NEWS A DRUG-WAR CASUALTY. HEADOUT WHAT WOULD JESUS CHEW? MOVIES HELL IS FULL OF BEARS. P. 8
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WWEEK.COM
VOL 37/24 04.20.2011
A complete guide to Portland’s street food.
2
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011 wweek.com
CONTENT
WINNING ARMY: Five things we learned from the Portland Timbers’ first two home games in Major League Soccer. Page 16.
NEWS
4
MUSIC
25
CULTURE
20
MOVIES
46
HEADOUT
21
CLASSIFIEDS
51
FOOD & DRINK
23
STAFF Editor-in-Chief Mark Zusman EDITORIAL Acting Arts & Culture Editor Ruth Brown Staff Writers Nigel Jaquiss, James Pitkin, Beth Slovic Copy Chief Kat Merck Copy Editors Matt Buckingham, Peggy Perdue, Sarah Smith Special Sections Editor Ben Waterhouse Screen Editor Aaron Mesh Music Editor Casey Jarman Assistant Music Editor Michael Mannheimer Editorial Interns Ailin Darling, Kevin Davis, Rachael DeWitt, Nathan Gilles, Ashley Gossman, Evan Sernoffsky CONTRIBUTORS Stage Ben Waterhouse Classical Brett Campbell Dance Heather Wisner Visual Arts Richard Speer
Erik Bader, Ruth Brown, Nathan Carson, Shane Danaher, Robert Ham, Whitney Hawke, Jay Horton, Matthew Korfhage, AP Kryza, Nilina Mason-Campbell, John Minervini, Katrina Nattress, Rebecca Raber, Alistair Rockoff, Jeff Rosenberg, Anika Sabin, Matt Singer, Chris Stamm, Mark Stock
DISTRIBUTION Circulation Director Robert Lehrkind
PRODUCTION Production Manager Kendra Clune Art Director Ben Mollica Graphic Designers Soma Honkanen, Adam Krueger, Carolyn Richardson, Dylan Serkin Production Interns Christa Connelly, Jessica Stambach
MUSICFESTNW Executive Director Trevor Solomon Too Sexy for This Masthead Dan Winters
ADVERTISING Director of Advertising Jane Smith Display Account Executives Sara Backus, Maria Boyer, Michael Donhowe, Drew Harrison, Janet Norman, Kyle Owens Classifieds Account Executive Jennifer Lee, Corin Kuppler Advertising Assistant Ashley Grether Marketing and Events Manager Jess Sword Marketing and Promotions Coordinator Brittany McKeever
Our mission: Provide our audiences with an independent and irreverent understanding of how their worlds work so they can make a difference. Circulation: 90,000 (except during holidays and school vacations.) Though Willamette Week is free, please take just one copy. Anyone removing papers in bulk from our distribution points will be prosecuted, as they say, to the full extent of the law. Willamette Week is published weekly by City of Roses Newspaper Company 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Main line phone: (503) 243-2122 fax: (503) 243-1115 Classifieds phone: (503) 223-1500 fax: (503) 223-0388
WWEEK.COM Web Production Brian Panganiban
OPERATIONS Accounting Manager Andrea Manning Credit & Collections Shawn Wolf Office Manager & Receptionist Nick Johnson Office Corgi Bruce Manager of Information Systems Brian Panganiban Publisher Richard H. Meeker
Willamette Week welcomes freelance submissions. Send material to either News Editor or Arts Editor. Manuscripts will be returned if you include a self-addressed, stamped envelope. To be considered for calendar listings, notice of events must be received in writing by noon Wednesday, two weeks before publication. Send to Calendar Editor. Photographs should be clearly labeled and will be returned if accompanied by a selfaddressed, stamped envelope. Questions concerning circulation or subscription inquiries should be directed to Robert Lehrkind at Willamette Week. postmaster: Send all address changes to Willamette Week, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Subscription rates: One year $100, six months $50. Back issues $5 for walk-ins, $8 for mailed requests when available. Willamette Week is mailed at third-class rates. A.A.N. Association of ALTERNATIVE NEWSWEEKLIES This newspaper is published on recycled newsprint using soy-based ink.
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INBOX you think high-income people just consume WWEEK.COM READERS COMMENT or waste it? Tell me again how many jobs TARP ON “9 THINGS THE RICH DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT TAXES” created at 300 million per? If you do not know “…The tax code is mind-bogglingly complex… and really needs to be simplified. …You seem to be proposing some sort of tax on savings like an undistributed profits tax, but this seems like a bad idea. [The companies’] savings act as an insurance, allowing companies to survive through tough times, decreasing the chance that they’ll go bankrupt. Forcing them to spend is very short-sighted; it might produce a boom in the short run, but will make them more vulnerable in the long term and thus kill jobs. I also wonder what you have in mind in terms of reform. If you think we should just raise the tax on the rich, I think you’ll find that the rich are very clever and will figure out ways to keep their tax rates low due to the complexity you’ve discussed. If you think we can close every loophole, then I think you underestimate the complexity of the tax code and the ingenuity of those who would like to circumvent it. If you propose simplifying the tax code, I totally agree, though we all have to admit, that’s politically unfeasible (too many special interests who benefit from various exemptions and such).” —Joseph “I created 50 jobs last year in the restaurant business. Each job took $50K in investment. The banks aren’t lending, so where is the money coming from? My high-income investors. So, you want to tax money away from highincome earners that I used to create jobs that pay from $10 to $40 per hour because
All right, Dr. Know, I got fucking scabies. What do I do? Do I buy a cream for it at Walgreens? Or can I cure it with sulfur and tick spray, like the Internet claims? And finally, does this mean I’m an unclean person? —Itchy and Scratchy Warning: Dr. Know is not an actual doctor. I can’t deliver your baby, write you a prescription for cocaine, or testify that you were legally insane when you burned down Applebee’s. Frankly, asking Dr. Know to cure your scabies is a lot like asking Cap’n Crunch to command your aircraft carrier. But what the hell, I’ll give it a shot—if you die, you die. The real answer, as I think you already know, is to bite the bullet and see a real doctor. The first-line treatment for scabies, permethrin, usually wipes out the skin-burrowing mites in a single application. You gotta admit, that’s pretty solid. 4
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
how jobs are created, start a business and find out how difficult it is to create one.” —Eric Hoffer “…The truth is, much of the job creation, especially coming out of the recession, is from…new businesses opened by poorer (as in unemployed) individuals. Many are sole proprietorships. What we are not seeing is corporations that are flush with cash, hiring. At least, not in this country. Some of these are building new factories in Asia and hiring many there, but that doesn’t help our own recovery unless you count the shareholders in the equation. That was supposed to be the goal of subsidizing businesses, so I have to agree with Dave—supply-side economics has simply funneled most of the money to large corporations and the rich with little return to the U.S. economy.” —Hal CORRECTION: Last week’s story “Lost in Transition” gave an incorrect name for Tea Gillis when she began work at Northwest Natural Products, and erred in the agency to which Gillis has filed a complaint. Gillis went by Todd Mock, and Gillis’ complaint was filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. WW regrets the errors. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR must include the author’s street address and phone number for verification. Letters must be 250 or fewer words. Submit to: 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Fax: (503) 243-1115, Email: mzusman@wweek.com
Your Internet quick-fixes? Not so much. “I have seen lots of patients with scabies,” says Julie Anne Chinnock, who works at Outside In as an actual doctor, with a stethoscope and everything. “Many of them have tried ‘home remedies’ unsuccessfully before coming in for treatment.” Still, if your beer-and-lap-dance money is so precious that you’d rather be literally eaten by bugs than spend it on doctors, there are anecdotal reports that some folks have had success with a cream containing 10 percent sulfur, which you can buy online or even make yourself. There are also flea treatments for dogs that contain permethrin, and theoretically one could compound something quite similar to the prescription product. Personally, I might be tempted to try that—but only because I’m an idiot who really is going to kill himself with one of his stupid schemes someday. Do as I say, not as I do. QUESTIONS? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com
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Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011 wweek.com
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LEGISLATURE: A new green energy giant. MARIJUANA: One cannabis user vs. Kaiser. POLITICS: Tea party vs. unions. SPORTS: The Blazers’ “dangerous” opponent.
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SUBMITTED FOR BOB RYAN’S APPROVAL. Here’s an update to a WW report from January that Portland Firefighters union president Jim Forquer got arrested for drunken driving after he drove his 2008 Jeep Wrangler into a telephone pole. Forquer pleaded guilty to reckless driving, and his DUII was diverted. It also turns out Forquer has been reassigned after the arrest: Despite not being a paramedic himself, Forquer now supervises the Fire Bureau’s 158 paramedics. The position comes with a 6 percent pay increase to $108,388 a year. Bureau spokesman Paul Corah says the new assignment “was not intended to make Forquer better off.” In 2009, the Broward County, Fla., sheriff’s office honored deputy Jonathan Morgan Bleiweiss as employee of the year. A few months later, Broward County prosecutors charged Bleiweiss with multiple counts of using his badge to coerce young men to have sex with him. Murmurs reports all this because Bleiweiss has relocated with the court’s permission to Portland while he awaits trial on felony charges. BLEIWEISS And late last month, records show Bleiweiss applied to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission to open a wine shop at Northeast 52nd Avenue and Sacramento Street. OLCC spokeswoman Christie Scott says her agency cannot conduct out-of-state background checks. The agency does not license convicted felons in some circumstances, and Scott says it is unclear whether Bleiweiss’ issues in Florida will keep him from getting a license. Bleiweiss did not return WW’s messages. Another neighborhood greenway, a bike boulevard that incorporates traffic-calming infrastructure and bioswales that absorb rainwater, is inching closer to existence. Portland City Council on Wednesday, April 20, will vote on approving a new request to seek contract bids for what they call the “80’s neighborhood greenway.” The bicycle and pedestrian route will stretch 2.7 miles from Northeast Hassalo Street near Interstate 84 to Southeast Powell Boulevard and is expected to cost $723,038. Much of that money will come from the Bureau of Environmental Services’ $20 million contribution to the Bicycle Plan for 2030, approved last year. Brent Walth, an award-winning investigative reporter for The Oregonian, was hired last week to be WW’s managing news editor. He replaces Hank Stern, who left the paper to work for Multnomah County. “Brent is an extraordinary journalist,” says WW Editor Mark Zusman. “The entire team here is looking forward to working with him.” Zusman first hired Walth as a reporter at WW in 1986. Walth took leave in 1989 to write a biography WALTH of the late Gov. Tom McCall and then, in 1990, went to work for The (Eugene) Register-Guard. In 1994, Walth joined The Oregonian and, in 2001, shared in the Pulitzer Prize for public service, reporting for stories the paper wrote about the then-titled U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Brad Avakian’s decision to run for Congress and City Commissioner Amanda Fritz’s re-election announcement.
6
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
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J O N AT H A N H I L L
NEWS
GREEN MACHINE NEW GREEN-ENERGY TAX BREAKS MAKE CRITICS SEE RED. BY NIG E L JAQ UI SS
njaquiss@wweek.com
Newly proposed green-energy tax credits in Oregon are prompting watchdog groups to warn that the measure is a warmed-up version of a discredited idea. And the tax watchdogs blasting the proposal from two Portland-area Democrats have a vocal ally—another Portland-area Democrat who agrees that now isn’t the time for more tax credits, when the Legislature faces a $3.5 billion revenue shortfall. The debate centers on the so-called “CAPCO Bill,” House Bill 3227. “I have yet to see any redeeming social value [in HB 3227],” Rep. Jefferson Smith (D-Portland) told his colleagues on the House Transportation and Economic Development Committee during a hearing last week. “I’m just not convinced that it adds any value.” Smith’s position was noteworthy for two reasons. First, his committee was not being asked to decide the merits of the legislation, which would give investors $180 million in tax credits over the next six years. Rather, the proposal from sponsoring Reps. Jules Bailey (D -Portland) and Tobias Read (D-Beaverton) was simply to move the bill to Bailey’s Tax Credit Committee without a recommendation. And Smith’s dissent marked a rare split between him and Bailey. Two watchdog groups—Tax Fairness Oregon and the Oregon Center for Public Policy—also dislike CAPCO intensely. CAPCO stands for “capital company,” and
needs to be put at any risk with any Oregon company, it can be safely put into federally insured bank accounts or state or federal bonds.” Bailey says critics of his bill need to be patient. He says the Tax Credits Committee he co-chairs is working on revamping energy tax credits so some version of the the concept has boomeranged around the country after CAPCO concept can play an effective role at the same time beginning in Louisiana in the 1990s. That state, Colorado, as putting stricter controls on BETCs. Florida and Washington, D.C., have all tried variations of “I don’t expect 3227 to move forward alone,” Bailey says. “I think it would be part of a BETC bill.” CAPCOs with little or no job creation and very high costs. Bailey says investors will still require an incentive to As written, Bailey’s bill would give tax incentives to investors—typically insurance companies—to invest up to $30 put their money into Oregon’s green-energy industry. “The bill calls out insurance companies,” he says. million annually in local venture capital companies, which would then invest in green energy. The investors would get a “What we are saying is, you invest through a venture capital fund [i.e., a CAPCO] that will invest in clean dollar’s worth of tax credit for each dollar invested. That incentive is even more generous than the infa- energy. You are taking a higher risk, but there is a public mous Business Energy Tax Credits, which at their peak good that comes from that and we are willing to provide an incentive.” allowed investors 50 cents of tax credit for every dollar invested. (Bailey says he FACT: A second new tax credit Sheketoff disagrees. He notes that Oregon’s renewable-energy law already hopes a tweaked version of his bill will measure, Senate Bill 817, would establish state-level New Market lets utilities recover the costs of building become part of redesigned BETCs.) green-energy generation, and that much “We’re talking about something that is Tax Credits. Oregon has already proven wildly successful at of the wind power the state subsidized even more obscene than the BETCs,” says attracting projects funded by a flows to California. Chuck Sheketoff of the Oregon Center for federal version of the program. Smith wants all tax credits and other Public Policy. “I don’t think of insurance Originally conceived to combat blight in poor neighborhoods, kinds of tax breaks to be evaluated with companies as being needy, and I don’t see the federal credits have subsiany metrics around job creation that give dized Portland’s Nines Hotel and the same rigor lawmakers use to examine the Indigo, a luxury apartment general fund appropriations, such as K-12 any element of accountability.” education, the Oregon Health Plan or In written legislative testimony her complex at 430 SW 13th Ave. prisons. Currently, newly proposed tax group submitted, Tax Fairness Oregon director Jody Wiser noted that the bill would allow breaks—such as the CAPCO concept—give away money investors to claim credits for making loans, which carry the state has not yet taken in and may never collect. He got outvoted on CAPCO—it did move to the Tax far less risk than equity investments. And Wiser said the measure could let investors earn tax credits for money Credits Committee, where the bill remains very much parked in U.S. Treasury bills rather than invested in alive. But Smith hopes his colleagues will keep an eye on Oregon startups. the bigger picture. “We’ve got to look at tax expenditures [i.e., credits and “The ‘investments’ can just be five-year loans, or they can be any combination of venture capital equity invest- other tax breaks] like ordinary expenditures,” Smith says, ments or hybrid investments,” Wiser wrote. “The other “because it’s easy to spend money when it feels like free half of the $15 million of insurance company money never money.” Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
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HEALTH CARE W W S TA F F
NEWS
DENIED: Johan Mathiesen.
SMOKE SCREENED A POT USER IS DENIED PAIN MEDS. ADVOCATES SAY HE’S NOT ALONE. BY JA MES PITKIN
jpitkin@wweek.com
Johan Mathiesen has smoked pot recreationally for 45 years. “It’s my coffee, my tobacco, whatever you want. It’s my social drug,” says Mathiesen, a 69-year-old deli clerk at New Seasons on Southeast Division Street. And in a weed-friendly town like Portland, he says, that never posed a problem—until last year, when Kaiser Permanente suddenly cut off his pain medication, citing his marijuana use. Doctors prescribed Mathiesen oxycodone several years ago to relieve arthritis. Now, Mathiesen says, the Oakland-based insurance giant is discriminating against him based on an arbitrary social stigma around cannabis. “I also drink half a beer a day. Is that prohibited? They said no,” Mathiesen points out. John Sajo, a longtime marijuana activist in Oregon, says doctors routinely deny pot users access to medication—even when they’re in Oregon’s medical marijuana program. Pot patients have also been denied organ transplants (see “Organ Failure,” WW, May 21, 2008). “It seems like a lot of healthcare providers have those sorts of rules,” Sajo says. But prompting insurance companies to discuss those rules, if they exist, is an uphill battle. In response to WW requests, the PR departments at Kaiser and Providence Health released only brief statements. Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon says it has no such policy restricting marijuana users’ access to medication. “Generally speaking, we recommend that patients not use opiates and marijuana together,” reads an email response from Kaiser spokesman David Northfield. “The doctor chooses 99 percent of the time at Kaiser Permanente Northwest to recommend to the patient to make a choice [between pot and prescription narcotics].” 8
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011,
wweek.com
Mathiesen’s story begins about four years ago, when he was briefly hospitalized for heart arrhythmia. Doctors prescribed Coumadin for blood clots. The drug can interact badly with aspirin, Tylenol and other analgesics Mathiesen had been taking for his arthritis, so doctors gave him oxycodone instead. The powerful painkiller can be habit-forming in some patients, but Mathiesen says he had no problems with the drug. He took it until last summer, when his former doctor left Kaiser and he was assigned a new physician, Dr. Tamara Oren. Mathiesen says he always informs doctors he uses pot, and after viewing his file, Oren asked him to take a urine test. When the test came out positive for marijuana and oxycodone, Mathiesen says Oren told him he had to choose between the two, citing company policy. He refused to give up cannabis, so Oren yanked his prescription for oxycodone. Mathiesen was left with only over-the-counter painkillers, and because Coumadin mixes badly with those drugs, he had to drop the anticoagulant as well. Numerous online medical sources warn of harmful or fatal interactions between alcohol and oxycodone. But Mathiesen could find none on oxycodone and marijuana. He wrote letters to Kaiser demanding the insurer either justify the policy or drop it. “Anti-marijuana fever in this country is fuel[ed] by religious and cultural prejudices with no rational or honorable basis,” Mathiesen wrote to Kaiser. “What I don’t want is to have the remainder of my life put in jeopardy or pain because of cultural/religious prejudice.” Kaiser officials set up a meeting with Mathiesen on April 15 to discuss the policy and his requests for a doctor with an open view on marijuana. But on April 7, Dr. Maureen Wright, an associate regional medical director at Kaiser, canceled the meeting. “We offered to meet with you to discuss your concerns, which you told me during our telephone conversation was related to discrimination,” Wright wrote. “What you outlined in your letter has to do with your wish that we nullify our opioid protocol. That will not be done.” So Mathiesen now is left with no prescription painkiller, no blood-clot pills and no primary care provider. “They’re saying, ‘You don’t get the best medicine because you smoke marijuana,’” Mathiesen says. “That’s social engineering. I can’t trust a doctor like that.”
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011 wweek.com
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CAN PACKY GET MORE ROOM IN TIME TO CELEBRATE HIS 50TH BIRTHDAY? Even as Portlanders wished Packy, the Oregon Zoo’s largest inmate, a happy 49th birthday April 15, we here at the Rogue Desk joined many fans of the nearly 7-ton birthday boy in wondering, “How long?” How long will it take Metro, which operates the Oregon Zoo, to expand the turf for Packy and the zoo’s five other elephants from 1.5 acres to 6? After all, quadrupling the space for elephants was a central selling point of Metro’s successful $125 million bond measure for the zoo in 2008. (WW opposed the measure, which voters passed 60 percent to 40 percent.) “They sold this measure on improving life for the elephants,” says elephants advocate Courtney Scott, a Portland photographer who says she voted “yes” on the bond. “Having done nothing in 30 months for the elephants is a betrayal of the elephants and taxpayers.” Expenditure of the bond funds was delayed by a blistering November 2009 report by Metro Auditor Suzanne Flynn, who found zoo staff had botched previous big-ticket projects at the state’s most popular paid tourist attraction. Two high-level staffers departed after the audit and a bond oversight committee found the auditor’s concerns “have been/ are being addressed.” But other news from that citizen oversight committee is less than inspiring. “The zoo has started some of the nine projects outlined during the bond campaign,” according to a February committee report. “Construction has started on the Veterinary Medical Center, the Penguin Filtration Project and some of the water and energy projects.” Stephanie Cameron, a zoo spokeswoman, says expanding Packy’s domain has been delayed because the planned projects “require careful and complex sequencing to ensure the zoo continues to operate without disruption.” A $1.5 million master-planning effort is under way for the rest of the projects. At an open house last month, zoo staff unveiled a design for the new 6-acre stomping grounds, which are now in the adjacent Elk Meadow exhibit. Cameron says the zoo hopes to break ground on the $19 million elephant habitat expansion next summer and adds that Metro approved taking an option on a 350-acre piece of land in Sandy for a planned offsite elephant sanctuary. Phil Prewett, a keeper at the Oregon Zoo, lobbied against the bond measure and is frustrated but not surprised that Packy’s living environment today is no better than it was 30 months ago. “I told you so,” Prewett says.
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WHO KNEW PIRATES COULD SING? The Pirates of Penzance – Just one of twelve great plays. Ashland 2011.
Michael Elich is The Pirate King
buy your tickets
www.osfashland.org 12
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011 wweek.com
phone: 800-219-8161
POLITICS
TEA PARTY VS. UNIONS BY NAT H A N G I L L E S
and
E VA N SE R NO F F SKY
243-2122
Portland’s living room—a.k.a. Pioneer Courthouse Square—hosted two very different guests last weekend less than 24 hours apart. On a rainy Friday evening, April 15, the Oregon tea party held court as part of its now-annual
tax day protest. The following day at noon under better weather conditions, a collection of Oregon unions led by Portland Jobs With Justice occupied the square for their “Jobs, Not Cuts” rally. As a divided Congress battles over where to spend and what to cut, WW attended both rallies to put Oregon’s pro-spending unions and slash-happy tea party to the test. What scares, delights and concerns these two groups? What do they think about the budget cuts? Who had a bigger turnout? Who spent more? And what do they agree on?
E VA N S E R N O F F S K Y
TEA PARTY
UNIONS
C H R I S T A C O N N E L LY
TWO GROUPS, ONE PUBLIC SQUARE.
NEWS
CROWD SIZE: About 200
About 2,500
DEMOGRAPHICS: Mostly baby boomers, mixed gender, all white (one African-American in anti-tea party protest. Does that count?).
Mixed-age, mixed gender, mixed ethnicity (mostly white, but hey, it’s Oregon).
MUSIC: Cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”
“Solidarity Forever” and other union favorites.
BIGGEST CELEBRITY: Conservative talk-radio host Victoria Taft.
Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Firefighters of Wisconsin, a key opposition figure to Wis. Gov. Scott Walker.
HISTORICAL REFERENCES: Ronald Reagan and Thomas Jefferson.
Mitchell quoted German anti-Nazi theologian Martin Niemöller on the importance of speaking out during oppressive regimes.
COSTUMES: No real costumes, but lots of red, white and blue. One man sported an anti-Che Guevara shirt (think a no-smoking sign with Che instead of a cigarette).
Alliance for Democracy dressed like Supreme Court justices with corporate logos adorning their robes to protest pro-corporate decisions.
CHANTS: “USA! USA! USA!”
“Banks got bailed out! People got sold out!”
SIGNS: “Redistribute My Work Ethic, Not My Wealth.”
“Stop the War on the Working People.”
FUNNIEST DONALD TRUMP SIGNS: “Obama…You’re Fired!!!! —Trump”
“Chop From the Top,” with an image of Trump.
HOW ONE DEMONSTRATOR WOULD FIX THE DEFICIT: “We need to stop spending. As an example, we should cut the Environmental Protection Agency.”—Greg Sterkson
“We have to cut things that are unnecessary; you know, not spend $2,000 for a wrench, things like that.” —Karen Dellelo
HOW ONE DEMONSTRATOR FINISHES THIS SENTENCE: “ I THINK PRESIDENT OBAMA IS A...” “…hardcore Marxist, but that’s just my personal opinion.”—Ty Raddue
“…sadly, a sellout. He is more practical than principled.”—Don Baham Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011,
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13
A STUDENT DRIVEN EVENT PRESENTED BY ENVIRONMENTAL CLUB, MILLER GRANT, AND THESE SPONSORS:
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CAMPFIRECOLUMBIA.ORG 14
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011 wweek.com
SPORTS
KNOW YOUR ENEMY ASSESSING THE THREAT LEVEL OF THESE INTERNATIONAL MAVERICKS.
