We've got issues.
Staff writer for Eugene Weekly, Rick Levin been airing his grievances in newspapers for the better part of two decades.
Wednesday, Sept. 11: Wood chips and sawdust fly helter skelter from the grinding teeth of a chainsaw as Dutch artist Floris Brasser stands perched atop the massive trunk of a tree in the courtyard of New Day Bakery. This is not a demolition job. It is not some Paul Bunyan act, though Brasser is something of a tree whisperer. Continue reading
A pair of city slickers arrives in a podunk town. They’ve come to close the local saloon, which is financially strapped. The businessmen’s trip is something of a lark; though their mission is clandestine and cutthroat, they find the saloon, and the people in it, quaint and charming. One of the businessmen starts to fall for the saloon’s proprietress, a gorgeous, lovelorn woman with a stubborn streak. Drama ensues, and the whiskey flows. Fights erupt. Hearts collide. Continue reading
So just how juicy is the role of murderess Roxie Hart in the Tony-winning Broadway musical Chicago? “It’s very juicy,” says actor Paige Davis, who will be playing the homicidal vamp when the touring production stops for two shows Sept. 10 and 11 at Eugene’s Hult Center. “It’s been exceptionally juicy,” Davis adds. Continue reading
Eugene’s street community lost one of its own when Philip James Williams — affectionately known by many as Pip — died Aug. 4 of a heroin overdose. He was 25. An evening memorial service and public celebration of life was held Aug. 28 at Kesey Square in downtown Eugene, where upwards of 100 people gathered to share remembrances. Over a public address system set up on the red bricks, friends, family and members of the city’s transient population spoke with emotion into a single microphone, sharing their recollections and grief. Continue reading
Against my strongest instincts, I will resist saying too much, or anything too fancy, about Fruitvale Station, the excellent new movie based on the 2009 New Year’s shooting of a young black man by a security guard on San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit line. When a critic encounters anything of this rarefied quality, it’s best just to get out of the way. The film is that good. It is art of the highest caliber. It speaks for itself. It has the power to break your heart. Continue reading
Perhaps, like Bauhaus furniture or the beauty of shallow people, Stanley Kubrick’s movies are meant to be admired but not loved. Kubrick, who died in 1999 at the age of 70, was a master stylist, a director whose films are as quickly identifiable as those of Alfred Hitchcock or Michael Mann. Steely, distanced, full of hard angles and wide vistas, a Kubrick movie is a study in formal technique, like looking upon a painting that magically, and rather sinisterly, animates itself. Continue reading
Irish playwright Martin McDonagh is a fecking, foul-mouthed arsehole with a shite attitude, but he sure is one hell of a writer. McDonagh’s plays, the earliest of which take place in rural Ireland, tend toward high satire in low settings. His dialogue, laced with profanity and steeped in dialect, is whip-smart and viciously funny, and he has a keen eye for the absurd. Continue reading
Even in Utopia, shit happens. Take, for instance, the Oregon Country Fair, that vaunted Northwest gathering of boho spirits and fandango oglers, where the freak flag is flown as a testament to some netherworld normalcy. Even here, at peace-loving OCF, where the ’60s spirit of freedom, expression and communal OK-ness reigns in benevolent wooded anarchy, it might happen that you step on a bumblebee, sprain an ankle or suffer some kind of respiratory distress. It’s all fun and games until you forget your insulin. Continue reading
On its surface, Les Misérables, the operatic adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel, can come across as a maudlin chain-yanker that nabs every low-hanging fruit it can reach, including issues of abject poverty, human degradation and the tragic death of a good-hearted prostitute. The show seems, in a way, beneath common dignity, if only because it strives so hard to achieve it. And because of this, people of high-aspiring intellect (snobs) tend to avoid Les Miz, ranking it on a level with Cats and other shitbird musicals by Andrew Lloyd Weber. Continue reading
Steeped in nostalgia and soaked in the nicest kind of naughty, the hit musical Grease has become a cultural artifact of the first order. The songs are a peach. The dialogue is funny, sexy and harmlessly rebellious (the original 1971 version, which was reputedly vulgar and pretty gnarly, has been watered down), and the book — the simplest of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl stories, set in 1959 — gives it a lean, sleek structure. Continue reading