ING S O D O MICRNG A NEW
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KENT SUTER
FINDINGS
PAGE 25
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM READING THIS WEEK’S PAPER VOL. 43, ISSUE 25.
Yes, Chloe Eudaly decided to give the two people she pushed out huge severance packages. Still, neither could match the payout to Dean “Sewer Palace” Marriott. 7 Michael Jordan and the Cowlitz
tribe are expected to take $110 million a year from Oregon. 9 Controversial Portland band Black Pussy has a new video featuring footage of Martin Luther King Jr. and dedicated to those who have fought for equality. 26
ON THE COVER:
Record Store Day traces to a feud between Garth Brooks and a Portland record store. 33
The singer from the Presidents of the United States of America is now playing doughnut shops, and he could not be happier. 39 If you would like to drink at a bar shaped like a giant Flying V, there is a place. 43 While filming in Portland, Andy Dick might have gotten in a fight in the restroom at Mary’s Club. 48
OUR MOST TRAFFICKED STORY ONLINE THIS WEEK:
Painting by Rachel Brown Smith.
Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly told a gripping tale of personal loss. But it wasn’t the whole story.
STAFF Editor & Publisher Mark Zusman EDITORIAL News Editor Aaron Mesh Arts & Culture Editor Martin Cizmar Staff Writers Nigel Jaquiss, Rachel Monahan, Corey Pein Copy Chief Rob Fernas Copy Editors Matt Buckingham, Nicole Groessel, Maya McOmie Stage Editor Shannon Gormley Screen Editor Walker MacMurdo Projects Editor Matthew Korfhage Music Editor Matthew Singer
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Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
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EUDALY’S INCOMPLETE STORY
It’s an insensitive revision of fact for selfChloe Eudaly claims the fact that her father was serving purposes. If you sweep this under the rug driving drunk—and killed a child and his mother now, it’s going to resurface at election time. doing so—does not detract in any way from her —“NW Guy” point, and that the point “remains unchanged.” TAX BREAK FOR HOMEBUYERS [“What She Left Out,” WW, April 12, 2017.] That’s an interesting statement, because Almost any deduction-based tax scheme will technically it is true: Her point is no less valid benefit higher earners by definition, because you now than before the truth came out. need income from which to deduct in order to Yet anyone with a moral compass take advantage of it [“Bought and instinctively knows it was wrong Sold,” WW, April 12, 2017]. So that to exploit those deaths to advance part of the analysis really isn’t very a political agenda, however worthilluminating or helpful. while that agenda may have been. With lending standards as tight It reveals a singular lack of as they are, and with large money empathy for the suffering of others, interests competing in the singleand it shines a troubling light on the family home market, this seems like woman we elected to bring compasa fairly modest and sensible policy sion and justice to the City Council. designed to assist first-time home—“Monsieur Abderrhaman” buyers compete in the housing mar“It reveals a ket. Better them buying homes than singular lack This is not news. It was an anecdote an investment firm, no? demonstrating Eudaly’s familiarity of empathy —“pdan” with problem tenants, an event that for the coincided with the fatal collision. suffering of If this were targeted to first-time It’s not as if she were blaming the others.” homebuyers who genuinely need other driver or the tenant or the help saving for a down payment, it water cycle for the accident, or saymight be worth a conversation. ing that passing renter protections You’d still have to convince me we need to provide more incentive will prevent car collisions. When did WW become a tabloid paper? Or is to buy a home than we already do, especially when so many renters get no public handout, that a silly question. —“peripatetictrash” and we have way too many Oregonians sleeping in doorways and cars. Chloe, I voted for you, but I find the fact that —“michael pdx” you used this “personal anecdote” to beat down the political opposition to be very disturbing LETTERS TO THE EDITOR must include the author’s street address and phone number for verification. and manipulative. “Bad tenants,” “tight curve,” Letters must be 250 or fewer words. “rainy day”? More like “drunk driver,” “excessive Submit to: 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: mzusman@wweek.com. speed,” “two innocent lives taken.”
BY MA RT Y SMIT H
Last month, Blazers big man Jusuf Nurkic sustained an injury with a projected recovery of two weeks. Now, some folks are saying he should keep healing and skip the playoffs. I know Greg Oden scarred y’all, but isn’t this an excess of caution? —Barles Charkley
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Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
Ha! If only the Oden debacle were the only center-related tragedy to give Blazers boosters PTSD. Longtime fans have plenty more nightmares to wake up screaming about. I’m not a real doctor, but I’d be shocked if the medical consensus about Nurkic’s leg fracture was that within two weeks a complete recovery was guaranteed. Whether he plays or not—he was held out April 16 in the Blazers’ Game 1 loss to the Golden State Warriors—we’ll worry. Blazers fans understand that NBA centers are a fragile, delicate breed. Even new Portlanders probably recall Oden, the No. 1 overall pick of the 2007 NBA draft, whose achy, breaky legs bubbled up with seasonending injuries in four of his five seasons with the Blazers. But there was also Sam Bowie, the center we selected with the No. 2 overall pick in the 1984 draft—ahead of MICHAEL FREAKING JORDAN. After a normal rookie season, Bowie
suffered a broken tibia in each of the next three seasons. And what about Arvydas Sabonis, the Lithuanian phenom we drafted in 1986? He played amazing—if injury-plagued—basketball for the next nine years. Unfortunately, he played those years in Europe, not for the Blazers. By the time we got him, in 1995, the Blazers team doctor said based on X-rays, Sabonis qualified for a handicapped parking space. Still, he managed to limp through seven seasons on limited minutes, which makes him a tank by Blazers standards. And now comes Nurkic, a deus ex machina who came out of nowhere to power a 13-3 stretch run that saved the Blazers’ season, like what’sher-name showing up at the end of the “Teenage Dirtbag” video with Iron Maiden tickets. Is it any wonder we’re careful with him? If I had my way, he’d be on bed rest till 2020. QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com
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Two of the field generals in the wars between Oregon business and organized labor are fading away. Sandra McDonough, CEO of the Portland Business Alliance, has told many people she will retire after this year, her 13th at the helm of the city’s largest business group. McDonough, a former utility executive and newspaper reporter, is going out on a high note. She’s the 2017 recipient of the Glenn L. Jackson Leadership Award, given each year by Willamette University’s Atkinson Graduate School of Management in memory of Jackson, a legendary Oregon power broker in the 1960s and ’70s. Another state leader—and McDonough’s sometime nemesis—Our Oregon executive director Ben Unger, is also stepping down. Unger will relocate to Atlanta following the legislative session, ending three years atop the public-employee, unionbacked advocacy group that dominated statewide ballot measures for years until a bruising loss on Measure 97 last year. Unger says he’s not sure what he’ll do in Georgia or who will replace him. “We haven’t made those plans, yet,” he says.
Cully Rent Hike Gets Even Steeper
Residents of the Normandy Apartments, home to 26 public-school students whose families were facing 100 percent rent increases, won a reprieve from an April 1 rent hike that would have forced kids to move during the school year. But the relief was short-lived. The landlord of the apartment complex in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood was forced to resend the rent-hike notice after failing to deliver
it properly, delaying the increase until July, when rent will go up even higher: 125 percent. Two-bedroom apartments that rented for $620 a month will cost $1,395 a month. “This meets the families’ immediate priority to stay through the end of the school year,” says Cameron Harrington, a member of nonprofit group Living Cully. “But almost all of the families are looking for new places to live now.” Under a new city ordinance, landlord Ira Virden will have to pay relocation costs for tenants who move because the rent hike exceeds 10 percent in one year.
Prosecutors Won’t File Charges in Baby’s Death
Multnomah County District Attorney Rod Underhill’s office last week determined prosecutors will not bring criminal charges against a homeless, mentally ill woman who gave birth near an East Portland homeless camp Jan. 9 during a bitter cold snap. As WW first reported, the baby died under circumstances that have never been fully explained. There were initial indications that the child was alive and staff at Oregon Health & Science University spent 25 minutes trying to revive the baby. State Medical Examiner Karen Gunson later ruled the baby was stillborn. The mother, who records show had a history of mental illness, was admitted for psychiatric evaluation after Gunson’s ruling. Underhill’s office considered charging the mother but told Oregon Public Broadcasting on April 15 there was no case. “The child was stillborn,” deputy district attorney Charles Mickley told OPB. “Consequently, there is no homicide in the present case.”
NEWS
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS WEEK
Parting Gifts PORTLAND BUREAU DIRECTORS SERVE AT THE PLEASURE OF CITY HALL— WHICH HAS STILL PAID MORE THAN A MILLION DOLLARS TO GET RID OF THEM. BY R AC H E L M O N A H A N
rmonahan@wweek.com
In her first 100 days at Portland City Hall, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly has shown two longtime bureau directors the door. She’s also given them generous going-away presents. When Eudaly pushed out Office of Neighborhood Involvement director Amalia Alarcón de Morris and Bureau of Development Services director Paul Scarlett, they both got a year’s salary as severance pay. That doesn’t have to happen. In 2000, voters approved a charter change stripping bureau directors hired thereafter of civil service protections, yet in the past two decades began awarding severance packages to bureau directors. But those golden parachutes are the norm at City Hall: Since 2002, the city has spent more than $1 million to change leadership in the bureaus, even though the city departments are run by at-will employees, meaning they can be dismissed for any— or no—reason. The $144,000 the city agreed to pay Alarcón de Morris was such a steep figure that Eudaly’s staff has begun to question whether the tradition is necessary. “Maybe this is the flashpoint that calls into question, is this the best policy?” chief of staff Marshall Runkel told KOIN-TV on March 23. But change would be difficult under the city’s form of government, in which oversight of bureaus can shift at the mayor’s discretion to different commissioners. Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who previously oversaw ONI, gave Alarcón de Morris a rave review of her job performance in January, even after an audit exposed management problems at the bureau. The Oregonian reported on that performance review last month, and first examined the city’s fund for departing employees in 2015. Fritz couldn’t be reached for comment. Eudaly’s office declined further comment. Mayor Ted Wheeler’s spokesman says the mayor is interested in finding efficiencies.
DEAN MARRIOTT
PAUL SCARLETT
AMALIA ALARCÓN DE MORRIS
BUREAU OF ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES
BUREAU OF DEVELOPMENT SERVICES
OFFICE OF NEIGHBORHOOD INVOLVEMENT
$199,160.00
$183,000.00
$143,811.00
MORTEZA ANOUSHIRAVANI
GIL KELLEY
DAVID OLSON
WATER BUREAU
BUREAU OF PLANNING
OFFICE FOR COMMUNITY TECHNOLOGY
$121,033.20
$113,315.20
$98,044.13
BABETTE HEEFTLE
MARGE KAFOURY
NANCY JESUALE
FIRE AND POLICE DISABILITY AND RETIREMENT FUND
OFFICE OF GOVERNMENT RELATIONS
OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKING
$93,846.00
$78,404.00
$61,739.60
BIG NUMBER
16,387
People who have applied for marijuana worker permits with the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. As the Oregon unemployment rates drops below 4 percent for the first time in state history, weed keeps growing as a job sector. One way to measure that: the thousands who are seeking the $100 license required to work in the industry. The number of applicants is nearly four times the number of people who work for the Oregon Department of Corrections. NIGEL JAQUISS.
BRANT WILLIAMS
WILL WHITE
MARIA LISA JOHNSON
BUREAU OF TRANSPORTATION
BUREAU OF HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
OFFICE OF HUMAN RELATIONS
$60,080.80
$59,623.20
$34,140.10
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COLIN ANDERSEN
NEWS
Betting on a Long Shot PORTLAND MEADOWS AND THE OREGON LOTTERY ARE DESPERATE TO FIND WAYS TO COMPETE WITH A NEW CASINO. BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS
njaquiss@wweek.com
Portland Meadows, the only commercial horse-racing track in Oregon, celebrated its 70th birthday last year. In a legislative hearing earlier this month, the track’s general manager and its lobbyist pleaded with lawmakers to help the track, located in North Portland just east of I-5, last a little longer. They sought permission to install 40 new Oregon Lottery video terminals—effectively, slot machines—on top of the 10 they have right now. “We’re trying to keep the track alive,” Mike Dewey, the track’s lobbyist, tells WW. House Bill 2971, which seeks the lottery machine expansion, is just one of the reasons Oregon’s tortured relationship with gambling is front and center in Salem. The conversation matters to all Oregonians, not just gamblers, because the lottery is the state’s second-largest source of revenue after income taxes. And like Portland Meadows, the Oregon Lottery’s business model is under threat. A new competitor could hasten cuts in public services that lottery money provides. After years of legal challenges that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Cowlitz tribe of Southwest Washington is set to open the new Ilani Casino in Ridgefield on April 24. Located 25 miles north of downtown Portland, the $510 million, 100,000-square-foot casino will feature eight restaurants, including a Michael Jordan’s Steak House, big-name entertainment, 75 gaming tables and—most threatening to Oregon interests—2,500 slot machines. It’s an understatement to say the new casino represents unwelcome competition to Portland Meadows, the state treasury and Oregon’s own Native American tribal casinos. “It’s going to have a big economic impact on us,” says Justin Martin, a lobbyist for the Grand Ronde tribe, owners of Oregon’s largest casino, Spirit Mountain, which at 63 miles from Portland is far less convenient for local gamblers than driving to Ridgefield.
State officials have been bracing themselves for Ilani’s impact. The Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, which prepares budget forecasts, expects the new casino to slash lottery revenues by $110 million a year, about 12 percent of the current total. Oregon Lottery dollars go to fund education, parks and economic development. Nearly half of the state’s video lottery terminals are in the metro area, data show, and those terminals are clustered heavily at the south end of Portland’s two interstate bridges crossing the Columbia River. Washington does not have a lottery. Bob Whelan, an ECONorthwest economist who has studied gambling for years for the Oregon Tribal Gaming Alliance, says the impact of Ilani will be enormous. “It’s going to have the same impact as the smoking ban,” Whelan says, citing a 2007 prohibition on smoking in bars that sent state lottery revenues into a tailspin from which it took a decade to recover. One way for the lottery to fight back is to increase the number of video terminals (terminals account for more than
An Oregon Supreme Court ruling that year clarified that “voters intended to prohibit the operation of establishments whose dominant use or dominant purpose, or both, is for gambling.” But the state has struggled to enforce the ban. The term “dominant use” has never been defined legally, so the lottery employs a 50 percent test—retailers should get more than half their revenue from sources other than gambling. Except they often do not. A 2015 state audit found that many lottery retailers— so called “lottery delis”—fail to meet the test. That would make expanding the lottery difficult, even if lawmakers and the governor decided it was good policy. (Gambling critics oppose the expansion of the lottery, saying the costs of gambling addiction outweigh the benefits.) Voters like the prohibition on private casinos, even if it’s illusory. In 2012, with the potential of Ilani on the horizon, Oregonians rejected overturning the private casino ban by 72 to 28 percent. The proposed private casino in Wood Village would have sent 25 percent of revenues to the state— about the same amount that will now be lost to Ilani. So in effect, while Oregon pretends nontribal casinos are illegal, dozens of them operate in low-rent strip malls, while Washington welcomes a half-billion-dollar investment that will employ 1,200 people. House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland), whose district includes Portland Meadows, waged war in recent years against the concentration of lottery delis on Hayden Island, just south of the I-5 bridge. Kotek’s spokeswoman says the speaker wants to see the effect the Ilani casino will have before making a policy response. Gov. Kate Brown’s spokesman referred questions to the Oregon Lottery. Lottery spokeswoman Joanie Stevens-Schwenger describes the Ilani as “a really serious threat.” She says her agency is responding by replacing its nearly 12,000 video lottery terminals with state-of-the-art machines that are comparable to those in casinos, can be remotely reprogrammed and will provide immediate feedback so the agency can offer the most attractive games. The lottery is also considering offering products online and reviving sports betting, although neither of those initiatives is ready to go yet. Portland Meadows’ bill died April 17, but the track will probably continue to seek new revenue sources. Horse racing nationally is in long-term decline. The amount wagered on races has shrunk by a third over the past 15 years, and polling shows Americans have lost interest in the sport. Portland Meadows augments its race card with a variety of other wagering options: betting on races at other tracks; betting on historical races; a large poker room; and 10 video lottery terminals, already more than any other location in Oregon. The Oregon Lottery takes no position on Portland Mead-
“It’s going to have the same impact as the smoking ban.” —Bob Whelan, economist 70 percent of lottery revenue). But research done last year found Oregon is already oversupplied with gaming options: Spending on gambling as a percentage of personal income is already about 1.5 times the industry’s “saturation level.” There’s also a legal barrier to expansion: Currently, lottery retailers other than Portland Meadows are limited to six video terminals per location, part of the state’s constitutional ban on private casinos. That ban is the reason a major new casino serving Portland is opening in Washington rather than under private ownership in Oregon. The ban stems from 1984, when Oregon voters approved state-run gambling but also specified that private interests not be allowed to operate casinos. Just what constitutes a private casino has been a matter of contention ever since. In 1995, lawmakers passed a bill that would have allowed Portland Meadows to operate 75 video lottery terminals, but then-Gov. John Kitzhaber vetoed the bill because it would have turned the horse track into a casino.
ows’ desire to increase the number of machines it offers. But the track’s effort to diversify faces another hurdle. Lawmakers are also considering banning for-profit poker rooms, which openly operate in violation of state law and Portland city code (see “Burning Down the House,” WW, March 22, 2017). Portland Meadows operates one of the city’s two biggest poker rooms and is currently battling a suspension of its city license. The track’s management opposes House Bill 2190, which would allow only nonprofits to host poker games. Tom Rask, a Portland lawyer who represents Washington card rooms, says Oregon’s reliance on gambling for state funding may be tempting policymakers and regulators to cut corners—whether by failing to enforce the prohibition on casinos or not policing poker rooms. “If they want to allow casino gambling and poker, they should ask the voters,” Rask says. “Otherwise, they should enforce the laws on the books.” Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
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HOTSEAT What cautionary tale would you take? Jim Jones was a demagogue. And Americans have always been susceptible to demagogues. First, he comes out and says, I’m the only one that can save you. Second thing, a demagogue will divide the world into us—the people who believe everything he’s saying—and everyone else. And everyone else is the enemy. Third, demagogues want their followers to listen to only them. Any negative things that are being said or written about them are lies, it’s being made up. And the final thing is, any demagogue always brings followers to a terrible end. It’s inevitable.
Jeff Guinn THE AUTHOR OF A NEW BIOGRAPHY OF JIM JONES WARNS: DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU HEAR ABOUT DRINKING THE KOOL-AID. BY AA R ON MESH
amesh@wweek.com
JILL JOHNSON
Jeff Guinn knows the sound of a tyrant riling up a crowd. Over the course of 19 books, the Fort Worth, Texas-based author has examined some of America’s most notorious killers, from Bonnie Parker to Charles Manson. His latest work is a biography of an equally infamous but more puzzling figure: Jim Jones, the reformminded Marxist minister who led his followers in 1978 to a mass death by cyanide in Guyana. The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and People Temple (Simon & Schuster, 544 pages, $28) traces the preacher’s path from the tent-revival circuit in Indiana to the height of power in 1970s San Francisco, where Jones won the favor of politicians who included Harvey Milk. Before stopping at Powell’s Books this week, Guinn spoke with WW about how a man who claimed to be Jesus Christ while popping amphetamines could gain such influence in a major, progressive West Coast city—then deploy it to orchestrate the largest murder-suicide in U.S. history. WW: Most people remember Jones as somebody who persuaded a thousand Californians to drink poisoned Kool-Aid in the jungle. What are we forgetting? Jeff Guinn: All that’s left of Jones and Jonestown in our memory is that phrase, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” which we’ve taken to mean, “Don’t be an idiot and follow leaders who clearly don’t know what they’re doing.” But that’s wrong from the beginning. It wasn’t Kool-Aid. And there were members who would not drink the Flavor Aid that was laced with cyanide. But there were armed guards, and the people that refused were held down and forcibly injected. Jones knew that this would only gain a place in history if it was just a massive number of deaths. So he set it up that everyone would die, willing or not. 10
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You make the case that he was both a demagogue and an unlikely civil rights leader. How do you resolve that conflict? We like our villains to be completely evil. And that usually isn’t true. In the case of Jim Jones, as a young minister in Indianapolis in the late ’40s and early ’50s, he almost single-handedly integrated one of the most segregated major cities in America. Peoples Temple itself under Jones’ leadership had great social programs: drug addiction programs, free cafeterias where anybody could eat, free clothing giveaways. Peoples Temple even took ghetto kids, who had no chance for an education beyond the streets, and paid their full rides to [attend] college. This isn’t in any way to excuse, ultimately, what Jones did. Please understand that. But so many of his followers stuck with Jim Jones as Jones got stranger and stranger because they’d also seen all the good things that he’d accomplished. Is that the same reason he was so consistently embraced by progressive politicians in California? Part of the reason. The social programs were great, and certainly there were politicians who admired that. But Jones could also produce a sackful of votes. He tried to have as many of his members become registered voters as he could. And then, once a politician would tie in with Jones and Peoples Temple, come election day Jones would use the fleet of church buses to pick up voters at their homes and bring them to the polling places, as long as they were going to vote right. He could conceivably deliver elections in big cities or even statewide. That’s how he GUINN got his power niche in San Francisco. Jones was very canny in terms of what politicians need, which is not only obvious supporters from the minority community—but the right kind. In the ’60s, the Black Panthers scared the hell out of white people across the country. But Peoples Temple was a mixed-race church, and these were polite, hard-working people, and the only reputation they had was doing great things in the community. He knew the buttons to push, and he pushed them brilliantly. How sincere do you think he was about the ideals he espoused? As his power grew, so did his megalomania. If he said something, no matter how outrageous, in some way it must be true. Again, the warning signs were there, and they were ignored by people who followed him and by the politicians who wanted what he could bring them, which was votes. If you see leaders today saying and doing some of the things Jones did, then it’s time to turn around and run. The stuff I learned writing this book scares the hell out of me now. GO: Jeff Guinn reads at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, powells. com, on Wednesday, April 19. 7:30 pm. Free.