D E N N I S C U LV E R
BY C AS E Y JA R M A N
cjarman@wweek.com
Technically, there shouldn’t be a team of “Mavericks” because the dictionary defines a maverick as “an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party.” Which sounds awful close to “radical”—which, let’s face it, sounds awful close to “terrorist.” Now, we’re not saying these four Dallas Mavericks—chosen for their hard-to-pronounce names and origins outside the 50 states—are al-Qaeda operatives. We’re just saying that Trail Blazers fans gearing up for Game 3 of the team’s first-round series on Thursday, April 21, ought to know what Portland faces. So we got some intel from experts on these four. In these dangerous times, you can never be too safe. THREAT LEVEL: RED (SEVERE) Dirk Nowitzki (32-year-old forward from Germany) Intel: “People might think Dirk is a boring guy on the court because his game is just as efficient, economic, wellrounded and straight-forward as his character is,” says Tobias Pox, a German resident of Portland who writes for the German monthly magazine FIVE. “But look again and
you find precious nuggets like that crazy fadeaway jumper off of one leg. He’s the best shooting big man ever.” Exit strategy: Pox urges a “hassling strategy” of either Nicolas Batum or Gerald Wallace fronting Nowitzki a lot and a big guy covering from behind. “That worked to perfection for the Golden State Warriors four years ago.” THREAT LEVEL: ORANGE (HIGH) J.J. Barea (26-year-old guard from Puerto Rico) Intel: OK. We know Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but Barea is still dangerous. “Listed at a generous 6 feet tall, Barea is the prototypical NBA small guard that gives opposing coaches and guards headaches,” says Wendell Maxey, a Portland-based freelance writer who contributes to ESPN. com, SLAMonline and his own blog, beyondthebeat.net. “As we’ve seen—Barea averaged 9.3 points this season— he uses his height and quickness to his advantage.” Exit strategy: “Portland’s best game plan for Barea is to pressure him early and force him to move the ball. If you sleep on him, he will no doubt wake you up by getting to the rim and hitting jumpers,” Maxey says. “He’s having a career season, and sometimes you have to tip your hat and pick your poison.” THREAT LEVEL: YELLOW (ELEVATED) Peja Stojakovic (33-year-old forward from Serbia) Intel: “Peja owns one of the quickest releases in the league, and he’s deadly from downtown,” says Art Garcia, a Dallasbased writer who has covered the NBA for more than a
NEWS
decade. “Opponents still seem to underestimate his ability to put the ball on the floor and drive when an opening is there. He also has an ability to pump-fake and create angles to get his shot off.” Exit strategy: “Crowd him at the 3-point line, stay in front and don’t fall for his fakes. He’s not going to beat anyone with his athleticism,” Garcia says. THREAT LEVEL: BLUE (GUARDED) Rodrigue Beaubois (23-year-old guard from France) Intel: “He’s very quick, fast and a good shooter. Great at creating his own shot,” says Kevin Sherrington, who has written for The Dallas Morning News since 1985. “He’s lost a lot of confidence this year. He hasn’t really learned the language that well. The injury [a broken foot last August] hurt his development, too.” Exit strategy: “He’s got enough offense to play [shooting guard], but he’s not very tough defensi vely,” Sherrington says. “ Very quick, but not strong enough for guards like Portland’s. That’s one of the reasons he’s not starting this series.” Beaubois didn’t play in Game 1 due to a sprained foot. He had not been cleared to play as of press time Tuesday afternoon.
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Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011,
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15
SPORTS N ATA L I E B E H R I N G . C O M
NEWS
WINNING ARMY: Portland soccer fans celebrate the team’s 4-2 victory against the Chicago Fire in the home opener.
CUTTING THE RIBBON FIVE THINGS WE LEARNED FROM THE PORTLAND TIMBERS’ FIRST TWO HOME GAMES IN MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER. BY J ON AT HA N CR OWL
JEFFERSON DANCERS!!! Portland Center for the Performing Arts – Newmark Theatre –
May 4,5 6 at 7:30 pm May 7 at 2 and 7:30 pm
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Tickets: $18.50, $13.50, $8.50
YE 16
Audition June 2nd and 3rd 3:30 - 6:30 Please attend both days
Box Office Mon-Sat/ 10 am - 5 pm 503 248 4335 Photographer: Blaine Covert
A R S ! ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: STEVE GONZALES
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011,
wweek.com
jcrowl@wweek.com
Portland’s initiation into Major League Soccer played to sellout crowds last week and produced the Timbers’ first wins of the season. For those who weren’t among the 18,600-plus fans to pack Jeld-Wen Field on a rainy Thursday night and a sunny Sunday afternoon, here’s a recap.
Fans have a big off-field crush on owner Merritt Paulson. During the opening ceremonies for the inaugural game, much of the stadium participated in a chant of the team owner’s name. The adulation was in sharp contrast to the Timbers logo unveiling last June, when fans blasted what they considered a cartoonish design by chanting “you fucked up” to an onstage Paulson. Now he’s the toast of Timbertown. But the crowd had a harder time remembering Mayor Sam Adams’ role in bringing Major League Soccer to Portland—he was booed loudly when introduced during pregame festivities.
As promised, Portland has the potential to become one of the jewels of Major League Soccer. MLS commissioner Don Garber said as much when he said the Timbers franchise would will help raise the profile of the 18-team league. Television ratings are paramount to the 15-yearold league’s continued success. And a raucous sellout crowd of 18,627 at Jeld-Wen Field translated well during the national ESPN2 telecast of the April 14 home opener. One of the challenges facing MLS is matching the game intensity found in European leagues. Timbers coach John Spencer, who’s been in MLS for eight years as a player and assistant after spending parts of his career in England’s Premier League, said the Timbers’ home-field atmosphere is unmatched in the United States and surpassed that of some European franchises.
Timbers fans have their on-field darling. Every player had the backing of the crowd, but no opening-night cheers were as loud as those for 20-year-old Darlington Nagbe. Though the Timbers’ top draft pick didn’t enter the game until the 82nd minute against Chicago, his arrival set off a thunderous roar from a crowd that had been depressed by two straight Fire goals that narrowed the Timbers’ lead to 3-2. Though not yet a starter, the forward/midfielder is considered the top prospect on the Timbers squad and was making just his second MLS appearance after returning from a hernia injury last month. On Sunday, the crowd gave strong acknowledgment to midfielder Kalif Alhassan as he left the game in the 72nd minute. Alhassan had two assists in the 3-2 victory and displayed mesmerizing footwork that frustrated the F.C. Dallas club.
Timbers Army seating is packed and competitive. Almost every seat in the 16 sections was filled an hour before Thursday night’s 8 pm game. Some fans started arriving several hours early to wait in line and get seats in the first few rows. “I’ve been going to games for years, and me and my friends are always in the fourth row,” said Dan Schaefer. “We got our spot, but we had to fight for it. We had people waiting in line at 4 o’clock.” And despite Boston Globe sportswriter Bob Ryan dissing the fans’ a-cappella rendition of the national anthem on opening night, the singing marked one of the stadium’s cooler moments so far.
Transportation and parking outside the stadium weren’t the headaches some feared. TriMet, which ran frequent bus and train service to the stadium, estimates about 6,600 fans— more than one-third of the crowd—used mass transit for the home opener. Wait times to board buses and trains were obviously worse before and immediately after the game, but crowds dispersed quickly. Parking around the stadium wasn’t hard to find, but it came at a steep price: Meters charge $3.50 an hour during games, and some parking lots were selling spots at $20 a pop. Riding express buses was the cheaper alternative, costing $2.05 each way.
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Willamette Week 04-20-11.indd 1
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011 wweek.com
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4/11/11 10:32 AM
ENVIRONMENT COURTESY OF BOB SALLINGER
NEWS
CLEANING BIRDS: This pelican was one of many victims of the BP oil spill.
Multnomah
Climate Short Film Prizes!
WHERE THERE’S A SPILL, THERE’S A WAY
Contest
Celebrity Judges! Multnomah County Sustainability
Winners shown at McMenamin’s Bagdad Theater on July 31, 2011
Entry Deadline: June 10, 2011 Theme: “How will climate change impact Oregon and what can we do about it?”
web.multco.us/climatefilms
18
WHAT ONE GROUP OF OREGONIANS LEARNED FROM THE BP DISASTER ONE YEAR AGO.
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011,
wweek.com
Urban Farm Store 2100 SE Belmont St (503) 234 -7733 www.urbanfarmstore.com
BY A I L IN DA RL IN G
adarling@wweek.com
Last July, Mike Rosen led a 22-member expedition from Portland to document the aftermath of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, on the anniversary of the April 20, 2010, spill, the group is sharing some of what it learned about the environmental disaster. The first product from the nonprofit known as PDX 2 Gulf Coast is a 30-minute film called Beyond the Spill, which will premiere at the Alberta Rose Theatre at 7 pm on Wednesday, April 20. One year ago, the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon allowed about 200 million gallons of oil to spill over five months. Among other effects, the film examines the toxicity of some short-term cleanup efforts. “Beach cleanup is an industrial operation,” says Rosen, a City of Portland watershed resource manager. “If you run a beach through a washing machine, it’s clean, but it’s also dead.” Included is footage from visits to a bird-cleaning facility, an experience Rosen says affected him deeply. “There is literally a cottage industry that goes from spill to spill, cleaning up birds,” he says. “The physical trauma of being cleaned often kills more birds than it saves.” (Also showing April 20 on HBO is Saving Pelican 895, a documentary by Portland filmmakers Irene Taylor Brodsky and Peter D. Richardson.) Rosen says his comments to a friend on the pointlessness of a “Fuck BP” T-shirt led her to send him a list of relief organizations working on the Gulf Coast, along with a message reading, “Let me know when you want to load up the van.” (See “Peek Oil,” WW, July 14, 2010.) And he acted on that challenge— accompanied by 22 local journalists, artists, documentary filmmakers and activists. Over nine days, the group flew to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Their documentary film will be made available to schools, released on DVD and submitted to environmental film festivals. The group’s other efforts are gaining momentum as well. Just Below the Surface, an educational series of essays and learning tools sponsored by the Northwest Earth Institute, has already attracted interest from local high schools and college environmental groups. And Oil and Water, a graphic novel written by The Oregonian’s Steve Duin and illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man), hits shelves sometime this fall. But Rosen sees this week’s anniversary of the disaster as a key time for the group’s efforts. “The anniversary is the next, and maybe last, time we’ll acknowledge the oil spill,” says Rosen. “So much oil was released. It’s in the environment and moving in a way we don’t understand.”
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011 wweek.com
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FOOD & DRINK: Joy for the meat sizzles. MUSIC: Undercover in dubstep. PERFORMANCE: Portland gets funny. MOVIES: The best movie ever made in Harney County.
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Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
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NICOLAS CAGE IS A PRICKLY PEAR. PUB IN A PICKLE: Sometime Portland film producer John Albert has applied for a liquor license to open Stone Pickle Deli & Pub in the Kenton neighborhood space that formerly housed short-lived cocktail bar Divina (2135 N Willis Blvd.). According to the OLCC application, the pub will “provide healthy, hearty sandwiches and other food menu items…a place where an adult may having [sic] a refreshing cocktail if desired.” Entertainment will include “acustical” music, comedy, karaoke and DJs. A FASHIONABLE FAREWELL: East Burnside fashion store Moxie (2400 E Burnside St.) is shutting its doors for good at the end of the month, after almost six years in business. Stock will go on sale this Friday. MY KINGDOM FOR A CHEF: As first reported on Portland Monthly’s Eat Beat blog, the executive chef and co-owner of Bluehour, Kenny Giambalvo, has announced he will be leaving after 10 years. Giambalvo opened the posh Pearl eatery with local restaurant mogul Bruce Carey (23Hoyt, Saucebox, Clarklewis) in 2000, and his modern Mediterranean cuisine has become synonymous with the name. Bluehour lost both pastry chef Alissa Rozos and bar manager Tommy Klus at the end of 2010, Saucebox lost executive chef Gregory Gourdet last year and his replacement Jason Neroni earlier this year, while 23Hoyt also lost its head chef in late 2010. STARFUCKER SELLS OUT: It took a while, but Starfucker is finally blowing up—just about everywhere. The local electropop outfit has been on a national tour since early March, and while the tour has had its share of breakdowns and arrests (well, one arrest: Multi-instrumentalist Ryan Biornstad was jailed briefly in Austin, Texas, for unloading the band’s van in a no-loading zone), it has also been the band’s most successful headlining tour to date, with sold-out shows in San Francisco, Boston, New York, Chicago and other cities. “The good shows have always been really good,” says founding member Josh Hodges, noting that the quartet had played to sold-out crowds in New York before this year’s visit to the Bowery Ballroom. “But what has amazed me is that we’ve had great shows in places like Burlington, Vt., and Omaha, Neb. I didn’t even know anything about Omaha!” Starfucker returns to play three separate Portland release shows next week. Sell-out crowds are expected. HOMETOWN HEROES: Veteran Portland chef Vitaly Paley competed on Iron Chef America Sunday night, beating Iron Chef Jose Garces in a radish battle. Paley held a screening party at Ecotrust for the premiere, with a very vocal crowd paying $25 a head to attend. Naturally, the audience erupted anytime any person or thing to do with Portland appeared onscreen, but never before have we witnessed 100 people hoot and cheer at the mere mention of “Dungeness crab.” Brava, Portland, you have outdone yourself.
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK IN ARTS & CULTURE
WILLAMETTE WEEK
HEADOUT
THURSDAY, APRIL 21 [THEATER] BRIDGETOWN COMEDY FESTIVAL It’s like summer camp for standup comedians: The four-year-old festival brings nearly 200 comics from around the country to the Hawthorne stumble zone, including Kristen Schaal, Doug Benson, Hannibal Buress, Hari Kondabolu, Iliza Shlesinger and Margaret Cho. See bridgetowncomedyfestival.com for the full, overwhelming schedule. Various locations Thursday-Sunday. $75 weekend pass, $20 Thursday or Sunday. Individual shows vary. [MUSIC] PHOSPHORESCENT It’s not too often you get to see a great songwriter in a great theater setting. Phosphorescent—a.k.a. Matthew Houck—is a great songwriter. His new record, Here’s to Taking It Easy, is a real heartbreaker. Who needs movies? Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 223-4527. 8 pm. $15. 21+.
FRIDAY, APRIL 22 [FILM] MUTANT GIRLS SQUAD If you’re not already hip to this twisted Japanese universe, well, how do you feel about a man showing his bloody vaginal growth to his daughter? You like? See this. You don’t? What’s wrong with you? Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St., 238-8899. Multiple showtimes. $4-$6.
SATURDAY, APRIL 23 [ROLLER DERBY] ROSE CITY ROLLERS VS. RAT CITY ROLLERS Portland’s premier female sporting league, the Rose City Rollers, takes on Seattle’s best in four 30-minute bouts of smack-talking, body-smashing derby action. The Coliseum is an infinitely better venue than the old Oaks Park stadium, transforming the scrappy, silly game into a real spectator sport. Memorial Coliseum, 300 Winning Way. Doors at 5 pm. $14 general admission, $20 guaranteed seating; available at rosequarter.com. [MUSIC] OFF!, MIKEY AND THE MISTAKES, MEAN JEANS, BLOOD BEACH Keith Morris was the best of Black Flag’s four frontmen. Sure, he only recorded an EP’s worth of songs with the band in the very beginning of its lifespan, but they trounce Henry Rollins’ albums of overwrought guttural wailings. His new band, Off!, doesn’t break any new ground, but it will break your face. East End, 203 SE Grand Ave., 2320056. 9 pm. $11. 21+. [BEER] MICROHOPIC Migration Brewing plays host to the third installment of beer blog Brewpublic’s Microhopic series, featuring recent releases from Amnesia Brewing, Beetje Brewery, Breakside Brewery and Burnside Brewing. Migration Brewery, 2828 NE Glisan St., 753-7572. 6 pm-midnight. 21+.
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
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BEST See pg. 53
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FOOD & DRINK WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20 Passover at Lincoln
North Williams restaurant Lincoln is cooking up some geschmack goodies for Passover. Until April 25, those observing the holiday or just looking to expand their cross-cultural culinary horizons can nosh on chef Jenn Louis’ housemade gefilte fish, matzah bread and meringue cookies with fruit conserva. Hag sameach! Lincoln, 3808 N Williams Ave., 288-6200.
FRIDAY, APRIL 22 Spring Beer & Wine Fest
The annual Spring Beer & Wine Festival is back, now in its 17th year. Forty-five breweries, 28 wineries, 15 cheesemakers and chocolatiers, and five distilleries will cram their comestibles into the Oregon Convention Center. The lineup for the “Chef’s Stage” is a little lackluster, but the schedule of seminars sounds more promising, including presentations by local salt savant Mark Bitterman and Olympic Provisions chef Alex Yoder. Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 235-7575. Noon-11 pm. Admission is free for the first 1,000 visitors, $5 after that. Children aged 12 and younger free. Tasting packages available. Minors accompanied by an adult permitted until 7 pm. All ages.
Urban Farmer’s Beer and Oyster Dinner
Downtown’s Urban Farmer restaurant is holding a six-course dinner matching Hood Canal oysterswith a range of craft brews from Fort George Brewery. The meal will feature pairings such as smoked oysters and beef tartare served with Murky Pearl Stout, and bacon-larded oysters washed down with Omega Tex Imperial IPA. Urban Farmer Restaurant, 525 SW Morrison St., 8th floor, 222-4900. 7 pm. $65 per person. 21+.
SATURDAY, APRIL 23 Microhopic
Migration Brewing will play host to the third installment of beer blog Brewpublic’s Microhopic series, showcasing new breweries and beer styles from around Oregon. In addition to Migration’s own brews, the event will feature recent releases from Amnesia Brewing, Beetje Brewery, Breakside Brewery and Burnside Brewing, all of which will have brewers or reps on hand to take drinkers through the finer points of their craft creations. Migration Brewery, 2828 NE Glisan St., 753-7572. 6 pm-midnight. 21+.
SUNDAY, APRIL 24 Easter
Clyde Common’s White House
West End gastropub Clyde Common continues its series of monthly dinner parties with an Easter feast inspired by the 1887 White House Cookbook (because nothing says “resurrection of the messiah” like dinner with Grover Cleveland?). The five-course meal includes dishes such as mock turtle soup, deviled lobster, squab pot pie and hashed mutton. Clyde Common, 1014 SW Stark St., 228-3333. Seating by 6:30 pm. $50. Reservations required.
Easter Brunch and Buffet at the Heathman
The Heathman’s annual Easter Sunday brunch and buffet is back, allowing diners to break their Lenten fasts in swanky surrounds. The Heathman’s regular brunch menu will be available, alongside Easter specials like roast leg of lamb, and oeuf mollet and rib Florentine. While executive chef Michael Stanton will prepare an all-you-can-eat feast. Heathman Hotel, 1001 SW Broadway, 241-4100. Brunch 9 am-3 pm, buffet 9:30 am-2 pm. Brunch à la carte. Buffet $38 for adults, $17 for children 12 and under.
Pix Pâtisserie Easter Egg Hunt and Sunday Tea
Motorcycle-riding bunnies and a rabbit leaping over the Eiffel Tower are just some of the chocolate desserts Pix Pâtisserie will be offering this Easter. Both stores are hosting Easter egg hunts when their doors open, along with the chance to win up to $50 in treats. Head to the North Williams Avenue location at 11 am for an Easter Sunday Tea that will include a selection of bite-sized delicacies like soft-boiled quail eggs wrapped in prosciutto. KAREN LOCKE. Pix PâtisserieNorth, 3901 N Williams Ave., 282-6539 and Pix Pâtisserie, 3402 SE Division St., 232-4407. Egg hunt from 10am, Easter Sunday Tea 11 am-3 pm. Easter egg hunt: free. Easter Sunday Tea: $30, advance booking required. All ages.
Brewing Up Cocktails with Oakshire Brewing
Go on a very different egg hunt this Easter Sunday: The mixologists from Brewing Up Cocktails are heading to Spints Ale House to tackle a class of mixed drinks called “flips,” which both beer snobs and booze hounds can appreciate. By using raw eggs and beer from Eugene-based Oakshire Brewing, they’ll take this creamy, textured drink back to its roots. Several Oakshire beers will also be available on tap, including the Heart Shaped Box—an imperial stout aged in bourbon barrels with cacao nibs and cherries. KAREN LOCKE. Spints Alehouse, 401 NE 28th Ave., 847-2534. 5-8 pm. Around $5-$7 per cocktail. 21+.
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REVIEW
= WW Pick. Highly recommended. PRICES: $: Most entrees under $10. $$: $10-$20. $$$: $20-$30. $$$$: Above $30. Editor: RUTH BROWN. Email: dish@wweek.com. See page 3 for submission instructions.
PRE-MIDNIGHT EXPRESS SECRET KEBAB WILL SERVE YOU ANYTHING (SOMETIMES), SO LONG AS IT’S KEBAB. BY MATTHEW KOR FHAGE 243-2122
Secret Kebab, as the name might suggest, is a kebab-smuggling operation, steered by the unseen hand of a shadowy, mustachioed figure known as Alparslan the Turk, who is also suspected of being a literary creation. “BOOM BOOM,” he writes when he takes BOOM BOOM: Alparslan the Turk’s Adana-style kebab. your online-only order for delivery. There is no storefront whatsoever, and the Why so much trouble? Well, these kebabs have website is a cryptic, half-drawn slate. Delivery runs sold out pretty much every single weekend since sometimes all weekend, sometimes only Saturday, Secret Kebab’s launch on March 4, sometimes days from 6 pm until an undisclosed time, presumably before their delivery. It seems that the very diffito confound easy surveillance by customers. culty of obtaining one of these kiyma kebabs—and Except when falafel makes a surprise appearance, the secrecy surrounding the owner—has become only one item is offered on the menu: a $5 kiyma the most effective advertisement for their desirlamb kebab, made Adana-style, with a gently spiced ability; standing-room crowds are willing to order tube of lamb sausage, beet, carrot, mint sauce and two days in advance, with a $3 delivery fee, for what seasonal greens on fresh-baked is essentially street food. flatbread. Still, even this one item Maybe, though, it’s just the Order this: Kebab ($5). It’s the is generally sold out hours or even hope of owning a little piece of only thing on the menu most days. days before the kebab delivery guy the Turk himself. “How I can to makes his rounds. you discribe my joy for the meat Twitter, nonetheless, has been virulently atit- sizzles?! My God I can not!!” he says on Twitter. ter about it, with over 500 followers on the @ “The breads are poofing!!” Who wouldn’t want to secretkebab account. In fact, aside from an email order from such a pleasant marketing persona? address available on the site, Twitter is pretty Two notes, though: 1) It’s not really the point, much the only way you can order a kebab. (A but I should mention that the kebabs are nonethephone number has sometimes appeared, but is less pretty dang good altogether—the greens fresh, always swiftly removed.) the beets rich, the pita still warm from the oven. As it goes, despite Twitter’s promises of an 2) Whoever the secretive “Turk” is, his Turkish is instantaneous world, we are returning to a nation as bad as his English. About the only impromptu of crossed fingers and Sears Roebuck catalogs: Turkish-language sentence on his Twitter feed, Reader, it took me three weeks to get a kebab. The “Ben Türkçe konusurlar,” is roundly ungrammatifirst weekend I got no response, the second I used a cal, according to a good Turkish friend. He’d meant friend’s Twitter account and was told in the Turk’s “Ben Türkce konusurum” instead, i.e., I speak Turkvery particular patois that “I am very soory it is not ish. Which is to say, it was a very gentle lie. possibel this night I have taken his every lamb!!,” and the third I ordered 36 hours in advance to EAT: Order online at secretkebab.com or twitter. com/secretkebab. Open Saturdays (and occafinally get confirmed delivery for the coming Satur- sionally Fridays), 6 pm–close. Currently serves day. (This arrived one hour early.) Northeast and downtown neighborhoods.
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MUSIC
SORE THUMB: Matthew Singer at the Rusko show.
