who takes a little too much care with his goatee, Joyce has some good stories about bad jobs. Harvey’s Comedy Club, 436 NW 6th Ave., 241-0338, harveyscomedyclub.com. 7:30 pm Thursday, 7:30 and 10 pm Friday, 5, 7:30 and 10 pm Saturday, 7:30 pm Sunday, May 5-8. $15.
Mice-tro
COMEDY Apocalypse Now and Later
Sketch comedy set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with Katie Behrens, Alex Gavlick, Stacey Hallal, Craig McCarty, Janet Rivera, Scott Rogers and Nate Smith. Curious Comedy Theater, 5225 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 477-9477, curiouscomedy.org. 8 pm Fridays-Saturdays through June 4. $12-$15.
Comedy Is OK
Stand-up by Ron Funches, Ian Karmel and Rochelle Love; videos from Paul Schlesinger, Mikey Kampmann and Andrew Michaan; free valet bike parking. Clinton Street Theater , 2522 SE Clinton St., 238-8899. 9 pm Wednesday, May 4. $5. All ages.
The Ed Forman Show: Garage Sale EDition
In a very special Ed Forman Show, Ed will attempt to sell you “three years’ worth of slightly soiled set pieces, polyester suits, wacky props and even old characters.” Music by Them! The band! Dante’s, 350 W Burnside St., 226-6630. 9 pm Tuesday, May 10. $3. 21+.
Girls! Girls! Girls!
An all-female improv show at the Brody. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 8 pm Saturdays through May 14. $8-$12.
Andy Kindler
Kindler, a regular Letterman guest and perennial favorite at the Just for Laughs Festival, makes most of his jokes at the expense of other comics. He once compared Dane Cook to Hitler, in history’s only case of justified Godwinization. Helium Comedy Club, 1510 SE 9th Ave., 888-643-8669. 8 pm Thursday, 7:30 and 10 pm FridaySaturday, May 5-7. $15-$25.
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Jesse Joyce
Put 16 improv actors onstage with a voice-of-God maestro pitting them against each other and the audience voting them off, and what do you get? A raw and clever show that’s disgustingly full of talent. The actors take cues from the audience, asking them to shout out a hardware object (“hammer!”) or scenario (“rehab intervention!”) or sentence (“do not step on my begonias!”), which they instantly incorporate into their skits. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 8 pm Fridays through May 27. $8-$12.
T.G.I.Funday!
The Brody crew improvises an episode of an early-’90s-style sitcom, complete with Bubble Yum ads and D.A.R.E. PSAs. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 10 pm Saturdays through May 14. $8.
The Weekly Recurring Humor Night
Whitney Streed hosts a weekly sketch and stand-up comedy night. Tonic Lounge, 3100 NE Sandy Blvd., 238-0543. 9:30 pm Wednesdays. $3-$5. 21+.
CLASSICAL Chanters of St. Panteleimon
Anyone who treasures the bracingly austere Byzantine music of Portland’s Cappella Romana will understand why the early music vocal ensemble is presenting this rare visit by an expert male-vocal quartet from Tbilisi, Georgia, that sings ancient Orthodox chants, hymns, folk tunes, yodels and other traditional Georgian songs. St. Mary’s Cathedral , 1716 NW Davis St., 800-494-8497. 8 pm Saturday, May 7. $18-$36.
I Ragazzi Baroque
In this benefit for the Multnomah Arts Center Association, a nonet of Baroque instrumentalists accompanies
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
a sextet of singers in Handel’s great opera Alcina. Multnomah Arts Center, 7688 SW Capitol Highway, 823-2787. 7 pm Saturday-Sunday, May 7-8. $20 suggested donation.
Markus Groh
The German pianist has forged a sterling reputation as both a solo recitalist and orchestral soloist. In this Portland Piano International solo show, he’ll perform two Beethoven sonatas, Schumann’s colorful Carnaval and Alban Berg’s Op. 1 sonata. Newmark Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 228-1388. 4 pm Sunday, May 8. $28-$54.
Opera Theater Oregon, Electric Opera Company
OTO puts the soap back in opera with this characteristically creative, cheeky adaptation that raises funds for its new residency at the Mission. For the new Sordid Lives, Live Wire!’s Pat Janowski and OTO’s Katie Taylor and John Dover contrived a silly plot involving a straying, married Wall Street banker; a scandalous pregnancy; frame-ups; amnesia; evil twins and other worldturning events in the days of the lives of the young and restless. As usual, the stage action may be accompanied by a winking eye and cheek-tickling tongues, but OTO takes the music (by famous 19th-century opera composers) quite seriously. This time it’s delivered by the dozen plugged-in guitarists of Electric Opera Company, OTO’s Technicolor Orchestra and Chorus and members of the Flash Choir. Ample audience participation determines the course of events. It’s sure to be a hoot. Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 281-0295. 7 pm Friday, May 6. $10-$12.
Oregon Chamber Players
Classical institutions are looking assiduously to connect with audiences. OCP did so here by letting listeners vote on the program repertoire, and they made some unusual yet dandy choices: Antonin Dvorák’s scintillating “Serenade for Winds,” Francis Poulenc’s “Perpetual Motions,” a sinfonie by Michael Haydn and the famous “Entrance of the Queen of Sheba” from Handel’s oratorio Solomon. All Saints’ Episcopal Church, 4033 SE Woodstock Blvd., 888-627-8788. 7:30 pm Saturday, May 7. $12-$15.
For this season’s last concert in a different venue, CSO takes advantage of the resonant acoustics of the cathedral with music that sounds expansive in echoey spaces: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ gauzy 1910 Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Anton Bruckner’s characteristically epic 1896 Symphony No. 9. St. Mary’s Cathedral , 1716 NW Davis St., 234-4077. 7:30 pm Friday and Tuesday, May 6 and 10. $5-$30.
SoundProof
The experimental California performance trio SoundProof (violinist Patricia Strange, bassist/composer/ computer performer Brian Belet and flugelhornist/trumpeter/composer Stephen Ruppenthal) combines contemporary sounds with advanced digital processing techniques to create interactive performances in which musicians actually do more than just push buttons that activate pre-programmed sounds. They’ll play works by Allen Strange, Brian Belet, Larry Austin and PSU prof Bonnie Miksch. Lincoln Hall, 1620 SW Park Ave., Room 75, 725-3307. Noon Tuesday, May 3, with lecture and demo at 2 pm. Free.
University of Oregon Music Faculty
For this free First Thursday event, the Eugeneans head north to perform piano music by Ravel, Scriabin and others, with music for piano and soprano by Fauré, Mendelssohn, Strauss and Lehár. Sherman Clay/Moe’s Pianos, 131 NW 13th Ave., 775-2427. 7 pm Thursday, May 5. Free.
DANCE BodyVox
What comes to mind when you think of home? The dance company BodyVox, which has just returned to Portland after touring Germany, considers the question by staging an old favorite: A Thousand Little Cities. In a series of vignettes—many athletic, some lyrical, a few even airborne—the company evokes the times, and places, of our lives. Tad Savinar provides the visuals, while the music ranges from John Adams to Aphex Twin to Roy Orbison, whose “Mystery Girl” will be sung live by a rotating cast of guest vocalists during the show’s wedding scene (an update on the original work). Eight BodyVox dancers and child performers recruited from the center’s studio classes perform the work. BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 NW 17th Ave., 229-0627. 7:30 pm TuesdaysFridays, 7:30 pm Saturday, May 7; 2 and 7:30 pm Saturdays, May 14 and 21. Closes May 21. $36-$49.
Savannah Fuentes Flamenco
Flamenco dancer Savannah Fuentes performs with local flamenco artist Lillie Last, singer Diana Bright and guitarists Greg Wolf and Brenna McDonald. Someday Lounge, 125 NW 5th Ave., 248-1030, flamencoarteypaz.
blogspot.com. 8 pm Sunday, May 8. $15-$18.