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CR O D O S
A N EW G OLDEN IN G BRING R T LA
OF PSYCHED PO E O G EL A I CS T BY MATTHEW KOR FHAGE
N D?
mkorfhage@wweek.com
Like a lot of Portlanders, Chris makes himself a smoothie before he starts work. He throws berries, cider, bananas and kale into a blender full of ice to make a nutritious shake full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. But for the past six months, the 29-year-old tech industry freelancer has been throwing in something extra: a couple of button-sized caps’ worth of psilocybin mushrooms, the same shrooms you maybe ate in college before going to the graveyard to freak yourself out. The dose Chris is taking won’t make the walls bleed. The quarter-to-half-gram he puts in a smoothie isn’t even enough to make most people feel funny. And yet, it’s become an essential part of his life. “The results have been pretty substantial,” Chris writes. “Improved mood, increased energy, passion for creative arts and an overall sense of well-being that definitely wasn’t there before.” CONT. ON PAGE 15
TRICIA HIPPS
W
MI L IL
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CHRISTINE DONG
“Portland is the
psychedelic underbelly
of America. It’s underground, but it’s everywhere.”
CHRISTINE DONG
—Esteban DeCorazon
GREEN REVOLUTION: Psychedelics proponent Esteban DeCorazon tends to his cacti, which he bought at a garden store but can be used to make mescaline. His Sonoran Desert Toad makes his own 5-MeO-DMT.
A
s this issue prints, about 2,800 scientists, doctors, researchers and others are gathering in Oakland, Calif., for a six-day conference on the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs. Put on by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in Santa Cruz, Calif., the conference’s $250 tickets sold out weeks ago. The biggest news at the conference is likely to be that the Food and Drug Administration in November gave permission for a large-scale clinical study that could allow doctors to treat PTSD-suffering veterans with hits of Ecstasy. Nationwide, there may be as many as 100,000 people who have tried microdosing, says James Fadiman, a Harvard- and Stanford-educated psychologist and author of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide. He’s studied more than 1,000 people who have microdosed since he introduced the broader world to the idea in 2011, when he presented a preliminary study on the subject. SCOTT KLINE
The afterglow lasts for a few days after a Monday dose, he says, but by Thursday it’s time for another smoothie. Some estimate a few thousand Portlanders are doing what Chris is doing—microdosing, using small doses of LSD or shrooms that leave the user totally functional but feeling… better. (I’m on shrooms right now. See sidebar, page 19.) If you ask around town, you’ll find people who say we’re entering a new golden age of psychedelics. In nutritionists’ offices, community centers and co-op grocery stores, Portlanders are gathering to compare notes on psychedelic drugs. Portlanders aren’t unique in the trend of consuming tiny, sub-psychedelic amounts of acid, shrooms, Ecstasy or mescaline to enhance their everyday lives. Magazines from Forbes to Wired report microdosing has become a trend among Silicon Valley programmers looking for an edge. Author Ayelet Waldman took small amounts of LSD for a month to cure postmenopausal depression, and, in January, published a best-selling book about it. Food activist Michael Pollan is also on board, having penned a microdosing piece for The New Yorker. But Portland has gone in deep. More than 2,000 people in the metro area have joined meet-up groups devoted to psychedelic substances, more than in any other U.S. city except New York and San Francisco. “Portland is the psychedelic underbelly of America. It’s underground, but it’s everywhere,” says Esteban DeCorazon, a 31-year-old marketer and organizer of psychedelic meet-up groups who says he and his wife moved here from New Jersey in part because of experiences with psilocybin mushrooms. “In New York, they want to trip balls. California is more burner culture—hearts and flowers. Portland is different. People want to incorporate psychedelic experiences into their daily lives.” Next week, one of the most prominent microdosing advocates in the world will be in Portland to give a talk, alongside people sharing their own results with psychedelics. And as LSD and shrooms move past dorm-room curiosity, our city may also set the stage for the next great legalization fight. A group called the Oregon Psilocybin Society has announced plans to get a measure on the Oregon ballot in 2020 to legalize and regulate psilocybin mushrooms. There are no scientific studies to support microdosing— and, indeed, some critics say any effect is a placebo. But across the country people believe they have found that small servings of psychedelics are a conduit for spirituality, a treatment for depression or a way to get ahead at work. The interest and enthusiasm around psychedelics is higher now than at any time since Ken Kesey was mixing acid into Kool-Aid on an old school bus, and Timothy Leary was dosing Harvard undergrads.
“It’s not exciting. It’s not colorful. It’s not tripping,” he tells WW. “The way you know you’re dosed correctly is, there are no psychedelic effects.” “Most I know who are into microdosing are business professionals,” says Jeremy Plumb, owner of Portland’s Farma dispensary and one of the organizers of the upcoming Cultivation Classic organic cannabis competition. He’s talking about psychedelics, but Plumb has been an outspoken advocate of microdosing cannabis for therapeutic benefit without impairment. A group called the Portland Entheogenic Exploration and Research Society will be among those sending representatives to the MAPS conference in Oakland. Its organizer, Helen, saw her group quickly balloon to 750 members after founding PEERS in 2014, and she hopes to build the group into a Portland version of MAPS, with a local psychedelic conference. A few years ago, microdosing was portrayed by Rolling Stone and other publications as a techie-driven phenomenon involving all-night creativity binges for programmers or acid camps for billionaires. These days, interest in the benefits of low-dose psychedelics has spread to a demographic as broad as the shoppers in the organic fruit section at New Seasons Market. “We’ve had dentists and doctors, professional musicians, students, of course, and everyday regular lower-wage [workers],” Helen says of PEERS. “Really, I don’t see any kind of trend in terms of profession.” CONT. on page 16
“It’s not exciting.
It’s not colorful.
It’s not tripping.” —James Fadiman JAMES FADIMAN
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“Microdosing is a new paradigm.
I can do psychedelics
and experience the benefits while still keeping it under control.” PAUL AUSTIN
—Paul Austin
Fadiman says his inbox is full of inquiries from around the world about microdosing—writers from Marie Claire (“Why Power Women Are Microdosing at Work”) and GQ (“LSD: My Life-Saving Drug”), but especially from private individuals who want to live better lives through psychedelics. The improvements Fadiman says microdosers have reported amount to a dreamy wish list for tired office workers. “People report they form better sleeping habits, better eating, improved stress response,” he says. “One man said he looked at a menu and said, ‘By God, I wanted the salad!’ They tend to drink less, smoke less—that’s both tobacco and pot—and many report less coffee-drinking as well.” The microdosers Fadiman has surveyed report they’ve used psychedelics to treat everything from anxiety to stuttering. One woman, an art historian, told Fadiman that microdosing psychedelics had caused her menstrual periods to become more regular and less painful.
I
f Fadiman is the father of microdosing, Paul Austin is the guy who married it—an entrepreneur and activist who’s been traveling the world trying to change how our culture thinks about low-dose psychedelic drugs, which he sees as a nonthreatening introduction to the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. The founder of the Third Wave microdosing advocacy site—which Austin says gets 15,000 to 20,000 visits a month—has given symposia in Berlin and the Netherlands, as well as in Denver and Philadelphia. He’ll be in Portland to give a talk on microdosing April 30 at an event held by PEERS at Bossanova Ballroom. Austin’s website often takes the evangelical, portentous tone of minority religion or midcentury cannabis activists. “Right now, you are a witness to the dawn of a new psychedelic age,” reads a manifesto on the site. “It is called the Third Wave of Psychedelics. And it will change the perception of psychedelics by Western civilization.” The “first wave” of psychedelic users, Austin says, were indigenous peoples, while the second was the psychonauts of the 1960s. “The second wave was often irresponsible consumption,” Austin tells WW. “Microdosing is a new paradigm. I can do psychedelics and experience the benefits while still keeping it under control.” It’s this notion that caused DeCorazon to move toward microdosing after long experimenting with larger doses—Decorazon and his wife keep a “journey room” in their basement where they used to hold Ecstasy parties. The laptop on the floor, next to San Pedro cacti that could be used to make mescaline, is loaded with a playlist marked “Magic Mushroom,” while in another corner, a slightly agitated Sonoran Desert toad cowers next to a fake terrarium log—the amphib-
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#wweek
ian, when squeezed hard enough, expels a powerful psychedelic from his venom sacs called 5-MeO-DMT. Last year, DeCorazon became a father, and it changed the way he treats psychedelics. “You can’t just go on a 12-hour journey anymore,” he says. “I have responsibilities.” While he still makes time for full mushroom trips when he can, DeCorazon microdoses small amounts of DMT and burnable tree bark in a mixture called changa, which he says gives him a very short meditative high before settling into a long afterglow that leaves him in control of his faculties.
y p p a H Hour
An equal number of microdosers suffer from maladies they believe can be treated with psychedelics. Conversations at meet-up events—for example, in the parking lot outside a scheduled talk last week at People’s Food Co-op in Southeast Portland—can sound like a cross between a recipe swap and a group therapy session. At the upcoming Bossanova Ballroom event, Portlanders will talk about the healing they say they’ve experienced from using psychedelic drugs—in both macro and micro doses—to overcome everything from deep childhood trauma to a 20-year heroin addiction. Wayne, a 45-year-old former commodities trader in Portland, arrived at his first meeting by accident. “He thought he was showing up to a presentation about plant medicine,” PEERS organizer Helen tells WW. “People started talking about journeys, and he thought everyone was a little bit nuts.” But Wayne had been suffering for years from cluster headaches so intense he was essentially housebound—the result of scarring on his brain after surgery to remove a tumor—and was open to anything that might help. “I don’t know how much experience you have with pain,” he says. “You get to a stage where you’ll do almost anything.” After five years of unrelenting pain and a resulting oxycodone addiction, Wayne says, “microdosing pulled me out of the dark.” It wasn’t that it relieved the pain, he says, but that the mushrooms made him feel life wasn’t utterly futile. “What I got was a calmness,” he says.
W W S TA F F
CONT. on page 19
CHANGA
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PSILOCYBIN MUSHROOMS
TRICIA HIPPS
dotal evidence is compelling enough to warrant research. “When someone writes me and says, ‘I’ve taken eight different antidepressants, electroshock and psychotherapy, and after two cycles of microdosing I feel more like myself than ever before, it doesn’t feel like placebo,” Fadiman says. “Microdosing will accelerate the path toward legalization—here is a dosage level that does not bother anybody. Lower doses inherently are safer. We’re talking a 10th to a 20th of a hit.” In a few years, Oregon might become the first state to put legalization of psychedelics on the ballot. In 2016, Tom and Sheri Eckert founded the Oregon Psilocybin Society with the express purpose of putting forward a ballot measure to legalize shrooms. The couple, both in their 40s, have a family counseling practice in Beaverton called Innerwork that specializes in domestic violence and emphasizes “Clarity. Consciousness. Connection.” Both believe in the potential for psilocybin to be used in a therapeutic context. In January, the Eckerts submitted a ballot initiative called the Oregon Psilocybin Therapy Act to Oregon’s Office of Legislative Counsel for approval: The version of legalization they’re advocating would permit the use of psilocybin mushrooms only in supervised “safe spaces.” But while the text of the initiative is under review, the Eckerts have yet to file the paperwork that would allow OPS to receive contributions toward a political campaign. Asked what they feel their prospects are, Sheri Eckert demurs. “One of the things we’re raising money for is polling,” she says. “The attitude toward legalization is coming around,” Fadiman says. “Since psychedelics have become illegal, 26 million Americans have taken LSD. Most of those have been in the higher 50 percent of education [level]. There’s a generation of people who have found them either beneficial or not too exciting. They see legalization as being sensible.” The Eckerts nonetheless remain cautious on the subject. “Psilocybin addresses huge issues such as depression and addiction,” Tom Eckert says. “Psilocybin works for smoking cessation better than any other. This is a revolutionary thing. We have to be careful with it. We don’t want to screw it up.” COURTESY ECKERTS
He now advises cancer sufferers and others interested in microdosing, but says only about 1 in 5 see positive results. Mary, a middle-aged Portland mother and musician, tells a similar story. She suffered from anxiety and PTSD from childhood trauma that was so severe she could no longer perform, but taking low-dose mushrooms gave her the fortitude to get back onstage. After a performance in which she took too much of the shrooms and felt impaired, she began growing her own mushrooms to ensure a consistent dose. “Dosing is a problem with the mushrooms,” she says, “because they’re so inconsistent.” Like Wayne, Mary religiously reads every accredited study on the benefits of psychedelics that she can get her hands on. “I come from a science family,” she says. Not everyone is so convinced of microdosing’s benefits. In an editorial in British newspaper the Daily Mail in February, a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge cautioned against experimental self-medication. “As a society,” they wrote, “we should consider the reasons as to why healthy people choose to use drugs in the first place.” Those looking to enhance their productivity, they suggest, should first consider good nutrition, exercise and adequate sleep. Even the strongest advocates for microdosing concede that its benefits remain unproven. “There’s skepticism both in the psychedelic space and outside it, in terms of the benefits of microdosing,” Austin says. “There’s no scientific research there yet.“ In part, that’s because it’s very difficult to conduct such studies legally. Psilocybin and LSD are considered Schedule I drugs in the United States, dangerous substances with no medical benefits. But Fadiman says the anec-
SHERI AND TOM ECKERT
“This is a revolutionary thing. We have to be careful with it.”
GO: The Microdosing & Psychedelic Stories Tour is at Bossanova Ballroom, 722 E Burnside St., on Sunday, April 30. 4-10 pm. $10 advance, $15 at the door. 21+. After a brief sitar concert, Paul Austin of the Third Wave will speak about microdosing’s popularity, risks and benefits; other participants will speak about their experiences with psychedelic drugs. Psychedelicinspired art and vendors will be on hand. Tickets and more information at peers.space.
—Tom Eckert
Psyched Up I TRIED MICRODOSING WITH FOUR DIFFERENT DRUGS. HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED. I’ve long held that drugs should be recreational or medical only. Something about using drugs for self-improvement stirs up uncomfortable shades of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—a managedsociety dystopia already evidenced in real life by the rampant overprescription of ADHD drugs designed to make lives easier for teachers, not students. But ever since reports surfaced that Silicon Valley types were using microdoses of psychedelic drugs to juice creativity or make their lives seem meaningful, the mediascape has been inflamed with the notion that low-bore psychedelics could improve a life through chemistry. I have no known anxiety or other clinical condition to treat, unlike many who use microdoses of these drugs. But for 10 days, I tried mini-hits of shrooms, cannabis, LSD and DMT to see if they offered enhancements to productivity or mood. Here’s my microdosed week and a half—with commentary from my colleagues. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.
SHROOMS
Wednesday-Friday, April 5-7 I acquired ground-up cubensis mushrooms through a friend dedicated to the chemical management of his own mental and digestive states—whether with kratom, activated carbon or a host of dietary supplements that combine to smell like a dentist’s office. He’d originally bought the mushrooms for a personal microdosing experiment, which he quickly abandoned. Psychedelics researcher and microdosing proponent James Fadiman recommends dosing once every three days. The idea is you’ll still feel effects the second day, and can use the third day as a control to understand what the mushrooms are doing. I didn’t have enough time for the long game, however, and took mushrooms three consecutive days, which I’m told temporarily increases tolerance. My prior experience with shrooms had been the usual loopy, college-kid sort—a gram or two of cubensis and some time spent making the room’s corners convex or concave using only my mind. A usual microdose is anywhere between 0.15 and 0.5 grams dependCONT. on page 21
GROUND MUSHROOMS
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Laura Kipnis
Preeminent American Cultural Theorist/Critic Professor of Radio/TV/Film, Northwestern University
Collins Distinguished Speaker’s Lecture: “Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus; Intellectual Freedom Takes a Hike” Post-lecture Conversation w/ Collins Professor David Li, Audience Q&A, and Book Signing 7: 30 pm Tuesday, May 2nd, 2017 Lillis Business Complex 182 955 East 13th Avenue University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403 Free and Open to the Public Sponsored by the Collins Fund, Department of English, University of Oregon An EOAA institution committed to cultural diversity http://english.uoregon.edu/
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“He seemed extra limber—of body, mind and spirit. Physically, that manifested as an extra-jaunty step, and a carefree bounce as he moved around the office. He dealt with stressful situations better, and reacted well to other people’s ideas. At times, he sometimes snapped back.” “Surly.”
LSD
W W S TA F F
COLLEAGUE REVIEWS:
“It feels like there are wolves in my mouth.” R A C H E A L R E N E E L E VA S S U R
ing on the type of mushroom, and so on the first day, I weighed out a conservative dose of 0.25 grams and ate them straight. I noticed approximately nothing all day—perhaps I was too hopped up on caffeine and deadlines—but people around me swore I was a nicer person. It got me worried, in an absent way: Maybe I am usually a terrible person. The next day at about noon, I upped the dose to 0.4 grams and found myself in the penumbra of a high that never came— a psychic pressure system at the edges of my consciousness— before settling into a dippy and somewhat unproductive afternoon. The third day, I dropped the dose to 0.3 grams and banged out a 2,000-word article by noon: Science! During these days, I was less likely to drink alcohol, and drank less coffee—although the anecdotal evidence that psilocybin helps you stop smoking cigarettes did not apply in my case. Was my newfound forbearance the result of the psilocybin itself, or the fact I’d become so newly attentive to my physical and mental state, like a narcissistic yoga-obsessive or auto-nutritionist? Hard to say.
COLLEAGUE REVIEWS:
PLEASANTNESS RATING: 7.2 out of 10 PRODUCTIVITY RATING: 6.5
“He kind of seemed to be surfing his own wave. He didn’t react strongly, in a positive or negative way, to anything going on around him.” “There was slightly less cross-talk in the office during this phase, generally indicating a higher level of productivity. But, on Friday, Korfhage had a small meltdown about the impending deadline for this project, so it may have all been a charade.”
CANNABIS
Saturday-Monday, April 8-10 I figured cannabis was more of a weekender, and boy was it. THC is my least-favorite drug of all drugs, which I’ve chosen to chalk up to personal chemistry rather than a moral failing in almost everyone I know. It makes me some version of tired or distracted, and after small doses—4 milligrams of edible THC from Grön, or a similar amount vaped from my favorite strain, Omega from Emerald Twist farms—I was also some combination of tired or distracted and easily frustrated. I spent 20 minutes Saturday yelling at my editor about a mild disagreement over formatting, and on Sunday, despite a decent night’s sleep, I was drowsy and useless all day. On Monday, refusing to sacrifice a day of work, I vaped a small amount late at night and slept like a baby. COLLEAGUE REVIEWS:
“He was spinning his wheels and getting nowhere. He seemed to be working, but he never had anything to show for it. At one point he yelled at me for a half-hour about something he was definitely wrong about before coming up with his own workable solution.” “Surprisingly pleasant. Handed me a book about bodypositive yoga, in a nice way.” PLEASANTNESS RATING: 6.5 PRODUCTIVITY RATING: 3
W W S TA F F
“I was drowsy and useless all day.”
EDIBLE CANNABIS
LSD
Wednesday-Friday, April 12-14 My first personal acid experience involved dinner at Portland City Grill, where I firmly remember declaring that “while I know technically I’m the one eating, it feels like there are wolves in my mouth,” plus a very devolved bout of the famed Stripparaoke at Devils Point strip club, where the dancer had to flag me as harmless to a bouncer deeply distressed I was belting Led Zeppelin with my arm around the dancer’s shoulders. Microdosed LSD is an entirely different experience. Much more so than with psilocybin, the low-dose LSD procured from the friend of a friend—I did what I believed to be a 10-microgram dose each day, about one-tenth of a standard hit—left me feeling brighter, sharper and more energized in a noticeable way, without the tooth-grinding speediness of uppers like caffeine or Adderall, which are also used in offices as productivity tools. Psychedelics tend to operate on your serotonin centers, so this makes sense. And with LSD much more than psilocybin, I understood why Silicon Valley types might use it for an added edge. On the third day of taking LSD, however, I was stressed for external reasons—sleeplessness, competing deadlines—and was a general lout to everyone around me. And on Thursday night, I was a little loopy after a long day’s work—more “creative,” perhaps, but also noticeably weirder, as reported by co-workers. Which is to say, my moods seemed amplified, not assuaged by the drug, a confirmation of the old psychedelic saw that what you get out of LSD is, by and large, what you bring with you. I wouldn’t repeat it on a bad day—but on a good day, I could see it as a productivity tool. As to whether I personally love the idea of routinely using drugs for productivity purposes? It fills me with an interesting moral queasiness—a Gattaca dread—that is made immediately hypocritical by the cup of coffee next to my keyboard.
PLEASANTNESS RATING: 7.1 PRODUCTIVITY RATING: 8.3
DMT
Saturday, April 15 DMT, in high doses, is reportedly as intense a psychedelic experience as anything on offer—the news that psychonaut Terence McKenna said he was waiting for, a reversion to a pre-language self. Reportedly, DMT uses also have a strange proclivity toward perceiving fractally regenerative elf creatures. The substance is found in ayahuasca vines—ingested ceremonially by deeply spiritual and self-realized celebrities from Sting to Tori Amos—and in some barks and toads. I got my DMT from an acquaintance in the form of changa, a mixture with smokable barks. The actual dosage is hard to gauge, but the effects were both mild and pleasant, euphoric without attendant spaciness, an open window on a slightly more beautiful and less threatening world. I felt, primarily, interest—a proactive curiosity that is the polar opposite of depressed apathy. Honestly, it’s my favorite drug of them all—although I couldn’t imagine using it for work that isn’t customer service. In time-compressed newspaper work, I’ve come to rely on adrenaline edge, something the DMT would quite frankly make less possible: In the words of Talking Heads, this burning keeps me alive. COLLEAGUE REVIEWS:
“All I know is, he took this weird Instagram-type picture under a bridge and posted it to Facebook. This is very out of character.” “In a good mood, with a desire to explore.” PLEASANTNESS RATING: 8 PRODUCTIVITY RATING: 8
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YO U R LY K E E W PERK
IT ’ S H FR E S
wweek.com
AVAILABLE NOW! POTLANDER MAGAZINE. WW’S 2017 GUIDE TO CANNABIS IN PORTLAND. FOR A BRIEF TIME, IT’S FREE. SOON: $5 AT POWELL’S AND TENDER LOVING EMPIRE
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Street
“I was 14, hanging out with my friend—the only other skater in Bandon. We were smoking his dad’s weed out of a can in the garage. I smoked until I couldn’t actually light it because my depth perception was so messed up.”