ONE SMALL DUBSTEP WHAT IS THE DANCE MUSIC SUBGENRE DUBSTEP, EXACTLY? DEPENDS ON WHO’S DANCING. BY M AT T H E W SI N G E R
243-2122
I don’t belong here. It’s Friday night, and the sold-out Roseland Theater is crammed full of teenagers. Some of the girls are wearing little more than a bra and a tutu; most of the boys are shirtless. The headliner isn’t even on yet and the air is already muggy. Around 11:20 pm, the lights dim. Five large, glowing letters descend from the ceiling: R-U-S-K-O. A scrawny dude sporting a floppy faux-hawk steps out on stage and perches himself behind a bank of DJ equipment. The opening guitar riff from Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” blares from the speakers. And then it hits: wobbly, throbbing, equilibrium-rattling bass—bass so deep it’s felt more than heard. The audience swells into a sea of waving hands and bouncing bodies. It doesn’t stop for 90 minutes. As I said, I don’t belong here. And it’s not just because I’m pushing 30. It’s because I don’t really know what the fuck I’m hearing. OK, I know it’s dubstep, the predominant form of U.K.-based underground dance music of the late 2000s. That’s about it, though. As a music fan— and especially as someone who writes about music—it’s embarrassing to confess complete ignorance about a style that is steadily pushing its way into mainstream pop, thanks largely to this Rusko guy, a 26-year-old Brit who’s worked with Rihanna, T.I. and Britney Spears. But electronic music in general has always seemed like an impenetrable culture, a kind of unnavigable forest of genres and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres. If you’re going to try and wander in, you’re sure to get lost, so best to stay away altogether. At least, that’s been my thinking. Even on its own, dubstep is a difficult style for an outsider to dive into, especially right now. Although it has galvanized American youth more than any other sound to come out of Europe this decade, it’s a genre currently at war with itself. I first heard the term applied to the moody 2006 self-titled debut from enigmatic producer
Burial, which All Music Guide calls “the first great dubstep album.” But that record’s haunting atmospherics are nowhere to be found in Rusko’s candy-colored rave-ups, nor in the abrasive textures of L.A.’s Skrillex, another rising producer. All they have in common are tempos of 140 beats per minute and the use of overwhelmingly huge, bowel-displacing bass. Only a few years into its existence, dubstep is split along generational lines: the old-schoolers who prefer the subtle, dusky ambience it had originally, and the younger crowd who likes it loud, brash and, in the genre’s parlance, “filthy.” Hoping to make some sense of this, I went to Jon “A.D.” (who requested his real last name be withheld), 36-yearold owner of Anthem Records in Northwest Portland. Almost literally from behind the counter of this small, vinyl-stuffed storefront, A.D. operates Lo Dubs, a label specializing in dubstep and other bass-centric music. “It’s a dichotomy that happens with so many cultures. You always end up with a statement, and you end up declaring truths on both sides of that statement,” A.D. tells me. “Yes, it’s true that dubstep is bass music; yes, it’s not true. Yes, it’s true that dubstep is ridiculous and skronky and gets people waving their hands and doing stuff that looks like porn-movie moves, and yes, it’s not true. Yes, it’s true that a lot of people who are into it go to Burning Man; yes, it’s not true. It carries on in that way, where you have to take it in both hands, and it’s a matter of how deep you want to go in the conversation.” Truthfully, it’s never been easy to pinpoint exactly what dubstep is, and that’s crucial to its popularity. It’s a genre built on a foundation of open interpretation. Initially, it spun off from garage—essentially the U.K.’s answer to Chicago house—via remixes that drew upon the eerie spatiality and fluid, melodic bass lines of Jamaican dub. Once it was given a name of its own, producers who’d become disenchanted with drum ’n’ bass, grime and other, more limited styles, flocked to it, drawn in by the freedom of movement it presented. “It was liberating for people who made music,” A.D. says. “You’re working in a form of music that becomes very rigid in terms of its core principles, then all of a sudden you find out about this
other structure that has so much space in it.” It attracted listeners for much the same reason. Coloring in the crevices of the music with elements from a wide palette of influences—dashes of reggae, hip-hop, even punk and metal—dubstep reached people for whom dance music previously seemed foreign. “Before it got defined like this, it was really broadly approachable,” says DJ Monkeytek, who along with A.D. co-founded Various, Portland’s first monthly dubstep night, in 2006. And by “this,” he means the “filthier” brand of dubstep, the more club-friendly form some have derisively labeled “bro-step.” A.D. views the schism within the dubstep community with a sense of pragmatism. “You can look at it as a form of cultural gentrification, but you can’t be that shitty about it, either,” he says. “Anything that allows for there to be some light to be brought into somebody’s life is a good thing.” Monkeytek (who also requested his real name be withheld), 40, is less charitable: “The people who are promoting that music are leaving behind cultural wreckage.” He doesn’t mention it specifically, but he would almost certainly agree that See You Next Tuesday, the weekly dubstep night at the Crown Room, is an example of such wreckage. Every Tuesday, the beautiful people who usually prowl the clubs around Old Town on weekends come to hear what even DJ Kellan Cooper, who started the night with his friends Bobby Callman and Kenneth Avery two years ago, admits could be considered “bro-step.” It’s obviously an older crowd than that of Rusko, but the scene is much the same: a lot of ecstatic hand waving, not a lot of clothes. Cooper, with his gruff beard and a sense of style somewhere between skater and hip-hop head, appreciates both sides of the dubstep divide—this week, in fact, he’s bringing in Ramadanman, a producer who even the purists feel is taking the genre in interesting directions—but he’s unapologetic about wanting to create a party environment. “I like it,” Cooper says. “I’m not going to lie.” For those with an attachment to the music’s roots, See You Next Tuesday and Rusko represent the death of dubstep. Still, by the end of Rusko’s Roseland set I’m beginning to realize why all these kids showed up. It’s the same reason I went to punk shows in high school: For the sheer power of simply feeling something. And for better or worse, the bass that pummeled all of us for an hour and a half is something. Maybe I belong here after all. SEE IT: Ramadanman plays Crown Room for See You Next Tuesday on Tuesday, April 26. See listings for more info. 9 pm. 21+. Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
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MUSIC
WEDNESDAY - THURSDAY
= 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. Editors: CASEY JARMAN, MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, go to wweek.com/submitevents and follow submission directions. All shows should be submitted two weeks or more in advance of event. Press kits, CDs and especially vinyl can be sent to Music Desk, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Please include show or release date information with all physical mailings. Email: cjarman@wweek.com, mmannheimer@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20 Garage A Trois
[SWINGING] For a troupe fated to spend its summers on the jamband circuit, since genre-bending fusion-funksters can’t exactly join Warped, Garage A Trois has as little to do with the H.O.R.D.E. hordes as, well, all its name implies. With tastes more polyrhythmic than polyandrous and four current members (New Orleans percussionist Stanton Moore, Seattle saxophonist Skerik, Texas vibraphonist Mike Dillon, and Brooklyn keyboardist Marco Benevento), this most left field of supergroups specializes in impossibly tight and impeccably designed freak-jazz distillations of countless sources—including a John Carpenter score on new release Always Be Happy, But Stay Evil—that would sound weird from any garage, save maybe John Zorn’s. JAY HORTON. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $17 advance, $19 day of show. 21+.
Chicharones, Yeah Great Fine, Elle Nino, VIVIVI, DJ G Wizki, DJ Zone
[PDX DOPE NOW!] Both Rotture and Branx—the Siamese twins of the East Portland club scene—are packed with solid local acts tonight. And both showcases refuse genre homogeneity as an organizing principle: The downstairs show features local hip-hop phantasms Chicharones, dancy indie-pop act Yeah Great Fine, and San Fran electro-rockers Elle Nino; the upstairs showcase features local MC-on-the-rise Tope, the technicolor dance beats of Pegasus Dream, and Hammercise, which may or may not be a very DayGlo young Jazzercize-style dance crew. We think this show will have the same kind of all-inclusive spirit as PDX Pop—except that everyone is going to be high (because it’s stoner Christmas) and over 21. Details, details. CASEY JARMAN. Rotture, 315 SE 3rd Ave., 234-5683. 9 pm. $5 (Branx only), $7 (admission to Branx and Rotture). 21+.
Dudu Maia, Douglas Lora, The Brazillionaires, Infinite Bossa, Araki Kodo VI, Samba Batucada
[BRAZILIANA] Portlander Zak Borden is one heckuva mandolin player, cutting his teeth mainly in the folk and bluegrass worlds.
A few years ago, though, he fell in love with Brazilian choro music, a pre-bossa-nova style dating back to the turn of the last century, and has been playing it around the Northwest of late with nicely named trio the Brazillionaires. For tonight’s Mercy Corps benefit, Borden has roped in two noted players direct from Brazil, 10-string mandolinist Dudu Maia and seven-string guitarist Douglas Lora. Local group Infinite Bossa, led by Brazilian native Alexandra Santos, also appears, and JapaneseIrish flute master Araki Kodo VI (a.k.a. Hanz Araki) will conjure the spirit of the beleaguered nation that tonight’s program benefits. JEFF ROSENBERG. The Old Church, 1422 SW 11th Ave., 222-2031. 8 pm. $20 suggested donation. All ages.
Tame Impala, Yuck
[GIMME INDIE ROCK] In high school I had a fellow music-nerd friend who absolutely hated Spoon, but for all the wrong reasons. Knowing his disdain had more to do with the fratty-sounding “The Way We Get By” and Britt Daniel’s boyish good looks than the band’s stature as an up-and-coming indie-rock powerhouse, I decided to play a little prank. I labeled a burned copy of Spoon’s A Series of Sneaks as the second Strokes record. And he totally fell for it. Ten years later, I could play the same trick on any number of blogs with the selftitled album from scrappy young London quartet Yuck, whose debut sounds like it came out of a 120 Minutes episode next to Dinosaur Jr., Pavement and Teenage Fanclub. But despite the obvious reference points, Yuck is not a mere caricature of the bands it loves—”Get Away” and “Georgia” show a careful study of the J Mascis songbook, with delicate, glorious melodies just as important as squealing, feedback-drenched guitar solos. Yuck isn’t that original, but when you can write songs that are just as good as your heroes’, why not live it up? MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 2848686. 8 pm. $15 advance, $17 day of show. All ages.
THURSDAY, APRIL 21
have been trickling forth from Pine Language HQ in past months, and the quality of these tunes is forcing me to upgrade my expectations for the group from “optimistic” to “giddy.” The five-piece—originally of Corvallis, since graduated to Portland—writes indie rock with layered, effervescent restraint. Its “International Waters” is one of the year’s best examples of prudently deployed orchestral texture. And even when the group puts on its Rock Band costume (as it does on “Your Love Is a Trend”), it can conjure a spine-tingling momentum reminiscent of local wunderkinds Typhoon. I would not be surprised if a devastating LP emerged from these guys and gals in the not-too-distant future. SHANE DANAHER. Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., 7196055. 8:30 pm. $10. 21+.
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Twin Shadow, Catwalk, DJ IZM
[BAKING PUMPKINS] The widescreen atmospherics and swirling guitar rock that open its recently released sophomore album, Belong, suggest the Pains of Being Pure at Heart is still beset by those (this round, more Siamese) dreams of the ’90s, but bombastic flourishes bolstering the lo-fi fey deserve a more rigorous chronicling. If frontboy Kip Berman’s ambitions haven’t yet reached Corganesque heights— though the addition of legendary producers Flood and Alan Moulder certainly raise the stakes—the altogether more willful stab at enduring relevance hints toward the NYC group expanding its 120 Minutes of indie fame. JAY HORTON. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 2319663. 9 pm. $15. 21+.
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Paint and Copter, When the Broken Bow, D.S.R.
[MOOD ROCK] It’s nice to give your life’s most menial events— the morning jog, the afternoon commute, the evening doobiesmoking—a soundtrack. And, really, shouldn’t you be soundtracking your day with something epic? Something with the funky, psychedelic groove of Can and the sprawling guitar work of Explosions in the Sky? Something with a real flair for the dramatic? Portland’s Paint and Copter is there for you. New record More Trial, Less Error is packed with dark, epic soundscapes—when frontman Andy Brown does sing, he does so with a gothy drone that sounds kind of like long notes from a synthesizer—that can get you through both your most mundane (try the Jesus & Mary Chain-esque “Salem’s Parking Lot”) and trippy (the jazzy “Delicate Flower” should do the trick) moments. CASEY JARMAN. Ella Street Social Club, 714 SW 20th Place, 227-0116. 9 pm. $5. 21+.
Parson Red Heads, Kelli Schaefer, Pine Language
[CHAMBER ROCK] Demo tracks
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T h u r s d ay 4 / 2 1 • 8 : 3 0 p m
Countryside Ride, Bull Ramos
Papagaiyo, STC and more at Mount Tabor Theater Doin’ the Tabe on 4/20 sounds like a par-tay! Blacklight paintings and the whole trip! Jam bands and Pabst cans! Not it on the driving, man!
f r i d ay 4 / 2 2 • 8 : 3 0 p m
Agent 86, Reefer Madness and more at Plan B I dig the band name, little bros! Salutin’ the classics—love it! So you’re on the whole punk rock trip, huh? That’s cool, man, that’s cool. “I Turned Into a Martian” has got me trippin’! What if, huh?! Wow!
S at u r d ay 4 / 2 3 • 8 : 3 0 p m
Two-story 4/20 Party at Branx/Rotture Tope, huh? More like Toke! Seriously, what’s that guy smoking? The good stuff, I hope! Then there’s Chicharones—that must be code for some real sticky Mexican dank, right? Hey, I can’t keep up, I’m 52 years old, for John Lennon’s sake! Where did the years go?! T-R-I-P! Trip! Onuinu, Gulls, Breakfast Mountain and more at Holocene Whoah, this stuff reminds me of Floyd! You guys are really into this stuff, huh? Far out. Way to keep Portland Weed! Ha! You can use that one. Hey, I got my medical—wanna come check out my magic eye posters?
The Sale Nicole Berke (pop soul)
T u e s d ay 4 / 2 6 • 8 : 3 0 p m
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THURSDAY - FRIDAY S E B A S T I A N M LY N A R S K
MUSIC
HERE’S TO MAKING IT SAD: Phosphorescent plays the Mission Theater on Thursday.
Phosphorescent, Family Band, John Heart Jackie
[STRONG STUFF] You know how iTunes tells you how many times you’ve listened to tracks? My listening habits with Phosphorescent’s Here’s to Taking It Easy are a bit curious. I’ve given seven listens to the horn-driven, Stones-y opener “It’s Hard to Be Humble (When You’re From Alabama)”; six listens to the choral heartbreaker “Nothing Was Stolen (Love Me Foolishly)”; and just five listens to the lovely “We’ll Be Here Soon.” It drops off from there. It’s not that the songs decline in quality or that I get bored of Phosphorescent—but a little Phosphorescent goes an awful long way. And now that I’m digging into the second half of Here’s to Taking It Easy, I’m kind of glad I left some of Matthew Houck’s best songs on the back burner. Everyone needs a little slide guitar, ruthless wordplay and heartbreak in their lives. But all good things are best in moderation. An evening with Houck in person at the lovely Mission Theater might just about kill you, emotionally. But how else would you want to die? CASEY JARMAN. Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 223-4527. 8 pm. $15. 21+.
FRIDAY, APRIL 22
te t e m illa
Empty Space Orchestra, White Orange, Ninja, Dark Country, The Greater Midwest, Ports Will Call
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[PARTY PARTY] Adam Pike should be a household name in Portland by now, but if your ears aren’t ringing, maybe you just don’t get out enough. The guy ably twists knobs at Ash Street Saloon on many a night, and runs a local studio known as the Toadhouse. That fine facility has hosted some of the most tooth-rattling acts around, including Red Fang, Rabbits and Diesto. On top of all this, Pike still finds time to blast ear drums in his own metallic grunge band White Orange. This show is a celebration of the fine gentleman’s 32nd birthday. NATHAN CARSON. Ash Street Saloon, 225 SW Ash St., 226-0430. 9 pm. $2. 21+.
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Mother Country Motherfuckers, Old Growth, Moth Dust, Fuck You Dad!
[FUCK ROCK] Kids these days: They only like bands with the word “fuck” in their names. The Bay Area’s Mother Country Motherfuckers haven’t let their name or their lack of recorded material stop them from gaining a small cult following here on the West Coast and praise from the punk press. And while both powerful Portland post-grunge outfit Old Growth and local mathpunk/ proto-emo outfit Moth Dust occupy a space in our hearts, we all know that Fuck You Dad! is the band most apt to explode. Because (in addition to playing lively melodic punk originals...and lots of covers) it has “fuck” in its name. CASEY JARMAN. Backspace, 115 NW 5th Ave., 248-2900. 9 pm. $5. All ages.
Grind Time Now Bridge City Battle: Illmaculate, 9DM, OnlyOne, KI Design, Mic Phenom, Volatile and more
[RAP BATTLE] Rap battles aren’t
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for everybody, and there are things you should know before attending one. First, a certain degree of disorganization should be expected, because battle MCs make very little money and smoke weed by the ounce. Also, there’s a lot more to winning a battle than just having the best putdowns, including a rapper’s reaction time: The loudest cheers often come not after the best line, but after an MC twists his opponent’s own words back on him in creative fashion (kinda like jazz, pops!). The third thing you should know? If these guys got fined $100,000 for using homophobic slurs à la Kobe Bryant, there wouldn’t be a rap battle circuit. Still, at their best—and Grind Time is very good—rap battles are as deep as chess and as explosive as boxing. CASEY JARMAN. Branx, 320 SE 2nd Ave., 234-5683. 8 pm. $7 advance, $10 day of show. All ages.
The Cave Singers, The Young Evils
[RAMBLIN’ MAN] Stand-up musician and downright nice dude Peter Quirk, frontman for the Cave Singers, has a voice many up-and-comers are trying to copy. Of course, he’s borrowed some from past singersongwriters as well—most notably the vocal rashness of Dylan and the bluesy getup of Lightnin’ Hopkins. No Witch is the Seattle band’s best record yet, mightier still with the support of iconic indie label Jagjaguwar. There’s a wisdom and craggy nature to the Cave Singers, like Roky Erickson minus the insanity. Kudos to Quirk for not changing his ways, despite a big label change and scores of fickle critics. MARK STOCK. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 231-9663. 9 pm. $14. 21+.
Philly’s Phunkestra, The Supraphonics
[ABOUT FUNKIN’ TIME] For a while, it seemed as if Portland were in a funk vacuum. Then, suddenly, there was Philly’s Phunkestra, an eight-piece army with the brass— literal and figurative—to bring us a regular fix. The band blends N’awlins and Chicago-style funk, drawing on the likes of James Brown and Parliament to deliver booty-dropping groove explosions. Philly’s has since become a grooveheavy mainstay, and with two albums (a debut studio effort and a live compilation) set for summer, it’s a sure bet the band will continue to dominate stages and bring much-needed funkadelia to Portland for a long, long time. AP KRYZA. Jimmy Mak’s, 221 NW 10th Ave., 295-6542. 8 pm. $8. All ages.
Y La Bamba, Dark Dark Dark, Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship
[GOTHIC ORCHESTRAL] Hailing from home states as diverse as New York and Louisiana, the six members of Dark Dark Dark have gathered behind the songwriting of pianist-vocalist Nona Marie Invie—as if she were a ruefully gothic Pied Piper. All in all, not a bad decision. Dark Dark Dark’s latest album, Wild Go, is one of the best specimens of chamber folk to have staked a claim to that overpopulated genre. Veering at times into noir jazz, effusive balladry and soaring melodrama (all of which combine to perfection on
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836 N RUSSELL • PORTLAND, OR • (503) 282-6810
The historic
MISSION THEATER
1624 N.W. Glisan • Portland 503-223-4527
http://www.gibson.
Where on any night, anything can happen! com/press/logos2004/logos/PURE_LOGOS/Gibson_
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Blue Skies For Black Hearts The Satin Chaps
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5:30 p.m. is “eagle time” • free
REVERB BROTHERS EP RELEASE SHOW FOR
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SATURDAY, APRIL 23 4:30 p.m. is “eagle time” • free
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FLEET FOXES-SOLD OUT! 5/16 CORNMEAL-lola’s 5/19 “LOCAL FLAVORS” 5/20 THE THERMALS 5/25 TEDESCHI TRUCKS BAND 5/27 FLOATER 5/31 IRON & WINE 6/1 FOSTER THE PEOPLE-SOLD OUT! 6/3 ADELE-SOLD OUT! 6/7 KRISHNA DAS 6/8 CAGE THE ELEPHANT - MANCHESTER ORCHESTRA 6/9 AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT 6/10 STEVE EARLE & THE DUKES 6/15 BRETT DENNEN 6/21 OKKERVIL RIVER 7/15 SHPONGLE
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Other fine events: 4/22 Homegrown DocFest w/ music by Ezza Rose 5/3 Notes from the Underground: Joe Manis Trio 5/5 Screening: Halogen TV’s “The Un-Road Trip” with Boaz Frankel 5/6 Opera Theater Oregon: “Sordid Lives,” Electric Opera Company 5/7 MadTV’s Michael McDonald 5/10 OMSI Science Pub: Not Quite Adults 5/18 Kathryn Calder The Dimes 5/19 PDX Jazz: Tin Hat 5/21 Miz Kitty’s Parlour 6/2 & 3 Mortified! 6/6 Powell’s Books Presents Laurell K. Hamilton
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“UNFILTERED” INDIE ROCK SHOWCASE!
JOHNNY AND THE BELLS DON JUAN PELIGROSO ANIMAL EYES
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FRIDAY - SATURDAY “Daydreaming”), the LP tethers its instrumental ambition to the guiding star of a unique and irresistible voice. SHANE DANAHER. Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 288-3895. 9 pm. $13. 21+.
break any new ground, of course, but it will break your face. . MATTHEW SINGER. East End, 203 SE Grand Ave., 232-0056. 9 pm. $11. 21+.
Capillary Action, Why I Must Be Careful, Ryan Francesconi
[ELECTRO-PSYCHOSIS] At Tobacco’s last Holocene appearance, the often be-masked producer and Black Moth Super Rainbow member headlined a bill that also included such au courant purveyors of hazy bedroom dream beats as Washed Out and Small Black. When he finally took the stage, projecting a series of unsettling visuals over his warped brand of psychedelic dance-noise, my friend and colleague Michael Mannheimer leaned over and said, “This is where chill-
SATURDAY, APRIL 23 Donald Glover & Childish Gambino
[COM-EMO-DY] It’s hard to say anything mean about somebody who seems as nice and cool and funny as comedian Donald Glover, but here goes: As his hip-hop alter ego Childish Gambino, Glover pretty much sucks. He delivers his rhymes— which are more serious than one would expect from a writer for 30 Rock and the guy who plays a LeVar Burton-obsessed Jehovah’s Witness on NBC’s Community—with a grating earnestness somewhere between a nerdcore MC and the singer for a mall-punk band. If it’s any consolation to him, he doesn’t sound like an actor shittily trying to rap, but a legitimate shitty rapper. That’s got to count for something, right? Then again, he did come up with “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah,” so maybe he deserves a lifetime pass for all his music endeavors. MATTHEW SINGER. Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 234-9694. 9 pm. SOLD OUT. 21+.
Kurt Vile & the Violators, EMA
[CHESTNUTT RIFFING] Mumbling below gorgeous guitar figures on those original bedsit recordings, few fans of the Philadelphia 12-string virtuoso Kurt Vile seemed overly worried that the failings of fidelity couldn’t properly capture his lyrical thrust: Whether the result of limitations of format or larynx, vocals just didn’t seem much of the point. With the recent release of Smoke Ring for My Halo, his fourth full-length and second for Matador, the production has been sufficiently sanitized to demonstrate Vile is indeed singing behind that ever-present mop of hair, and—while it won’t much matter live, surrounded by touring band the Violators—he’s got something witty and trenchant and downright meaningful to sing about. JAY HORTON. Bunk Bar, 1028 SE Water Ave., 8949708. 10 pm. $12. 21+.
OFF!, Mikey and the Mistakes, Mean Jeans, Blood Beach
[FOREVER HARDCORE] General opinion says otherwise, but Keith Morris was the best of Black Flag’s four frontmen. Sure, he only recorded an EP’s worth of songs with the band in the very beginning of its lifespan, but they trounce Henry Rollins’ albums of overwrought guttural wailings. Maybe it’s that underappreciation that led Morris to put together OFF!, a group that recalls the blitzkrieg assault of Nervous Breakdown more than the slightly more popleaning work he produced as leader of the Circle Jerks. More likely, though, he probably just looked around and realized nobody else could do this kind of unapologetically retro hardcore punk any better. Assisted by members of Burning Brides, Redd Kross and Hot Snakes, First Four EPs—a compilation of the band’s introductory 7-inches—is a collection of highly concentrated blasts of middle-age aggression that rarely exceed two minutes. It doesn’t
wave goes to die.” Couldn’t have said it better myself, so I won’t. Come to feel the bowel-displacing bass, stay for the live Chatroulette feed. Oh, and E.T. porn. Don’t forget the E.T. porn. MATTHEW SINGER. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 2397639. 8:30 pm. $13 advance, $15 day of show. 21+.
Class M Planets, Run On Sentence, The Envelope Peasant
[WELCOME RETURN] A “solo” project by name only, the Envelope Peasant is led by Sean Harrasser, former frontman for the Vertels, Dearest, Crown and Harvester, who released the lovely Me Climb
CONT. on page 32
ALBUM REVIEW J U ST I N DY L A N R E N N E Y
[ADD PROG] Somehow persuasively amalgamating poppy prog rock, avant jazz, 20th-century classical music and other unlikely ingredients, Jonathan Pfeffer’s punchy songs as Capillary Action flash by in a frenzy of Zorn-meets-Zappa fragments, fueled by trumpet, guitar, accordion, bass and percussion. The collisions aren’t always spot-on, but the music’s intensity and structural uniqueness makes it difficult to avert your ears. Inventive local duo Why I Must Be Careful opens. BRETT CAMPBELL. Worksound, 820 SE Alder St., myspace.com/worksoundpdx. 8 pm. $5-$10. All ages.
