We've got issues.
Staff writer for Eugene Weekly, Rick Levin been airing his grievances in newspapers for the better part of two decades.
Send Shakespeare to the moon. Put him in the middle of Nazi Germany, the antebellum South, the Prague Spring, the Whiteaker Block Party. The miracle of Shakespeare’s plays, and the iambic mechanics of their impossible flexibility, is that wherever you set them, Shakespeare more or less remains Shakespeare — even in Castro’s Cuba. Continue reading
photos by trask bedortha In theater as in life, timing is everything, though just showing up is a good start. And at the Healing Trauma Project on Coburg Road, where performers have been rehearsing in anticipation of its Feb. 7 show at Wildish Theater, the cast of Transformational Personal Theatre has definitely shown up, in itself a small miracle. These are people who, all things being equal, might not have shown up at all. Continue reading
I’ve been to hundreds of movies over the years, but I’ve never experienced anything remotely like the solemnity that settled over the audience at the end of Clint Eastwood’s latest film, American Sniper. Absolute quiet. Not a person rose to leave. It wasn’t until the real-life footage of the memorial motorcade for murdered Navy SEAL Chris Kyle bled into a stream of rolling credits that the souls in that movieplex rose, still in silence, and filed out like a funeral procession. Continue reading
Eugene foodies were out in full force Sunday, Jan. 18, as patrons gathered to enjoy “Oaxaca,” the third collaboration dinner put on by Party Downtown and Belly. Upwards of 80 local folks attended this celebration of Mexican culture and cuisine, the brainchild of two of this town’s finest chefs, Belly’s Brendon Mahaney and Party’s Mark Kosmicki, both of whom put their considerable talents to task decking the tables with a delicious variety of authentic dishes inspired by the southern Mexican state known for, among other things, its mezcal and mole. Continue reading
No American playwright — and perhaps no playwright ever — was as adept as Tennessee Williams at pulling apart the icky, sticky tangle of hurt that one furiously guarded secret can exact on a family. In the humid atmosphere of a Williams play, a single skeleton in the closet can level an entire clan for generations down the line, by way of recrimination, jealousy, resentment, obsession, addiction and, most of all, fear. Shit gets ugly when we tamp down the truth. Continue reading
At the heart of most Hollywood films, from The Wizard of Oz to World War Z, is some perceived threat to the domestic tranquility of the nuclear family. Whether it’s a tsunami, invading aliens or a stampeding horde of zombies, the danger that rattles our cinematic daydreams is the impending chaos of social disintegration, and it typically befalls an unlikely hero (usually dad, sometimes mom) to suddenly acquire a spine and ward off the forces of evil. Continue reading
Who — or, rather, what — is the Babadook? And why is it that, once you let the Babadook in, you can never get rid of it? First and foremost, The Babadook is an Australian horror film by writer-director Jennifer Kent, a former actor who apprenticed with Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier during the making of his 2003 film Dogville before going on to make her own short film, Monster, upon which The Babadook is based. Continue reading
It’s a timeless literary trope, from Ecclesiastes to Groundhog Day: A cynical man, mired in despair and the funk of worldly resentments, is confronted with the error of his ways to such an extent that he undergoes an immediate and permanent transformation, emerging from darkness into light. Such victories of the spirit are the epitome of happily ever after, and we never tire of their telling. Continue reading
A good friend of mine in Seattle — an Eritrean immigrant who helped pen that country’s as yet unratified constitution — once pointed out that, should I really want to understand the collision of race and politics in the U.S., read the sports pages. I figured he was being coy, but the more I think about it, the more I comprehend sports as a microcosm of society, where all sorts of racial and social tensions play out, often in the subterranean codes of privilege, ability and competition. Continue reading
Seattle in the ’90s was the kingdom of super fuzz and big muff, as greasy-haired white boys in skinny jeans crunched out Neanderthalic riffs like The Kinks on horse ludes. It was a glorious time, full of sound and fury, signifying Sub Pop Records. Iggy was god. Everyone was touching each other and getting sick. And through all that nevermind noise, this beardy old dude with a froggy voice and clangy guitar continued to ply his strange old-timey stylings, laying down this wonky-doodle groove that was like a surreal vaudeville patter horned through the swordfish trombone. Continue reading