Author: Rick Levin

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 →

Welcome to the Machine

Music
Dave Rawlings Machine

Among guitarists, if not across the wide world, Dave Rawlings is recognized as a stylist of the highest order, a folk traditionalist who is also a supreme innovator. For evidence of what this man can do with his 1935 arch-top Epiphone, witness “Revelator,” the first track on 2001’s Time (The Revelator) by singer and songwriter Gillian Welch, with whom Rawlings frequently collaborates. Continue reading →

Proof of Life

Film

At once uplifting and infuriating, Alive Inside is a new documentary that can’t help but tell two stories at once. On the one hand, this film is about Dan Cohen, a former social worker who some three years ago began bringing iPods loaded with music into nursing homes, where “patients” with dementia were suddenly awakened by the simple act of hearing the songs that once brought them joy. Continue reading →

Retreat from Reality

Film

I really, really, really want to tell you what happens in The One I Love, the smart and slithery new movie by director Charlie McDowell, but I can’t. To reveal the device at the center of this cinematic mind-fuck about a married couple on the skids and their surreal, disarming and ultimately transformative experiences during a weekend retreat suggested by their therapist would be tantamount to breaking the first rule of Fight Club (“Don’t talk about fight club”) or spilling the beans on Rosebud in Citizen Kane (it’s the sled). Continue reading →

Happy Days Are Here Again

Red Cane makes Much Ado about the red, white and blue

Theater
David Angier and Lizz Torrecillas in Much Ado About Nothing. Photo courtesy of Red Cane Theatre

The plays of Shakespeare are infinitely flexible, capable of being transported across time to various historic eras and transplanted into soils that are vastly different than those originally intended. Some adaptations work splendidly, others not so much: I’ve seen the Bard by turns relocated to late-20th-century Venice Beach, wedged wickedly into Nazi Germany and, not too long ago, given the hipster goose of modern Manhattan. Continue reading →

The Walk to Burning Man

Eugene artist Joe Mross and crew build a steam walker for the Nevada festival

Visual Arts
Photo by Trask Bedortha

For a man currently wedged between a rock and that proverbial hard place, Eugene artist Joe Mross appears surprisingly serene. Here’s the deal: Mross, a metalsmith and perhaps this town’s foremost purveyor of the steampunk aesthetic, has but a handful of days to complete the grandest and most ambitious project of his life thus far — a 5,000-plus lbs. metallurgic behemoth of rivets, Plexiglas, fabricated steel and sandblasted wood that must be trucked down and set up for Nevada’s legendary Burning Man festival by Aug. 25. Continue reading →

Our Man in Hamburg

Film

In what would become his final film role, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman inhabits a classic fictional persona, that of the downbeat institutional man. As Günther Bachmann, a career spy heading an anti-terrorism unit in Hamburg, Hoffman — who died in February of a heroin overdose — puts an ingenious modern spin on the existential anti-hero who, against all odds and caught up in a tangle of lies and deceit, tries to do the right thing. Continue reading →

The Power of Pop

Music
Huey Lewis and the News

I was pulling the Sam Spade act (à la The Maltese Falcon) last week, hovering over a slider and fries at the bowling alley up Hwy. 99 and watching some good-looking kids roll the rock. The place was damn near empty; just me, the kids and the gal at the counter spraying high-grade disinfectant into the guts of the smooth communal shoes.  Continue reading →

The Assassin

Film

Having all but walked away from movies in exhaustion and disgust after finishing his last full-length feature Killing Me, local writer-director Henry Weintraub now returns to the cinematic fold with The Assassin, a compact gem of shoestring filmmaking. Shot in digital black-and-white and devoid of dialogue, this surreal short film about a low-rent, grungy killer is in many ways a return to Weintraub’s roots in slam-bang, low-budget auteurism, and the joy he rediscovered in the endeavor shows in every frame. Continue reading →