Tobacco, Beans, Shapers
MUSIC
BLUE SKIES FOR BLACK HEARTS, EMBRACING THE MODERN AGE (SUPER BIG LTD.) [HERE’S YOUR FUTURE] It’s hard to fault Blues Skies for Black Hearts for being out of touch. The power-poppy quartet—led by bespectacled frontman Pat Kearns—sticks to a (relatively) simple template, twisting the classic, catchy jangle of groups like Teenage Fanclub with local references and a sparkling commitment to keeping things vintage. Unlike so many retro-leaning acts that put too much focus on the aesthetics of looking the part instead of actually, like, writing a decent hook, BSFBH pens shoulda-been-hits like 2007’s “Siouxsie Please Come Home,” a slice of AM-radio heaven rarely heard these days outside the New Pornographers oeuvre. But on its new long-player, Embracing the Modern Age, the band takes baby steps toward updating its sound with a concept record supposedly about the anxieties caused by modern technology. Fortunately, this shaky premise is something of a ruse: Embracing the Modern Age, despite its OK Computer-like title, isn’t really about computers and iPhones. It’s about girls. And that’s a good thing: Most of the album is full of breezy, hummable and memorable power-pop songs that sound like British revival covers. There’s nothing heavy or deep here, just well-worn sentiments and lines like “look in my direction/ I want to know your name,” as Kearns sings on the bouncy “Majoring in the Arts.” It’s more Pro Songs than Pro Tools, more about automobiles than Auto-Tune. And the whole thing, despite being self-recorded, just sounds tremendous: Kearns has a side gig as a producer (the Exploding Hearts, Clorox Girls, the Dandy Warhols) and his good taste frames the record in clean, unfussy textures instead of baths of reverb. There are a few missteps here: The doo-wop heavy “Caroline Make Up Your Mind” aims for the (prom) dance floor but ends up as a bad pastiche, and songs like “Deck of Cards”—which runs over five minutes but should be closer to three—get lost in the shuffle. Yet for all its Big Ideas and wacky concepts (including the companion sci-fi film, written by bassist Kelly Simmons and directed by friend Jon Griffith that’s described as “sort of in the vein of Help!, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park and Purple Rain all packed into a Monkees episode”), Embracing the Modern Age works best as a solid, old-fashioned rock record. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. SEE IT: Blue Skies for Black Hearts plays Saturday, April 23, at the Mission Theater, with the Satin Chaps, Midnight Callers and the debut screening of Embracing the Modern Age. 9 pm. $8 advance, $10 day of show. 21+. Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
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MUSIC
SATURDAY
Mountain in 1996 on David Geffen’s DGC imprint. Harrasser has mostly been quiet since around 2004, though, raising a daughter and moving back to Chico, Calif., from Portland, where he spent the last six years years piecing together the songs on his new double (!) album Next Year Will Be Beautiful. Recorded with help from friends like Dustin Hamman (Run on Sentence) and featuring a host of local players including Catherine Odell (Horse Feathers) on cello and John Whaley (Pancake Breakfast, Nick Jaina) on trumpet and flugelhorn, it’s a stirring collection of folk-rock songs ranging from the gorgeous finger-picking
SUNDAY, APRIL 24 Floor, Totimoshi, Norska
[MERCILESS ROCK] Just like the never-ending train of indie-rock
CONT. on page 34
ALBUM REVIEW JEREMIAH DEASEY
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on “Hold Me Up” to more upbeat tracks like the set closer “You Will Not See This Day.” Tonight is also the release show for local antifolk troubadour Adam Goldman and his new band Class M Planets. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. White Eagle Saloon, 836 N Russell St., 282-6810. 9:30 pm. $6. 21+.
ILLMACULATE
ILLMACULATE & G_FORCE THE GREEN TAPE (SELF-RELEASED FREE DOWNLOAD) [REAL TALK] Illmaculate and G_Force’s concept seemed ambitious and restrictive all at once: They would take Al Green’s 2008 return-to-form record, Lay It Down, and rework each track, in order, as the beat-heavy foundation for Illmaculate’s verses. But there’s magic in the follow-through: G_Force’s tracks are largely unrecognizable from their origins with Green and his studio band, the Roots. While opener “Lay It Down” contains horn blasts and guitar stabs from the original track, “Oh-Luv” sounds more like a rave at 3 am than a visit to Al Green’s church on Sunday. Even more impressively, Illmaculate took this opportunity to evolve. The soulful building blocks of the new disc elicit a few love songs from the Portland MC, who is still best known for his rap-battle prowess—though both “Just 4 Me” (one of two cuts featuring excellent vocals from J-Rome) and the OnlyOne collaboration “2 Much” are really too emotionally mature and analytical to be tossed in the same dumpster as tracks like Enrique Iglesias’ “I’m Fuckin’ You.” In fact, over the album’s first eight tracks (the disc ends with a healthy dose of bravado), Illmac’s are only thin excuses for self-examination and deep probes of the human condition. “(K)new You,” an open-letter plea for one of Illmac’s contemporaries to reach for his fullest potential, might be the best example of this. “You keep saying you’re gonna change when you grow up,” he tells his friend before turning the criticism on himself. “Maybe that’s why I relate to you so much.” In the Fight Club-esque reveal verse, Illmac admits he was writing a letter to himself all along—to the foolish young Illmaculate who wasted years and struggled to get momentum on his side. But what’s more interesting is the question he keeps asking this beta version of himself: Why are you still here? It’s a brutally honest evaluation of the chasm between who we are and who we want to be, and like so many moments on this disc, it’s a stark admission of the artist’s own character flaws—flaws that are universal in nature. Illmaculate, it turns out, has grown up an awful lot. Here’s to hoping the knowledge-dropping spirit behind this mixtape translates to his forthcoming solo debut, Skrill Talk. CASEY JARMAN.
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SEE IT: Illmaculate hosts the Grind Time Now Bridge City Battle on Friday, April 22, at Branx. 8 pm. $7 advance, $10 day of show. All ages. The Green Tape is available as a free download at freshselects.net.
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011 wweek.com
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MUSIC
SUNDAY - TUESDAY
REPPING SO HARD: EMA plays Bunk Bar on Saturday. bands that are reuniting these days so they can finally collect the accolades (and cash) they deserve, a number of metal acts are taking another swing at playing live and recording new work as the shine on their legacy gets brighter and brighter. One such outfit is Florida doom-rockers Floor. The trio already had two amazing runs (from ’92 to ’96, and from ’01 to ’04) that produced some masterpieces of sludge and fury, and the band is back in support of a recently released career-spanning box set entitled Below & Beyond. ROBERT HAM. Branx, 320 SE 2nd Ave., 234-5683. 9 pm. $12 advance, $14 day of show. All ages.
Dirty Beaches, The Reservations, Tunnels, DJ Yeti
[FAREWELL TRANSMISSION] It’s too bad that Alex Zhang Hungtai’s project Dirty Beaches is just coming out now, because I don’t think David Lynch has any completed films in the tank. Hungtai, a Taiwan-born Canadian immigrant who has also lived in Hawaii, creates eerie, lo-fi appropriations of doo-wop and minimal synth music that comes off like a deranged Elvis wandering into Martin Rev’s studio and doing a lot of speed. Dirty Beaches’ debut, Badlands, is one of the most striking—and creepy—releases of the last year, the perfect soundtrack to any surrealist drama and a weirdly apropos choice to play between streaming episodes of Twin Peaks on Netflix and, like, finishing your laundry. Don’t let the name fool you. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $8. 21+.
The Devil Makes Three, Brown Bird
Portland’s Largest Finest Pipe Shop www.mellowmood.com 4119 SE Hawthorne, Portland ph: 503-235-PIPE (7473)
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Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
[KNEE-SLAPPIN’ SATANISM] Say what you will about Mephistopheles, the motherfucker knows how to get down, and Santa Cruz trio the Devil Makes Three channels Big Red with a playfully old-timey country Americana that celebrates dirty deeds and hedonism with the giddiness of a newly Kool-aided cultist. Pete Bernhard’s down-home vocals chide us on with such sage advice as “if you’re gonna do wrong, buddy, do wrong right,” while the group plucks and stomps along with psychotic abandon. Dark Americana is nothing new, but three albums in, Devil is at the top of the totem. Seldom has damnation sounded so much like musical salvation. AP KRYZA. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686. 8 pm. $15 advance, $17 day of show. All ages.
MONDAY, APRIL 25 Mike Watt & The Missingmen, Charming Birds, Sons of Huns
[MIDDLE-AGED MISSINGMAN] When bassist extraordinaire and DIY lifer Mike Watt decided to take on the subject of growing older and looking back on his life and storied career as a musician (he was a founding member of one of America’s best punk bands, the Minutemen; has played with everyone from Kelly Clarkson to Nels Cline; and is now holding down bass duties for the Stooges), he ended up with an album’s worth of
art-punk brilliance. HyphenatedMan wraps stories from his 53 years in with interpretations of characters painted by surrealist Hieronymous Bosch. Heady ideas ensue, but alongside some fierce playing and often hilarious observations. ROBERT HAM. Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., 2319663. 9 pm. $13 advance, $15 day of show. 21+.
Operative, Soft Metals, Maxmillion Dunbar, Jason Urick
[FUTURE ROCK] A word to the wise: Make sure you don’t eat anything too weird before coming to Holocene tonight. After eight months away, Operative—the noisehouse quartet whom I described on last year’s Best New Band list as sounding “like getting run over by a semi truck, then living to make it to the next rave”—is back with a set of physical, rhythmically dense, stomach-churning techno. The rest of the lineup is just as adventurous, with Portland’s Soft Metals joined by Baltimore expat ambient composer Jason Urick (who just released the glitchy Fussing & Fighting 12-inch on Thrill Jockey) and Maxmillion Dunbar, who co-runs the awesome DC/Maryland house label Future Times. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $5. 21+.
Plum Sutra, Margaret Wehr, Sam Emmitt
[JAZZ FOR ALL TASTES] The trio known as Plum Sutra is one of those rare groups that dares to find some middle ground between the artistic and commercial bents of most jazz players. It takes a rather tried-and-true instrumental lineup— piano, bass and violin—and creates sounds that are easy to swallow for folks who would rather their jazz be as smooth as silk while still exhibiting some surprisingly dense compositions that should please fans who use expressions like “chasing the ’Trane” without irony. Catch the group now before it takes off on a West Coast tour, and in a more intimate setting than its upcoming Rose Festival performances. ROBERT HAM. The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian, 426 SW Washington St., 228-3669. 9 pm. Free. 21+.
TUESDAY, APRIL 26 Royal Bangs, Superhumanoids, Team Evil
[THE ONLY 10 I SEE] My, how they grow up. Just under two years ago, Knoxville crash-rock trio Royal Bangs played before a tiny MFNW crowd at East End while a psychic read palms near the bar. Now the band is playing Letterman, energized by its newest release, Flux Outside. Still punishing drum sets, switching keyboards to “spacey” and seemingly breathing helium before hollering, Royal Bangs is too young to have changed all that much. And that’s for the best. Credit Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney for originally bringing these guys to the fore..as if we didn’t have enough to thank him for already. MARK STOCK. Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., 239-7639. 8:30 pm. $8 advance, $10 day of show. 21+.
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Thursday April 21st Victor Little Trio 8pm
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SERVING BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, LATE-NIGHT. FOOD SPECIALS 3-6 PM EVERYDAY COVERED SMOKING PATIO, FIREPLACE ROOM, LOTS OF LOG. LIVE SHOWS IN THE LOUNGE... SHOEGAzE DRENCHED INDIE POP FROM NYC qUARTET
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Monday April 25th
THURSDAY APRIL 21
•
A CROSS-GENRE POLLINATION OF PDX TALENTS
ASCETIC JUNKIES SATURDAY!
$17 ADVANCE
CARS & TRAINS BOY EATS DRUM MACHINE +LEIGH MARBLE
CAVE SINGERS
FRIDAY!
SATURDAY APRIL 23
•
$10 ADVANCE
CLASSICAL FOLK-FLAVORED POP FROM CHAPEL HILL
LOST
+THE YOUNG EVILS
FRIDAY APRIL 22
•
Sunday April 24th
Renanto Caranto
(Free entry with dinner purchase)
8pm every wed - Arabesque & Belly Dance 8pm
BACKWOODS CAMPFIRE SONGS FROM SEATTLE TRIO
THE
The Ocular Concern 9pm
THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART
+DJ IzM SPINNING THROUGH THE EVENING $15 ADVANCE
WEDNESDAY APRIL 20 •
Saturday April 23rd
Now serving home made NY pizza!
music 7 nights a week
Portland’s best happy hour
5 - 7 pm and all day sunday 3341 SE Belmont thebluemonk.com 503-595-0575
IN THE
$14 ADVANCE
TREES
AN EVENING WITH FORMER MINUTEMAN/FIREHOSE BASSIST
MIKE WATT
+SEAN ROWE
SUNDAY APRIL 24
& THE MISSINGMEN
•
EDDIE SPAGHETTI
$10 ADVANCE
THIS WEEK
GENRE-BUSTING ROOTS ROCK FROM AUSTIN TX COMBO FRI
CHARMING BIRDS +SONS OF HUNS
MONDAY APRIL 25
wed
“ in the cooky jar”
1
DOORS 8PM, dancing 9PM
DEC
•
$13 ADVANCE
POMEGRANATES LAURA STEVENSON & THE CANS +NOW, NOW EVERY CHILDREN
EARLY SHOW! Doors at 7pm, Show at 8pm
WEDNESDAY APRIL 27 •
sat
$10 ADVANCE feb
12
IDIOSYNCRATIC PERFORMANCE POP FROM BAY AREA POWERHOUSE
TUNE YARDS
BUKE & GASS +WHITE HINTERLAND
THURSDAY APRIL 28
•
apr
22
with dj cooky A Soul Night
3
$
$12 ADVANCE
THURSDAY APRIL 26
+PAT SWEANY
•
$15 ADVANCE
BENEFEST STARFUCKER feat. ERIC D. JOHNSON (of Fruit Bats) ANDY CABIC (of Vetiver) & RICHARD SWIFT
FRIDAY APRIL 29
20+BLOUSE
$
MENOMENA
EMA +HOSANNAS
MONDAY MAY 2
+TALKDEMONIC
TUESDAY MAY 3
•
$15 ADVANCE
•
$5 ADVANCE
STYLISH ALL-GIRL INDIE POP FROM THE UK
PIPETTES
The GINA NOELL
SATURDAY APRIL 30
•
$10 ADVANCE
EMILY WELLS 5/17 BIFFY CLYRO 5/30 SLOAN 6/5 BLONDE REDHEAD 6/27 OBITS 8/20
All of these shows on sale at Ticketfly.com
LESSER SAINTS 5/1 • BATTLES 5/4 • JOE PURDY 5/5 • THE DIMES 5/6 DAVE DEPPER PRESENTS THE RAM PROJECT 5/7 • CITIZEN COPE 5/8 & 5/9 • THE SLANTS 5/11
PETER BJORN & JOHN 5/12 • THE LOW ANTHEM 5/13 • JOE PUG 5/14 • EZRA FURMAN & THE HARPOONS 5/15 ADVANCE TICKETS AT TICKETSWEST 503-224-TIXX - www.ticketswest.com, MUSIC MILLENNIUM, JACKPOT RECORDS • SUBJECT TO SERVICE CHARGE &/OR USER FEE ALL SHOWS: 8PM DOORS / 9PM SHOW • 21+ UNLESS NOTED • BOX OFFICE OPENS 1/2 HOUR BEFORE DOORS • ROOM PACKAGES AVAILABLE AT www.jupiterhotel.com
36
23
bring 1 bag, leave with 1 bag! bring 2, leave with 2!
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011 wweek.com
sat
apr
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ADVANCE TIX SOLD OUT TIX AVAIL AT DOOR
+BLUE SKIES FOR BLACK HEARTS
TWO INTIMATE EVENINGS WITH PORTLAND’S SONIC MADMEN
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p i c k at h o nTHROW-DOWN p r e s e n t s WITH PDX AVANT-POPSTERS A LOW-DOUGH
A benefit festival to support arts education at Buckman & Portland Schools Foundation
w/ charmparticles & dr o p a
sat
apr
GOURDS
MNEMONIC SOUNDS
FRIDAY 4/22 @ 7PM Eddie Spaghetti grew up in Tucson, trying desperately to ignore the country music that floated all around him. As a kid he turned to Heavy Metal then Punk Rock to block out the noise and that’s how his band The Supersuckers was born. ‘Sundowner,’ Eddie’s third solo album, is a back of the hand dismissal of the fussy genre lines between hard rock and hard country, all done with a sly nod to the bartender that the next round’s on him.
6
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sh a dbecame e free Clark, Steves ola Earle rquickly a master storyteller in his & with S i re nhisansongs d t h ebeing s e a recorded by Johnny Cash, Willie own right, Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Travis Tritt, The Pretenders, Joan Baez and countless others. ‘I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive’ is the anticipated follow up to the Grammy Award winning ‘Townes.’ The album was produced by T Bone Burnett and is Earle’s first collection of original material since ‘Washington Square Serenade.’
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MUSIC CALENDAR = WW Pick. Highly recommended. Editor: Michael Mannheimer. TO HAVE YOUR EVENT LISTED, send show information at least two weeks in advance on the web at wweek.com/submitevents or (if you book a specific venue) enter your events at dbmonkey.com/wweek. Press kits, CDs and especially vinyl can be sent to Music Desk, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. lease include show or release date information with all physical mailings. Email: mmannheimer@wweek.com. Find more music: reviews 27, clublist 38 For more listings, check out wweek.com/music_calendar
WED. APRIL 20 Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. Beyond the Spill: One Year Later with Reggie Houston, Janice Scroggins, D.K. Stewart, Andrew Oliver, Steve Kerin
Andina
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Arabsque Bellydance
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Nightshift: Chicarones, Yeah Great Fine, Elle Nino, VIVIVI, DJ Wizski, DJ Zone
Buffalo Gap Saloon
1314 NW Glisan St. Pete Krebs
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Buffalo Bandstand
Ash Street Saloon
Camellia Lounge
225 SW Ash St. Seahearse, Flesh Lawn, Stag Bitten
510 NW 11th Ave. Slumgum
Backspace
350 W Burnside St. Sign of the Beast Burlesque
115 NW 5th Ave. Fair Weather Watchers, Gashcat, Engine, Elephant Apple
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St. Little Sue
Dante’s
Doug Fir Lounge 830 E Burnside St. Garage A Trois
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave.
Suburban Slim’s Blues Jam (9:30 pm), Chris Olson’s High Flyers (6 pm)
Ella Street Social Club 714 SW 20th Place The Shy Seasons, Towering Trees, The Heevees
Good Neighbor Pizzeria
800 NE Dekum St. Open Mic
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Mars Retrieval Unit, Garcia Birthday Band
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave. Eric John Kaiser The French Troubadour
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave.
[APRIL 20-26] McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Billy D’s Voodoo Lounge
Mississippi Pizza
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Onuinu, Gulls, Breakfast Mountain, DJ Sgt. Forkner
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. Colin Hogan (8:30 pm); Corinthia Bethune (7 pm); Nicholas Matta (6 pm)
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Mel Brown Quartet
LaurelThirst
Plan B
Mississippi Studios
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
4107 SE 28th Ave. 420 Celebration: Fruition, Bellboys
Mt. Tabor Theater Lounge
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Item 9, The Sindicate, Closet Monsters
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Kimosabe
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Musty’s 420 Funny
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd Urban Shaman, Andrew’s Ave
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. 420 Party: Papagaiyo, STC, Urban Shaman, Lost Creek Gang
2958 NE Glisan St. Shicky Gnarowitz, Mike Coykendall (9 pm); Norman, Old Light & Evan Way (6 pm_
Mudai
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
8105 SE 7th Ave. Sleepy Eyed Johns
2126 SW Halsey St. Rindy and Marv Ross
2314 SE Division St. Billy Kennedy 1305 SE 8th Ave. Agent 86, Touscan Sam, Faithless Saints, Absent Minds
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Everyday Prophets, Mosley Wotta Rockstar Karaoke
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
801 NE Broadway Vox Populi Karaoke
Muddy Rudder Public House
O’Connors
7850 SW Capitol Hwy Kit Garoutte on guitar
Pub at the End of the Universe
Red Room
Rotture
315 SE 3rd Ave. Tope, Hammercise, Pegasus Dream, Solar Hexus, Ryan Organ, DJ King Fader, Jimme Jamma, Darkcloud, Stormy Roxx
Saratoga
6910 N Interstate Ave. Almost Dark, The Guild, Au Dunes
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. The Neck Brace...a PDX Beat Showcase
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Key of Dreams
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Trial Balloons, Souvenir Driver
The Old Church
1422 SW 11th Ave. Brazil for Japan: Dudu Maia, Douglas Lora, The Brazillionaires, Infinite Bossa, Araki Kodo VI, Samba Batucada
The World Famous Kenton Club 2025 N Kilpatrick St. Sarah Moon and the Night Sky, The Stumpgrinders
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd. RansackRadio.com Live: In Bloom, Delta Bravo, Suburban Anthem
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. Dadfag, Dark Entries, Pleassure, Jewelry Rash
Vino Vixens Wine Shop & Bar 2929 SE Powell Blvd. 6bq9
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St.
“Unfiltered” Showcase: Johnny and the Bells, Don Juan Peligroso, Animal Eyes
Wilf’s Restaurant
800 NW 6th Ave. Ron Steen Trio, Barbara Lusch
Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. Tame Impala, Yuck
THUR. APRIL 21 Alberta Rose Theatre
3000 NE Alberta St. Parson Red Heads, Kelli Schaefer, Pine Language
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Matices
Andrea’s Cha Cha Club 832 SE Grand Ave. Dina & Bamba Y Su Pilon D’Azucar with La Descarga Cubana
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. GDP, Eastern Sunz, Mobonix, The Dark Monk, Mic Crenshaw
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Sunderland, Faire Du Surf, Assemble the Skyline, Farewell Fighter
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St. The Don of Division St.
Blue Monk D AV I D C O O P E R
3341 SE Belmont St. Victor Little Trio
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Daedelus, Tokimonsta, Shlomo, Natasha Kmeto
Chapel Pub
430 N Killingsworth St. Steve Kerin
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Patience Price, David Faustino
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Twin Shadow, Catwalk, DJ IZM
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. John Cugno (9 pm), Portland Playboys (6 pm)
Ella Street Social Club 714 SW 20th Place Paint and Copter, When the Broken Bow, D.S.R.
Goodfoot Lounge 2845 SE Stark St. Fruition, Otis Heat
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave. Karaoke Kings
Hawthorne Hophouse 4111 SE Hawthorne Robert Richter and the Moonlight Mile
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
1503 SE 39th Ave. Savoir Faire Burlesque
Jackpot RecordsDowntown
203 SW 9th Ave. Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. Michael Mirlas (8 pm); Renegade Minstrels (6 pm)
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Mel Brown B3 Organ Group
Kennedy School
5736 NE 33rd Ave. Paleface
HIGH TIMES: Chicharones play Wednesday, April 20, at Branx.
CONT. on page 38
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
37
MUSIC
CALENDAR
SPOTLIGHT VIVIANJOHNSON.COM
Acoustic Open Mic with host Steve Huber
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Dengue Fever, NIAYH, Maus Haus
Secret Society Lounge
Backspace
Mississippi Studios
116 NE Russell St. The Brazillionaires
Duff’s Garage
8132 SE 13th Ave. Dale Miller
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Rindy and Marv Ross
McMenamins Grand Lodge
3505 Pacific Ave. Lynn Conover and Gravel
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Billy Kennedy
Mission Theater
1624 NW Glisan St. Phosphorescent, Family Band, John Heart Jackie
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Swing Papillon
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Damn Dirty Apes, Smoking Mirrors
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Bomba Estereo, Purple ‘N’ Green, Sun Angle
Mock Crest Tavern 3435 N Lombard St. The Sale
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Eric John Kaiser
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
2314 SE Division St. Andrew Orr, Jen Howard
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. Tell It Like It Is: An Evening of Storytelling
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave.
315 SE 3rd Ave. Jr. Worship, Teenage Murder School, Welsh Bowmen
Alberta Street Public House
Sellwood Public House
Andina
8132 SE 13th Ave. Open Mic With Two Rivers
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. Oh My Mys
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Johnny Martin
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. The Has Been Corner, No More Parachutes, No Passengers
The World Famous Kenton Club
2025 N Kilpatrick St. Tortune, The Martyrs, Trampoline
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Destination : Oblivion, Item 9, Covered in Spiders
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd. Jake Herring, City Squirrel, The Big Ideas, Jason Oattis
Wilf’s Restaurant 800 NW 6th Ave. The Knuckleheads
FRI. APRIL 22 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Augustana and Cody Beebe & the Crooks
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St.
