NEWS NANCY HALES' DEVELOPER TIES. P. 7 HEADOUT SALMON, RANKED. P. 31 WEED PIZZA-AND-STRAIN PAIRINGS. P. 60
"THEY'RE ABLE TO GET AWAY WITH DESTROYING PEOPLE.” P. 11 WWEEK.COM
VOL 41/47 09.23.2015
Why Portland’s PWWORTLAND’S fresh-hop ales FRESH-HOP ALESare ARE some OF of the SOME THE best BEST and rarest beers NDRAREST BEERS on ONearth EARTH
SoFRESH SO
E E N R G PAGE 12
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Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
KIM HERBST
FINDINGS
PAGE 31
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 41, ISSUE 47.
Cats are like foreign diplomats. 4 For the first time in history, Byron Beck could not be reached for comment. 6 Portland was once conquered by religious crusaders who consider it one of “their great places in history.” 11 Oregon hops sell for 45 cents more per pound than cut-rate Washington hops. 20 In Lents, you can now buy crack pipes and brewpub-fresh beer. 30
ON THE COVER:
The band Goatsnake rose from the ashes of the bands Sleep and Obsessed. 39 Twiztid is known as “the evenpoorer man’s ICP.” 41 Paul McCartney is a nihilist and
doesn’t care about anything, says an old punk rocker. 53 Showgirls is the best film ever made about female strippers. 58 Our weed critic suggests Super Sour Diesel with Apizza Scholls’ white pie. 60
OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK:
Fresh hops stolen off our neighbor’s fence by EEN WW staffR .
G
They didn’t cut down some old trees thanks to the dude from South Park.
STAFF Editor & Publisher Mark Zusman EDITORIAL News Editor Pro Tem Aaron Mesh Arts & Culture Editor Martin Cizmar Staff Writers Nigel Jaquiss, Beth Slovic Copy Chief Rob Fernas Copy Editors Matt Buckingham, Madeline Luce Stage & Screen Editor Enid Spitz Projects Editor Matthew Korfhage Music Editor Matthew Singer Web Editor Lizzy Acker Books James Helmsworth
Visual Arts Megan Harned Editorial Interns Katana Dumont, Lisa Dunn, Coby Hutzler, Walker MacMurdo, Zach Middleton CONTRIBUTORS Dave Cantor, Nathan Carson, Rachel Graham Cody, Pete Cottell, Shannon Gormley, Jordan Green, Jay Horton, AP Kryza, John Locanthi, Anthony Macuk, Mark Stock, Anna Walters PRODUCTION Production Manager Dylan Serkin Art Director Julie Showers Special Sections Art Director Alyssa Walker Graphic Designers Rick Vodicka, Xel Moore Production Interns Elise Englert, Emily Joan Greene, Caleb Misclevitz, Kayla Sprint
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Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
3
LOCAL FOSTER CARE AGENCY
“IT’S AS IF WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY INVENTED BURNING
I worked at Give Us This Day from 2011 to 2013, and despite my efforts to alert the Department of Human Services to the abuse and neglect at these foster care homes, the DHS failed to investigate thoroughly [“Home Sweet Hustle,” WW, Sept. 16, 2015]. Most employees were hired because they were friends of executive director Mary Holden. They lacked training and the ability to administer any form of treatment or skill-building, as the state requires for funding. Having this “work experience” on my record has hurt more than helped me. I eventually left the program, not because of the fact that GUTD didn’t pay us on time or that I was constantly reprimanded for calling the police to report abuse or refusing to do things I saw as morally wrong or against state regulations, but because I could not stay another day knowing that this abuse was happening and the DHS was not doing anything to protect these children. I have since moved into the criminal justice field. GUTD absolutely disgusts me. —Rachel E. Rosas WILLAMETTE WEEK PORTLAND’S
family model—that requires foster parents to treat foster kids like their own kids. You cannot work at GUTD if you do not have a passion for children. —“Concerned” Mary Holden runs one of the largest foster care agencies in Portland. For years, she’s been accused of financial misdeeds and neglecting vulnerable children.
NEWSWEEKLY
Why is she still in business? BY NIGEL JAQUISS
PAGE 13
MAN.” P. 4
WWEEK.COM
VOL 41/46 09.16.2015
NEWS
WEED-INFUSED BOOZE. P. 7
CULTURE
INCENSE OR CRACK PIPE? P. 19
BAR REVIEW
HAMLET’S VERY FINE PORK. P. 39
“GUTD absolutely disgusts me.”
I am appalled at this one-sided article. Since when is getting an attack campaign together considered newsworthy? I work for Give Us This Day, and it’s just like other foster care agencies I’ve worked for. It was routine until I met Mary Holden, who is a very busy director. I learned of the passion she has for the children who are placed with the agency, and she often gives jobs to people in the community. She shared a model for care—an extended-
Q.
Please explain why cats get to roam neighborhoods without a leash. They make terrible noises at night, leave their crap in my yard, and they kill birds. Why do my dogs need to be leashed and not cats? —Confused Pet Owner
The standard answer is that a loose cat can’t kill or maim anybody, whereas a loose dog (at least in theory; sorry, shih tzu fanciers) may. Still, I get where dog owners are coming from. Multnomah County code defines “animal at large” as “any animal, excluding domestic cats, 4
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
Why on earth is Holden not in jail? She is clearly serving no one but herself. She needs to be jailed and to make restitution for all of the money she has received and not accounted for. —Robin Monroe
MARIJUANA-INFUSED ALCOHOL
Hopefully the Oregon Liquor Control Commission allows this to be sold all around the city [“Cannabooze,” WW, Sept. 16, 2015]. I have sampled Messina Bitters and had a really nice evening while feeling its effects. I am not a weed smoker by any means, and this seemed to be the perfect dosage for me. It is always nice to know exactly how you’ll feel when ingesting a substance, and this one hits the spot. Its healing properties are too great to not have it sold nationwide. —Brett McConnell
CORRECTION
In last week’s review of Taiwan Eats, the ranking of Beaverton’s population in relation to Portland was incorrectly reported. Beaverton is Portland’s third-most-populous suburb, following Gresham and Hillsboro. WW regrets the error. 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.
that is not physically restrained on [its] owner’s or keeper’s premises.” Did you catch that? The sleaziest lobbyist at Exxon could only goggle in jealousy at the massive by-name exception carved out of the law on behalf of the feline species. Under current law, a cat can drive a stolen car through a school playground at 80 mph, bottle of whiskey in one paw and a loaded revolver in the other, and all the cops can do is give him a friendly wave. How did cats get away with this? Perhaps it’s because cats are—conceptually, at least— Democrats. Having a dog, meanwhile, is basically Republican. Republicans love the top-down, hierarchical thrill of underlings who know their place and think their boss is a god. Sound like anyone you’ve seen at the dog park lately? Moreover, this slavish adoration is focused on the very person who cut their balls off, which makes me think of the Tea Party and the Koch brothers. Cat owners, for their part, take masochistic pleasure in pouring resources into a black hole that doesn’t know they exist. If that’s not the definition of a Democrat’s relationship to government, I don’t know what is. Given the overwhelmingly Democratic local power structure, then, it’s no wonder cats are pulling the strings. Especially if they’re attached to an expensive sweater. QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com
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MOBILE
“If the Supreme Court decides against us, we’re going to have to be more aggressive.” —Joe Baessler, page 9
SAVING PORTLAND, ONE TREE AT A TIME.
STAY CONNECTED
Leonard Williamson, inspector general for the Oregon Department of Corrections, has filed notice of his intent to sue the department and his boss, DOC director Colette Peters. The tort claim notice, filed with the Oregon Department of Administrative Services on Sept. 3, says the potential defendants “have injured Mr. Williamson’s professional reputation.” Claiming the smearing of his name is ongoing, PETERS Williamson has asked for $3 million. On the same day, Williamson filed a complaint with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, alleging cronyism by Peters. As is their practice, state officials declined to comment on potential litigation. Williamson’s attorney did not return a call seeking comment.
CHRISTOPHER ONSTOTT
Sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree. Darin Campbell, who as the elected representative of 1,200 Portland taxi drivers has been in the middle of the city’s Uber battles, has registered to run as a Democrat for the House District 27 seat being vacated by Rep. Tobias Read (D-Beaverton). Campbell, 45, is the youngest of four sons of former Oregon House Speaker Larry Campbell (R-Eugene), whose ascension to speaker in 1991 began 14 years of Republican control of that chamber. Darin Campbell says his campaign focus will be the “war on the middle class” rather than the war he and fellow cabbies have been waging against Uber.
In August 2014, Rhode Islander Josh Fenton launched “hyperlocal” news website GoLocalPDX with ambitions of challenging The Oregonian’s online supremacy. A year later, the last of Fenton’s original editorial hires has left. Byron Beck, a former WW columnist, left GoLocalPDX earlier this month. Records show the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries investigated GoLocalPDX this year about whether it was misclassifying its workers. The state found in February that GoLocalPDX had not violated the law—because the website’s writers were independent contractors, not employees. The BOLI investigator noted that GoLocalPDX’s attorney said its writers “are not ‘reporters’ in traditional sense…but rather ‘content providers.’” Beck could not be reached for comment. In an email to WW, Fenton says GoLocalPDX is “focused on having a wide range of contributors, experts, and MINDSETTERS.” Michael Rodgers, the former state information technology manager who refused a request in February to delete 5,000 of Gov. John Kitzhaber’s emails from state servers (“The Whistleblower,” WW, May 26, 2015), resigned effective Sept. 18. A settlement Rodgers reached with the Oregon Department of Justice on Sept. 21 will pay him $286,200 and cover his legal fees. In exchange, Rodgers, who leaked the Kitzhaber emails to WW, agreed not to sue the state. “I came to the decision that it was time to close this chapter in my life and move on,” Rodgers told WW in a statement. Read the latest news on wweek.com. 6
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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CITY OF PORTLA
ND/ @MA YO R
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NEWS
When in Rome A TRIP TO THE VATICAN RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT NANCY AND CHARLIE HALES’ SHARED TIES TO DEVELOPERS. BY BE T H S LOV I C
bslovic@wweek.com
This week, Pope Francis lands in the United States, a visit with deep significance for many Catholics. Two months ago, Portland Mayor Charlie Hales took his own meaningful trip to meet the pope. Now that trip may become an issue in the mayor’s re-election bid. In July, Hales traveled with his wife, Nancy, to Italy for 12 days for a meeting at the Vatican on climate change. Hales later described the meeting as inspirational. The city of Portland paid the mayor’s expenses, but not for his wife’s airfare. Who actually footed Nancy Hales’ bill is a small mystery. Nancy Hales, who previously ran a community foundation in Vancouver, Wash., runs an unusual program at Portland State University called First Stop Portland. She has done so since 2009, three years before her husband was elected mayor. The program, administered by PSU’s office of Research and Strategic Partnerships, brings delegations of visitors from the U.S. and abroad to study Portland’s sustainable infrastructure—think bike lanes, bioswales and the Portland Streetcar. The vision for First Stop Portland came from Dike Dame, a developer who has done business with the city for decades yet is less well-known than his business partner, Homer Williams, who’s known for having shaped the Pearl District.
First Stop Portland’s advisory council includes several significant members of Portland’s real-estate development world, including some who gave generously to Mayor Hales’ 2012 campaign. When Nancy Hales flew to the Vatican with the mayor in July, she spent $2,125 on airfare, tapping First Stop Portland’s approximately $200,000 annual budget. The funding comes from private donors, government agencies, and fees paid by visiting delegations. The money for her trip came specifically from donors, says Scott Gallagher, a spokesman for PSU. “Those funds,” Gallagher wrote in a July 28 email to WW, “come in the form of gifts from individuals or companies.” But the identities of those donors are not a matter of public record, because the donations are run through the PSU Foundation, which is a private nonprofit, not a government agency. PSU officials say it was an easy call to send Nancy Hales to the Vatican. “As director of First Stop Portland, PSU’s international city-to-city knowledge exchange program, Ms. Hales is an expert in how cities solve urban sustainability questions, which was a core focus of this symposium at the Vatican,” Gallagher wrote in his July 28 email to WW. “The trip also provided a unique opportunity to make contacts with mayors of cities from around the world who are also interested in urban sustainability and encourage them to visit Portland as part of the First Stop Portland program.” First Stop Portland is an active and well-regarded part of the university. Since 2014, it has hosted close to 1,000 government officials and students from dozens of cities and countries, introducing them to concepts such as regional planning, public-
private partnerships and transit-oriented development. At the same time, it’s a small program whose fundraising is modest—First Stop Portland has raised $176,000 total in the past four years from donors to PSU’s foundation who give specifically to Nancy Hales’ program. It’s not clear how First Stop Portland spends its money beyond paying Nancy Hales’ annual salary, which was set at about $65,000 in 2014. But the lack of disclosure may raise questions about whether undisclosed gifts are used to curry favor with the mayor. Members of First Stop Portland’s advisory council are not required to donate to the program, according to PSU. But some do. Of all the special interests in a city that a mayor can help or hurt, few are as significant as the real-estate development business. A mayor’s power (even in Portland’s weak-mayor form of government) to influence decisions on financing, zoning and other policies can drive property values. It’s why relationships with developers need to be transparent—a point that Hales challenger Ted Wheeler, Oregon’s state treasurer, wasted no time in hammering when he announced his candidacy Sept. 9. “There’s a clear lack of openness and transparency with regard to real-estate development as it’s currently taking place in this city,” Wheeler told WW the day before launching his campaign. “People don’t sense they’re being brought along with the decisions. They feel the decisions are being made on their behalf behind closed doors.” Todd Donovan, a political science professor at Western Washington University, says donors giving to Nancy Hales’ group could raise eyebrows. Campaign contributors in Oregon don’t face any caps, but they do have to disclose their gifts. Not so with First Stop Portland. “Is that a way that donors can get some sort of extra influence?” Donovan asks. “It’s obviously possible.” Nancy Hales declined to be interviewed for this story. Mayor Hales initially agreed to an interview with WW, then declined, deciding instead to respond to written questions by email. Asked how voters should view the overlap between donors to his campaign and First Stop Portland supporters, he wrote: “I have no guidance about what voters should think about community leaders volunteering with a PSU program that deals with smart growth.” First Stop Portland used to receive funding from the city of Portland. Under previous Mayor Sam Adams, the city contributed a total of $64,000 over four years. Those contributions stopped under Hales, who told the Portland Tribune after his election in 2012 that he was mindful of the potential for conflicts of interest. John Mangan, a spokesman for Dame, says Dame has given consistently to First Stop Portland since before Hales was elected, but declined to say how much. Of the Hales donors on the First Stop Portland board, only developer John Russell agreed to an interview. Russell could not recall how much money he’d donated to the program over the years. He says there is no connection between his support for the mayor and his giving to First Stop Portland. “Absolutely not,” he says, adding he’s a big fan of Nancy Hales’ program. “First Stop filled a void. A lot of people want to come to Portland to learn what we’ve done.”
DONORS TO CHARLIE HALES WHO ALSO SERVE ON THE 21-MEMBER ADVISORY BOARD OF NANCY HALES’ FIRST STOP PORTLAND INCLUDE: PHILLIP BEYL, principal at GBD Architects, who gave the mayor $1,600 in the 2012 election cycle and has given $500 so far for the 2016 election.
DIKE DAME, president of Williams & Dame, which gave $15,000 to Hales for his 2012 campaign. Dame Consulting also gave Hales $5,000 in June for 2016. (Dame pleaded guilty to bank fraud in 1988.)
JOHN RUSSELL of Russell
Development Company, who has given $2,500 so far in 2015 and gave $7,450 in the 2012 cycle.
JOHN CARROLL, president and CEO of development firm Carroll Investments, who has given Hales $5,000 so far this year and gave him for the 2012 election.
CARTER MACNICHOL, an associate with Shiels Obletz Johnsen and project director for the Portland Streetcar, who gave the mayor $7,100 for his 2012 campaign.
First Stop Portland doesn’t require donations from members of its advisory council. The council includes two city employees who report to the mayor: PATRICK QUINTON, Portland Development Commission executive director, and SUSAN ANDERSON, Bureau of Planning and Sustainability director. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
NEWS
unaffiliated or belong to minor political parties,” Gibson and Huffman wrote in the brief filed Sept. 11. “Since 2006,” the brief continues, “Oregon teacher unions have contributed over $4 million to political candidates, and approximately 98 percent of that amount has
BethAnne Darby, an OEA lobbyist, says the lawyers’ figures are slightly misleading. Darby says the $4 million is an accurate figure, but it represents teachers’ voluntary contributions to a political action committee over and above their union dues. Only about 11 percent of teachers who contribute to the OEA political action committee are registered Republicans, although a Republican chairs the PAC. Darby says the union makes its endorsements and contributions in a democratic (“with a small d”) process that is fair to all members. There’s no disputing, however, that
gone to Democratic candidates.” In their brief, Gibson and Huffman argue that public employees who are not Democrats are forced to contribute to causes in which they may not believe. If they could change that, the argument goes, they might change election outcomes.
combined with contributions from Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, OEA’s money has helped Oregon Democrats win legislative majorities and every statewide office. Republicans have launched a two-
OREGON LABOR UNIONS MAY BE RUNNING OUT OF TIME FOR BIG TAX MEASURES. BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS
njaquiss@wweek.com
When Allan Bruner set up a booth for the Oregon Education Association at the annual gathering of the Republican Party of Oregon earlier this year, he was operating behind what many teachers consider enemy lines. “We got a lot of looks,” says Bruner, a 25-year classroom veteran who teaches in the Colton School District in Clackamas County. “People said, ‘What are you doing here?’” In Oregon, teachers and Republicans don’t usually mix. Perhaps no group has contributed more to Democratic dominance of state politics than the 45,000-member teachers union. OEA has given $4 million directly since 2006 and leveraged more from affiliates. Bruner is a rarity—an OEA member who is also a registered Republican. Union critics are trying to end what they see as the Democratic Party’s coercion of non-Democratic union members. That battle, both in Oregon and nationally, has profound implications for a 2016 ballot fight that could lead to the largest tax increases in more than a decade. Labor unions are the biggest backers of up to $5 billion in tax measures planned for the 2016 ballot. But some union members aren’t political supporters of new taxes. Jill Gibson is a Portland lawyer representing Republican interests seeking to weaken union support for Democrats through socalled “right-to-work” ballot measures. Earlier this month, Gibson and former Lewis & Clark College law dean James Huffman filed a brief in a related U.S. Supreme Court case containing numbers that reveal a surprising fact: Unions are not nearly as Democratic as their giving suggests. “Fifty-two percent of Oregon teachers are registered Democrats, 25 percent are registered Republicans, and 24 percent are
R O N A N LY N A M
Dues Date
pronged attack on that dominance. Earlier this year, Gibson filed two right-to-work ballot measures aimed at making it easier for public employees to opt out of supporting Democratic candidates and causes. Gibson received unfavorably worded ballot titles for those measures, however, and is now drafting new versions. A similar issue is in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in a case called Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. Observers, including leaders of the Oregon unions Gibson targeted, expect the court to rule in the middle of next year on the Friedrichs case—and they expect the court to rule against union interests. “We think the Supreme Court case would do substantially the same thing as the Oregon ballot measures were supposed to do,” says AFSCME’s state political director, Joe Baessler. “It would weaken the unions.” Gibson and Huffman illustrated the issue in the friend-of-the-court brief they filed in the case. Their clients, state employees Glenn Schworak and James Mitchell, belong to SEIU, Oregon’s largest labor union, but disagree with the union’s politics. Every year, SEIU deducts $1,488 each from the men’s paychecks. They have opted out of SEIU’s political program, so each gets $300 back. They contend the process for opting out is onerous, however, discouraging other members from following suit. The looming court decision has implications for what is shaping up as the biggest battle on the 2016 ballot: the effort by Our Oregon, an advocacy group funded by public employees, to raise between $1 billion and $5 billion in new taxes. That would be a far larger increase than tax increases that split the state in 2007. Two years ago, then-Gov. John Kitzhaber brokered a truce between business and labor that avoided a ballot battle over new taxes. The threat of reduced union membership and financial muscle makes it unlikely any such diplomacy will derail new tax measures in 2016. Union leaders say chances of passing new taxes are greater in a presidential election year, which in Oregon spells a large Democratic turnout, and it doesn’t hurt that the state’s business lobby is in disarray (“The Unger Games,” WW, Sept. 2, 2015). “There are a lot of people who think we need to go to the ballot now,” Baessler says, “and if the Supreme Court decides against us, we’re going to have to be more aggressive.”
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
Tony Ortega
COURTESY TONY ORTEGA
NEWS
A LONGTIME CRITIC OF SCIENTOLOGY VISITS THE CHURCH’S VICTORY CITY. BY AA R O N M E S H
amesh@wweek.com
The Church of Scientology isn’t getting great Scientology was appalled. They sent everybody press these days. up to Portland. It was called the Religious FreeThe self-improvement religion founded by L. dom Crusade, also known as the Portland CruRon Hubbard in 1954 was exposed in a 2013 book sade. Thousands of Scientologists all were outside by Lawrence Wright and in a 2015 film documen- the courtroom trying to pressure the judge, and tary, both titled Going Clear. it worked. The judge blinked and decided that he The investigations laid out a case that Scien- had given bad instructions to the jury and vacated tology’s leaders flattered celebrities for dona- the award. And ultimately Titchbourne ended up tions, imprisoned and enslaved its converts, and settling for a few thousand dollars, when she had harassed anyone who left or criticized the church. originally won $39 million. Nobody is watching the church’s comeuppance So to Scientology, Portland represents a great with greater interest than Tony Ortega. victory for them. And when they opened that The 52-year-old journalist has been publishing Ideal Org [at 360 SW Oak St.] in May 2013, they unflattering reports on Scientology since 1995, cited it constantly, like, “This is our city.” They mostly in weekly newspapers, including the Phoe- really think of Portland as one of their great nix New Times and The Village Voice. (Ortega was places in history. editor of The Voice until 2012.) He says church operatives retaliated by tracking his movements, What are Ideal Orgs? interviewing his co-workers to dig up dirt, and Are they like megachurches? showing up at his mother’s house. They are not. Because “megaOrtega has written a book, The church,” of course, implies lots “IF YOU Unbreakable Miss Lovely, alleging of people. And they’re empty. Scientology’s harassment of defector WRITE ABOUT The idea was that you would take Paulette Cooper. This Sunday, he visits over some historic structure, SCIENTOLOGY, spend a lot of money to procure Portland—a city with great significance to Scientologists. He explained why in a YOU WILL FIND the building and then spend a lot recent conversation with WW. more to refurbish it. Miscavige had this idea that if he created a A MASSIVE WW: Has the increased exposlick enough presentation that AUDIENCE.” sure of Scientology driven any it would create this rush of new of its high-profile members into people to Scientology. May 2013 jumping ship? in Portland was a big one. And it’s Tony Ortega: For several years, some very high- dead. There’s just nobody in it. profile celebrities have been either quietly or a little less quietly moving toward the exit. But on Why should people care about this fairly the other hand, what’s really interesting is that this obscure religion with fairly few adherents? year, David Miscavige, leader of Scientology, seems First of all, they do. If you write about Scientolto have put some of the remaining celebrities on ogy, you will find a massive audience. I think it’s a the spot. I noticed several months ago that people combination of the fact that there are some celeblike Kelly Preston and Kirstie Alley and Nancy rities involved, that they’re very secretive about Cartwright [the voice of Bart Simpson] suddenly what they do, and that they’re bullies, and they get got a lot more vocal about their progress on what’s away with it. called “the Bridge.” It says they’re putting on a show, and all of this kind of activity is always aimed But does Scientology actually matter? I think it does. It’s really amazing to see how a totaliat the big donors. tarian organization can exist inside the United States Why is Portland such a special city for today and the way it’s able to run roughshod over our Scientologists? courts. Scientology takes all of America’s most closely Portland is a really important city mainly because held beliefs and ideas about itself—freedom and of a mid-1980s lawsuit involving Julie Christof- tolerance—and turns them around and uses them as ferson Titchbourne. Two lawsuits at that time weapons. They’re able to get away with destroying were really crucial. And the reason why they’re people—all with the help of the United States court important—because Scientology has been sued so system. And I think that exposes some real problems many times in so many ways, and Scientology has in our current society and systems. I think it’s imporsued people in so many ways—is that they were tant to watch them. suing because they claimed the technology itself Tony Ortega speaks to the Humanists of Greater was harmful, that Scientology itself was harmful, GO: Portland at Friendly House Community Center, 1737 and in both cases, juries agreed with them. NW 26th Ave. 12:45 pm Sunday, Sept. 27. Free. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
WHY PORTLAND HAS THE BEST FRESH-HOP BEERS ON EARTH. Fresh tastes so much better.
That’s a lesson most Portlanders learned a decade or more ago, when farmers markets and restaurants with chalkboards listing local providers became enmeshed in the city’s culture. We all know the unmatched quality of a tomato from your own backyard or a bunch of purple heirloom carrots from New Seasons. Lately, it seems like even people in Wichita and Dubuque have come to appreciate the subtle superiority of things that come to them quickly and from nearby. But there’s a very special fresh product too few Portlanders have embraced. It’s one of the finest and rarest fresh products made. It’s not something Portland invented, but it is something that exists in very few places in the world, and probably nowhere with the same quality and quantity as you’ll find here. We’re talking about fresh-hop beers. If this is new to you: Hops are the little, acid-rich flower cones used to give beer its bitter bite and pungent scent. Virtually all beers include hops, almost always dried and preserved. Hops are grown commercially only in a few places in Europe, in Washington’s Yakima Valley, and in the small, German farming towns of the Willamette Valley. Almost every hop in the country is grown within a three hour drive of Portland. In those places, it’s possible to brew beer with hops before they’ve been dried to create a beer that has a distinctive living flavor—it’s the difference between canned fruit salad and fresh fruit salad. Fresh-hop beers, like still-wet Netarts Bay oysters or the local Beaujolais Nouveau-style wines that are starting to crop up, are about a fleeting moment. Just-harvested
hops do not behave like their dried counterparts in the kettle, meaning you never really know what you’re going to get until the beer is finished. And those flavor compounds also seem to be quite brittle—they change from tap to tap and day to day. Just about 10 years ago, the hop harvest became a phenomenon that drinkers were interested in, too. Starting with the first harvests in late August, local brewers get up at dawn and drive down to Mount Angel or St. Paul to get batches of just-plucked hops for a once-a-year beer. A few weeks later—like, right now—that beer is tapped. Timing is touchy. This summer’s heat brought early harvests at most farms—see our interview with a hop farmer on page 19. By the time this paper disappears from news boxes, these beers will be nearing their functional expiration date. By the first week of October, when the Portland Fresh Hops Fest rolls around, the vast majority will be past their prime. That’s OK—there are earlier fresh-hop festivals if you’re willing to drive an hour, and there’s a killer lineup of other beer festivals in Portland this fall. You can find a full list, starting with this weekend’s Vegan Beer & Food Festival, on page 25. But when you get a great Portland-brewed fresh-hop beer, there’s really nothing else like it. That’s true anywhere in the world—Jeff Alworth explains why on page 14. Objectively speaking, Oregon makes the best fresh-hop beers—the winners in that category at the Great American Beer Festival for the last two years have come from here. And after sampling everything we could find from this year’s crop (page 19), it seems like Portland brewers are getting better and better with them. See for yourself—right now, and not for much longer.
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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So Fresh, So Green
Why Oregon is central to the most important beer trend of the last decade.
And Then There Were Fresh Hops Editor’s note: Last month, internationally known Portland beer writer Jeff Alworth released his magnum opus, The Beer Bible. It’s only a slight stretch to say the 720-page tome had its genesis here at WW when arts & culture editor Audrey Van Buskirk hired a young freelancer named Jeff Alworth to write a beer column titled “Mash.” For some reason, the publisher was prickly about WW’s request to reprint the chapter on fresh-hop ales from the best-seller. Alworth was kind enough to provide us with an Oregon-centric retelling of the fresh-hop phenomenon. You should still buy a copy of The Beer Bible.