“My sister gave me a pot brownie, and I ate the whole thing. I thought I was having a seizure and was going to die.”
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH CANNABIS? OUR FAVORITE LOOKS THIS WEEK. PHOTOS BY SA M GEHR KE
“I was 13 with my best friend in a soccer field. We smoked some really good weed and I coughed for a half-hour straight. I’m scared of the dark, and we got paranoid. I thought I saw someone by the soccer goals, and we sprinted back to my friend’s house, crawled in her window and then immediately went to the kitchen for snacks.”
“I was in high school with a bunch of friends. I just remember it being super-trippy and fun!” “It was my graduation night of high school. I smoked with my entire family to celebrate.”
“In the womb. My mother’s a big fan of plant medicine. I was born to 420.”
“I met up with my girlfriends and smoked in a park. We hid inside a bush and everyone got high except me. I ended up being the responsible Wendy in the group. We went to the grocery store to get munchies and I remember going into the bathroom to see if my eyes were red, because I had always heard that’s what happens.” Willamette Week April 19, 2017 wweek.com
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E Z O BO MUSIC MILLENNIUM PRESENTS
Celebrating Oregon’s pesticide-free craft cannabis
the 10th Annual
RECORD STORE DAY SATURDAY, APRI L 22ND
FREE COFFEE AND MUFFINS @7AM!
OPEN EARLY @
8 AM!
FREE GIFT BAGS WHILE THEY LAST
+ 450 LIMITED-EDITION VINYL RELEASES!
Autograph Signing Sessions with: 3PM
THE OHIO PLAYERS Legendary soul/funk/R&B band The Ohio Players will be joined by Portland’s own Marlon McClain (Pleasure, Shock, Dazz Band
SUSANA MILLMAN Author of ALIVE WITH THE DEAD
KE YNO TES
E TH AN RUSSO,
Medical Director, PHYTECS
F R I D AY, M AY 1 2 N O O N - 9 P. M. RE VO LU TI O N HA LL P O RTL A N D , O R
5PM
TI C K E TS $ 2 5
AD I E P O E, PHD
Founder, Habu Health
Susana Millman had a front row seat to the later years of the Grateful Dead, traveling with the band throughout the 80s and 90s and taking thousands of behind the scenes photos as they lived, worked and of course, performed.
AND
Featuring Live Performances from: 7PM
JOEL RAFAEL
w/ JOHN TRUDELL’S BAD DOG
Following the passing of John Trudell, his group Bad Dog asked activist Joel Rafael to carry on John’s legacy and perform with the band. John Trudell’s ‘AKA Grafitti Man’ will be an RSD Vinyl Title
PORTUGAL. THE MAN
2017
9PM
Tim Blake, Founder, The Emerald Cup Kevin Jodrey, Co-Founder, Golden Tarp Awards Dominic Corva, Founder, Center for Cannabis Research and Social Policy Adam Smith, Co-Founder, Craft Cannabis Alliance Ashley Preece, Executive Director, Ethical Cannabis Alliance Jodi Haines, Owner, Alter Farms Dee Dussault, Author, Ganga Yoga Sam Chapman, New Economy Consulting Madeline Martinez, World Famous Cannabis Café Amy Margolis, Greenspoon Marder Jesse Sweet, OLCC Rep. Earl Blumenauer, Oregon Congressman
H O ST
Jason Rouse, Live Wire Radio
Pre-buy new single “Feel It Still” on Flexi-Postcard 7” for guaranteed entry!
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3158 E Burnside St. Portland, OR. | 503-231-8926
W W E E K . C O M / C U LT I V AT I O N C L A S S I C
KENT SUTER
The Bump
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GO: The Timbers play their hated rivals, the Vancouver Whitecaps, at 1 pm Saturday, April 22, at Providence Park. Tickets at timbers.com. Televised on Fox 12. Willamette Week April 19, 2017 wweek.com
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STARTERS
B I T E - S I Z E D P O RT L A N D C U LT U R E N E W S
YO U R LY K E WE PERK
wweek.com
THE REAL RACISTS: Controversial Portland band Black Pussy has spent the past few years fending off criticism that its name is offensive to women and African-Americans, since the group is made up of neither African-Americans nor women. Last month, the all-white, all-male band was forced to cancel its tour kickoff show at Kenton Club after the venue was besieged with complaints. In response, the band posted a message on Facebook, encouraging “non-cunty” dialogue about its moniker. So, with a new album set for release in May, the band decided to do what many others accused of racial insensitivity have done: invoke Martin Luther King Jr. In the video for “Home Sweet Home,” the first single from its upcoming full-length, Power, the band sets ’60s civil rights footage, including the March on Washington, to stonerrock riffs and concludes with a dedication to “all of the people who’s [sic] names we’ll never know that sacrificed themselves to the idea that all humans are created equal.” It’s unclear how the message of the video correlates with the song, whose main lyric is, “Let’s spend another night together.” ROGUE OF THE WEEK: Beer adventurer John Lovegrove likes to go big. In 2012, we wrote about his quest to visit 50 Portland-area breweries in a single day. In 2015, he topped that, visiting 77 Portland-area breweries. To celebrate his birthday, Lovegrove decided to do something—uh, extreme. Lovegrove drank at all 11 North American locations of Rogue in a single day, starting in San Francisco and ending in Issaquah, Wash. “Everyone was super-nice,” Lovegrove says. “We called ahead to order food, and they had it all ready for us, and signs wishing me happy birthday.” One nice thing about the quest? Lovegrove got free beers. You can, too. All Rogues except the Portland airport location give customers a free 32-ounce beer on their birthday. NEW DAD: A new jazz club is coming to the Alberta neighborhood. Afrodaddy’s is set to open as part of the Alberta Commons development at Northeast Alberta Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. According to owner Carmen Blanchard, the venue will aim for a younger demographic by appealing to fans of hip-hop as well as jazz. “I don’t want to be another Jimmy Mak’s,” she says. “I’m trying to start my own lane.” The club will be managed by Blanchard’s three sons, making it “the only premier casual dining restaurant/ lounge managed by millennial African-American men born and raised in Portland, Oregon,” according to its website. Blanchard is running an ambitious $50,000 Kickstarter campaign. She says buildout will begin this summer, and the club is aiming to open in late September or early October.
Toke’n of love Maloy's offers a fabulous selection of antique and estate jewelry and fine custom jewelry, as well as repair and restoration services. We also buy.
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MOUNTAIN OF MADNESS: The Overlook Film Festival, the new horror festival at Mount Hood’s Timberline Lodge, has announced its inaugural lineup of 20 features and 17 shorts. The festival, which takes place April 27-30, is headlined by William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth, an official selection at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and The Bad Batch, Ana Lily Amirpour’s follow-up to her 2014 Persian vampire Western, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. In addition to screenings, the Overlook Film Fest will feature a weekend-long immersive horror game as well as storytelling seminars, parties and other events. Tickets are available at overlookfilmfest.com.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19
Princess Mononoke One of the best from the never-bad Studio Ghibli, and a surprise favorite among weird punk kids due to its nature-versus-man themes, the 20th anniversary screenings of Princess Mononoke continue this week. Laurelhurst Theater, 2735 E Burnside St., laurelhursttheater.com. 9:20 pm, through April 20.
Shaed On its debut EP, Just Wanna See See, Washington, D.C., trio Shaed soars on the strength of Chelsea Lee’s vocals and the sharp, semi-crunk beats of twin brothers Max and Spencer Ernst. Fans of Florence and the Machine, Chvrches and Sylvan Esso will feel at home among the endless climaxes of “Running Through the Fields” and the throbbing bounce of “Perfume.” Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., dougfirlounge.com. 8 pm. $13 advance, $15 day of show. 21+.
THURSDAY, APRIL 20
Stumpfest VI It feels like mini-fests catering to heshers in all-black Carhartt are a monthly occurrence these days. If you have to pick just one, then it should probably be former Portland promoter Rynne Stump’s eponymously named metal and psych fest, which kicks off with a lineup headlined by throwback psych-metal bros Danava. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 503-288-3895, mississippistudios.com. 8 pm. $20 advance, $25 day of show. 21+.
RJD2 + Tortoise Despite having one foot planted firmly in hip-hop culture, much of the acclaim producer RJD2 has enjoyed since his 2002 breakthrough, Deadringer,, is because of his ear for the kind of heady jazz and acid house co-headliners Tortoise specialize in playing live. Neither act is a stranger to collaboration, which means a tasty jam sesh is probable. Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 503-225-0047, crystalballroompdx.com. 9 pm. $27.50. 21+.
FRIDAY, APRIL 21
Get Busy
Solange Once known only as “Beyoncé’s sister”—and, in one infamous instance, her de facto bodyguard— Solange earned her own mononym last year with A Seat at the Table, a stunning statement of protest that stands alongside To Pimp a Butterfly and “Formation” as one of the definitive documents of the Black Lives Matter movement. She headlines this year's Soul’d Out Festival. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 503-248-4335, portland5.com. 8 pm. $50-$99. All ages. See music listings for more Soul'd Out picks.
WHAT WE'RE EXCITED ABOUT APRIL 19-25
SATURDAY, APRIL 22
Spiritrials The only theater show in the Soul’d Out Music Festival’s lineup, Dahlak Brathwaite’s one-man show is a rhythmic, poetic ramble through issues like the prison system and drug addiction. Brathwaite seamlessly flips between storytelling and rapping—including a retooled version of “Flashing Lights”— backed by an onstage DJ. Disjecta, 8371 N Interstate Ave., boomarts.org. 7:30 pm. Also April 21. $12-$30.
Wastedland 2 Director Andrew Shirley’s new guerrilla-styled short follows three masked graffiti artists as they journey through a post-apocalyptic world, tracking down beer and weed while searching for the trail left by an enigmatic artist. Shirley will attend the screening, which will be transformed into a detritus-strewn mess for the evening. Trust Art Collective, 325 NW 6th Ave. 6-11 pm.
Rodney King Before the Spike Lee-directed film of the one-man show is released by Netflix next week, Roger Guenveur Smith is giving his last performance this weekend in Rodney King. Bookended by Willie D’s “Fuck Rodney King” and King’s “Can we all get along?” speech, Smith evokes scenes from King’s life with fast-paced lines and sparse, deeply symbolic staging. Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison St., 503-241-1278, artistsrep.org. 7:30 pm. Also April 21 and 23. $15-$30.
SUNDAY, APRIL 23
The xx On its latest, this year’s I See You, the London trio leans a bit more heavily on the dub and two-step samples that made producer Jamie Smith’s 2015 solo release, In Colour, a breakthrough hit. The result is a wider and more colorful world that’s still home to deeply personal missives on relationships and the devastation of love. Veterans Memorial Coliseum, 300 N Winning Way, 503-235-8771, rosequarter.com. 8 pm. $40 advance, $45 day of show. All ages.
Caspar Babypants Caspar Babypants is the kindie-rock project of Presidents of the United States of America frontman Chris Ballew. With a repertoire of songs like “Jellyfish Jones” and “Stompy the Bear,” it’s hard to hear old Presidents and not wonder how long Ballew has been angling for stardom among the potty-training crowd. See our interview with Ballew on page 39. The Village Ballroom, 704 NE Dekum St., babypantsmusic.com. 2 and 4 pm (sold out). $7, children under 2 free.
MONDAY, APRIL 24 30th Annual Oregon Book Awards Were you enamored with Martha Grover’s memoir, The End of My Career, or were you smitten with Gina Ochsner’s novel The Hidden Letters of Velta B.? They’re up for honors at the Oregon Book Awards. And if you’re skeptical of literary awards, remember: neither Peggy Noonan nor Bob Dylan are nominated for a damn thing. Gerding Theater at the Armory, 128 NW 11th Ave., literaryarts.org, 7:30 pm. $10.
Juno 10th Anniversary Leave it to Michael Cera and Ellen Page to make the awkward topic of teen pregnancy comical. Resent the precociousness of the film’s lead all you want, but the brilliant performance of J.K. Simmons as Page’s befuddled father is well worth the price of admission for this mumblecore-as-teen-comedy classic. Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., mcmenamins.com. 8:30 pm. $4 for adults, $3 for kids 12 and under.
TUESDAY, APRIL 25 Jake “The Snake” Roberts Unspoken Word Tour Jake Roberts is the Keith Richards of pro wrestling, a guy who should’ve succumbed to his demons long ago but, through some Faustian bargain, managed not only to survive but outlive many of his peers. He’s been to hell and back, and tonight he’s telling the stories—fingers crossed that one of them is about the time he attacked the Macho Man with a live cobra. Dante’s, 350 W Burnside St., 866-777-8932, danteslive.com. 9 pm. $25-$55. 21+.
Cafe Castagna Crab Feed Dungeness crab, the apogee of Oregon crab, is at its apogee—and on this fine Tuesday there will be a bountiful pile of the ocean's bounty, ready for the crackin'. For $40, you'll get your fill of crab, plus salad, sourdough bread and an assortment of sauces, including traditional Louis. Special drink pairings will also be offered. Cafe Castagna, 1758 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-231-9959. 6:30 pm. $40. Call for reservations. Willamette Week April 19, 2017 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.
DRANK
The Station (DE GARDE BREWING)
FRIDAY, APRIL 21 Nano Beer Fest
Experience Lebanese cuisine at its best Call us for your event party & catering needs! Belly dancing Friday and Saturday evenings
Every year, John’s Marketplace hosts a fest for the tiniest breweries around, which are sometimes also the newest. This year, you should be especially stoked for Hop Haus from Camas, Wolf Tree from Seal Rock, and a complete unknown: Brewery 26, whose first beers were brewed April 5. John’s Marketplace, 3535 SW Multnomah Blvd., 503-244-2617. 2-10 pm. $20. Through Saturday.
SATURDAY, APRIL 22 GermanFest
For the seventh consecutive year, Bailey’s Taproom will devote its entire tap list to Oregon-brewed German-style beers. That means smoked Helles and American kettle variations of gose, lager, weissbier, altbier, schwarzbier, Pilsner… boy, the Germans sure do make a lot of beers. Bailey’s Taproom, 213 SW Broadway, 503-295-1004. Noon.
TUESDAY, APRIL 25 223 SW STARK STREET PORTLAND, OR 503-274-0010 ALAMIRPORTLAND.COM
Cafe Castagna Crab Feed
Dungeness crab is at its apogee— and on this fine Tuesday there will be a bountiful pile of the ocean’s bounty, ready for the crackin’. For $40, you’ll get your fill of sweet and flavorful crab, salad, sourdough bread and an assortment of sauces, including traditional Louis. Cafe Castagna, 1758 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-231-9959. 6:30 pm. $40. Call for reservations.
Belmont Station turned 20 this month, celebrating with two weeks of special releases and lots and lots of sours. The Station, unquestionably one of the city’s best beer bars, can also be one of its most persnickety—it enforces rules inconsistently, issuing last call at random times, closing the patio for weird reasons and once even refusing to fill my growler because the bartender said its shape would make the beer too foamy. This tribute beer comes from De Garde, one of the state’s most persnickety breweries, an all-wild-fermented operation near the Tillamook Air Museum. De Garde’s beer, some of the only in the country made with no added yeast, needs to be taken bottle to bottle, since it flashes brilliance but also turns out some undrinkable vinegar bombs. The Station, sadly, is a dud. This blend was aged in oak barrels for four years. The resulting beer tastes like pool chemicals, heavy on the chlorine and muriatic acid. The $17 bottles disappeared fast, to lucky customers who’d been tipped off to its existence in boxes behind Belmont Station’s register. If you got one, let it sit for a while—maybe until the big 25th anniversary blowout. Not recommended. MARTIN CIZMAR. DRANK
Where to eat this week. 1. Wares
2713 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-954-1172, warespdx.com. Johanna Ware’s new fast-casual spot in the Zipper is streamlined for fast service—but the best reasons to go are a yuzu-miso rice bowl with egg and chicken or pork belly, and a heavenly granolaspiked congee at brunch. $$.
2. Sunset Fried Chicken
In Rachel’s Ginger Beer, 3646 SE Hawthorne Blvd., sunsetfriedchicken.com. Until April 25, enjoy quite possibly the finest fried chicken sandwich in town—a crisp OG sammie with dill pickle and acid-sweet slaw. $.
3. XLB
4090 N Williams Ave., 503-841-5373, xlbpdx.com. The new Shanghai dumpling spot from former Aviary chef Jasper Shen has been inconsistent on those soup dumplings—but when they’re on, Jesus Christ, they’re on. $$.
4. Urdaneta
3033 NE Alberta St., 503-288-1990, urdanetapdx.com. Basque spot Urdaneta’s new pintxo hour from 5-6 pm weekdays is killer—$2 Gildas with house boquerones, $4 Morcilla with deepnoted blood sausage, and Asturian cider or Spanish vermouth for merely $5. $$-$$$.
5. Fukami
In Davenport, 2215 E Burnside St., fukamipdx.com. Every Sunday and Monday, reserve a place to get umpty plates of kaisekistyle Japanese food, from nettle salad to the finest sashimi in town. $$$$.
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2015 Layne Vineyard Vermentino (HOLDEN WINE CO.)
Holden is the rare Oregon wine brand drawing more praise for white wine than red. Holden’s 2014 Johan Vineyard Chardonnay by winemaker Sterling Whitted was a standout—one of the best Oregon wines I tasted last year. This season’s Holden white edition is another uncorker. The 2015 release of Whitted’s Layne Vineyard Vermentino ($20) is from one of the original vineyards planted in Southern Oregon’s Applegate Valley. Fans of dead-dry, steely, sugar-free white wines should look elsewhere. This bottle is a jam jar of fresh lychee, juicing oranges, Grandma’s ambrosia, and tutti frutti. A vinification process that’s low on sulfur and long on gross lees aging helps lend a wildflower honey complexity and golden color, and it finishes clean, easy-drinking and fresh. Holden Vermentino tastes like Oregon springtime in a bottle. Better yet, keep it in the fridge to celebrate the first officially hot day of 2017. Recommended. JORDAN MICHELMAN.
#wweek AUBREY GIGANDET
REVIEW
I
TAKE A BATH: In Danwei Canting’s excellent la zi ji chicken.
Capital City DANWEI CANTING BRINGS BEIJING TO THE MIDDLE OF PORTLAND. BY M IC H A E L C . Z U SM A N
Ever since Chinatown moved east to 82nd Avenue and beyond, decent Chinese food in the center of Portland has been as elusive as protests in Tiananmen Square. Not only does Southeast Stark Street’s new Chinese spot, Danwei Canting, turn this sad situation around, it does so with a menu focusing on Beijing street food—a category rarely explored in Portland or, frankly, anywhere else I’ve been in the United States. Beijing cuisine borrows ideas and traditions from all over China: the riotously fermented meatsauce noodles along the Korean border, or the pepper-bath chicken of Chongqing in the South. Danwei brings together the tumult of the Beijing street-food experience as a joint effort between Kyo Koo, a Korean-American chef with a background in Western fine dining, and James Kyle, a Mandarin-fluent Westerner who lived in Beijing for 15 years. Though consistency remains an occasional problem, much of the menu really stands out. For starters, order the $3 dish of roasted peanuts partially submerged in sweetened black vinegar, the flavor of Cracker Jack imbued with an earthy tang. Once they hit the table, I can’t keep my hands off them. A second favorite is la zi ji chicken (aka hot pepper chicken bath; $10), easily the best version of this Sichuanese dish to hit town since Lucky Strike’s tear-jerkingly hot rendition. At Danwei, the moderately sized order arrives in a stainlesssteel bowl filled with chunks of chicken lightly floured and wok-fried to piping-hot, dark-golden greaselessness, together with a fistful of flamboyantly red dried chilies. Sichuan peppercorns and bits of garlic and scallion also mingle in the bowl. Devout pepperheads will consume everything, including the dried chilies, tripping on the full inferno effect. For the sane, it’s best to dig out a piece of chicken with some of the other spices (hint: they tend to migrate to the bottom of the bowl) to glory in a brief, heady blast of heat, accompanied by savory chicken
and numbing peppercorn. If you tried this dish shortly after Danwei opened and were disappointed with its tepid mildness, take heart that it has improved markedly since January. Another simple but compelling dish is paigu ($6), dry-fried pork ribs. The plate arrives simply— two meaty but unseasoned ribs with a dull, mattebrown color that suggests excessive wok time. Don’t be deceived. The meat is succulent and piggy, and each order comes with a small pile of coarse salt so you can customize your sodium intake. The familiar dumplings (“jiaozi” on the menu; $7-$8) may be stuffed with lamb, pork or mushroom and are served with a ramekin of
chopped garlic to which black vinegar can be added for dunking. They’re well-made, if prosaic—well-suited for wee ones, elders and Republicans. One of the most unexpected gems on the menu is a $10 meal of burger and fries. But this is a far cry from the conciliatory burger plate that graced ChineseAmerican spots in the ’80s—the pork or lamb Beijing street burgers ($6-$7) come in gingeranise or chili-cumin-garlic flavors that would make Ray Kroc cringe. While you’re at it, order a bowl of shoestring fries ($4), whether merely salted the way they normally come or enhanced with black vinegar and ground Sichuan peppercorn that the kitchen will add if you ask nicely. Danwei forces you to endure the counterservice rigmarole, which becomes a problem when the food is so unfamiliar to most firsttime customers. The party ahead of you may have lots of questions, or special needs. But it’s so damn nice that there’s finally decent Chinese food in the middle of the city, who cares about a little inconvenience? EAT: Danwei Canting, 803 SE Stark St., 503236-6050, danweicanting.com. 11 am-9 pm Sunday-Thursday, 11 am-10 pm Friday-Saturday.