1036 NE Alberta St. Mikey’s Irish Jam 1314 NW Glisan St. Dan Diresta
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Adam Pike’s Rock of Ages 2: Empty Space Orchestra, White Orange, Ninja, Dark Country, The Greater Midwest, Ports Will Call
BC’s American Saloon
2433 SE Powell Blvd. Flash: Mutor, Mr. Ben, Audioelectronic, Centrikal, Nude Photo Music
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Mother Country Motherfuckers, Old Growth, Moth Dust, Fuck You Dad!
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St. WhistlePunk (9:30 pm); Billy Kennedy and Jimmy Boyer (6 pm)
Bipartisan Cafe
7901 SE Stark St. Michael Jodell and Matt Brown
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Fernando
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Grind Time Now Bridge City Battle: Illmaculate, 9DM, OnlyOne, KI Design, Mic Phenom, Volatile and more
Camellia Lounge
510 NW 11th Ave. Brian Copeland Band
Canvas Art Bar & Bistro
1800 NW Upshur St.
38
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
Saratoga
830 E Burnside St. The Cave Singers, The Young Evils
625 NW 21st Ave. Karaoke
Rotture
Mississippi Pizza
Doug Fir Lounge
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge
2958 NE Glisan St. “A Little Goes a Long Way” Benefit for Japan: Kris Stuart, Alex Hudjohn, John Phelan, John Shepski (9 pm); Lewi Longmire Band (6 pm)
Ash Street Saloon
Blue Skies for Black Hearts, The Satin Chaps, The Midnight Callers
Devils Point
1800 E Burnside St. Boy and Bean
Earth Day Festival with the Muse’s Market: Muse’s Market, Huck Notari Trio, Anne Weiss, Gabrielle Louise
1314 NW Glisan St. Toshi Onizuka Trio
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Dreamdog
East Burn
The Stringbeans, Child Children, The Mermaid Problem, Somewhere In The Middle
Andina
225 SW Ash St. Missionary Promotions Presents Legends of Synthpop: Mesh, De/ Vision, Iris
1635 SE 7th Ave. A.C. and the Live Wires, Kevin Selfe and the Tornadoes (9:30 pm), Joy and Her Sentimental Gentlemen (6 pm)
LaurelThirst
315 SE 3rd Ave. Safety Meeting: Manoj, Global Ruckus, Pipedream 6910 N Interstate Ave. Adelitas, Squalora, Honduran, Apathy Towards Flies
5305 SE Foster Road Eddie Spaghetti
JUKEBOX GOLD: If the first thing you hear when entering a bar is “I swear the jukebox is free,” there are two possible scenarios: You’ve found a gold mine, or someone is already stupid drunk. And while the jukebox at Bare Bones Bar (2900 SE Belmont St., 206-6535) does cost a few quarters, I was lucky enough on a recent visit to discover that the bar staff and a friendly patron had loaded it up with enough cash for me to pick songs by Pavement and Madonna without sacrificing any sacred beer money. The rest of the space, which opened in February and shares a name with the cafe next door, is just as laid back, with plenty of cheap drinks ($2.50 Miller High Life tallboys) and a killer bowl of Frito pie ($6) featuring housemade vegan espresso chili and lime sour cream. Remember to tip your bartender, and you just might get a few free plays. MICHAEL MANNHEIMER.
Rotture
1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. Felicia and the Dinosaur (8 pm); Patrick Harris (6 pm)
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Philly’s Phunkestra, The Supraphonics
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Blackberry Bushes, The Water Tower Bucket Boys (9:30 pm); Plumb Bob (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Crown Point
McMenamins Grand Lodge 3505 Pacific Ave. Redwood Son
McMenamins Hotel Oregon
310 Northeast Evans St. Heartroot
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road My Three Travellers
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Backyard Blues Boys
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Mo Phillips
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Y La Bamba, Dark Dark Dark, Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship
Mock Crest Tavern
3435 N Lombard St. DC Malone & the Jones
Music Millennium
3158 E Burnside St. Eddie Spaghetti
Papa G’s Vegan Organic Deli
2314 SE Division St. Lynn Conover
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. Annual Clown Party: Wayne Gacy Trio, Ether Circus, The Graceland Five
Press Club
2621 SE Clinton St. Pete Krebs
Red Room
2530 NE 82nd Ave. Livid Minds, Deep Sea Vents, Ace of Spades, Onyx Guild
Refectory Restaurant & Lounge 1618 NE 122nd Ave. Baby Boomers Disco Night
River Roadhouse 11921 SE 22nd Ave. The Insanitizers
Sellwood Public House
Slabtown
1033 NW 16th Ave. Brownish Black, On the Stairs, The Way Downs, DJ Seoul Brother No. 1
115 NW 5th Ave. Mackintosh Braun, Beautiful Lies, So Good
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St. Poncho Luxurio (9:30 pm); Twisted Whistle (5 pm)
Blue Monk
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
3341 SE Belmont St. The Ocular Concern
Someday Lounge
626 SW Park Ave. Rhythm Dogs
8635 N Lombard St. The Bumpin Nastys
125 NW 5th Ave. Painted Grey, Chris Robley and the Fear of Heights, Hello Morning, Roman Holiday
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave. Silver Hawk
Star E Rose
Brasserie Montmartre
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Nicole Berke, Ayam
Bunk Bar
1028 SE Water Ave. Kurt Vile & the Violators, EMA
Camellia Lounge
2403 NE Alberta St. Nick Brakel
510 NW 11th Ave. David Friesen, Greg Gobel, Jon Gross
The Crown Room
Dante’s
205 NW 4th Ave. Yuk, Groundislava, Devonwho, Citymouth, Timeboy
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Alyssa Schwary
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. The Ax, The Eiger Sanction, Old Wars
The Whiskey Bar
350 W Burnside St. Hell’s Belles, Alabama Black Snake, The Dirty Birds
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. The Ascetic Junkies, Boy Eats Drum Machine, Cars & Trains, Leigh Marble
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. The Knuckleheads
East End
31 NW 1st Ave. Fallout: Japan Relief Party
203 SE Grand Ave. OFF!, Mikey and the Mistakes, Mean Jeans, Blood Beach
The Woods
Goodfoot Lounge
6637 SE Milwaukie Ave. Mnemonic Sounds, Charmparticles, Dropa
The World Famous Kenton Club
2025 N Kilpatrick St. The Old States, Power of County
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Tiki Tease Time at the Tonic: Sneaky Tiki and the Lava Lounge Orchestra, DJ Drew Groove, The Dolly Pops, Lucky Lucy O’Rebel, Miss Frankie Tease, Sophia Flash
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. Hoodrich
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd. American Friction, Shorty Tonedeaf and the Screachers, Rubella Graves, Lady Sullen
Twilight Room
5242 N Lombard St. The Ken Hanson Band
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Fairweather, Naomi Hooley (9:30 pm); Reverb Brothers (5:30 pm)
2845 SE Stark St. Sugarcane, Early Hours, the Resolectrics
Gypsy Restaurant & Lounge 625 NW 21st Ave. Karaoke
Hawthorne Hophouse 4111 SE Hawthorne How Long Jug Band
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Tobacco, Beans, Shapers
Jade Lounge
2346 SE Ankeny St. David Griggs, Sarah Anderson, Ciri Jaye (8 pm); Michele Van Kleef (6 pm)
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. The Bobby Torres Ensemble
Kennedy School
5736 NE 33rd Ave. Jackstraw
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Jimmy Boyer Band (9:30 pm); Tree Frogs (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
Wilf’s Restaurant
2126 SW Halsey St. Kris Deelane
Worksound
3505 Pacific Ave. Peter Rodocker
800 NW 6th Ave. Greg Goebel Trio, Dave Captein, Todd Strait 820 SE Alder St. Capillary Action, Why I Must Be Careful, Ryan Francesconi
SAT. APRIL 23 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Donald Glover & Childish Gambino
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. The Shook Twins
McMenamins Grand Lodge
McMenamins Hotel Oregon
310 Northeast Evans St. The Mustachioed Bandits and Damsel in Distress, Paleface
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road The Brothers Jam
Mission Theater
1624 NW Glisan St.
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. The Jim Jams 3939 N Mississippi Ave. The Bridge, The Quick & Easy Boys, Tap Water
Mock Crest Tavern 3435 N Lombard St. Blueprints
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Cafe Cowboys
Northwest Academy’s Blue Box Theater
1130 SW Main Street The Northwest Academy All-Star Jazz Band
Plan B
1305 SE 8th Ave. Sauce Policy, Weekend Assembly
Saratoga
6910 N Interstate Ave. The Estranged, Company, Tensions
Secret Society Lounge
Danny Romero
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Ian and the Crushers
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Chance Hayden/Matt Tabor Quartet
Branx
320 SE 2nd Ave. Floor, Totimoshi, Norska
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Sinferno Cabaret, James Angell
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Lost in the Trees, Sean Rowe
East End
203 SE Grand Ave. ANOK4UOK?, Apocalypse Dudes, No L.A. Kill, Koban
Ella Street Social Club
714 SW 20th Place Dirftwood, dKota, Riviera
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Dirty Beaches, The Reservations, Tunnels, DJ Yeti
Jade Lounge
116 NE Russell St. Lisa & Her Kin (9 pm); The Portland Playboys (6 pm)
2346 SE Ankeny St. Philippe Bronchtein (9 pm); Human Voices (7:30 pm); Byron and Shelly (6 pm)
Sellwood Public House
LaurelThirst
8132 SE 13th Ave. Wicky Pickers
Slabtown
1033 NW 16th Ave. Heaven Generation, Ex-Girlfriends Club, Red Ships Of Spain
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. Miriam’s Well
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. Filmistan, DJ Anjali & the Incredible Kid
Spare Room
4830 NE 42nd Ave. Shannon Tower Band
TaborSpace
5441 SE Belmont St. Bridges and Sleepy Bell
The Analog Room
3954 N Williams Ave. Rob Johnston
The Heathman Restaurant and Bar 1001 SW Broadway Linda Lee Michelet
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Spirit Lake, Cement Season, Statewide, Dave Lindenbaum
The World Famous Kenton Club 2025 N Kilpatrick St. Szyslak
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Thunderstruck (AC-DC Tribute), Ed to Shred
Twilight Café and Bar
1420 SE Powell Blvd. The Warshers, The Hunt, Feral Pigs
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. Class M Planets, Run On Sentence, The Envelope Peasant
Wilf’s Restaurant
800 NW 6th Ave. Tasha Miller and Friends Party
Wonder Ballroom 128 NE Russell St. Pantyraid
SUN. APRIL 24 Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Tupai Spring Performance Series 2011: Aaron Meyer and Tim Ellis
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St.
2958 NE Glisan St. Billy Kennedy & Tim Acott (9:30 pm); Lewi Longmire Band (6 pm)
Lola’s Room at the Crystal Ballroom 1332 W Burnside St. Plan B, Yours
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Sonny Hess
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Hanz Araki and Kathryn Claire
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Natural Vibrations, Solidity, Na Hemo
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Irish
NEPO 42
5403 NE 42nd Ave. Open Mic with Fred Stephenson
Slim’s Cocktail Bar
8635 N Lombard St. Johnny Ward Sharktet
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. Karaoke That Doesn’t Suck
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Sunday Sunday Sunday Swing Swing Swing
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Hangover Helper Comedy and Burlesque Showcase: Miss Frankie Tease, Whitney Streed
Tonic Lounge
3100 NE Sandy Blvd. Boom!, Best Supporting Actress, The Singing Knives
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. Litanic Mask, Light House, René Hell
Vie de Boheme
1530 SE 7th Ave. Jammin’ For Japan: The Ty Curtis Band, Robbie Laws, Lloyd Jones & Friends, Lisa Mann, Rae Gordon
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St. Open Mic/Songwriter Showcase
CALENDAR Wonder Ballroom
128 NE Russell St. The Devil Makes Three, Brown Bird
MON. APRIL 25 Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. Scott Head
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Rocks’off: DJ Rick Elvis, DJ Danny Rock, DJ Pete Roll
Backspace
115 NW 5th Ave. Dorkbot
Biddy McGraw’s
6000 NE Glisan St. Eric Tonsfeldt
Blue Monk
3341 SE Belmont St. Renato Caranto’s Funk Band
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. Karaoke From Hell
Doug Fir Lounge
830 E Burnside St. Mike Watt & The Missingmen, Charming Birds, Sons of Huns
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Blues Train
East End
203 SE Grand Ave. Heavy Metal Ladies Night: Valkyrie Rodeo, Big Black Cloud, DJ Nate C
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Sonic Forum Open Mic Night
Hawthorne Theatre Lounge 1503 SE 39th Ave. Rockstar Karaoke
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Operative, Soft Metals, Maxmillion Dunbar, Jason Urick
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Dan Balmer
LaurelThirst
2958 NE Glisan St. Kung Pao Chickens (9 pm); Little Sue & Lynn Conover (6 pm)
McMenamins Edgefield Winery 2126 SW Halsey St. Skip vonKuske
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Bob Shoemaker
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Keegan Smith & the Fam
Muddy Rudder Public House 8105 SE 7th Ave. Lloyd Jones
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
426 SW Washington St. Plum Sutra, Margaret Wehr, Sam Emmitt
The Know
2026 NE Alberta St. Hornet Leg, Magnetic South, DMV
Twilight Café and Bar 1420 SE Powell Blvd. SIN Night
White Eagle Saloon
836 N Russell St. NIAYH Family Residency: Sarah Tone, Scott Gilmore, Mr. Crab Feathers
TUES. APRIL 26 Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave. Mindy Smith
Alberta Rose Theatre 3000 NE Alberta St. Alash Ensemble
Andina
1314 NW Glisan St. JB Butler
Ash Street Saloon
225 SW Ash St. Mixed Social Every Tuesday: Pink Slip, The We Shared Milk, Random Axe
Buffalo Gap Saloon
6835 SW Macadam Ave. Open Mic With Scott Gallegos
Bunk Bar
1028 SE Water Ave. Anne
Camellia Lounge 510 NW 11th Ave. Weekly Jazz Jam
County Cork Public House 1329 NE Fremont St. Bahttsi
Dante’s
350 W Burnside St. The Ed Forman Show, DSL Open Mic Comedy
Doug Fir Lounge 830 E Burnside St. The Gourds, Pat Sweany
Duff’s Garage
1635 SE 7th Ave. Dover Weinberg Quartet (9:30 pm), Trio Bravo (6 pm)
Ella Street Social Club
714 SW 20th Place Hill House, Amos Val, Port St. Willow
Goodfoot Lounge
2845 SE Stark St. Scott PembertonTrio
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Royal Bangs, Superhumanoids, Team Evil
Jimmy Mak’s
221 NW 10th Ave. Mel Brown Septet (8:30 pm), VH1 Save the Music Event (6 pm)
426 SW Washington St. Flesh Lawn, Option B, Gender Roles
Tube
LaurelThirst
18 NW 3rd Ave. Tubesday
McMenamins Edgefield Winery
1420 SE Powell Blvd. Open Mic Night: The Roaming
2958 NE Glisan St. Jackstraw
2126 SW Halsey St. Caleb Klauder and Sammy Lind
McMenamins Rock Creek Tavern
10000 Old Cornelius Pass Road Open Bluegrass Jam
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Supadupa Marimba Brothers
Mississippi Pizza
3552 N Mississippi Ave. Baby Ketten Karaoke
Mississippi Studios
3939 N Mississippi Ave. Eastern Conference Champions, Yours, The Singleman Affair
Mock Crest Tavern 3435 N Lombard St. Jeff Jensen Band
Mt. Tabor Theater
4811 SE Hawthorne Blvd. The Family Funktion featuring Average Leftovers
Slim’s Cocktail Bar 8635 N Lombard St. Open Mic
315 SE 3rd Ave. Blow Pony: DJ Airick, DJ Kinetic, Roy G Biv, Lustache
205 NW 4th Ave. See You Next Tuesday with Ramadanman, Pearson Sound, Zed Bias
The Knife Shop at Kelly’s Olympian
Twilight Café and Bar
White Eagle Saloon 836 N Russell St. Will West and the Friendly Strangers
Wilf’s Restaurant
800 NW 6th Ave. Stumptown presents Karioki
MUSIC
Rotture
The Crown Room
Star Bar
WED. APRIL 20 East End
203 SE Grand Ave. DJ Smooth Hopperator
Matador
1967 W Burnside St DJ Whisker Friction
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Overcol, DJ Sean Moder
The Crown Room
205 NW 4th Ave. Crush Drum and Bass
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. DJ A-Train
THUR. APRIL 21 Fez Ballroom
316 SW 11th Ave. Shadowplay with DJ Horrid, DJ Ghoulunatic, DJ Paradox
Holocene
1001 SE Morrison St. Nightclubbing: Suzanne Kraft, DJ Mike M., Linger & Quiet
Palace of Industry 5426 N Gay Avenue DJ Galavant & DJ Krinkle Kut
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave. The Fix: Rev. Shines, KEZ, Dundiggy
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Funthousand
The Crown Room 205 NW 4th Ave.
Blast Thursdays
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. DJ Dreamlover, DJ Snakk$, DJ Sister Sister
FRI. APRIL 22 Fez Ballroom
316 SW 11th Ave. Decadent 80s
Gilmore’s Meadows
5823 SE Johnson Creek Blvd. DJ Gen. Erik, Southeast T, Illyresyst
Palace of Industry 5426 N Gay Avenue DJ Mild Child
Star Bar
639 SE Morrison St. DJ Ikon
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. Ecstasy #4: Finesse, DJ Honey O, Boy Rafael
639 SE Morrison St. French Invasion: DJ Cecilia Paris
The Crown Room 205 NW 4th Ave. Club Crooks
Tube
18 NW 3rd Ave. DJ Wels
Valentine’s
232 SW Ankeny St. Dj Knife Hits
SUN. APRIL 24 Matador
1967 W Burnside St DJ Donny Don’t
The World Famous Kenton Club
2025 N Kilpatrick St. Michael Wright’s Dance Party: DJ Holiday, The Fantastic T.A.D.
MON. APRIL 25 Star Bar
SAT. APRIL 23 Fez Ballroom
316 SW 11th Ave. Twice As Nice
Gilmore’s Meadows
639 SE Morrison St. Into the Void: DJ Blackhawk
TUES. APRIL 26
5823 SE Johnson Creek Blvd. DJ Weather, Diction One
East End
Lola’s Room at the Crystal Ballroom
Star Bar
1332 W Burnside St. Jai Ho! Strictly Bhangra Dance Party (Hosted by DJ Prashant)
203 SE Grand Ave. DJ Masterblaster, DJ Sarah Smut 639 SE Morrison St. DJ Smooth Hopperator
Yes and No
20 NW 3rd Ave. Idiot Tuesdays: DJ Black Dog
©2011 COORS BREWING COMPANY, GOLDEN, CO Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
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SCOOP PAGE 20 GOSSIP SHOULD HAVE NO FRIENDS
40
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011 wweek.com
PERFORMANCE
APRIL 20-26
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
PREVIEW COURTESY OF IAN KARMEL
Most prices listed are for advance ticket sales. At-the-door increases and so-called convenience charges may apply, so it’s best to call ahead. Editor: BEN WATERHOUSE. Stage: BEN WATERHOUSE (bwaterhouse@wweek. com). Classical: BRETT CAMPBELL (bcampbell@wweek.com). Dance: HEATHER WISNER (dance@wweek.com). TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, submit information at least two weeks in advance to: bwaterhouse@wweek.com.
THEATER The Adding Machine
Do you feel oppressed by technology? Do you worry that your ceaseless toil will never be rewarded by your employer? These may seem like prompts from the writer’s room at The Office, but Elmer Rice addressed them all in 1923. Jane Bement Geesman has dusted off this classic expressionist comedy and given it a Fritz Langesque masque-theater production for the final show of Theatre Vertigo’s season. Despite its age, the show feels unsettlingly contemporary; but for the Jazz Age slang, it could have been written by Sarah Ruhl. Gary Norman, with all his usual hangdog charm, plays Mr. Zero, a colorless functionary at a department store who spends his days doing endless sums and lusting after his assistant (Jenn Hunter). When his boss informs him he’ll be laid off after 25 years of labor and replaced by an adding machine, Zero murders him. He is executed, and mopes his way through undeath, the Elysian Fields and some kind of mechanical hell. If you think of the expressionists as a humorless bunch, The Adding Machine will surprise you: Rice wraps his message in bizarre deadpan humor. BEN WATERHOUSE. Theater! Theatre!, 3430 SE Belmont St., 306-0870. 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays. Closes May 7. $15. Thursdays are “pay what you will.”
Big River
While you may have read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you haven’t heard it like this. Staged!’s student production of Roger Miller and William Hauptman’s musical adaptation of Twain’s classic is infused with oldtimey orchestra. The music is funny, wide-ranging and impressive. Alice’s (Lauren Steele) soulful solos bring a melancholy beauty to the plight of a slave. Marzell Reuben Sampson (Jim) is one of the mentor actors who add some grounding to the cast by escorting Huck (Jackson Walker) through duets like a winsome, foxy father figure. Another standout is Sarah Michelle Spear as the chaste Mary Jane Wilkes. The Duke and the King (Tony Zilka and Chris Porter) provide comic relief from this emotionally charged tale. Zilka is an ostentatious actor and Porter is the villain you love to hate. ASHLEY GOSSMAN. World Trade Center Theater, 121 SW Salmon St., 971322-5723. 8 pm Friday-Saturdays, 2 pm Sunday, April 22-24. $21-$25.
Bugged
Simple Machines Theatre reprises its 2010 show, in which bugs, annoyance and electronic surveillance are explored through the lives of three insects portrayed by shadow puppets. Theater! Theatre!, 3430 SE Belmont St., 917-292-9121. 10:30 pm ThursdaySaturday, April 21-23. $10, “pay what you will” Thursdays.
The Cherry Orchard
Artists Rep concludes its series, seven years in the making, of world-premiere adaptations of Chekhov’s major plays with liberal rewrites, the most famous of them all by Richard Kramer (My So-Called Life, Thirtysomething). Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison St., 241-1278. 7:30 pm Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2 and 7:30 pm Sundays. Closes May 22. $20-$42.
Cymbeline
Northwest Classical Theatre Company presents Shakespeare’s very strange, flawed fairy tale, in which King Cymbeline’s daughter, Imogen, is abused by her stepmother, courted by her stepbrother and secretly married to her childhood best friend. Shoe Box Theater, 2110 SE 10th Ave., 971-2443740. 7 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 15. $15-$18.
I Left My Heart
Broadway Rose Theatre Company presents “a musical salute to the music of Tony Bennett.” Broadway Rose New Stage Theatre, 12850 SW Grant Ave., Tigard, 620-5262. 7:30 pm ThursdaysSaturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 8. $20-$35.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Having enjoyed great success in 2010 with August Wilson’s final play, Radio Golf, Portland Playhouse now returns to the playwright’s work to end its season with his first. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a better play than Radio Golf, its language more lyrical and characters better formed, but this production (directed by Kevin Jones), while good, doesn’t match the taut excitement of last year’s hit. The fascinations with music, family and insecurity that appear throughout Wilson’s work are already evident here: The entire play takes place in 1923 in three rooms of a Chicago recording studio (neatly stacked back to front in Daniel Meeker’s set), where white record producer Sturdyvant (Bruce Burkhartsmeier) is preparing for a session with blues singer Ma Rainey (alternately Julianne Johnson and Marilyn Keller). The problem: Ma Rainey has not shown up. The musicians, who gather in the studio’s rehearsal room, manage very little rehearsing between a lot of first-rate bullshitting: Cutler (Wendell Wright), Slow Drag (Jerry Foster), Toledo (Wrick Jones) and Levee (Victor Mack, in his best performance I’ve yet seen) are characters you can chew on for hours. Jones does; the band’s scenes are the show’s best. When Rainey does show up, in stunning regalia, things begin to falter. Johnson gave an excellent performance on opening night, but Jones can’t seem to figure out what to do with Rainey’s stuttering nephew or vamping flapper girlfriend. Jones recovers from the midshow lag powerfully, though: Levee’s reaction to Sturdyvant’s rejection of his music is terrifying. BEN WATERHOUSE. Portland Playhouse, 602 NE Prescott St., 205-0715. 8 pm WednesdaysSaturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 29. $20-$25.
Passion Play
Portland Actors Conservatory students perform Sarah Ruhl’s study of the backstage lives of actors in passion plays from 16th century England through Nazi Germany to 1970s South Dakota. Portland Actors Conservatory, 1436 SW Montgomery St., 274-1717. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes May 1. $15-$25.
Same Time, Next Year
The Public House Theatre Company admirably pulls off this Bernard Slade play with a meager cast of two and an unassuming one room set. The story spans over 20 years but starts with Doris (Melissa Kaiser) and George’s (Leif Norby) first encounter between the sheets at a romantic inn. Although married to others, they agree to meet in the same hotel room every year. The cast integrate comedic and dramatic moments seamlessly, immersing the audience in the tangled emotion of their tryst. Coinciding with a line of George’s in which he tells Doris he would sound like a medley of clichés if he told her how he felt are scene changes spliced with popular love songs. But it’s the strong character development (not repressed by the unchanging 1990’s-esque set), that moves us through time more adequately than historically relevant music. KAREN LOCKE. The CoHo Theater, 2257 NW Raleigh St., 9220532. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays. Closes April 30. $19-$24, $14 Thursdays.