BY JE F F A LWO RT H
@beervana
Given the speed at which things change in the beery landscape, fresh-hop ales count as old news. Something just shy of 10 years ago they started to be a major annual event—in local terms, they’re older than Breakside, the Commons and Gigantic, just to illustrate their relative fustiness. I wouldn’t doubt that many local beer lovers are greeting this year’s batch with blasé half-interest. Let me tell you something, though: Those of us in the Pacific Northwest are exceedingly fortunate. Not only are fresh-hop ales a rarity outside our region, but most beer drinkers have never even heard of them. Not only that, their arrival coincides with—and serves as a perfect example of—the emergence of a new approach to craft brewing. Each fall, scores of breweries in Washington and Oregon make hundreds of beers with freshly picked, undried hops. This is possible here—and nowhere else—because nearly all of the Western Hemisphere’s commercial hops are grown in Oregon and Washington. As the name implies, in these kinds of ales, freshness is critical. While they still have an electric current of life animating their flavors and aromas, these emerald cones are spirited back to a brewery for use in a beer. Every minute they spend off the bine, that current grows weaker. 14
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
Portland breweries can get just-harvested hops into their beers just an hour or two after they’re plucked—giving us a huge advantage over other cities. Even Seattle is more than twice as far from Washington’s hop fields in Yakima. If you want fresh hops, you have to get them at the source—and consequently, most people have never encountered one. Despite the fact that hops have been used in beers for a thousand years, the freshhopping appears to be quite recent—dating back only to 1992. And it took several years before any Americans took up the idea. The earliest record we have suggests the Wadworth brewery, a regional operation in Southern England, was the first to make such a beer. There are whispers about an American brewery that may have done it earlier, but no hard evidence that I’ve found suggests anyone made a fresh hop before Wadworth, which is in Devizes, about 90 miles west of London. The head brewer at the time, Trevor Holmes, got the inspiration while watching the autumn harvest, wondering what green hops would taste like in a batch of beer. Holmes is retired, but Wadworth’s current brewer, Brian Yorston, describes the brewery’s practice, which has not changed in 23 years. “A Wadworth employee is dispatched on the given date, predawn, to get to the farm
by 6 to collect [the] hops,” Yorston says. “He returns to Devizes so that by 9:30 the first of two coppers can receive the hops. This timing is very critical. In 2008, I decided personally to do the hop run; I made the mistake of stopping for a cup of coffee on the way back, only to find a posse of brewery operators standing by the gate waiting impatiently for my arrival.” By 1996, California’s Sierra Nevada Brewing and the now-defunct Yakima brewery Bert Grant’s were making one. The first fresh-hop beer we can find record of in Oregon was brewed by Karl Ockert in 2002 at BridgePort, which added Crystal hops from Sodbuster Farms in Salem to his hopback. This was still in the dark ages of American brewing. We were drinking pale, amber and wheat ales then, and the vivid hoppiness that came to characterize American brewing was only just being born. As fresh-hop ales began their slow move toward the mainstream, American brewers used them roughly the same way they did regular hops—and very much the same way Yorston described Wadworth’s process. American brewing is something of a European pastiche, borrowing heavily from the English tradition. From the birth of craft brewing through the late 1990s, Americans made ales in very much the way
OREGON’S FIRST FRESHIE
As best we can tell from talking to a half-dozen people involved in craft beer in the early 2000s, these are photos of the first fresh-hop beer ever brewed in Oregon. Pictured is Karl Ockert (left and right above), then brewmaster of BridgePort and now at Deschutes, with fresh Crystal hops from Sodbuster Farms in Salem. If these photos are from 2002—the director of the Oregon Brewers Guild, beloved former Oregonian beer writer John Foyston and Ockert all think it is—then BridgePort probably would have made the third fresh-hop beer brewed in the United States—if you count Sierra Nevada, which made its first “wet hop” beer in 1996, using undried hops sent by UPS Next Day Air. The very first American fresh-hop beer? That came from the very first modern brewpub, the now-shuttered Bert Grant’s in Yakima, Wash., the heart of hop country. “We had two ex-Grant’s brewers working for us, and one early-fall day they were talking about how it was the time of year they would brew a fresh-hop brew in Yakima,” says Ockert. “I got to thinking, ‘Geez, we are only 35 miles from the hop fields and we have a hopback—let’s do it.’ And we did! It’s the ultimate seasonal beer, sort of brew nouveau for beer.” Breweries like Grain Station, Full Sail and Deschutes followed close behind. “We brewed Hop Trip here at Deschutes last week with Crystal hops from Goschie Farms in Silverton, and Steiner Hops is picking Lemon Drop hops in Yakima for our Chasin’ Freshies right now,” says Ockert. “We are truly blessed to live and brew here in the Pacific Northwest.” MARTIN CIZMAR.
the English do. They made stronger beers, used American hops, and more of them, and didn’t cotton to cask ale the way the Brits do. But in the mechanics of brewing, the processes looked quite similar. For those first few decades, Americans dosed their beers with heavy loads of bittering hops and accentuated them lightly with aroma hops, just as the British do. In a pint of beer, the sensation we call “hoppiness” is a collection of qualities that
CKERT OF KARL O COURTESY
includes bitterness, aroma and flavor—but these qualities were initially beside the point. The reason hops have become an integral part of the brewing process is because breweries realized they helped inhibit microbial action that otherwise spoiled beer. They learned to boil their beer to draw out these antimicrobial properties, and nearly every beer style on the planet leans heavily on bittering hops for this reason, even in styles where the beer is not very bitter. When brewers add hops later in the process, either during the boil or afterward, hops’ other properties are revealed. They give those intense flavors we have come to associate with modern IPAs: citrus, pine, mango, cedar, and so on. How do fresh hops fit into this picture? Their use coincided with the shift from bittering to aroma hops. At about the same time breweries were realizing they could still make intensely hoppy beers without making them face-meltingly bitter, they were also starting to experiment with fresh hops. Fresh hops are to dried hops what fresh basil is to dried. They’re more vivid and green—more alive. Hops contain more than 400 compounds, and it appears that some of these are lost or changed during the drying process. Fresh hops have bright, unusual flavors not present in their dried forms. Indeed, identifying even familiar strains is difficult because they taste so much different when fresh. They express their vintage and terroir more, so fresh Cascade hops from Goschie Farms in Silverton may not taste the same in 2015 as they did in 2014, and they may also taste different than the fresh Cascade hops from Sodbuster Farms just down the road in Salem. But here’s the thing: They’re not so great for bittering. They seem to get cooked in a way dry hops don’t and often produce vegetal flavors like boiled cabbage. Fresh-hop beers became a pretty big thing starting in 2007, and at first brewers felt, like Wadworth, that they should go “into the coppers,” as the wortboiling vessel is known. However, they quickly realized that fresh hops should be added late in the process, especially when added to the beer after fermentation—what brewers call dryhopping. Used this way, they supercharge the hoppy goodness without adding any bitterness. Oregon has long been on the forefront of this kind of brewing. I was recently talking to Breakside’s Ben Edmunds about modern hoppy ales, and he said, “Frankly, it’s not a secret, but all the brewers who make these award-winning beers—everyone [uses late hops]. Those [bittering] hops are basically for kettle performance.” When you travel to other countries now, you see the word “American” applied to a lot of beer—and when they use our country as an adjective, this is what they’re talking about. We still have it better than the rest of the world, though, because fresh hops offer flavors dried ones can’t. It’s like going to 11, or finding an extra hoppy gear. And while a few breweries have fresh hops delivered overnight to their breweries (a travesty), basically no breweries outside the Pacific Northwest have access to these amazing beers or the knowledge to brew them properly. There are newer beer trends, yes, but few so completely unique to us. So grab a pint—it’s the flavor of the season here in Portland, and precious few other places on earth.
A magnum of excellent vintage Maloy's offers a fabulous selection of antique and estate jewelry and fine custom jewelry, as well as repair and restoration services.
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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So Fresh, So Green
TOP
HOPS
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that Oregon will harvest 11,571,900 pounds of hops this year, about 3 million more than in 2014. What are we growing? Here’s a look at the top five varieties in 2014, according to the Oregon Hop Commission. PARKER HALL.
Nugget 1,363 acres Nugget hops were first bred in Oregon as part of a USDA program in 1982. By 1991, Nugget had taken over 14 percent of production in the nation. While Nugget is loved for its resiny, woody and herbal aromas, the versatile hop is mostly used as a clean bittering addition, added early in the boil to give hoppy ales their signature bite. Brewers love Nugget hops because they hold most of their bittering capacity for many months after harvest.
Cascade 961 acres When researchers at Oregon State University first released the Cascade varietal as an aroma hop in 1972, there wasn’t much of a commercial market for it. A grapefruit-forward hop with a spicy, citrus characteristic, Cascade was not well-suited for a time when beer came in two flavors: light and dark. But as the craft-beer revolution began, so did the rise of Cascade, now the most popular aroma hop in the nation. The variety can be credited in large part with the floral, citrusy trend in craft beer, stretching all the way back to BridgePort IPA, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Anchor Liberty Ale—three of the most important stepping stones in the history of craft beer. Willamette 553 acres A fruity, peppery, aroma hop with modest bittering properties, Willamette is well suited to many styles of beer, from New Belgium’s Fat Tire to Widmer’s Hefeweizen. The hop, which was first bred in 1976 and now accounts for about 20 percent of U.S. acreage, is a nice blend of traditional Old World flavor and newer, bolder American aromas, making it a popular choice among brewers for its versatility.
Centennial 443 acres The yin to Cascade’s yang, Centennial hops are often used in parallel with the famed citrusy varietal. Centennial hops are sometimes referred to as “Super Cascade” due to their higher bittering properties. First bred in 1974, they’re named for their public release during Washington state’s centennial celebration in 1989. Though not as aromatic as their smaller, older brothers, their excellent blend of floral and bittering characteristics make them well-suited to extrahoppy styles. Centennial hops are a centerpiece of craft classics like Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, Fort George’s Vortex IPA and Lompoc’s C-Note IPA. Mount Hood 269 acres Developed in Oregon and released about the same time as Washington’s Centennial hop in 1989, Mount Hood hops are a mild, earthy variety best suited to Old World ales and lagers, though they are often used in other styles. Described as a fine substitute for more expensive noble European varietals, Mount Hood hops are used to great acclaim in everything from Pilsners and wheat beers to doppelbocks. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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E M I LY J O A N G R E E N E
So Fresh, So Green
CLASS OF
2015
EARLY REVIEWS ON THIS YEAR’S LOCAL FRESH-HOP BEERS. Most Portland fresh-hop beers were hitting taps as we were going to press. Still, some eager beavers managed to release beers in time for our reviewers. Note: Part of the magic of freshhop beers is how delicate and brittle the hop flavors can be. The taste of these beers can change day to day. Your best bet is to sample around until you find one you love, and plant yourself at the pub for a nice, long session. WALKER MACMURDO.
ULTRA GNAR GNAR FRESH HOP IPA (BASE CAMP)
POST-PLUCK: Patrick Leavy in his fields after the harvest.
Mister Hopular
FRESH HOP FREE RANGE RED (LAURELWOOD)
HOP FARMER PATRICK LEAVY ON THE 2015 HARVEST BY WA L K E R M AC M U R D O AND PA R K E R H A L L
Hop roots run deep in Oregon. Patrick Leavy of the Oregon Hophouse can trace his family’s involvement in hop farming back to 1912, when his Irish émigré grandfather established the family farm in Aurora, just east of Champoeg State Heritage Area. At the time, there were hundreds of others—Leavy has records showing about 500 hop farmers in the state in 1933. But plague and Prohibition caused them to dwindle, and only a handful of Oregon’s original hop families are still farming today. Prohibition, obviously, diminished the demand for beer ingredients—the few hop farms that survived rode it out by producing hops for export and alcoholic medicinal elixirs that tasted a lot like beer. When Prohibition ended in 1933, downy mildew struck Oregon hops. Much of the hop industry moved to Washington’s drier, less mildew-prone Yakima Valley. Farmers who stayed in the damp climate of the Willamette Valley continued to battle downy mildew, which can lay waste to an entire commercial crop. Mechanization in the 1940s changed the industry, and by the ’50s, if you didn’t have this machinery you couldn’t compete, forcing small farmers out of the hop business. Leavy’s grandmother Ella kept his family in the business after his grandfather died in 1941. Today, Leavy Farm is going strong. The land is owned by Patrick’s father, federal appeals Judge Edward Leavy, who leases it to Patrick. We sat down with Patrick and talked about hop history, this year’s crop, and an experimental variety he is growing called X17.
WW: Given the summer heat, how is the crop looking this year? Patrick Leavy: The hop crop is a little bit early, but I’m not quite in the camp that this is an exceptionally early year or anything like that. Oregon’s got irrigation, so water was not a factor. The dominating thing that affected this hop wasn’t the hot summer, but the mild winter. I’ve seen it about three times in my 37 years of growing hops. When you have a warm winter, certain varieties like Willamette don’t get enough “chilling hours,” which regulate their growth hormone. Hops are a perennial plant, and when some varieties go dormant, they wait for a cold snap to grow again. Last year, they went through the winter waiting for cold, and were still waiting for it in spring. There was some very low vigor, and as they warmed up, they were forced to grow. But the Willamette crop in Oregon is below average— it didn’t grow very fast, and the vines are small this year. That problem only affected some varieties? Yes. The Cascade variety sat around and said, “I don’t care about the winter, it’s warm, I’m growing.” Nugget didn’t care. Most varieties didn’t care. The quality of the hops this year looks very nice. Oregon is historically pretty consistent in that area. When did hop farmers such as your family start feeling the craft-beer revolution in Oregon? When craft beer first started in the late’70s and ’80s, the brewers were still having to deal with the varieties that the larger breweries were demanding from growers.
The word “gnar,” short for gnarly, goes one of two ways, either describing something incredibly awesome or incredibly horrible. Ultra Gnar Gnar falls into the latter camp. It’s way too malty and suffers from strong ester flavors, which usually occur when there is a problem during fermentation. Our guess is that something went awry with the thermostat. Better luck next year, Base Camp.
But in the ’90s, as the craft brewers started developing, they were looking for different hops, and now we have around 15 varieties growing in Oregon. What kind of hops are you growing? We’ve got seven varieties, and about half of the farm is in organic production. We grow Nugget and Crystal as our nonorganic hops, and Magnum, Golding, Fuggle, Perle and Liberty as organics. We also have a breeding program focused on improving the farming of hops, and have a new organic hop that we have given an acre to this year that we are calling X17. Cider Riot has done some trials with it, and it has a fruity characteristic. We are going to send 15 pounds of [X17] to Odell Brewing in Colorado this year, and hope they make a good experimental brew with them. What other breweries do you sell to? We sell our organic hops directly to about 15 breweries. Our biggest customer is Hopworks, but we also sell to Logsdon Farmhouse Ales, Ambacht, and we sell all the way down to Standing Stone Brewing in Ashland, among others. Can you talk about how Oregon hops taste compared to their Yakima and Idaho counterparts? It’s so subjective. Of a given variety, you’ll have brewers who prefer the Oregon variety over the Washington or Idaho variety, and vice versa. Certain varieties like Nugget do yield better in Oregon, and certain hops yield better in Washington. Obviously I think Oregon hops are better, but then I have that in me.
We’re guessing that the 160 pounds of Amarillo hops that Laurelwood’s brewers added to the tank had something to do with the intense, almost physical flavor of the fresh-hop version of their Free Range Red. This was one of the most vividly hoppy beers we’ve ever tasted, with a finish like a red, lupulin-lined laser slicing through the tongue. It tastes like hops on steroids.
FRESH HOP IPA (BREAKSIDE)
Breakside froze fresh Simcoe hops with liquid nitrogen, then used soil tampers to manually shatter the hops—the idea is to preserve more of the “hop essence” found in the hops’ lupulin glands. The result is an extraordinarily complex IPA that balances the lush grapefruit notes of the hops with a fresh, mellow earthiness reminiscent of a fine farmhouse ale. This beer genuinely tastes the way that hop farms smell. I think we have an early frontrunner for fresh-hop beer of the year.
THUNDERCONE FRESH HOP ALE (CRYSTAL BALLROOM)
Thundercone’s malt comes through a little too strong, clashing with the Galena, Cascade and fresh Simcoe hops in a manner that leaves no one showing their best side. The fresh Simcoe hop flavor is buried in the beer somewhere, but does not pop out nearly as much as hoped. Thundercone is a little too unfocused to stand out.
COASTLINE FRESH HOP IPA (CRYSTAL BALLROOM)
Coastline has significantly more spring in its step than its Thundercone brother. Flavored with 55 pounds of fresh Amarillo hops, Coastline has a similar profile to Laurelwood’s Fresh Hop Free Range Red. Coastline does taste resoundingly of hops, but does not have the same penetrating freshness that Laurelwood’s Red offers. Although pleasant, this fresh-hop IPA is mostly IPA.
FRESH HOP IBUSIVE (FAT HEAD’S)
This is Fat Head’s flagship double IPA, but with fresh Amarillo hops from Crosby farm in Woodburn, giving it an earthy, piney nose and crisp bitterness. Amarillo is the hop variety found in Dogfish Head 60 Minute and Rogue Yellow Snow IPAs, and this beer has that classic orange-zest flavor, but with a fresh twist. At 7.3 percent ABV, it’s a lot stronger than most fresh-hop beers, and yet you still feel like you can taste the yellow lupulin powder in each sip.
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So Fresh, So Green
Cone Heads
IMPRESS YOUR DRUNK FRIENDS WITH SOME NEWFOUND HOP KNOWLEDGE.
Ever wonder why hoppy beer kind of smells like weed? It’s because hops
and cannabis are cousins, both members of the Cannabaceae family, which includes Humulus (hops), Cannabis (weed) and Celtis (a bunch of weird trees called hackberries). Chemical compounds called terpenes give them that zesty, vegetal scent.
Speaking of chemicals,
the magical flavor hops impart to beer comes from a yellow, waxy oil called lupulin. If you ever get the chance to rub a hop cone between your palms, do it: You’ll get a blast of fresh-hop scent that will remind you of your favorite beer. Lupulin contains mild antibacterial agents that stop bacteria from growing in your beer while the brewer’s yeast does its job.
Hops grow on bines, not vines. Why have a special word? Bines grow upward when a plant’s shoots are near a support, such as a trellis. Vines rely on suckers to make their way up supports. Hops don’t need any of that highfalutin sucker nonsense. They pull themselves up by their bootstraps to grow the oldfashioned way, like real Americans. (Yes, hops are native to North America.)
The United States produces 30 percent of the world’s hops, and almost all of that is
produced in the Pacific Northwest. Oregon produces about 14 percent of the country’s hops, adding $35 million to the state economy in 2014.
Oregon hops are the most valuable in the nation, selling for $4.34 per pound
compared to Washington’s $3.89 and Idaho’s measly $2.75 in 2014. Washington produces the vast majority of the country’s hops—75 percent—most years.
Speaking of poundage, the total amount of hops currently growing in the U.S. has increased massively over the last few years. More than 59 million pounds of hops were grown in the U.S. in 2012. In 2014, it was more than 70 million pounds. Recent forecasts suggest that American farmers will harvest close to 80 million pounds of hops in 2015.
Your beer is putting money directly into Oregon farmers’ wallets. Craft
beers use significantly more hops than macro brews—Budweiser, Miller and Coors—at least four times as many on average. This explains why farmers keep growing more hops: As consumers demand more and more craft beers, the need for hops rises.
There are more than 120 varieties of hops grown commercially around the world. Different varieties of hops are associated with different kinds of beers. Pilsner is made with European noble varieties like Saaz and Hallertau, while your newfangled, ultra-hoppy craft IPA is probably made with patented Citra™.
Oregon brewers have won
the gold medal in the Great American Beer Festival’s Fresh Hop Ale category for the last two years. Portland’s Old
Town Brewing Co. won in 2013 with Cents and Censability American Pale Ale, and Baker City’s Barley Brown’s Brew Pub won in 2014 with Fresh Hop Pallet Jack IPA. WALKER MACMURDO. 20
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
How Hops are Used START
Hops grow by climbing tall trellises.
Once the bines are at the processing station, workers attach bines to a conveyor belt running from the ceiling. The conveyor belt takes the bines through blades that strip the hop cones. Hop cones tumble from the blades onto a series of conveyor belts that separate them from their leaves. The cones are dropped into a large drying bed.
Once mature, the hop bines are cut from the trellises using machines and machetes. The bines are thrown into trucks, which are driven to sheds filled with processing machinery.
Hops are cut from the trellis and ripped from the bine, but instead of being taken to the drying room, they’re shipped straight to the brewery and dumped in the kettle.
Hops are dried in beds with a metal mesh floor. Massive gas-powered furnaces blast hot air into rooms to dry the hops. The dry hops are stored in warehouses in huge piles until they are ready to be packaged. Hops are typically pressed into 200pound bales using wood presses. Some farms process hops into pellets, which many brewers prefer to use over whole cones. After being shipped to the brewery, bittering hops are added to grain and water. Later, more hops are added for flavor and aroma. WALKER MACMURDO.
FINISH
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OREGON’S HOP FARMS 1.
4-B Farms
24. Leavy Farm
15234 Butsch Lane NE Mount Angel
22675 Butteville Road NE Aurora
Size: 2,600 acres, 337 acres of hops
25. Lone Oak Hop Farms
Founded: 1972
6021 Deconinck Road NE Woodburn
Varieties: Crystal, Magnum, Mount Hood, Nugget, Cascade and Sterling.
2. Abiqua Hop Farms 7750 Annen Lane NE Mount Angel
3. Annen Brothers 14358 Dominic Road NE Mount Angel
4. Arrowhead Farms 3rd Street NE St. Paul
5. BC Hop Farms 5419 Le Brun Road NE Woodburn
6. B&D Farms 2187 Horseshoe Lake Road NE St. Paul Size: 850 acres, 725 acres of hops Founded: 1984 Varieties: Citra, Cascade, Centennial, Golding, Mount Hood, Nugget and Willamette.
7. Capitol Farms 9015 Windsor Island Road N Salem
8. Champoeg Farm 21579 Champoeg Road NE St. Paul
9. Coleman Ranch 16873 French Prairie Road NE Woodburn
10. Crosby Hop Farm 8648 Crosby Road NE Woodburn Size: 330 acres, all hops Founded: 1900 Varieties: Amarillo, Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Crystal, Golding, Mount Hood, Nugget, Sterling and Willamette.
11. Dean McKay Farms 19172 French Prairie Road NE St. Paul
12. Echo Ridge Farms 4494 Raybell Road NE St. Paul
13. F&B Farms and Nursery 10498 Geschwill Lane NE Woodburn
26. Mark McKay Farms 14. Fairfield Farms 4440 Mahony Road NE St. Paul
15. Fobert Farms 18899 Fobert Road NE Hubbard Size of Farm: 400 acres, 150 acres of hops Founded: 1919 Varieties: Fuggle, Centennial, Cascade, Crystal, Nugget, Sorachi Ace and Eroica.
16. Geschwill Brothers 950 S Pacific Highway Woodburn
17. Goschie Farms 7365 Meridian Road NE Silverton Size: 1,000 acres, 550 acres of hops Founded: 1943 Varieties: Cascade, Centennial, Crystal, Fuggle, Hallertau 102, Magnum, Meridian, Nugget, Santiam, Sterling, U.S. Tettnanger, Willamette.
18. Greenleaf/Coleman Hop Farm 15151 Feyrer Park Road Molalla Size: 1,500 acres, 320 acres of hops Founded: 1940 Varieties: Willamette, Centennial, Cascade and Nugget.
19. H&E Farms 2291 Waconda Road NE Gervais
20. Heritage Hops 18871 Fobert Road NE Hubbard
21. HopSmith Ranches 2984 Raybell Road St. Paul Size: 1,500 acres, 800 acres of hops Founded: 1895 Varieties: Centennial, Golding, Willamette, Cascade, Chinook, Citra, Mosaic, Mount Hood and Nugget.
22. Horseshoe Lake Farms 20493 Riverside Drive NE St. Paul
23. KW Crosby Hops 7798 Crosby Road NE Woodburn
19393 French Prairie Road NE St. Paul
27. Pearmine Farms 12223 River Road NE Gervais
28. Riverbrook Farms 9700 River Road NE Salem
29. Rogue Farms 3590 Wigrich Road Independence Size: 200 acres, 42 acres of hops Founded: 2008 Varieties: Liberty, Newport, Revolution, Rebel, Independent, Freedom, Yaquina and Alluvial.
30. Sodbuster Farms 9815 Wheatland Road N Salem Size: 1,200 acres, 800 acres of hops Founded: 1984 Varieties: Mount Hood, Cascade, Crystal, Magnum, Simcoe, Nugget, Brewer’s Gold, Saaz, Sterling, Santiam, Centennial, Citra, Perle, Millennium and some secret and proprietary hops.
31. Stauffer Farms 13851 Stauffer Road NE Hubbard Size: 620 acres, 320 acres of hops Founded: 1865 Varieties: Brewers Gold, Bullion, Cascade, Centennial, Nugget, Tettnanger and Willamette.
32. Weston Bend Farms 2218 Horseshoe Lake Road NE St. Paul
33. Westwood Farms 6507 St. Paul Highway NE St. Paul
34. Willamette Mission Farms 11122 Wheatland Road NE Gervais
35. Willamette Valley Hop Farms 4797 St. Paul Highway NE St. Paul
36. Willamette Valley Hops 18704 French Prairie Road NE St. Paul
37. Wilmes Hop Farms 20178 Case Road NE Aurora
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So Fresh, So Green THROUGH OCT. 4
FALL BEER FESTIVAL SCHEDULE
LOYAL LEGION OKTOBERFEST
SEPT. 25-27
OAKS PARK OKTOBERFEST Pull out your dirndl and hosen for the theme-
parkiest Oktoberfest in city limits—also to our knowledge the only one sponsored by an actual Munich beermaker (Paulaner). There will be wiener-dog races, games, amusement-park rides and a kids’ play area so they don’t bug you when you drink the beer. Oaks Park, 7805 SE Oaks Park Way, 233-5777, oaksoktoberfest. com. 3 pm-midnight Friday, 11 am-midnight Saturday, 11 am-7 pm Sunday. Admission $2-$5.
SEPT. 25-27
ROSCOE’S FRESH HOP SUMMIT Where should you go for fresh hops in Portland?
Right here, at the apple of Montavilla’s one good eye. Roscoe’s will flood its taps with fresh-hop beers as green as they come for three days. They promise Upright, Oakshire, Pelican, Ecliptic, Laurelwood, a new Mosaic from Breakside, Reverend Nats, cask Simcoe from Machine House, and a whole bunch more. Roscoe’s, 8105 SE Stark St., 255-0049, roscoespdx.com.
SEPT. 25-27
PACIFIC NORTHWEST BREW CUP Oregon’s greatest beach town, Astoria, will host
a brew cup featuring 40 breweries in the region— whether a fresh-hop beer from Fort George, a gose from Buoy, or the wonderful Hop-a-Wheelie IPA from Boneyard—on the waterfront, making it a riverside Oktoberfest. Barbey Center at the Maritime Museum, 1792 Marine Drive, Astoria, pacificnorthwestbrewcup.com. Noon-10 pm Friday, 11 am-10 pm Saturday, 11 am-4 pm Sunday. $9 for a cup, $1 for each additional taster.
SEPT. 26
HOOD RIVER HOPS FEST Near the hop fields of the Gorge, Hood River
puts on one of the most anticipated beer fests of the year, amid ridiculously pretty scenery. Local breweries like Pfriem, Logsdon and Double Mountain will offer fresh-hop beers alongside hoppy heavyweights from Breakside, Laurelwood and Barley Brown’s. VIP access includes a ticket to something called the Painted Hills beef bar. Columbia Street between 5th and 7th streets, Hood River. Noon-8 pm. $15-$50. Tickets at brownpapertickets.com.
SEPT. 26
SISTERS FRESH HOP FESTIVAL Do you like deserts better than mountains and
rivers? Sisters, near Bend, will host a fresh-hop fest featuring 26 breweries, including some little-known ones like Smith Rock and Riverbend. Village Green Park, 101 E Washington Ave., Sisters, sisterscountry.com. Noon-8 pm. $5 for a mug, $1 per 4-ounce taste.
SEPT. 26
VEGAN BEER & FOOD FEST You might think that all beer is already vegan.
And you’d be wrong. Lots of brewers use animal byproducts to create foam, or clear yeast, or to sweeten (ah, sweet honey). This fest is 100 percent animal-free unless you bring a dog. There will be more than 15 breweries and cideries with vegan libations, plenty of vegan food from an impressive array of carts, cafes, diners and bakeries, and—dear lord—so much kombucha. Zidell Yards, 3121 SW Moody Ave., veganbeerfest.com. 1-7 pm. $25-$75.
OCT. 2-3
PORTLAND FRESH HOPS FEST Didn’t make it to Hood River for the freshest
fresh hops? Most of the same fresh-hop beers will be here, just…less fresh. Oaks Park, 7805 SE Oaks Park Way, oregoncraftbeer.org/freshhops. 5-9 pm Friday, noon-8 pm Saturday. $15-$20.
OCT. 17
KILLER PUMPKIN FESTIVAL
This is perhaps the most family-friendly beer fest of the year. Many, many pumpkin beers, sure, but also pumpkin sodas, pumpkin cocktails, and pumpkin bowling, carving, smashing and decorating are featured. If there’s something legal you can do with a pumpkin, you can probably do it here. More than 25 pumpkin beers are expected at the fest. Green Dragon, 928 SE 9th Ave., 517-0660, pdxgreendragon.com. 11 am-midnight. $5 suggested donation.
C O U R T E S Y L O YA L L E G I O N O K T O B E R F E S T P H O T O I L L U S T R AT E D B Y W W S TA F F
Loyal Legion is making use of its 99 taps to host a cumulative Oktoberfest party, putting a new Oregon Oktoberfest beer on tap every day until the official end of the fest in Munich. It culminates in a huge tap takeover from NoPo’s Occidental. This is also the only time of year you’ll get non-Oregon beers on tap. Expect Paulaner, Ayinger, Weihenstephaner, HackerPschorr, Spaten, Warsteiner and Franziskaner. Loyal Legion, 710 SE 6th Ave., 235-8272, loyallegionpdx.com.
outdoor drinkfest weather the city’s likely to see. Although, perhaps a hot hard cider or two is also in order? Pioneer Courthouse Square, 701 SW 6th Ave., nwciderfest.org. 11 am-8 pm Saturday, 11 am-6 pm Sunday. $25-$50.
OCT. 18
KILLER IPA FEST This is your hoppy place. N.W.I.P.A. and
Brewpublic.com pair up to bring herbal, floral, flowery goodness to beer lovers for the third consecutive year. Kegs of the region’s finest hoppy ales will be featured—from award-winning breweries and excellent hophouses like Breakside, Laurelwood and Barley Brown’s. And grab a plate of food from nearby Holy Mole, our 2015 food cart of the year. N.W.I.P.A., 6350 SE Foster Road, 805-7342, nwipa.beer. Noon-8 pm. $10.
