Year: 2016

Progressive Poptimists

Stockholm’s Miike Snow

Music
Miike Snow

Bloodshy & Avant, the production duo that takes up two-thirds of Stockholm’s Miike Snow, are known as some of the most forward-thinking producers in pop.  Their songs with Britney Spears — including the epochal “Toxic” and the Bridesmaids-immortalized “I’ve Just Begun” — are still head-scratchers even in today’s postmodern pop landscape. One would think that in their own band, free of the commercial expectations of writing for the world’s biggest stars, Bloodshy & Avant would let their ideas go completely off the chain.  Continue reading →

A Walk in Needle Park

On the eve of the Whiteaker Block Party, a look at the rise and fall of the neighborhood’s Scobert Gardens

News
Scobert Gardens Park

Bob Emmons looks like he wants to spit. Standing on sun-scorched grass in Scobert Gardens Park, Emmons is hardly able to endure the blighted landscape, littered with empty beer cans, cigarette packs and pizza boxes. Shoeless daysleepers stretch out flat in swaying blots of shade. Summer breezes tumbleweed a plastic grocery bag across the dusty lawn and leave it at his feet.  “It’s painful to see,” he says. Continue reading →

David Rosen

I like to tell stories and jokes

Happening People
David Rosen

A physician, a psychiatrist and a Jungian analyst, Dr. David Rosen spent 25 years in College Station, Texas, where he held the McMillan Professorship in Analytical Psychology at Texas A&M University. When he retired in 2011, Rosen moved to Eugene, a city he had first visited six years earlier. “I house sat for someone on Crest Drive and worked on a book,” he explains. “I enjoyed Eugene.”  Continue reading →

The Eugene Ballet Company (EBC) has received a $200,000 grant from the Richard P. Haugland Foundation

Dance
Lane Community College student Tristan Giannini performs a repertory piece by Merce Cunningham.

Hear ye, hear ye: EW’s annual dance issue is slated for September and we want your dance listings including date, time, location, cost and genre. Please send dance listings to alex@eugeneweekly.com with “Dance Listings” in the email subject line by Aug. 15. The Eugene Ballet Company (EBC) has received a $200,000 grant from the Richard P. Haugland Foundation, as well as $40,000 from the Hult Endowment, to create a new work: Move over Elsa, here comes The Snow Queen — premiering April 2017.  Continue reading →

Breaking Vows Beneath the Stars

Free Shakespeare in the Park brings Love’s Labour’s Lost to Amazon Park

Theater
Lydia reynolds (left), Stephanie McCall and Isabella Lay in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

The passion of a young scholar knows no bounds. In the pursuit of knowledge, the King of Navarre and his best friends swear a sacred vow to renounce sleep, wine and even women for three years as they engage solely in educating themselves.  Then the witty Princess of France and her ladies in waiting arrive at the court of Navarre to negotiate a land dispute. Mayhem ensues. Continue reading →

Freedom Versus Bondage

VLT presents the not-so-oddball You Can’t Take It with You

Theater

Central to the comic tension of You Can’t Take It With You is a fairly routine dichotomy that, perhaps by its very nature, remains forever unresolved, and which best might be summed up thus: freedom versus bondage. Of course, freedom and bondage have been at war since before Socrates whispered in Plato’s ear and Jesus put a shellacking on the Pharisees, but in this country we like to imagine capitalism invented the eternal conflict between vile materialism and spiritual liberation — in other words, Wall Street versus Main Street. Continue reading →