Homo’s Got Talent Dance-off Competition
What does it take to win Portland’s Top Homo 2011 title? Only the fiercest dance moves in town, honey. At the Homo’s Got Talent Dance-Off Competition, emceed by Max Voltage, celebrity judges Mr. Charming, Sossity Chiricuzio and Sea Man will decide who has ’em. The event also features a dance demo by Swagger, a burlesque demo by Fannie Fuller and her students, and a special guest performance from ChiChi and Chonga, not to mention a fliptography booth, where guests can document the good times and revisit them later. Fez Ballroom, 316 SW 11th Ave., 221-7262. 8 pm Friday, May 6. $5-$10.
Jefferson Dancers
The highly regarded high-school troupe celebrates 35 years in existence by dancing works in a range of styles, created by a range of choreographers including Steve Gonzales, Kristi Bacon, Thomas Yale, Alexander Dones, Aukai La’amaikahiki and Káaumoana Ahina, Liz Aguila and Durante Lambert. (If the show inspires you, pencil June 2-3 into your calendar, which is when the company next holds auditions.) Newmark Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, ticketmaster.com. 7:30 pm WednesdayFriday, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturday, May 4-7. $12.75-$22.75.
Marylhurst Art Gym Dance Exhibits
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 (around that time, Banyas and Louise Steinman founded their own group, So&So&So&SO). Patton, a PSU professor, has digitized footage from those days, which should be a revelation to those of us who arrived after the fact. Marylhurst University, 17600 Highway 43, 699-1814. Opening reception 3-6 pm Sunday, April 3. Free. All ages.
The Winds of Donegal Irish Dance
Sam Keator teaches and calls traditional Irish dances, accompanied by Irish music played live by Johnny Connolly, Django Amerson and Cary Novotny. Winona Grange No. 271, 8340 SW Seneca St., Tualatin, 691-2078. 7:30 pm Friday, May 6. $5-$10. All ages.
The Zig Zags
The myth of Pandora’s box inspired Seeds of Hope, a new show from the Zig Zags (Do Jump! Physical Theater’s teen company). Through aerial dance, acrobatics, live music and physical theater, the Zig Zags work their way through various changes: loss and hope on three different scales—personal, familial and global. It’s an original show and all ages are welcome, although it does address death—so if you haven’t had that conversation with your kids yet, be forewarned. Echo Theater, 1515 SE 37th Ave., 231-1232. 7 pm Saturdays, 1 and 4:30 pm Sundays, May 7-8 and 14-15. $5-$10. All ages.
For more Performance listings, visit
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51
VISUAL ARTS
MAY 4-10 REVIEW
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
SPECIAL EVENT CAP Auction Wrap-up
Although final figures won’t be computed for several weeks, the total proceeds of this year’s Cascade AIDS Project Art Auction (held Saturday, April 30) far exceeded last year’s total of $420,000. According to CAP development director Michael Sorensen, this year’s total is somewhere north of $525,000. The live auction generated much suspense, most markedly in bidding for the highest-fetching lot, a painting by world-famous glass sculptor Dale Chihuly. After a spirited escalation in bidding, the piece sold for $11,000. As a venue, the Memorial Coliseum proved a mixed bag. The patron event on the coliseum floor suffered from a dark lighting scheme and a cavernous vastness that made social mixing difficult. The grand event, held in the long upstairs corridor, was more convivial, although the big-band entertainment, while classy, made the event seem more geriatric and bourgeois than in years past. Still, it was a banner night for the dress-up crowd, with plenty of seeing and being seen, and most importantly, raising significant funds for CAP’s programs benefiting AIDS/HIV education, support and prevention.
NOW SHOWING Ted Katz
Tom Cramer
Michael T. Hensley exhibits his intri-
Wood, wax and pigment come together in Johannes Girardoni’s Light Matters, showing this month at both PDX and PDX Across the Hall. The artist conflates painting and sculpture in works that exult in form and surface. PDX Contemporary Art, 925 NW Flanders St., 222-0063, pdxcontemporaryart. com. Closes May 28.
Holly Andres
Holly Andres is known for her eerie narrative photographs, which often weave stories around the fundamental creepiness of small-town America. In The Fall of Spring Hill, her first solo show with Charles Hartman, she heralds the heroism of mothers protecting their children. Some of the works have the unnerving quality that has become her signature style: the pissed-off, baseball bat-brandishing mothers in The Mothers Ascending Spring Hill, and the disturbing The Mother With Child and Ax. But other works come across prosaic and flat: Unremarkable shots of watermelons and punch bowls are hard to get excited about. Charles A. Hartman Fine Art, 134 NW 8th Ave., 287-3886, hartmanfineart.net. Closes May 14.
Sean Healy
Pristine is not a word that comes to mind in association with devastated Northeastern manufacturing towns (“sooty,” “grungy” and “derelict” are more like it), but in Sean Healy’s dramatic Upstate, the once-thriving industrial hub of Brasher Falls, N.Y., becomes a spotless and abstracted metaphor for everything from urban decay to the psychic ravages of middle age. The cigarette butts and filters deployed in works such as Smoke Breakers, Ember and Male Pattern Midlife I, are placed with such O.C.D. precision and chromatic exactitude, they turn a quotidian material into the stuff of transubstantiation. Healy throws us bones of color in a largely monochromatic show, but largely keeps the palette and thematic concerns muted but impactful. This feels like a new, more minimalist direction for the artist, but upon reflection, reveals itself as a refinement of trends he has been moving toward for several years. Elizabeth Leach, 417 NW 9th Ave., 224-0521, elizabethleach.com. Closes May 28.
For more Visual Arts listings, visit
ORANGE BOX WITH BLUE VESSELS (LEFT) AND CHROME POPPY (ABOVE) BY DANTE MARIONI AT BULLSEYE GALLERY.
DANTE MARIONI VARIATIONS Varied, virtuosic and sumptuous beyond imagination, the work of Seattle-based s c u l pt o r D a n t e M a r i oni seems to come from another time—perhaps the Renaissance, when craftsmanship and invention were the fulcra upon which artists’ reputations were built. In the triumphant exhibition Variations, Marioni, best known for his work in blown glass, stretches his already formidable technique to include works in kilncast and fused glass. There are still plenty of the oversized vessels for which he made his name: the nearly 3-foot-tall Yellow Circle Mosaic and the graceful Standing Leaf With Red Stripe, with its crisscrossing “reticello” patterns all the way up and down the piece, an immaculate bubble in the center of each diamond. How can an object of such complex execution still create a silhouette of such simplicity? This is more the stuff of wizardry than of art. Elsewhere, Marioni flexes new muscles. His mirrored wall pieces, one yellow and one red, have honeycomblike cutouts and are dramatically encased in steel, imparting a Gothic sinisterness. The red piece is displayed on the wall of an intimate domestic mise-en-scène, appointed with a settee, a glass stool (not designed by Marioni) and a side table bearing a Sculptor Dante Marioni takes a risk and scores a hit.
Guide to Portland
Michael T. Hensley
Johannes Girardoni
W i l l a m e t t e W e e k’ s
Portlanders have long been familiar with iconic painter Tom Cramer’s Keith Haring-like murals and art cars, as well as his sumptuous relief carvings in gold and silver leaf. But in Oregon Landmarks, this Portland native revels in the landscape and landmarks of his home state: Mount Hood, Timberline Lodge, Crater Lake Lodge and the Pittock Mansion, among others. As always, Cramer deploys his unique painting and carving styles with equal doses of romanticism, verve and wit. Laura Russo, 805 NW 21st Ave., 226-2754, laurarusso.com. May 5-28.
cate compositions on the groundfloor art space of Holst Architecture’s gorgeously contemporary 937 Condominiums. The show is curated by Hensley’s longtime gallerist, Mark Woolley, with a portion of sales benefiting Outside In’s programs for homeless youth. Presentspace, 939 NW Glisan St. presentspace.org. Closes May 28.
finder
A poet of the horizon line, painter Ted Katz subdivides earth and water from the great, vaulting sky. His semiabstract acrylic paintings often feature brooding swaths of shadow highlighted by piercing streaks of counterintuitive color. The current show is titled Looking at Pictures: The Edge of Vision and questions the notion of the object’s edge and its implications to meaning, memory and life itself. Butters Gallery, 520 NW Davis St., 248-9378, buttersgallery.com. May 5-28.