NOV. 7
PORTLAND CDA FEST Cascadian Dark Ale—that controversial “style” OCT. 2-4
OCT. 10
Owner Dan Hart will pick up where Stammtisch left off with another outdoor lager drink-off, this time in North Portland. Prost, 4237 N Mississippi Ave, 954-2674, prostportland.com.
the heart of Willamette Valley hop country, where as many hops are grown as anywhere else in the state. On the down side, it is Oct. 10. It is a bit late for fresh hops. Jaycee Bullpen Beer Gardens, 4258 Park Ave., St. Paul, stpaulfreshhopfestival. com. 2-10 pm. $15. Cash only.
claimed wholeheartedly by half-hearted Pacific Northwest secessionists—will have its heyday here. These are hoppy, dark, malty beers meant to be the essence of a rainy autumn. And they are by no means the same thing as a Black IPA. Culmination Brewing, 2117 NE Oregon St., 3536368, culminationbrewing.com.
PROST OKTOBERFEST ST. PAUL FRESH HOP FEST The last gasp of drunken Germankind in Portland. On the plus side, you’re at a fresh-hop festival in
OCT. 3
BEER PRO/AM Willamette Week’s annual Beer Pro/Am pairs the
Portland area’s finest homebrewers with pros for a competition. It’s an eclectic and widely experimental bunch, with past competition favorites running the gamut from barrel-aged Belgians to Neapolitan ice cream-themed ales brewed with hefeweizen yeast, and silky coffee milk stouts. Maybe we’re biased, but one of our top 10 Oregon beers of the year for each of the last two years has come from this festival. This will be the only place to try it. The North Warehouse, 723 N Tillamook St., 719-5520, wweek.com. 1-6 pm. $27 for tastes of 20 beers.
OCT. 3
CELEBRATION OF BEER FESTIVAL Way up in the pretty environs of Skamania
Lodge in the Gorge, you can try out the local product from upriver breweries including Mt. Tabor Brewing (which is in Washington), Double Mountain Brewery, Full Sail Brewing and Backwoods Brewing Company. Skamania Lodge, 1131 SW Skamania Lodge Way, Stevenson, Wash., 844-233-9146, skamania.com. Noon-5 pm. $25 for mug and 5 tasters, $1 for additional tastes.
OCT. 3-4
HANDMADE BIKE & BEER FESTIVAL After combining what used to be two sepa-
rate festivals—Biketoberfest and the Oregon Bicycle Constructors Association show—this fest is a huge bike fair featuring cycling performances, games, showcases of handmade bikes from more than 30 makers, and a whole mess of craft beer and food. Hopworks Urban Brewery, 2944 SE Powell Blvd., 232-4677, hopworksbeer. com. Noon-9 pm Saturday, Noon-5 pm Sunday. $10-$40.
OCT. 10
PECHE FEST This fest features 25 beers with lovely peaches
inside, from sought-after peach beers like Dogfish Head’s Festina Peche, Logsdon’s famed Peche ’n Brett, and Upright’s Fantasia, to one-off beers from Breakside and Fort George, all held in North Portland’s most rightfully beloved beer bar. What’s sweeter than a peach? Saraveza, 1004 N Killingsworth St., 206-4252, saraveza.com. 3 pm. $10 for admission, glass and two drink tickets. Additional tickets $2.
NOV. 27
BLACK FRIDAY Black cider, black soda and especially black
beer—including a whole mess of CDAs and black IPAs—will gather at Green Dragon the day after Thanksgiving. But even more importantly, they’ll unleash a new barrel-aged beer every hour on the hour, from noon to 8 pm. Green Dragon, 928 SE 9th Ave., 517-0660, pdxgreendragon.com.
OCT. 10
BEERS MADE BY WALKING PORTLAND All summer, the Forest Park Conservancy took
brewers on hikes through Forest Park to try to inspire them to make beers—while discouraging them from actually, you know, foraging in Forest Park. You can now hike among Belmont Station, Horse Brass, Bazi Bierbrasserie and Likewise to try the 18 beers and ciders inspired by the nature walks. Trek solo, or join a walking group at Belmont Station at noon. Noon-5 pm.
DEC. 2-6
HOLIDAY ALE FESTIVAL
Themed for the winter but still technically in the fall, this is one of the largest holiday beer festivals in the world. Skip work or show up rosy, because you seriously don’t want to be here after 5 pm. There is so much beer, and most of it will never be seen again. Kick fall in the ass on the way out. Pioneer Courthouse Square, 701 SW 6th Ave., holidayale.com. 11 am-10 pm WednesdaySaturday, 11 am-5 pm Sunday. $35. Cash only.
OCT. 10-11
NW CIDERFEST More than 30 cideries—Apple Outlaw, Bull Run,
Cider Riot and so forth— will convene at Pioneer Courthouse Square for some of the last decent
Portland Bars Where You Can Find Fresh-Hop Beers APEX
Surly, cash-only Apex has a very nice patio to soak up the early-autumn sun, and has Lagunitas and Laurelwood fresh-hop beer on its taps. 1216 SE Division St., 273-9227, apexbar.com.
BAILEY’S TAPROOM
Portland’s greatest westside beer bar has had some lovely Californian fresh-hop beer on its taps, and recently had a Stickmen fresh hop out of Lake Oswego. 213 SW Broadway, 295-1004, baileystaproom.com.
BELMONT STATION
Along with Roscoe’s, Belmont Station cares as much about fresh hops as any bar in town—and it brings in the best (Breakside Simcoe!) along with the rarities. 4500 SE Stark St., 2328538, belmont-station.com.
LAURELWOOD
Hop-happy Laurelwood is gonzo for fresh hops–with fresh-hop IPA and red, and even hop-poor Kölsch. You can get all of them at Laurelwood’s Northeast outpost. 5115 NE Sandy Blvd, 282-0622, laurelwoodbrewpub.com.
SARAVEZA
Saraveza’s taps are fewer than at many other beer bars, but they’re always well-chosen, and it stocks at least one tap of fresh hop at its North Portland outpost. 1004 N Killingsworth St., 206-4252, saraveza.com.
ROSCOE’S
Roscoe’s had some of the first fresh-hop beers on its taps, and it will have by far the most in town during its Fresh Hop Summit on Sept. 25-27. 8105 SE Stark St., 2550049, roscoespdx.com.
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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Genevieve Bell
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Genevieve Bell has a team of 100 people at Intel who do strange things. They spent a year photographing messy car interiors all over the world. They developed a robot that runs apps the same way a phone does. As a vice president in charge of “Corporate Sensing & Insights” at Intel, Bell is the Portland area’s most famous futurist—a Stanfordtrained social scientist who believes the best way to understand the future is to “think exquisitely and critically about the present.” We caught up with her before her appearance at Think & Drink this week. WW: What do futurists do? Genevieve Bell: I still believe in the virtues of fieldwork—spending time with people in the places they make meaning in their lives, trying to get a sense of what makes people tick from the inside out. I believe strongly in the notion that there are things to learn from history. I’m not one of those people who believes that the world is a continuously revolving blank slate. When we think about self-driving cars—that conversation is as old as cars themselves. It’s not like that conversation sprang fully formed out of 2007. What kind of fieldwork? We’ve looked at some of the camps that have sprung up in Silicon Valley to help them disconnect [from technology]. We have fieldwork looking at how people think about powering their devices, people chasing electrical outlets at airports. Most recently I’ve been working on the early history of industrial design—the machine age from the 1880s to the 1940s. What were the new technologies of the day that were made palatable for consumers by giving them a designed aspect? So, early versions of Steve Jobs? What’s fascinating is that the relationship between Steve Jobs and [Apple designer Jonathan] Ive has many historic precursors. Charles and Ray Eames worked with Watson at IBM in the ’40s on a top-to-bottom model, from their logo to their interior design to their vision videos. Henry Dreyfuss—an industrial designer in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s—was in close collaboration with Bell Labs to create the Princess phone. The early ads for the Princess phone are infinitely worth Googling: “It’s little. It’s lovely. It lights.” It doesn’t tell you anything that it does. They’re like iPhone ads before Apple. What’s a typical week for you? Like many people in many companies all over the world, I have a lot of meetings. They run the gamut from meetings about “What will the world look like in 2025?” to “We need to do this PowerPoint presentation.” I spend most of my spare time in a book. My mother will tell you that my second or third sentence was me running around the house yelling, “A book, a book, a book, a book, read me now!”
Edward E. Ward,
D.M.D., MAGD, MBA
INTEL’S RESIDENT FUTURIST ON THE IPHONE OF THE ’40S AND WHY IT’S WEIRD TO THANK YOUR COMPUTER. BY M AT T H E W KO R F H AGE
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E-book or paper? All formats. I still think there’s nothing more evocative than the smell of a book. I’m not quite the sort of person who’d wander into bookstores and sniff books, but I could see that happening. But I was also one of the earliest adopters in my entire extended network of the Kindle. What has surprised you the most in your research? At the moment it’s a personal one, not a research one. I got Amazon Echo, their [voice-operated] personal assistant object. The moment I found myself actually thanking a computational object…. It was a timer. The timer stopped and I said, “Thanks!” Then I went out of the house thinking, “Oh my God, I’m a complete idiot.” And then I did it again a half-hour later. I would never thank my refrigerator for functioning, although it’s something we should be thankful for. So why did you thank the Echo? I suspect it’s partly the voice. It has a humansounding voice. The lack of latency—it’s immediate. There’s something about the multitalented facet of the object. I wonder if speaking out loud is part of it—that it’s verbalized. I would like to imagine it’s because I was raised to be polite. What have you discovered that people don’t want their computers to ever do? We had some lovely work with consumers responding to smart objects that knew things about them, that were then talking to other people. They would inevitably say things like, “That device seems to be gossiping about me.” It was always a really interesting choice of language. Do you hang out with Shingy? The AOL Internet prophet? No, sadly, I don’t get to spend any time with Ray Kurzweil either. A few other futurists I do get together with periodically—Marina Gorbis is one of my favorites down at the Institute for the Future. Two others who work at Intel, Brian David Johnson and Steve Brown. Mark Pesce in Sydney is a fave, as is Mike Walsh. There are a bunch of us around. GO: Genevieve Bell will appear in conversation with Oregon Humanities director Adam Davis at Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., 719-6055, albertarosetheater.com, on Wednesday, Sept. 23. 7 pm. $10. Under 18 permitted with legal guardian. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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BITE-SIZED PORTLAND CULTURE NEWS.
PERIOD PIECE: Artist Sarah Levy may be Portland’s most deserving Internet celebrity of September— which is saying a lot given that the month also saw the rise of Klepto Kitty the weed-stealing narc cat and basic icon Socality Barbie. The Lincoln High School grad is on BuzzFeed, USA Today, HuffPo and basically everywhere with #BloodyTrump, her Donald Trump portrait done in menstrual blood using a tampon and a paint brush. The painting couples America’s most-hated person with one of 2015’s most satisfyingly ridiculous trends: showing period blood to the world. On her blog, Levy says she is auctioning her original to “give the money to an organization that helps Mexican immigrants in the U.S., because ol’ Don would hate that.” You can buy a poster of the portrait for a very reasonable $20 on Etsy. FUTURE DRINKING: Portland institution Besaw’s will be back this fall—just two blocks from the old Besaw’s. After 112 years in business, Besaw’s was forced to close in May after negotiations between restaurant owner Cana Flug and her landlord broke down, leading Flug and the landlord to sue each other and each announce plans to open a restaurant named Besaw’s. The lawsuits were settled in June, and Flug announced she will open a new Besaw’s by year’s end next to the Slabtown New Seasons on Northwest 21st Avenue and Raleigh Street, plus a restaurant next door called the Solo Club named after a previous incarnation of Besaw’s. >> Lents just got its first brewery. And it’s huge, with 200 seats, a kids’ play area and an open ceiling looking up at the second floor. Pints Brewer Alan Taylor—who trained in Germany and made a schwarzbier that was one of our 10 favorite beers of last year—opened the new, 15,000-square-foot Zoiglhaus brewpub at 5716 SE 92nd Ave., in the former Ararat Bakery. On the tap list? Lents Lager, a Bavarian-style helles. PIZZA RULED EVERYTHING: Hip-hop pizzeria P.R.E.A.M. won Feast—well, the only part of Feast that matters, the annual flipcup tournament at Chefstable’s after-after-party. The 16-team tournament, offering a $1,600 prize in its third year, featured important Portland food types chugging warm beer #FEAST2015 and flipping Solo cups as zebra-striped judges Michael C. Zusman (a real-life judge and WW contributor) and Eater Portland editor Mattie John Bamman made sure they didn’t cheat. WW’s team beat beer bar Loyal Legion but lost to Le Pigeon in the quarterfinals. Afterward, P.R.E.A.M. co-owner Nick Ford revealed that the rest of his team were ringers he’d met at the party; all of his actual staff was too tired to play. COOKIES NOT CAKES: A family-run bakery specializing in decorated sugar cookies has set up shop in the former home of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, which closed following a discrimination complaint for refusing to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. Nonnie’s Bake Shop opened in downtown Gresham after owner Trina Fornoff decided to evolve her home-run bakery into a shop. And, yes, Fornoff gets questions about her personal stance on the previous owners’ refusal to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. “I prefer not to comment because I don’t want to put myself in a category one way or the other,” says Fornoff. “I stay very neutral, and I usually don’t discuss it at all.” Fornoff has big goals for her bakery and foresees it becoming a “strong pillar in the community.” There is one thing this bakery doesn’t do, though. “We don’t do wedding cakes,” says Fornoff.
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Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
SARAH LEVY
Antoinette
HEADOUT
WILLAMETTE WEEK
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK IN ARTS & CULTURE
THURSDAY SEPT. 24 LITTLE GEM [THEATER] Catching a show from Portland’s only Irish theater company is a rare treat—like squeezing gold out of leprechauns. Corrib’s shows used to be hidden in Kells’ upstairs backroom, but the company nabbed a slot at CoHo for this show—bleak, snarky and full of black humor, following three generations of workingclass women. CoHo Theater, 2257 NW Raleigh St., 220-2646. 7:30 pm. $25.
FRIDAY SEPT. 25 OREGON INDIE FILM FEST [FILM FEST] Art-house shorts, features and obscure documentaries take over Portland’s repertory cinema screens, including comedies like Taco Night, a horror short called I’m Gonna Eat Your Brains and Companions: Lessons from Gay Mormon Missionaries. Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St., oregonindependentfilmfest.com. 6 pm. $10-$22.
SATURDAY SEPT. 26
KIM HERBST
FRESH HOP SUMMIT [FARM-FRESH BEER] This will be the best place in Portland to get the freshest beers you will ever taste (see page 12). Roscoe’s will flood its taps with freshhop beers from Friday evening through Sunday. Entries from Upright, Oakshire, Pelican, Ecliptic, Laurelwood, Breakside, Reverend Nat’s, Machine House and a whole bunch more. Roscoe’s, 8105 SE Stark St., 255-0049.
Salmon, Ranked
5. SALMON-COLORED CRAYONS
Are you looking for a crayon that isn’t as ostentatious as lobster pink but isn’t as boring as halibut white? Well friend, for you, I have just the crayon. Meet serviceable salmon, the color that should be included in every box.
THE ULTIMATE AND FINAL GUIDE TO ALL SALMON, IN ORDER OF THEIR USEFULNESS TO HUMANITY.
4. CHINOOK SALMON
On Sunday, people will gather in Westmoreland Park to celebrate the return of wild coho salmon to the city. Wild coho salmon are great, absolutely, but we are not species-ists here at WW, and we believe all worthy salmon should be celebrated. Here is our ultimate and final guide to all valuable salmon, ranked in order of their usefulness. LIZZY ACKER.
3. SALMON STREET SPRINGS
8. CHUM SALMON
Sure the chum salmon of Hood Canal and the Lower Columbia are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, but these dudebros have fangs, so you better watch out or they might threaten you.
7. BENOÎT SALMON
Things to like about Benoît: He’s French. He used to be a bike racer. He once won the young rider classification in the Tour de France. He is not a fish, but were he one, imagine how high he’d be on this list!
6. SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN
Not a great movie, sure, but it does star Ewan McGregor, who is not only as beautiful as a Chinook salmon but smart, polite and Scottish, just like an Atlantic salmon.
Duh. These guys are also called “King” salmon because they are the kings of the river and ocean. Chinook are big, they are pretty and they are our hometown salmon (they love the Columbia). If you are picking a salmon to be for Halloween, always go for a Chinook costume. Do you like youthful joy, the distilled essence of summer, and leaping through water much like a salmon heading home to lay her eggs? Then you’ll love this famous waterfront fountain.
2. GRAVLAX
Salmon are pretty and an important part of a healthy ecosystem, yes, but also, salmon are tasty. The best way to eat them is pretty much any way, but best best way is the Nordic way: raw and cured in salt, sugar and dill.
1. AQUAPONIC SALMON
Someday soon, when the rivers are gone and the pastures are barren, all farming will be done via aquaponics. Salmon will work hard to fertilize our crops and feed us their protein-filled bodies once they are too old to labor in the watery fields. This dystopian future won’t be so bad because we’ll be full of omega-3s, and soylent green won’t be people. GO: The Salmon Celebration is at Westmoreland Park, Southeast McLoughlin and Bybee boulevards, 823-2525, on Sunday, Sept. 27. 11 am. Free. See portlandoregon.gov for more information.
PDX COLLECTIVE SALE [BUY PDX] Eleven local boutiques pack The Ace’s playroom twice a year for one of Portland’s biggest designer sales, stocking men’s and women’s clothes, shoes and jewelry from top shops like Mabel & Zora, Radish Underground, Adorn, Bridge & Burn, and Parts + Labour. The Cleaners at the Ace Hotel, 403 SW 10th Ave., 954-1334. 10 am. Free. Through Sept. 27.
SUNDAY SEPT. 27 EMPRESS OF [BJÖRKIAN POP] Me, Lorely Rodriguez’s debut full-length, has a lot in common with a certain Icelandic singer, deploying explosive beats, playful vocal runs and weird noises aplenty. With pop music letting its freak flag fly of late, she could find herself playing the same venues as her hero in a year or two. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $10. 21+.
MONDAY SEPT. 28 SHAMIR [NU HIP-HOP] Despite his youth, the 20-year-old Las Vegas native is spiritually connected to a more innocent time in hip-hop and electronic music, with minimal, colorful beats and an early-’90s fashion sense. When Shamir really sings, his smoky, genderless voice reaches way back to figures like Bessie Smith. Star Theater, 13 NW 6th Ave., 248-4700. 8 pm. $15. All ages.
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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FOOD & DRINK = WW Pick. Highly recommended. By MATTHEW KORFHAGE. Editor: MARTIN CIZMAR. Email: dish@wweek.com. See page 3 for submission instructions.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 23 Arnaldo Caprai Wine Dinner
Eastside rooftop wine spot Noble Rot will host a four-course wine dinner with Umbrian Arnaldo Caprai wines—including a 2003 vintage of the region’s trademark Sagrantino di Montefalco wine, produced nowhere else. Call for reservations. Noble Rot, 111 E Burnside St., 233-1999. 6 pm. $90.
FRIDAY, SEPT. 25
SATURDAY, SEPT. 26 Vegan Beer & Food Fest
You might think that all beer is already vegan. And you’d be wrong. Lots of brewers use animal byproducts to create foam, or clear yeast, or to sweeten (ah, sweet honey). This fest is 100 percent animalfree unless you bring a dog. There will be more than 15 breweries and cideries, vegan food and—dear lord—so much kombucha. Zidell Yards, 3121 SW Moody Ave., veganbeerfest.com. 1-7 pm. $25-$75.
SUNDAY, SEPT. 27 Last Sunday BBQ
Consider this the perfect intersection of summer and fall: A beer
pairing barbecue with fresh-hop Killer Green from Double Mountain, Devil’s Kriek, cask Vaporizer, Peche Mode, Killer Red and Pilsner, with a game-crazed a la carte menu planned to include duck and rabbit sausage, grilled whole trout, elk tartare and bison burger, among other things. Interurban, 4057 N Misssissippi Ave., 284-6669. 3 pm.
MONDAY, SEPT. 28 Culinaria Eat|Art
Disjecta’s food and art series returns with a Near/Far East Asian dinner from Patrick Fleming of Boke Bowl and Troy MacLarty of Bollywood Theater at the group exhibition Book of Scores, curated by Chiara Giovando. Disjecta, 8371 N Interstate Ave., 286-9449. 6:30 pm. $125.
REVIEW K AY L A S P R I N T
Roscoe’s Fresh Hop Summit
Roscoe’s will flood its taps with fresh-hop beers as green as they come. For three days. They promise Upright, Oakshire, Pelican, Ecliptic, Laurelwood, a new Mosaic from Breakside, Reverend Nat’s, cask Simcoe from Machine House and a whole bunch more. Roscoe’s, 8105 SE Stark St., 255-0049. 2 pm. Through Sept. 27.
Oaks Park Oktoberfest
Pull out your dirndl and hosen for the theme-parkiest Oktoberfest in city limits—also to our knowledge the only one sponsored by an actual Munich beermaker (Paulaner). There are wiener-dog races, games, amusement-park rides and a kids’ play area. Oaks Park, 7805 SE Oaks Park Way, 233-5777, oaksoktoberfest.com Through Sept. 27. 3 pm-midnight Friday, 11 am-midnight Saturday, 11 am-7 pm Sunday. $2-$5 admission.
1. Coquine
6839 SE Belmont St., 384-2483, coquinepdx.com. Chicken has long been the poor relation on fine-dining menus, but hilltop French-ish bistro Coquine joins Trifecta and Imperial in reminding the world that the neglect has been criminal. $$$.
2. Chicken and Guns
1207 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 234-7336, chickenandguns.com. If you prefer your chicken from a roadside stand, this is the spot. It’s roasted over oak and mesquite, rubbed with spice and doused in Peruvian-style aji sauce. $.
3. Farm Spirit
1414 SE Morrison St., farmspiritpdx.com. Aaron Adams’ prix-fixe modernist vegan spot aspires to be the best vegan restaurant in the world—El Bulli but with plants. $$$$.
4. Matt’s BBQ
4709 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. New York-bred and Australia-trained, Matt Vicedomini nonetheless turns out solid Texas-style ’cue, with beautiful bark on the brisket and a perfect pop on the hot link. $-$$.
5. Taiwan Eats
4708 NW Bethany Blvd., Suite E6, 888-2378, taiwaneatspdx.com. The closest Beaverton has yet gotten to a “food cart,” Taiwan Eats is a micro restaurant with a tiny but hyper-authentic menu of coldsmoked five-spice beef, noodle soups and pork belly over rice. $.
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MONTEVILLIANO: Fillmore Coffee does both espresso and pizza.
Fillmore Coffee (and Pizza) When it comes time to fasten and secure your leftovers for transport, rarely do pizza places hand you an industrial-sized roll of aluminum foil. Rarer still is the feeling that this is an extension of goodwill, meant to make you feel at home on your first visit to their new place. The gesture could have been misunderstood—we did roll into Fillmore Coffee at 7:45 pm, just 15 minutes before close, after ordering ahead by phone—but the vibe inside this homey little corner shop gave it warmth. Fillmore comes into a rapidly gentrifying stretch of Northeast Glisan Street. The room is open but the angle of the windows and the petite lighting fixtures leave it dim much of the day. Most seating is at large communal tables. The music comes from Cat Power and Arcade Fire. As a coffee shop, I’m not that into it. My Americano was made with espresso poured from wee rim to large rim and kept almost no crema. A breakfast sandwich with olive oil, egg and a pile of raw basil on a salt Order this: White pie, salad and Gold Beach lager. bagel left a basil burn in my mouth for an hour. The barista forgot to bring my housemade pastry. Early on a Monday morning, with only one shot in me, I didn’t have the energy to go up to the counter and interrupt a lively conversation to ask for it. But as a pizza place, Fillmore is a lot better. Along with coffee and tea, they have beers like Gold Beach lager on tap. The menu is small; on our visit, there were just three pies and a satisfying arugula Caprese salad with little balls of mozzarella and a thick, fruity balsamic. Made in a small oven behind the bar, these are true Neapolitan-style pies, soft and bendable, with a puffy outer ring and faint leopard spots on the bottom. I was especially taken with a white pie, which used fat globs of ricotta and a little truffle oil. A margherita had a half-dozen silver-dollar-sized pools of cheese and a lot of loudly sweet sauce. It was oddly light on basil—I’d hate to point fingers, but maybe the morning shift is using it up on the bagel sandwiches? MARTIN CIZMAR. EAT: Fillmore Coffee, 7201 NE Glisan St., 971-236-7411, fillmorepdx.com. 7 am-8 pm Monday-Friday, 8 am-8 pm Saturday, 8 am-3 pm Sunday.
EMMa bRownE
REVIEW
LaundErIng FrEnch: cozy renard serves old-school bistro fare like steak tartare and French onion soup (top right).
The News on Fox RENARD IS A COMFORT-FORWARD FRENCH BISTRO JUST NOW FINDING ITS STRIDE WITH A NEW CHEF.
handily serves as an appetizer for two, and is a rich and satisfying comfort. The massive ramekin comes capped with Comté- Gruyere-Emmenthaler gratinée that hides the deep caramel of long-cooked onions beneath it, a heady stew redolent of the thousands that have come before it. BY M AT T H E W KO R F H AGE mkorfhage@wweek.com The charcuterie plate ($14) is very much a counRenard is named after a fox—the unpredictable try board—galantine, duck liver pâté, a spot of local charmer of French folk tales. And so far, the tiny fig—an art that Best learned from a French Laundry restaurant has been equally unpredictable. At cookbook and from Stan Luoma at Paley’s Place. It’s a this new Frenchified bistro in the old St. Jack modest offering in a city whose meat boards can look space, I have witnessed a complete kitchen melt- like commentaries on decadence or deeply personal down, and also enjoyed a pleasant experience art projects. The duck liver descended a bit too much that shows its potential as a fine neighborhood into iron, but the “country pâté”—which Best calls spot slinging coq au vin, French onion soup and “soul food”—and galantine recalled fond memories of meals in the small towns surrounding Bordeaux. terrifically lovely desserts. And the coq au vin ($26) is likewise both oldOn our first visit in August, three months into Renard’s life, the restaurant crammed so many school and welcome, chicken (not rooster) leg and breast tenderized with wine failures and errors into a single meal that it would strain even a Order this: Coq au vin, french onion soup and served up with oyster and one dessert per person. mushroom and healthy bits of Yelp moderator’s credulity: lost I’ll pass: $3 oysters can be had much lardons, atop a bed of potato appetizers, entrees gone cold in better elsewhere. puree gone orange from the the staging area, miffed drinks, steak bordelaise that tasted weirdly oystery, and braise. Two could easily share it, with appetizers. The best feature on the drink menu is a rare meat gone almost granular under attack from spice powder. You might think it was an episode of Chuck selection of Armagnac, made available in a fairly in which the chefs were being held hostage in the economical flight of four for $25. Don’t pass it kitchen. But without any complaint from our table, up. But mixed cocktails have been up and down the restaurant offered to comp almost everything at double-digit prices. My favorite was a Smoke in the meal—being both gracious and keenly aware and Mirrors martini—vodka with a peaty wash of Laphroaig coating the glass that pairs well with of the problems. But as of Sept. 4, the restaurant has changed the deep flavors of the food. Pastry chef Molly Lasko’s desserts are wonderful. chefs, bringing in Paley’s Place and Imperial veteran Ian Best. A subsequent experience was A goblet of lemon custard topped with fruit was just the right balance of soft and sweet tingled with the entirely different. In its current form, Renard is an utterly unfussy gentle sours of lemon and cream. And an apple tarte Gallic spot—like a nice place in Provence or an ode tatin—a tongue twister that caught our server laughto Julia Child—with old-school French fare and ing—was pure cinnamon delight, airy pastry topped a service staff that might remember you’d left a with the textured sweetness of caramelized fruit. Though there’s the occasional out-there hat there a month before. The front area is warmtoned, no-nonsense cozy and arranged around the dish—curried octopus, perhaps—amid a menu of bar, with a side-street patisserie as cute and bright curry moules, steak tartare, and steak frites with as a child’s replica of a midcentury Euro bakery. parsley on the frites, Renard is perhaps most The menu is more familiar than ambitious, but interesting in its resolute ordinariness. It is the the spot’s very faithfulness to the humble tradition tableclothed fine dining of decades gone, now of French bistro is a lot of its appeal. And judging made as comfy as your favorite chair. from an ever-accelerating brunch business, Renard Eat: Renard, 2039 SE Clinton St., 719-7529, seems to be finding its place in the neighborhood. renardpdx.com. 4 pm-close daily, 8 am-2 pm The dinnertime French onion soup ($11) Monday-Friday, 10 am-2 pm Saturday-Sunday. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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MUSIC PROFILE
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
C O U R T E S Y O F WA R P
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: MATTHEW SINGER. 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: msinger@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 23
FRIDAY, SEPT. 25
Madeleine Peyroux, Stephanie Schneiderman
Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld Duo, Ryan “Lone Wolf” Sawyer
[CLASSIC VOCALS] If you close your eyes at the right moment during jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux’s set, you’ll swear you are listening to Billie Holiday cover Elliott Smith. An American-born artist who spent her formative years busking in France before hooking up with starmaking producer Craig Street (John Legend, Norah Jones), Peyroux has the sort of gentle accent that transforms Smith’s “Between the Bars”—a featured number on her latest compilation release, Keep Me in Your Heart for a While—into a smoky jazzclub number. This isn’t hotel-lobby trickery. Peyroux and her band captivate and mesmerize as a modern jazz group that turns colorful new songs into black-and-white musical Casablanca. PARKER HALL. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 2349694. 8 pm. $46 advance, $49 day of show. Under 21 permitted with legal guardian.