CONT. on page 42
IAN KARMEL
PRESENT LAUGHTER HOW BRIDGETOWN COMEDY FESTIVAL MADE PORTLAND FUNNY. BY MATTHEW SI N GER
243-2122
As someone who slept with, and was subsequently electrocuted by, Carrie Brownstein on national television in January, Ian Karmel can attest that the past year has been a big one for Portland comedy. A year and a half ago, Karmel, a mountainous 26-year-old with, in his words, the name of “a whimsical British candy store,” was just beginning to dabble in stand-up. He won the 2010 Portland Amateur Comedy Contest in June, right around the time Helium Comedy Club was opening on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. He became a regular host at Helium, supporting comics’ comics like Marc Maron and Michael Ian Black. Then Brownstein decided to lovingly lampoon her hometown on IFC, and recruited local comedians to help. Now, Karmel receives nods of recognition when he introduces himself to audiences as “the fat guy who died in a bathtub on Portlandia.” And this week, he’s going to be performing—along with nearly 200 other established and rising comics, including Margaret Cho, Andy Dick, Hannibal Buress and Doug Benson—at the fourth Bridgetown Comedy Festival, an event he talks about with the excitement of a businessman about to go on a company retreat. “It’s like our trip to Vegas,” Karmel says. In 2008, when Bridgetown held its inaugural edition, Karmel’s résumé was much less impressive. Then, there was no Portlandia. There was no comedy venue, like Helium, to fill the gap between the dive-bar amateur hours and the big-ticket shows at the Schnitz. All Portland’s aspiring comics and fans had were a handful of weekly open mics and the Old Town staple Harvey’s, which catered more to the date-night crowd than serious aficionados. That’s why Bridgetown co-founder Andy Wood says he started the festival in the first place. “[Comedy] was a forgotten subsection of the Portland cultural landscape,” he says. And that was still true, more or less, 12 months
ago. But in the last year, the momentum from Bridgetown’s growing attendance—from an estimated 1,000 in 2008 to 4,000 in 2010—has finally manifested itself in the development of an actual comedy infrastructure in Portland. Along with Helium, which offers the city’s working comics an up-close opportunity to study the bleeding edge of stand-up—the Patton Oswalts, the Brian Posehns, the Maria Bamfords—there is now an open mic, comedy class or showcase happening somewhere in town every night of the week. As a result, the population of Portlanders self-identifying as comedians has exploded. According to Virginia Jones, who hosts a twice-monthly open mic at Curious Comedy Theater, the average number of people clamoring for stage time has ballooned from 40 to 200. More importantly, an audience willing to pay for live comedy has also emerged. “When I started, we were only doing open mics to each other,” says Jones, a five-year stand-up vet. “It’s more valuable to do an open mic to a human audience without the jaded comedian sensibility. Doing stuff to make your friends laugh is great, but then you don’t know what works at a paid show in the real world. There are only so many jokes about eating babies you can get away with.” There’s still a lot Portland has left to learn if it wants to be known as a comedy hotbed—that goes for both the comics and the spectators. (A particularly Portlandian example of poor crowd etiquette is what Jones calls “friendly heckling,” in which audience members “think they can help the show with their own thoughts and feelings.”) But during Bridgetown, everyone, established headliners from New York and Northwest natives who just completed year one alike, is on equal footing. And for a newcomer like Karmel, that’s an education in itself. “You have the same thing around your neck as Margaret Cho,” he says. “It’s like being called up to the majors for four days and getting a taste of what it’s like.” SEE IT: Bridgetown Comedy Festival runs Thursday through Sunday, April 21-24, at various venues on Hawthorne. See bridgetowncomedyfestival.com for the full schedule. Weekend passes $75, single show tickets $10-$25. Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
41
APRIL 20-26
Singlehandedly!
Portland Story Theater’s solo-performance fest returns with seven nights of adult storytelling (see the full schedule at portlandstorytheater. com/2011solo/index.htm). This week: Ryan Wolf Stroud (“The Most Beautiful Place on Earth”), auGi (“Teenage Commando”) and Lynne Duddy on Friday; Kristin Olson-Huddle, Brad Clark and Joseph Boyd on Saturday. Hipbone Studio, 1847 E Burnside St., 793-5484. 8 pm Friday-Saturday, April 22-23. $15 per night, $48 for four, $75 all seven.
Tada!
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s annual gala, with dinner, cocktails, luxe auction items and the preliminary announcement of the 2011 Time-Based Art lineup. Bison Building, 419 NE 10th Ave., 242-1419, ext. 225. 6 pm Saturday, April 23. $175.
A Walk in the Woods
Profile Theatre continues its season of Lee Blessing plays with a staged reading of his arms-negotiation drama: Two diplomats, an American and a Russian, play mind games and grow close during nuclear arms talks. Theater! Theatre!, 3430 SE Belmont St., 242-0080. 7:30 pm WednesdaySaturday, 2 pm Sunday, April 20-24. $15.
COMEDY Bridgetown Comedy Festival
It’s like summer camp for stand-up comedians: The four-year-old festival brings nearly 200 comics from around the country to the Hawthorne stumble zone, including Kristen Schaal, Doug Benson, Hannibal Buress, Hari Kondabolu, Iliza Shlesinger and Margaret Cho. See bridgetowncomedyfestival.com for the full, overwhelming schedule. Multiple locations. More or less nonstop Thursday-Sunday, April 21-24. $75 weekend pass, $20 Thursday or Sunday. Individual shows vary. 21+.
Icarus
Good improv comedy. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 10 pm Saturday, April 23. $8.
The Liberators
Good improv comedy. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 8 pm Saturday, April 23. $10-$14.
Mice-tro
Put 16 improv actors onstage with a voice-of-God maestro pitting them against each other and the audience voting them off, and what do you get? A raw and clever show that’s disgustingly full of talent. The actors take cues from the audience, asking them to shout out a hardware object (“hammer!”) or scenario (“rehab intervention!”) or sentence (“do not step on my begonias!”), which they instantly incorporate into their skits. STACY BROWNHILL. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 8 pm Fridays through April 29. $7-$10.
TheatreSports
The Brody players face off against the winners of the theater’s high-school improv tournament in competitive improv games. Brody Theater, 16 NW Broadway, 224-2227. 8 pm Friday, April 22. $8-$12. All ages.
Unexpectations
Curious Comedy founder Stacey Hallal in “a one-person comedy show that may or may not have more than one person in it.” Curious Comedy, 5225 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., curiouscomedy.org. 8 pm FridaysSaturdays. Closes April 23. $12-$15.
The Uninvited
The Unscriptables improvise a Tennessee Williams-esque family drama—with zombies. Because, like bacon, you can never have too many zombies. The Unscriptables Studio, 1121 N Loring St., theunscriptables.com. 8 pm Saturdays through April 30. “Pay what you want.”
42
The Weekly Recurring Humor Night
Whitney Streed hosts a weekly comedy night. This week: Richard Bain, Ron Funches, Tristian Spillman, Carmen Trineece, Boomer and Justin Lentz. Tonic Lounge, 3100 NE Sandy Blvd., 238-0543. 9:30 pm Wednesdays. $3-$5. 21+.
You Have the Right to Remain Dead
The Black Tie Comedy Troupe performs a murder-mystery comedy (with audience participation) as a fundraiser for Madison High School’s speech team. Theater! Theatre!, 3430 SE Belmont St., 1-800-9928499 (TicketsWest). 8 pm TuesdayWednesday, April 26-27. $11.50.
CLASSICAL 45th Parallel
For this Good Friday Seven Last Words service, some of the city’s best-known classical players (cellist/ coffee roaster Justin Kagan, flutist Abby Mages, clarinetist David Hattner, violinist Greg Ewer, pianist/organist Bill Crane) will play music by Fauré, Mendelssohn, Bach, Weber and selections from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, interpolated among liturgical and other readings. St. David’s Episcopal Church, 2800 SE Harrison St., 232-8461. Noon Friday, April 22. Donation.
Cynthia Gerdes
This local composer’s thoughtful, sometimes-wistful music has been featured in recent Cascadia Composers concerts, and its quality is reflected in the lineup of some of Portland’s most adventurous players (Fear No Music pianist Jeffery Payne, Oregon Symphony violinist Erin Furbee, PSU opera singer Christine Meadows) who’ll play music from her promising debut CD, which ranges from toccata to tango, poetic songs and solo piano works. Reedwood Friends Church, 2901 SE Steele St., 232-0317. 7:30 pm Friday, April 22. $5-$10.
Meester & Meester
Béla Balogh and Courtney von Drehle, founders of 3 Leg Torso, revert to their original accordion-and-fiddle busking duo, playing European cabaret, Latin and klezmer sounds. Press Club, 2621 SE Clinton St., 233-5656. 8:30 pm Saturday, April 23. Free.
Portland State University Opera
Even if you saw Portland Opera’s version of Kurt Weill’s Tony Awardwinning 1949 social drama some years back, PSU’s evocative production of Street Scene is worth a return visit to the sweltering midcentury Manhattan street corner and its multiethnic, Depression-weary tenement dwellers. Based on the 1925 PulitzerPrize-winning play by Elmer Rice (whose powerful previous work, The Adding Machine, is currently running at Theatre Vertigo), with lyrics by the great Harlem poet Langston Hughes, this landmark tale of high passions on the Lower East Side blends Weill’s European classical and cabaret sensibility with American blues, jazz and pop music and even a snazzy dance sequence. Sort of a cross between opera and musical, it anticipates the following decade’s West Side Story in its depiction of compelling characters against a gritty social backdrop, all set to poignant music. Birth, death, recession, eviction, love affairs, greed, murder, capitalist exploitation of workers—it all still feels relevant 62 years later. Lincoln Hall, Portland State University, 1620 SW Park Ave., 7253307. 7:30 pm April 23, 25, 27 and 29; 2 pm Sunday, May 1. $15-$26.
Shirley Edith Hunt
The Portland native, who plays with Portland Baroque Orchestra and other leading music ensembles, performs a solo recital, featuring an archaic-yetbeautiful viola da gamba (a Baroque instrument) created by Bach’s own instrument-maker. Hunt will play music by Bach, Abel and other composers of the period. Community Music Center, 3350 SE Francis St., 823-3177. 8 pm Friday, April 22. Suggested donation of $15.
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
Talavya
The tabla has enjoyed a resurgence beyond its classical roots, thanks to its use by DJs and electronic music artists like Talvin Singh and popularizers like the Bay Area’s teacher/wizard Zakir Hussain. The torrid young tablawallahs in this quartet (formerly called Tabla Ecstasy) demonstrate that the versatile Indian percussion instrument is capable of so much variety and expressiveness that it needs no accompanying instrumentation beyond harmonium. The show, presented by Kalakendra, includes the Koreanborn dancer Jin, who’s one of the few female tabla virtuosos. Scottish Rite Center, 1512 SW Morrison St., 226-7827. 8 pm Friday, April 22. $5-$25.
The Ocular Concern, Pachi Pamwe
Yet another project featuring the indefatigable jazz pianist Andrew Oliver, this trio includes his fellow traveler guitarist Dan Duval and Paxselin Quartet drummer Steve Pancerev. The Pachi Pamwe duo mixes traditional Zimbabwean mbira music with acoustic guitar, poetry and modern influences. Blue Monk, 3341 SE Belmont St., 595-0575. 9 pm Saturday, April 23. $5. 21+.
caller onstage and takes inspiration from the American West (at least as the Russian-born choreographer envisioned it), set to Vivaldi and Corelli and danced primarily in the classical idiom. Newmark Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 248-4335. 7:30 pm Thursday-Friday, April 21-22. 2 and 7:30 pm SaturdaySunday, April 23-24. 7:30 pm Thursday and Saturday, April 28 and 30. 2 pm Sunday, May 1. $25.50 and up.
Pendulum Aerial Arts Studio Performance
While Pendulum Aerial Arts’ Community Day demonstrated what its students are learning to do, its evening-length concert, In the Studio, features new works choreographed by its company members. Come expecting unusual aerial acts, levitating acrobatics and roller skating as you’ve never
seen it. A question-and-answer session with company members and choreographers will follow the show, allowing viewers to ask pertinent questions like, “How did you that?” French American International School, 8500 NW Johnson St. 7:30 pm Friday-Saturday, April 22-23. Free-$15.
Tease Time
The monthly burlesque-heavy variety show takes on a tiki theme this time, featuring Sneaky Tiki and the Lava Lounge Orchestra, DJ Drew Groove and performances by Meghan Mayhem, the Dolly Pops, Lucy O’Rebel, Sophia Flash and Miss Frankie Tease. Dinner and cocktails will be served. Tonic Lounge, 3100 NE Sandy Blvd., 2380543. 9 pm Friday, April 22. $7-$10. 21+.
For more Performance listings, visit
REVIEW OWEN CAREY
PERFORMANCE
DANCE A-WOL Dance Collective
A-WOL Dance Collective timed its Zip Zap Doom show well, since April is Comic Book Month in Portland. A sequel to last year’s superhero show, Zip Zap Zoom, the story picks up as evil sisters Zip and Zap and their posse of villains kidnap their good sister Zoom’s pet unicorn. It’s a kidfriendly tale told through aerial dance and acrobatics, with performers in ropes, harnesses and other apparatus battling overhead. A-WOL Studio, 920 NE Flanders St., 201-9798. 8 pm Friday, April 22, 5 and 8 pm Saturday, April 23. $10-$20, info and tickets at awoldance.org.
Hangover Helper
Weekly burlesque and stand-up comedy showcase with brunch, hosted by Whitney Streed and Miss Frankie Tease. Tonic Lounge, 3100 NE Sandy Blvd., 238-0543. 2-5 pm Sunday, April 24. $5 door, $5 for brunch.
Marylhurst Art Gym Dance Exhibits
If you’ve ever left a dance performance wondering “What was that all about?” you now have an excellent opportunity to find out. The Marylhurst Art Gym is opening two exhibits that not only offer a window into the creative process but document Portland’s contemporary dance history as well. The exhibit Dance: Before, After, During will include materials, documentation and performances by local choreographers Linda K. Johnson, Linda Austin, Tahni Holt and Susan Banyas. Past Moves: Selected Archival Footage of Portland Dance Performances in the 1970s and 1980s documents the Portland Dance Theater, which, although it disbanded in the late ’70s, lived on through its members—among them Judy Patton, Gregg Bielemeier and Bonnie Merrill—who went on to choreograph and teach subsequent generations. Marylhurst University, 17600 Highway 43, 699-1814. Opening reception 3-6 pm Sunday, April 3. Free.
Oregon Ballet Theatre
The Bloodhound Gang, Bach, Cole Porter and Vivaldi walk into a bar—no, wait, a barre—in Oregon Ballet Theatre’s spring program Song and Dance. This evening of shortish works has something for most tastes, musically and otherwise. Hip-hop fans will see how ballet does it in Trey McIntyre’s Speak; Nicolo Fonte takes a more serious turn with the limber athleticism of the Bach-based Left Unsaid, which OBT premiered two years ago; and OBT Artistic Director Christopher Stowell’s Eyes on You is also a repeat performance: a series of vignettes that range from cheerful to melancholy to slightly corny, set to Porter and costumed from the same era. That leaves the company premiere of the Balanchine classic Square Dance, which features a live
FROM LEFT, COLEMAN, JACKSON AND HIETIKKO.
OPUS (PORTLAND CENTER STAGE) This is a story of four men and a fiddle. And a woman and a viola, too, but let’s not complicate matters overly. Michael Hollinger’s very funny chamber-music drama is all about the experience of playing in a string quartet, which is, if Brendon Fox’s production for Portland Center Stage is to be believed, like really amazing sex with an irremediably crazy, emotionally abusive partner. When we meet the Lazara String Quartet, the crazy has boiled over. Lead violinist Elliot (Chris Coleman) has fired violist Dorian (Matthew Boston), who is also his ex-boyfriend, for reasons having as much to do with sundered romance as with Dorian’s kidnapping of Elliot’s priceless violin. Part of a violin-viola pair made by a fictional 18th-century instrument maker, Pietro Lazara, that was given to the quartet, the violin is the script’s totem; whoever holds it holds the power. The drama unfolds slowly, in flashbacks interpolated with the addition of Grace (Sarah Stevens), Dorian’s young replacement, to the quartet one week before the group is scheduled to perform at the White House. The basic elements of the story are the same as any sports movie—the team must face down extraordinary odds before the big game—but the game is Beethoven’s Op. 131, and the odds are bad tempers, broken hearts and cancer. I’ve heard a lot of snarky skepticism about Coleman—who joined PCS as artistic director in 2001 but has never appeared on a local stage—performing in the show. It was unfounded. Coleman is well suited to the role of the uptight, vain, occasionally cruel musician, and has the good sense to keep his emoting restrained in contrast to Boston’s expansively maniacal performance. Chris Hietikko and Greg Jackson turn in good performances as the cellist and second violinist, the peacemakers of the group. Stevens has much less to work with, especially in the play’s somewhat hysterical final scene, after the White House performance. It’s an unnecessary addition, out of pace with the rest of the script, but masterfully directed by Hollinger, who retains a taught focus as suspenseful as any ticking-bomb Hollywood thriller. BEN WATERHOUSE.
Scandalous sex and violins!
SEE IT: Gerding Theater, 128 NW 11th Ave., 445-3700, pcs.org. 7:30 pm
Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 pm Saturdays-Sundays, noon and 7:30 pm Thursdays. Closes May 8. $33-$58.
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VISUAL ARTS
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By RICHARD SPEER. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, submit show information—including opening and closing dates, gallery address and phone number—at least two weeks in advance to: Visual Arts, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: rspeer@wweek.com. Fax: 2431115. Emailed press releases must be backed up by a faxed or printed copy.
Mar 25 2011 12:09PM
mtouchofclasstours@yahoo.com oc.oohay@sruotssalcfohcuot Touch ofISClass Tours OREGON ONCASINO AC NOGERO www.touchofclasstours.com April 13-15 od/•p$224 p 422pp/do $ • 51-31 lirpA
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TOUCH OF CLASS TOUR COMPANY
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THE MOTHERS ASCENDING SPRING HILL BY HOLLY ANDRES AT CHARLES A. HARTMAN
NOW SHOWING Dante Marioni
Seattle-based sculptor Dante Marioni is known primarily for his blown-glass vessels, but in Variations, he exhibits work in techniques outside the traditions of glassblowing. By working in cast glass and fused glass, Marioni is continuing a dialogue between diverse approaches to the same material. If anyone can make the leap, it is Marioni—a master with impeccable taste. It will be intriguing to see what new magic he has concocted for this exhibition, which blends blown, cast and fused glass sculptures. Bullseye Gallery, 300 NW 13th Ave., 2270222. Closes June 25.
Mary Josephson
Mary Josephson’s colorful figurative style is one part symbolist and one part naive. In Work += Play (Rites and Rituals), she depicts children and adults in highly saturated hues, surrounding them with objects that stand in as symbols of the activities that consume us while we’re on the clock, and the often very different activities we engage in at home and at play. Can these be reconciled? Josephson seems to believe they can and should. Laura Russo, 805 NW 21st Ave., 226-2754. Closes April 30.
Masao Yamamoto
In “KAWA = FLOW” Japanese photographer Masao Yamamoto presents a suite of immaculate black-and-white silver gelatin prints. “Kawa” is Japanese for “flowing water,” and indeed, the most striking of these images, #1599, shows a splash of water frozen as it arcs through the air like a crystalline epiphany. Other works show trees, waterfalls, dragonflies and diaphanous shimmerings of light, the precise subject matter of which is ambiguous. This is understated and superbly modulated work. PDX Contemporary Art, 925 NW Flanders St., 222-0063. Closes April 30.
Ron van Dongen
Sometimes time works in ways that are both arbitrary and profound. Photographer Ron van Dongen found this out when he recently came across a series of black-andwhite Polaroid studies for floral still lifes. The Polaroids were not holding up well to the ravages of time. Mottled, chromatically adulterated, and otherwise on their way out, they nevertheless showed a kind of beauty that appears only when decay sets in. The works, shown together as a series called Proof, suggest that since time cannot be stopped, nor its ravages
reversed, the artist—and perhaps all of us—would do better to embrace the signposts of age and change rather than endeavor vainly to mitigate them. Froelick Gallery, 714 NW Davis St., 222-1142. Closes April 30.
hThunderous sirI fo noitarCelebration beleC suoredofnuIrish hT Music, eRIVER cnBoyle aD &Song gnDANCE oS& ,cDance isuM Connie Lisa May 28th • $149 ppStroup WILD N541.508.1500 OTEPortland LDHORSE NEP/OKeller NCASINO/PENDLETON ISA541.419.3084 CAuditorium ESROH DLIW pp/do; ;oJune d/pp22nd-24th 981$Celebration • ht4•2-$189 dn22of enIrish uJ Thunderous Box •nuSisters, OR 97759 alIncludes liP.O. tamU ,rUnderground u615 oT dSong org&reDance dTour, nU •seUmatilla dulcnI Music, llaMuseum, H oedoRWoolen ,slliM nMills, elooWRodeo ,muesuHall M WILD sHORSE 2 breakfasts tof safFame kaerCASINO/PENDLETON b& 2& emaF fo June 22nd-24th • $189 pp/do; Early snIncludes oisrucdeadlines xEUnderground yaD rofor f seDay nTour, ildaExcursions edUmatilla ylraE Museum, Woolen Mills, Hall ConnieeBoyle lyoB eiRodeo nnoC of Fame & 2 breakfasts
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Holly Andres
Holly Andres is known for her eerie narrative photographs, which often weave stories around the fundamental creepiness of small-town America. In The Fall of Spring Hill, her first solo show with Charles Hartman, she heralds the heroism of mothers protecting their children. Some of the works have the unnerving quality that has become her signature style: the pissed-off, baseball bat-brandishing mothers in The Mothers Ascending Spring Hill, and the disturbing The Mother With Child and Ax. But other works come across prosaic and flat: Unremarkable shots of watermelons and punch bowls are hard to get excited about. While these prints may play into the larger narrative, as individual statements, they lack kick. Charles A. Hartman Fine Art, 134 NW 8th Ave., 2873886. Closes May 14.
TJ Norris
TJ Norris is a local treasure, but he also exhibits his work out of town—as in, like, Europe. So when he shows his work in Portland, which he is this month at Anka, it’s cause to take notice. Norris wears two of his many hats this outing. In B/W, he presents black-andwhite photographs of dilapidated advertising signs seen on a crosscountry road trip. The compositions have the blend of immaculate composition and eerie sterility that have become the artist’s signature. As curator, Norris teams up with Anna Solcaniova King for PXL, a group show with work themed around pixels. This is the strongest double bill Anka has mounted in a long time. Anka Gallery, 325 NW 6th Ave., 224-5721. Closes April 29.
Katherine Treffinger
For vivid, saturated color and an intuitive mastery of composition and surface, it’s hard to beat painter Katherine Treffinger. Her current show is an ode to chartreuse, turquoise and orange-red, interwoven with sinuous, meandering lines and circles that unify the picture plane and lend a jaunty visual syncopation. In Coltrane, circles cluster like grapes, while in The Grotto, turquoise drips seep downward into pink drips rising upward against gravity. Guardino Gallery, 2939 NE Alberta St., 281-9048. Closes April 26.
For more Visual Arts listings, visit Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
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Medical Marijuana Card Services Clinic
BOOKS
APRIL 20-26
= WW Pick. Highly recommended. By ASHLEY GOSSMAN. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, submit lecture or reading information at least two weeks in advance to: WORDS, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: words@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20 Noah Strycker
You don’t have to be an ornithologist to enjoy Noah Strycker’s Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica. Liking birds helps. As does an affinity for adventure stories. Strycker’s story begins when he graduates from college and decides to get dropped in Antarctica to study half a million penguins. Readers are treated to the findings of his research in an informal, anecdotal account. Audubon Society Wildlife Center, 5151 NW Cornell Road, 2929453. 7 pm. Free.
Noam Chomsky
Renowned philosopher, linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky will speak at Pacific University’s Stoller Center gymnasium, focusing on “Prospects for Peace in the Middle East,” followed by an audience Q&A. Pacific University, 2043 College Way, Forest Grove, 352-2918. Noon. Free.
30 MINUTE APPOINTMENTS
Paulann Petersen
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April is National Poetry Month, all the more reason to go to the Mountain Writers Series to hear Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen. Her work is introspective and earthy, wise and prolific. Press Club, 2621 SE Clinton St., 233-5656. 7:30 pm. $5 suggested donation.