DANTE MARIONI
By RICHARD SPEER. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, submit show information—including opening and closing dates, gallery address and phone number—at least two weeks in advance to: Visual Arts, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: rspeer@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115. Emailed press releases must be backed up by a faxed or printed copy.
2010 - 2011 : FREE
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gloriously bizarre piece called Chrome Poppy. This is one of the most jaw-dropping sculptures you are likely to lay eyes upon in the next 10 years. One part Wizard of Oz, one part art deco and one part Dorothy Draper, it is an object of uncommon assertiveness: preeningly macho in its technique but absolutely effete in the over-the-top preciousness of its ornamentation. As a whimsical coda, in his Red Vessel Display and Orange Box With Blue Vessels, the artist works with multiples, stocking curio shelves with 12 diminutive vessel forms apiece. Adorned with bulbous knobs, spines and cochlear curlicues the works evoke the serialism of Andy Warhol and the sheer silliness of Dr. Seuss. Marioni was once a child prodigy who studied with Venetian master blower Lino Tagliapietra. Clearly, the 47-year-old Marioni is not coasting on his early precociousness. By extending his reach into diverse glass techniques, he pushes his own envelope. Anyone who works this vigorously with a material as fragile as glass, is by definition a risktaker. In Variations, Marioni takes a big risk, and it pays off in spades. RICHARD SPEER. SEE IT: Bullseye Gallery, 300 NW 13th Ave., 227-0222, bullseyegallery.com. Closes June 25.
2011-2012
finder Publishes • Aug 8th, 2011 • Deadline to reserve ad space • Wed, June 22nd @ 4pm Call • 503 243 2122 • Email • advertising@wweek.com
BOOKS
MAY 4-10
= WW Pick. Highly recommended. By ASHLEY GOSSMAN. 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.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 4 A Jane Austen Education
Portlander William Deresiewicz is a former associate professor of English at Yale and writes literary criticism for the London Review of Books and The New York Times. A Jane Austen Education is a memoir of sorts—stringing stories and lessons from Deresiewicz’s life and loves together through the novels of Jane Austen. Austen nerds may find the literary analysis a little light, and those who’ve never read her books probably won’t be rushing out to do so, but Deresiewicz is a witty, engaging writer whose words and coming-of-age tales stand on their own merits. RUTH BROWN. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm. Free.
THURSDAY, MAY 5 Gingerbread Girl
Gingerbread Girl is a graphic novel set in Portland about a young woman who might have let her
imagination create a sister, Ginger, during the turmoil of her parents’ divorce. Floating World Comics, 20 NW 5th Ave., Suite 101, 241-0227. 6 pm.
SATURDAY, MAY 7 Free Comic Book Day
Before there was Record Store Day, there was an even nerdier holiday— Free Comic Book Day. For this year’s event, local retailers will feature a number of free national comics that seem pulled directly out of my childhood—Darkwing Duck? Sonic the Hedgehog?—and the finer shops will give away a notable local ensemble comic called Dan Quayle, which pays tribute to the late John Callahan. CASEY JARMAN. At Portland’s comic shops, visit freecomicbookday. com for info.
Lazy Fascist Reading
Australian author Kris Saknussemm will debut two new books, Enigmatic Pilot and Sinister Miniatures, among
a milieu of other authors, including Douglas Lain, Mike Daily, Mykle Hansen, Riley Michael Parker and Kirsten Alene. The Waypost, 3120 N Williams Ave., 367-3182. 7 pm. Free.
MONDAY, MAY 9 Jean Kwok
Poverty, emigration, immigration, love, betrayal: Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation is an epic journey as the young heroine transcends a New York sweatshop for the Ivy League. Barnes & Noble Clackamas Town Center, 12000 SE 82nd Ave., 7863463. 7 pm. Free.
TUESDAY, MAY 10 Michael Parker
The Watery Part of the World is a work of historical fiction based on the actual disappearance of Vice President Aaron Burr’s daughter. However, the book is based in both 1813 and 1970, as author Michael Parker weaves in the story of the last people to leave a remote island off the North Carolina coast. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm. Free.
For more Words listings, visit
REVIEW
PAUL ALLEN IDEA MAN
hosting dogfighting events at his home, resulting in “a room in his house where we hear the walls are covered in blood.”) Curious readers will also Though the title of Paul Allen’s memoir is learn of Gates’ more wearyingly aggressive traits, patently an attempt to define himself as a big- including tirades about “the fucking stupidest picture guy against Bill Gates’ myopic wonk, it is thing I’ve ever heard,” checking the Microsoft also a misnomer: Allen is not a man of ideas, but parking lot to see which employees showed up on a man of interests. The Microsoft co-creator and weekends, and trying to move a jetway to catch a Portland Trail Blazers owner is a serial enthusi- taxiing plane. ast, his imagination tickled by any contraption You know who there are no such embarrasswith a futuristic gleam. In the early pages of Idea ing stories about? Paul Allen. His memoir is a Man (Portfolio, 368 pages, $27.95), a 9-year-old companionable read, but it is never remotely Allen visits the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, and is candid. An invitation to one of his lavish boat smitten by a “transparent, parties famously comes with spherical elevator” called a non-disclosure agreement, the Bubbleator. “I loved the and the book often reads as Bubbleator,” he recalls, “just if Allen himself signed one. the idea of the Bubbleator.” He conspicuously skirts any This sets a pattern, and it is mention of his notoriety as Allen’s very good luck that an unlikely ladies’ man, and the preoccupation he shares barely references Vulcan Inc., with Gates—the coding of a his fearsome holding comBASIC language for an Altair pany. Money is a mysterious microprocessor—firepowers hole in Idea Man. Perhaps the PC revolution and perbecause he wants to look like petually funds all his other he doesn’t care about corpocrazes. After opening with a rate earnings, and perhaps burst of sleepless innovation, because he actually doesn’t Idea Man becomes a gee-whiz care about corporate earnenumeration of hobbies: ings, he breezes past the part basketball, commercial space of the Microsoft story where travel, submarines, extraterthe cash comes pouring in, restrial intelligence, artificial and that elision gives his You know what’s cool? intelligence, safaris. The reminiscences an imbalanced A billion dollars. portrait of the billionaire that structure: When I was 16 years emerges is fairly adorable: It is easy to imagine old, I loved Hendrix, and then when I was 47, I had him as an overgrown teenager with Carl Sagan, Frank Gehry design a museum in Hendrix’s honor. Jacques Cousteau and Jimi Hendrix posters still It’s hard to say which is the funnier offhand referadorning the walls of his Mercer Island mansion. ence on page 261—first mentioning his multiple Portlanders are most likely to be interested in yachts by noting that each one carries a recording the chapter on the Trail Blazers—its main revela- studio, or first mentioning U2 with an anecdote tion is that Clyde Drexler regularly called Allen’s that begins, “Later in the evening, I asked Bono home number in the wee hours to gripe about for help.” The autobiography of the man who his contract, though there’s also an ominous was once the world’s second richest concludes on quote from former owner Larry Weinberg: “The a poignant paradox: The most regular-guy thing losing starts to tear your guts out.” (Speaking of about Paul Allen is how badly he wants to be seen which, there’s a brief but fun discursion into the as a regular guy. AARON MESH. Jail Blazers era that includes a team investigator calling Allen to report player Qyntel Woods READ IT: Idea Man is in bookstores now.