[GRATUITOUS SAX AND VIOLINS] If their Christian names aren’t recognizable to you, their résumés certainly are. While both tour with Arcade Fire, Colin Stetson has played on enough of your favorite bands’ records to warrant personal interest. His team-up with Sarah Neufeld is a Philip Glassian shade of modern classical that trades in the epic, war-cry overdubs of their day jobs for equally hypnotic ostinato. Anyone keeping tabs on the recent trend of indie’s elite (Bryce Dessner, Johnny Greenwood, half of Beirut’s current roster) moonlighting as classical composers won’t be disappointed. CRIS LANKENAU. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. $15. 21+.
SATURDAY, SEPT. 26 Slim Twig, Jack Name
[BLUES ROCK] Vintage Trouble offers exactly what its name advertises— retro-sounding riffs that’ll lead you to trouble. The Los Angeles four-piece has a traditional guitar-bass-drums setup, propelled by the shimmying, mic stand-swinging force that is frontman Ty Taylor. Although the band may sound classic-rock—it’s opened for the likes of the Who, the Rolling Stones, AC/DC and Bon Jovi, after all—Vintage Trouble only released its first album, The Bomb Shelter Sessions, in 2011, and its sophomore effort, 1 Hopeful Rd., last month. HILARY SAUNDERS. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 8 pm. $18 advance, $20 day of show. 21+.
[POST-MODERN POP] “Slim Twig” sounds like the name of a hot new Southern rapper, but it’s actually the alias of Canadian songwriter and actor Max Turnbull, whose prodigious output has more in common with Ariel Pink and Dirty Beaches than Paul Wall. Thank You For Stickin’ with Twig, the latest batch of post-modernist experiments to roll off Turnbull’s ever-running assembly line of weirdness, is a hissy collection of lo-fi psych-pop that’s difficult to efficiently describe in a space this small, but suffice to say, if your favorite hobby is eating ‘shrooms and staring at your cat, here’s your soundtrack to an awesome evening. MATTHEW SINGER. Bunk Bar, 1028 SE Water, 328-2865. 9:30 pm. $10 advance, $12 day of show. 21+.
THURSDAY, SEPT. 24
Witch Mountain, Serpent’s Caul, Sleeping Beauties
Vintage Trouble
Little Hurricane, Rin Tin Tiger
[DIRTY BLUES] Crafted in the style of the White Stripes, San Diegobased duo Little Hurricane features singer-guitarist Anthony Catalano and drummer Celeste “CC” Spina, who sings as well. Back in 2010, they started pairing fuzz-ridden riffs with beastly beats, culminating in Little Hurricane’s debut, Homewrecker, in 2011. Last year, the duo released its follow-up, Gold Fever, which takes the former’s grungy blues and makes it even swampier. HILARY SAUNDERS. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663 9 pm. $18 advance, $20 day of show. 21+.
Turquoise Jeep, Rasheed Jamal, Neka & Kahlo
[INTERNET CULTURE RAP] I’m of two minds about Turquoise Jeep. On one hand, Flynt Flossy, Watchyamacallit and the gang put a tight, catchy, contemporary rap spin on some of the biggest pop trends of the last few decades—think new jack swing, late’90s boy band ballads and mid-2000s strip-club bangers. On the other hand, they do it with the aggressive zaniness of high-school theater kids screaming nonsense at each other in the hallways—think pirate jokes and huge mustaches. My bet is that this is going to be a fun, inside joke-heavy live show, and an enjoyable one if you can prepare yourself for a high level of silliness. WALKER MACMURDO. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. $15 advance, $18 day of show. 21+.
[DOOMY SENDOFF] Portland doom metal mainstay Witch Mountain(which, as we’re obliged to point out, features WW contributor Nathan Carson on drums) is about to hit the road in support of Danzig—yes, that Danzig. Before it goes, though, the band is helping to commemorate the fifth anniversary of one of Portland’s truest rock’n’roll watering holes, Star Bar, which is where you’ll most likely find members posted up once they’re back in town and sharing all their stories about Glenn’s cats for many years to come. Star Bar, 639 SE Morrison St., 232-5553. 8 pm. Free. 21+.
Blackalicious, Lateef the Truthspeaker, Lifesavas
[ACROBATIC RHYMES] Try saying this, one of Gift of Gab’s most wellknown rhymes, from the Blackalicious song “Alphabet Aerobics,” out loud: “Artificial amateurs aren’t at all amazing/Analytically, I assault, animate things.” Do you hear it? The lines aren’t tongue twisters, but if read just right, they give a sense of Gift of Gab’s flow, with equal heaping portions of soul and technique. He and the other half of Blackalicious, beat architect Chief Xcel, have come through Portland many times in recent years, but they return tonight in support of their first album together in a decade, Imani Vol. 1. MITCH LILLIE. Star Theater, 13 NW 6th Ave., 248-4700. 9 pm. $18. 21+.
The Oh Hellos, Joseph
[SIBLING FOLK] Brother-and-sister act the Oh Hellos are a self-made group out of southern Texas that broke onto the fore in 2011. The band’s string-
CONT. on page 39
Organic Tech AUTECHRE BRINGS ITS SOUND MACHINE BACK TO THE STATES. BY WYATT SCHA FFN ER
243-2122
Twenty-some years ago, Sean Booth and Robert Brown of English duo Autechre had a eureka moment, when a bottle of soda spilled onto their sampling keyboard during a recording session. It modified the sound chip within the cheap piece of gear, incidentally retrofitting a now-customized instrument, which they giddily tracked out using just a drum machine and delay pedal. It was a happy accident that would benefit their long and influential career as electronic music pioneers. Eleven albums in, Brown and Booth’s “song machine” remains, its organic composite of hardware and digital elements evolving harmoniously with modern computing speed, using open-source algorithmic programs like Max MSP in conjunction with custom-built programs in a highly configurable modular system. But according to Brown and Booth, Autechre’s creative process is less high-minded than it seems. It’s actually rooted in early hip-hop—the futuristic jams of Afrika Bambaataa being more integral to their generative sound design than, say, Stockhausen—and particularly graffiti writing. “Wild-styling in graffiti was an early example of a form taken to the extreme,” Booth says over Skype. “With the competitive nature and spirit of hip-hop, you are only doing the graff for other writers to recognize. [Autechre] was never intended to be for a wider audience.” During their formative years in Manchester, Brown and Booth started swapping tapes and making re-edits, deliberately remixing tracks to obscure their origins. The duo clicked on the idea that you could “force music into these abstract shapes, combining with obvious science fiction elements,” as Brown puts it. Autechre’s original synthesis of these ideas earned it a place on Warp Records with its 1993 debut, Incunabula, and they remain the backbone
of the group’s output, all the way through its last full-length release, 2013’s Exai. In creating the architecture for its sound, Autechre’s collaborative process remains vibrant. Performed live, the Autechre machine is an entirely different entity than its studio form. Both Booth and Brown take the stage with the intention of holding back certain elements in the name of complementing onstage modulations performed by the other. By affecting the way that harmonies work, the two performers work within sound on a much smaller scale, and are able to anticipate algorithmic changes in the music and make adjustments, creating an optimal mix in the spirit of improvisation. Embarking on their first U.S. tour in eight years, it’s clear Brown and Booth hold a certain reverence to the country that created the music that has most defined their sonic discovery. On their last tour of the States, however, promoters eagerly lumped Autechre under the “intelligent dance music” misnomer, which American audiences had already consumed and regurgitated as a “glitchy beat thing,” according to Booth. Carrying around cumbersome hardware equipment, while insisting on traveling by bus—a romantic impulse driven by the desire to absorb the socio-geographical tapestry of the U.S.—the duo barely broke even financially. So why is this notoriously oblique icon of electronic music playing two nights in a place like Portland? “The only reason we did it was because, fuck it, it’s kind of a first,” Booth says. “We are open because we haven’t been in America for a while. We haven’t done as many shows back-to-back. We haven’t done this in eight years, and we are prepared to be a little more open to that, and the risks involved. We are influenced by the landscape coming into Oregon. It feels familiar to the north of England but very grand and epic. It’s visually exciting. And it smells fucking great.” SEE IT: Autechre plays Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., with Cygnus and Rob Hall, on Wednesday and Thursday, Sept. 23-24. 8 pm. $25. 21+. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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MUSIC COURTESY OF WINDISH AGENCY
PROFILE
Mick Jenkins FRIDAY, SEPT. 25 Some rappers rap about cars. Others rap about weed, money and women. Mick Jenkins raps about water. “It represents truth, very simply,” says the 24-year-old Alabama-born, Chicago-raised MC. “Water is probably the most important element in the world, and so is the truth about the world—about beauty, about success, about happiness.” Jenkins is one of hip-hop’s rising stars, a poet schooled in the art of penning stories from city blocks. But he also has a deep conceptual streak, known for weaving rich, extended metaphors throughout his albums. On his last two releases, 2014’s The Water[s] and this year’s Wave[s], he has used water as a metaphor for discussing how humanity deprives itself of experiencing natural truths. Jenkins’ fervor for tackling social issues on record has garnered him a reputation as a thinking man’s rapper. Critics label his output as “conscious rap,” but for Jenkins, it’s crucial, basic common sense. His music is heady, theoretical and critical of the world we live in. Often, he’s asked why his music is rife with social commentary and criticism, as if he’s doing something above and beyond other artists. “I think it’s crazier that we so often come across albums that we don’t have to dissect, that don’t have a concept,” he says. “We’re making believe that the audience doesn’t care about [social issues], isn’t going to try and figure it out, doesn’t want to hear that, or isn’t smart enough to understand it.” While all of Jenkins’ projects are connected through lyrical continuity, acid jazz-inspired production buoys the weight of his words. “Martyrs,” The Water[s]’ lead single, typifies his ability to balance weighty content with crowd-bouncing beats. An obscured sample of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” roots the song in black American history, while punching bass drops and ticking hi-hats keep it running as Jenkins powers through hardhitting couplets. “All the little niggas got guns now/ And they carry them to the fucking beat/ All these little girls give it up now/ Shame, I could see the cherry stems in the fucking street.” He lifts “Martyrs” higher with a sinister hook that flips radio-rap tropes while glaring back at the “Strange Fruit” refrain. “I’ma get all this money/ I’ma buy all this shit/ I’ma fuck so many hoes/ Nigga, I’ma fuck yo bitch/ I’m just with my niggas hanging.” Everything Jenkins does is deliberate. Last month’s Wave[s] EP stepped away from sociopolitical concerns, delivering dance-baiting tracks recounting romance and lost love. But Wave[s] is merely a placeholder, Jenkins says, intended to establish the theme of his forthcoming debut studio album, [T]he [H]ealing [C]omponent, which he says will be about “what real love looks like. Not even romantic love, like love for the next man—your brother.” From the audience’s perspective, Jenkins seems like an obsessive plotter, building these concepts and threading them through his art. But to hear him tell it, everything comes naturally. “This is very much my struggle, my honesty, my feelings, my experiences,” Jenkins says. “I just write it down as it comes.” MATTHEW SCHONFELD. Water, water everywhere…
SEE IT: Mick Jenkins plays Star Theater, 13 NW 6th Ave., with the Mind, J-Stock and Easy McCoy, on Friday, Sept. 25. 9 pm. $18.50. 21+. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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MUSIC loving folk sound is quite traditional, but the boisterous backing band adds depth and heft. there’s a dreamy sway to the oh Hellos, exemplified in several singles off forthcoming LP Dear Wormwood. tyler and Maggie Heath lead the act, but don’t show up expecting quiet duets. the oh Hellos prefer a broader stage presence, fit with fiddles, electric guitars, accordions and plenty of percussion. MARK StocK. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 9 pm. $15 advance, $17 day of show. All ages.
SUNDAY, SEPT. 27 Goatsnake, Black Breath, Battalion of Saints, Obliterations
coURtESy of PRURIEnt
[GRooVE MonStERS] Heavy metal has an extremely strong ten-
dates here dency toward cultural conservativism. If a particular genre, era or band’s sound ain’t broke, why try doing anything new? Going into Goatsnake’s new album, Black Age Blues, the expectation is to find variations on the themes created long ago by stoner-doom forefathers Sleep and the obsessed, from whose ashes Goatsnake emerged. And that is precisely correct. But Goatsnake also surprises with a lot of tight, bluesy doom, given a surprising amount of depth by way of exemplary use of backing vocals. the band is joined here by hardcore act Black Breath, who will provide a mosh-heavy contrast to Goatsnake’s groove. WALKER MAcMURDo. Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 SE César E. Chávez Blvd., 2337100. 8 pm. $15 advance, $18 day of show. All ages.
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MIC CHECK
PRURIENT The best album of 2015 is Prurient’s Frozen Niagara Falls. It’s 91 minutes of huge synthesizer hooks, plaintive acoustic guitar, winding feedback, lush field recordings, haunting spoken vocals and vicious screaming. It sounds like a lot to absorb, and it is. Frozen Niagara Falls is a sonic deep-tissue massage: Sometimes it feels great, sometimes it’s excruciating, and by the end you’ll come out feeling woozy, relieved and better for the experience. The man behind Prurient—and a raft of other projects well-known in the worlds of electronic and extreme music, including darkwave act Cold Cave—is Dominick Fernow, who is currently opening dates for legendary industrial-metal forefathers Godflesh, making for one of the heaviest doublebills of the year. WW spoke to Fernow about what it’s like to tour with one of metal’s most important bands, making “religious noise,” finding motivation in band T-shirts, and his conflicted feelings about live performance. Read the full Q&A at wweek.com. WALKER MACMURDO. WW: Has this been an aspirational experience, watching Godflesh play Streetcleaner, which came out 26 years ago, live? Dominick Fernow: It is an inspiration. I’ve really started to question the form of performance in general. I don’t know what motivates people to get onstage at all, because it is a really strange thing to do…. I was raised in a really Roman Catholic household. Maybe it’s the Catholic guilt, or just the inherent sense of self-hatred that Christianity fosters, but I just don’t have the desire to perform live. I don’t feel the need for, or even [deserving] of attention, applause, acceptance, adulation—whatever you want to call it. So seeing Godflesh do it after so long, and seeing how sincere they are and how much humility they have, I think the reflection of that is mirrored in the audience. The audience has so much time and so much respect and so much patience for them. It’s very demanding. It’s very overwhelming. Godflesh makes incredibly regimented, obsessive music. It really is like machine music. And I think that there is a suffering that goes with having to aspire to something that’s inhuman. SEE IT: Prurient plays Hawthorne theatre, 5709 SE césar E. chávez Blvd., with Godflesh and Usnea, on tuesday, Sept. 29. 8:30 pm. $22 advance, $25 day of show. 21+. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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MUSIC Empress Of, ABRA, Golden Donna
[BJÖRKIAN POP] Debuting in 2012 with a series of 13 sonically impressive, if hegemenous, minutelong songs called Colorminutes, the tough-to-Google Empress Of first set sail on relatively placid stylistic waters that recalled the Beach Boys and John Hughes soundtracks, with a little chillwave thrown in for good measure. The erstwhile Lorely Rodriguez’s predilection for bilingual lyrics and intentionally unsightly album art not withstanding, her debut full-length, Me, has more in common with her hero, Björk, deploying explosive beats, playful vocal runs and weird noises aplenty. Pop music is letting its freak flag fly of late, and considering that Rodriguez
DATES HERE is a pretty populist songwriter, calling a minor audible could find her playing arenas in a year or two. Considering Holocene’s aesthetic, though, ABRA’s minimal houseand darkwave-inspired dance pop might just steal the show. CASEY JARMAN Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8 pm. $10. 21+.
Twiztid, Blaze Ya Dead Homie, Boondox, Prozak, Wolfpac, Scum, Tragedy 503, Guilt by Association
[WOOP! WOOP!] Twiztid, which recently left Psychopathic Records to start Magik Ninja Entertainment, is probably best known for playing second fiddle to infamous former label-heads Insane Clown Posse. But Jamie Madrox and Monoxide Child’s reputation as “the even-
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BENNET PEREZ
PROFILE
Deradoorian FRIDAY, SEPT. 25 Angel Deradoorian doesn’t like to name-drop. For anyone writing about her, though, it’s hard to avoid. While playing bass in acclaimed Brooklyn art-rock group Dirty Projectors, she worked on projects with Björk and David Byrne. She toured with Animal Collective’s Avey Tare in his Slasher Flicks project, and she’s contributed her distinctive vocal flourishes to music by the Roots, Brandon Flowers and Flying Lotus. But when asked about a dream collaboration with anyone, living or dead, she demurs. “I think most of them are dead,” she says, giggling. With such a long list of collaborations on her résumé, it’s understandable why Deradoorian is adamant to make clear that her first full-length solo album, The Expanding Flower Planet, was done entirely on her own, in a studio space she built herself. “I’d try not to get down on myself about not producing something everyday that’s usable,” she says. “It’s more about going in there and being free and not a high demand of self— just letting it come to you.” Released in August, the songs on The Expanding Flower Planet are complex, ethereal and urgent. There are hints of Indian raga and looping beats recalling an African drum circle, but everything is tethered by layers of Deradoorian’s distinctive vocal acrobatics, which were a key component in the sound of Dirty Projectors. While this is a more subdued effort, there’s enough going on to make it seem like there’s a small, multinational choral army at work. When asked whom she drew inspiration from, she’s once again not completely forthcoming. “For the lyrics, there’s no credit,” she says. “It’s just how I write. It’s my least favorite part of writing. I’ve always written growing up, but in music, it becomes this daunting task to explain your feelings just in English. I think a lot of people make music because they don’t know how to talk about it. Some people can’t really operate in this reality, but they’re totally aware and present in a completely different realm.” CRIS LANKENAU.
A former Dirty Projector goes it alone. Completely alone.
SEE IT: Deradoorian plays Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., with Laetitia Sadier, on Friday, Sept. 25. 9 pm. $12 advance, $14 day of show. 21+. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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DATES HERE M AT T H E W P E R R I T H O M A S
TO THE 13TH YEAR
MUSIC
(Lucky number 13)
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MY BOY LOLLIPOP: Shamir plays Star Theater on Monday, Sept. 28.
Join us Wednesday, Sept 30 from 11am–10pm for the 13th annual
poorer man’s ICP” isn’t entirely fair. The duo are more proficient rappers, for one thing, and have shown a willingness to experiment outside of the nu metal-flavored struggle rap that characterizes the Psychopathic sound. Be warned: Fans—Juggalos, for the uninitiated—are known to party hard, so be prepared to get wild. But then, if you’re going to be in attendance, you surely already knew that. WALKER MACMURDO. Peter’s Room at Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., (971) 230-0033. 7 pm. $23. All ages.
Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, Ruby the Hatchet, Ecstatic Vision
[PSYCH GLOOM] Obsessed with the occult, horror-movie tropes and Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, U.K. psych-metal band Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats has released a new homage to the macabre, The Night Creeper. While the new album certainly maintains the style and aesthetic that made Blood Lust and Mind Control wildly popular within the metal community, Uncle Acid almost backtracks in terms of studio quality, allowing The Night Creeper to adhere to the lo-fi grit the group was praised for before it actually got to tour with Ozzy and the boys. Check out the new tunes if you like heavy riffs and songs about stabbing people. ASHLEY JOCZ Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 9 pm. $18 advance, $20 day of show. 21+.
MONDAY, SEPT. 28 Crooks on Tape
[EXPERIMENTAL] John Schmersal has quite the résumé. He was a crucial member in cult legends Enon and Braniac, and now he’s in Caribou and Crooks on Tape. Caribou may be better known, but Crooks on Tape are where it’s at. The band is largely experimental, improvising all its recordings. That means the songs are a mixed bag, but the batting average is solid. Sometimes the band sounds like UFO Club-era Pink Floyd, other times like Jim James, or both at the same time. The trio makes music that’s lighthearted, loose and full of different instruments. Beyond that, you don’t really know what you’re going to get, but that’s part of the fun. SHANNON GORMLEY. Bunk Bar, 1028 SE Water Ave., 328-2865. 9 pm. $8. 21+.
Chelsea Wolfe, Wovenhand
[GAME OF DRONES] On her new record, Abyss, Chelsea Wolfe is borrowing more than a monochromatic make-up aesthetic from the Norwegian black metal scene— she’s taking the lead-heavy sludge
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of the guitars and drowsy, droning tempos as well. There are rare occasions when she sounds a little like Björk on sedatives, but mostly it is a mid-range vocal affair that any regular at the Lovecraft is going to be fanatical about. CRIS LANKENAU. Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 SE César E. Chávez Blvd., 233-7100. 8 pm. $15. 21+.
Thievery Corporation, Sonny Knight & the Lakers
[BEATS AND GROOVES] There was enough misguided crosscultural music made in the early aughts—especially under the larger umbrella of electronic music—that now demands cross-examination. The easiest thing is probably just to avoid it all. But Thievery Corporation always seemed more interested in true collaboration and discovery than exploitation. Yes, the ganja smoke is thick enough and the tabla pervasive enough in its discography to tempt quick dismissal. But from the band’s slightly New Age bossa nova-cum-dub roots to its guestpacked opus The Cosmic Game, you’ll find heady production and a pioneering fusion of electronic hip-hop beats with live instrumentation. Which may not be enough to persuade you to brave the inevitable hippie dancing at the Roseland tonight (rich hippies, judging from the ticket price), but then again, maybe you need some hippie dancing in your life. CASEY JARMAN Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., (971) 230-0033. 8 pm. $45 general admission, $75 reserved balcony seating.
Shamir, Allie X
[NU HIP-HOP] It’s fascinating me that an artist as young as Shamir would be so spiritually connected to a more innocent time in hip-hop and electronic music. We tend to think of music as some step-bystep evolution when in fact, as Tribe Called Quest tried to explain, “things go in cycles.” For Shamir, that means minimal, colorful beats and an early ’90s fashion sense. But there’s more here than artifice: When Shamir feels less playful and really sings, as on “Vegas” and “Demon,” a smoky, brassy, genderless voice emerges that reaches way back past MJ and Prince to figures like Bessie Smith. To stand in proximity to a young artist from one of the worst places on earth— Las Vegas—who has somehow put it all together? That’s pretty rad. So while not every song on Shamir’s XL debut, Ratchet, hits the sweet spot, the totality of the artist— Shamir’s fashion, politics, spirituality, etc.—is pretty thrilling. I’m just gonna trust the kid. CASEY JARMAN Star Theater, 13 NW 6th Ave., 248-4700. 8 pm. $15. All ages.
Thirsty City: Devonwho, Ghostfeet, Mtrshka, NorthernDraw
[CLOUD FUNK] Cascadia-born Dropping Gems affiliate Devonwho honed his West Coast sound in the hazy climes of Olympia, but has since plied his trade in San Francisco and now L.A., while building a devoted online following. Having patented a special blend of bedroom G-Funk under this alias and emotional glitch-hop with his Wires For Sulu project, his recent collaborative EP with esteemed producer Shigeto, 2010, harkens to the shuffling beats and ambient pads featured on early Flying Lotus productions, a departure of style and atmosphere that makes song titles like “Tarmack” appropriate. With Ghost Feet also performing, tonight’s installment of Thirsty City is a proper showcase for the roots of a particular electronic family tree that sprouted close to home. WYATT SCHAFFNER. The Know, 2026 NE Alberta St., 960-6340. 8 pm. $5. 21+.
Mew, the Dodos
[PROG POP] Releasing its first album since 2009, Mew is back on the grid. While the group maintains its grandiose structures and the crystalline croon of lead singer Jonas Bjerre, Mew’s new album, +-, comes off as more palatable to a mainstream audience than previous efforts. With less focus on the “prog” part of its “prog-pop” hybrid—a slew of tracks are even danceable!—Mew joins the ranks of fellow indie-pop prodigies like Blonde Redhead and Passion Pit. Check out the band here with fellow hermits the Dodos before they both disappear for another six years. ASHLEY JOCZ. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 8 pm. $18 advance, $20 day of show. 21+.
CLASSICAL, JAZZ & WORLD Javon Jackson Band with Les McCann
[JAZZ JIVE] Doing time in groups helmed by players from the bop era, including a stint in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, saxophonist Javon Jackson has cut a swath across the genre, hooking up with organ player Les McCann as a touring partner. Counting a batch of Northwesterners as their band, the duo have derived a set of inspired tunes, including “Compared to What,” an arrangement cooked up by the keyboardist and Eddie Harris about 40 years back. And while jazz in this particular iteration isn’t as concerned as its forebears with expanding consciousness, the date will focus on revamping some McCann classics, as well as paying tribute to John Coltrane. DAVE CANTOR. Jimmy Mak’s, 221 NW 10th Ave., 295-6542. 7 and 9 pm Wednesday, Sept. 23. $20 general admission, $25 reserved seating. 21+.
Musette Explosion with Courtney Von Drehle and Gideon Freudmann
[SQUEEZEBOX SERENADE] Like the guitar in America, the accordion democratized music for the early 20th century’s European underclass, from French peasants to Gypsy (Roma) immigrants—including Django Reinhardt, who got his start playing banjo in a musette band, so named after the old bagpipes that originated it. When a friend gave New York pianist Will Holshouser an old squeezebox, it opened the door to that tradition and others, like Cajun and klezmer music. He formed a band with Matt Munisteri on guitar and banjo and tuba virtuoso Marcus Rojas to play both traditional and original compositions and improvisations that embrace varied influences (hot jazz, waltzes, polkas, Eastern European dance rhythms, etc.) and also take it in new and colorful directions that are both laidback and upbeat. Together, the trio has played with some of jazz and rock’s brightest stars, from Regina
Carter to Loudon Wainwright, David Byrne, John Zorn and Lionel Hampton, and even major orchestras and opera companies. Two other European-influenced musicians, Portland Cello Project stalwart Gideon Freudmann and 3 Leg Torso accordionist Courtney Von Drehle make an ideal opener. BRETT CAMPBELL. The Old Church, 1422 SW 11th Ave., 222-2031. 7 pm Friday, Sept. 25. $10 advance, $12 day of show. All ages.
Alexander Melnikov
[KEYBOARD CLASSIC] To kick off Portland Piano International’s 38th season, Russian virtuoso Alexander Melnikov, best known for his historically informed performances of 18th century music, makes his Portland debut with a quite different program that echoes J.S. Bach’s Baroque masterpiece, The Well-Tempered Clavier. Over two days, he’ll play Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s complete, wide-ranging 24 Preludes and Fugues. Melnikov’s award-winning 2011 album is considered one of the definitive recordings of the 20th century’s keyboard landmarks. Saturday’s recital also includes some Schubert classics. BRETT CAMPBELL. Lincoln Hall at Portland State Universty, 1620 SW Park Ave. 4 pm Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 26-27. $45-$55.
Northwest Piano Trio
[CAFE MUSIC] The Northwest Piano Trio—pianist Susan McDaniel, cellist Hannah Hillebrand, violinist Heather Mastel-Lipson—begins its first full season with a trio of classics that stretch across the 20th century, beginning with one of Maurice Ravel’s most ravishing creations: His 1914 a minor “Piano Trio,” whose
mysterious opening sends listeners into a world of swirling beauty influenced by everything from Baroque to Basque to Malaysia. The great Argentine nuevo tango composer Astor Piazzolla’s “Four Seasons” also nods to a Baroque predecessor, Vivaldi’s classic violin concertos of the same name, but summons the urban energy of his native Buenos Aires’ shady nightlife. Michigan composer Paul Schoenfeld’s popular Café Music stirs ingredients from Jewish klezmer, blues and ragtime into a delightfully danceable romp. BRETT CAMPBELL. Vie de Bohème, 1530 SE 7th Ave., 360-1233. 7 pm Sunday, Sept. 27. $10.
Colin Currie with the Oregon Symphony
[PERCUSSION MASTER] Scottish virtuoso Colin Currie is widely considered one of the best percussionists in the world, and that makes his debut as artist-in-residence with the Oregon Symphony a celebration worth experiencing. This three-night stint features a wild, modern piece by Currie’s countryman, James Macmilllan. “Veni, veni, Emmanuel” is a single movement in five parts marked by percussive beating hearts, blinding drum rolls and clanging tubular bells. It’s dramatic, hair-raising, important music, and an auspicious start to the sort of programming Currie is likely to be championing over the next three seasons here. Aye, walcome, Colin! NATHAN CARSON. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 228-1353. 8 pm Monday, Sept. 28. $23-$115. All ages.
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ALBUM REVIEW
Woolen Men TEMPORARY MONUMENT (WOODSIST) [PRESENT-TIME PUNKS] A familiar, jittery nervousness pulses throughout Woolen Men’s most highs t r u n g m o m e n t s. A n d while it’s still there on Temporary Monument, the band’s second album for the venerable Woodsist label, it’s relayed in a much different form. Subbing out the garagelike tendencies splayed open on the trio’s 2012 self-titled effort, Woolen Men further embrace a spartan approach to their sinewy rock, while also escalating the elegiac tension only hinted at on earlier efforts. As conspicuous as the refocusing has been, it’s guitarist Lawton Browning’s growing assuredness in his vocal delivery that’s enabled “Life in Hell” to wind up being an album standout. All that jangled finery, with Alex Geddes’ melodic bass figures wrapping around Raf Spielman’s speedy beat-keeping, makes the track a torrent of rushed emotion. “After the Flood,” “On Cowardice” and the album-closing “Walking Out” offer brief breaks from all the fast-paced punk stuff, with “Flood” coming off as both contemplative and accusatory of a culture the band perceives to have polluted its hometown. The rest of the album isn’t as somber, even as songs’ narrators continue watching life pass them by, traverse an everevolving cityscape or don’t go to college. There’s a spate of antecedents informing Temporary Monument, but Woolen Men seem to have steered themselves into a genre ripple enabling the trio to channel something supremely candid and, most of all, present. DAVE CANTOR. SEE IT: Woolen Men play Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., with Landlines and Honey Bucket, on Monday, Sept. 28. 9 pm. $5. 21+.