I
y p p a H Hour
Sha
www.sha
Shandong www.shandongportland.com
Simple ApproAch
Bold FlAvor vegan Friendly
open 11-10
everyday
500 NW 21st Ave, (503) 208-2173 kungpowpdx.com
Fillmore Trattoria
Italian Home Cooking Tuesday–Saturday 5:30PM–10PM closed Sunday & Monday
1937 NW 23RD Place Portland, OR 97210
(971) 386-5935
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MUSIC CANON FODDER
How Music Millennium’s
GARTH BROOKS BOYCOTT
Bargain Bin Again
Created Record Store Day
You won’t find any Garth Brooks albums in the used-CD bins at Music Millennium. In fact, you won’t find the world’s richest cowboy anywhere in the iconic Portland record store. Twentyfour years ago, after Brooks tried to pull a fast one on secondary music retailers, Music Millennium owner Terry Currier decided to go scorched earth—or, more accurately, charbroiled—against the country superstar. It turned out to be more than a publicity stunt— as Currier told us, it’s the event that indirectly led, more than a decade later, to the creation of Record Store Day.
BY PE T E COT T E L L
pcottell@wweek.com
Vinyl is over. Again. There’s a reason it became uncool the first time around, in the ’80s—it was bulky, fragile and technologically inferior to the then-new format of compact discs. After a brief resurgence caused by the impressionability of hipsters and their insatiable thirst for inconvenient trinkets, it looks as though we’ve reached Peak Vinyl. Collectors cherish Record Store Day and the opportunity it presents to snatch up rare, one-off pressings made specifically for the event, but the annual logjam such releases create for vinyl pressing plants is a well-documented source of frustration. There is a better way, as it turns out, and it’s been rotting in the budget bin of your favorite record store since the late ’90s. While the industry has deemed vinyl and streaming to be the commercial future of recorded music, CDs have been devalued to the point of absurdity. But the same cycle of nostalgia that made vinyl cool again is bound to come back around and whisk the sonically superior CD back into public consciousness, turning those piles of discarded Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray albums you purchased 20 years ago for $18.99 to hear the one song you liked into plastic gold. Rather than spend your money on this year’s ketchup-scented, confetti-infused RSD exclusive 7-inch from Jack White, we believe this Record Store Day is the perfect time to reassess the bevy of records you’re all but guaranteed to find collecting dust at your local record store. Here’s the best of what we found on a recent afternoon combing the CD bins in search of gold.
Filter, Title of Record
Former Nine Inch Nails touring guitarist Richard Patrick struck gold with his splinter group’s 1995 hit “Hey Man Nice Shot,” but the rest of Filter’s debut, Short Bus, was forgettable NIN-lite filler. Lots of teenage girls bought the band’s 1999 follow-up to hear the bongo-heavy New Age ballad “Take a Picture,” but deep cuts like “Welcome to the Fold” and “It’s Gonna Kill Me” are near-perfect aggro-electro with just enough crunchy guitars to nominally qualify as rock ’n’ roll. Also of note is “The Best Things,” a spiritual cousin to Republica’s essential jock jam “Ready to Go” that perfectly demonstrates just how much justice the CD format did for over-compressed late-’90s alt-rock.
Orbit, Libido Speedway
Hailing from Boston, Orbit’s sound was too blatant a Pixies ripoff to garner any sort of buzz beyond moderate radio play of this 1997 album’s single “Medicine.” After repeated listens of “Wake Up” and “Paper Bag,” it’s irritating that Sponge became a household name and Orbit didn’t.
Sponge, Wax Ecstatic
Speaking of Sponge, this post-butt-rock outfit from Detroit apparently had a lot more fuel left in the tank once the dust from the Empire Records soundtrack cleared and radio programmers forgot about the band’s hit single “Plowed.” Skip the lukewarm, Live-esque single “Have You Seen Mary” and go straight to the title track, which is the glorious sound of middle-aged men in embellished denim making a go of providing soundtrack filler for Vin Diesel movies.
Dave Matthews Band, Before These Crowded Streets
This is the last DMB album to net the legendary frat-rock group considerable radio play before it became the PG-rated jam band of choice for dudes with entry-level marketing jobs and one-too-many Patagonia jackets. “Halloween” and “The Stone” are good songs on record, and probably sound even better when you’re a little stoned on the grassy hill of an amphitheater with your very average significant other.
Tori Amos, From the Choirgirl Hotel
We found Tori Amos’ entire discography at the Everyday Music on Northeast Sandy for under $10, which is a perfect gift for that person in your life who’d rather strategically place feminist ephemera around his or her apartment than actually engage in any of sort of activism.
Third Eye Blind, Third Eye Blind
Stephen Jenkins is doing a commendable job chipping away at the heap of goodwill the hot-take economy has created for this recently canonized pop-rock classic since he doot-doot-dooted his way into our hearts 20 years ago, but no amount of pseudowokeness and celeb-rag shit-talking can ever take away just how good the last three songs on this record are.
Natalie Merchant, Tigerlily
Aspiring ingenues two decades her junior get a pass for making midtempo alt-country because it’s what their daddy raised them on, yet the former frontwoman of 10,000 Maniacs remains forever unforgiven because you still hear “Carnival” every other time you wander the aisles of Safeway. It’s not her fault. If making tender, accessible folk rock for adults is so wrong, why would Merchant ever want to be right?
Creeper Lagoon, Take Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday
Dreamworks released this album in hopes of scoring a hit with Counting Crows and Wallflowers fans, but no one gave a shit about either of those bands in 2001. So the sophomore effort of this San Francisco bar band tanked. It’s a shame, because the massive guitars on lead single “Wrecking Ball” and the heady, slow-burning closer “Keep From Moving” are ’90s alt-rock at its absolute finest—a few years too late to get made fun of by Beavis and Butt-head, yet a few years too early for the “blog rock” boom. Sigh.
White Town, Women in Technology
The music industry was bloated and rife with iniquity in the late ’90s, and few records are as exemplary of how bad it felt to plunk down almost $20 for just one good song than Women in Technology. File sharing and streaming services have since rendered this idea preposterous, which allows a neutral ear to finally be applied to what is, in actuality, a well-rounded lo-fi electro-pop record. It’s too pleasant to write off just because the impossibly catchy single “Your Woman” is so obviously the best track—if only we hadn’t had to learn the hard and expensive way the first time around.
Chris Isaak, Speak of the Devil
There’s an inordinate number of Chris Isaak CDs taking up space in the bargain bins of Portland record stores. What prompted such an aboutface in perceptions of this impeccably coiffed crooner’s talents is anyone’s guess, but damn, can this guy sing. Slap some reverb and tape hiss on this record’s best tracks, and you’re basically looking at a glossier version of early Kurt Vile. It’s cause to believe that Isaak has much to gain by growing a beard and adopting an alter ego not too far afield from a burnout Chris Gaines. GET IT: Record Store Day is Saturday, April 22. See wweek.com for local details.
“In 1993, four of the six major distribution companies came up with a policy that record stores selling used CDs wouldn’t be supported with marketing money. Five months later, Garth Brooks came out in a press conference and said he didn’t want his new album [In Pieces] sold in stores that sell used CDs, because he thought he should get a secondary royalty. This was weeks after he made the statement that he had more money than his kids and his grandkids could spend in their whole life. “So I pulled his product off shelves and sent it in for returns. I scheduled an ad—in Willamette Week, actually—and invited the public to come down the next Friday, bring their Garth Brooks posters, VHS tapes, CDs and vinyl, and we’ll barbecue them. I was COURTESY OF TERRY CURRIER
YOUR USED-CD SHOPPING GUIDE FOR THIS YEAR’S RECORD STORE DAY.
eating melted CDs on hamburger buns, covered in barbecue sauce. “We ended up doing a radio show in Seattle that night, and set up barbecues at nine stores between Bellingham and San Diego. We sent out national press releases and got covered by People, CNN, MTV. Within weeks, all the distributors had rescinded the policies they had put into place. So I was ready to put Garth Brooks back in stores, but then he came out on a national talk show and said, ‘People should stand up for what they believe, but those people in Portland were still selling my CDs during the barbecue,’ which wasn’t true. So I said, ‘Screw him,’ and haven’t sold Garth Brooks since. “As I went down to these nine stores on the barbecue tour, I found that people had similar feelings and similar issues that they felt strongly about. I made a proposal to create a support network of record stores. That’s when the Coalition of Independent Record Stores began, which led to the creation of two other coalitions, and when Record Store Day was born, it was put together by all three. Everything that’s happened since came out of that barbecue, one way or another.”
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MUSIC = WW Pick. Highly recommended. Prices listed are sometimes for advance ticket sales. At-the-door increases and so-called 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, APRIL 19 Julian Lage & Chris Eldridge, Aoife O’Donovan
[SONGWRITING MASTER CLASS] These may be just names to those not plugged into the classical-adjacent art-folk scene, but without exaggeration, this is an all-star cast—a full-spectrum sampling of what American singersongwriting can sound like at its absolute best. O’Donovan, known best as the frontwoman of avantgarde string band Crooked Still, is thoughtful and melodic as a solo act, with an old-time country cadence similar to Gillian Welch, plus unexpected dissonances, disparate chord voicings and other gold nuggets for former band kids to nerd out on. And Julian Lage—now emerging as one of the world’s best living jazz guitarists—segues into Goat Rodeo Sessions-style artisanal bluegrass with staggering ease, with the help of the Punch Brothers’ Chris Eldridge. All three of these players have classical-caliber chops, having played with Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Pops Orchestra. But mostly, they’ve played with each other, and on top of their individual virtuosity, their deeprooted chemistry with each other is what drives every sublime, surprising twist and turn. ISABEL ZACHARIAS. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SW Milwaukie Ave., 503-2349694. 8 pm. $20. All ages.
Shaed, K.I.D, Cupcakke
[ELECTRO-POP] See Get Busy, page 27. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 503-231-9663. 8 pm. $13 advance, $15 day of show. 21+.
Soul’d Out: Toots and the Maytals, Lee Fields and the Expressions
[ROCKSTEADY SOUL] As significant figures in the history of black music, Frederick “Toots” Hibbert and Lee Fields have nearly a lifetime’s worth of cultural contributions under their respective belts. In terms of the former, what started as a trio back in 1962 eventually progressed into the gamechanging group, Toots and the Maytals, who are responsible for popularizing what the world knows now as reggae, ska and rocksteady. They even gave reggae its name with 1968’s “Do the Reggay.” Part of what catapulted the Maytals into becoming forefathers of the genre was Hibbert’s soulful croon, leading him to be named one of Rolling Stone’s greatest vocalists of all time. James Brown also made that list, and though he has passed on, part of him lives on through Fields. His career started by mildly mimicking the Godfather of Soul, but Fields is godfathering soul in his own right. He’s one of the only old-school soul musicians still commanding stages with his incredible energy and penchant for heartfelt, sultry love songs. No matter who his style imitated early on, his original creations over nearly five decades is what defines him. CERVANTE POPE. Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., 971-2300033. 8 pm. $26.50-$40. 21+.
Soul’d Out: Cory Henry & the Funk Apostles, Moorea Masa & the Mood, Blind Bartimaeus
[FUNK KEYS] The intense focus with which keyboardist Cory Henry approaches a groove won him and large-ensemble wunderkinds Snarky Puppy a Grammy in 2015, and has led the musician to
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collaborations with everyone from Bruce Springsteen to P. Diddy over the past decade. But while he mostly spends his time building striking layers of keyboards over beats rather than shredding solos, when Henry does let loose inside of the massive two-drummer, two-keyboard, two-guitar outfit he calls the Funk Apostles— basically an audio tour of postDilla beat music—hold onto your hats. His lines are so quick and shocking, you’ll catch his own band shaking their heads in disbelief. PARKER HALL. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 503284-8686. 9:30 pm. $22. 21+.
Soul’d Out: Travi$ Scott, Flying Lotus
[CHILLWAVE] Travi$ Scott and Flying Lotus are, respectively, masterminds of hip-hop and electronic music who don’t fit rigid definitions of either genre. They take a carefree approach to producing moods, and for proof, you don’t have to look further than what they accomplished on their recent albums—Scott with the moody, R&B fusion Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight and FlyLo’s all-encompassing You’re Dead! For Scott, who once toured the country with the eccentric Young Thug, he’s reaching Kanye West levels of influence, with a melodic sound that’s rubbing off on the likes of Quavo of Migos and Post Malone. Recently, he collaborated with Drake on an infectious, flutesampling track named after the City of Roses, keeping Portland weird and awesome for those in the know. ERIC DIEP. Veterans Memorial Coliseum, 300 N Winning Way, 503-235-8771. 8 pm. $42.50. All ages.
THURSDAY, APRIL 20 Lil Debbie, Ceez Morales, Lord Lawrence
[HIP-HOP] For those who remember Bay Area rap circa 2011, there couldn’t be a true 4/20 celebration without Lil Debbie. She may have come up as part of the White Girl Mob, but splitting away from Kreayshawn and V-Nasty has granted Lil Debbie the spotlight to smoke her way into underground cult fame. On her latest album, Debbie, the “ratchet girl next door” still raps about bad bitches and twerking while dropping overt sexual innuendo, but she does show a little maturity in terms of her flow. She’s grown as a person, but she’ll always be the lil one hitting blunts, sipping lean out of two cups and making it “Squirt” with Riff Raff. CERVANTE POPE. Bossanova Ballroom, 722 E Burnside St., 503-206-7630. 9 pm. $15. 21+.
Soul’d Out: RJD2 + Tortoise, 1939 Ensemble
[POST-ROCK + TURNTABLISM] See Get Busy, page 27. Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 503-225-0047. 9 pm. $27.50. 21+.
Stumpfest VI
[STONER] See Get Busy, page 27. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 503-288-3895. 8:30 pm. $20 advance, $25 day of show, 21+. Through April 22.
Real Estate
[YOUNG ADULT YACHT ROCK] Though their whimsical daydream rock is a safe distance from the
jam-band circuit, the members of Real Estate have never been shy about their love of the uncool sounds of Steely Dan or the Grateful Dead. On its fourth album, this year’s In Mind, the suburban New Jersey indie-pop outfit is just a few cheesy synth presets away from becoming a hipster’s answer to the Moody Blues. But its predilection for shimmering lattices of guitar and carefully stacked vocal harmonies is not to be faulted, considering how consistent the ambience and scenery such a simple formula can still evoke after remaining mostly the same all these years. PETE COTTELL. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 503-284-8686. $20 advance, $23 day of show. All ages.
FRIDAY, APRIL 21 Soul’d Out: Solange, Jamire Williams
[FUTURISTIC DIVA] See Get Busy, page 27. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway Ave., 503-248-4335. 8 pm. $50-$99. All ages.
Soul’d Out: Big Freedia, Tribe Mars
[NEW ORLEANS BOUNCE] A longtime New Orleans hip-hop scenester, Big Freedia was pioneering the sound of bounce—the city’s trademark call-and-response party music—long before she announced her intentions to “slay” in Beyoncé’s “Formation.” And just as Freedia shaped the sound and culture of bounce music, she spread it like glittery butter all
across America. Born with the decidedly less spectacular name Freddie Ross, Big Freedia’s also had a huge influence on popular ideas of what “queer music” can sound like. Known from the start for her outrageous live performances, the best way to experience Freedia, by far, is to see her live. ISABEL ZACHARIAS. Dante’s, 350 W Burnside St., 866-7778932. 10 pm. $20. 21+.
Soul’d Out: Giorgio Moroder, Dam-Funk
[ELECTRO GRANDFATHER] Giorgio Moroder’s robotic pulse throbs through the history of the late 20th century popular music. He brought Donna Summer to ecstasy—figuratively, but also sort of literally—on 1975’s electro-disco groundbreaker “Love to Love You Baby” and somehow made Britney Spears covering “Tom’s Diner” make sense on his daffy 2015 comeback album, Deja Vu. In between, he worked with everyone from Bowie to Blondie to Berlin, for whom he produced the gauzy Top Gun ballad “Take My Breath Away.” From big-tent EDM to chart-topping pop, the world would sound a lot different today were it not for Moroder popularizing synthesized production and showing how far you could take it. At the very least, we wouldn’t have Daft Punk, who owe the dude their career and whose 2013 album, Random Access Memories, is both directly and indirectly an extended tribute to him. MATTHEW SINGER. Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., 971-2300033. 8 pm. $25. 21+.
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ALASDAIR MCLELLAN
PREVIEW
The XX
[LOVERS IN SPACE] In the lead-up to The XX’s third album, this year’s I See You, a palpable apprehension clouded the critical elite whose adoration is largely responsible for the band’s rise to fame. The sonic realm inhabited by the young London trio on its previous two records was a barren and icy place wrought with loss and confusion, which posed the question whether the XX’s sullen, vaguely electronic take on lover’s rock had room to grow while retaining the brief moments of warmth and humanity that functioned as its hooks. The answer lies in the impeccable taste and world-building of Jamie Smith, the group’s in-house producer, who has quite obviously taken the wheel after the success of his 2015 solo album, In Colour. The buzzing samples, slow builds and gentle drops of standouts like “Say Something Loving” and “A Violent Noise” are evidence that we’re still safe from being goosed by the kind of EDM bro-baiting crescendos Smith is surely capable of, further emphasizing that restraint is still the XX’s greatest strength. Paired with a quantum leap in the confidence of vocalists Romy Croft and Oliver Sim, I See You’s reliance on sampled dub and U.K. garage sounds is a gambit that pays off. The end result is a more generous spectrum of tones that’s as inviting and disarming as ever, which is all one can ask for from a group so invested in the sounds and feelings wrought by heartache and intimacy. PETE COTTELL. Veterans Memorial Coliseum, 300 N Winning Way, 503-235-8771. 8 pm Sunday, April 23. $39.99. All ages. Willamette Week April 19, 2017 wweek.com
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MUSIC I Love the 90s Tour: Vanilla Ice, Salt-N-Pepa, All 4 One, Tone Loc, Rob Base, Young MC
[YOUNGER US] What’s the sound of one decaying nostalgia act playing alone? A county fair. What’s the sound of several playing together? An arena tour! Salt N Peppa deserves better than this—and not just because they technically broke through in the ‘80s—but “Shoop” should still bang, at least. Veterans Memorial Coliseum, 300 N Winning Way, 503-235-8771. 7:30 pm. $38-$68. All ages.
SATURDAY, APRIL 22 Loudpvck, Casey Vann, Night City
[DUBSTEP] Over the past five years, many popular club nights have been filled with DJs and artists playing music marked by ground-quaking 808s, machinegun hi hats and all the swagger of your favorite Rick Ross song. This style is known as trap music, and it’s hard to find artists who drop these heavy-hitting productions more consistently than L.A. duo Loudpvck. Even within the past two months, these guys have put their unique stamp on the Chainsmokers’ “Paris,” along with a handful of original productions. Never ones to sit still, they are rarely home in their L.A. studio, preferring life on the road hitting some of America’s largest clubs. WILLIAM VANCE. 45 East, 315 SE 3rd Ave. 10 pm. $10 advance, $15 day of show. 21+.
The Walters, Summer Salt, New Move
[NOT THE BEACH BOYS] The Walters might be from Chicago, but their sound is rooted in the beachy, surf-rock bands of the Best Coast. Often compared to the Beach Boys, the slow tempo and light guitar strumming might make you drift gently off to sleep, but in a way that’s too crisp and blended to feel saccharine. It doesn’t mean that’s the only trick up their sleeve, though. Songs like newest single “She’s Gonna Leave You” hint at their inclination for a more upbeat and, if not quite raucous, at least dynamic sound. MAYA MCOMIE. Bunk Bar, 1028 SE Water Ave., 503-328-2865. 9:30 pm. $7. 21+.
San Fermin, Low Roar
[MODERN POP] Like Chairlift or Sufjan Stevens before it, San Fermin offers a mixed bag of modern-pop elements—electronic percussion, co-ed vocals, orchestral instrumentation— to boost an otherwise prosaic, Zach Braff-y brand of indie pop into a vibrant, inventive aesthetic that even the most malicious of music snobs can’t resist. Released earlier this month, third effort Belong replaces the sunny disposition of SF’s previous work with darker, downtempo grooves and a subdued panache more akin to R&B, creating a dour juxtaposition to an otherwise elated sonic landscape. CRIS LANKENAU. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 503231-9663. 9 pm. Sold out. 21+.
Soul’d Out: Ohio Players, Shock featuring Marlon McClain, Andy Stokes
[TRUE SOUL] Double Tee did an incredible job curating Soul’d Out this year, but there’s no booking that represents the true, well, soul of the festival more than the legendary funk ensemble the Ohio Players. It’s unclear who’s exactly in the band these days, but with the death of onetime singerkeyboardist Junie Morrison in January, expect tonight’s performance to be as heavy on emotion as the grooves. Get there early for a rare gig from Portland’s own icons of funk Shock, whose 1981 deep cut “Let’s Get Crackin’” is considered the first rap song to
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DATES HERE come out of Portland—at least, that’s what frontman Marlon McClain insists. MATTHEW SINGER. Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., 971-230-0033. 8 pm. $35 general admission, $49.50 balcony. 21+.
Emily King
[JAZZY R&B] New York-born vocalist Emily King dropped out of high school at age 16 to pursue singing full-time, and picked up a Grammy nom for 2007 debut East Side Story. Her 2015 follow-up, The Switch, is rife with energetic, jazz-influenced R&B featuring King’s husky, whispered trilling. On some songs, like the title track, she sounds a bit like the jazz pop of Kimbra, and even reflects the hushed intensity of Feist. The fast tempo on most songs conveys the vivacity of her soulful melodies, a drive that probably compelled her to dedicate her energies toward singing. MAYA MCOMIE. The Old Church, 1422 SW 11th Ave., 503-222-2031. 8 pm. $18 advance, $70 meet and greet. All ages.
SUNDAY, APRIL 23 The Zombies
[18,328 DAYS LATER] Though mostly known in the States for their chart-toppers “Time of the Season” and “She’s Not There,” the Zombies’ crowning achievement is their epic masterpiece Odessey and Oracle, which turns 50 next year and stands among the greatest British rock albums of all time. Imagine a late-career Beatles album that pays less attention to revolutionizing studio recording and more to crafting the best psych-inflected piano pop imaginable. The principal members have reunited to celebrate previous anniversaries of the album to make up for the fact that they’d disbanded by the time it was released the first time around, and while this year is no different, it should be just as magical. CRIS LANKENAU. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 503-234-9694. 8 pm. Sold out. 21+.