CAMPFIRECOLUMBIA.ORG
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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DATES HERE REVIEW
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
IFC FILMS
MOVIES
Editor: AARON MESH. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, send screening information at least two weeks in advance to Screen, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: amesh@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115.
African Cats
Disneynature visits lions and cheetahs. Not screened for critics. G. Evergreen, Lloyd Mall.
Arthur
32 Russell Brand, who is either a Kaufman-esque bluff of anti-humor perpetrated by Jim Carrey or some sick form of viral marketing for the world’s finest purveyor of nearly lifelike latex masks, attempts to squeeze into Dudley Moore’s tiny shoes in this misbegotten remake of 1981’s unapologetic ode to crapulent dandyism, and it’s as sad and exhausting as a threeday bender’s blighted home stretch. PG-13. CHRIS STAMM. Broadway, Sandy.
Atlas Shrugged: Part 1
27 Ayn Rand’s dumbbell-weight parable about the heroism of selfishness has always struck me as petulant pseudo-philosophy: the political equivalent of Eric Cartman screwing you guys and going home. Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t make a good film, or at least a secretly alluring one: Movies with an upsetting viewpoint can be invigorating, and much of cinema’s allure is its flaunting of profane pleasures, so why not try infinite pride? But this jerry-built project doesn’t plunge us into Randland so much as assume we’ve been marinating in this bizarro world for half a century: Villainous characters say things like “I’m giving the money to the less fortunate” with the same mustache-twirling sneer traditionally reserved for “I’m going to burn down the orphanage and build condominiums over the dead babies’ bodies.” PG-13. AARON MESH. Fox Tower, Tigard.
Bill Cunningham New York
82 Arriving with the prized imprimatur
(and fonts) of the Sulzberger Times, director Richard Press’ graceful documentary is deceptively spontaneous—a quality it shares with fashion photographer Cunningham’s “On the Street” column. It requires real concentration to find the patterns and connections between haute Paris runways and harried Manhattan commuters, just as it surely took effort to get Cunningham to reveal any detail of his personal life—or even to sit still long enough to take questions. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters. NEW Cinema Project Presents: Stranded in Canton
73 [ONE NIGHT LEFT] It’s common to insult experimental film by saying it looks like somebody’s home movies, but that’s a clinical description of Stranded in Canton: It’s William Eggleston’s home movies, shot in 1974 on two brand-new Sony Porta-paks, which turn everybody’s skin translucent. The collection straddles the line between “interesting even if you don’t know who William Eggleston is” and “will annoy the bejesus out of you even if you do know who William Eggleston is.” (William Eggleston is a photographer. Maybe you’ve seen his ceiling shot on the cover of Big Star’s record Radio City?) The setting is Memphis and surrounding Mississippi; the subjects are artists, musicians, drag queens, lowlifes and one very angry veterinarian. “Everyone liked Quaaludes,” the photographer recalls, and they surely do seem to enjoy them—much of the movie is hypnotic chanting and aggrieved rambling, in barrooms and parlors, with breaks to chow down on those magnificently dreadful Krystal hamburgers. I mean it as a kind of compliment to say that Stranded in Canton most reminded me of Harmony Korine’s unjustly maligned Trash Humpers: It is night, it is the South, and the weirdos come out to play. AARON MESH. Clinton Street Theater. 7:30 pm Wednesday, May 4. Presented by Cinema Project.
The Conspirator
68 Although the film is ostensibly
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a re-enactment of the trial of Mary Surratt, the sole woman accused of partaking in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Robert Redford’s intentions are clear the moment the other alleged co-conspirators are dragged in front of a military tribunal wearing Guantánamo-style hoods. It only gets more obvious from there. PG13. MATTHEW SINGER. Tigard. NEW
A Deneuve Dozen
95 [TWO WEEKS ONLY] Disappointed
as I am that Northwest Film Center isn’t making it a baker’s dozen by including The Hunger, this survey of the divine Deneuve’s 50-year career is essential— it’s not only an expertly abridged timeline of Catherine Deneuve’s phases of icy inscrutability, but a handy cross section of European cinema as well. My recommendation: Skip the greatest hits like Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (6:45 pm Saturday, May 7) and Polanski’s Repulsion (9 pm Friday and 4 pm Saturday, May 6-7) and Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (7 pm Friday, May 6). Granted, they are the best of the 12 films here, but you’ve either already seen them or will have a few more chances to do so before celluloid gives up the ghost. Deneuve is a sphinxlike delight in everything she graces with her presence, so draft behind her into something dark and mysterious like Genealogies of a Crime (7 pm Thursday and 4:30 pm Sunday, May 12 and 15), Raoul Ruiz’s sui generis murder mystery about a psychoanalytic cult and its dangerous methods. If you ever wondered what Alain Resnais might do with a Magritte painting, well, Ruiz beat him to it. You know what? Forget it. Just see 8 Women (7 pm Friday and 9 pm Saturday, May 13-14). Why? Here: Deneuve, Huppert, Béart, Ardant, Ledoyen, Sagnier. It’s Francois Ozon’s finest film, and if you don’t like it I’m afraid you hate beauty and don’t deserve eyeballs. CHRIS STAMM. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. Friday-Sunday, May 6-15.
Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
The graphic novel about the supernatural P.I. now stars Brandon Routh. Not screened for critics. PG-13. Broadway, Lloyd Mall.
Fast Five
70 Less than a minute into Fast Five,
the simply-titled fifth installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise, we get our first car chase. It’s a quick and dirty gambit, something about busting Vin Diesel’s mush-mouthed, car-swiping meathead Dom Toretto out of a moving prison bus. It’s the first great explosion in a movie filled with unbelievable explosions: The bus flips over a few cars, the good guys get away, and Diesel mutters something about family as his bald head glistens like a guido Jason Kidd. It’s also the most realistic scene in the entire film. Diesel and his cast of chiseled friends—Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, some Asian dude from Tokyo Drift and the gorgeous model Gal Gadot—don’t just steal fast sports cars and obliterate the streets of Rio, they concoct a plan to swipe $100 million from Brazil’s biggest drug kingpin, who keeps his bills locked inside an impenetrable vault inside police headquarters. If this concept seems far-fetched, well, I hate you. Go watch The King’s Speech and get off my lawn, you damn intellectual. Of course the dialogue is awful and clunky—my favorite line in the film, and possibly of all year, is when Ludacris declares that his $11 million share “can buy a lot of vaginal activity”—but you don’t need to pay attention to it. After last summer’s disappointing crop of blockbusters, it’s refreshing that someone finally gets that plot doesn’t always matter as long as you have five car chases and a few more reminders to never, ever get a neck tattoo. PG-13. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. CineMagic, Cinetopia, Cornelius, Oak Grove, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Lloyd Mall, Tigard, Sandy, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub.
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
YOU PLAY JAZZ FLUTE? I DABBLE: W. Hein and Werner Herzog.