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
MUSIC CALENDAR WED. SEPT. 23 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Madeleine Peyroux, Stephanie Schniederman
Ash Street Saloon 225 SW Ash Mask & Marrow
Dante’s
350 West Burnside PROM QUEEN with Mishka Shubaly, and Alexa Dexa
Edgefield
2126 S. W. Halsey ST. Matthew Szlachetka
Hawthorne Theatre
1507 SE 39th An Evening with Greg Graffin (Bad Religion) Live in Portland
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St Autechre
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Javon Jackson Band with Les McCann
Justa Pasta
1336 NW 19th Ave Anson Wright Duo
Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St Rose City Round : Nashville style writer’s round
Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Psychopomp curated by Ogo Eion
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St Travis Hayes, Liam Cahill, & Ronnie Carrier at Laurelthirst
Mazza’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Bo Ayars Piano Bar
Panic Room
3100 NE Sandy Blvd Ill LUCID ONSET / STRANGE HOTEL (CA) / KEEPER KEEPER / LAST GIANT
Star Theater
13 NW 6th Ave Zella Day
The Blue Room Bar
8145 Open Mic at The Blue Room Bar- hosted by Brian Bays of Soul Progression
Tigard Public Library 13500 Hall Blvd. Indalo Wind Concert
Wonder Ballroom 128 NE Russell St. Vintage Trouble
THURS. SEPT. 24 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave Dave Alvin and Phil Alvin with The Guilty Ones
Camellia Lounge and Teazone 510 NW 11th Avenue Lori Boone and Matt Tabor
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Little Hurricane, Rin Tin Tiger
Euphoria Nightclub
315 SE 3rd Ave Aaron Dae, DJ Gwizski, Jens Irish, & Sappho
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St Autechre
Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St
For more listings, check out wweek.com.
[SEPT. 23-29]
LAST WEEK LIVE Sadistik / Sapient / Ceschi / Graves 33 / Early Adopted
LaurelThirst Public House
2958 NE Glisan St Lewi Longmire & the Left Coast Roasters
Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Shadowplay
Mississippi Pizza Pub 3552 N Mississippi Ave Red Yarn kids show
The Quadraphonnes
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld Duo, Ryan “Lone Wolf” Sawyer
Moloko
3967 N Mississippi Ave Monkeytek & Friends
Roseland Theater 8 NW 6th Ave Megan Nicole
Star Theater
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Turquoise Jeep, Rasheed Jamal, Neka & Kahlo
13 NW 6th Ave Double Tee & Dead Nation Pre$ents: MICK JENKINS & STWO with guests
Rialto Corner Bar
The Blue Room Bar
Mississippi Studios
529 SW 4th The Famous Haydell Sisters
Starday Tavern
6517 SE Foster Rd Radio Gumbo
The Old Church Concert Hall
1422 SW 11th Avenue at Clay MARÍA VOLONTÉ: BLUE TANGO PROJECT with ERIC JOHN KAISER: PARISIAN AMERICANA
The Tardis Room
1218 N Killingsworth Dionvox with Groovebirds
The Lovecraft
8145 Se 82nd Ave Cats Under the Stars
The Firkin Tavern
1937 SE 11th Ave When We Met, New Not Normals, Wet Socks (Savannah, GA)
The Old Church
1422 SW 11th Ave. Musette Explosion with Courtney Von Drehle and Gideon Freudmann
The Sweet Spot
10825 SW Butner RD Apartment 23 Erik Anarchy, The Von Howlers, and Man Hunter at The Sweet Spot
421 SE Grand Ave Withering of Light / Breathe Glass / Wrtch / Sky Symbol Rituals
Twilight Cafe and Bar
Twilight Cafe and Bar
Vie de Boheme
Valentines
Wonder Ballroom
1420 SE Powell Demure/Vasoline/Them Bones 232 SW Ankeny Megafauna, Lightning Rules EP Release, Al Muhareb
FRI. SEPT. 25 Bossanova Ballroom 722 E Burnside St STEPHAN PEARCY OF RATT/POOR BOY/ MADAME TORMENT
Camellia Lounge and Teazone
1430 SE Powell 48 Thrills/Symptoms/The Lolligaggers 1530 SE 7th Ave The Djangophiles at Vie de Boheme 128 NE Russell St An Evening with Citizen Cope + Band
SAT. SEPT. 26 Alberta Abbey
126 NE Alberta St BETWEEN THE LINES (Featuring All-Youth Cast of Maverick Main Stage Productions in NE PDX)
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
510 NW 11th Ave. An evening with Sophont & Acroyear
1037 SW Broadway Colin Currie with the Oregon Symphony
Dante’s
Artichoke Music
350 West Burnside A Special Acoustic Performance By EVERLAST
Doug Fir Lounge
3130 SE Hawthorne Blvd Michael Henchman concert w/ Mare Wakefield & Nomad
Bunk Bar
830 E Burnside St Laetitia Sadier, Deradoorian
1028 SE Water Slim Twig, Jack Name
Edgefield
1400 SE Morrison St A Family Affair Continues
2126 S. W. Halsey ST. John Bunzow
Glenn and Viola Walters Cultural Arts Center 527 East Main St. Thomas Lauderdale in Concert
Hawthorne Theatre 1507 SE 39th Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers Live in Portland
Headwaters Theatre
55 NE Farragut St. # 9 Ian Ethan: “Run Toward the Mountains” Live featuring G Maxwell Zemanovic
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave The Curtis Salgado Band
Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St The Hugs, Racer
Mazza’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd.
COLIN MCLAUGHLIN
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
Editor: Matthew Singer. TO HAVE YOUR EVENT LISTED, send show information at least two weeks in advance on the web at wweek.com/submitevents. 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: music@wweek.com.
Crush Bar
Dante’s
350 W Burnside Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band with guests
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St Ramble On : A Tribute To Led Zeppelin
Edgefield
2126 S. W. Halsey ST. Moody Little Sister
Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St Mosby, Lucy Gray, All My Exes
The Lovecraft
421 SE Grand Ave Darkness Descends w DJ Maxamillion
Mazza’s
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Pranksters Big Band
Mississippi Pizza Pub 3552 N Mississippi Ave
SPROCKET MEN: The lights went off. A warbling, unintelligible robotic voice called out from the darkness, slowly switching to the familiar “Ein zwei drei vier fünf sechs sieben acht.” And that’s when it started to get loud. The numbers 1 through 8 rendered in Matrix-esque neon green appeared onscreen, rippling and undulating in 3-D as the propulsive drumbeat grew louder. “Numbers” isn’t just one of Kraftwerk’s best-known songs, it’s also a certified banger. The four members of the seminal electronic group stood in body suits with dimensional rendering straight out of the Vectrex, tinkering away on instruments-turned-podiums. Beginning with a Computer World suite, Kraftwerk worked its way through its highly influential discography over the course of the two-hour set Sept. 19. At times being seated felt like a hindrance—“Aerodynamik” all but commands you to dance—but it helped draw attention to the concert film. During “Spacelab,” I could do nothing but sit quietly, fully captivated by the alien flying through a space station and eventually landing outside Keller Auditorium. But the highlight was when the lights went out again. When they came back on, Kraftwerk had been replaced by automated mannequins wearing matching red shirts, gray slacks and black ties. That’s right: I got to see “The Robots” performed by robots in Portland in 2015. Now I am as happy as a little girl. JOHN LOCANTHI. See the full review at wweek.com/ lastweeklive. The Alphabeticians; Jackson Emmer - live concert
Ranger Station PDX
4260 SE Hawthorne Blvd Ranger Station 1 Year Pordy w/ YUR DADDY
Revolution Hall
1300 SE Stark St #110 Live Wire featuring Aasif Mandvi, Maya Forbes, and China Forbes with music by Blitzen Trapper and Soft Sleep
Roseland Theater 8 NW 6th Ave Beth Hart
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St Star Bar 5th anniversary w/Witch Mountain, Serpent’s Caul, Sleeping Beauties
Star Theater
13 NW 6th Ave BLACKALICIOUS: Imani Tour
Turn Turn Turn
8 NE Killingsworth St Freak Feast of Golden Beats
Twilight Cafe and Bar
1420 SE Powell Cuntagious/ Schadenfreuders/Dwight Dickinson
The Blue Room Bar
3121 SW Moody Ave Vegan Beer & Food Fest + VegFest
SUN. SEPT. 27 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave Marty Friedman
Clyde’s Prime Rib Restaurant & Bar
5474 NE Sandy Blvd Ron Steen Jazz Jam
Hawthorne Theatre
3341 SE Belmont Rare Diagram, Kulululu, Beatrix Sky
The White Eagle 836 N Russell St The Grounders
Peter’s Room at Roseland Theater
Zidell Yards
128 NE Russell St. The Oh Hellos, Joseph
The Know
The Liquor Store
3939 N Mississippi Ave Mint Mile
Wonder Ballroom
Doug Fir Lounge
2026 NE Alberta St Glose, Vulgar Trade, and The Cut 45 at The Know
Mississippi Studios
8 NW 6th Ave. Twiztid, Blaze Ya Dead Homie, Boondox, Prozak, Wolfpac, Scum, Tragedy 503, Guilt By Association
The Blue Room Bar 8145 se 82nd ave A Night With SPANK!
Softcore Mutations w/ DJ Acid Rick
830 E Burnside St Jess Glynne
1507 SE César E. Chávez Blvd. Goatsnake, Black Breath, Battalion of Saints, Obliterations
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St Empress Of, ABRA, Golden Donna
Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave
8145 SE 82nd Ave Mr. Musu
Twilight Cafe and Bar 1420 SE Powell PS-AX/Pitschouse/ Universe
Vie de Bohème
1530 SE 7th Ave. Northwest Piano Trio
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, Ruby the Hatchet, Ecstatic Vision
MON. SEPT. 28 Ash Street Saloon 225 SW Ash Bibster
Goodfoot Pub & Lounge
2845 SE Stark St Sonic Forum @ 7:00pm
Hawthorne Theatre
Edgefield
2126 S. W. Halsey ST. Groovy Wallpaper with Carmina Luna
Doug Fir Lounge 830 E Burnside St Oh Land
1507 SE César E. Chávez Blvd. Chelsea Wolfe, Wovenhand
Edgefield
The Lovecraft
1507 SE 39th Godflesh, Prurient
421 SE Grand Ave rock w/ Cory, dance w/ Cory, watch videos w/ Cory
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave The Woolen Men
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave Thievery Corporation, Sonny Knight & the Lakers
Star Theater
13 NW 6th Ave Shamir, Allie X
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. Thirsty City: Devonwho, Ghostfeet, Mtrshka, NorthernDraw
Wonder Ballroom 128 NE Russell St Mew, the Dodos
Bunk Bar
1028 SE Water Ave. Crooks On Tape
Legendary Shack Shakers with Joe Fletcher
TUES. SEPT. 29 Ash Street Saloon 225 SW Ash Amy Bleu
2126 S. W. Halsey ST. Robert Sarazin Blake
Hawthorne Theatre
LaurelThirst Public House 2958 NE Glisan St Jackstraw
The Lovecraft
421 SE Grand Ave HUrricane Sandy and Barry Convex
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St. Release and Release Party Live Performance of the new single: “LETS JUST KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD” On Vinyl, including free MP3 & WAV download codes, and featuring the New Song: “Keep Portland Weird” This new
The Waypost
3120 N. Williams Ave Loop Madness
Twilight Cafe and Bar 1420 SE Powell Great Collapse/The Brass/Pageripper/ Phantom Family
Dante’s
350 West Burnside
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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Mango IPA with Mt. Hood, Simcoe, Mandarina Bavaria and Hull Melon hops
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Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
K’S
TTE WEE
WILLAME
e m i ly j o a n g r e e n e
BAR REVIEW
Where to drink this week. 1. Roscoe’s
8105 Se Stark St., 255-0049, roscoespdx.com. Fresh-hop beers taste like the farm the hops came from—and this is a very good thing. The freshest spot for fresh hops from Friday to Sunday will be roscoe’s, the apple of montavilla’s one good eye, when roscoe’s rolls out the first big fresh hop festival of the year, its Fresh Hop Summit. The big fest is in Hood river on Saturday, but roscoe’s keeps it close to home.
2. Victoria Bar
4835 N Albina Ave., victoriapdx.com. The people behind Dig a Pony, jackknife and Bye and Bye have managed to combine all three, somehow, in the old Trébol space: Bye and Bye’s patio, jackknife’s high-end décor and cocktail stylings, and Dig a Pony’s spacious floor.
3. Hamlet
232 NW 12th Ave., 241-4009, hamletpdx.com, Cathy Whims and ryan magarian’s Hamlet is an unlikely utility bar at happy hour, with fine $8 cocktails and a $5 plate of thin-sliced la Quercia prosciutto piccante—a post-business or pre-dinner stop.
4. SE Wine Collective
2425 SE 35th Place, 208-2061, sewinecollective.com. it’s still harvest time, but not much longer. Watch this year’s grapes get squished while lazily drinking last year’s crop from one of the taproom’s economical wine flights. ask for the surprise flight and open your mouth wide.
5. World Famous Cannabis Cafe
7958 SE Foster Road, 777-1667, usaworldfamouscannabiscafe.com. The reboot of madeline martinez’s accidentally world-famous pot cafe is more like a spartan, smalltown gathering space for smokers of all stripes than a pretentious multiuse den for dilettantes. get hold of weed however you see fit, bring it here and smoke in warmth, dryness and peace.
YOU’RE IN HIGH SCHOOL AGAIN: Gizmo is being a very bad boy. It’s just after quitting time on one of the first truly autumnal days of the year. The runt of the dog park edging the patio at Marthas (1300 SE Stark St., 421-9165, marthaspdx.com), the cafe and bar on the ground floor of the Revolution Hall complex, is threatening to take his rubber ball and go home. This is in direct defiance of his mother, a dark-haired woman in a Nirvana T-shirt. As entertainment goes, this is it for tonight. But hey, it’s not too bad, especially with a pint in hand. When Mississippi Studios and promoter True West teamed up to revive the long-dormant Washington High School as a mixed-use building centered on a concert theater, they envisioned the neighborhood that initially fought against it would eventually gather here, even on nights when the venue is dark. With the opening of Marthas, the project has entered its “community hub” phase. On its own, the bar is fine. It is bright and high-ceilinged, mixing modern furnishings with reclaimed pieces from the building ’s school days. Sandwiches include caprese ($7) and barbecue tofu ($8). There are pizzas, and a $9.50 breakfast special that comes with a bagel, hard-boiled egg, double espresso, juice and a copy of The New York Times. The two-dozen rotating taps are filled with staple Northwest microbrews, available for $2.50 at happy hour. Compared to the refurbished auditorium and the stunning roof deck—now called “Marthas Lookout,” though still only available for rentals—this place is the least remarkable aspect of the property. But through the chill of fall, it’s possible to imagine its small patio filling with summer crowds watching people chase their mutts around the former football field before going inside for, say, a live podcast taping in the evening. Buckman could get used to this. MATTHEW SINGER.
WED. SEPt. 23 Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Psychopomp curated by Ogo Eion
FrI. SEPt. 25 Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Club Kai Kai drag dance party - $?
SUN. SEPt. 27 Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Softcore Mutations w/ DJ Acid Rick
Moloko
tHUrS. SEPt. 24 Euphoria Nightclub
315 SE 3rd Ave Aaron Dae, DJ Gwizski, Jens Irish, & Sappho
Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Shadowplay
3967 N Mississippi Ave Monkeytek & Friends
SAt. SEPt. 26 Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Darkness Descends w DJ Maxamillion
Bossanova Ballroom 722 E Burnside St Portland INFERNO
MON. SEPt. 28 Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave rock w/ Cory, dance w/ Cory, watch videos w/ Cory
tUES. SEPt. 29 Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Hurricane Sandy and Barry Convex
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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Saison with roasted figs
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Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
PERFORMANCE DANIEL COLE
HOTSEAT
= 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: ENID SPITZ. Theater: ENID SPITZ (espitz@wweek.com). Comedy: MIKE ACKER (macker@wweek.com). Dance: ENID SPITZ (dance@wweek.com). TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, submit information at least two weeks in advance to: espitz@wweek.com.
THEATER OPENINGS & PREVIEWS Adrift in Macao
An admiring mix of the hard-boiled heroes, femme fatales and faux-tropical locales once littering studio backlots, this scattershot satire gleefully explodes every genre convention of Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age. Featuring whip-smart dialogue by Tony Award winner Christopher Durang and a catchy score from composer Peter Melnick (Richard Rodgers’ grandson), the backhanded tribute to film noir potboilers and overseas adventures follows American ex-pat Rick Shaw and sidekick Tempura—so named because he’s been “battered by life”— as they spar with the sinister McGuffin and battle against the forces of good taste and common sense. Broadway Rose, 12580 SW Grant Ave., Tigard, 620-5262. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Saturday-Sunday Sept. 25-Oct. 25. $20-$42.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
What better material for this third annual fundraiser for the Roosevelt High School Theater Department’s Opening Act Company, staged by proud RHS alumni, than Robert Fulghum’s musical theater spin on elementary education? While Ernest Zulia’s adaptation veers sentimental and David Caldwell’s gospel-fueled score is not known for its show stoppers, Fulghum’s generational touchstone is undeniably inspirational, if not naive. Twilight Theater, 7515 N Brandon Ave., 847-9838. 8 pm Friday-Saturday, 3 pm Sunday, Sept. 25-27. $12.
Camel Camel
Sitting on death row in 1923, Ukrainian poet Oleg Navolska wrote the twisted tale of two weird sisters—a surrealist fever-dream from the brain of an artist staring at death. Using clown acts, vaudeville and buffoon, Californian comedic duo Glitter Gizzard (Janessa Johnsrude and Meghan Frank) stage the story of Navolska’s Camel Sisters. It all starts with a death-worm that comes at the sisters, and from there it’s a mind-fucking multi-disciplinary show with costumes by the Wonderheads’ designer and Mooky Cornish of Cirque Du Soleil. The Steep and Thorny Way to Heaven, 210 SE Madison St., Suite 15, 262-586-9774. 8 pm Friday-Saturday, Sept. 25-26. $15.
Falsettos
A tragi-comic musical follows a gay love triangle ravaging a very Jewish New York family. This 1992 Tony Award winner got buzz at it’s opening because the AIDS crisis was just making headlines. Marvin seems to have the perfect family life, but when he leaves his wife Trina for some guy named Whizzer, Trina reciprocates by getting with Mendel, the family’s psychiatrist, and everything goes akimbo with the lesbians next door and the couple’s young son. Local stage mainstays Matt Brown and Courtney Freed lead the cast for Live On Stage’s first show of their 2015 season. With writing credits to James Lapine (Into the Woods) and William Finn (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) at least we know the script has chops. World Trade Center Theater, 121 SW Salmon St., 875-1149. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, Sept. 24-Oct.10. $25-$35.
Little Gem
Shows from Portland’s only Irish theater ensemble are a rare treat, often tucked in the upstairs back room of Kells downtown. CoHo hosts Corrib’s love letter to the everyday Irish with Emma Murphy’s play about three working-class women simply surviving.
In a series of monologues, 18-year-old Amber, her mother Lorraine and her mother Kay detail three very different stages of life. As Irish theater tends to be, it’s a dark look at coming of age, death and divorce. But there’s always stiff drink, too. CoHo Theater, 2257 NW Raleigh St., 220-2646. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays, 8 pm Saturday Sept. 26. Sept. 24-Oct. 4. $25.
Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure
Based on an original work compiled by William Gillette (the matinee idol who came to embody the great detective on stage) from the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Final Adventure fast-forwards and tweaks the canon. Adding appearances from Irene Adler and Professor Moriarty, it blends large swaths of The Final Problem and A Scandal In Bohemia. Although the play was performed for more than a century without alterations, the Magenta production will take advantage of the recent adaptation by accomplished playwright Steven Dietz, which won the Edgar Allan Poe award for loosening the play’s Victorian stiffness and imparting welcome modern wit to the iconic character. Magenta Theater, 606 Main St., Vancouver, WA, 360-635-4358. 7:30 pm WednesdaySaturday, 2 pm Saturday, Sept. 25-Oct.10. $15-1$8.
NEW REVIEWS Or,
Equal parts biography and fiction, Liz Duffy Adams’ Restoration era comedy Or, follows London playwright and poet Aphra Behn, who is determined to leave her life as a spy to pursue her dream of being a successful playwright. The parallels between Adams and Behn as powerful female writers are obvious, as are the play’s prevailing themes of love, poetry, theatre, sex and womanhood. But that hefty subject matter stays light and engaging thanks largely to the talented cast, helmed by Maureen Porters’ Behn, who is equal parts witty and wise. “I never learned how to stop loving, just how to not let it stop me,” she says in a line that sums up Adams’ take on women in power and society. Staging 1660s England with modern English dialogue and complex casting—both Amy Newman and Damon Kupper play multiple roles—keeps the energy up through lengthy scenes. Newman and Krupper quickly switch accents, mannerisms, and even genders with dexterity, and Adams’ story about one woman’s struggle to find virtue in her vices, keeps us on our toes just as much as her characters’ quick changes. Imago Theatre, 17 SE 8th Ave., 235-1101. 7 pm Wednesday-Saturday and 2 pm Sundays through Oct. 10. $18-$42.50.
ALSO PLAYING Anything Goes
Drammy Award-winning actor-director Joe Theissen brings Cole Porter’s classic 1934 musical to Lake Oswego. Full of song-and-dance numbers and tap dancing spectacles, this show-tune classic follows a stowaway on an ocean liner from New York to London who attempts to woo a nightclub singer away from the wealthy nobleman she’s engaged to. WALKER MACMURDO. Lakewood Center for the Arts, 368 S State St., Lake Oswego, 7:30 pm Wednesdays Sept. 23 and Cot. 2, 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 pm Sundays through Oct. 18. $20-$37.
The Best of Everything
On the surface, The Best of Everything is a comedy. The antiquated concept of women in the workplace serving as nothing but typewriters with tits for
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Peace out: Portland’s Funniest Person steven Wilber.
Californication ONE OF PORTLAND’S TOP COMICS IS LEAVING FOR L.A. Over the past few years, Portland has grown into a hotbed of standup comedy nights, but it still doesn’t have the paid gigs needed to carry a large roster of working comics. For that, there are basically two choices: Los Angeles or New York City. Already, stalwarts like Ron Funches and Ian Karmel have departed to Southern California for a network television sitcom and latenight writing gigs, respectively. Shane Torres, Portland’s Funniest Person in 2013, chose New York. Now, Steven Wilber—winner of Portland’s Funniest Person 2014 and a previous WW Funniest Five comic—is following the trend and migrating to Los Angeles in October. Last month, he visited the City of Angels and almost didn’t come back. “But I wanted to have a goodbye show,” he says. Before his big sendoff this Thursday, Wilber told Willamette Week what he really thinks about Portland comedy. MIKE ACKER. WW: Los Angeles is a pretty big move. Steven Wilber: It’s scary. I’m feeling better about it now, but you’re always afraid that you’ll go down there and instantly you’ll be peeing in a bag on the streets or something. Have you already done work in L.A.? The first time I went was September or late August of 2014, shortly after I won the [Portland’s Funniest] contest. And then I went down in April of this year. [I do] the same type of shows there that I do in Portland, like a small black-box theater or a bar. I think meeting people at festivals, like people who come up for Bridgetown, helps because everybody runs a show down there. If you know enough people, at least you can get some stage time. It’s much easier to get your foot in the door with somebody who knows you, rather than just cold-calling people, and it just springboards from there. Are you going down there with a job in hand? No. I’m just using the “heat” that I got from doing Just for Laughs [in Montreal]. I was told that if I stayed in Portland, that good will would sort of fade away. It’s a good time—I don’t have a job, or a girlfriend, or a lease. It’s a good time to cut and run if you have to.
You were named a “New Face of Comedy” at Just for Laughs this year. Has that put more pressure on you? When I move to L.A., I’m definitely going to feel the pressure of trying to keep afloat in this sea of talented comedians. The fears are like, where am I going to live, how am I going to eat, and will I just get lost in obscurity down there? I felt a lot of pressure that whole year [after winning Portland’s Funniest Person]. It’s like you are calibrating the audience to have this expectation, and they’re like, “We’ll see about that,” and I hated that. It was a great opportunity. It helped me get into festivals and stuff, but I hated the pressure. What was comedy like in Portland when you got here? I didn’t start until 2011. I didn’t know there was comedy here, and I think at that time there really wasn’t. There was Augie Smith, and I think Gabe Dinger was around. I did it as a personal challenge to myself. I went to school for film, but I also liked making comic books and cartooning and writing. I was just in a real funk, and standup is like the scariest thing. I was like, if I could do that I could do anything. The first open mic I did was Boiler Room. Do you feel like the scene here is good for developing young comics? There’s its share of in-fighting, or little clique behavior, but nowhere near some of the other scenes I’ve witnessed. I think Ian [Karmel] and Ron [Funches] and Sean [Jordan] and Shane [Torres] and Bri [Pruett]—all these people who I looked up to when I was starting—they were so great and nice, and just not dickheads to younger comics. Portland is a good incubator for talent. It’s open to weird stuff. It’s open to whatever type of standup you want to do. You’re not going to get swept up in politics. And you can get onstage for five minutes almost every night of the week. How did other local comics react when you announced you’re going to L.A.? A lot of congratulations. It’s weird to be congratulated for going to sleep on an air mattress in a guy’s living room. see it: Kick Rocks, Steven Wilber!: A Comedy Good-Riddance Show is at Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd. 9:45 pm Thursday, Sept. 24. $10. Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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PERFORMANCE
Equivocation In the face of religious persecution, government subterfuge and torture, what power does art have? That’s the question in Bill Cain’s post-9/11 masterpiece that filters terrorism paranoia through the lens of Jacobean London. The notoriously cruel politician Robert Cecil (Matt Smith) wants William Shagspeare (Keith Cable) to write a play about how the government stopped the Gunpowder Plot. But Shag—the Bard in all but his name—knows that staging the government’s propaganda will destroy his credibility with the groundlings. Not to mention the fact that a play about a bomb that doesn’t go off spits in the eye of the very concept of dramatic tension. Fitting of the name Equivocation, Shag uses tricks of rhetoric and staging to get around his dilemma. Post5’s staging and cast perfectly match this flexibility. As is only appropriate of his last production, Post5 co-founder and artistic director Ty Boice steals the show. JAMES HELMSWORTH. Post5 Theatre, 1666 SE Lambert St. 7:30 Friday-Sunday through Oct. 4. $20.
La Luna Nueva
One of Portland’s largest Latin artsand-culture festivals runs 10 days long at Miracle Theatre with guitar soloists, kids’ sign-alongs, multilingual theater, story times and puppetry. This year’s lineup expands the scope of the festival beyond traditional Latin influences to include performances by groups from places like Japan and Tahiti. Miracle Theatre, 425 SE 6th Ave., milagro.org. Wednesday-Sundays, through Sept. 27. $5-$35.
One Man, Two Guvnors
Clackamas Rep co-founder and artistic director David Smith-English leads the Pacific Northwest’s first production of Richard Bean’s Tony Award-winning farce, based on Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters. Set in Brighton, England, in 1963, One Man follows a young street urchin who bumbles his way into being employed by a lowly street gangster and an upper-class criminal. As he struggles to keep his employers from learning about one another, a mixture of traditional farcical antics, slapstick, audience interaction and musical comedy ensues. WALKER MACMURDO. Clackamas Repertory Theater, 19600 Molalla Ave., Oregon City, 594-6047. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday and 2:30 pm Sunday, through Oct. 4. $12-$30.
Passion Play Part III
For Passion Play, Profile Theater’s most ambitious 2015 production, the local company maintained it’s strict policy of devoting each year to a single playwright (this time, Pulitzer Prize-winner Sarah Ruhl). But Profile broke the mold by collaborating with another theater to stage Ruhl’s three separate adaptations of the passion of the Christ, as put on by three very different communities: Elizabethan England, postwar Germany and Cold War-era South Dakota. The same actors play vastly different characters across the timeswept settings, and director Samantha Van Der Merwe will follow the final installment across the river to Shaking The Tree theater after helming the first two versions at Profile. JAY HORTON.
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Shaking the Tree Theater, 823 SE Grant St., *235-0635. 7:30 pm ThursdaysSundays, Sept. 25-Oct. 24. $25.
Pippin
“How many musical gimmicks can you throw in one production?” asks Broadway in Portland with Pippin straight from Broadway. Think Bob Fosse-style choreography set to compositions by the man behind Wicked with internationally touring Les 7 Doigts de la Main acrobats as a side show. Charlemagne’s young son, prince Pippin searches for the meaning of life amid a performance troupe in this flashy mash-up of folklore from the Middle Ages and Jazz Era charades. Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St. Tuesday-Sunday, Sept. 22-27. $30-$85.
Play On!
A bumbling community theater tries to stage a murder mystery amid constant re-writes from the playwright— right up until opening night—in the New Century Players’ Play On! The Players themselves have been fighting the community theater fight since 2004, when founders started the theater as an alternative to Portland’s overflowing stage scene, so this wacky comedy hits close to home. Jo Strom Lane directs Rick Abbot’s play-withina-play comedy about short tempers and unusual personalities. WALKER MACMURDO. Rex Putnam High School Auditorium, 4950 SE Roethe Road, Milwaukie, 367-2620, newcenturyplayers.org. 7:30 pm Thursday and Saturday, Sept. 24 and 26, and 2 pm Sunday, Sept. 27. $18.