NE-HI
[REVERB ROCK] NE-HI is still warm to the touch in the wake of the February release of its sophomore album, Offers. The quartet’s torching, reverb-heavy sound possesses the raw thawing power to put the long-ass Pacific Northwest winter to bed for good. The blown-out vocals and guitar-centric approach flirts with grunge, but NE-HI is far too cool and collected for a full-blown stage dive. A fairer comparison would be Weezer, whose moderately punkish pop rock certainly influenced this rising Windy City band. MARK STOCK. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 503-2883895. 9 pm. $10 advance, $12 day of show.
MONDAY, APRIL 24 Spiral Stairs, Blesst Chest
[PAVEMENT OFFSHOOT] Spiral Stairs is the solo project of formative Pavement and Preston School of Industry member Scott Kannberg. Doris and the Daggers, his first record since 2009, features an impressive list of cameos, including the National’s Matt Berninger and Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew. Refreshingly, the record mixes the expected ’90s slacker-rock motifs with artsier, Bowie-esque showmanship, cementing Kannberg as a true frontman. Rumor has it, he’ll be playing old Pavement classics, too, so be prepared for the inevitable shout for “Summer Babe.” MARK STOCK. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 503-2883895. 9 pm. $12. 21+.
C O U R T E S Y O F E M I LY K I N G
DISTANT GAZE: Emily King plays the Old Church on Saturday, April 22.
CLASSICAL, JAZZ & WORLD Oregon Symphony presents Debussy’s La Mer
[CLASSICAL SYMPHONIC] It’s not often a classical masterwork clocks in at under 30 minutes. But in so many spectacular ways, French Impressionist Claude Debussy’s La Mer is an exception to the components that are “supposed” to be at work in our most beloved classical music. Totally dismissed by critics at its 1905 premiere as heavy-handed, La Mer is now one of Debussy’s most performed works, and can be used as a real measure of the emotionality he was capable of. Very clearly a product of Debussy’s obsessive fandom for Richard Wagner, La Mer is all drama—a little unbalanced, a little unhinged—imitating the tumultuousness of its namesake. Featuring superstar violin soloist Simone Lamsma’s return to the Oregon Symphony, this program places Benjamin Britten’s oddly impressionist “Violin Concerto” between two other gorgeous, seafaring works from Mendelssohn and contemporary Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa. ISABEL ZACHARIAS. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, portland5.com. 7:30 pm Saturday, April 22 and Monday, April 24. 2 pm Sunday, April 23. $23-$150. All ages.
Oregon Repertory Singers present Love and Fire
[SIZZLING LOVE SONGS] One of the world’s most-performed composers is actually from Beaverton. Morten Lauridsen long ago traded his beloved Northwest for SoCal sunshine and a teaching job at USC, but he returns each summer to a shack in the San Juans, where one of Portland’s only two National Medal of the Arts winners writes the choral music that has made his scores among the best-selling of any living composer. His music returns home often, too, performed by Portland-area choirs, and sometimes prepared by Lauridsen himself. He’ll be back this time to help Oregon Repertory Singers perform his Madrigali: Six ‘Fire Songs’ on Italian Renaissance Poems—far more, well, heated than his usual, gently soothing style—and two more modern classics, O Magnum Mysterium and Sure on This Shining Night. The choir will also sing American spirituals and Spanish composer Carlos Surinach’s The Dark Night of the Soul. BRETT CAMPBELL. First United Methodist Church, 1838 SW Jefferson St. 3 pm Saturday-Sunday, April 22-23. $15$35. All ages.
Portland Chamber Orchestra
[ODES AGAINST OPPRESSION] In 1989, the great American conductor Leonard Bernstein led an orchestra of international musicians in a historic Berlin Wall performance of Beethoven’s mighty Symphony No. 9, helping turn one of European classical music’s masterpieces into an ode to political liberation. That same year, on the other side of the world, longtime University of Washington music professor John Verrall—a music school classmate of Bernstein’s and student of Aaron Copland— wrote another work about political oppression, Chief Joseph Legend, for the state’s 1989 centennial. It commemorated the U.S. government’s tragic forced removal of the Wallowa band of Nez Perce from their Oregon home. Their leader Chief Joseph’s surrender speech became a famous statement of resistance. Now Portland Chamber Orchestra honors America’s indigenous peoples on its 70th anniversary with a performance of both works, in a concert that also features some of Portland’s finest singers, including Met Opera bass-baritone Richard Zeller and soprano Angela Niederloh, plus the Lewis & Clark College and Hillsboro Community Youth choirs. Some proceeds benefit the Native American Rights Fund, and both concerts will be preceded by a screening of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Oregon Experience film C.E.S. Wood, about the Portland legend who recorded Joseph’s speech and became a lifelong advocate for the Nez Perce. BRETT CAMPBELL. Agnes Flanagan Chapel at Lewis and Clark College, 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, 503768-7000. 7:30 pm Saturday and 3 pm Sunday, April 22-23. $15-$35. All ages.
Soul’d Out: Honoring Jimmy Mak
[JAZZ TRIBUTE] When Jim Makarounis succumbed to larynx cancer the day after his iconic Northwest Portland jazz club, Jimmy Mak’s, closed its doors for good at the beginning of 2017, it was sad and shocking, but not surprising—he was Jimmy Mak’s and Jimmy Mak’s was him, and one couldn’t exist without the other. Tonight, club regulars— including drummer Mel Brown, singer Andy Stokes, guitarist Dan Balmer and more— pay tribute to the man who gave them a regular stage for 20 years. Roseland Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., 971-2300033. 7 pm Sunday, April 23. $25 general admission, $35 balcony seating, $65 VIP. 21+.
For more Music listings, visit Willamette Week April 19, 2017 wweek.com
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MUSIC BRIAN KASNYIK
PROFILE
Kid President CHRIS BALLEW GOT FAMOUS SINGING ABOUT PEACHES AND FROGGIES. NOW HE MAKES MUSIC FOR CHILDREN. To hear Chris Ballew tell it, Caspar Babypants is a sacred undertaking. Ballew, who you may remember from his days with Seattle post-grunge power-pop act the Presidents of the United States of America, sees his life as a quest to be, as the kids say, “#authentic.” “The real search in my life has been for transparency,” he says. “Transparency between who I really am inside myself and how I express that outwardly. The most transparent, clear, sustainable, relaxing, cozy place for me to live is Caspar Babypants.” Caspar Babypants is Ballew’s kindie-rock project, which features songs like “Jellyfish Jones,” about what a jellyfish would do if he had bones; “The Stump Hotel,” about all the bugs that live in a stump; and breakout hit “Stompy the Bear,” which has 850,000 views on YouTube. Ballew, 51, says he knew shortly after signing a big label deal with the Presidents that the project was “like a metaphorical suit that was way too small.” The band stuck together through 23 years and a triple-platinum album, finally calling it quits in July 2015 after playing occasional shows for the previous few years. “I knew the Presidents wasn’t quite right for me immediately when we hit,” he says. “It was like, ‘This is a wobbly platform that I’m standing on. It’s not solid, at all. I have to get off this.’ But when the pony is pooping gold, you hang onto the pony and ride it as far as you can, until the gold poop stops coming out of it.” All along, he felt a cosmic nudge to “keep digging, keep searching.” And search he did. Ballew’s side projects are many and varied, ranging from the solo instrumental act Sampladelic, consisting of sliced-up breakbeats, to the electro-rap-rock outfit the Feelings Hijackers. My personal favorite—and the thing that convinced me Ballew is an underappreciated genius of fractured pop—was an obscure indie project called the Giraffes, which released two records, in 1998 and 2000. (For the other six Giraffes fans out there, Ballew posted a 33-song double album hours before we chatted last week on chrisballew.org.) “I’m releasing all these old records because at the time they were kinda frustrating—it was like,
‘Oh, that’s great but it’s not it,’” he says. “And now I found the ‘it,’ so I’m like, ‘OK, this is going to make somebody happy somewhere.’ Even if one person downloads an album for free, that’s one more than zero. And it’s just gathering dust on my hard drive.” After a half-dozen projects, the answer finally came to Ballew through the art of his second wife, Kate Endle, who does the twee, animal-focused illustrations for his records. “I saw her artwork and I thought to myself, ‘The music I’m trying to make comes from the same planet as that artwork,’” he says. “I really honed it toward that vibe, which is really innocent, folksy, bright, full of animals. Obviously, when I listened back, it was kids’ music. It’s like this giant search was over.” That, he says, has made him happier than ever, allowing him to connect with fans in a way he couldn’t even when he was playing The Tonight Show and headlining Crystal Ballroom. “My intention with music has always been, really, to help people,” he says. “Specifically now, I’m helping families reduce stress, which is a huge deal to me. Especially first-time parents of little, tiny children. They’re so stressed out. I get tearful parents coming up to me thanking me for saving their family.” That, of course, requires making music that works for everyone, from age 3 to 30. So far, Ballew has found regional success, including a standing weekly showcase at Top Pot Doughnuts, Seattle’s answer to Pip’s Original in Northeast Portland. “I have to like it,” he says. “It has to be interesting enough for me to want to work on the song, and record it and mix it and master it and then potentially play it live hundreds of times. I’m an adult with refined musical taste, so if I can tweak aspects of a Caspar Babypants song so that I’m satisfied, [listeners are] probably going to be satisfied.” Ballew will play a double matinee at Portland’s Village Ballroom on Sunday. The 4 pm Caspar Babypants show is sold out, but tickets remain for the 2 pm show, with plenty of room at the bar afterward. “We have a routine when we go down to Portland: We play the Village Ballroom doubleheader, then we go to Tin Shed for jalapeño vodka to celebrate,” he says. “If any parents want to come down and party, we’ll be there.” MARTIN CIZMAR. SEE IT: Caspar Babypants plays the Village Ballroom, 704 NE Dekum St., on Sunday, April 23. 2 and 4 pm (sold out). $7, children under 2 free. All ages. Willamette Week April 19, 2017 wweek.com
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2393 NE Fremont St. • FremontTheater.com
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MUSIC CALENDAR WED. APRIL 19 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave Julian Lage & Chris Eldridge, Aoife O’Donovan
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St Ghost Bath, Astronoid
Dante’s
350 West Burnside RIKKHA: Parisian Burlesque Rock Band
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Shaed, K.I.D, Cupcakke
Mississippi Studios
Revolution Hall
1300 SE Stark St #110 Soul’d Out: Bilal, Shy Girls, Laura Ivancie
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave Soul’d Out: Lupe Fiasco
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd. Emerson String Quartet: 20th Century Masterpieces
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave Tallulah’s Daddy
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Joe Purdy
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave Soul’d Out: Toots and the Maytals, Lee Fields and the Expressions
The Analog Cafe
720 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Surrogate, Fialta, Tyson Motsenbocker; Chris Tsefalas
Veterans Memorial Coliseum
300 N Winning Way Soul’d Out: Travi$ Scott, Flying Lotus
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St An Evening with Jim Lauderdale
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. Soul’d Out: Cory Henry & the Funk Apostles, Moorea Masa & the Mood, Blind Bartimaeus
THURS. APRIL 20 Artichoke Music Cafe 3130 Se Hawthorne, Songwriter Roundup
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St DJ Aphrodite, Ray Uptown, The Dirt Merchant, DJ Wels, MC Sake One
Bossanova Ballroom
722 E Burnside St. Lil Debbie, Ceez Morales, Lord Lawrence
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St Soul’d Out: RJD2 + Tortoise, 1939 Ensemble
Hawthorne Theatre
1507 SE César E. Chávez Blvd. Fyohna, Shae, JM Long
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Soul’d Out: Shura, Women’s Beat League DJs
Landmark Saloon
Catfish Lou’s
2460 NW 24th Avenue Sheila Wilcoxson & Friends
116 NE Russell St Thursday Swing featuring The Cherry Blossom Hot 4, Pink Lady & John Bennet Jazz Band
Landmark Saloon
4847 SE Division St, Ian Miller and Friends
Mississippi Pizza
White Eagle Saloon
3552 N Mississippi Ave Mr. Ben
836 N Russell St Bees In A Bottle, Northside Four
FRI. APRIL 21 Alberta Street Pub
1036 NE Alberta St Fortune’s Folly, Cloud Six
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
1037 SW Broadway Soul’d Out: Solange, Jamire Williams
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St Sustainer, She Preaches Mayhem, Across Three Hundred Seas, The Hoons
DEATH IS REAL: “I’m sorry for doing this to you,” Phil Elverum told the crowd at Mississippi Studios on April 17, in a breath between songs that address, directly and by name, the wife he recently lost to cancer. “But there’s a lot more of it, so get ready.” The audience laughed cautiously, grateful both for the comic relief and the very real bracing for what was ahead. In effect, what he said was, There will only be sad songs tonight. But we already knew that. Elverum—who, to a pocket of Pacific Northwesterners, is more folkloric deity than musician—rose to indiegod status with noisy, lo-fi recordings of songs rooted in naturalism that cast the everyday as mythically sacred, first under the moniker of the Microphones and now as Mount Eerie. His newest LP, A Crow Looked at Me, could more pointedly be called Death Is Real. “Some of you knew my wife, Geneviève,” he said, at once sounding shaken and relieved. “This is the first time I’ve played this set to people who aren’t strangers. It feels different. It feels heavier.” At Mississippi Studios, wearing a green plaid flannel with red undershirt, he looked oddly comfortable onstage, by himself with just an acoustic guitar, singing with perfect articulation through sparse lyrics that are poetic in their frankness. “I don’t want to learn anything from this,” Elverum sang at one point. Death is real. It is not metaphorical, it is not artful, it is not beautiful. But singing is the best way Elverum knows how to keep telling Geneviève that he loves her. Not telling us in the crowd—telling her. ISABEL ZACHARIAS.
Bunk Bar
1028 SE Water Ave. Thomas Mudrick & The Buffet Brothers, Lord Alba
Classic Pianos
3033 SE Milwaukie Ave. Alfred Muro
Dante’s
350 West Burnside Soul’d Out: Big Freedia, Tribe Mars
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Left Coast Country, Grateful Bluegrass Boys
Duff’s Garage
The Annette Lowman Trio
Star Theater
13 NW 6th Ave. Soul’d Out: Farnell Newton’s Prince Tribute
The Analog Cafe
720 SE Hawthorne Blvd. The Relationship (feat. Brian Bell of Weezer), Cotillion, Psychomagic; Garcia Birthday Band
The Firkin Tavern
1937 SE 11th Ave Cold Static, Strictly Platonic
2530 NE 82nd Ave Rick Emery; PDX Social Club
The Secret Society
Fremont Theater
Tony Starlight Showroom
2393 NE Fremont Street Sam Densmore, Dam Sensmore & Scott Gerard
Landmark Saloon
4847 SE Division St, The High Cotton Boys; Leslie Lou and The Lowburners
Mission Theater
1624 NW Glisan St. Garcia Birthday Band
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Stumpfest VI: Windhand, Bell Witch, Lord Dying
4847 SE Division St, Jake Ray and the Cowdogs; Miller and Sasser’s Twelve Dollar Band
Ponderosa Lounge
Mission Theater
8 NW 6th Ave Soul’d Out: Giorgio Moroder, Dam-Funk
1624 NW Glisan St. Black Swan Classic Jazz Band
225 SW Ash St Dwight Church, Dwight Dickinson, Eddie Kancer, Nick Passey, Jeff Dillion and more...
3341 SE Belmont St, Hobosexual, Maurice and The Stiff Sisters
128 NE Russell St. Real Estate
10350 N Vancouver Way, Kurt Van Meter & Country Wide
Roseland Theater
Skyline Tavern
8031 NW Skyline Blvd
1015 SW 18th Ave Portland Symphonic Girlchoir Music in the Making Concert
Ash Street Saloon
2845 SE Stark St Asher Fulero Band, Far Out West
Wonder Ballroom
Zion Lutheran Church
1037 SW Broadway Oregon Symphony presents Debussy’s La Mer
The Goodfoot
The Secret Society
224 NW 13th Ave. Camerata PYP
MON. APRIL 24
13 NW 6th Ave. Soul’d Out: Ghost Note, MonoNeon
Kaul Auditorium (at Reed College)
Wieden + Kennedy
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
Star Theater
The Liquor Store
2393 NE Fremont Street All In: Social Music
LAST WEEK LIVE
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Stumpfest VI: Danava, Mammatus, White Manna
Fremont Theater
[APRIL 19-25]
For more listings, check out wweek.com.
E M I LY J O A N G R E E N E
= 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.
116 NE Russell St The Sportin’ Lifers
1125 SE Madison St, Tony Starlight’s Neil Diamond Experience
Twilight Cafe and Bar 1420 SE Powell The Down House, Phantom Family, Beach Party, Goddamned Animals
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. Grand Royale (Beastie Boys tribute), The Chicharones, ADDverse Effects
SAT. APRIL 22 Agnes Flanagan Chapel (at Lewis and Clark College)
0615 SW Palatine Hill Rd, Portland Chamber Orchestra
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
1037 SW Broadway Oregon Symphony presents Debussy’s La Mer
Artichoke Music Cafe 3130 Se Hawthorne, Earth Day Celebration featuring Sara Tone
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St Cliterati, Generation Decline, Speedwitch, Juicy Karkass
Bunk Bar
1028 SE Water Ave. The Walters, Summer Salt, New Move
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St Soul’d Out: Alex & Allyson Grey
Dante’s
350 West Burnside Soul’d Out: Dead Prez, Mic Crenshaw, Libretto, Maze Koroma, Mat Randol
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. San Fermin, Low Roar
Duff’s Garage
2530 NE 82nd Ave Pin & Horn-its
First United Methodist Church 1838 SW Jefferson St. Oregon Repertory Singers present Love and Fire
Fremont Theater
2393 NE Fremont Street Fremont Recording Presents #2: Scott Gallegos and Chuck Cheesman
Mission Theater
1624 NW Glisan St. The Fambly Ramble
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Stumpfest VI: Elder, Intronaut
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave Soul’d Out: Ohio Players, Shock featuring Marlon McClain, Andy Stokes
The Analog Cafe
720 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Revenge of the Nerd Camp; The PDX Broadsides, Shubzilla, Lucia Fasano, Kid Apocalypse, Mathias: The Charming Cardist, DJ Switch
The Firkin Tavern
1937 SE 11th Ave Sin City Ramblers, Phantom High, Jake McNeillie & Co.
The Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Coronation, Mattress, Night Lizard
The Old Church
1422 SW 11th Ave Emily King
The Secret Society
116 NE Russell St The Ukeladies; J-Moses & The Ragged Sunday, Sarah Gwen, Wilkinson Blades
The Waypost
3120 N. Williams Avenue, The Great Smoking Mirror, Jacob Metcalf, Voices of the Sea
Twilight Cafe and Bar
A Hootenanny Benefit for Nuggets Night
Valentines
232 SW Ankeny St YAWNING
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. Soul’d Out: Antibalas, Cherimoya
SUN. APRIL 23 Agnes Flanagan Chapel at Lewis and Clark College
0615 SW Palatine Hill Rd, Portland Chamber Orchestra
Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave The Zombies
Granger Smith, Earl Dibbles Jr., Jackson Michelson
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. The Cactus Blossoms
First United Methodist Church 1838 SW Jefferson St. Oregon Repertory Singers present Love and Fire
Fremont Theater
2393 NE Fremont Street Tim Rose
Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Ladies Rock Camp Showcase
Landmark Saloon
Alberta Rose Theater
4847 SE Division St, PeeWee Moore; Dust and Thirst
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
3939 N Mississippi Ave. NE-HI
3000 NE Alberta St Jacob Collier
1037 SW Broadway Oregon Symphony presents Debussy’s La Mer
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St Claire Nelson, Dartgun and the Vignettes, Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicides, Stumblebum
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicides
Classic Pianos
3003 SE Milwaukie Ave, Sounds of Brazil PDX Concert
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St
Mississippi Studios
Rontoms
600 E Burnside St AAN, Wild Powwers
Roseland Theater
8 NW 6th Ave Soul’d Out: Honoring Jimmy Mak
Star Theater
13 NW 6th Ave. Soul’d Out: Spawnbreezie
Veterans Memorial Coliseum 300 N Winning Way The xx
Village Ballroom
700 NE Dekum St, Caspar Babypants
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Spiral Stairs, Blesst Chest
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 Se 7th Ave. Lloyd Jones
The Analog Cafe
720 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Jeff Dillon
The Firkin Tavern
1937 SE 11th Ave Design Drift Distance
The Goodfoot
2845 SE Stark St Sonic Forum
The Know
3728 NE Sandy Blvd. Action/Discipline, Harness, Obsidian Needle & Full Metal Confused
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St April Global Folk Club
TUES. APRIL 25 Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
1037 SW Broadway Che Malambo
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St T-Zank, Ben Frankie, Beastler, Brad!, Myer Clarity
Catfish Lou’s
2460 NW 24th Avenue Thad Beckman/Kurtis Piltz Duo
Classic Pianos
3003 SE Milwaukie Ave, Ella At 100
Landmark Saloon
4847 SE Division St, High Flyers
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave Baby Ketten Karaoke
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. A Jesus Christ Superstar Singalong with OK Chorale
Roseland Theater 8 NW 6th Ave Taylor Bennett
The Analog Cafe
720 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Rose Room Swing Dance
The Ranger Station 4260 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Bluegrass Tuesday
1420 SE Powell
Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
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MUSIC COURTESY OF B HAMMER’D
NEEDLE EXCHANGE
Where to drink this week. 1.
The Lay Low
6015 SE Powell Blvd., 503-774-4645. If former dive bar Club 21 is now an outdoor graffiti museum on Sandy Boulevard, the old owners’ new Lay Low Tavern is like a museum devoted to Club 21, with seemingly every bartender, every piece of decor and the build-your-own burger bar transported intact.
2.
Nyx
215 W Burnside St., nyxpdx.com. In the former Alexis, secondstory nightclub Nyx plays host to a crowd that looks more Brooklyn or Chicago than Portland—with hip-hop and sneakerheads worlds apart from the usual Old Town club crowd of frat boys and fuccbois.
