We've got issues.
Staff writer for Eugene Weekly, Rick Levin been airing his grievances in newspapers for the better part of two decades.
You’re living in a sleepy, shitty, cozy little town and, suddenly, everything changes. It seems to happen overnight, like some bent fairy tale: The restaurants get way better, the drugs improve, coffee shops sprout on every corner, yippies start yammering about gentrification and yesterday’s wine, bourgeois hepcats from L.A. and Phoenix gallop in, now everyone’s either an artist or a suit or a fucking snake. Nostalgia hits the roof. Your rent spikes. Continue reading
First, the bad news: Cottage Theatre’s excellent production of David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning drama Proof ends its run this weekend, so you’ll have to scramble to get tickets. The good news, then, is that, should you land seats, you will be treated to one of the finest local productions of the year. Directed with a sure hand by Alan Beck and featuring a small cast of talented local actors, this production achieves an almost perfect balance of emotional resonance and technical finesse. The play is so engaging and moving, so rich and dynamic, it feels like a dream. Continue reading
The subject matter of Crystal Moselle’s new documentary The Wolfpack sounds like the premise for some creepy, postmodern young-adult novel: In Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the seven Angulo siblings — six teenaged brothers and a sister, with names like Govinda, Bhagavan and Krsna — have been raised in almost total confinement, held captive in a subsidized apartment by their paranoid-mystic father and dazed, abused mother. Continue reading
Used to be pot was just pot. Two dimes to the neighborhood hesher back in the day bought you a generic baggie of the giggle weed — that crispy, brown-green shake you’d smoke all afternoon without suffering anything other than the munchies. These days, however, smokers arriving fresh to the scene best beware: One hit of the modern chronic and you’ll figure you’ve dropped a hit of window pane, the way it splits your cerebellum and sends you galloping into the wonky-doodle. The shit’s strong, boy. Continue reading
A trillion monkeys typing for all eternity might eventually reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare, but it wouldn’t take them five minutes to bang out a turd like Jurassic World — a flat hash of a movie that, at every furiously empty gesture, fails to scale even the most vulgar logical requirements of crass entertainment. Exhibit one: In the middle of a pterodactyl attack, as hundreds of people are getting viciously tossed around and torn apart, two star-crossed lovers stop to share a passionate kiss. Continue reading
Had Yelawolf never elevated his game beyond the flush of his furious 2010 mixtape Trunk Muzik, which contained at least one bona-fide masterpiece in “Pop the Trunk,” he’d yet remain a significant footnote in the history of modern hip hop — an Alabama-born rapper of manic intensity and talent who gnawed his initials into the rusty proud husk of Southern culture on the skids of the 21st century. Continue reading
A fine and fascinating new documentary, Sunshine Superman provides an intimate portrait of the founder of a movement in which participants — perhaps I should say followers — commit protracted suicide in circus-like gestures that are public and grandiose and defiantly illegal. And for these gestures they are widely heralded as free-spirited heroes whose failed attempts to burst the bonds of human limitation are considered tragic evidence of their own greatness. Continue reading
Golfing is to sports what masturbation is to sex — a solitary endeavor that, no matter how vigorously you go at it, always ends up being about you and you alone, as you come face to face with your own failings in the universe as well as the measure of your stamina in overcoming them. I’ve been golfing, more or less vigorously, for years, and I’m sad to report that my game hasn’t improved one jot. It’s an existential dilemma. Golf, for me, is too often a good walk spoiled, just like people think Mark Twain said. So why walk? Continue reading
Nearly every situational comedy in the history of television — Three’s Company being the purest and most salient example — can trace its ancestry to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, which in turn divined its easy, effervescent form from the classical Aristotelian unities of action, time and place. Continue reading
Film has a long and fairly distinguished history of satirizing the insidious allure of televised celebrity — Being There, King of Comedy and To Die For come immediately to mind — and yet few films to date have captured the way our newly acquired addiction to selfies and social media is elevating narcissism to a collective pathology. Continue reading