Spectravagasm
Sam Dinkowitz created Spectravagasm after dropping out of Penn State’s MFA program and moving to Portland for theater. Reverently titled “SHHH… ART!,” Spectravagasm 7 sends up the ridiculousness of the art world with song, dance and a trailer for Dinkowitz’s third mock film. Post5 Theater, 1666 SE Lambert St., 971-258-8584. 11 pm Fridays-Saturdays through Oct. 3. $5. 21+.
The Understudy
The play-within-a-play concept is a familiar one, often utilized to comic effect. Artists Rep takes it one step further with the Portland premiere of Theresa Rebeck’s The Understudy, where Harry (who’s the understudy for Jake, who’s the understudy for Bruce) must rehearse a fictional Kafka play with a stage manager whose life he ruined many years ago. If the premise proves anything, it’s that the most captivating drama happens behind the curtain. PENELOPE BASS. Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison St., 241-1278. 7:30 pm WednesdaySunday, 2 pm Sundays through Oct. 4. $25-$55.
Waiting for Godot
Blackout. The sound of marching. Then, a spotlight on a haggard man, sitting alone on a pile of rocks below a knotty tree. Before the lights even come up at Northwest Classical Theatre Collaborative’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s iconic Waiting for Godot, the production is captivating. Tucked into the tiny Shoebox Theater—large enough for only 50 or so patrons—the show feels intimate and personal without requiring any painful “audience participation” shtick. As the man struggles to take off his boots, you can see faces lean in closer from their seats, hooked. The tragicomedy escalates with perfectly timed banter—if you can claim escalation in a play about two men endlessly waiting for an absent phantom named Godot. “It’s indescribable,” says Vladimir. And somehow, that’s exactly right. RACHEL SANDSTROM. Shoebox Theater, 2110 SE 10th Ave., 971-244-3740. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday and 2 pm Sundays through Oct. 11. $25.
COMEDY & VARIETY Anon & On & On
Crafting an improvised play in the style of The Bard, the actors of the Brody Theater present all the
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
comedy, tragedy, history and historical tragicomedy that made William Shakespeare a household name long before Baz Luhrmann was even born. The Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 7:30 pm, Friday Sept. 25. $12.
Bam!
Here’s the setup: take five of the Brody Theater’s top improvisers, put them into costumes, give them some props, rearrange the furniture and then BAM! Off come the blindfolds and here comes the improv. Watch as hilarity ensues as the actors try to figure out who they are, why they’re wearing that hat and what they are doing with that spatula. The Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 7:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 26. $12.
Bianca Del Rio: Rolodex of Hate Comedy Special
Winner of season six of the Logo hit series RuPaul’s Drag Race, and winner of 2014’s Best New Television Personality award from NewNowNext, Biana Del Rio tours the world captivating fans with her sharp wit, dismembering humor and perceptive commentary that is a brash, metro kick to the ego. Newmark Theater, 1111 SW Broadway, 248-4335. 8 pm Sunday, Sept. 27. $37.25-$79.50.
men and women have recorded an album. Hosted by Andie Main, the evening’s lineup includes Curtis Cook, Barbara Holm, Caitlin Weierhauser, Nariko Ott and many more. Helium Comedy Club, 1510 SE 9th Ave., 888-643-8669. 8 pm Wednesday, Sept. 23. $5-$13.
Who’s the Ross?
Comedian Aaron Ross is taking his late-night talk show across the Willamette river. Featuring interviews with and musical performances by Kyle Craft and Rasheed Jamal, Who’s the Ross brings one of Portland’s longestrunning late-night comedy talk shows from downtown to Southeast. The Liquor Store, 3341 SE Belmont St. 8 pm Saturday, Sept. 26. $5. 21+.*
DANCE Alice in Datingland
Imagine Tim Burton trolling Tinder at Disneyland, make it a burlesqueinspired dance show, and you might have some idea of what Megan Armand’s first full-length production with Mixd Dance Company might be. Lindsey Duus as Alice falls down the rabbit hole of social media dating, ending up on a brain-bending search for self and identity with the help of her friend Cat (Shannel Williams). Multnomah Arts Center, 7688 SW Capitol Highway. 8 pm Friday, Sept. 25. $20.
For more Performance listings, visit
REVIEW PAT R I C K W E I S H A M P E L / B L A N K E Y E .T V
lecherous, cartoonish men is played to such effect that the opening night crowd was practically in hysterics. But the play, based on the 1958 Rona Jaffe novel, explores beyond the surface into the lives of five secretaries working at a New York City publishing company. Recently heartbroken but ambitious Caroline (Cassie Greer, channeling Lilith from Frasier) wants to be an editor while the other girls arre just waiting to land a husband. The roles are tropes to be sure (the naïve country girl, the aspiring ingénue, the gossip), but the overall theme still resonates even 50 years later. We still struggle with the concept of what it means to “have it all,” which is what makes The Best of Everything so funny, and so sad. PENELOPE BASS. Venetian Theatre, 253 E Main St., Hillsboro, 345-9590. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday through Sept. 27. $25-$30.
Christopher Titus
A veteran of the comedy industry, Christopher Titus is best known for his eponymous, autobiographical sitcom that ran for three critically-acclaimed seasons. Titus comes to Portland with his newest of five comedy specials, Angry Pursuit of Happiness. Known for channeling his personal life directly to the stage, Titus has been around and paid his dues, both in comedy and in life, and proves night after night that he’s one of the strongest, most confessional, comics working. Come see a man who has seen it all riff on relationships, families and the entirety of the human race. MIKE ACKER. Helium Comedy Club, 1510 SE 9th Ave., 888-643-8669. 7:30 pm and 10 pm Friday-Saturday, Sept. 25-26. $27-$35. 21+.
Earthquake Hurricane
One host is good. Four hosts are four times as good. You can’t argue with science. Portland’s powerhouse comedy showcase hosted by Alex Falcone, Bri Pruett, Anthony Lopez and Curtis Cook returns for another week of comedy in a bike shop. This week’s show features local favorites Jason Traeger, Scoot Herring and Amy Miller, alongside Sally Jordanl. Velo Cult Bike Shop, 1969 NE 42nd Ave., 922-2012. 9 pm Wednesday, Sept. 23. Free ($5 suggested donation).
Garbage People - Clockout!
Hosts Brodie Kelly and Lewis Sequeira have brought along local notables Anthony Lopez, Jeremy Laden, Brandy Feit and Ben Harkins, as well as visiting Seattleites Erin Ingle and Daniel O’Connell to tell their true stories. Clockout’s headliner, Steven Wilber, closes out Saturday’s show as part of his farewell tour. The Waypost, 3120 N Williams Ave., 367-3182. 9 pm Saturday, Sept. 26. $6-$10. 21+.
Lady Parts Justice: V to Shining V
Lady Parts Justice is a collaborative team of comedians, cultural influencers, technologists and activists. Together they use humor and outrage to expose, remove and replace antichoice zealots with pro-choice, prowomen politicians. Round two of V to Shining V will be held throughout the United States on Saturday. Celebrate the awesomeness of women across the country while drinking, laughing and learning about issues. Hosted by Bri Pruett, Portland’s V to Shining V show includes Barbara Holm, Coor Cohen, Whitney Streed, JoAnn Schinderle, Andie Main and Belinda Carroll. MIKE ACKER. Curious Comedy Theater, 5225 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 477-9477. 9:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 26. Free.
PDX Comedy Mixtape Release Party
The cream of Portland’s crop of funny
THE LEAST IMPORTANT DAY IN YOUR LIFE: Sathya Sridharan and Nikki Massoud.
Our Town, Stripped Down PCS’s classic opening is surprisingly fresh.
Thornton Wilder said Our Town was his favorite work, but that it was rarely performed to his satisfaction. It should be done sincerely without being sentimental, because that’s how the majority of our lives unfold. So it’s not only an appropriate choice but a refreshing treat that Portland Center Stage is opening its 25th season with a production of Our Town that’s faithful to the playwright’s intent. What could easily be a folksy rendering of an overproduced show instead is a stripped-down presentation of the human connection found (or lacking) in live theater. While most productions (particularly at PCS) aim to suspend disbelief with elaborate sets and props, Our Town takes a meta approach. The stage is bare, with lights and rigging exposed. The actors pantomime their props, using nothing more than a dozen or so chairs. We are consistently reminded that we are watching a play, but really we are watching underrated moments of life. Wilder’s 1938 play is set in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, just after the turn of the 20th century. The Stage Manager (Shawn Fagan) reflects on this town of 2,642—its street layout, religious affiliations, even its coordinates—where we meet the Gibbs family. Fagan repeatedly reminds us that nothing notable ever happens in Grover’s Corners. People are born, they get married, and they die, just like everywhere else. PCS’s production mimics that simplicity but soars in the caliber of its performance. Gina Daniels and Tina Chilip as Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb prepare breakfast and gossip with enough vivacity to keep the whole production aloft. The amiable and witty Fagan leads the story into metaphysical realms without becoming trite. But the company does make one notable departure from Wilder’s traditional work: the racial diversity of its cast. It seems a nod to the ongoing relevancy of a play that nearly 100 years old—our citizens might look different, but their characters stay the same. When the curtain rose on Act 3, the audience gasped. Set partially in the afterlife, the third act stands at the highest risk of Wilder’s dreaded sentimentality. But PCS’s stage is haunting and stark, and the “dead” characters’ indifference—particularly the bone-dry Simon Stimson (Gary Norman)—rings with more profundity than any tearful monologue. It’s as if veteran PCS director Rose Riordan were heeding the ghosts’ advice to the newly dead: “Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.” PENELOPE BASS.
SEE IT: Our Town is at Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th Ave., pcs. org. 7:30 pm Tues.-Sun. and 2 pm Sat.-Sun. through Oct. 11. $21-$35.
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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VISUAL ARTS
Roya Motamedi grew up in her parents’ homelands of Afghanistan and Japan and has been adjusting to living in the U.S. for the past 25 years. This makes the process of finding herself in a painting much like the effort to locate herself culturally. This push/ pull dynamic, translated into a play of vibrating color and negative/positive shapes, animates Motamedi’s pareddown paintings that she limits to just two colors and shapes. Through Sept. 26. Blackfish Gallery, 420 NW 9th Ave., 224-2634.
Back in the day, Peter Rock, an author and professor of English at Reed College, wrote stories about art to keep himself occupied as a museum security guard. His current body of work harkens back to that period with a fragmentary novel in response to work of five of his favorite photographers—Sophia Borazanian, Sara Lafleur-Vetter, Shaena Mallett, Peter McCollough and Colleen Plumb. Rock’s loose narrative, which will also be integrated within the exhibition using audio and video components, gleans details from each photograph in order to construct various moments in the lives of three young friends and other seemingly unconnected individuals, all of whom are brought together by mystical circumstances. Through Sept. 27. Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW 8th Ave., 225-0210.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins: Confessions
The Thing Itself (Or Not)
By MEGAN HARNED. 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: mharned@wweek.com.
Book of Scores
The first exhibition of curator-in-residence Chiara Giovando’s programming explores an expanded definition of sound. Giovando invited Helga Fassonaki, Tobias Kirstein, Ellen Lesperance, Johannes Lund and Alison O’Daniel to create visual scores for musical and performative interpretation. Sept. 26-Nov. 1. Disjecta, 8371 N Interstate Ave., 286-9449.
Co-Conspirators and the Possibilities of Painting in a Parallel Universe
In her first Portland show, Leslie Baum presents a series of new works in conversation with her existing painting, Co-conspirator. Using differing media and scale, each of these new pieces— which include oil paintings, large-scale drop-cloth paintings, standing floor panels and table-top watercolors— engages in conversation with the reference piece. Working both as fully realized objects and in the larger dialogue, the new works are building blocks for her painting-based installation. Through Oct. 1. Hap Gallery, 916 NW Flanders St., 444-7101.
Dark Matter
Anticipating the shorter days and longer nights of winter, Jeffrey Thomas solicited a diverse body of works exploring the theme of darkness from artists who work in a variety of media. This dark and foreboding exhibition champions a world assembled out of shadows and contrasts and promises art that’s either about the bleak, black and sinister or somehow uses darkness as a medium itself. Through Nov. 7. Jeffrey Thomas Fine Art, 2219 NW Raleigh St., 544-3449.
Eyebeam in Objects
Eyebeam, a New York nonprofit art and technology center, commissioned a group of experimental artists working in myriad tech-related forms, from conceptual to sound arts, to render their work into objects. The resultant pieces challenge, quiz, and interrogate notions of materiality and its porous relationship to data and concepts. The exhibition Includes work by Chloë Bass, Zach Blas, James Bridle, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Zach Gage, Brian House and Addie Wagenknecht. Through Oct. 31. Upfor Gallery, 929 NW Flanders St., 227-5111.
Fay Ray & Robert Yoder
Fay Ray and Robert Yoder, from Los Angeles and Seattle respectively, reject the storybook narratives of our youth to explore the shades of gray, smog and rain, that permeate our grown-up realities through collage and painting. Might be dreary, but maybe I’m just still clinging to summer. Sept. 26-Oct. 25. Carl & Sloan Contemporary, 8371 N Interstate Ave., 360-608-9746.
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Impromptu in Grey
Confessions is a collective endeavor that seeks transparency about the distinctions between collecting, curating and making, while exploring related concerns such as the care, circulation and preservation of works of art. The exhibition is organized by Portland collector Sarah Miller Meigs and Cooley Gallery curator and director Stephanie Snyder, working closely with Jessica Jackson Hutchins to develop one interrelated exhibition that expresses the distinctiveness of each space, while allowing the artist to investigate their differences in situ through experimentation and dialogue. Through Nov. 8. The Lumber Room, 419 NW 9th Ave.; Cooley Gallery, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., 777-7251.
Night Was Already in My Hands
Bisected, flattened, bleached and predyed. Pretreated canvases are the basis for William Matheson’s second solo exhibition at Nationale, inspired by poetry of the same title from Japanese modernist Sagawa Chika. Matheson’s paintings, which previously had superimposed marks that looked like smiley faces on top of everyday images of video games or screenshots, are traditionally abstract and chunky. This show takes modernism even a step further by examining the base material itself. Through Oct. 19. Nationale, 3360 SE Division St., 477-9786.
Skinning Vision
Over the past year, Rebecca Mackay Rosen Carlisle created a series of process-driven works using dense layering, thick application of paint, and physical manipulation of the surface to reimagine the body. The tactile material qualities suggest flesh and skin, and obscure nearly all underlying figurative imagery. Eyes and eye-like forms are employed as a means of drawing viewers into the work and creating an empathetic response. The pull is a result of experiencing pareidolia— in this case the recognition of a face where there is none. Through Sept 26. PNCA, Gallery 2, New Commons, 511 NW Broadway, 226.4391.
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
Fitting its equivocating title, Cameo’s new show puts source material next to its offspring for the sake of art. Featuring the work of Northwest artists Natalie Jenkins and Anderson Funk, it explores the relationship between an original and all the other possible forms that it could take. Jenkins and Funk are both craft-driven artists, meticulous with their material choices and finishings, but their work is meant to draw you away from their craftsmanship as it is meant to draw you in. Through Sept. 30. Cameo Gallery, 2809 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
This Is the Only One
Heather Watkins’ process- and material-based practice examines ideas of action and repetition, and seeing and experience, through gesture and pigment. This new series of work includes experimental forms of drawing, printmaking, installation and sculpture. Her use of the richly hued cobalt-blue ink is consistent across genres. Through Sept. 26. PDX Contemporary Art, 925 NW Flanders St., 222-0063.
Traces of the Arctic
Lauren Hartman’s embroidery and sculptural installations respond to current topics to serve as a record in our cultural conscience. After watching news of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Hartman began to focus on our relationship with the sea, which became a platform to discuss global issues connected by international waters. Through Oct. 23. Duplex Gallery, 219 NW Couch St., 206-5089.
Trust Falls & Transparent Things
Local painter Michelle Ross’ newest body of work, Trust Falls & Transparent Things, starts with outdated logos and art periodicals and ends up with abstract washes of color that refer to architectural space. Through Sept. 26. Elizabeth Leach Gallery, 417 NW 9th Ave., 224-0521.
For more Visual Arts listings, visit
REVIEW D AV I D L E W I S
Spells
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
mESSy maTErIal: Dawn Kasper’s What Is Time?
Plenty Pictures, Lacking Teeth Time-Based Art’s Pictures of the Moon With Teeth stays vague.
One of the major problems with “timebased art” is its definition, or lack thereof. Artists at PICA’s annual TimeBased Art Festival gallery this year interpreted it as renegade percussion instruments and glitter explosions at Pictures of the Moon With Teeth. What Is Time? by New York performance artist Dawn Kasper defies its simple title. Her work is scattered—cymbals, Persian rugs, loose bells, speakers, books and cassette tapes speckle the floor. A drum kit sits in the corner. Serpentine wires crisscross the ground. Mirrored walls reflect the mess from many angles. More fleeting, Portlander Peter Simensky’s Surface Contents 1 & 2 is a series of videos of glitter floating in rays of light in a deserted warehouse. Mirroring the video’s glitz, gold and silver foil on the adjacent walls crinkles as people pass. The effect is schmaltzy and nostalgic, and fades just as quickly as its gold dust. Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki’s Nami is a slowly rotating platform of radios tuned to static. As you walk in circles around the lazy Susan, it throws you into an ever-changing soundscape where the radios’ babbling voices ebb in and out of earshot. The effect is melodic and hypnotizing, but it doesn’t take long for so much circling to turn maddening. Straightforward in comparison, Eugene artist Tannaz Farsi’s And Others is a light-up text display forming a phrase from Bertolt Brecht’s “Mack the Knife”: “Some are in the/dark and others/are in the light.” Despite being literally readable, Farsi’s piece isn’t any more easily interpreted than its counterparts. Closer to that old-school definition of “time-based” than any other, Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s Vanishing Point/A Drive-in at the End of the World is a series of abstract projections, video compilations and audio clips interspersed through multiple rooms. The effect is a disjointed experience where peepholes between the rooms make you feel like you’re seeing the show through a kaleidoscope. At times, Pictures of the Moon With Teeth feels vague just for the sake of it, as contemporary art shows too often do. But as the title suggests, you’re there to see something that defies definition. MEGAN HARNED. SEE IT: Pictures of the Moon With Teeth is at 2500 Sandy, 2500 NE Sandy Blvd., 242-1419. Through Oct. 11.
BOOKS HOTSEAT
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 23 Jerry Stahl
In Permanent Midnight (later a Ben Stiller movie), Jerry Stahl documented his struggle with addiction while working as a TV writer in L.A. In Old Guy Dad: Weird Shit Happens When You Don’t Die Young, he explores his life as a 58-year-old new father. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm. Free.
Judy Nedry
In Judy Nedry’s The Man Who Wasn’t There, an Oregon wine entrepreneur gets drunk and tries to beat up a developer (the dream) and is soon found dead (definitely not the dream). It’s up to middle-aged amateur detective Emma Golden to find out the truth in the third book about Golden by the Portland author and journalist. Annie Bloom’s Books, 7834 SW Capitol Highway, 246-0053. 7 pm. Free.
Liz Prato and Lidia Yuknavitch
In Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children, the sight of an Eastern European war refugee child sends a writer into a deep depression, at which point the writer’s friends bring the child to the U.S. It’s a deeply physical novel, full of all sorts of human fluids. She’s joined by Liz Prato, who published a short story collection called Baby’s on Fire earlier this year. Broadway Books, 1714 NE Broadway, 284-1726. 7 pm. Free.
THURSDAY, SEPT. 24 Dan Baker
In Vintage, food critic Bruno Tannenbaum has washed up, relegated from newspaper column glory to his mom’s couch. But when he gets the chance to get it all back by recovering a bottle of wine that Nazis stole, he treks across Europe to get it. The debut novel from Dan Baker, he will be joined by wine educator Scott Wright. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm. Free.
Amy Schutzer, Nancy Slavin and Rita Traut Kabeto
Three Oregon poets come together for a reading. They include Lamda Literary Award finalist Amy Schutzer, recovering Coastie Nancy Slavin and Rita Traut Kabeto, who writes everything from boarding school dramas to poems about every day life. Another Read Through, 3932 N Mississippi Ave., 208-2729. 7 pm. Free.
FRIDAY, SEPT. 25 The Paradisi Chronicles
Any sci-fi or fantasy book faces a
hurdle that realism (but what even is real, man, cough, cough) doesn’t. They have to explain how their world works: its customs, legends and even physics. The Paradisi Chronicles finds an end around that: authors collaborating on the same universe. Seven will read, including Cygnus Award-winner Tristan James and fantasy and romance writer Sarah Woodbury. Another Read Through, 3932 N Mississippi Ave., 2082729. 7 pm. Free.
“Let It Be” is nihilistic? It’s something I never understood about the hippies, yeah. That’s why I was a punker and not a hippie.
A N TJ E N A U M A N N
= WW Pick. Highly recommended. By JAMES HELMSWORTH. 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.
It’s an optimistic book. How do you like humanity’s chances of finding stasis with our environment? Prognostication, despite what you might read because it sells a lot of books, is really not the realm of science. If you’re hopeful about mankind, there’s plenty to be hopeful about. I’ve read so many doom-and-gloom scenarios that I don’t think we need another one. I think that if you look at a coarse-grained view of history, you find that populations persist and they’re very hard to get rid of. That, to me, is a hopeful fact.
Mary Karr in Conversation with Cheryl Strayed
Look, dude: Just because your life is traumatic doesn’t mean your memoir is going to be great. There’s a craft to it. No one knows it better than Mary Karr, who wrote about her childhood in an industrial Texas town in 1995’s The Liars’ Club. In this year’s The Art of Memoir, she gets into the nuts and bolts of her craft. She’ll be interviewed by one of her former protégés in her Syracuse memoir workshop, Portland’s Cheryl Strayed. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm. Free.
SUNDAY, SEPT. 27 Vu Tran
In Vu Tran’s debut novel Dragonfish, Robert Ruen is a twenty-year veteran of the Oakland Police Department who trusts no one. On a robbery call, Ruen falls for a Vietnamese immigrant that stabs the perp with garden shears. Powell’s Books on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 228-4651. 4 pm. Free.
MONDAY, SEPT. 28 Censorship and the First Amendment
When the recording industry began affixing warning labels to albums, sales of the stickered albums shot up. While likely less of a driver of sales, banning a book is a similar assurance of quality, evidenced by books like Catcher in the Rye or Farenheit 451. Powell’s celebrates Banned Books Week with a lecture by First Amendment lawyer Duane Bosworth. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm. Free.
TUESDAY, SEPT. 29 Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is about her experience as a 20-something learning to grow up in a mortuary. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm. Free.
For more Books listings, visit
Greg Graffin The Bad Religion singer explains why Paul McCartney is a nihilist.
Greg Graffin has been singing—or yelling—for decades about a lot of the ideas in his new book, Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence (Thomas Dunne Books, 320 pages, $27.99). The book’s hopeful thesis is that both organisms and ideas have a tendency to persist, and humanity’s best bet is usually to contain perceived threats rather than attempt to defeat them fully. This means changing the “war” narrative we assign to everything from diseases to foreign ideologies. A briefer synopsis, barked by Graffin’s band Bad Religion on “Recipe for Hate,” from the defining 1993 album of the same name: “Our forefathers who led the way/ Their victims are still here today.” Graffin, who teaches evolution for nonmajors at Cornell University when he’s not touring with Bad Religion, integrates doses of autobiography into his multidisciplined look at population battles. By the end of the book, it feels as if you’ve had a long and fascinating conversation with an engaging, if slightly nerdy, professor friend. My much shorter conversation with Graffin took place via telephone. He was driving. CASEY JARMAN. WW: You argue in the book that humans need to be active stewards of their environment. I’m sorry to quote Paul McCartney here, but why we can’t just “Let It Be”? Greg Graffin: Part of the punk tradition that I never subscribed to was this idea of nihilism. Nihilism gets you nowhere. It’s just saying, “Nothing matters, so why do anything?” I think the “Let It Be” route is empty. Doing nothing isn’t a worldview for the future, it’s the worldview of today.
There’s a brief passage in the book where you talk about killing birds on your property. Tell me about shooting your first starling. It felt really good. It was a very proud moment, because starlings are unusually crafty. They’re a very adaptable bird. I look at them as a scourge on the continent. I try to shoot them any time I can—but I only have a BB gun. My best friend shot a bird with a BB gun as a kid, and we felt terrible seeing it twitch around on the ground. You didn’t feel guilty? No, because they’re taking the lives of the birds that they displace. But I had the same exact experience as you when I was a kid. I think almost every kid shoots a bird, and they can’t believe they actually hit the thing. My friend was with me, and he put it out of its misery by plugging it in the head when it was on the ground. His sisters were close by, and they went off screaming in horror and got their mother. She came out and started yelling at us and said, “These kids are going to hell for this!” It was a major ordeal. Do kids take your class because you’re the dude from Bad Religion? Do you tell them rock-’n’-roll stories? Well, I have office hours for that if people want to talk about it. The truth is, you’d be surprised how few students really care. Those students are pretty damn serious. I don’t make judgments about it, I just know that I don’t get asked a lot of questions about music. GO: Greg Graffin’s book tour (which includes a short set of songs) stops at the Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 SE 39th Ave., 2337100, hawthornetheatre.com, on Wednesday, Sept. 23. 7 pm. $25. All ages.
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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Save The Date
Come along for Willamette Week’s Dispensary Tour! Visit five of Portland’s premiere lady-run dispensaries. Guests will ride in style with Old School PDX to each shop on the tour, and end the night with dessert at a beloved local sweets shop to be announced. Enjoy great deals at each dispensary and learn from their owners themselves about the shop.
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Five Stops
21+
Thursday, October 8 • 6-10pm wweek.com/dispensarytour 54
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
MOVIES FEATURE
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
OPENING THIS WEEK Hotel Transylvania 2
Adam Sandler’s hotel is a flourishing tourist destination for humankind in this follow-up to the 2012 nonsucky kid flick. But when his halfhuman grandson is waxing a little too normcore, Drac decides the kid needs monster training. Kevin James and Andy Samberg join in providing voices for Sandler’s brood, but director Genndy Tartakovsky thankfully threw Selena Gomez into the mix so this isn’t just I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry with animated vampires. PG. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, City Center, Division, Evergreen, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Pioneer Place, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.
The Intern
From the movie poster, you’d think this was the Monica Lewinsky scandal starring Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway. But fiercer director Nancy Meyers (Father of the Bride, The Parent Trap) flips the premise: De Niro plays a retired, widowed businessman who interns for a fashion website run by Hathaway’s version of the Devil wearing Prada. Screened after deadline. See wweek.com for Lauren Terry’s review. PG-13. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Mill Plain, Living Room Theaters, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, City Center, Division, Evergreen, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.
Jane B. par Agnès V.
B Agnes Varda’s surreallist arthouse flick masquerading as a documentary is an intimate, fantastical portrait of French actress Jane Birkin, complete with a few quick cuts and moments that play with the audience’s sense of what’s real. The film is filled with still-life tableaus right out of Western art that are a stark contrast with the subject matter: a woman in her 30s reminiscing about her birthday—”shit, so this is 30. This is not a pretty sight”—her abusive ex-husband Gaston, and the ephemera she’s collected, like a taxidermied sewer rat. Varda oscillates between Birkin’s phantasmagoria and stark cinema verite shots. A particularly captivating scene, shot in black-and-white, verges on voyeurism as it watches Birkin lounge in a bakery with a Charlie Chaplin look-alike. The “point” of the film isn’t to derive some sort of grand, larger meaning but to enjoy the romantic ideation of it all. NR. RACHEL SANDSTROM. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm FridaySaturday, Sept. 25-26, and Monday, Sept. 28.
Korla
A- One-of-a-kind L.A. weirdo Korla Pandit found minor fame in the ’40s and ’50s as the mute star of a daily television show with a strange but simple premise. Pandit, donning a bejeweled turban, would conjure exotic sounds with his Hammond organ while training his hypnotic gaze on the folks at home. That’s just the way television worked before Friends was invented. In the decades that followed, Pandit drifted to the show-business fringes with a small following in tow, and he did so while guarding a secret: Pandit was not—as he’d claimed throughout his career—a Hindu from New Delhi. He was a Missouri-born black man named John Redd. Director John Turner’s lowbudget documentary about Pandit’s life and work is a bit rough around the edges, but the film skillfully dissects the man’s double life in a way that validates Pandit’s struggle and the odd beauty of his whole show. It is the film Korla Pandit deserves. NR. CHRIS STAMM. Hollywood Theatre. 7:30 pm Tuesday, Sept. 29.
C O U R T E S Y O F W ü S T E F I L M / W W S TA F F
Editor: ENID SPITZ. 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: espitz@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115.
Kung Fu Master
B- The second Varda film in the Northwest Film Center’s (Re) Discoveries series is Kung Fu Master, remastered from the original 1987, 35 mm negative. The film opens with what can only be described as a liveaction video game sequence, complete with the kind of music that played in classic 8-bit arcade games. But that’s the only fun part of this film. Kung Fu Master takes audiences through a taboo relationship between a motherof-two housewife (Jane Birkin) and a 15-year-old kid who goes to school with her eldest daughter. Well-framed shots and understated acting make the uncomfortable subject matter easier to handle. The AIDS panic of the 1980s shows up in pamphlets and schoolyard jokes, but that fear factor doesn’t gain much traction as a plot point— and that’s intentional. This is a personal film, not a political exposé. The meat of the story comes from watching the mother’s relationship affect her family. Spoiler alert: It affects them poorly. NR. RACHEL SANDSTROM. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Friday-Saturday, Sept. 25-26, and Monday, Sept. 28.