THURSDAY, APRIL 21 Dan Savage and Terry Miller
Do I need to talk up the It Gets Better Project to you, my fellow Portlanders? I think not. But just in case: Dan Savage and Terry Miller’s new book, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living, all started with an encouraging YouTube video telling LGBT kids who were getting bullied or even considering committing suicide that it will get better. This book is a collection of essays from teens, celebrities and people who responded with their own videos or just have something interesting to say on the subject. Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm. Free.
Martha Shelley
Martha Shelley’s new novel, The Throne in the Heart of the Sea, is set in the 9th century B.C., retelling the biblical story of Jezebel from a feminist perspective. Although Shelley has done extensive research to keep the details of the backdrop authentic, her characters’ speech remains fairly modern. She wants readers to use all of their senses—smell and taste food cooking, listen to poems and songs, feel they are there with the characters and see how the drama of the story unfolds. Shelley is a spiritual feminist and a founder of the Gay Liberation Front. St. Johns Booksellers, 8622 N Lombard St., 283-0032. 7 pm. Free.
2011-2012
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Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
SATURDAY, APRIL 23 Earth Day with Craigmore Creations and the City Repair Project
This Earth Day, join publisher Craigmore Creations and the City Repair Project to honor Earth and celebrate Portlanders’ efforts to stay green. A Craigmore Creations tome, Terra Tempo: Ice Age Cataclysm, will be featured, and authors David Shapiro, Erica Melville and Christopher Herndon will sign copies between 2 and 4 pm. Craigmore not only makes its books out of recycled materials, but also uses themes that educate children about natural history in a graphic-novel format.
Washington High School, SE 12th and Stark, Portland, 503-477-9562. 10 am-5 pm. Free. All ages.
MONDAY, APRIL 25 Antonia Juhasz
The Gulf oil spill, the Deepwater
Horizon oil spill, the BP oil disaster—no matter what you call it, it’s the worst in history. Black Tide: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill recounts the stories of the people considered responsible, families affected, environmentalists, the seafood industry’s unemployed and others involved in the spill. Juhasz, touted as an oil-industry expert, watchdog and authority on this disaster, reminds us: If we don’t do something about our dependence on oil, this could happen again. Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd., Beaverton, 228-4651. 7 pm. Free. All ages.
REVIEW
PORTLAND’S GOOSE HOLLOW TRACY J. PRINCE It is natural to assume that the topography of a city is fundamentally constant—that some half-distant ancestors found a promising patch of earth and proceeded to sow the seeds for what would ripen, as if inevitably, into the place we know well. But cities are things of tumult, Plumbing old depths. and so are the lands on which they sit. Historian Tracy J. Prince’s picture-studded Portland’s Goose Hollow (Arcadia, 128 pages, $21.99) documents, among other things, the now-estranged fact that Portland’s west side was once bisected by a meandering 50-foot-deep trench called Tanner Creek, which emptied into a broad basin—the catfish-rich Couch Lake—that annually swelled and receded into acres of thick mud across much of Old Town. Starting in the 1870s, the oft-flooded creek was filled, in part, by shaving 25 feet of berm from what is now the old-residential heart of Northwest Portland, and tossing it into the gulch. This has leveled the streets but left raised hillocks on the grounds of Beth Israel Temple, along with blocks and blocks of domestic gardens that stumble bluntly into the sidewalks. In the meantime, the remaining gulch was farmed into acres of vegetable gardens by Chinese immigrants who lived in disposable shacks on the premises and who sold their fresh goods from door to door. When the creek’s burial was finally completed in 1912, the immigrants were forced to emigrate yet again—although the creek itself remained there, deep underground, audible even today beneath Goose Hollow’s manholes. Much of this history was already known, but much also wasn’t, or had escaped firm documentation. In particular, Prince has for the first time unearthed the original 1875 Oregonian story detailing how Goose Hollow got its name: Apparently a gaggle of angry women attacked an officer who had tried to silence their “gabbling” geese. Prince also provides never-before-seen images of water flowing down the Tanner Creek gulch. The book was started largely as a form of advocacy for what has always been a somewhat maligned or forgotten neighborhood, despite its being the stomping grounds of one of Portland’s best-loved mayors (Bud Clark, who also writes the foreword to this book). In this it largely succeeds: Prince makes a case that Goose Hollow’s tannery and planked road, along with Portland’s deep harbor, were pivotal in pushing Portland up over now-obscure rivals Milwaukie, Oregon City and St. Helens as the major municipality in the area. But while the format of the book—hundreds of old pictures, along with explanatory captions—piques gentle interest, it also, unfortunately, muddies narrative and historical continuity. This layout was a stipulation and function of a publisher, Arcadia Publishing, better known for postcard-style portraits of communities than historical texts written by Ph.D.s. Even so, Prince has been dedicated and meticulous in her research. In overlay after overlay of the past, the familiar and the outmoded become interlaced, bound together in contingency, until it is the present that comes to seem strange, the past that is made an unlikely escapee. READ: Portland’s Goose Hollow is in bookstores now.
APRIL 20-26
TUESDAY, APRIL 26 Nathaniel Philbrick
Ahoy, history nerds! Awardwinning author Nathaniel Philbrick (Mayflower, In the Heart of the Sea) recounts the epic clash between General Custer and Sitting Bull in the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn in his new book The Last Stand, calling into question much of the popular wisdom about this often glorified event. Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd., Beaverton, 228-4651. 7 pm. Free. All ages.
BOOKS
A Night of Poetry and Experimental Music
If you are up for the unconventional, go see John Sibley Williams, A. Molotkov, Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk, David Cooke and Ragon Linde’s poetry and music. Most of them have been honored with awards and published books or chapbooks, and Linde has been playing music for over 35 years. Broadway Books, 1714 NE Broadway, 284-1726. 7 pm. Free. All ages.
For more Words listings, visit
APR
20 DONOVAN HOHN / Moby-Duck (Viking)
A journey through science, myth, the global economy ó and some of the worst weather imaginable. WED / 20TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
JOHN ELDER ROBISON / Be Different (Crown Archetype) A window into the minds of those afflicted with Aspergerís syndrome.
REVIEW
DONOVAN HOHN MOBY-DUCK Donovan Hohn was correcting high-school English papers one night, when one of his students brought to his attention the existence of thousands of plastic bath toys—ducks, beavers, frogs and turtles—circumnavigating the globe after tumbling off of a container ship en route to the United States from China. The image of inanimate The case of the shipwrecked yellow ducks bobbing cheerrubber duckies. fully in the ocean inspired children’s author Eric Carle (The Very Hungry Caterpillar) to write 10 Little Rubber Ducks, and beachcombers in Newfoundland and England to search for weather-beaten bath toys that might have safely crossed the Arctic. It also sent Hohn—schoolteacher by day, investigative journalist by night—to put his investigative skills to work in a five-year wild duck chase, away from his wife and newborn son. Hohn set out to learn what the toys might have encountered on the high seas and whether they actually made it to the Atlantic, but the resulting book, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them (Viking, 370 pages, $27.95), goes far beyond a simple investigation into these questions. “Questions, I’ve learned since, can be like ocean currents,” Hohn writes poetically. “Wade in a little too far and they can carry you away. Follow one line of inquiry and it will lead you to another, and another. Spot a yellow duck dropped atop the seaweed at the tide line, ask yourself where it came from, and the next thing you know you’re way out at sea, no land in sight, dogpaddling around in mysteries four miles deep.” Hohn tells of his adventures in Alaska, Hawaii and China, of the environmental disasters he encountered, and of the eccentric scientists and environmentalists devoting their lives to seaborne plastics. This “quixotic duckie hunter,” as he calls himself, learns that plastic flotsam is like a magnet for toxins, delivering hazardous chemicals from land to sea, potentially poisoning plastic-munching aquatic life. And though it must be done, no one can agree on a solution to keep plastic out of the sea. Hohn’s scientific reporting is complemented by frequent quotations of Thoreau and personal admissions of fears about fatherhood. He doesn’t say which came first—the book deal or the voyage—but he is no stranger to publishing. Before his days as a schoolteacher, he was an editor at Harper’s and is now the features editor at GQ. Astonishingly well written, Moby-Duck joins the work of Rachel Carson and Bill McKibben in the ecowriting hall of fame. RACHAEL DEWITT. READ: Donovan Hohn speaks at Powell’s at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd., 878-7323. 7 pm Wednesday, April 20. Free.
We’ve been a regular advertiser in WW for fifteen years. To me, it’s a great value considering the variety of people who read it. It’s one of the essential Portland news sources and lunch time companions.
David Guettler Owner River City Bicycles
WED / 20TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
JACKSON HOLTZ / Fly, Colton, Fly: The True Story of the Barefoot Bandit (New American Library) The first book to tell the full story of the criminal adventures of ì Barefoot Bandit.î THU / 21ST / 7P CEDAR HILLS
DAN SAVAGE & TERRY MILLER / It Gets Better (Dutton) A collection of essays from those who have posted videos of encouragement for LGBT youth facing harassment. THU / 21ST / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
NANCY ROMMELMANN / The Bad Mother (Dymaxicon) Novel set among Hollywoodís transient population of street kids. THU / 21ST / 7:30P HAWTHORNE
ANTHOLOGIST JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS / Brave New Worlds (Night Shade) & The Way of the Wizard (Prime Books) Anthologies that bring together the best dystopian stories and magical tales. FRI / 22ND / 7P CEDAR HILLS
KEN BABBS / Who Shot the Water Buffalo (Overlook) Novel that looks through the eyes of young helicopter pilots in Vietnam. FRI / 22ND / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
ANTONIA JUHASZ / Black Tide (Wiley)
A searing look at the human face of BPís disaster in the gulf. MON / 25TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
DAVID KIRP / Kids First (PublicAffairs) Clarifies the importance of investing wisely in children and outlines a visionary policy agenda. MON / 25TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
NOAH LEVINE / The Heart of the Revolution (Harper One) Offers tools to help readers unlock their own sense of empathy. MON / 25TH / 7:30P HAWTHORNE
NATHANIEL PHILBRICK / The Last Stand (Penguin) A reappraisal of the epochal clash at the Little Bighorn in 1876. TUE / 26TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
JASON GOODWIN / An Evil Eye (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The 4th adventure of the famous investigator Yashim. TUE / 26TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
BETHANY MAINES / Compact with the Devil (Atria) Nikki is back and ready to take on an exotic anarchist. WED / 27TH / 7P CEDAR HILLS
OLGA GRUSHIN / The Line (Penguin) A transformative work that speaks to the endurance of the human spirit. WED / 27TH / 7:30P DOWNTOWN
Visit POWELLS.COM/CALENDAR for further details and to sign up for our EVENTS NEWSLETTER. Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
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MOVIES
APRIL 20-26 REVIEW
= WW Pick. Highly recommended.
NEW
The Adults in the Room
48 [ONE NIGHT ONLY] In certain
Portland circles, Andy Blubaugh’s autobiographical docudrama was one of the most anticipated premieres of last year; WW proclaimed Blubaugh the city’s filmmaker to know in 2010. The director has put much care into re-creating his teenage affair with a man twice his age, and he may in fact have kneaded all the leaven out of his story—the picture is about as inert as a movie where a 15-year-old boy offers a 30-year-old man a blow job can be. It stalls in the extensive meta-sexual scenes where Blubaugh consults with various writers and critics about his uncertainty over what his experience means, and whether it has anything to do with Sam Adams, and what his movie should say. Nobody gives him the proper advice: Stop dithering, and tell your story. AARON MESH. Q Center, 4115 N Mississippi Ave., 2347837. 7 pm Friday, April 22. NEW
African Cats
Disneynature visits lions and cheetahs. Not screened for critics. Look for a review on wweek.com. G. Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Eastport, Bridgeport, Evergreen, Lloyd Center.
American: The Bill Hicks Story
64 Though he hailed from Bush I-era
Texas, the scabrous comedian’s blistering fusillades against know-nothingism—including a spectacularly vengeful impression of a Waffle House waitress asking, “What you readin’ fer?”—couldn’t be more current. The drawback of Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas’ affectionate and visually inventive retrospective on the late Hicks is that it doesn’t serve up a thick enough slice of that stand-up: The most compelling moments in the movie can all be found on YouTube. Though Hicks suspected that death was no permanent end, the main takeaway from his terminal pancreatic cancer is a sense of continuing loss: He just was made for these times. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre.
Arthur
32 Russell Brand, who is either a Kaufman-esque bluff of anti-humor perpetrated by Jim Carrey or some sick form of viral marketing for the world’s finest purveyor of nearly lifelike latex masks, attempts to squeeze into Dudley Moore’s tiny shoes in this misbegotten remake of 1981’s unapologetic ode to crapulent dandyism, and it’s as sad and exhausting as a three-day bender’s blighted home stretch. PG-13. CHRIS STAMM. Cinetopia, Forest, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Mall, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.
NEW
The Battle of Algiers
[THREE NIGHTS ONLY, REVIVAL] The formidable 1966 docudrama of the Algerian War. 5th Avenue Cinema. 7 and 9:30 pm Friday-Saturday, 3 pm Sunday, April 22-24. NEW Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
78 [ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] The mystery of country-music genius Townes Van Zandt—which Margaret Brown’s 2004 documentary doesn’t solve, but explores with admirable honesty—is that he always sounded so wise and without illusions, even as he flew high, low and in between on sour mash, heroin and glue. Brown digs up footage of a young Van Zandt gibbering madly outside a double-wide Texas trailer; moving listeners to tears with a performance of “Waiting Around to Die”; and, in an Amsterdam television interview after “Pancho and Lefty” became a hit, taking questions about why all his songs are sad. “You don’t think life is sad?” he retorts, and the darkness in his expression says he knows it is. But life is sadder when you’re living off Stouffer’s dinners and
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M E E K S C U T O F F. C O M
Editor: AARON MESH. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR LISTINGS, send screening information at least two weeks in advance to Screen, WW, 2220 NW Quimby St., Portland, OR 97210. Email: amesh@wweek.com. Fax: 243-1115.
handles of whiskey, and after hearing interviews with family—especially his much wiser children—it’s hard to ignore the evidence that this underrated songwriter was trying to be forgotten, even to obliterate himself. There is no romance in this decision, but there is poetry, and it’s reflected in the lost-highway images from Lee Daniel, Richard Linklater’s cinematographer. AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Friday, April 22. The screening is followed by covers of Van Zandt songs by Rebecca Gates, Flash Flood & the Dikes, and other musicians. NEW
Beyond the Spill
[ONE NIGHT ONLY, DIRECTOR ATTENDING] Twenty-two Oregon residents traveled to the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and returned with this film. See story on page 18. Alberta Rose Theater. 7 pm Wednesday, April 20.
Bill Cunningham New York
82 Arriving with the prized imprimatur
(and fonts) of the Sulzberger Times, director Richard Press’ graceful documentary is deceptively spontaneous—a quality it shares with fashion photographer Cunningham’s “On the Street” column. It requires real concentration to find the patterns and connections between haute Paris runways and harried Manhattan commuters, just as it surely took effort to get Cunningham to reveal any detail of his personal life—or even to sit still long enough to take questions. As the octogenarian cyclist pedals through Times Square in search of great jackets and better legs, it’s clear that the movie, while belonging to the milieu that gave us profiles of Anna Wintour and Valentino, is also one of the great recent New York street-life films; it does for newspaper photography what I Like Killing Flies did for diner cuisine. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.
Cedar Rapids
50 Miguel Arteta (The Good Girl, Youth in Revolt) hosts a Midwestern potluck of current indie-comedy talent, which means Cedar Rapids is not very ambitious, and only superficially funny. R. AARON MESH. Living Room Theaters.
Certified Copy
77 Juliette Binoche’s filmography already reads like a Bazin-quoting video store geek’s wet dream, and with Certified Copy, she adds an Abbas Kiarostami film to the CV. Although it’s his first narrative feature made outside of Iran, Certified Copy is classic Kiarostami: People drive and talk and then park and walk and talk some more. CHRIS STAMM. Living Room Theaters.
The Conspirator
68 It’s set in 1865, but make no
mistake: Robert Redford’s The Conspirator is a post-9/11 movie. This isn’t a particularly difficult conclusion to reach. Although the film is ostensibly a re-enactment of the trial of Mary Surratt, the sole woman accused of partaking in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Redford’s intentions are clear the moment the other alleged co-conspirators are dragged in front of a military tribunal wearing Guantánamo-style hoods. It only gets more obvious from there, as Surratt (Robin Wright) is railroaded by the government—unable to apprehend her son Osama…er, John, they settled for her instead—and her Civil War heroturned-lawyer (James McAvoy) makes impassioned declarations about the sanctity of the Constitution and the danger of confusing vengeance for justice. Redford presents the story as an archetypal courtroom drama, all tropes included, but it still manages some intrigue as an oft-forgotten piece of American history. PG-13. MATTHEW SINGER. Bridgeport, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center.
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
FACT—HARNEY COUNTY’S BIGGEST CROP IS STICKS: Michelle Williams harvests them.
LOST AND FOUND KELLY REICHARDT PIONEERS A NEW PATH FOR OREGON MOVIES WITH MEEK’S CUTOFF. BY AA RON MESH
amesh@wweek.com
“We’re close, but we don’t know what to.” These lines, spoken in an apprehensive hush near the close of Kelly Reichardt’s pioneer drama Meek’s Cutoff, are a key to what makes her film— which is methodical, arid, uneventful and without resolution—so improbably thrilling. It is not, as many of us were vocally hoping, the Oregon Trail video game turned into a movie. Instead, it saturates an audience with the sensations of what it was like actually to be on the Oregon Trail: the complete disorientation, the exhausting routines as a means of warding off fear, the paranoia of being surrounded by so much silence but being unable to quite hear the most important conversations. It is a vision of the West different from and more intimate than any I have seen before, and it sets a high-water mark for the Oregon film renaissance. But it is also a movie about no water at all. Reichardt and her trusty screenwriter, Jonathan Raymond, have based their story on a luckless wagon train that attempted a shortcut across what is now Harney County; the filmmakers have shot in the high desert outside Burns, where the cracked earth is so egg-white it looks like a beach— crucially minus the ocean. (Shot in a tight 1.37:1 that increases the feeling of isolation, Meek’s Cutoff is evidence that Eastern Oregon contains an enormous selection of the color brown.) By the time the movie opens, they are already lost: The first scenes show the party fording a river and collecting creek water, and only later do we (and they) realize how precious those barrels will become. Their hired guide, a blithering braggart named Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood, in rattily ornate facial hair somewhere between that of Yosemite Sam and a biblical patriarch), deflects attention from his navigational ineptness with claws-and-brimstone storytelling: “Hell is full of bears, Jimmy,” he tells a rapt child. “But there are no bears here.” There is nothing here. Well, almost nothing: This being Oregon, even in the most desolate wasteland you can find a hipster. The Meek’s Cutoff cast includes indie darlings Michelle Williams, Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan,
and it is tempting to draw parallels between these parched emigrants and a more recent generation of young people who have found the state less of a paradise than promised. The pioneers’ pastel bonnets and cross-stitch samplers may seem familiar, and Kazan has even brought a canary in a cage—she has come to the Oregon high desert and put a bird on it. But this synchronicity goes deeper: Every movie Reichardt has made here has been about people who are forced, under duress, to jettison things they care about. In Old Joy, two friends tried to find Bagby Hot Springs, and began to abandon their connection; in Wendy and Lucy, Williams broke down in Portland and could only continue to Alaska by parting with her beloved dog; Meek’s Cutoff’s most breathtaking image is Williams tossing heirlooms out the back of a prairie schooner,
“HELL IS FULL OF BEARS, JIMMY.” to reduce weight and keep moving. Reichardt and Raymond’s West is a place of lostness and loss. It is also a place to find yourself. Meek’s Cutoff has already been dubbed a feminist western and a minimalist western—these tags may be true, but the movie is foremost a blank-slate western. It does not feel like a historical drama; it has no interest in history’s verdict. The film hinges on Williams’ decision to trust a captured Cayuse Indian (Rod Rondeaux) over Meek—but it is the choice itself Reichardt chronicles, not its results. The character’s courage is stirring, but the movie’s ultimate open-endedness is electrifying. Ninety-nine percent of movies pretend that life is most accurately viewed in hindsight, when in fact its most vivid experiences always take place without knowing the resolution. Gus Van Sant was a trailblazer for American cinema as a record of sensation, but Reichardt is advancing into a storytelling that is perfectly immediate—linear, sure, but requiring no moral tied on like a bow. Meek’s Cutoff is filled with the dizzying freshness of freedom, and it portends that Reichardt is leading Oregon filmmaking to places it has never been before. It doesn’t matter what to. We’re close. 93 SEE IT: Meek’s Cutoff opens Friday at Fox Tower. Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond will attend the screening at 7:30 pm Friday, April 22.
APRIL 20-26
Death Rides a Horse
[ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] A spaghetti-western series kicks off with a helping of Lee Van Cleef. Hollywood Theatre. 7:20 pm Saturday, April 23.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules 29 Love Ramona Quimby but hate
all that pesky imagination? Would you rather see a kid lip-sync to Ke$ha on YouTube? Have I got a movie for you! PG. AP KRYZA. Oak Grove, Lloyd Mall. NEW
Fast Break
82 [ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL] Amateur psychedelic soundtrack over grainy, slo-mo basketball footage makes the ’70s seem like an ancient, foreign world, but this vintage documentary of the Blazers’ 1977 championship season was never a conventional, sporty sports movie, even in its own time. The film’s backbone (and its most interesting thread) is director Don Zavin’s postseason bicycle ride down the Oregon coast with superstar center Bill Walton, the 7-foot, red-bearded hippie credited for the young team’s first (and only) championship season. TONY PIFF. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Thursday, April 21.
part of the film is eaten up with a lightly sentimentalized road trip that buries (if quite personably) the kernel of A.B. Yehoshua’s novel A Woman in Jerusalem: that the immigrant always goes unclaimed by everyone. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. Living Room Theaters.
epic parade of talking heads from Noam Chomsky and Thom Hartmann to Howard Zinn and Desmond Tutu. The high point is watching Shadyac control the energy field of a petri dish full of yogurt with his feelings about his lawyer. KELLY CLARKE. Broadway.
I Am
Insidious
29 After Hollywood director Tom
Shadyac developed suicidal leanings while suffering from “post concussion syndrome,” he set out to heal himself and simultaneously figure out the fundamental problems of the entire world. That would seem a tall order for the man who directed Ace Ventura, Bruce Almighty and The Nutty Professor. But being responsible for Patch Adams apparently garnered him access to a lot of respected brains, yielding an unfocused documentary featuring an
NEW
Homegrown DocFest
[ONE NIGHT ONLY, DIRECTORS ATTENDING] A new batch of films from NW Documentary students; subjects include a lady on an electric motorcycle and LGBT love for Barbie dolls. Mission Theater. 7 pm Friday, April 22.
Hop
38 Unlike his homeboy and fellow childhood-greed enthusiast Kris Kringle (who has had to deal with everything from Martians to Vince Vaughn), the Easter Bunny has remained relatively untouched on the silver screen. With Hop, the rabbit is front and center in the form of E.B., the heir to the Easter Bunny dynasty. This being a big studio project, E.B. is a flannel-sporting, jellybean-crapping slacker voiced by Russell Brand. At least Hop doesn’t teach us the “true meaning” of Easter—a CGI zombie messiah would really scare the shit out of the kids. PG. AP KRYZA. 99 West Drive-In, Cornelius, Oak Grove, Cinema 99, Broadway, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Mall, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.
NEW The Human Resources Manager
72 The Human Resources Manager begins as a film of cynical, comic savagery; a young Romanian worker at Israel’s second-largest bakery is killed in a suicide bombing, but is kept on ice by a local newspaper so they can savage the bakery in print for not even noticing she was dead. The titular human resources manager (played by Mark Ivanir with caustic sadness worthy of House, M.D.) must then bury the woman in her homeland for the sake of PR, except that no one in Romania seems to want the body. The latter
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OIL, BIRD AND WATER: The very dirty pelican.
SAVING PELICAN 895 One greasy bird with a very human story.
Local documentary filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky often captures stories of small human triumphs in the face of adversity—an Indian polio victim’s effort to immunize slums against the disease in the Oscarnominated The Final Inch; and her own parents’ struggle after receiving cochlear implant surgery following a lifetime of deafness in the Sundance Audience Award-winning Hear and Now. The star of her latest work, the 40-minute HBO documentary Saving Pelican 895, is not a person at all—it’s a gawky young brown pelican covered in petroleum from last year’s BP oil spill. The film almost entirely ignores the story of the spill itself, the politics, the workers and the disgraced company behind the cleanup effort, focusing instead on the day-to-day minutiae of getting one bird—one of thousands rescued—oil-free and ready to return to the wild. No pointing of fingers, no depressing montages, no preachy diatribes from sanctimonious celebrities. They didn’t even pick a particularly adorable animal. And yet by telling the small story of just one ugly bird, the film brilliantly highlights the magnitude of the tragedy. We see the time, money, dedication and manpower it takes just to save Pelican 895—just washing him is a delicate, daylong, multiperson process; teaching him to eat takes weeks—and multiply it by the 894 pelicans who came before him, the hundreds who came after, the thousands every year affected by spills we don’t even hear about. Speaking at the doc’s opening night in Portland, Brodsky admitted she was very lucky 895 pulled through—only about 1,250 of the 8,200 birds rescued survived—since he was the only one the crew followed. With those kind of figures, it’s easy to wonder whether it really matters if 895 lived or died at all. “Populations are made up of individuals, and if you start looking at individuals as not important, then ultimately, the population becomes not important,” says one of the rescue workers, as they scrub every speck of grease from between 895’s claws. And sure enough, when that ugly, bratty bird spreads its wings and flies free for the first time, you could almost hear the audience squeal with delight. Even my cynical little heart melted a bit. It’s a human thing. RUTH BROWN.