B Hammer’d
3.
Tonic Lounge
Years DJing: Six years, but I’ve been making electronic music since high school.
3100 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-238-0543, tonicloungeportland.com. Panic Room Caution: High Volume Bar is now the Tonic again, the metal continues and all is right with America. God bless what’s left of America.
Genre: Mash-ups, especially EDM-meets-hip-hop. I make lots of remixes and mash-ups because I find the best way to get people dancing to new music is to mix it with the classics. Where you can catch me regularly: Every first Tuesday at Lovecraft; monthly at Ranger Station, Spare Room and O’Malley’s.
PORTLAND’5 PRESENTS
Craziest gig: I did the Silent Disco at What the Festival a couple years ago. All my friends were there, including my sister, and our crew is known as the OG Flamingos. So I did the whole set in a giant flamingo costume. It was amazing. Then the next day at the pool, I was wearing the costume and this guy comes up to me, gives me a hug and says, “Flamingo! You played ‘Thong Song’ last night! I love you!” My go-to records: Aaliyah. She’s just the best. And millennials especially love to dance to her music. So anytime the dance floor dies, I play “Are You That Somebody” and it picks back up. Don’t ever ask me to play…: I try not to hate too much on pop music—musical taste is incredibly subjective. That being said, I really hate uber-cheesy dance tracks like “Cupid Shuffle” or “Cha Cha Slide.” I really don’t understand those kind of songs. SEE IT: B Hammer’d spins at the Lovecraft, 421 SE Grand Ave., on Tuesday, May 2.
4.
The Know
3728 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-473-8729, theknowpdx.com. Well, the restroom at the new Know—the Knew, perhaps?— might need a little more graffiti to feel the same. But “EAT SHIT, KYLE” is a good start.
5.
2610 NW Vaughn St., 503-220-0283, thegoldpdx.com. The Gold smooshed together Slabtown Ribs and Acapulco’s Gold into a Tex-Mex bar with stiff-ass margaritas at $21 a pitcher. When the weather warms, where else would you be?
White Owl Social Club
1305 SE 8th Ave East Taken by Force (rock ‘n roll)
FRI. APRIL 21 WED. APRIL 19 Beulahland
118 NE 28th Ave Wicked Wednesday: Open Turntable Night
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. TRONix: Proqxis (electronic)
Swift Lounge
1932 NE Broadway St The New Style
The Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Event Horizon (darkwave)
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. Easy Egg
THURS. APRIL 20 45 East
315 SE 3rd Ave Bass Cube 420: Dubloadz, Deekline, Keith MacKenzie
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Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
45 East Black Book
20 NW 3rd Ave Ladies Night (rap, r&b, club)
Dig A Pony
736 SE Grand Ave. Battles & Lamar (freestyle, electro, boogie)
Killingsworth Dynasty 832 N Killingsworth St Post Punk Discotheque
315 SE 3rd Ave Firebeatz
Bit House Saloon
727 SE Grand Ave The Cockpit - Round 2 (house, techno, disco)
Black Book
20 NW 3rd Ave The Cave (rap, r&b, club)
Crystal Ballroom
No Fun
1332 W Burnside St 80s Video Dance Attack: 70s vs 80s
Spare Room
Dig A Pony
The Lovecraft Bar
Ground Kontrol
1709 SE Hawthorne Blvd Questionable Decisions 4830 NE 42nd Ave Gravitate (beats, bass, funk) 421 SE Grand Ave Shadowplay (goth, industrial)
Valentines
232 SW Ankeny St Living On Video w/ VJ Gregarious
736 SE Grand Ave. Jimbo (funk, rap, electro) 511 NW Couch St. DJ ROCKIT The Excellence of Traxicution
Holocene
The Gold
1001 SE Morrison St. The Way Up: Afro/Caribbean Dance Party
Jade Club
315 SE 3rd Ave Shade Grown Presents: Magic Touch, Miracles Club, Pantone
Killingsworth Dynasty 832 N Killingsworth St Strange Babes
Parasol Bar
215 SE 9th Ave, Prismlabs & Co.
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Danava
Swift Lounge
1932 NE Broadway St Flavor (hiphop, r&b)
The Goodfoot
2845 SE Stark St Soul Stew (funk, soul, disco)
The Liquor Store
3341 SE Belmont St, Spend The Night: Objekt (Hessle, PAN)
The Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Darkness Descends (classic goth, dark alternative)
Valentines
232 SW Ankeny St Decadent 80’s
A R T I S T S R E P E R T O R Y T H E AT R E SAM GEHRKE
BAR REVIEW
by
Yussef El Guindi Jane Unger
directed by
STARTS APR 25 SEASON SPONSORS:
EPIC FLAME SHIRT: If Guy Fieri were a bar, he’d be the Rock and Roll Chili Pit (304 SW 2nd Ave., 971-242-8725, rockandrollchilipit.com). The decor of the new downtown bar approximates a roadie truck, or the garage of a suburban dad who really understands the blues. There are guitars on the wall, snare-drum light fixtures, table supports made to look like Marshall amps, and an entire bar top in the shape of a Flying V. Why the bar contains no visible flames is a mystery, but there are paintings of boobs and Keith Richards. The food, meanwhile, is a come-hither whistle to the producers of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. When we asked what was good, the guy with the Spinal Tap quote on his RRCP shirt informed us, “You can order whatever you want, bro!” The guy wearing a Richards quote told us, “All the food is pretty extreme,” then added that any menu item could be “amplified” by the addition of chili, which also comes in a $12 flight of three (pulled pork, beef and vegan). The grain-rich vegan chili is the best of them, but don’t get it if you’re vegan: There’s a solid chance it will arrive, as ours did, topped with sour cream and cheese. The peanut-butter-fried-pickle tater tots ($7) were smothered in taupe-colored nut paste that had the approximate consistency of caulk—an ingredient combo that might clue you in that the place is owned by a former partner in Killer Burger. While this makes its location three blocks from KB’s downtown spot hilariously suspicious, it also means the burgers are damn good, especially the $11.95 “Epic” topped with pulled pork, bacon, jack cheese, “slawsome” and barbecue sauce—a clusterfuck that came together largely because the spicy slawsome was, indeed, awesome. The beer menu is decent and local, the “Classic Rock Hour” lasts from 2 pm to closing time (9 pm weekdays, midnight weekends) with a $5 amplified baked potato and $6.75 Classic Rock Burger with fries, and there’s a Little Rockers menu for the chilluns. It’s sort of like what would happen if the city of Gresham took over the Hard Rock Cafe, and it’s hard not to find it both guileless and charming. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. SAT. APRIL 22 45 East
315 SE 3rd Ave Loudpvck, Casey Vann, Night City
Beech Street Parlor
412 NE Beech Street Center for Cassette Studies
Black Book
20 NW 3rd Ave The Ruckus (rap, r&b, club)
Bossanova Ballroom 722 E Burnside St. Blowpony
Crystal Ballroom
1332 W Burnside St 90’s Dance Flashback
Dig A Pony
736 SE Grand Ave. Doc Adam (hiphop, dance tunes)
Double Barrel Tavern
Jade Club
Tryst
Killingsworth Dynasty
Tube
315 SE 3rd Ave Dress Rehearsal 832 N Killingsworth St Dynasty a Go-Go! w/ DJ Drew Groove
Lay Low Tavern
6015 SE Powell Blvd. DJ Philadelphia Freedom
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. Chartbuster! (glam, psych, garage)
Swift Lounge
18 NW 3rd Ave. DJ Skout
Vendetta
4306 N Williams Prince Tribute & Dance Party
Whiskey Bar
31 NW 1st Ave Nico Luminous
SUN. APRIL 23
1932 NE Broadway St Leftside Lean (funk, soul, beats)
Beech Street Parlor
The Goodfoot
Black Book
2845 SE Stark St Tropitaal! Desi-Latino Soundclash w/ DJ Anjali, Mijo and The Kid
2002 SE Division St. DJ Malty Stag & DJ Stonebunny
The Liquor Store
Holocene
The Lovecraft Bar
1001 SE Morrison St. Main Squeeze Dance Party (house, disco)
19 SW 2nd Ave, DJ Mr. Mumu
3341 SE Belmont St, Prince Night 421 SE Grand Ave Electronomicon (goth, industrial, 80s)
412 NE Beech Street DJ Bad Wizard / DJ Ed 20 NW 3rd Ave Flux (rap, r&b, club)
Dig A Pony
736 SE Grand Ave. Do Right Sunday (throwback rap, electro, r&b)
The Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Softcore Mutations w/ DJ Acid Rick (new wave, synth, hunkwave)
MON. APRIL 24 Dig A Pony
736 SE Grand Ave. Oops (amazing jams)
Ground Kontrol
511 NW Couch St. Reaganomix: DJ Robert Ham (80s)
•
WORLD PREMIERE SHOW SPONSOR:
artistsrep.org • 5 0 3 . 24 1 .1 2 78 • 1515 SW Morrison Ave
y us B t Ge
The Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave Black Mass (goth, new wave)
TUES. APRIL 25 Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Party Damage: DJ El Dorado
Sandy Hut
1430 NE Sandy Blvd. DJ Smooth Hopperator
The Lovecraft Bar
421 SE Grand Ave BONES (goth, wave)
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. Tubesdays w/ DJ Jack
White Owl Social Club
1305 SE 8th Ave East Video Music Party w/ VJ Price
Sign up for our gET BuSY nEwSlETTEr! wweek.com/follow-us Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
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PERFORMANCE PAT T I M C G U I R E
PREVIEW
= 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: SHANNON GORMLEY (sgormley@wweek.com). TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, submit information at least two weeks in advance to: sgormley@wweek.com.
THEATER OPENINGS & PREVIEWS Building the Wall
Although every other play seems inevitably contextualized by the current political climate, theaters plan their seasons way in advance, so most theater companies haven’t had the chance to really respond to it. But Triangle Productions is one of the 40-plus theaters across the country to add Building the Wall to their preplanned season, which Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright Robert Schenkkan churned out after the inauguration. Set in 2019, Building the Wall imagines an interview between a historian and a warden of an illegal immigrant prison camp. SHANNON GORMLEY. The Sanctuary at Sandy Plaza, 1785 NE Sandy Blvd., trianglepro.org. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, April 20-29. $15-$35.
Medea
Imago Theatre’s artistic directors had long tried to find a production that would be worth reviving their set for their production of No Exit, which had a stage that’s a giant board that tilts in all directions with the actor’s movement. They found what they were looking for in Ben Power’s modern adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, in which its eponymous character takes revenge on her ex-husband by killing their kids. But by staging one of the most popular Greek tragedies, Imago wants to challenge the canon, not uphold it. Including their unusual set, Power’s script reimagines the ending of the centuries-old play. SHANNON GORMLEY. Imago Theatre, 17 SE 8th Ave., imagotheatre.com. 7:30 pm Friday-Saturday, April 21-May 20. 7 pm Thursday, April 27, and May 4, 11 and 18. $19-$29.
Spiritrials
We typically don’t think of theater crowds and hip-hop crowds as having a lot of overlap. But that’s the kind of rigid separation of art forms that Spiritrials wants to subvert. The only theater show in this year’s Soul’d Out Festival, Dahlak Brathwaite’s one-man show is a rhythmic, poetic ramble through issues like the prison system and addiction. Brathwaite seamlessly flips between performing stories and hip-hop and rap—including a retooled version of “Flashing Lights”— backed by an onstage DJ. SHANNON GORMLEY. Disjecta Contemporary Arts Center, 8371 N Interstate Ave., boomarts.org. 7:30 pm ThursdaySaturday, April 21-29. Additional show Sunday, April 30. $12-$30.
ALSO PLAYING Beehive
What’s great about compilation albums is that you can condense an entire genre/decade/artist into a tidy little package of hits while ignoring any missteps. That’s the general concept behind Beehive, a musical revue packed with a parade of hits from the female icons of the ’60s, from Lesley Gore to Janis Joplin. Strung together with the loosest of plot structures and cultural milestones touched on with the depth of a middle school social studies report, Beehive goes from bubblegum pop like The Chiffon’s “One Fine Day” to a dash of Motown with a Supremes medley, before wrapping things up with an unfortunate caricature of Janis Joplin. More or less embracing
44
the campiness, the six-woman cast gives a laudable performance, impressively shifting between styles, with the real standout being Antonía Darlene, whose Aretha Franklin will give you goose bumps. Let’s hear it for the girls. PENELOPE BASS. Broadway Rose Theatre, 12850 SW Grant Ave., Tigard, broadwayrose.org. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm SaturdaySunday, through May 14. Additional performances 7:30 pm Wednesday, May 10, and 2 pm Thursday, May 11. $21-$46.
Berlin Diary
Comedy and tragedy clash in this quasi-autobiographical dive deep into the diary of a Holocaust survivor. It’s about Andrea—an avatar of playwright Andrea Stolowitz—piecing together the life of her great-grandfather, Max Cohnreich, a Jewish doctor forced to flee Berlin during the Holocaust. Along the way, there are jokes about everything from getting drunk to hemorrhoids, but none of them undermine Andrea’s horror as she realizes how many of her ancestors were murdered. Berlin Diary triumphs not only because of its beautifully minimalist set and its two dynamic actors (Erin Leddy and Damon Kupper), but because of the way it confronts tragedy with both brutal frankness and a fierce sense of humor that sends a clear message: “We’re not broken.” BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. CoHo Theater, 2257 NW Raleigh St., cohoproductions.org. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, 3 pm Sunday, April 20-30. $20-$30.
Lauren Weedman Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
A longtime creator of shows that star only her, playwright and actor Lauren Weedman is familiar with the criticism that she’s “self-centered.” But aside from the fact that such talk is pretty sexist—men in theater don’t get called self-centered—ego is something she plays with in her newest show, Lauren Weedman Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. It centers on her bighaired alter ego Tami Lisa, who hosts a country music variety show in which she talks about her messy love life. She sings Lucinda Williams in front of a big pink sign that reads “Tami Lisa” in lights, and plays an array of characters. But the show is deeply concerned with the emotions hidden behind the big production and big hair: Interspersed with the outlandishly over-the-top performances, Weedman delivers candid monologues with little more staging and production than a stool and a spotlight. In what Weedman describes as a “Jungian nightmare,” Lauren Weedman Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is an exercise in open-hearted and sometimes painful honesty. SHANNON GORMLEY. Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th Ave., pcs.org. 7:30 pm TuesdaySunday, through April 30. Additional shows 2 pm Saturday, April 22 and 29, and Sunday, April 30. No show Wednesday, April 26. $25-$70.
DANCE Formless
Back in February, PDX Contemporary Ballet’s artistic director, Briley Neugebauer, premiered Formless, a work that investigated female stereotypes. Then, it was one of many in a large showcase by the new dance company, but the company is already reviving the piece for a standalone show. Neugebauer choreographs en
Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
DISCIPLINED IMPROVISATION: Roger Guenveur Smith performs his one-man show.
Final Revival
ROGER GUENVEUR SMITH PERFORMS RODNEY KING FOR THE LAST TIME. BY SHA N N ON GOR MLEY
sgormley@wweek.com
On May 1, 1992, Rodney King addressed the L.A. riots with a televised speech. He was suffering from brain damage inflicted by the LAPD, and he had spent the previous three days watching TV news footage of people dying in his name. His attorneys, who hadn’t let him testify at the trial in which the officers who beat him were acquitted, had written a speech for King to read. King improvised his own. “It’s one of the great American speeches,” says Roger Guenveur Smith, whose one-man show Rodney King comes to Portland this week. “Immediately, people started cutting it to that part where he says, ‘Can we all get along?’ It became the butt of many jokes. Even Rodney King said that his own children used it against him.” But at the end of Rodney King, Smith performs the speech in its entirety. Smith first performed the show in August 2012, two months after King was found dead in his swimming pool. Smith will perform the show for the last time here in Portland, a week before a Spike Lee film of a Rodney King performance from last August goes up on Netflix. Lee and Smith’s prolific artistic collaboration stretches back to Do the Right Thing (Smith played Smiley), and they’ve already made a film of another one of Smith’s many one-man plays about black historical figures, A Huey P. Newton Story, which originally aired on PBS. But Netflix has an even broader demographic than public television, and certainly a wider reach than theaters. “Usually, you would only get those people who were interested in pursuing this avantgarde solo performance thing,” he says. Created by an Ivy League-educated theater artist and a history academic, Smith’s work is definitely high concept. But it’s not esoteric. Within the confines of a small stage that’s an illuminated, white rectangle, Smith performs Rodney King barefoot with a microphone as his only prop. The play ends with King’s speech, but starts with Willie D’s “Fuck Rodney King,” an anti-pacifist anthem with lines like “You can’t lead the black struggle/And be friends with the enemy.” In
between, Smith fervently rolls out poetic lines that evoke moments from King’s life, from his childhood, to his brutal beating by the LAPD, to his struggle with public attention and addiction, to his death at age 47. Though the play was born out of what Smith calls “disciplined improvisation,” it had to be scripted for the film. On the hottest day of the summer, it was shot in one take. Talking on the phone from his home in L.A., Smith sounds relieved to move on from Rodney King. “Telling this tale has not been the easiest thing,” he says. “It takes a lot out of me.” He rattles off what King suffered: at least 56 blows from metal batons, two shots from a Taser emitting 50,000 volts of electricity. “He was kicked, abused, it was televised,” says Smith. “And those officers we saw abuse him were acquitted of basically all charges.” Then, there’s the estimated 56 people who died in the riots following the acquittal. “For each blow, one person died,” says Smith, “none of them police officers.” A man was strangled in a grocery-store produce aisle. A woman went out to get bread, “caught a stray bullet. Boom.” King personally knew Reginald Denny, who was pulled from the truck he drove and beaten nearly to death as TV cameras rolled. “[King had] to absorb the story of Reginald Denny being beaten to a pulp in his name,” says Smith. “It’s an unbearable weight that he took on.” Which, to Smith, is part of why King’s speech is so remarkable. “Rodney King could have righteously gotten up there—I think anyone would say, even his detractors—and said, ‘Burn it down.’” King didn’t do that, but he also didn’t stop at “Can we all get along?” either. “He answers it at the end,” says Smith. “He says, ‘Yes we can, we can get a long.’” To Smith, that resolution is crucial. It’s still not asking for “bullets for bullets” like Willie D, but it’s remarkably less passive: King was telling, not asking, his country something. “It’s beautifully inspiring,” says Smith, “to those who want to listen.” SEE IT: Rodney King plays at Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison St., artistsrep.org. 7:30 pm Friday-Sunday, April 21-23. $15-$30.
REVIEW JAMES MCGREW
pointe, but is influenced by contemporary dance at least as much as traditional ballet. And like a truly contemporary work of art, Formless’ decade-spanning soundtrack includes podcasts. For this performance, there’ll also be a performance by Mt. Hood Community College’s improv troupe to lighten the mood before an audience forum on the feminist issues raised in Formless. SHANNON GORMLEY. Mt. Hood Community College Studio, 26000 SE Stark St., Gresham, pdxcd.com. 7 pm Thursday, April 27. Free.
Che Malambo
Somewhere between line drumming and tap dance, the Argentine dance style, malambo, developed as form of dueling: Since the 1600s, gauchos have been using malambo as competitive displays of strength and agility. But when French choreographer Gilles Brinas decided he wanted to export the traditional dance, Che Malambo was born. Their performances are hypermasculine: The dancers are usually dressed in black sleeveless shirts, and play giant drums and stomp their feet to mimic the sound of horse hooves. SHANNON GORMLEY. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, whitebird.org. 7:30 pm Tuesday-Wednesday, April 25-26. $26-$64.
Le Chic Le Freak
With aerial and pole dance, Ecdysiast’s yearly show pays homage to the birth of disco. An underdog story with lots of glitter and spandex, the company’s spin on the birth of disco isn’t meant to be taken totally seriously. But Le Chic Le Freak’s sense for comedy doesn’t mean it’s insincere: Not only does the company intend for the show to be a genuine tribute to the misfits that created disco, it’ll also be donating a portion of their Friday profits to Q Center and TransActive Gender Center. SHANNON GORMLEY. Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., albertarosetheatre.com. 8 pm FridaySaturday, April 21-22. $25 advance, $35 at the door.
XPOSED
Polaris’ yearly showcase gets its name from the fact that it premieres new choreography and involves artistic collaborators: The dancers are exposed to guest choreographers, the audience to new works. For the contemporary dance company’s seventh iteration of the show, it’ll be reviving a few works from past XPOSED showcases, as well as new pieces by Polaris’ Jess Zoller and Robert Guitron, as well as Brazilian choreographer Barbara Lima. SHANNON GORMLEY. Polaris Dance Theatre, 1826 NW 18th Ave., polarisdance.org. 7:30 pm FridaySaturday, April 21-29. Additional shows 2 pm Sunday, April 23, and Saturday, April 29. $18-$25.
COMEDY Sincerity Is Gross
Each week, Sincerity Is Gross books some seriously solid lineups that branch out from the usual rotation of Portland comedy scene’s top of the pack, while still booking plenty of well-established and deeply reliable comics. This week, it’s Marcus Coleman, whose matter-of-fact delivery earned him a regular spot not long after relocating from St. Louis, as well as host of the Young Gunz showcase Carter, plus Chase Brockett and Thomas Lundy. SHANNON GORMLEY. The Slide Inn, 2348 SE Ankeny St., slideinnpdx. com. 7 pm Sunday, April 23. Free.
For more Performance listings, visit
BATTLE CRY: OBT ensemble dancers in Terra.