Meet the Patels
B- Ravi Patel has American dreams of finding his soulmate in a moment of serendipity, but he also has Indian parents who want to find him an appropriate Indian bride. In this romantic-comedy-documentary, Ravi shows his foray into the world of arranged dating, and we get a look into the Indian-American experience. Through home videos and animated depictions, this real-life dating show brings us around the world on Ravi’s arranged dates with prospective matches, bringing up the challenge all first generations face when resolving the pressure the preserve their family’s culture. He adds shots of Dirty Dancing and Jerry Maguire to highlight how being raised stateside clashes with the logic of his parents’ arranged marriage. His sister, co-director and camerawoman, Geeta, has a shaky hand, but her unsuppressed giggles during pre- and post-date debriefs keeps the story grounded and sincere. Yet after learning how names, castes and hometowns align in a perfect pair, Ravi’s journey for an American happy ending is eclipsed by the fascinating intricacies of Indian matchmaking. PG. LAUREN TERRY. Fox Tower.
Station to Station
B- In 2013, visual artist Doug Aitkin led a cross-country train tour in which artists of all stripes (Beck, Jackson Browne, Cat Power) gathered in 10 cities for artistic events and concerts called “happenings.” Aitkin filmed the entire intracontinental ballistic art missile and released it as a montage of 62 one-minute videos in Station to Station. Like Jerry Garcia’s 1970 tourde-Canada (The Festival Express) before it, Aitkin’s film makes being on the train and at the events seem infinitely better than just watching a documentary about it. The artistic acts are incredibly diverse—punk guitar screeching, rhythmic whip cracking, Gregorian Rasta chanting—but the self-serious tone of the film ruins the fun. It’s only accidentally comedic, like when artist and writer Gary Indiana sits in a sparse and hauntingly lit room raging against the evils of normies while enjoying a massive iced coffee. Depending on your tolerance for good things, Station to Station may be a bit much. NR. ZACH MIDDLETON. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Thursday, Sept. 24.
Stonewall
In 1969, bricks and anti-gay slurs flew outside a Greenwich Village gay
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No morE lEdErHoSEN: Wacken screens at at Cinema 21 at 9:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 26.
Im Kino THE SIXTH ANNUAL GERMAN FILM FEST SCREENS BANNED FILMS, TRUMMERS AND METAL BANDS. Germany’s movies look about as cheery as its political arena nowadays. Its film exports in the past year included a disfigured concentration camp survivor in Pheonix, a deadly zombie virus flick called Kartoffelsalat, and Goodnight Mommy, in which twins are haunted by their mother after she undergoes face-changing surgery. Portland’s German culture nonprofit Zeitgeist Northwest is on a mission to prove not all art from Deutschland is so dark. “People always think German cinema is so dreary,” says Yvonne P. Behrens, director of this year’s sixth annual Portland German Film Festival. “The festival started out as by Germans, for Germans—but we’ve grown a diverse audience, and we want to get away from that lederhosen image. People come and say, ‘I never knew that Germany has comedies.’” Here are some flicks Behrens picked for the fest. ENID SPITZ.
Head Full of Honey (Honig im Kopf)
On a mission to prove that German films can do slapstick comedy and happy-go-lucky romps just as well as dark drama, this tragicomedy by actor-director Til Schweiger (Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, Inglourious Basterds) follows a girl and her Alzheimer-addled grandfather on their search for happiness. It’s schmaltzy to be sure—Grandpa pisses in refrigerators and ruins his family’s fancy parties like some kind of pitiable, German Mr. Bean. When he wanders off of a train, his granddaughter pulls its emergency brake, sending the police in hot pursuit. This innocent crime sends the two romping through the Italian Alps, drawing out a central theme of German responsibility versus Italian vitality that hits like a bludgeon. Less consistent, the film’s tone takes a hit as Grandpa oscillates incoherently between slapstick senility and wily insight. While Honig im Kopf falls short of the witty caper comedy that won Schweiger cult status for his turn in Knockin’, his film is just attractive and manipulative enough to appease Germanophiles willing to sit through the subtitles. NR. ERIC MILLMAN. Cinema 21. 7 pm Saturday, Sept. 26.
In the Basement (Im Keller)
If you believe the best way to learn a culture is through its subversions, you’ll know Austria with a shocking intimacy after watching director Ulrich Seidl’s darkly comedic documentary. Characters come at you like a shotgun blast, united only by their proclivities underground. Some are as innocent as teenage punks playing drums and smoking weed, others are as sordid as alcoholic Nazis playing oompah music, but Seidl presents them all from a detached perspective that gives the
potentially disturbing imagery humanity and black humor. We listen to an opera singer-turned-gun enthusiast’s singsong ode to male superiority and then cut abruptly to the hairy ass of a BDSM bottom. It’s a subtle, unapologetic wink from the filmmaker that defuses images that might otherwise be repulsive. Seidl’s camera gets uncensored access to an underground world, leaving you with fascinating memories you might wish you could forget. NR. ERIC MILLMAN. Cinema 21. 7 pm Monday, Sept. 28.
The Misplaced World (Die Abhandene Welt)
In director Margarethe von Trotta’s globe-trotting drama, Sophie is a German woman in search of her recently deceased mother’s doppelgänger in New York City. The ensuing goose chase is less wild than mildly convoluted, and following the TV movie-esque story requires a handful of big leaps of faith. It’s a shame, as Katja Riemann is compelling as Sophie when she’s given room to work, and there’s real chemistry between her and Barbara Sukowa (the aforementioned doppelgänger). But tender human moments are vastly outnumbered by little explosions of silly melodrama in The Misplaced World, and characters seem to enter and exit scenes (and entire continents) without any regard for linear narrative or common sense. An hour into the film, you might be bored by the parade of unsubtle family secrets revealed, except that von Trotta gives us a spectacularly lethargic fight between two old Germans, in which one man is beaten with a bouquet of flowers. NR. CASEY JARMAN. Cinema 21. 7:30 pm Friday, Sept. 25.
Lola on the Pea (Lola auf der Erbse)
Based on the German children’s book by Annette Mierswa, this bildungsroman follows spunky loner Lola (Tabea Hanstein), who can’t seem to catch a break between the wealthy bullies at school and coping with her father’s absence at home. Living in close quarters on a houseboat with her free-spirited mother (Christiane Paul)—they’re so tight Lola says things like “You overdid the perfume”—Lola finally finds a friend in Rebin (Arturo Pereia-Bigwood), a Kurdish boy who has just moved to town. After Lola finds out he’s an undocumented immigrant, she’s humbled by the challenges his family faces, and it puts her own struggle into perspective. As Lola faces her emotions around her absentee father, writerdirector Thomas Heinemann’s sunny children’s story waxes serious. If the cheerful musical score had any fewer horns or tambourines, this would be a legitimate drama about modern families, albeit with a cheesy ending. NR. LAUREN TERRY. Cinema 21. 3 pm, Saturday, Sept. 26.
Wacken—The Movie (Wacken—Der Film)
In Germany, heavy metal is still charting popular music. And to metal fans, the Wacken Open Air festival has the gravity of Woodstock or Burning Man. Director Norbert Heitker takes viewers on an immersive, uncensored 3-D tour of the annual three-day festival. Thanks to the film’s superb quality and editing, there’s no better way to get a sense of the overwhelming Wacken experience without actually buying a ticket, hiking in, camping out, drinking for 72 hours straight and ending up covered in mud with a ringing in your ears. The talking heads include monoliths like Henry Rollins, Alice Cooper and Micky Dee of Motörhead, and the footage of early Scorpions guitarist Uli Roth jamming with Deep Purple is worth the price of admission. But the real takeaway is just how joyous and peaceful 80,000 headbangers truly are when they’re in each other’s company and sweat. NR. NATHAN CARSON. Cinema 21. 9:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 26.
SEE IT: The Portland German Film Festival is at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave., 223-4515, portlandgermanfilmfestival.com. Sept. 25-29. Opening-night party and film $25, film only $12. Other films $10, students and seniors $8.
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
55
COURTESY OF ON THE CORNER FILMS
MOVIES
AMY bar, igniting what might still be the most influential riots in LGBT history. Already igniting debate on online forums, Roland Emmerich’s Hollywood version of the Stonewall riots is taking flak for being “whitewashed” and stars Jeremy Irvine as the lead rebel Danny Winters and Jonny Beauchamp as the street queen who might’ve started it all. Screened after deadline. See wweek. com for Alex Falcone’s review. R. Bridgeport, Living Room Theaters.
Time Out of Mind
A- I was ready to dismiss this por-
Everest XD-3D (PG-13) 10:55AM 1:50PM 4:45PM 7:40PM 10:35PM Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (PG-13) 11:20AM 12:15PM 1:00PM 2:30PM 3:20PM 4:10PM 5:45PM 6:30PM 7:20PM 8:55PM 9:40PM 10:25PM Minions (PG) 11:25AM Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (PG-13) 1:00PM ® 4:10PM ® 7:20PM ® 10:25PM ® War Room (PG) 10:55AM 1:45PM 4:35PM 7:25PM 10:20PM Intern, The (PG-13) 11:00AM 1:50PM 4:40PM 7:35PM 10:30PM Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (PG-13) 10:05PM Un Gallo Con Muchos Huevos (PG-13) 11:15AM 1:45PM 4:30PM Visit, The (2015) (PG-13) 12:25PM 2:55PM 5:25PM 7:55PM 10:25PM Straight Outta Compton (R) 7:00PM 10:15PM
Maya (Primetech Media) (NR) 9:30PM Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (PG-13) 11:35AM 12:40PM 1:45PM 2:50PM 4:00PM 5:00PM 6:05PM 7:10PM 8:15PM 9:20PM 10:20PM War Room (PG) 1:20PM 4:10PM 7:00PM 9:50PM Learning To Drive (R) 11:00AM 2:30PM 7:30PM Visit, The (2015) (PG-13) 12:15PM 2:40PM 5:10PM 7:40PM 10:05PM Walk in the Woods, A (R) 11:25AM 2:00PM 7:40PM Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (PG-13) 4:35PM 10:15PM Perfect Guy, The (PG-13) 10:00PM 5:00AM Inside Out (PG) 11:00AM 1:30PM 4:00PM 6:30PM Everest (3D) (PG-13) 11:00AM 3:45PM 10:15PM
Pawn Sacrifice (PG-13) 11:00AM 1:50PM 4:40PM 7:30PM 10:25PM Perfect Guy, The (PG-13) 11:50AM 2:25PM 5:10PM 7:50PM 10:20PM Minions (PG) 11:20AM 1:55PM 4:35PM Walk in the Woods, A (R) 7:05PM 9:40PM Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (PG-13) 11:25AM 12:25PM 1:35PM 2:40PM 3:50PM 4:55PM 5:55PM 7:00PM 8:10PM 9:10PM 10:05PM Veteran (CJ Entertainment) (NR) 1:20PM 4:10PM 7:10PM 10:10PM Visit, The (2015) (PG-13) 11:40AM 2:30PM 5:05PM 7:30PM 10:00PM The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (PG-13) 11:00AM 4:50PM 10:30PM
Pawn Sacrifice (PG-13) 11:00AM 1:50PM 4:40PM 7:30PM 10:20PM Perfect Guy, The (PG-13) 11:30AM 2:05PM 4:40PM 7:10PM 9:45PM Black Mass (R) 11:00AM 12:30PM 1:55PM 3:30PM 4:45PM 6:30PM 7:40PM 9:30PM 10:35PM Captive (PG-13) 11:20AM 2:00PM 4:35PM 7:15PM 9:50PM Ant-Man (PG-13) 7:05PM 10:00PM Inside Out (PG) 11:10AM 1:45PM 4:20PM 90 Minutes In Heaven (PG-13) 1:55PM 4:50PM 7:45PM 10:35PM Everest (PG-13) 12:10PM 3:15PM 6:15PM 9:15PM Hotel Transylvania 2 (3D) (PG) 12:20PM 12:20PM ® 2:50PM 2:50PM ® 5:20PM 5:20PM ® 7:50PM 7:50PM ® 10:20PM 10:20PM ® Hotel Transylvania 2 (PG) 11:05AM 1:35PM 4:05PM 6:40PM 9:10PM Green Inferno, The (R) 12:30PM 3:00PM 5:30PM 8:00PM 10:30PM Grandma (R) 11:05AM 1:15PM 3:25PM 5:35PM 7:50PM
Everest (PG-13) 12:30PM 7:00PM Intern, The (PG-13) 11:00AM 1:50PM 4:40PM 7:35PM 10:30PM Black Mass (R) 12:00PM 1:20PM 3:00PM 4:20PM 6:00PM 7:20PM 9:00PM 10:20PM Hotel Transylvania 2 (3D) (PG) 11:25AM 1:20PM 3:40PM 6:00PM 8:20PM 10:40PM Hotel Transylvania 2 (PG) 11:00AM 12:10PM 2:30PM 4:50PM 7:10PM 9:30PM Grandma (R) 11:20AM 1:30PM 3:40PM 5:50PM 8:00PM 10:10PM Green Inferno, The (R) 12:50PM 3:15PM 5:40PM 8:00PM 10:25PM
Shaun the Sheep Movie (PG) 11:35AM 2:05PM 4:30PM Straight Outta Compton (R) 6:50PM 10:10PM Everest (3D) (PG-13) 11:00AM 4:40PM 10:30PM Everest (PG-13) 1:50PM 7:35PM Black Mass (R) 12:45PM 3:55PM 6:55PM 9:55PM Intern, The (PG-13) 12:30PM 3:45PM 7:00PM 10:15PM Ant-Man (PG-13) 2:00PM 7:40PM Hotel Transylvania 2 (PG) 2:15PM 4:45PM 7:15PM Inside Out (PG) 11:05AM 1:40PM 4:15PM Hotel Transylvania 2 (3D) (PG) 11:45AM 9:45PM Gift, The (2015) (R) 7:20PM 10:00PM Green Inferno, The (R) 11:30AM 2:10PM 4:50PM 7:30PM 10:15PM
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Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
trait of homelessness as Oscarbaiting trash, but Oren Moverman’s understated film about a father’s struggle with mental illness avoids your typical narrative trickery. No revelatory ups or downs, just a fragmented Richard Gere searching for the words. Gere’s George waits in one of many offices, unable to obtain welfare benefits due to personal weakness and systemic bureaucracy alike. His lone pal, played by the captivating Ben Vereen, rattles on about love and family, but rather than offering his own insight, George can only stare into the distance. The hidden camera never cuts away from George, always leering, allowing him not a moment’s privacy, and you’re forced to fill the void in his eyes with some level of empathy. This demands a lot from the viewer, and while the appeal may not prove universal, I’ll be damned if you don’t feel a thing or two. NR. ERIC MILLMAN. Living Room Theaters.
STILL SHOWING Amy
A Even if you followed Amy Winehouse’s career, it’s hard to keep from crossing your fingers for a different ending while watching Amy. Filmmaker Asif Kapadia approaches this exposé of “the girl behind Amy Winehouse” with his usual, unconventional eye, using sound clips from the star, her friends and colleagues to narrate Amy’s home videos and live performances. Getting familiar with prefamous Amy makes watching the tabloids tear her from public grace more unnerving than ever. The drugs get harder and the footage gets more graphic. But like the loyal accompanists that played with her to the end, you feel compelled to believe she’s going to turn everything around. R. LAUREN TERRY. Academy, Cinema 21, Laurelhurst.
Ant-Man
B+ Ant-Man is a largely self-contained, breezy, hilarious and gorgeous heist film that manages a feat few recent superhero films do: It stands up well on its own. Ex-con Scott Lang (a beefed-up
Paul Rudd) invades the home of Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and finds a weird-looking suit that can shrink its wearer to insect size while granting super strength and the ability to control ants telepathically. He’s nobody’s favorite superhero, but director Peyton Reed is fully aware of this dopiness, and just runs with it. If it were a comic book, it wouldn’t be the kind you put in a Mylar bag. It’d be one that you read with greasy fingers and childlike relish. PG-13. AP KRYZA. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Evergreen, Movies on TV, Pioneer Place, Wilsonville.
Best of Enemies
A This doc centers on the debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley during the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions and plunges viewers into the frothy political climate of protests against militarized police in a decade when people were fighting for freedom of body and opinion. R. LAUREN TERRY. Laurelhurst.
Fantastic Four
D While neither Avengers: Age of Ultron nor Ant-Man were total failures, they were, at least, fun. Fantastic Four is decidedly not fun and—with the exception of largely decent casting and some genuinely compelling flashbacks—a total failure. PG-13. CASEY JARMAN. Avalon, Vancouver, Joy, Valley.
The Gift
C The Gift is that rare mass-marketed psychological thriller that’s less concerned with scares than nuanced interiority. It’s as ominous, thoughtful and ultimately meaningless as any of the elaborate gifts left at the sparkling new home of Simon (Jason Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall). Following his dream job, the couple leaves Chicago for Simon’s hometown of Los Angeles, where a chance encounter with a forgotten schoolmate leads “Gordo the Weirdo” (writer-director Joel Edgerton) to aggressive efforts at rekindling a friendship Simon insists never existed. R. JAY HORTON. Eastport, City Center, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Tigard.
Grandma
C+ Like a feminist companion piece
to last year’s Bill Murray feature St. Vincent, Paul Weitz’s Grandma tells the tale of Elle (Lily Tomlin), who takes her neglected granddaughter (Julia Garner) under her wing when the teenager comes asking for money for an abortion. An out-ofwork poet and widow who just broke up with her young girlfriend (Judy Greer), Elle sees the situation as a chance to bond with her entitled granddaughter. So she takes the girl on a journey through L.A., visiting people from her past to raise funds for the procedure. Tomlin is great as
the wise but stubborn Elle, doling out f-bombs and sagelike lessons in equal measure. But given the episodic nature of Paul Weitz’s film, each scene is only as good as its co-star. The vignettes are designed to give us telling portraits of Elle’s life, and some scenes—particularly an encounter with ex-lover Sam Elliott— are pulsing with vitality, honesty and humor. Other times—a coffeeshop confrontation with a Christian barista or a hitchhiking debacle with a post-nuclear family—the material is too superficial for even Tomlin to shoulder. Despite flashes of genuine emotion, Grandma eventually buckles under its heavy-handedness. It would have made a great play. Instead, it’s an all right movie with a fantastic central performance. R. AP KRYZA. Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Hollywood, City Center, Division, Fox Tower, Movies on TV, Tigard.
Hitman: Agent 47
D- According to the extensive voice-over (accompanied by some third-rate CGI, which plays a larger role in the film than most characters) that begins the movie, the Hitman program was a government experiment to create super-soldiers, super-strong and devoid of human emotions like fear and love. Based on the film, its makers seem like graduates of this program since they don’t understand human emotion. The bar for well-crafted drama is already low in movies based on video game franchises, but Hitman makes the Mortal Kombat movie look like My Dinner With Andre. R. JAMES HELMSWORTH. Vancouver.
Inside Out
A Pretty much everybody in the theater was sobbing at some point during Inside Out. It’s sad. Crushingly, relentlessly sad. And absolutely brilliant from writerdirector Pete Docter, (Up). It’s about young Riley, who has to move across the country for her dad’s job, and the tiny people in her head who represent her emotions. PG. ALEX FALCONE. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, CineMagic, Empirical, Kiggins, Oak Grove, Vancouver, Wilsonville, Sandy.
Learning to Drive
B Wendy (Patricia Clarkson) is a literary critic going through a difficult divorce. Darwan Singh Tu (Ben Kingsley) is a charming, sagely driving instructor. Wendy needs to learn to drive so she can visit her daughter (played by Meryl Streep’s daughter Grace Gummer) in Vermont and get a fresh start on life. The setup is painfully formulaic, but Learning to Drive is an unexpectedly fresh take on the romcom genre from director Isabel Coixet. Oh, and there are also a few laughs—Daily Show
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The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
B+ If you walked out of Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation and thought, “I can’t wait to see another spy thriller with too much punctuation based on a ’60s TV show,” then fear not. The film feels a lot like writer-director Guy Ritchie’s amazing heist flick Snatch: innovative action sequences, unflappable characters and lots of jazzy flute riffs. PG-13. ALEX FALCONE. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, City Center, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Movies on TV, Pioneer Place, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.
Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation
A None of this film’s merits is unique to the Tom Cruise-led series, but they add up to something that’s top-ofclass for the genre. It’s not sappy. It’s a tight action movie focused on talented people working together for the good (or harm? You have no idea!) of the world. PG-13. ALEX FALCONE. Academy, Avalon, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Mill Plain, Kennedy School, Laurelhurst, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, City Center, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Pioneer Place, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.
Mistress America
B- Greta Gerwig’s newest collaboration with director Noah Baumbach has depreciated every day since I saw it. It’s a buddy movie about two intolerably self-centered women in New York. One is introverted college student Tracy (Lola Kirke from Gone Girl), who cares exclusively about getting published in a campus literary magazine and mumbling. The other is social butterfly Brooke (Gerwig from Frances Ha), who seems like Jenna from 30 Rock without the success. While the quasi-intellectual banter is fun, I just can’t get too excited about whether or not two people I do not like are going to fulfill their terrible dreams. PG-13. ALEX FALCONE. Living Room Theaters.
No Escape
B A taut, relentlessly old-fashioned
thriller that plays shamelessly on the worst fears imagined by First World families on exotic vacations, No Escape at first appears uncomfortably exploitative of a presumed collective racism. From the moment a Texan couple (Owen Wilson and Lake Bell) arrive in a politically unstable Southeast Asian country, the film obsesses over the leads’ whiteness. The story completely follows obvious ethnic lines, inviting unwelcome historical parallels, and Pierce Brosnan reprises his role as a gin-soaked colonial guide and protector. But in this case, his twinkling parody of a British secret agent has gone to seed and the Yanks have no defining characteristics beyond unflagging optimism and cheerful ignorance. As the couple runs for their lives, the film romanticizes innocence abroad more than most homegrown genre vehicles have for generations. It ignores how the proud Americans illegally enter Vietnam by any means necessary, emphasizing instead how foreign nations are all intrinsically dangerous and tourists are all inevitably luckless. This theme, hammered home again and again, proves that at the end of the day, all politics are local. R. JAY HORTON. Eastport, Clackamas. Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Evergreen, Movies on TV, Tigard, Sandy.
Pawn Sacrifice
B Pawn Sacrifice chronicles legendary American chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) through his rise from poor Jewish kid in Brooklyn to international chess superstar in the 1960s, culminating in his victory over Soviet Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber) in the 1972 world championship in Reykjavik, Iceland. Ostensibly a film about chess, the pawns in Pawn Sacrifice act more as props in a film primarily about the declining mental state of Fischer, whose meteoric rise in the
world of international chess belied his mental descent into intense paranoia and anti-Semitism. Maguire is excellent as the infamously difficult Fischer, gliding between the public braggadocio of an elite athlete and the clomping, angry and detached obsessiveness of someone whose degenerating mental health was largely glossed over for fear of spoiling his skill. Fischer’s erratic, room-trashing paranoia contrasts with the cool professionalism of Spassky and the Soviets, who understand constant surveillance to be part of their everyday lives. But Schreiber’s Spassky has the air of a rock star resentful of his role in the totalitarian regime he represents. With all these pieces in play, director Edward Zwick plays a smooth game. PG-13. WALKER MACMURDO. Eastport, Clackamas, Bridgeport, Fox Tower.
The Perfect Guy
David M. Rosenthal gives us the newest attempt at psychological thrillers about men who turn out to be— mother of all surprises—imperfect. We’ll probably choose between the JLo renditions, Enough and The Boy Next Door, and save our money for Mace. Not screened for critics. PG-13. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV.
Phoenix
A Since its debut at the Toronto
International Film Festival last summer, the nominations keep coming for this concise, moving neo-noir set in postwar Germany. Nelly (Nina Hoss) has just returned from a concentration camp, her face disfigured beyond recognition. “I no longer exist,” she says after seeing her unfamiliar reflection, but we’re hooked into her twisted search for what remains of her sense of self. PG-13. LAUREN TERRY. Cinema 21, City Center.
Pixels
C Those who are bored by the sight of exploding national monuments can at least rejoice in a watching them reduced to rainbow-colored LED rubble. Visuals aside, though, the allwhite cast is dull and unconvincing— one realizes a trip to Ground Kontrol would have been cheaper and more satisfying. PG-13. CASEY JARMAN. Academy, Avalon, Clackamas, Kennedy School, Movies on TV, Tigard.
Shaun the Sheep Movie
A- In a vibrant return to traditional clay animation, Shaun the Sheep Movie tells a fresh story with the familiar painstaking imagery that makes Aardman Studios the “English Pixar.” Steeped in the tongue-incheek charm of the original Wallace & Gromit, parents will find as much in store for them as their children. PG. LAUREN TERRY. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Lloyd Center.
Sleeping With Other People
C Remember the first person you slept with? You’re still holding a torch for them, right? No? Then you aren’t Jake (Jason Sudeikis). After a hot and steamy night with Lainey (Alison Brie) on the roof of a Columbia dorm, he reconnects with her 12 years later at a support group for people with sex addictions. He’s now a serial cheater, while she keeps sabotaging relationships by sleeping with her gyno (Adam Scott). So they decide to use each other as a test case: Can they hang out with someone without trying to bonk them? If that sounds like the kind of thing no one has ever or would ever do, that’s because it is. Though chockfull of laughs (thanks in no small part to Jason Mantzoukas as Jake’s business partner) and opportunities to leer at an underdressed Brie, the movie is missing other critical elements, like a smooth narrative arc, or editing that shows characters’ reactions to important events in the film. Still, Scott’s John Waters-y ’stache almost makes up for it. Almost. R. JAMES HELMSWORTH. Fox Tower.
Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine
B Director Alex Gibney, who earlier
this year put L. Ron Hubbard and his acolytes under the microscope in Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, swings his spotlight over to the Apple cult’s beloved leader in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. Gibney’s sketch of Apple’s history and latter-day market dominance is perfectly serviceable, but the film doesn’t heat up until its final third, when Gibney gets to work on his decanonization of St. Jobs, the Dylan-quoting monomaniac whose ostensible liberation theology belied a cold, calculating will to power. That a rich genius just cared mostly about himself is not all that surprising, and viewers who are even a little bit cynical about capitalist triumphalism won’t find any new fuel here. But we should remember Gibney’s film when the next savior starts talking sweet to us. R. CHRIS STAMM. Kiggins, Living Room Theaters.
but the humor, even though it’s unintentional, makes it hard to stay in the moment. “Little kid, will you climb into the oven please?” We’ll give it to M. Night, he does make us feel trapped in an uncomfortable spot. PG-13. ALEX FALCONE. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, City Center, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Pioneer Place, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.
A Walk in the Woods
B+ Based on Bill Bryson’s novel,
this film shows Robert Redford as Bryson, embarking on a hike of the Appalachian Trail, joined by an estranged friend from his youth, Stephen Katz (Nick Nolte). The pair of older men, unfit for the strenuous length of the trail, meet skeptical glances from their perky, young fellow hikers and wheeze as troops
of Boy Scouts trot past. At their age, even crossing the slick rocks of a minor stream amps up the tension along the way. Nolte is bloated and gravelly as ever, but as morbidly amusing as his physical comedy comes off, the screenplay sets up honest, candid conversations between two men coming to grips with their mortality. Director Ken Kwapis mixes in stunning shots of the pristine forests and seemingly mile-deep ravines, so awe-inspiring that, like Bryson and Katz, one is reminded that the need for validation is not at all the meaning of life. R. LAUREN TERRY. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Bridgeport, City Center, Division, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Tigard, Wilsonville.
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REVIEW
Straight Outta Compton
R A M A C C - BY- S A- 2 . 0 - F R
expats Samantha Bee and John Hodgman play supporting roles, after all. R. JOHN LOCANTHI. Cedar Hills, Bridgeport, City Center, Fox Tower.
C Telling the greatest story in the history of popular music—full of actual violence and sex and death and betrayal and redemption and brotherhood—wasn’t going to be easy. Especially since it attempts to follow three main story lines, as Dre, Cube and Eazy-E all get major play, with DJ Yella and MC Ren rightly relegated to bit-player status. And even more especially since it’s co-produced by the star subjects, who all want to manage their own images and follow their own arcs. That doesn’t really work here. As best I know, it’s a fairly faithful telling of the story, but it’s not the movie N.W.A. deserved. R. MARTIN CIZMAR. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Clackamas, Hollywood, Oak Grove, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV,
Pioneer Place, St. Johns Cinemas.
Trainwreck
C Amy Schumer is the absolute tops, but Trainwreck isn’t worth the ticket price. Amy Schumer stars as Amy, a version of herself as a magazine writer instead of a comedy writer. She inexplicably falls in love with a boring guy (Bill Hader from Saturday Night Live) who loves her back unconditionally but for no apparent reason. It goes well for a while, then it doesn’t for a couple days, then it does again. That’s the entire plot. R . ALEX FALCONE. Cedar Hills, Clackamas, CineMagic, Bridgeport, City Center, Fox Tower.
Vacation
D+ You can look forward to the same opening tune of Lindsey Buckingham’s “Holiday Road,” but this spin on 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation replaces the original’s irreverent, campy charm with puke scenes and punch lines that rely on the comedic value of a child saying “vagina” as Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms), all grown up, tries to refresh his relationship with his wife (Christina Applegate) and kids by re-creating his family’s road trip to Walley World. R. LAUREN TERRY. Avalon, Kennedy School, Laurelhurst, Mission, Valley.