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65 Best things first: I see no reason
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30 If you cast your eyes downward, you should see letters P and G and number 13 all bolded there. That should probably tell you everything you need to know about how “horrific” the latest horror flick from the Aussie duo behind Saw (and Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI and Saw 3-D), Leigh Whannell and James Wan, really is. Allegedly, they were trying to create Poltergeist for a new generation. If I—a fully
Hanna
why every movie shouldn’t be filmed in a rusting, abandoned German amusement park. East Berlin’s Spreepark does wonders for the final act of director Joe Wright’s Hanna, which includes some jaw-dropping visuals—including Cate Blanchett walking down train tracks that emerge from the moldering jaw of a giant wolf. If there were an Oscar for location scouting, Hanna would be the 2011 front-runner; as it is, the eerie moonscapes throughout the film (Finnish ice floes, orange-tiled Berlin subway stations, granite military compounds under the Moroccan desert) help compensate for a script that feels a little too eager to be a punky parable. PG-13. AARON MESH. CineMagic, Cinetopia, Cornelius, Oak Grove, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville.
That’s all folks!
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85 SEE IT: Saving Pelican 895 premieres on HBO at 9 pm Wednesday, April 20. For more on Gulf spill documenting, see page 18.
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
47
MOVIES
APRIL 20-26 because you’re disgusting and you don’t care. If you’re not already hip to this twisted universe, how do you feel about a man showing his bloody vaginal growth to his mutant daughter? You like? See this. You don’t? What’s wrong with you? CHRIS STAMM. Clinton Street Theater. 7 and 9 pm Friday-Thursday, April 22-28.
COURTESY OF PIFF
Movie reviews, showtiMes and brew views: wweek.coM
NEW
No Eres Tu, Soy Yo
The romantic misadventures of a Mexican cardiologist. Not screened for critics. Look for a review on wweek.com. PG-13. Fox Tower.
Of Gods and Men
87 A deeply serious study of devo-
MUTANT Photo GIRLS caption SQUAD tk
summer of mesh Movie reviews, showtiMes and brew views: wweek.coM
grown adult—had trouble understanding the flimsy and nonsensical internal logic of Insidious (even with 100 excruciatingly plodding minutes to figure it out), I can only imagine how today’s generation of Ritalin-popping instant-gratificationseeking teens would fare. About one tedious hour in, you won’t even care; you’ll just be praying for someone, anyone, to get brutally dismembered. Which, irony of ironies, you know they won’t, because it’s…. PG13. RUTH BROWN. Cornelius, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Mall, Tigard.
Jane Eyre
77 A word of warning for fans of
sweeping period romances: This is not the Jane Eyre you are looking for. Young director Cary Fukunaga and screenwriter Moira Buffini pull everything dark out of Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel and unleash it in all its gothic glory on the big screen. Although this version chops vast swaths of the original text, it is, in many ways, a much truer adaptation than most of the 5 trillion others, which have tended to polish away the characters’ rough edges— including casting inordinately goodlooking stars to play characters who repeatedly talk about how ugly they are. Really, most of the characters in the original novel are assholes—ugly assholes—and Fukunaga doesn’t shy away from that. PG-13. RUTH BROWN. Fox Tower. NEW Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
64 If Donnie Yen looks familiar rocking a black leather getup— complete with Kato mask—and howling like a deranged chicken while beating asses in the name of Chinese nationalism, there’s a damn good reason. The titular character of Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen is the Philip Marlowe of kung fu cinema, having been played by Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury, Jet Li in Fist of Legend and Yen himself in a television series. Legend of the Fist picks up where Lee’s film left off, with a presumed-dead Chen doling out justice in Japanese-occupied Shanghai by taking various aliases, including a mustachioed nightclub owner and a masked avenger. When the fists are flying, it’s a kinetic joy, with the remarkably skilled Yen (the terrific Ip Man) channeling Bruce Lee and laying waste to hordes of baddies in jazz clubs, trenches, alleyways and a dojo. The action scenes are bombastic—particularly a jawdropping opening war sequence and the climactic melee. But director Andrew Lau, the man behind the great Infernal Affairs (later remade as The Departed), thrusts too many double-crosses and subplots into a film where the only necessary dialogue consists of “get him” and screams of agony. AP KRYZA. Hollywood Theatre.
Limitless
PublishesJune 15, 2011sPace ReseRvation & MateRials DueThurs., June 9 @ 4pm
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48
Willamette Week APRIL 20, 2011, wweek.com
71 Bradley Cooper’s handsomeness has always carried a whiff of the disingenuous—he’s to the douchebag manor born—but that works for him in a role where he’s smart, sleazy and more than a little
pathetic: a junkie whose fix actually does cure all his problems. Trading on his addicted amorality, the movie becomes a momentarily perceptive satire of unchecked capitalism as literal vampirism. PG-13. AARON MESH. Cinetopia, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Bridgeport, Division, Tigard, Sandy.
The Lincoln Lawyer
67 Matthew McConaughey is a
lawyer who rides around in the back of a black Lincoln Continental with the custom license plate “NTGUILTY.” The movie is NTGOOD, exactly, but it’s NTBAD, either. A sub-Grisham potboiler, its characterizations and atmosphere are secondhand, but the courtroom machinations of its plot are enjoyably convoluted. R. AARON MESH. Bridgeport, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Tigard. NEW
The Lives of Others
85 [ONE NIGHT ONLY, REVIVAL]
Spying on people can make you crazy—anybody who’s ever spent a little too much time on Facebook knows that. So it’s no surprise that when spying is your job, you turn weird. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is the best there is at his job. He’s also decidedly odd: a tense, quiet man with tunnel-vision eyes and a flat, unbending line of a mouth. Wiesler works for the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. It’s 1984, five years before the Berlin Wall crumbles, though everything in the film, even the air, looks old and shabby. The Oscar-winning 2007 film, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (quite the name, that), works on all kinds of levels: as a romance, a thriller, a grim portrait of an oppressive regime. But thanks to Mühe’s heartbreaking performance, it’s most memorable as a study of a lonely untermensch, exploited and broken by the system he’s devoted his life to preserving. R. BECKY OHLSEN. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Thursday, April 21. NW School of Film instructor Holly Brix will introduce the film. NEW
Mutant Girls Squad
76 [ONE WEEK ONLY] “My belly
sword’s got a hard-on,” says a man with an erect belly sword in this gleefully deranged gorefest helmed by Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura and Tak Sakaguchi, who each get about 30 minutes to do their worst. By which I mean best. By which I mean I am happy that evolution gave me eyeballs with which to admire such Pez-hued spew. If you’re familiar with the surreal bloodletting perpetrated by Iguchi and Nishimura in Tokyo Gore Police, Machine Girl and RoboGeisha, you know what you’re in for: exploding noggins, ass chainsaws, suppurating man-boob efflorescences, and various other ludicrous body modifications indebted to Mortal Kombat and Garbage Pail Kids and almost wholly severed from narrative reason. And if you’re wondering how Mutant Girls Squad stacks up against its splatter-happy progenitors, well, do you think you’d be able to tell the difference between your child’s guts on a canvas and Jackson Pollock’s guts on a canvas? No,
tion and doubt as experienced by a brotherhood of French monks whose quiet lives of prayer and community service (and a whole lot of puttering in the garden) are threatened by the Algerian Civil War. Director Xavier Beauvois evinces a deep and abiding reverence for the deliberate rhythms of ritual—the film is, at times, as slow as a Communion line at Lourdes—and although I don’t think I’ll be buying any of the Lord’s bullpucky anytime soon, Of Gods and Men builds to an affirmation of faith so stunningly transcendent that I emerged from the theater with some understanding of how grace might feel, and I liked it. PG-13. CHRIS STAMM. Living Room Theaters. NEW
Potiche
[54] Catherine Deneuve takes the reins of the factory run by her piggish husband (Fabrice Luchini). It makes umbrellas. Yep, as in Cherbourg. François Ozon’s winking, 1977-set gender skirmish is painted in the Technicolors of Demy’s musical, though it also looks a lot like the set of The Brady Bunch. The title roughly means “trophy wife,” but the exact translation is “vase”—indeed, interior decoration and wardrobe steal the show, with a shaggy green telephone earning a big laugh. Speaking of cherished heirlooms: Here comes Gérard Depardieu, growing more adorable the more he resembles the Muppet Sweetums. Ozon bases his pastiche on a 1980 boulevard farce and, yeah, I can see how the scene of Luchini’s wife and mistress chanting his name so it rhymes with “asshole” would have killed on community-theater stages across France. It’s certainly stagy. Potiche loosens up a bit in its second half, with a Sturges-worthy joke involving La Deneuve and a long-haul trucker. Maybe the farce could stand to be a bit more acidic and a lot less mellow; maybe that’s my old anti-middlebrow reflex acting up again. I shouldn’t be hypocritical: If Potiche were an episode of That ’70s Show, I’d probably be more enthusiastic. It could use a laugh track. AARON MESH. Fox Tower. NEW
Queen of the Sun
80 [DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER
ATTENDING] In 2006, half of America’s bees abandoned their hives. The technical term is “colony collapse disorder,” but it’s pretty much bee genocide. And when we kill bees, we sting ourselves in the process. Queen of the Sun, the vivid new documentary from Portlanders Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz (the same team behind The Real Dirt on Farmer John) packs a wealth of disturbing and delightful info nuggets about these buzzing harbingers of doom in less than 90 minutes. There is even a 70-year-old French bee historian who likes to tickle his bees with his bushy, blond Gene Shalit mustache (“See? Zey like it!”). It’s all a little overwhelming, but, then again, so is the level of destruction that industrialized agriculture has wrought on these insects in the past few decades. If anything, Queen of the Sun forces us to stop and question the swarm around us—both human and insect—before it’s too late. KELLY CLARKE. Hollywood Theatre. Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz will attend on Friday, April 22.
APRIL 20-26
82 If there’s a criticism to lob at Gore Verbinski’s wildly entertaining existentialist cartoon Western, it’s that he made an existentialist cartoon Western aimed at kids. Ninety-five percent of the stuff that makes Rango so fun is going to be lost on its target demographic, unless Chinatown (from which it cribs part of its plot) and Sergio Leone flicks have suddenly become popular among grade schoolers. PG. MATTHEW SINGER. 99 Indoor Twin, Tigard, Sandy.
Rio
63 The new Fox cartoon begins with a Busby-Berkeley-in-Brazil number, a computer-choreographed cavalcade of tropical feathers. But then Man Is in the Rain Forest, and Rio never regains that first kinetic burst—it’s grounded by the story of Blu (an amusingly fussy vocal turn by Jesse Eisenberg), a macaw endangered by poaching and his own domestic timidity, which has left him unable to fly. His crisis is a transparent case of performance anxiety; his ladybird friend (Anne Hathaway) is not very understanding. The mismatched pair are imperiled by plasticine humans and an embittered, cannibalistic excaberet-idol cockatoo (Jemaine Clement, continuing his habit of making his own separate, better movie in the middle of the movie paying his bills) who brags of his wicked deeds in Rio’s only memorable song: “I poop on people and I blame it on seagulls.” Other music bears an unfortunate and unmistakable Black Eyed Peas influence; will.i.am and Jamie Foxx play songbirds, and it is worth noting that will.i.am puts in considerably more effort. Overall, it’s hard to watch a cartoon toucan without thinking he’s selling you cereal. But this one is voiced by George Lopez, and he’s selling Latino libido and the joys of species procreation. That just means more little CGI birds get made, and I didn’t mind that. I’m only human—I like artificial colors and flavors. G. AARON MESH. Cinetopia, Cornelius, Pioneer Place, Lake Twin Moreland Oak Grove, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Lloyd Mall, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville.
Rubber
79 Right off the bat, director
Quentin Dupieux establishes the knowingly ridiculous story that is to follow, the tale of a tire that rises from the sand and, after a quick voyage of self-discovery, realizes it has the ability to telekinetically make things explode, especially people’s heads. What unfolds is a thrill-kill road flick akin to The Devil’s Rejects or Natural Born Killers. Except the killer is a tire. It’s an absolute blast, thanks in large part to the soundtrack, crafted by Dupieux’s alter ego, Euro house musician Mr. Oizo. The musical choices, and Dupieux’s commitment to presenting a grindhouse riff with tongue practically impaling cheek, make Rubber an instant gonzo classic. With redneck cops in full pursuit (“Is he black?” one even asks), he becomes rather sympathetic. Like any desert traveler, all the tire really wants is to relax in a hotel room and watch NASCAR— and if anyone interrupts his R&R, it’s their brain matter at stake. R. AP KRYZA. Hollywood Theatre.
Scream 4
Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette are back, possibly because they have nothing else to do. Not screened for critics. R. Cinetopia, Cornelius, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Fox Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy. NEW
Secret Sunshine
88 [TWO NIGHTS ONLY] It might
not be fair to mention that, about a third of the way through Secret Sunshine, something very bad happens to widowed mom Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) and her kindergar-
ten-aged son Jun (Seon Jung-yeop). But those first 45 minutes are so unsettled, and director Lee Changdong’s foreshadowing so insistent, that you might as well be prepared. (If you caught Chang-dong’s Poetry at this year’s PIFF—or Bong Joonho’s Mother at last year’s PIFF—you know that innocent children don’t make it out of recent South Korean first acts unscathed.) It’s only after the tragedy that the 2007 movie really comes alive, anyway. Shin-ae takes up a neighbor’s offer to attend a Christian church, and Chang-dong immediately captures the unnerving, urgent and catharitic undercurrents of a charismatic service: the endless keyboard music and the sudden eruption of wails from the bottom of someone’s gut. It might
not be fair to say where Secret Sunshine goes from there, but it ranks as the fiercest portrait of hungry faith and violent repudiation since Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture. It is more gentle, but its tonal shifts are abrupt and fascinating, with a grand comedic ballast provided by Song Kang-ho (The Host) as a persistent suitor whose mother calls to tell him he’s a loser...on his birthday. Chang-dong evidences real affection for these characters, but he takes them where their natures, and luck, compel. It might not be fair. It might not be fair. AARON MESH. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Saturday and 4 and 7 pm Sunday, April 23-24.
THE RETURN OF CHEN ZHEN LEGENDOFTHEFIST.COM
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s dumbbell-weight parable about the heroism of selfishness, has always struck me as petulant pseudophilosophy: the political equivalent of Eric Cartman screwing you guys and going home. Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t make a good film, or at least a secretly alluring one: Movies with an upsetting viewpoint can be invigorating, and much of cinema’s allure is its flaunting of profane pleasures, so why not try infinite pride? (Rand has never really been about greed, but disgust with everyone else in society.) But this jerry-built project doesn’t plunge us into Randland so much as assume we’ve been marinating in this bizarro world for half a century: Villainous characters say things like “I’m giving the money to the less fortunate” with the same mustache-twirling sneer traditionally reserved for “I’m going to burn down the orphanage and build condominiums over the dead babies’ bodies.” In Atlas Shrugged: Part I’s dystopia of layabouts and do-gooders, there’s a tough white lady CEO (mannequin-like Taylor Schilling) negotiating with a steely white dude CEO (Grant Bowler), who makes blue steel under the hilarious name of Rearden, and demands people tell him how good his steel is. (For a film so obsessed with merit, it is markedly incompetent: When Schilling stands to berate a union boss, her ferocity is somewhat undermined by her chic business shirt having ridden up, leaving her midriff exposed like she’s going clubbing.) Meantime, the nation is suffering from an Invasion of the Rich White CEO-Snatchers; the best and brightest middle managers are being whisked away by a man in a raincoat who sounds like Rorschach. At stake: high-speed trains, and the big government that wants to keep high-speed trains from happening. Because if there’s one thing success-hating liberals have never proposed, it’s high-speed trains. Leaving aside the rather transparent hypocrisies here, Part I is incredibly boring because it feels most like a gathering of Young Republicans at a Milton Friedman summer camp—the overwhelming emotion (from the script and direction; the actors convey no emotions) is the verge-of-tears frustration of people with a desperate need to confirm to each other that they are the best at being smart and great, and everyone else is lazy and stupid. And if all the lazy and stupid people don’t tell them how smart and great they are, they will go away. Well, if it’s so important to you: You’re amazing, and Rearden steel is the steeliest steel in the steelworks. Now will you please still go away? PG-13. AARON MESH. Tea party on the Ayn Rand Express.
SEE IT: Atlas Shrugged: Part I opened last Friday at Fox Tower and Bridgeport, and continues this week. It was not screened for critics. We reviewed it anyway. 27
STARTS FRIDAY HOLLYWOOD THEATRE APRIL 22nd
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NOT SCREENED FOR CRITICS
ATLAS SHRUGGED: PART I
ASS-kIckIng!” DONNIE YEN SHU QI
CONT. on page 50
TITANS OF WOODEN ACTING: Grant Bowler and Taylor Schilling.
“An AvALAnche oF - Devin Faraci, BADASS DIgeST
AT L A S S H R U G G E D PA R T 1 . C O M
Rango
MOVIES
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Soul Surfer
Hamilton is basically a genderswitched 127 Hours, except she gets her arm stuck in a shark. Soul Surfer is also Dennis Quaid quoting Bible verses and Carrie Underwood trying to explain the mysterious ways of God—schmaltz for Jesus. If you know the premise coming in, the early bits are filled with unintentional humor: There’s little Bethany (wholesome AnnaSophia Robb) playing ukulele...for now! The movie teases with underwater cameras in that coy, post-Jaws way, but when the shark attack occurs, it’s absurdly abrupt and somehow funnier than anything that came before. But what comes after, complete with unpersuasive hide-the-limb CGI, is the comedy of the year. There’s a scene in which the family is about to eat dinner, but Bethany reminds them they need to say grace first, but when they start to hold hands, she can’t hold hands, because she doesn’t have a hand. That sort of thing. PG. AARON MESH. Cornelius, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Lloyd Mall, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.
EXCELS!” ELLE MAGAZINE
“A NEW
AMERICAN CLASSIC.” TIME
“FINELY CHISELED.” ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“INTRIGUING
AND BEAUTIFUL.” EYE FOR FILM
CUTOFF
Source Code
93 The director Duncan Jones must
understand the desire to recapture a fleeting experience: His alonewith-my-clone movie Moon was one of the handful of films in recent years to develop a devoted cult following, and he has returned to the same theme of multiple lives for a larger-scale sophomore feature, Source Code. Lightning has struck twice: Source Code is the best science-fiction film since Moon, and may prove the finest picture of this year. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a soldier transported, via some mysterious computer program, into a sensory recording of the final eight minutes before a blast ripped apart a Chicago commuter line. He wakes up inside a soon-to-be-victim’s body, next to a fellow passenger (Michelle Monaghan) understandably perplexed by his alarm, and has 480 seconds to identify the perpetrator before fire and pain whisk him back to the metal pod where he reports his data to cold superiors (Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) who digitally deploy him again. You shouldn’t know more than that going in; he doesn’t. PG-13. AARON MESH. Cinetopia, Oak Grove, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Lloyd Mall, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.
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Sucker Punch
29 Well, at least we now know that
Zack Snyder thinks about more than oiled-up Spartan warriors while wanking. PG-13. AP KRYZA. Broadway.
Food & drink 2 COL. (3.772") x 7"
OSCILLOSCOPE
Super
58 Super plays like a geek-chic Taxi
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BREW VIEWS
25 The true story of Bethany
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Driver, if Martin Scorsese couldn’t decide whether the Schrader script was some kind of sick joke, and if he superimposed the killing of Sport with cartoon balloons reading “BANG!” and “POW!” Like Travis Bickle, Rainn Wilson’s Frank is lonely, insomniac and paranoid, with a fixation on saving a woman from predators she may prefer to him. Unlike Travis, Frank wears a bright-red jumpsuit and a mask. There’s about an hour of patience-testing, smug and ugly filler, the kind of superior comedy that asks us to laugh at “the Crimson Bolt” driving around in a Buick beater and thwacking miscreants (a weed dealer, a pedophile, a guy who cuts in line at the movies) over the head with a giant wrench. But in its final 15 minutes, Super makes a leap from violence into ultraviolence—and becomes harder to dismiss. As in 2006’s overlooked Slither, Gunn proves himself adroit with gore, and applies it liberally. We’re talking about the kind of staved-in heads and spilled innards most associated with ’70s exploitation reels; I really can’t remember a recent mainstream picture with such
FLASHDANCE
WE NEED A MONTAGE: Taking movie karaoke to its logical conclusion, the ’80s Movie Anthem Sing-Along cuts out the pesky interruptions of dialogue and plot: It’s one long string of synth-heavy bombast. Compiled by the Alamo Drafthouse, the reel is incredibly comprehensive—Flashdance, Goonies, Short Circuit 2—though most of the songs are not shown in their original context; instead, they’re either the official music video or a newly assembled montage from the film. So Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby” plays over Fast Times at Ridgemont High scenes of Jennifer Jason Leigh uncomfortably being somebody’s baby, then deciding not to have somebody’s baby. Still, you know: “Eye of the Tiger,” everybody! AARON MESH. Hollywood Theatre, 7:30 pm Tuesday, April 26. Best paired with: Lagunitas A Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ Ale. Also showing: The Man With the Golden Gun (Laurelhurst).
a queasy-making level of brutality. It isn’t enough to make me admire the movie, exactly, but it is evidence that something is redeemed through bloodshed, anyway. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. 7 pm Friday-Thursday, April 22-28. 1:30 pm SaturdaySunday, April 23-24.
ence redeems a lot: His blond shag of hair, long face and collected indifference recall Sean Penn’s Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. R. AARON MESH. Bridgeport, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center.
Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family
52 While most teens studiously eye second base in coming-ofage films, Winter in Wartime’s protagonist finds his allegiance torn between family members and aiding the Resistance in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands of 1945. Said Nazis are what we’ve come to expect in cinema: high-cheekboned caricatures of jackals, vultures and various other scavengers. Unfortunately, much of the film is just as routine and clichéd. It’s as workmanlike as a long bike ride in the snow—of which we witness many. JUDGE BEAN. R. Broadway.
NEW
Tyler Perry puts on the wig again, to deal with a health crisis of some kind. Not screened for critics. Look for a review on wweek.com. PG13. Cornelius, Bridgeport, Division, Lloyd Mall. NEW
Uncut Enter the Void
[ONE WEEK ONLY] Chris Stamm’s favorite movie of 2010, now with 20 additional minutes of drug freakouts! Cinema 21. 8:45 pm FridayThursday, April 22-28. 3:30 pm Saturday-Sunday, April 23-24. NEW
Water for Elephants
Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon fall in love. With an elephant. Not screened by WW press deadlines; look for a review on wweek.com. PG-13. Cinetopia, Cornelius, Lake Twin, Living Room Theaters, Oak Grove, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.
Win Win
81 In Tom McCarthy’s redoubtable indie film, Paul Giamatti plays Mike, a New Jersey elder law attorney and high-school wrestling coach who volunteers to become guardian for senile client Leo (Burt Young, very touching in the role), mostly so he can deposit the old man in the nursing home he dreads, then pocket the state checks. This is a venal sin, but a really shitty one. Mike’s bad deed is rewarded with the arrival of Leo’s laconic runaway grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer), who turns out to be a champion highschool wrestler. This is perhaps one coincidence too many for the movie to bear, but Shaffer’s pres-
Winter in Wartime
Your Highness
28 “Kenny Powers goes medieval.” That’s probably how Your Highness star and co-writer Danny McBride pitched this stoner fairytale, which essentially transplants his foulmouthed dickhead ballplayer from HBO’s Eastbound & Down into Middle Earth and sends him on a quest for redemption. Alongside James Franco and the tightly corseted bosoms of Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel, it sounds like a can’t-lose proposition. What gives? Not a lot of effort, that’s for sure. No one involved seems willing to expend much energy toward actually making the film worthwhile. Three-fourths of the jokes are rooted in what I can only assume is an old improv comedy axiom: “If you can’t think of anything funny to say, just say ‘fuck.’” And the other 25 percent involve a severed Minotaur cock. R. MATTHEW SINGER. Forest, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Cinema 99, Bridgeport, Division, Evergreen, Lloyd Center, Sherwood, Tigard, Wilsonville, Sandy.