Strange Terrain
Te r ra l o o k s m o r e l i ke a battle than a ballet. In the new piece by New York choreographer Helen Pickett, the dancers take wide side stances, form ritualistic circles, slap their chests and yell in unison. It has a kind of Dune-like sci-fi vibe: Maybe it’s the intense, cinematic score created by House of Cards composer Jeff Beal, or maybe it’s the futuristic leotards with claw-ike cutouts worn by Oregon Ballet Theatre’s dancers—but Terra is definitely high-adrenaline and bizarre. Terra’s premiere is the headliner for OBT’s spring show, which also includes Petal, another work of Pickett’s that OBT staged back in 2014. Fervent and upbeat, Petal looks like a more vibrant “Hotline Bling ”—white sheets that box off the stage’s three sides are illuminated with sunset pastels. Terra and Petal bookend two pieces by Nacho Duato. A big name in the world of modern ballet (he’s currently the artistic director of the Berlin State Ballet), Duato is far more staid in his choreography than Pickett. Still, El Naranjo and Jardí Tancat create subtly vivid scenes. El Naranjo is only a short excerpt from Gnawa, but it’s a warm, fluid duet danced by Jacqueline Straughan and Peter Franc. Jardí Tancat depicts rural quiet desperation: The six dancers bend like rag dolls and drag their hands across the stage as if plowing a field. Next to Duato’s work, Pickett’s pieces definitely seem overthe-top, but they don’t lack detail. Particularly when it comes to duets, Pickett has an astonishing ability to create nameless characters. In Terra, there’s a recurring duet danced by Xuan Cheng and Michael Linsmeier that’s extremely delicate. When Linsmeier lifts her into the air, Cheng pulses her legs and arms in sync with strings plucked in the score. Rather than being dipped by Linsmeier, Cheng appears to fall backward into his arms. But then there’s Jacqueline Straughan and Peter Franc’s duet that’s like a fight over who should lead: Franc twirls Straughan, but Straughan also lifts Franc’s leg over her head, shoves his shoulders and spins him around. Pickett’s range isn’t just aesthetic: What brings Terra to life even more than its dramatic staging is Pickett’s sense for the individual, and her ability to contain a wide spectrum of human emotions in a single piece. SHANNON GORMLEY.
Terra is one intense ballet.
SEE IT: Terra plays at Newmark Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, obt.org. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, through April 22. $29$102. Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
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VISUAL ARTS ROUNDUP
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Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
COURTESY OF DESIGNWEEKPORTLAND.COM
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU PORTLAND!
Designing, a Breakdown OUR PICKS FOR DESIGN WEEK EVENTS. BY ISA B EL ZACHA R IAS
To those of us who didn’t go to school to be “creatives,” the vocabulary of design reduces itself quickly to vague, dissociative jargon. Case in point: ad agency AKQA, who will present, with OMSI, a one-day “design challenge” for 10-to14-year-olds at this year’s Design Week Portland. The agency has asked the gathered tweens to describe themselves as “an imaginary agency that encourages the use of design thinking and exploration of coexisting with the environment.” Sorry, what? This week, some of the TEDx-watching know-it-alls in the Adobe Creative Cloud will deconstruct the word “design”—and ask what it can possibly be worth in our divided, suffering, doomed, desperate America. This year, Design Week Portland’s most exciting events tackle the one thing every participant will probably have in common: social responsibility, the clawing desire to do one’s part in addressing the crises we all feel suddenly faced with. The discussion will range from literal (drawing through working definitions of “sustainable design”) to sensory and ephemeral (an experimental musical art installation that calls into question what it means to listen). There will, of course, be plenty of difficult, ugly, fun and confusing ground covered in between. Aaaah, 2017.
What Will We Do After the Protest?
In critique of what he’s astutely named “a movement movement,” Charlie Brown of brand agency Context Partners poses the questions every “woke,” digitally literate millennial should be asking themselves: Did my Instagram of the Women’s March do anything to effect change? Why are my friends still talking about that comment Sean Spicer tweeted @ Dippin’ Dots in 2010? Promising to reveal “the three must-haves in all movements,” Brown will start a discussion about activism versus slacktivism, and how designers can work to effect tangible change. Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark St., designweekportland.com. 1 pm Friday, April 21. Included in general admission pass ($395).
Design Thinking for Social Impact Panel
The phrase “human-centered” gets thrown around a lot, especially in design circles, but this panel presents an opportunity to hear from professionals whose work has been focused on social impact. Exhibit A is panelist Cat Goughnour, whose Portland gentrification mitigation project Right 2 Root redevelops publicly owned land according to the needs and wishes of its long-standing residents, particularly the black community of North and Northeast Portland. Xplane, 411 SW 6th Ave., 503548-4343. 7 pm Wednesday, April 26. $5.
CHARLIE BROWN
Sustainable Design Is…
Another “what the fuck are we actually talking about when we say these words” kind of event, this talk admits right away that “sustainability” is, of course, defined differently by everyone. And yet, any cycle-based practices of creation and consumption that can be broken down and used across multiple design platforms will be broken down here. Steph Koehler of design firm Let’s CoCreate will propose and draw out several patterned alternatives to the “take, break and make” American production framework. Hatch Innovation, 2420 NE Sandy Blvd, 503-452-6898. 2 pm Sunday, April 23. Sold out.
Place-Based Making: NW Vernacular Design
Portland’s WildCraft Studio, beloved offerer of classes in everything from mushroom foraging to huarache sandal-making, examines the cultural connotations of being a regional artist. There are the Portlandia-backed stereotypes— hippie-dippy herbs, handmade organic artisanal everything—but what real opportunity is there to reflect on our physical landscape when identifying as a PNW craftsperson? And what role do the Northwest’s Native traditions play in the art made here? WildCraft Studio and Fieldwork Design, 601 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-360-1437. 7 pm Wednesday, April 26. $5.
Music for an Empty Space and a Full Mind
Sort of a James Turrell light-and-color art concept with music added to the mix, this monthlong installation at One Grand Gallery is the brainchild of independent experimental record label Sounds et al, sonic artist Ben Glas and visual artist Tyler Snazelle. Designed to “question alternate modes of listening and experiencing,” the listener will move through a fluctuating soundscape that changes physically as it changes sonically, and be called to examine the most basic relationship people have to the designed objects around them: the experience of those objects via their five senses. One Grand Gallery, 1000 E Burnside St., onegrandgallery.com. Through April 30. Free.
BOOKS = WW Pick. Highly recommended.
REVIEW
BY ZACH MIDDLETON. 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.
THURSDAY, APRIL 20 Edie Meidav
The new story collection from novelist Edie Meidav, Kingdom of the Young, tells the stories of the dogs of Havana, Roma travelers, and child soldiers losing faith in their general. Meidav’s stories have been compared to those of legendary Italian fictionalist Italo Calvino, and she demonstrates commanding prose style here. Powell’s Books on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 800-878-7323. 7:30 pm.
FRIDAY, APRIL 21 Double Bind: Women on Ambition
The new essay collection Double Bind edited by Portland author Robin Romm explores the topic of why women still shy away from being defined by their ambition. At a time when Beyoncé may be the hottest artist on the planet, but Hillary Clinton lost to a man caught on tape describing sexual assaults, this book examines what it means to be a woman in the spotlight. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323. 7:30 pm.
SATURDAY, APRIL 22 Anne Greenwood
Tapestry of Hours is the newest multimedia art book from Anne Greenwood, and it’s based on the tapestry and poetry of nearly forgotten, 1920s-era Portland artist Hazel Hall. Confined to a wheelchair after a childhood battle with scarlet fever, Hall learned to sew to earn money for the family. She also learned to write poems, which are chopped and reassembled in The Tapestry of Hours. Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, 523 SE Morrison St., 503-236-2665. 7 pm.
SUNDAY, APRIL 23 Jenn Louis
Semi-celebrity chef Jenn Louis’ newest cookbook, The Book of Greens, spans the green gamut, from amaranth to watercress, providing information on seasonality, nutrition and origin. There’s also, obviously, a glut of recipes, the likes of which vaulted the Ray chef to Top Chef Masters fame. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-8787323. 2 pm.
MONDAY, APRIL 24 30th Annual Oregon Book Awards
Were you enamored with Martha Grover’s memoir, The End of My Career, or were you smitten with Gina Ochsner’s novel, The Hidden Letters of Velta B.? They’re up for honors at the 30th annual Oregon Book Awards. And if you’re someone who’s skeptical of the value of literary awards, remember: Neither Peggy Noonan nor Bob Dylan are nominated. The Gerding Theater at the Armory, 128 NW 11th Ave., 503-4453700. 7:30 pm. $18-$65.
TUESDAY, APRIL 25 John Daniel
John Daniel, three-time winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, takes his first foray into fiction with Gifted, a novel about a teenager who leaves an abusive father to explore the backcountry of the coast range during the mid-1990s. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323. 7:30 pm.
For more Books listings, visit
Rachel Dolezal, If True A WRITER FROM DOLEZAL’S FORMER NEWSPAPER WEIGHS IN ON THE DISGRACED EX-NAACP PRESIDENT’S NEW BOOK. BY DANI E L WALTER S
@danieltwalters
Spokane is over Rachel Dolezal. Spokane is over the white, former local NAACP president, who bronzed her skin and claimed to be black, the same way you’re over your ex. You’re fine, you don’t think about her, she doesn’t matter to you, you’ve long ago moved on—until you find yourself unreasonably irritated that someone mentions her. Or when she writes a book. Dolezal’s new memoir, In Full Color, has meant yet another round of international media outlets parachuting into Spokane, eager to explore the slippery nature of racial self-conception. Spokane hasn’t joined in. There was no release party at our local independent bookstore. Local media haven’t breathlessly passed along her new claims. The current Spokane NAACP president winced and wearily shook his head when he saw me holding Dolezal’s book in the coffee shop. In Spokane, we know more about Dolezal than the various colors of her skin. She used to write a column for The Inlander, just a few pages away from where my own byline appears. We know her lies went beyond claiming
to be black. Her parents never beat her with a “baboon whip.” She never lived in South Africa. Her father wasn’t a black former Oakland police officer who’d escaped the South on a “midnight train.” Many of the hate-crime claims she made turned out to be fabrications, or misinterpretations, or—at minimum —dubious.
she turned the letter over to police without opening it is, let’s say, undercut by footage of her holding the opened letter. But the most absurd allegation in In Full Color is Dolezal’s grand conspiracy theory. She suggests she was unmasked because former Spokane Police Chief Frank Straub, ostensibly angered by her dogged commitment to justice, hired a private detective to follow her and dig into her “integrity issues.” She even says the mayor and city council president sent her a letter revealing she’d been followed by a private investigator. “That is a completely inaccurate statement,” Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart counters. A private investigator did investigate Dolezal, but he says he wasn’t working for Straub or following Dolezal, and there’s no reason to believe he’s the one lying. That investigator also wasn’t responsible for exposing her lies to the public. Two journalists from the Coeur d’Alene Press did that. They get only the briefest of mentions in the book. Dolezal says she’s an honest person, but to be seen as who she truly is, she’s had to “gloss over or hide much of my complex past in favor of simpler stories that I felt would make more sense to other people.” Yet she’s still telling simple stories. In nearly every scene in In Full Color, she paints herself in one of two colors. First, there’s Rachel the victim—as when she fumes over being passed over for director of the Human Rights Education Institute, which hired a part-Jewish white man, leaving her convinced it was because “she was viewed as a poor young Black woman.” Second, there’s Rachel the hero: “When a pipe bomb was found in a backpack along the route of the MLK Day march in Spokane in 2011, I pressed authorities to find the culprit.” What she isn’t is sorry. Beyond a perfunctory sorry-if-anyonegot-hurt aside in the prologue, Dolezal ardently refuses to take responsibility for the damage she did to her community and causes. She doesn’t discuss how her name is thrown in the face of transgender activists. She has no interest in talking about how right-wing bloggers used her story to falsely accuse black New York Daily News columnist Shaun King of being white. Nor does she consider how her shaky hate-crime claims gave ammunition to those arguing all hatecrime claims are bogus. It’s why Spokane
Her parents never beat her with a “baboon whip.” She never lived in South Africa. Yet In Full Color asks you to believe Dolezal. This time. She writes about a procession of child abuse and molestation and rape and domestic violence and racism. It’s all horrifying, if true. “If true” is the ballast that sinks the book. Here, she introduces several new falsehoods without bothering to clear up the old ones. She fires back at anyone who accuses her of faking her hate-crime claims with first-of-all-how-dare-you bombast. But she never explains why, for instance, she went on local TV to portray an apology letter as a racist threat. Her claim in her memoir that
Spokesman-Review columnist Shawn Vestal recently called her “the Northwest’s biggest gift to white supremacy since [Aryan Nations founder] Richard Butler.” In Full Color is a story with an unintended moral: When you sacrifice truth in your eagerness to speak truth to power, it’s the power structures that grow stronger. Daniel Walters is a staff writer at The Inlander in Spokane, Wash. Rachel Dolezal’s memoir, In Full Color, was published March 28. Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
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GET YO UR R E PS IN
Beetlejuice (1988)
The film that launched Tim Burton to the stars, Beetlejuice follows a newly dead couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) who enlist the help of a crass trickster spirit (Michael Keaton) to drive the family out of the house they haunt. Proceeds go to Old Town’s nonprofit Sisters of the Road Cafe. Clinton Street Theater. 7 pm Monday, April 24.
COURTESY OF ALLIANCE INDEPENDENT FILMS
MOVIES
Fish Tank (2009)
Andrea Arnold’s American Honey was my favorite film of last year—a beautiful, massive masterwork of a coming-of-age film. Before that, she directed this Cannes Jury Prizewinning story of Mia (Katie Jarvis), a 15-year old dropout who escapes her brutal life in East London council housing through dance. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Thursday, April 20.
MEMORY LOSS: Luke Wilson.
Losing Ground (1982)
The first feature ever directed by an African-American woman, Kathleen Collins’ debut film follows a philosophy professor (Seret Scott) whose relationship with her artist husband (Bill Gunn) is threatened when he has an affair. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 4:30 pm SaturdaySunday, April 22-23.
Princess Mononoke (1997)
One of the best from the never-bad Studio Ghibli, and a surprise favorite among weird punk kids due to its nature-versus-man themes, the 20th anniversary screenings of Princess Mononoke continue this week. Laurelhurst Theater. April 19-20.
The White Ribbon (2009)
No one really captures suffering quite like Austrian auteur Michael Haneke, whose look into the quiet brutality of life in a pre-World War I German village took the Palme d’Or at Cannes that year. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Saturday, April 22.
ALSO PLAYING: 5th Avenue Cinema: How Green Was My Valley (1941), April 21-23. Academy Theater: Brazil (1985), April 21-27. Cinema 21: Donnie Darko (2001), April 19-25. Clinton Street Theater: A Grin Without a Cat (1977), 8 pm Wednesday, April 19; The Last Mentsch (2014), 7 pm Tuesday, April 25. Hollywood Theatre: Be Here to Love Me (2004), 7:30 pm Thursday, April 20; 7th Heaven (1928) with live organ, 2 pm Saturday, April 22; BioDome (1997), 9:30 pm Saturday, April 22; Mary Poppins (1964), 2 pm Sunday, April 23; Marie Antoinette (2006), 7:30 pm Monday, April 24; Creepers (1985), 7:30 pm Tuesday, April 25. Laurelhurst Theater: Brick (2006), April 21-27. Mission Theater: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sing-along (1978), 8 pm Saturday, April 22; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), April 23-24; Juno (2007), April 24-25. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium: Sud (1999), 7 pm Friday, April 21; The Grandmother (1970), 7 pm Sunday, April 23; Ratcatcher (1999), 7 pm Sunday, April 23. Paris Theatre: The Simpsons Movie (2007), 7 pm Wednesday, April 19.
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Bang a Bong HOW PORTLAND-MADE STONER COMEDY BONGWATER FLOPPED, DESPITE ITS ALL-STAR CAST. BY JAY H O RTO N
@hortlandia
Bongwater never had much of a chance. Adapted from Portland author Michael Hornburg’s widely panned grunge novel of the same name, the film follows a peevish painter-slash-pot dealer and his manic pixie exgirlfriend through a series of loosely connected events. The film flopped in 1997, and would probably be totally forgotten were it not for its cast’s later accomplishments. Yes, there’s a movie starring Jack Black, Brittany Murphy, Luke Wilson, Jamie Kennedy, Alicia Witt and Andy Dick, set and filmed in Portland, that few people in the city have ever seen. And that lingering critique should ring familiar to Portlanders and potheads alike: It’s a gorgeous waste of potential that goes beyond the star-studded cast. Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh, who’d score Rushmore, handled the music. Cameraman Richard Crudo later served six terms as president of the American Society of Cinematographers. Costumer Nancy Steiner outfitted Lost in Translation and Little Miss Sunshine. Producers Laura Bickford and Alessandro Uzielli would next purchase the property that became Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and the company that supplies objets d’art for Britain’s royal family, respectively. When he took on his first feature, Richard Sears had just won Best Short Film at Cannes for An Evil Town, an adaptation of a Charles Bukowski story. But Bongwater ended up being his last feature for almost two decades. His newest feature, Bottom of the World, a thriller starring Jena
Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
Malone (The Neon Demon, Nocturnal Animals) about a young woman who disappears and her boyfriend’s search for her, was released in March. “If the movie’s not a success…you get put in jail a little bit,” Sears laughs. “It played a couple festivals—opened at Los Angeles Film Festival, that was the big one—and got a good reception, but it was weird. People either loved this movie or they hated it, with no in-between. And, there was a lot of hate…‘It’s too slow! There’s no plot!’ To me, it was a study of a culture and a time and a place with these characters that you just hang out with. And, they’re interesting, or they’re not.” They were, the homegrown director says, very Portland. The Portland lore starts with Hornburg, the book’s author, who lived here during the grunge years. He wrote for The Portland Mercury before moving to New York and becoming an editor at Grove Press. He famously had a fling with Courtney Love while both lived here, and he played in an art rock band called the Usual Suspects. Bongwater the book has a character named Courtney based on Love. The filmmakers feared legal action should their antiheroine, Serena, too closely resemble the newly ascendant actress, who’d just turned up blue in Larry Flynt’s bathtub. Meanwhile, the feel of the city and the characters was lost on a cast and crew flown up from Los Angeles for three weeks of filming. “I knew people like David [Luke Wilson]
meandered around like a lot of guys meandered their lives around—that’s what drew me to him,” Sears says. “The storyline wasn’t really that enthralling. It’s more about the characters. That’s why I like Portlandia so much.” It’s striking how many of Bongwater’s shots of Portland use the same landmarks later made famous on television—and eerie how little the city’s visual touchstones have altered. That climactic embrace atop City Signs could’ve been captured last night, as could scenes outside David’s residence next to the Bagdad Theater. Jack Black’s band of crusty shroom hunters may well still hang out on Sauvie Island. The wholly unchanged Mary’s Club, a notable presence in the novel, was Sears’ first stop upon arrival and became a favorite of cast and crew both for drinks and as the setting for the film’s signal moment, when David boozes while Serena sets his home ablaze. If the locations look the same, though, arranging access was easier. After a brief chat with Mary’s manager, Sears was allowed to set up cameras and even enlist a dancer (credited as “Muffy”) as an extra. “Portland at that time was a very easy place to shoot,” he says. “Everyone was very accommodating. I don’t think we could have found a house to burn down anywhere else.” In fact, the Portland Fire Bureau was happy to burn down a house for him. “The producer somehow wrangled that. It was kind of a training vehicle for their staff and just happened to be at the right time. This house in a really bad neighborhood had been condemned,” he says. “Somebody had been evicted and left all this acid or lye inside, so nobody could ever go back because of chemical endangerment. We painted and did some little cosmetic fix-ups so the exterior would match where we had been shooting. It was an amazing day. Like, ‘Holy shit! I can’t believe they’re letting us do this!’ They burned that baby up, and we filmed ’em putting it out.” Members of the cast enjoyed their short Portland stays differently. Luke Wilson combed Powell’s. Jack Black stalked Elliott Smith. Brittany Murphy attached her Walkman and roamed the streets of downtown. Andy Dick, however, disappeared. “We never knew where Andy was,” Sears says. “He was a fucking tornado, and very hard to corral. One night, we were at Mary’s. I didn’t even know he was at the bar when we hear some fight in the bathroom. Andy’s in there, doing God knows what, and we had to yank him out.” Not that you can blame Dick for the film’s oddities—or lack of success. “I remember specifically, that scene with Luke and Andy having mimosas on the patio. We were getting ready to shoot, and Andy wasn’t there. It’s call time, the actors are getting dressed, hair and makeup setting up, and we’re literally looking at the script trying to figure out a way to do this without Andy, when he rolls up. I don’t think he’d slept a wink—up all night partying, doing something—and he just walks right on the set, puts on his little outfit, sits down, and… he just fucking nailed that scene.” SEE IT: Bottom of the World is available to stream on Amazon Video.
: This movie sucks, don’t watch it. : This movie is entertaining but flawed. : This movie is good. We recommend you watch it. : This movie is excellent, one of the best of the year.
OPENING THIS WEEK Cézanne et Moi
What exactly do artists and writers do? If Cézanne et Moi is to be believed, they work occasionally, but spend most of their waking hours bickering about art, life or women. That may be true, but it makes this biopic about the turbulent bromance between two 19thcentury French legends, novelist Emile Zola (Guillaume Canet) and painter Paul Cézanne (Guillaume Gallienne), pretty dull. Of the two performers, Gallienne is the more commanding—with a great mass of dark hair and a Hagrid-lite beard, he rages through the movie like a hurricane, spewing curses and crumpling only when a particularly barbed insult is slung at his work. Canet, on the other hand, is disappointingly feeble as Zola—unlike Gallienne, he doesn’t have the charisma to match his facial hair. Even more frustrating is the work of director Danièle Thompson, who peppers the movie with bland, postcard-pretty nature shots and disorienting chronological shifts that fail to liven up the film as Cézanne and Zola talk, talk, talk. Thompson forgets that Cézanne and Zola endured because they created. The movie should have tried doing the same. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Fox Tower.
David Lynch: The Art Life
In A Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote that great artists “exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.” No one has ever accused David Lynch of being uninteresting, but Jon Nguyen’s new documentary about him certainly is. The film consists mostly of montages of the director’s paintings interspersed with an interview at his home studio in the Hollywood Hills. Lynch describes his fairly uneventful suburban childhood, outlining his life up through the filming of Eraserhead at the American Film Institute. For hardcore fans, this kind of access may feel like a revelation. In addition to an incredible catalog of his visual art, viewers are granted an hour and a half of interview footage from the notoriously press-shy director. But despite its length and scope, the content of the interview isn’t particularly revealing. Lynch’s mother was a “very adoring and good person,” his father “a research scientist, meaning he was looking into things.” Lynch mostly sticks to generalizations about each major period discussed, rarely offering the poignant anecdotal touches that would keep a viewer engaged. Considering how much of himself he has already poured into his work, though, should we really expect him to? NR. GRACE CULHANE. Cinema 21.
