Author: Rick Levin

The Kryptonite Factor

Sports

Sports are funny. If folks in this country cared half as much about the political process as they do about football, we’d all be living in some elegant utopia right now. Even casual sports fans can hold a civil, intelligent discussion about the pros and cons of the nickel defense, but bring up Obamacare and most of us degenerate into retrograde morons, hurling incoherent epithets at each other. Politics these days have become a nightmare, but football — it’s our religion. And that’s sad. Continue reading →

Orphan Saves the Day

Theater
Jenny Parks as Molly, Kenady Conforth as Annie and Tony Joyner as Daddy Warbucks

There’s something fuzzy and bittersweet about that old populist daydream of an adorable orphan so possessed by optimism that her mere presence can sand down the rough edges of a capitalist tycoon and compel an embattled president to launch the New Deal. If that’s not a political fairy tale for a bygone era, I don’t know what is. Continue reading →

Duck Talk

Sports

What a difference a weekend makes in the fickle, fanatical world of college football, where the panic and pandemonium of winning and losing wreck havoc with all cool reckonings. It’s all so hard to grasp, much less parse and parlay. A single game can overthrow the whole shebang, sending the number-crunchers scrambling for a new paradigm. Not all that far back, for instance, the wily bookmakers in Vegas suddenly scooted the Oregon Ducks to odds-on favorites for a national title, deeming UO’s chances at 9-2 (22 percent), just above Alabama’s 5-1 (20 percent). Continue reading →

The Powerful Play Goes On

Theater
Jonathan Thompson and Liv Burns in OCT’s I and You

As perhaps Eugene’s foremost purveyor of new theatrical works, artistic director Craig Willis at Oregon Contemporary Theatre (OCT) is a tireless advocate of the hidden gem, the offbeat barnburner, the unfamiliar fandango. For Willis, the hunt is always on. He spends many a weekend traveling hither and yon along the coast — to Portland, to Seattle — attending table reads and walk-throughs of new plays, all in dogged pursuit of something fresh and lively for audiences here in town. Continue reading →

The Horror Picture Show

Film

Something wicked this way comes, again, and just in time for Halloween: A witch’s brew of spooky, campy, gory and/or otherwise terrifying short films made lickety-split by aspiring auteurs right here in Eugene. Upwards of 35 teams have signed up for Eugene Film Society’s 72-Hour Horror Film Competition, which should make for a fun night of fright when Bijou Art Cinemas on 13th holds its “Audience Award” screenings of the top entrants at 8 and 10:30 pm, Oct. 31.  Continue reading →

No Exit

Film

Every war is a failure, of course, but for this country the Vietnam War signals something profoundly shameful and unappeased in our national fiber — a colossal moral fuck-up compounded by diplomatic arrogance and political deceit, in which a generation of Americans, and every generation thereafter, came to regard the government with a cynicism from which we have never recovered. Continue reading →

Radio Days

Fred Crafts’ Radio Redux moves to the Hult

Theater
On stage with Radio Redux

Once upon a time, families across this nation gathered around the radio at the appointed hour, eagerly awaiting the next installment of such classic shows as Gunsmoke, Superman, Burns and Allen or Arch Obler’s creepy Lights Out. This was the “Golden Age of Radio,” an era stretching roughly from the 1930s through the end of the Second World War, and it was no less vital for being cast now in an aura of quaint nostalgia. Continue reading →

Jesus U

Northwest Christian University talks faith, tolerance and higher purpose

Culture

Fronting Franklin Boulevard and cozied up like a cat against the much larger University of Oregon, the campus of Northwest Christian University has sat for well nigh 125 years as a curiosity to some and a beacon to others. What, after all, is a Christian university all about? Jesus himself was a peripatetic teacher, opting to wander the wilderness with his radical message of universal love and liberation from the false knowledge of the Pharisees. Continue reading →

The Making of a Quagmire

Steve Lyons’ play The Ghosts of Tonkin, about Wayne Morse and Vietnam, hits Eugene for one-night engagement

Theater
Greg Monahan as Sen. Wayne Morse and Gray Eubank as President Lyndon Johnson in The Ghosts of Tonkin

The Ghosts of Tonkin, a dramatic work about the Vietnam War by Bellingham, Washington-based playwright Steve Lyons, will show Sunday, Sept. 28, at Wildish Theatre. Lyon’s play is a behind-closed-doors investigation of the political maneuvering that led to the conflict, focusing on such historical figures as Robert McNamara, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson and Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, one of only two U.S. senators to vote against the war. I’ll start by playing devil’s advocate. Why do we need another dramatic work about Vietnam? Continue reading →