MAN OF THE CAVE BEAR WITH HIS 3-D DOCUMENTARY, WERNER HERZOG IS DANCING IN THE DARK. BY AA R ON MESH
amesh@wweek.com
The new Werner Herzog documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is comparatively thin on the cuckoo German’s trademark perversity—except when you consider that he has made a 3-D documentary about motionless drawings on rocks. They are, admittedly, very old drawings on very unique rocks: Sketched in charcoal on the walls of the Chauvet Cave in southern France, the 32,000-yearold paintings are the earliest ever found, preserved by a rockslide that sealed the artwork (and many bear bones) until 1994, when it was uncovered and immediately locked up again for preservation. Still, there are no flying dragons. You will have to settle for woolly rhinos, which doesn’t strike me as too painful a concession. Science, even at a remove, trumps fantasy. Herzog’s most recent triumph, you may recall, also involved unlocking a Cage—Nicolas, to be exact, who roamed bug-eyed through Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans until slumping exhausted against an aquarium tank filled with primordiallooking sharks and grouper, and wondering: “Do fish have dreams?” Paired with that movie’s alligator and iguana POV cams, that question might have seemed like a dry joke—but with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the director keeps doggedly at it. This documentary is the most straightforward project Herzog has helmed (parts of it wouldn’t feel out of place on PBS), which makes it easier to take his speculations at something like face value. He is gazing at a creature less prehistoric than the fish, but his concern is the same: “Do they dream?” he asks of the cavemen, comparing a computer chart of their art locations to the Manhattan phone book. “Do they cry at night? You will never know from the phone directory.” Actually, what is most endearing about the drawings is their suggestion that Paleolithic man, much like a tribe of elementary-school girls, dreamed mostly of horses. There are also some bears on the walls, some bulls, and a lot of rhinos. The images roll out from the shadows, rippling under
headlamps—and suddenly the rationale for filming in 3-D makes perfect sense. This is the closest most of us will ever come to these paintings, and we should be able to gain as tactile an experience as possible. Herzog never descends into vulgar tricks like animating the drawings, but he points out how a number of the animals have been given eight or more legs, so they seem to be in motion, an effect that might have been amplified by the flickering of torchlight. Then he cuts to Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadow in Swing Time. That long leap feels intuitively right: As one researcher notes, some overlapping creatures were drawn five millennia apart—less than half the time has passed between us and Jesus Christ than between those two rhinos.
“DO THEY DREAM? DO THEY CRY AT NIGHT? YOU WILL NEVER KNOW FROM THE PHONE DIRECTORY.” Cave of Forgotten Dreams is filled with Herzog’s usual roster of deadpan eccentrics—a master perfumer who sniffs for cavern openings, a man in pelts who plays “The Star-Spangled Banner” on an ancient flute, like he’s having a Paleolithic Osama bin Laden death party—but that vast span of time begins to gnaw at you, until Chauvet Cave begins to seem as far away as the moon in Avatar. (And just as fantastic: Both landscapes are vertiginous and, in Herzog’s Teutonic phrasing, “Wagnerian.”) Herzog’s subjects have tried to civilize the jungle (Fitzcarraldo) and flee civilization (Grizzly Man), but none of them are able to experience nature as natural. At the very end of this film, Herzog offers an epilogue featuring albino mutant crocodiles living in a greenhouse warmed by the steam of a nuclear plant. And, sure, this is another calculatedly oddball moment featuring reptiles, but it also begins to explain what Herzog has been doing with his most recent films: He has always been fascinated by our vicious animal past, and now he wonders what mutated dreams must come when we are no longer wild at heart. 80 SEE IT: Cave of Forgotten Dreams opens in 3-D this Friday at Cinema 21.
MAY 4-10 REVIEW
ZADE ROSENTHAL
For a Few Dollars More
NEW
[THREE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] A spaghetti-western series concludes with Clint at his Clintiest. Hollywood Theatre. 7:10 pm Saturday-Monday, May 7-9. 3:30 pm Saturday-Sunday, May 7-8.
MOVIES CONGRATS TO THE 2011
The Future
NEW
[TWO NIGHTS ONLY, DIRECTOR ATTENDING] Miranda July, Portland’s own adorable purveyor of ennui, returns from L.A. with an advance screening of her new feature film, narrated by a shelter cat scheduled to be euthanized. I can has stay of execution? Reviews held for wide release this summer. Hollywood Theatre. 7 and 9:30 pm Saturday, May 7. July will host a screening of her short films at 7 pm Friday, May 6.
WINNERS PEOPLES’ CHOICE:
WHIFFIES FRIED PIES
Hanna
65 Best things first: I see no reason
why every movie shouldn’t be filmed in a rusting, abandoned German amusement park. East Berlin’s Spreepark does wonders for the final act of director Joe Wright’s Hanna, which includes some jaw-dropping visuals—including Cate Blanchett walking down train tracks that emerge from the moldering jaw of a giant wolf. If there were an Oscar for location scouting, Hanna would be the 2011 front-runner; as it is, the eerie moonscapes throughout the film (Finnish ice floes, orange-tiled Berlin subway stations, granite military compounds under the Moroccan desert) help compensate for a script that feels a little too eager to be a punky parable. PG-13. AARON MESH. Forest, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Tigard, Sandy.
Henry’s Crime
74 Boy, there’s just not much to do
in Buffalo. Henry (Keanu Reeves) is a patsy in a bank heist, and when he gets finished with hard time, he decides to actually rob the bank he was falsely imprisoned for robbing, because like I said: not much going on. But there’s quite a bit happening in the movie, where the whimsical premise rings false but everything else feels unexpectedly true. The key is in the performances: Reeves’ sleepwalking quality develops a passive charm (Henry makes Mark Wahlberg’s character in The Fighter seem comparatively proactive); James Caan looks like a kid in a money shop, playing a confidence man with a gift for shoveling piles of bullshit; and Vera Farmiga perfectly conveys the mannered theatricality of a regional-company thespian, while remaining fairly irresistible. Really, Malcolm Venville’s entire movie rides on chemistry: between Reeves and Caan, between Reeves and Farmiga, and between Farmiga and Caan, who engage in a delightful little slap-fight in a parked sedan. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.
Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil
55 The answer to your prayers, if you’ve been praying for a mid-tier production company to make an animated version of Mission: Impossible featuring the principal characters of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. If this is the case, you probably aren’t reading this review. Your parents might be; lucky for them, they’ll find some adult-oriented dialogue and nods to films like GoodFellas and The Silence of the Lambs amongst the varied levels of expected children’s humor in this fairy-tale populated universe. PG. JUDGE BEAN. Cornelius, Oak Grove, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Mall, Tigard, Sandy.
Hop
38 Unlike his homeboy and fellow childhood-greed enthusiast Kris Kringle (who has had to deal with everything from Martians to Vince Vaughn), the Easter Bunny has remained relatively untouched on the silver screen. With Hop, the rabbit is front and center in the form of E.B., the heir to the Easter Bunny dynasty. This being a big studio
CONT. on page 56
EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THOR: Chris Hemsworth has a hammer.
THOR What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
It has been two days since I saw Thor. Rarely has a movie given me so little to think about and consequently faded so quickly from my memory. Looking through my notes now feels like reading someone else’s journal—a few lines of disembodied dialogue (“Is the Renaissance Faire in town?” and “Oh. My. God.” stand out) and lots of wanton cursing. Thing is, I should be this film’s target audience. Sure, The Mighty Thor was already one of the more dated comics franchises in my prime early-’90s reading/shoplifting years—he was kinda like Hulk Hogan with a cool helmet—but that didn’t stop me from flipping the pages of The Avengers now and again, or from taking notice when he showed up in the pages of The Amazing SpiderMan. Moreover, any man who rocked tights during those impressionable years had—and still has, truth be told—my full attention. So, why couldn’t I connect with the Thor movie? Well, for one, we don’t speak the same language. Chris Hemsworth—he’s the musclebound Aussie who plays Thor—is from the “louder is better” school of acting, and lucky for him the role calls for plenty of incoherent yelling. But even when the film speaks softly, the dialogue is so entrenched in action-movie cliché—with just a touch of hack-job Shakespeare from director Kenneth Branagh—that you might as well wear headphones through the whole thing (Handel, maybe? Power-metal?). The love story is banal and the paper-thin love interest, played by a returning-to-awful-form Natalie Portman, barely qualifies as a character. That said, give Thor some credit for refusing to take itself too seriously. When a power-stripped Thor is banished to Earth, he swaggers down the median of small-town streets, garnering sideways glances and a hearty “douchebag!” hollered from a passing car window. One of his first stops is a pet store. “I need a horse!” he demands to the clerk. When told the store only carries animals of the dog-and-cat variety, Thor is disarmingly practical. “Then give me one of those large enough to ride!” he insists. But eventually the “plot” needs pushing along and comedy takes the back seat, slain by ho-hum baddies (spoiler alert: Frost Giants look stupid) and yawner sci-fi backdrops (with the exception of the gorgeous Rainbow Bridge, which looks like an ELO album cover and should really be packed up and moved to a better movie). When Marvel began to reclaim control of its movie licensing, the hope was that the superhero-movie universe might become as complex and interwoven as the superhero-comic universe. That appeals to nerds like me, and Thor, perhaps more than any Marvel movie to date, hints at this potential by sharing characters and plot points with other Marvel films. But really, if Marvel’s movies are going to be this dumb, why bother? They can keep their universe— I’d much rather flip through old comic books than sit through two more hours of flexing and screaming. PG-13. CASEY JARMAN. 26 SEE IT: Thor opens Friday at Pioneer Place, Bridgeport, Division, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Eastport, Cinetopia, Cornelius, Lake Twin, Oak Grove, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Lloyd Mall, Sherwood, Tigard, Sandy, Wilsonville and St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub.