The Fate of the Furious
It’s no small testament to the sanity-dampening field projected by Vin Diesel’s doughy spark-plug warlord Dominic Toretto that the road race opening The Fate of the Furious feels sorta tame. Human scale and recognizable emotions are a poor match for the ever-escalating spectacles of a franchise veering cosmically deranged one mile at a time. For lapsed viewers who’ve skipped a few installments, our plucky, warmhearted auto thieves have essentially turned paramilitary warriors caught between a shadowy intelligence agent, Kurt Russell as “Mr. Nobody,” and a cyberterrorist, Charlize Theron as hentai Cruella de Vil, with the fate of the world at stake. In short, the conceptual nitrous boost has been pushed so many times that the barest semblance of coherence was giddily torn asunder.
To be sure, Dwayne Johnson unburdened of obligation to taste or credulity is wondrous—like a nestling taken flight or an eyebrow that’s slipped its moorings—and Helen Mirren’s cameo as Jason Statham’s comic-cockney gangster mum deserves its own movie/ TV show/channel. Alas, the sheer cynicism of reductive pseudo-satire curdles before long against the heavy-lidded solemnity of Michelle Rodriguez and our founding paterfam. Its hard not to see how a certain floppy-haired, fundamentally humorless positivism greased the gears from an altogether different angle—grounding the shtick and leavening brutalism. Objects in the rearview mirror may appear more crucial than we’d assume. PG-13. JAY HORTON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Lloyd, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Roseway, St. Johns Twin, Tigard, Vancouver.
Free Fire
A new British gangster flick from cult director Ben Wheatley sees a pack of gangsters trapped in a Boston warehouse after an arms deal goes awry. R. Bridgeport, Lloyd, Vancouver.
The Lost City of Z
At the start of this supremely entertaining tale of exploration and obsession, a group of men chases a galloping deer. Yet only one of them proves worthy of the challenge: British adventurer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), who nails the graceful creature with his first shot. That ruthlessness powers him through this fact-based film, which unfolds in the early years of the 20th century and chronicles Fawcett’s storied search for an ancient city he believes lies hidden deep within the Amazon. The quest fuels the fires of Fawcett’s ego—he craves manly trials, even when they force him to abandon his wife (Sienna Miller) and his oldest son (Tom Holland). Despite its poisonous protagonist, The Lost City of Z is one of the most purely enjoyable American movies of the decade. With a buildup of suspense that could have made Hitchcock crack a sinister smile, and intoxicating images—men hacking their way through foliage with machetes, ramshackle boats floating toward elusive destinations—from director James Gray (Two Lovers), the movie hypnotizes completely. Rarely has the allure of the unknown been dramatized so momentously on film, which is why you shouldn’t bother reading up on the real Fawcett before you buy a ticket. The less you know, the better. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Clackamas.
Oregon Art Beat: Oregon’s Animation Magic
In advance of its TV premiere on OPB, NW Film Center screens a look into Oregon’s animation industry. NR. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Wednesday, April 19.
The Promise
Director Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) tries to raise some Titanic-level romantic goosebumps with this historical-fiction epic set during the Armenian genocide in Turkey—but only during the film’s first act. The movie may heat up with a rapturous affair in Constantinople between Michael (Oscar Isaac) and Ana (Charlotte Le Bon), but the sparks of their affection are quickly snuffed by sounds of windows shattering and Michael being struck on the skull with a gun. These jolts of horror are a prelude to massacres, and as Armenians, Ana
and Michael are set adrift across a country that’s gone from being home to being hell. They’re often accompanied by Chris Myers (Christian Bale), an American photojournalist vying for Ana’s affection. His romantic rivalry with Michael feels jarringly out of place in this grim film, which in one scene reveals a pile of bodies that includes a recently murdered pregnant woman. Yet The Promise will not be denied as George powerfully dramatizes stunning acts of both savagery and decency, most notably in a scene where Michael struggles to free prisoners from a moving train at night in the midst of a storm, refusing to surrender even as rain buffets his face. Like George, he’s committed. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, City Center, Division, Lloyd, Pioneer Place, Vancouver.
3 Hours Till Dead
An AWOL soldier goes into hiding in a rural farm area with friends, only to discover upon his return that society has collapsed into a zombie apocalypse. NR. Clinton Street Theater.
The Void
A policeman delivers an injured patient to an understaffed hospital, then experiences strange occurrences linked to a group of weirdos in hoods. A new, low-budget horror film whose practical effects have drawn comparisons to John Carpenter’s The Thing. NR. Hollywood Theatre. April 22-23.
STILL SHOWING After the Storm
Once-bestselling novelist Shinoda Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) slums it as a private detective, but After the Storm is ultimately a sad-bastard film about a protagonist viewers leave the movie wishing had more depth than what’s shown. NR. Living Room Theaters.
Colossal
Nacho Velgado’s new monster flick follows Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudekis drunkenly rampaging through the friend zone as down-and-out yuppies whose angst somehow controls gigantic kaiju. PG. Cinema 21, Hollywood.
Frantz
A girl befriends a Frenchman she encounters at the grave of the fiance she lost in the Great War. Hilarity does not ensue. NR. Kiggins, Living Room Theaters.
Going in Style
Zach Braff’s Going in Style acts as a bitterly honest ode to aging, ageism and existentialism—themes that are always spry. What one might not expect is a plot that’s fairly heinous, both morally and logistically, with characters who remain justified and likable throughout. PG-13. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Fox Tower, Lloyd, Oak Grove, Tigard, Vancouver.
Raw
Ostensibly about a young woman who develops an insatiable hunger for human flesh, Raw is more a visually stunning, deeply human coming-of-age story than a vicious Eurohorror film. R. Cinema 21.
T2: Trainspotting
It’s been 21 years since Trainspotting turned a blackly comic druggie caper into generational touchstone, and the follow-up posits that if you can survive the first rush of freedom and weather the inevitable hangover of crashing dreams, nostalgia becomes the last true habit R. City Center, Clackamas, Fox Tower.
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Editor: WALKER MACMURDO. 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: wmacmurdo@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115.
GRAFURRIES: Wastedland 2.
PREVIEW
False Gods, Graffiti and the Trash Heap of Existence Post-apocalyptic short film Wastedland 2 is “Teletubbies meets Waiting for Godot, with spray-paint cans.”
“It wasn’t the weed, Wolftits,” says Amoeba from beneath the green mask Saran-wrapped around his head. “It was real.” He’d really seen it, there, in ripples on the stream: a vision of UFO, their omnipresent graffiti deity, whose tags they follow every day until they find him. Only UFO can explain to Wolftits and Amoeba what their constant, manic scrawling on walls will be worth someday. Only he can answer the question they pose to the void, out loud and ad nauseam, as they wander in animal masks through the underpasses of a postapocalyptic Wastedland: “What’s the point?” Thus unravels Wastedland 2, the brilliantly bizarro short film graffiti writer and video artist Andrew H. Shirley has been presenting in immersive installation settings across the country. Most commonly it’s screened, as it will be in Portland, among piles of garbage and cryptic groupings of spray-painted words. In opposition to cool-kid graffiti documentaries like Style Wars, whose takeaway is that graffiti culture might be existentially interesting in theory but is mostly fun and silly in practice, Wastedland 2 ambitiously holds up graffiti as a mirror of mankind’s search for meaning. “I don’t think there’s anything alluring about being a graffiti writer,” Shirley says, talking about graffiti in long, run-on sentences, as if it were alive and breathing down his neck. “Graffiti’s parasitic. It’s part of your organism that feeds off of you and uses you to create something. It’s an obligation.” That compulsive spirit lives alongside an unnerving futility throughout Shirley’s film, whose loose narrative alludes to deep-seated tales of naive purpose-searching and ultimate disappointment. The example Shirley uses is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and there are certainly shades of The Wizard of Oz—only here, the Wizard is just another writer, implying that the mystery and ephemera of tagging can elevate the tagger to godlike all-knowingness in the minds of his peers. Surely, this must be part of the allure. “There’s a lot of symbols in the film,” Shirley says, struggling himself to articulate what they all mean. “One big one is that graffiti writers hide their faces in masks—when they go on the streets and have bandannas around their faces, or they’re cloaked in darkness, or they make videos and obscure their images to protect their identity.” Every character we see in Wastedland 2 is portrayed by a graffiti artist, and most play some version of themselves. At some moments, it’s painfully obvious that this isn’t a cast of professional actors, but that only heightens the film’s estranged, nonhuman point of view. “For me, graffiti is anti-graffiti,” says Shirley. “It’s anti-everything. It’s punk. It remains outside of the system. It alludes to dysfunction and allows a public audience to see that people without a voice still have a message, and by any means necessary will get it out to you.” In the deceptive guise of a hip, artsy, funny graffiti movie, Shirley has created an absolutely enthralling work of existentialist art—either that, or he’s wasting his life. ISABEL ZACHARIAS. SEE IT: Wastedland 2 plays at Trust Collective, 325 NW 6th Ave., on Friday, April 21. 6 pm. Free. All ages. Read the full profile of Andrew H. Shirley at wweek.com, Willamette Week APRIL 19, 2017 wweek.com
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WE TALKED TO JD SHORT, SON OF LEGENDARY EUGENE BREEDER DJ SHORT, ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF BLUEBERRY. BY M A RT I N C I Z M A R
mcizmar@wweek.com
Quick: Open the website of any pot shop in Portland. Almost certainly, there’s something blue on the menu—Blue Dream, Blue Cheese, Berry Bomb, Blue Headband, Blue Diamond Phillips. According to cannabis lore, the taproot of all those strains can be found in Eugene. You’ve probably seen it, too: Blueberry, arguably the most widely seen genetics of its generation. The legendary Blueberry was bred by a man named DJ Short, who runs Old World Genetics, which is now based outside Los Angeles. His son, JD Short, is still in Eugene, recently launching a breeding company called Second Generation Genetics. Maybe you’ve heard stories about a seed hunter finding Blueberry in the mountains outside Chiang Mai, or a soldier bringing it back from ’Nam. The actual truth is less exciting, says JD Short. “It’s Thai, Chocolate Thai, Afghan and Oaxacan,” he says. “Those were the four strains DJ started with. All his strains started with those genetics.” Why are Blueberry and its many offspring so wildly different from other strains? That has to do with a tiny twist on the basics. More on that in a minute. Traditional cannabis breeding involves pollinating a female plant with a male. Because the males don’t produce flowers of their own, it’s hard to know exactly what traits they have unless you pollinate many female plants and observe the commonalities in the offspring. DJ Short did that, keeping rigorous notes about each phenotype that emerged and his efforts to stabilize the genetics into a consistent set of characteristics—a strain. “Blueberry’s been around since, I don’t know, 1980?” JD Short says. “The Blueberry pheno that everybody loves and raves about now showed up in DJ’s work probably around 1979.” Blueberry stood out from the start. The color and aroma that emerged from that plant were unlike anything American cannabis users had ever seen. “When it first came out, what set his stuff aside was that he had stabilized the color purple, with berry and fruit,” JD says. “A lot of the herb that was around at that point was spice weed, or it was the Afghan, which was skunk. DJ came along with these things that were berry and purple, and it just blew people’s minds.” The starter seeds weren’t necessarily exceptionally rare, JD says. He figures they may have come through the American government, as is
common lore in the trillion-dollar U.S. pharmacopeia industry. So why didn’t another berry bloom for another breeder? While the complex genetics of the cannabis plant mean there are always oddities, you’d think that such strong berry notes would have shown themselves elsewhere if they were common enough to be stabilized. Therein lies the big secret of Blueberry. In the late ’70s, breeders were just starting to experiment with indicas. To create Blueberry, DJ Short used female sativas, pollinating them with male indicas. He was swimming against the stream. “When the Afghan came around, what everybody was doing was using the female Afghans, because they were indicas, they were novel and they produced well, they finished quick, they were short and they were potent,” JD Short says. “DJ didn’t like the Afghans— he didn’t like the smoke. All his strains are about the end product. He preferred the sativas as his mother, so he used his male Afghan on his sativas, which was the opposite of what everyone else was doing.” The results of his little twist? Blueberry. “The reason it’s in everything is, they’re some of the most reliable true-breeding strains on the market,” JD says. “You get your pack of seeds and you get your male, you throw it on your favorite female, and you have stabilized strains.” But are all those blue and berry strains really descended from Blueberry? As far as JD is concerned, they are. “To be honest with you, my nose hasn’t come along with anything yet,” he says. “There’s a certain smell in there—a floral-berry-earthen-hash smell in there—that’s unique. I’ve been smelling it literally since I was in diapers, so it’s hard for me to miss.” How could a little strain from Eugene spread its genetics across the world? JD has a theory on that, too. Call it the lore of the tour. “Back then, Eugene was known as the stopover town,” he says. “There was a really good music scene that happened in this town. It was a pretty happening place for musicians who wanted to play in Portland and then maybe scoot down to Eugene and have a little retreat. It was known as the cool retreat place. The cool rich kids kinda wanted to come here and hang out. They would come here and get genetics, and they would take them back to Northern California. Once those genetics made it to Northern California, it was quickly established. And it changed the industry at that point.”
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“Hm...”--I think it’s stuck in the middle.
52 Longtime “Saturday Night Live” announcer Don 55 Epiphany 59 “Way to botch that one” 61 Elevator innovator Elisha 62 In ___ (properly placed) 63 “___, With Love” (Lulu hit sung as an Obama sendoff on “SNL”) 64 Golden goose finder 65 Trial run 66 Enclosures to eds. 67 Sorts
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Across 1 “Listen up,” long ago 5 Allude (to) 10 1/8 of a fluid ounce 14 Perennial succulent 15 “I’d Be Surprisingly Good For You” musical 16 Certain mortgage, informally 17 Extinct New Zealand birds 18 Current host of “Late Night” 20 Far from optimal 22 Basic PC
environment 23 Like lycanthropes 24 JetÈ, for one 26 Grand Coulee or Aswan, e.g. 28 “Kilroy Was Here” rock group 30 Anthony of the Red Hot Chili Peppers 34 Go off to get hitched 36 Mr. Burns’s word 38 This and that 39 Ceilings, informally 40 Past time
41 Emo band behind 2003’s “The Saddest Song” 43 “Ad ___ per aspera” 44 They may use tomatoes or mangoes 45 “Am ___ Only One” (Dierks Bentley song) 47 Jan. 1, e.g. 48 Dwarf planet that dwarfs Pluto 50 ___ ipsum (fauxLatin phrase used as placeholder text)
Down 1 “Mad Men” star Jon 2 1966 N.L. batting champ Matty 3 Trap on the floor, slangily 4 “Tik Tok” singer 5 Vacation spot 6 Annually 7 Needs no tailoring 8 “I Love Lucy” neighbor 9 Zodiac creature 10 Times to use irrigation 11 Sax player’s item 12 “The Mod Squad” coif 13 Battleship call 19 It may be sent in a blast 21 One way to crack 25 ___ out a living
(just gets by) 26 IOUs 27 Hawaii hello 29 II to the V power 31 Genre for Cannibal Corpse or Morbid Angel 32 Start 33 Great value 35 Ended gradually 37 “Oh, well!” 39 Actor Oka of “Heroes” 42 Deck for a fortuneteller 43 Prefix with space or plane 46 They clear the bases 49 Island with earth ovens called ‘umus 51 Eggplant, e.g. 52 Sound from an exam cheater 53 Frenchman’s female friend 54 Decomposes 56 “Bonanza” son 57 Kroll of “Kroll Show” 58 Admonishing sounds 60 Abbr. after Shaker or Cleveland last week’s answers
©2017 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 #JONZ823.
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Week of April 20
ARIES (March 21-April 19)
After George Washington was elected as the first President of the United States, he had to move from his home in Virginia to New York City, which at the time was the center of the American government. But there was a problem: He didn’t have enough cash on hand to pay for his long-distance relocation, so he was forced to scrape up a loan. Fortunately, he was resourceful and persistent in doing so. The money arrived in time for him to attend his own inauguration. I urge you to be like Washington in the coming weeks, Aries. Do whatever’s necessary to get the funds you need to finance your life’s next chapter.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20)
Fantasize about sipping pear nectar and listening to cello music and inhaling the aroma of musky amber and caressing velvet, cashmere, and silk. Imagine how it would feel to be healed by inspiring memories and sweet awakenings and shimmering delights and delicious epiphanies. I expect experiences like these to be extra available in the coming weeks. But they won’t necessarily come to you freely and easily. You will have to expend effort to ensure they actually occur. So be alert for them. Seek them out. Track them down.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20)
Contagion may work in your favor, but it could also undermine you. On the one hand, your enthusiasm is likely to ripple out and inspire people whose help you could use. On the other hand, you might be more sensitive than usual to the obnoxious vibes of manipulators. But now that I’ve revealed this useful tip, let’s hope you will be able to maximize the positive kind of contagion and neutralize the negative. Here’s one suggestion that may help: Visualize yourself to be surrounded by a golden force field that projects your good ideas far and wide even as it prevents the disagreeable stuff from leaking in.
CANCER (June 21-July 22)
A reader named Kris X sent me a rebuke. “You’re not a guru or a shaman,” he sneered. “Your horoscopes are too filled with the slippery stench of poetry to be useful for spiritual seekers.” Here’s my response “Thank you, sir! I don’t consider myself a guru or shaman, either. It’s not my mission to be an all-knowing authority who hands down foolproof advice. Rather, I’m an apprentice to the Muse of Curiosity. I like to wrestle with useful, beautiful paradoxes. My goal is to be a joyful rebel stirring up benevolent trouble, to be a cheerleader for the creative imagination.” So now I ask you, my fellow Cancerian How do you avoid getting trapped in molds that people pressure you to fit inside? Are you skilled at being yourself even if that’s different from what’s expected of you? What are the soulful roles you choose to embody despite the fact that almost no one understands them? Now is a good time to meditate on these matters.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)
In the coming weeks, there will be helpers whose actions will nudge you -- sometimes inadvertently -- toward a higher level of professionalism. You will find it natural to wield more power and you will be more effective in offering your unique gifts. Now maybe you imagine you have already been performing at the peak of your ability, but I bet you will discover -- with a mix of alarm and excitement -- that you can become even more excellent. Be greater, Leo! Do better! Live stronger! (P.S.: As you ascend to this new level of competence, I advise you to be humbly aware of your weaknesses and immaturities. As your clout rises, you can’t afford to indulge in self-delusions.)
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)
I love to see you Virgos flirt with the uncharted and the uncanny and the indescribable. I get thrills and chills whenever I watch your fine mind trying to make sense of the fabulous and the foreign and the unfathomable. What other sign can cozy up to exotic wonders and explore forbidden zones with as much no-nonsense pragmatism as you? If anyone can capture greased lightning
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in a bottle or get a hold of magic beans that actually work, you can.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)
A friend told me about a trick used by his grandmother, a farmer. When her brooding hens stopped laying eggs, she would put them in pillowcases that she then hung from a clothesline in a stiff breeze. After the hens got blown around for a while, she returned them to their cozy digs. The experience didn’t hurt them, and she swore it put them back on track with their egg-laying. I’m not comfortable with this strategy. It’s too extreme for an animal-lover like myself. (And I’m glad I don’t have to deal with recalcitrant hens.) But maybe it’s an apt metaphor or poetic prod for your use right now. What could you do to stimulate your own creative production?
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)
Now would be an excellent time to add deft new nuances to the ways you kiss, lick, hug, snuggle, caress, and fondle. Is there a worthy adventurer who will help you experiment with these activities? If not, use your pillow, your own body, a realistic life-size robot, or your imagination. This exercise will be a good warm-up for your other assignment, which is to upgrade your intimacy skills. How might you do that? Hone and refine your abilities to get close to people. Listen deeper, collaborate stronger, compromise smarter, and give more. Do you have any other ideas?
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)
“If I had nine hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first six sharpening my ax,” said Abraham Lincoln, one of America’s most productive presidents. I know you Sagittarians are more renowned for your bold, improvisational actions than your careful planning and strategic preparation, but I think the coming weeks will be a time when you can and should adopt Lincoln’s approach. The readier you are, the freer you’ll be to apply your skills effectively and wield your power precisely.
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CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)
Zoologists say that cannibalizing offspring is common in the animal kingdom, even among species that care tenderly for their young. So when critters eat their kids, it’s definitely “natural.” But I trust that in the coming weeks, you won’t devour your own children. Nor, I hope, will you engage in any behavior that metaphorically resembles such an act. I suspect that you may be at a low ebb in your relationship with some creation or handiwork or influence that you generated out of love. But please don’t abolish it, dissolve it, or abandon it. Just the opposite, in fact: Intensify your efforts to nurture it.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18
)
Your astrological house of communication will be the scene of substantial clamor and ruckus in the coming weeks. A bit of the hubbub will be flashy but empty. But much of it should be pretty interesting, and some of it will even be useful. To get the best possible results, be patient and objective rather than jumpy and reactive. Try to find the deep codes buried inside the mixed messages. Discern the hidden meanings lurking within the tall tales and reckless gossip. If you can deal calmly with the turbulent flow, you will give your social circle a valuable gift.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20)
The best oracular advice you’ll get in the coming days probably won’t arise from your dreams or an astrological reading or a session with a psychic, but rather by way of seemingly random signals, like an overheard conversation or a sign on the side of a bus or a scrap of paper you find lying on the ground. And I bet the most useful relationship guidance you receive won’t be from an expert, but maybe from a blog you stumble upon or a barista at a café or one of your old journal entries. Be alert for other ways this theme is operating, as well. The usual sources may not have useful info about their specialties. Your assignment is to gather up accidental inspiration and unlikely teachings.
Homework
At least 30 percent of everything you and I know is more than half-wrong. Are you brave enough to admit it? Describe your ignorance at FreeWillastrology.com.
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