We've got issues.
Staff writer for Eugene Weekly, Rick Levin been airing his grievances in newspapers for the better part of two decades.
Now that Armageddon is actually breathing down our necks, it’s sort of cute to look back at all our quaint, fancy ideas about how the end might pan out — especially in movies, where post-apocalyptic scenarios are less a warning than an enticement to some grand new adventure where hunky good guys in steampunk rags wage war against evil fuckers in spiked hockey masks for the last drop of water, gas, food, etc. Continue reading
There was a time, not all that long ago, when writers could become cultural icons in this society — endangered emissaries who, like canaries in a coal mine, sniff out the poison seeping from the rank spigots of our popular culture. The late, great David Foster Wallace was such an author. Wallace’s prose, a kind of rococo thicket that belied deep veins of compassion and understanding, acted as a funhouse mirror reflecting back our malaise in a discursive, catch-all style that was frustrating, assaultive, revelatory and liberating, often all at once. Continue reading
Entering into the gloriously tattered tradition of strung-out criminal lit ranging from Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn to Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Seattle rocker turned author Danny Bland has written a novel that reads like a beastly scream into the dark mythology of ‘90s Seattle — a gilded wasteland where junkies reared on Iggy and Sabbath turned filthy power chords into gold and cosmonauts of the apocalypse pimped hip to the culture vultures. Continue reading
VLT casts Anne of the Thousand Days as a post-apocalyptic feminist tale of Tudor intrigue William Faulkner once suggested in an interview that the essential ingredients of any good drama are family, money and murder. This might help explain our ongoing obsession with the House of Tudor, those ingrown English monarchs whose rule included ample instances of greed, intrigue, betrayal and bloody battles for the rights of primogeniture. Continue reading
The Soromundi Lesbian Chorus of Eugene had its humble origins in the home of Eugene native Karm Hagedorn and her partner, Sheryl Bernheine. “We just wanted to sing with some folks,” Hagedorn says, recalling that, at first, the casual choir was just “six of us in our living room and, amazingly, it went from there.” Continue reading
Anyone who has dealt up close and personal with mental illness will tell you it can be an unmitigated hell — a black hole that devours solutions faster than they can be hatched. Families wrecked by schizophrenia and manic depression discover, all too quickly, that frustrated applications of love and discipline and pills and despair tend to come up empty in the face of a condition that, by its very definition, defies all reason. Continue reading
The Whiteaker Block Party will not be televised. As an annual expression of the contested soul of the Whit, the block party is a shot in the arm for the communal side of neighborhood living, in all its sloppy, carnal, artistic glory. It’s at the Whiteaker Block Party that seething, sweaty mobs — gawkers and gackers, locals and carpetbaggers, heps and asshats — coalesce in celebration of the creativity that springs up when a once-and-former slum becomes home to a ragtag coalition of beautiful losers. Continue reading
The documentary Cartel Land is about the Mexican drug trade in the same way Moby Dick is about a fish — nominally, symbolically, as a single point of contact in a tale so monstrously bloated with violence, corruption and thwarted desire that it baffles comprehension at every turn. Just when you think you have a bead on this film, it wriggles free of easy assessment, turning morality inside-out to such an extent that life itself becomes a blur of guilt and complicity, every hand bloody. Continue reading
At just 30 years of age, it’s a bit odd to speak of Eugene musician Halie Loren as a time-tested veteran of the trade, but so be it. With eight albums to her name, along with international accolades, industry awards and globe-hopping tours, this gifted singer-songwriter has built the sort of solid career any artist would find enviable — the result of equal parts guts, hard work and rare talent. Continue reading
Just a few weeks back on a hot Friday morning, I stood in a field with outgoing Oregon Country Fair general manager Charlie Ruff and his replacement, Tom Gannon, the three of us surveying the “New Area,” a 6-acre expanse that opens this year as a brand new part of the Fair’s general stomping grounds. Continue reading