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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MAY 4-10
project, E.B. is a flannel-sporting, jellybean-crapping slacker voiced by Russell Brand. PG. AP KRYZA. Forest, Oak Grove.
BREW VIEWS P H AW K E R . C O M
MOVIES 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. Good for him. Now will he please get back to making Jim Carrey talk through his ass cheeks again? KELLY CLARKE. Broadway.
Insidious
30 If you cast your eyes downward, you should see letters P and G and number 13 all bolded there. That should probably tell you everything you need to know about how “horrific” the latest horror flick from the Aussie duo behind Saw (and Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI and Saw 3-D), Leigh Whannell and James Wan, really is. PG-13. RUTH BROWN. Movies on TV, Division.
Jane Eyre
77 A word of warning for fans of
7 .2
Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
$10
A benefit for Oregon Food Bank
FOR MORE INFO, GO TO WWEEK.COM/PROMOTIONS UPCOMING IN-STORE PERFORMANCES NOPOMOJO • THURSDAY 5/5 @ 6PM
From the streets of North Portland, NoPoMoJo blends an eclectic brew of Blues, Folk, Swing, Old-Timey, and Country music, with a hint of Gypsy added. Their music is truly Americana at its best. Presenting catchy original music with thought-provoking lyrical content, their sound is unique, yet universal. NoPoMoJo’s debut release is ‘Fallen Angels.’
LLOYD JONES
SATURDAY 5/7 @ 2:30PM
Portland roots artist Lloyd Jones has recorded six critically acclaimed albums, toured internationally, and racked up dozens of major awards and accolades. Yet he may be the most invisible, best-kept roots/blues/Americana secret on the contemporary scene. His new release ‘Highway Bound’ is a solo tribute to all his early musical influences and features guest appearances by harmonica legend Charlie Musselwhite and BMA winner Curtis Salgado.
FONZARELLI • SATURDAY 5/7 @ 5PM
Originally penned as a rock n roll epitaph solo project, Tannar Brewer ended up resurrected in the form of this new band, Fonzarelli. Powerfully catchy songs with clever lyrics, covering topics you’d expect in a eulogy to his decade of rock and the road, ‘Last Chance Summer Dance’ delivers a fresh new collection of rock anthems.
SPECIAL FREE SOLO APPEARANCE!
STEVE EARLE • SUNDAY 5/8 @ 3PM PRE-BUY A COPY OF
‘I’LL NEVER GET OUT OF THIS WORLD ALIVE’ FOR GUARANTEED ADMISSION
THE VENTURES
AUTOGRAPH SIGNING • WEDNESDAY 5/11 @ 7:30PM SEE THEM LIVE THURSDAY 5/12 @ CRYSTAL BALLROOM
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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. Really, most of the characters in the original novel are assholes—ugly assholes—and Fukunaga doesn’t shy away from that. PG-13. RUTH BROWN. Fox Tower.
Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
64 The titular character of Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen is the Philip Marlowe of kung fu cinema, having been played by Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury, Jet Li in Fist of Legend and Yen himself in a television series. Legend of the Fist picks up where Lee’s film left off, with a presumed-dead Chen doling out justice in Japanese-occupied Shanghai by taking various aliases, including a mustachioed nightclub owner and a masked avenger. AP KRYZA. Hollywood Theatre. 7 and 9:40 pm Sunday-Monday, May 8-9.
Limitless
71 Bradley Cooper’s handsomeness has always carried a whiff of the disingenuous—he’s to the douchebag manor born—but that works for him in a role where he’s smart, sleazy and more than a little pathetic: a junkie whose fix actually does cure all his problems. Trading on his addicted amorality, the movie becomes a momentarily perceptive satire of unchecked capitalism as literal vampirism. Unusually for a semi-thriller, Limitless only falls apart after its action climax, in a final-scene reversal that dodges the ironic and deserved fate for its protagonist. The movie does have a limit—100 minutes, apparently. PG13. AARON MESH. Broadway.
Meek’s Cutoff
93 “We’re close, but we don’t know what to.” These lines, spoken in an apprehensive hush near the close of Kelly Reichardt’s pioneer drama Meek’s Cutoff, are a key to what makes her film—which is methodical, arid, uneventful and without resolution—so improbably thrilling. It is not, as many of us were vocally hoping, the Oregon Trail video game turned into a movie. Instead, it saturates an audience with the sensations of what it was like actually to be on the Oregon Trail: the complete disorientation, the exhausting routines as a means of warding off fear, the paranoia of being surrounded by so much silence but being unable to quite hear the most important conversations. It is a vision of the West different from and more intimate than any I have seen before, and it sets a high-water mark for the Oregon film renaissance. The film hinges on Michelle Williams’ decision to trust a captured Cayuse Indian
BEST OLD BAND: Everybody knows the iconic walking bass line in Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’.” But do you know who wrote the part? Though they played on hundreds of standards—from the songs on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds to Ricky Nelson’s “Fools Rush In”—the group of L.A. musicians, dubbed “The Wrecking Crew” by drummer Hal Blaine, has gone unknown to everyone but the odd music curmudgeon for over 40 years. The Wrecking Crew, a lovely little documentary by Denny Tedesco, the son of a prominent Crew guitar player, sheds light on the story of the mishmash gang of musical castoffs that made all of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson’s weird ideas come to fruition. The only downside is, the film never attempts to answer the burning question: If these players were so good, how come they never tried to form their own band? MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Sunday, May 8. Best paired with: Lagunitas A Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ Ale. Also showing: Road House (Laurelhurst), Spaceballs (Academy).
(Rod Rondeaux) over hired guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood)— but it is the choice itself Reichardt chronicles, not its results. The character’s courage is stirring, but the movie’s ultimate open-endedness is electrifying. PG. AARON MESH. Fox Tower. NEW
Melali: The Drifter Sessions
[ONE NIGHT ONLY] An hour of surfing. Clinton Street Theater. 7 pm Thursday, May 5. NEW
Memories of Overdevelopment
[ONE NIGHT ONLY, DIRECTOR ATTENDING] Miguel Coyula explores the adventures of a Cuban émigré. Look for a review on wweek. com. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Tuesday, May 10. Miguel Coyula will introduce his film.
Of Gods and Men
87 A deeply serious study of devo-
tion 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. I emerged from the theater with some understanding of how grace might feel, and I liked it. PG13. CHRIS STAMM. Living Room Theaters. NEW
One Foot in the Gutter
[ONE NIGHT ONLY, DIRECTOR ATTENDING] A drama about raising hell in an Oregon logging town. Bagdad Theater. 7 pm Tuesday, May 10.
Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
35 I imagine the conceit of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold sounded oh-so-clever to Morgan Spurlock when he first dreamed it up: Make a film about product placement in movies by filming himself selling product placement into the movie itself, and thereby exposing the big Hollywood secret that: Brands pay money to put their products in movies! Did you hear me? THEY HELP FINANCE THE FILMS BY PUTTING THEIR PRODUCTS INTO
THEM! Oh…you knew that? Your 7-year-old knows that? Forgive my facetiousness, but the very concept of this film is inherently flawed. The actual movie is amusing enough: Spurlock talks moronic marketing people from largely D-list brands (Sheetz, Pom Wonderful, Amy’s Organic Pizza—damn you, rapacious Amy’s Organic Pizza!) into sponsoring the project, mocking them and their products as he fulfills his part of the deal by including them in the film. There are some irrelevant interviews with Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, some more relevant ones with Quentin Tarantino and Brett Ratner (who basically just shrug, because: duh). It’s occasionally very funny, often mildly funny, and winds up with Spurlock smugly declaring that the entire $1.5 million film was financed by these suckers. And then you leave the cinema wishing it had been 30 minutes shorter and thinking about Sheetz, Pom Wonderful and Amy’s Organic Pizza. Who’s laughing now? PG-13. RUTH BROWN. Fox Tower, Tigard.
Potiche
54 Catherine Deneuve takes the reins of the factory run by her piggish husband (Fabrice Luchini). It makes umbrellas. Yep, as in Cherbourg. François Ozon’s winking, 1977-set gender skirmish is painted in the Technicolors of Demy’s musical, though it also looks a lot like the set of The Brady Bunch. The title roughly means “trophy wife,” but the exact translation is “vase”—indeed, interior decoration and wardrobe steal the show, with a shaggy green telephone earning a big laugh. Speaking of cherished heirlooms: Here comes Gérard Depardieu, growing more adorable the more he resembles the Muppet Sweetums. Ozon bases his pastiche on a 1980 boulevard farce and, yeah, I can see how the scene of Luchini’s wife and mistress chanting his name so it rhymes with “asshole” would have killed on community-theater stages across France. It’s certainly stagy. Potiche loosens up a bit in its second half, with a Sturges-worthy joke involving La Deneuve and a long-haul trucker. Maybe the farce
NEW
REVIEWS
The Princess of Montpensier
51 As if in rebuke to the Disney
associations conjured by the title, Bernard Tavernier’s tale of 17th-century foxiness opens with a Huguenot soldier, cornered in a barn, accidentally stabbing a pregnant mother in the belly with a pike. This is the Comte de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), who resigns from religious war to tutor teenage Princess Marie de Montpensier (Melanie Thierry), who loves one heir, is forced to marry another, and is pursued by a third—I don’t think differentiating them is of much use, since they’re mainly distinguished by how forcefully they stare at Marie’s gregarious bosom. It’s a bit of fun as period anti-romances go, and Tavernier includes some blunt recognition of the ugly treatment of very young women as chattel, but whatever enchanting horror it produces in well over two hours can’t match what Catherine Breillat summoned in the 80 minutes of Bluebeard. Yes, I’m still angry that Bluebeard never got a proper Portland theatrical release last year, and I’m going to take it out on all the inferior princess movies for a while. This one becomes so drearily and stereotypically French, culminating with cutlass-wielding noblemen hissing at each other through their wispy mustaches. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.
Prom
40 Upon entering Prom, I was besieged by questions: “Will you go with me to prom? Will you go with me to prom? Will you go with me to prom?” These were coming from the screen. If there was a world record for the most time a film’s title is spoken within the film, Prom has shattered it. Imagine American Pie, but instead of talking about sex, everybody was talking about prom, with the same tone of wonder. But soon I had questions of my own. In the order that they occurred: Is the complete absence of lustful designs at this high school a Disney thing, or part of some larger backlash to hook-up culture? Is this boy with the long hair and the moped going to eventually understand the magic of prom? When did Disney’s movie budget get reduced to the proceeds from the snack bar next to the Jungle Cruise? What would happen if you took a shot of Old Crow every time somebody in this movie said “prom”? You would die. Yet Prom withstood my questioning of it, and indeed outlasted all my resistance. Young people found love, young people lost love, and even younger people in the crowd sighed blissfully when the boy with the moped helped the girl with control issues by building her a fountain. There were many other characters, whose stories intersected like a kind of peewee Short Cuts, and most of them ended up pledging their devotion with escalating ardor. “But now I’m in this tree, and you’re beautiful.” I almost got goosebumps twice. PG. AARON MESH. Cornelius, Oak Grove, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Mall, Tigard, Sandy.
NEW
The Queen Singalong
[ONE NIGHT ONLY] For a moment, we hoped this was a singalong to Stephen Frears’ The Queen. But it’s a singalong to Freddie Mercury. The Hollywood Theatre will hand out mustaches to the first 100 people in attendence without their own mustaches. Hollywood Theatre. 7:30 pm Tuesday, May 10.
Queen to Play
Kevin Kline plays chess. In French. Living Room Theaters.
CONT. on page 58
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could stand to be a bit more acidic and a lot less mellow; maybe that’s my old anti-middlebrow reflex acting up again. I shouldn’t be hypocritical: If Potiche were an episode of That ‘70s Show, I’d probably be more enthusiastic. It could use a laugh track. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.
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DISCOVER HUMANITY’S LOST MASTERPIECE IN 3D! YOU CAN’T HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER: Paula Patton and Laz Alonse in Jumping the Broom.
NOT-SO-ROYAL WEDDINGS Jumping the Broom 45 From the opening marriage proposal backed by the world’s creepiest piano player, there’s something a little off-putting about Jumping the Broom, the new wedding dramedy co-produced by influential African-American minister T.D. Jakes, who also plays the ceremony’s officiant. The movie contains all the requisite clashes between upscale and boondock families on Martha’s Vineyard, but there’s also an unexpected Grant Hill vs. Jalen Rose thing happening, a debate about blackness that becomes very frank and then emphatic: “I usually don’t talk to dark-skinned girls, but I’m making an exception for you.” None of this is funny, but none of it is boring. As the groom’s undermining mom, Loretta Devine plays against expectations of lovability—her character is remarkably awful, yet still the only one in the movie with much poignance. As directed by Salim Akil, the picture is more polished than the Tyler Perry movies, but Perry is willing to skewer everybody. This feature feels more like a hip youth-group leader who tries to join in on the dirty jokes, but keeps needing to mention that, OK guys, it’s good to laugh, but let’s remember that sex really is a precious gift shared between a husband and wife, and that’s not something we should take lightly, right? The uncomfortable piety distorts the whole film, so that Jumping the Broom is never free to be at ease or funny; it’s an unintentional reminder why you don’t invite church people to parties. PG-13. AARON MESH. Opens Friday at Cornelius, Bridgeport, Division and Lloyd Mall. Something Borrowed 24 Without a doubt the most harrowing of the Saw sequels, Something Borrowed stars Kate Hudson as Darcy, a tan with teeth engaged to a haircut with teeth named Dex (Colin Egglesfield, who looks like he was conceived, delivered and christened at one of Rob Lowe’s Slip ’n Slide parties circa 1985). Darcy and Dex, whose names actually function as rather swift character development— stay away from these people, basically—have enough money and free time to go to the Hamptons every weekend to wear sandals and play badminton and drape thick white sweaters over V-necks without a care in the world. The only problem: Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin, cute as a button sewn into the face of a kitten that’s as cute as a bug’s ear), Darcy’s best friend and maid of honor, has a thing for Dex, and that Top Gun-looking motherfucker Dex might have a thing right back. And, like in a bad dream, John Krasinski, whose service as The Office straight man has rendered him permanently bemused, but in a creepy and almost PTSD way, as if he will sarcastically kill himself at any moment, is somehow there the whole time for no good reason, but there’s no reason for any of this, so whatever. Features Counting Crows and Third Eye Blind songs. Cover versions. Yup. PG-13. CHRIS STAMM. Opens Friday at Cinetopia, Cornelius, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Tigard and Sandy.