The Visit
B- M. Night Shyamalamadingdong has lost the luster of his early career, so it’s no surprise he’s making little $5 million found-footage horror movies. But this entry into cheapshaky horror movies doesn’t add much to the genre. The Visit is told from the points of view of an unbelievably precocious 15-year-old who’s making a documentary about her fi rst trip to meet her estranged grandparents, and her 12-year-old brother, whose rapping is so bad it makes me want bad things to happen to him much faster than they do. The movie is packed full of jump scares and gross-outs (vomit, poop, old people naked) and a cast of people you’ve probably never heard of. The fi lm’s got some tense scenes,
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Just a Reflektor T h e r e ’s a g i a n t w a t e r m a r k splashed across the screen of my critic’s copy of The Reflektor Tapes, the new rock documentary from director Kahlil Joseph and Montreal’s Arcade Fire. That’s perfectly normal, except that the text of the watermark—“PROPERTY OF ARCADE FIRE MUSIC LLC”—can’t help but mar the way a person processes the film. It’s not just because ARCADE FIRE MUSIC LLC is a square title for an organization helmed by one of the world’s most inventive art-pop bands (disclaimer: I’m a fan), but the declaration serves as a constant reminder that the film’s contents were band-approved. That speaks volumes. As the film opens, frontman Win Butler says, “You know, I feel like our lives are a lot crazier than we ever let each other in on.” It’s tantalizing, getting us excited for an intimate look at an inscrutable group. But we get nothing except some borderline-pretentious sound bites without any context: “All these influences are layers on top of each other” and, “It’s like a diamond with a million cuts in it.” Too guarded to pass as a real documentary, the film is also too brashly edited to be a true concert film. It ends up feeling like a 90-minute commercial for a 2-year-old album. It’s a pretty commercial, sure. Joseph alternates between blackand-white and color footage of the band in Haiti, where Arcade Fire found inspiration for the Reflektor album and recorded pieces of it. Street scenes at the Haitian Carnival in Jacmel are intercut with shots of Arcade Fire’s stadium gigs, which pose questions about privilege, celebrity, history and cultural appropriation. But there’s no time for reflection. There are no band arguments, no talk of where art ends and business begins, and precious few unguarded moments. It’s hard to blame the director for any of this when the band’s name is burned into my screen. All musicians have egos, but I expected Arcade Fire to offer up something heartfelt. Instead, I got platitudes and artist statements. Then I realized that “Normal Person” is just “Takin’ Care of Business,” with some new words. As a fan, it’s a film I wish I could unwatch. CASEY JARMAN. Arcade Fire’s film doc is a misfire for die-hards.
D+ SEE IT: The Reflektor Tapes is rated PG-13. It opens 7 pm Wednesday, Sept. 23, at Cinema 21.
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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MOVIES
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IT DOESN’T SUCK: Elizabeth Barkley.
Pole Position
So Showgirls endures as the best film about female strippers ever made. And that’s a goddamned shame.
SHOWGIRLS IS THE BEST FILM ABOUT FEMALE STRIPPERS EVER MADE.
ALSO SHOWING:
BY A P KRYZA
WWEEKDOTCOM WWEEKDOTCOM WWEEKDOTCOM WWEEKDOTCOM
58
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
apkryza@wweek.com
If you think this is one of those clickbaity, contrarian stories in which I argue the virtues of trash-cinema favorite Showgirls, you’re wrong. Showgirls—showing Saturday at the Hollywood in much-deserved Hecklevision—is terrible. It’s an exploitative, misogynist piece of shit that’s entertaining to watch only because it crashes so incredibly hard. It’s also the best film about female strippers ever produced by a mainstream studio. That’s a problem. In 2012, Magic Mike proved that it’s possible to make a fascinating, humanistic and earnest film about the business of baring it all for flying dollars. It had compelling personalities, romance and the utmost sympathy for its characters. Its male characters. Naturally. Women strippers, on the other hand? They’re damsels in need of saving at best (Sin City, Closer), punching bags or drug addicts at worst. They’re burnouts (The Wrestler) or jokes (Striptease). Sometimes they’re maneaters, often literally (From Dusk to Dawn, Zombie Strippers). The thing about Showgirls is that the strippers in the film—especially “good girl gone bad” Elizabeth Berkeley—represent every one of these tired tropes. In striving to make it big in Vegas, they maim and seduce the competition. They run on drugs and sexuality. When they’re good, they’re rewarded with rough sex. When they’re bad, they’re punished with rough sex. It’s not really a surprise that Paul Verhoven— who rose to notoriety by introducing ultraviolent machines in Robocop and sneaking a beaver shot into Basic Instinct—made a film full of provocation and degradation. That’s the entire point: To push the limit. What’s more surprising is that nobody— except the also-terrible 2000 misfire Dancing at the Blue Iguana—has bothered to make a movie to counteract the shitfest that is Showgirls.
SEE IT: Showgirls plays at Hollywood Theatre. 9:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 26. $8.
Church of Film moves to the Clinton for the penultimate screening in its French Film Fantastique series, Maurice Tourneur’s macabre 1943 fable Carnival of Sinners, about a man’s attempt to undo a deal with the devil to save his soul. Clinton Street Theater. 8 pm Wednesday, Sept. 23. In the Brazilian frightfest At Midnight I Take Your Soul, infamous B-movie icon and undertaker Coffin Joe seeks the perfect woman to bear his son. Too bad it was 1963. Nowadays, a dude like Coffin Joe could do pretty well on the Craigslist Casual Encounters section. Joy Cinema. 9 pm Wednesday, Sept. 23. Projekt Records and Movies in the Dark present a 35 mm screening of the director’s cut of Donnie Darko, which is slightly less confusing and convoluted than the theatrical cut. On the plus side, it does feature Patrick Swayze, playing a pedophile for the first time since Dirty Dancing. Hollywood Theatre. 9:30 pm Friday, Sept. 25. Sergio Leone’s sprawling, gorgeously realized Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the best films of its genre, if not the best. The other two candidates? A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly…also by Leone. Hollywood Theatre. 8 pm Saturday, Sept. 26. With its twisted imagery and murderous somnambulist, 1920’s silent expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the first examples of horror on film. And, to this day, it’s still one of the best. Hollywood Theatre. 2 pm Saturday, Sept. 26. Once you get past the casual racism and rapey vibe, John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles is, well, casually racist and kind of rapey. That it endures despite that is a testament to Hughes’ and Molly Ringwald’s charms. Kennedy School. Sept. 25-Oct. 1. Banned by the Nazis in France upon its release— because, apparently the Third Reich only really loved movies about the glories of the Third Reich—Max Ophuls’ politically charged drama From Mayerling to Sarajevo deals with romance amid the events that led to World War I. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 4:30 pm Saturday and 7 pm Sunday, Sept. 26-27. The Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore romantic thriller Ghost holds up remarkably well until you consider Whoopi Goldberg’s role in the weirdest cinematic threesome of all time. Century Clackamas Town Center. 2 pm Sunday, Sept. 27.
MOVIES
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DEVIL ON CLINTON STREET: Carnival of Sinners screens at the Clinton Street Theater at 8 pm Wednesday, Sept. 23.
Regal Lloyd Center 10 & IMAX
1510 NE Multnomah St. HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 Fri-Sat-Sun 12:00, 05:00, 09:55 HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 3D FriSat-Sun 02:30, 07:30 THE INTERN Fri-Sat-Sun 12:55, 03:50, 07:10, 10:05 JUST LET GO: A NIGHT OF FORGIVENESS Mon 08:00 ROGER WATERS THE WALL Tue 08:00 THE WALK: AN IMAX 3D EXPERIENCE Wed 12:55, 04:00, 07:05, 10:10
Regal Evergreen Parkway Stadium 13 & RPX
2625 NW 188th Ave. HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 12:00, 04:55, 07:20 HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 3D FriSat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 02:30, 09:45 THE INTERN Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 12:30, 04:15, 07:15, 10:15 EVEREST Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 01:00, 07:00, 10:00 EVEREST 3D Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue-Wed 12:00, 03:00, 04:00, 07:30, 10:30
Regal Division Street Stadium 13 16603 SE Division St. HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 Fri 12:00, 02:00, 02:30, 05:00, 07:30, 10:10 HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 3D Fri 11:30, 04:30, 07:00, 09:40 THE INTERN Fri 12:30, 03:15, 07:15, 10:05 EVEREST Fri 10:00 EVEREST 3D Fri 11:45, 03:00, 06:30 BONOBOS: BACK TO THE WILD Fri 11:40, 02:10, 04:40, 07:10, 10:15
Regal Movies on TV Stadium 16
2929 SW 234th Ave. HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 Fri-Sat-Sun 12:00, 04:40, 09:30 HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 3D Fri-Sat-Sun 02:20, 07:10 THE INTERN Fri-Sat-Sun 12:45, 04:10, 07:20, 10:10 EVEREST Fri-Sat-Sun 10:00 EVEREST 3D Fri-Sat-Sun 01:00, 04:00, 07:00
Avalon Theatre & Wunderland
3451 SE Belmont St., 503-238-1617 FANTASTIC FOUR FriSat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 05:05, 09:30 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE ROGUE NATION Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 12:10, 02:40, 07:00 VACATION Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue-Wed 05:15, 09:10 PIXELS Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 01:15, 03:15, 07:10
Bagdad Theater
3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-249-7474 BLACK MASS Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue-Wed 12:30, 03:30, 07:00, 10:15
Cinema 21
616 NW 21st Ave., 503-223-4515 PHOENIX Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 06:30 MERU Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 04:30, 06:45, 08:45 GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY & THE PRISON OF BELIEF Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 03:45, 08:30 GERMAN FILM FESTIVAL Fri-SatSun-Mon-Tue-Wed CALL THEATRE FOR SHOWTIMES Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed
Laurelhurst Theatre & Pub
2735 E Burnside St., 503-232-5511 THE PRINCESS BRIDE Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-TueWed 09:30 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE ROGUE NATION Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 07:00 AMERICAN ULTRA Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 09:45 AMY Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 06:30 BEST OF ENEMIES Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 06:45 WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue-Wed 09:00 DOPE Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 07:15 MAD MAX: FURY ROAD Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-TueWed 09:15
St. Johns Cinemas
8704 N Lombard St., 503-286-1768 MAZE RUNNER: THE SCORCH TRIALS Fri-SatSun-Mon-Tue-Wed 05:00, 07:55 EVEREST Fri-SatSun-Mon-Tue-Wed 04:20, 07:30
CineMagic Theatre
2021 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-231-7919 INSIDE OUT Fri-SatSun-Mon-Tue-Wed 04:45 TRAINWRECK Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue-Wed 07:00, 09:30
Kiggins Theatre
1011 Main St., 360-816-0352 WILDLIKE Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue 06:30 COOTIES Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue 08:45 INSIDE OUT Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue 04:30 DOCTOR WHO INCREDIBLE NINTH SERIES Sat 08:15
Regal City Center Stadium 12
801 C St. HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 Fri-Sat-Sun 12:30, 08:05 THE INTERN Fri-Sat-Sun 12:10, 02:50, 05:45, 08:30 HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 3D Fri-Sat-Sun 03:00, 05:30
EVEREST Fri-Sat-Sun 08:30 EVEREST 3D Fri-Sat-Sun 12:00, 03:10, 05:20
Kennedy School Theater
5736 NE 33rd Ave., 503-249-7474 SIXTEEN CANDLES FriSat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 03:00 PIXELS Fri-Sat-SunTue-Wed 05:30 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE ROGUE NATION Fri-Sat-Sun-TueWed 08:00
Empirical Theatre at OMSI
1945 SE Water Ave., 503-797-4000 WALKING WITH DINOSAURS 3D Fri-Sat 12:00 SECRET OCEAN Fri-Sat-Sun 11:00, 02:00 JOURNEY TO SPACE Fri-Sat-Sun 01:00, 03:00 GREAT WHITE SHARK FriSat 04:00 WATERMELON MAGIC Sat-Sun 10:15 INSIDE OUT Sun 05:45 MINIONS Sun 04:00
Hollywood Theatre 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-281-4215 GRANDMA Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue-Wed 07:15, 09:15 STRAIGHT OUTTA
COMPTON Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue-Wed 06:45, 09:45 THE WINDING STREAM Fri 07:00 DONNIE DARKO Fri 09:30 THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI Sat 02:00 ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST Sat 07:00 SHOWGIRLS IN HECKLEVISION Sat 09:30 RETURN OF THE RIVER Sun 02:30 THE MOVIE QUIZ Mon 09:30 KORLA Tue 07:30 RE-RUN THEATRE 1985: THE YEAR IN VIDEOS Wed 07:30
Regal Pioneer Place Stadium 6
340 SW Morrison St. HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-TueWed 01:00, 09:30 HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 3D Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 04:00, 07:00 EVEREST Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 09:45 EVEREST 3D Fri-SatSun-Mon-Tue-Wed 12:45, 03:45, 06:45 THE GREEN INFERNO Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 01:15, 04:15, 07:15, 10:00
St. Johns Theater
8203 N Ivanhoe St., 503-249-7474-6 BLACK MASS Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue-Wed 12:00, 03:00, 06:00, 09:00
Century 16 Cedar Hills
3200 SW Hocken Ave. THE GREEN INFERNO FriSat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 12:50, 03:15, 05:40, 08:00, 10:25 INSIDE OUT Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 11:00, 01:30, 04:00, 06:30, 09:00 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE ROGUE NATION Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 10:15 WAR ROOM Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 01:20, 04:10, 07:00, 09:50 GRANDMA Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 11:20, 01:30, 03:40, 05:50, 08:00, 10:10 MAZE RUNNER: THE SCORCH TRIALS Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-TueWed 11:35, 12:40, 01:45, 02:50, 04:00, 05:00, 06:05, 07:10, 08:15, 09:20, 10:20 THE VISIT Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 12:15, 02:40, 05:10, 07:40, 10:05 THE PERFECT GUY FriSat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 04:20, 10:00 EVEREST Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue-Wed 12:30, 07:00 EVEREST 3D Fri-Sat-SunMon-Tue-Wed 11:00, 03:45, 10:15 BLACK MASS Fri-SatSun-Mon-Tue-Wed 12:00, 01:20, 03:00, 04:20, 06:00, 07:20, 09:00, 10:20 HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 Fri-SatSun-Mon-Tue-Wed 11:00, 12:10, 02:30, 04:50, 07:10, 09:30 HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 3D Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 11:25, 01:20, 03:40, 06:00, 08:20, 10:40 THE INTERN Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 11:00, 01:50, 04:40, 07:35, 10:30 LEARNING TO DRIVE Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-Tue-Wed 11:00, 02:00 A WALK IN THE WOODS Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon-TueWed 11:25, 02:00 MAYA FriSat 06:30 SUBRAMANYAM FOR SALE Sat 03:00 JUST LET GO Mon 08:00 ROGER WATERS THE WALL Tue 08:00
Valley Theater
9360 SW BeavertonHillsdale Highway, 503-296-6843 AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 06:30, 09:20 FANTASTIC FOUR Fri-SatSun-Mon-Tue-Wed 06:45 VACATION Fri-Sat-Sun-MonTue-Wed 09:00 SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE Fri-SatSun 01:20, 03:15, 05:10 MAD MAX: FURY ROAD Fri-SatSun-Mon-Tue-Wed 07:00, 09:30 HOME Sat-Sun 12:30, 02:30 SUBJECT TO CHANGE. CALL THEATERS OR VISIT WWEEK.COM/MOVIETIMES FOR THE MOST UP-TO-DATE INFORMATION
ALEXA DEXA
Wednesday, September 23rd at 6PM
“Alexa Dexa is a multifaceted artist with footholds in composition, electronic sound design, and performance. Her toychestral electronic pop solo project parades her floating vocals, handcrafted soundscapes, and enough instruments made with children in mind to rival a playpen.”
NAILS HIDE METAL
Thursday, September 24th at 7PM
“After discussing the music that they listened to and loved, MeLinda Dalton and Russ Quinn got together to write and play. The chemistry was perfect to develop the songs that came out of the union. Some time later the duo became a trio with the addition of bassist Jon Carpenter.”
THE SHAMS
Saturday, September 26th at 3PM
“The Shams are quickly becoming a fan favorite by combining their hard rocking, punked-up beat and raw, powerful vocals. They provide listeners with a new, hard-hitting perspective on the evolution of Irish music, unlike any you’ve heard before.“
MEW
Monday, September 28th at 6PM
“Matching their fascinating, enigmatic album titles and lyrics, the Danes’ music follows its own unique path, transporting a pure-pop sensibility through ever-evolving scenery and around exhilarating hairpin bends, making music as layered and expansive as it is charismatic and melodic.“
RINGS OF ALCYONE
Tuesday, September 29th at 7PM
“Returning to Portland after a twenty year absence; the founding members of Rings Of Alcyone decided it needed an anthem that had to be, “fun, quirky, and danceable.” He sat down and combined a chord progression which John had “doodled on guitar back in 1979”, along with a “Catchy Bridge” and in several hours churned out “Keep Portland Weird.”
FRIDAY-THURSDAY, SEPT. 25-OCT. 1, UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
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END ROLL
Too High to Pie Editor’s note: On Monday, Portland’s best new pizzeria, the old-school hip-hop-themed P.R.E.A.M., hosts a pizza-and-weed pairing dinner. We are pretty stoked—and as of our deadline, a few tickets were still available. In honor of the event, we reached out to Portland’s original cannabis columnist to provide his own pizza-and-strain pairings. Pairings are all the rage in cannabis right now. Thanks to recent leaps in research accomplished by teams in Israel and locally, we’re learning a lot more about terpenes, the odoriferous organic compounds responsible for some of your favorite scents, such as pine, lemon and peppermint. Fortunately, appreciation of cannabis pairings can be diverted from the curse of pinkies-up pomposity that plagues wine and beer, partly because it’s hard to get too high and mighty about a plant that was cloaked in black lights a few years ago. And yet, the magic of pizza is that you can dress it up or down. Here are some of my favorite weedand-pie pairings. WM. WILLARD GREENE. APIZZA SCHOLLS BACON BIANCA with SUPER SOUR DIESEL Apizza Scholls certainly doesn’t need much in the way of enhancement, so I’d go with a couple light hits of Super Sour Diesel, a Sour D-Super Silver Haze mash-up suited for early-evening conversation. An ideal batch of flower would accentuate the Sour’s high-caryophyllene profile, with the peppery bacon and earth notes of the Haze matching the pizza’s umami-rich pecorinoParmigiano blend. HOTLIPS SMOKED HAM AND PINEAPPLE with PINEAPPLE EXPRESS Portland has plenty of high-quality pig-andpiña options, but Hotlips gets the call because Hawaiian-style pizza is best served as a cacophony of sweet, sour, smoky and savory flavors, bedded down in melted cheese. Pineapple Express gets the nod over Golden Pineapple and Pineapple Kush because the brighter notes stand up well to the smoke and salt of the ham. (And because Hotlips delivers.) 60
Willamette Week SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
KEN’S ARTISAN MARGHERITA with CINEX One straightforward peak of style deserves another. Cinex’s effects are all-around: floaty enough to get spontaneous heads churning and hips wiggling, yet balanced with a body melt. Ken’s take on the Margherita, the true measure of any pizzaiolo, is wood-fired perfection—crust charred and chewy, the creamy fresh mozzarella layered with crispy whole-leaf fried basil. Like Apizza Scholls, there’s no need to fake an appetite. Toke easy beforehand and savor the bites, service and spectacular dining space. LITTLE CAESARS DEEP!DEEP! DISH PEPPERONI with JACK HERERBLUE DREAM SHAKE THAT’S BEEN AIRED OUT FOR SIX MONTHS. Crack open a Dew and fire up some Twisted Metal 2, and you’ve accomplished what I in the late ’90s liked to call a quadrofecta. FLYING PIE STROMBOLI with BLUE MAGOO A powerful hunger is required to plow through this Montavilla institution’s thick discs. Blue Magoo is my go-to for pre-meal tokeage, but is especially well-suited at Flying Pie because the strain is socially engaging enough for soccer parties or at least a few rounds of four-player tabletop Pac-Man. The blueberry lineage also serves to mitigate the Stromboli’s garlicky sausage and onion onslaught. SIZZLE PIE RAISING ARIZONA with DOGWALKER Dogwalker has enormous versatility. In lower doses, a night-shift navigation through the glass and steel of downtown to Sizzle Pie’s West Burnside location could be in the offing, and the strain’s powerful effects pair well with the latenight oddities in Big Pink’s moon shadow. Too many hits, and Dogwalker works like an elephant tranquilizer. If you’d prefer sticking to the couch and Fury Road, find a middle ground and dial in a house call. Either way, the peppery Parmesan chicken and bacon combo of Raising Arizona holds up well to the dense earth and loam aromas of a bowl of Dogwalker OG. EAT: Puff Puff Pizza is at P.R.E.A.M., 2131 SE 11th Ave., on Monday, Sept. 28. $59. 21+. Event starts at 5:30 pm at 2136 SE 8th Ave. Tickets available at wweek.com/puffpuffpizza.
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O N T W IT T E R Willamette Week Classifieds SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 wweek.com
61
TO PLACE AN AD CONTACT:
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CHATLINES
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Across 1 Curly-tailed Japanese dog 6 Bit of turf 10 Bone with teeth 13 Gets back to full strength 15 Debtor’s loss 16 Fireplace accumulation 17 Overcharge for a cigar? 19 Show set in Las Vegas 20 Bygone oath 21 Big name in oats 23 Los ___ (“La Bamba” group)
26 Public expressions of thanks 28 Bit of wishful thinking 30 Before, for poets 31 Stacks of wax 32 Bit of hair gel 33 “___ my keep” 35 Society page newcomer 36 Extinguished, as a candle 38 Meet in the middle? 42 Dessert often served a la mode 43 Many, with “a”
45 Prefix for pressure 46 “Honest” guy 47 Address from a rev. 48 Skyping accessory, maybe 50 Hay dummy? 53 Giant from Finland? 54 Louisiana subdivision 55 Blue movie material, slangily 57 “Ew!” 58 Program that just notifies you without blocking?
Down 1 Radius setting 2 Mauna ___ (Hawaii’s highest peak) 3 German pronoun 4 Adopt 5 Pixar movie with an entomological theme 6 Can recycler, sometimes 7 Beirut’s country: Abbr. 8 Not at all transparent 9 It may start as a flat ring 10 Hoist one player in a chess game? 11 Balance sheet heading 12 Helicopter sounds 14 Place for relaxation 18 Descendants of 31-Across 22 “You’ve got mail” hearer 23 Pot tops 24 In the blink ___ eye 25 Carnival announcer that surfaces from the water? 27 “Ready ___ ...”
29 “___-haw!” 34 Austrian psychiatrist Alfred 35 The accused 37 Guy who might try to put whiskey in your meal 39 “I shall return,” e.g. 40 Antioxidant-rich berry 41 Mountain cat 44 Full-voiced 46 Tree in a giraffe’s diet 47 It may “let out” in the afternoon 49 Gets on the plane 50 Knocked over, as milk 51 Annual sports awards since 1993 52 “Trap Queen” rapper Fetty ___ 56 Focus of “Straight Outta Compton” 59 Start to exist? 60 Jazz Masters org. 61 Word with plug or bud 62 Some hosp. employees
last week’s answers
©2015 Jonesin’ Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com) For answers to this puzzle, call: 1-900-226-2800, 99 cents per minute. Must be 18+. Or to bill to your credit card, call: 1-800-655-6548. Reference puzzle #JONZ746.
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Week of September 17
ARIES (March 21-April 19): You are destined to become a master of fire. It’s your birthright to become skilled in the arts of kindling and warming and illuminating and energizing. Eventually you will develop a fine knack for knowing when it’s appropriate to turn the heat up high, and when it’s right to simmer with a slow, steady glow. You will wield your flames with discernment and compassion, rarely or never with prideful rage. You will have a special power to accomplish creative destruction and avoid harmful destruction. I’m pleased at the progress you are making toward these noble goals, but there’s room for improvement. During the next eight weeks, you can speed up your evolution. TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Taurus-born physicist Wolfgang Pauli won a Nobel Prize for his research. His accomplishment? The Nobel Committee said he discovered “a new law of nature,” and named it after him: the Pauli Principle. And yet when he was a younger man, he testified, “Physics is much too difficult for me and I wish I were a film comedian or something like that and that I had never heard anything about physics!” I imagine you might now be feeling a comparable frustration about something for which you have substantial potential, Taurus. In the spirit of Pauli’s perseverance, I urge you to keep at it. GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In 1921, the French city of Biarritz hosted an international kissing contest. After evaluating the participants’ efforts, the panel of judges declared that Spanish kisses were “vampiric,” while those of Italians were “burning,” English were “tepid,” Russians were “eruptive,” French were “chaste,” and Americans were “flaccid.” Whatever nationality you are, Gemini, I hope you will eschew those paradigms -- and all other paradigms, as well. Now is an excellent time to experiment with and hone your own unique style of kissing. I’m tempted to suggest that you raise your levels of tenderness and wildness, but I’d rather you ignore all advice and trust your intuition. CANCER (June 21-July 22): The astrological omens suggest you could get caught up in dreaming about what might have been. I’m afraid you might cling to outworn traditions and resuscitate wistful wishes that have little relevance for the future. You may even be tempted to wander through the labyrinth of your memories, hoping to steep yourself in old feelings that weren’t even good medicine for you when you first experienced them. But I hope you will override these inclinations, and instead act on the aphorism, “If you don’t study the past, you will probably repeat it.” Right now, the best reason to remember the old days is to rebel against them and prevent them from draining your energy. LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): You may laugh more in the next fourteen days than you have during any comparable fourteen-day period since you were five years old. At least I hope you will. It will be the best possible tonic for your physical and mental health. Even more than usual, laughter has the power to heal your wounds, alert you to secrets hiding in plain sight, and awaken your dormant potentials. Luckily, I suspect that life will conspire to bring about this happy development. A steady stream of antics and whimsies and amusing paradoxes is headed your way. Be alert for the opportunities. VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): It’s a favorable time to fantasize about how to suck more cash into your life. You have entered a phase when economic mojo is easier to conjure than usual. Are you ready to engage in some practical measures to take advantage of the cosmic trend? And by that I don’t mean playing the lottery or stealing strangers’ wallets or scanning the sidewalk for fallen money as you stroll. Get intensely real and serious about enhancing your financial fortunes. What are three specific ways you’re ignorant about getting and handling money? Educate yourself. LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth,” wrote author William Faulkner. Some astrologers would say that it’s unlikely a Libra would ever say such a thing -- that it’s too primal a feeling for your refined, dignified tribe; too lush and unruly. But I disagree with that view. Faulkner himself
was a Libra! And I am quite sure that you are now or will soon be like a wet seed in the hot blind earth -fierce to sprout and grow with almost feral abandon. SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): You and I both know that you can heal the sick and raise the dead and turn water into wine -- or at least perform the metaphorical equivalent of those magical acts. Especially when the pressure is on, you have the power to attract the help of mysterious forces and unexpected interventions. I love that about you! When people around you are rendered fuzzy and inert by life’s puzzling riddles, you are often the best hope for activating constructive responses. According to my analysis of upcoming cosmic trends, these skills will be in high demand during the coming weeks. SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Some astrologers regard the planet Saturn as a sour tyrant that cramps our style and squelches our freedom. But here’s my hypothesis: Behind Saturn’s austere mask is a benevolent teacher and guide. She pressures us to focus and concentrate. She pushes us to harness and discipline our unique gifts. It’s true that some people resist these cosmic nudges. They prefer to meander all over the place, trying out roles they’re not suited for and indulging in the perverse luxury of neglecting their deepest desires. For them Saturn seems like a dour taskmaster, spoiling their lazy fun. I trust that you Sagittarians will develop a dynamic relationship with Saturn as she cruises through your sign for the next 26 months. With her help, you can deepen your devotion to your life’s most crucial goals. CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): The coming weeks will be a favorable time to break a spell you’ve been under, or shatter an illusion you have been caught up in, or burst free from a trance you have felt powerless to escape. If you are moved to seek help from a shaman, witch, or therapist, please do so. But I bet you could accomplish the feat all by yourself. Trust your hunches! Here’s one approach you could try: Tap into both your primal anger and your primal joy. In your mind’s eye, envision situations that tempt you to hate life and envision situations that inspire you love life. With this volatile blend as your fuel, you can explode the hold of the spell, illusion, or trance.
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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.” So advised author Ray Bradbury. That strategy is too nerve-wracking for a cautious person like me. I prefer to meticulously build and thoroughly test my wings before trying a quantum leap. But I have observed that Aquarius is one of the three signs of the zodiac most likely to succeed with this approach. And according to my astrological calculations, the coming weeks will be a time when your talent for building robust wings in mid-air will be even more effective than usual. PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): You are being tempted to make deeper commitments and to give more of yourself. Should you? Is it in your interests to mingle your destiny more thoroughly with the destinies of others? Will you benefit from trying to cultivate more engaged forms of intimacy? As is true for most big questions, there are no neat, simple answers. Exploring stronger connections would ultimately be both messy and rewarding. Here’s an inquiry that might bring clarity as you ponder the possibility of merging your fortunes more closely with allies or potential allies: Will deeper commitments with them inspire you to love yourself dearly, treat yourself with impeccable kindness, and be a superb ally to yourself?
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Homework Formulate your game plan for hunting down happiness during the last three months of 2015. FreeWillAstrology.com.
check out Rob Brezsny’s Expanded Weekly Audio Horoscopes & Daily Text Message Horoscopes
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The audio horoscopes are also available by phone at
1-877-873-4888 or 1-900-950-7700
BUMPER
DAHLIA
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If you or your business would like to sponsor a pet in one of our upcoming Pet Showcases, contact: Matt Plambeck 503-445-2757
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63
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