‘‘If you’re a member of the human race-
YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO SEE THIS MOVIE.” -Dana Stevens, SLATE
‘‘ ffff ! WONDERFUL.
See this film. It takes you to a place you won’t soon forget.” -Michael Phillips, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“ WHAT
A GIFT.
An inside look at the astounding cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc-And in 3-D too. IT’S A BLAST TO BE INSIDE THE CAVE.” -Manohla Dargis, THE NEW YORK TIMES
A FILM BY
WERNER HERZOG
STARTS FRIDAY, MAY 6
IN DIGITAL 3D
CINEMA 21
616 NORTHWEST 21ST AVE (503) 223-4515 www.sundanceselects.com Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
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“MICHELLE WILLIAMS EXCELS!”
MOVIES
68 [ONE NIGHT ONLY] A hypnotic
little black-and-white curio from sculptor Richard Serra, who in 1975 arrived in Portland to document the workings of Burlington Northern Railroad Draw-Span Turnbridge, better known as the St. Johns Railroad Bridge. And it is the operation of the bridge that first startles you: It’s a swing-span bridge, rotating in a half-circle to let ships pass, and Serra opens his film in the center of the span, so it’s a little disconcerting when the placid shoreline suddenly begins scurrying off to the right. Serra later gained renown for setting up sheets of steel; no shock, then, that he separates the imposing bridge into its components, and we never see it functioning from a distance. It’s the moving pieces that count here. The Portland Center for the Visual Arts is opening its YU gallery with an exhibition of this 17-minute film, pulled from PCVA archives; it’s worth stopping by for a close look at the one Willamette River crossing you can’t see by foot, bike or car. You already know if you’re intrigued: This is catnip for infrastructure geeks. AARON MESH. YU, 800 SE 10th Ave., 236-7996. 6-9 pm Friday, May 6. Free.
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Rio
63 The new Fox cartoon begins with a Busby-Berkeley-in-Brazil number, a computer-choreographed cavalcade of tropical feathers. But then Man Is in the Rain Forest, and Rio never regains that first kinetic burst—it’s grounded by the story of Blu (an amusingly fussy vocal turn by Jesse Eisenberg), a macaw endangered by poaching and his own domestic timidity, which has left him unable to fly. His crisis is a transparent case of performance anxiety; his ladybird friend (Anne Hathaway) is not very understanding. G. AARON MESH. 99 West Drive-In, Cornelius, Oak Grove, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Mall, Tigard, Sandy.
3.772 x 3.5”
Willamette Week Thu: 05.04
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NEW
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NOW PLAYING
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Soul Surfer
25 The true story of Bethany Hamilton is basically a genderswitched 127 Hours, except she gets her arm stuck in a shark. There’s a scene in which the family is about to eat dinner, but Bethany reminds them they need to say grace first, but when they start to hold hands, she can’t hold hands, because she doesn’t have a hand. That sort of thing. PG. AARON MESH. 99 West Drive-In, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Mall, Sandy.
Source Code
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Willamette Week MAY 4, 2011 wweek.com
R E E L A R T S Y. C O M
A FILM BY KELLY REICHARDT DIRECTOR OF “WENDY AND LUCY”
93 The director Duncan Jones must understand the desire to recapture a fleeting experience: His alonewith-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. 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. PG-13. AARON MESH. Oak Grove, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Tigard, Sandy.
NEW
Trust
[ONE WEEK ONLY] David Schwimmer directs a drama about a teenage girl raped by a man she meets online. This is not what we
A DENEUVE DOZEN: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg thought David Schwimmer would be directing. Not screened for WW critics. R. Clinton Street Theater. Friday-Thursday, May 6-12.
Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family
68 Like a lot of pale dudes, I’ve
come to Tyler Perry movies somewhat belatedly and crabwise—starting with For Colored Girls, and only now seeing my first Madea picture. So forgive me if this has been often noted before, but what strange genre mash-ups these movies are: very straightforward, three-hanky melodramas abruptly interrupted by brassy, trashy sitcom characters who come pounding in to make everything right and everybody laugh. It’s essentially low-production-value Almodovar broken up by short episodes of Mama’s Family. And Madea (Perry in drag) is fascinating in her own right: a self-confessed scofflaw and terrible role model who solves everybody’s problems—and reveals all their psychic wounds—with a combination of unsought advice and physical intimidation. It’s like Kramer showing up in Jerry’s apartment and beating him about the head until he starts treating Elaine better. But this movie, at least, works like gangbusters: Loretta Devine, who was spectacular in For Colored Girls, is nearly as good here as a dying mom who just wants to serve her kids some collard greens and say goodbye. PG-13. AARON MESH. Lloyd Mall.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
[98] I still care about movies because once in a while something extraordinary like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives comes along, and I fall in love with the medium all over again. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cannes-laureled cinematic séance is a work of terrifying beauty, a slow initiation into a spirit world of dead lovers, ghost monkeys and amorous catfish. Weerasethakul handles such outlandishness with a deadpan reverence befitting a movie that is actually about one man’s date with death; the surreal flourishes, all of them sublime, are essentially standins for the universal mystery that Jeff Mangum once nipped in the bud thusly: “How strange it is to be anything at all.” When Boonmee, nearing his end, journeys at dusk to the cave in which he was once born, monkey ghosts standing guard, he has a vision of the future, a future wherein lights travel through people to project images. Weerasethakul is referring, of course, to this very film itself: a vision of a place that is also no place, about people who are not people, a village as it is and once was, a present that is a past that is a future. And in the end, it is a vision of the power of film itself to once in a while reduce the epic mess of existence into something we can hold in our heads for seconds at a time. It is glorious. CHRIS STAMM. Hollywood Theatre. NEW
V for Vendetta
[THREE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL]
You know who cries a lot in this? Natalie Portman. R. 5th Avenue Cinema. 7 and 9:30 pm FridaySaturday, May 6-7. 3 pm Sunday, May 8.
Water for Elephants
30 Oddly, at no time in this surpassingly dreary circus movie does anybody fetch any water for the show’s sole elephant. The pachyderm is seen slurping up lemonade, and often it is served buckets of contraband hooch (it’s Prohibition, but try telling that to the elephant); however, there’s no watercarrying—which is strange, since you’d think with all that boozing, the poor creature would be dehydrated. Anyway, it’s a gorgeous elephant (played by Tai, who has also starred with Bill Murray and posed for Banksy, and so may be the second-most accomplished actor here, after Hal Holbrook), and just about every scene she’s in is interesting—as opposed to just about every scene Robert Pattinson is in, which is boring. I’ve vouched for the Twilight kid’s chops before, but here he takes a nothing role and makes even less out of it. Director Francis Lawrence takes a Far and Away-style whitewashed periodpiece approach that favors dull lovebirds—including Reece Witherspoon, who was beating a hot retreat to squaresville even before she won her Oscar—over actors who are trying something: Here, that’s pretty much just Christoph Waltz and Tai, who develop a guilt-ridden abusivepartners dynamic that is so much more interesting than Pattinson and Witherspoon making whoopee to orchestral flourishes. No movie set on a train can be completely worthless, but Water for Elephants comes very close. PG-13. AARON MESH. Cinetopia, Cornelius, Lake Twin, Oak Grove, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Tigard, Sandy.
Win Win
81 In Tom McCarthy’s redoubtable indie film, Paul Giamatti plays Mike, a New Jersey elder law attorney and high-school 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 highschool 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. R. AARON MESH. Fox Tower.
NEW
Wrecked
Adrian Brody, trapped by a car crash, fights mountain lions. Not screened for WW critics. R. Hollywood Theatre. Opens Friday, May 6.