That’s Amore
Woody Allen is a great American filmmaker, though I’m not sure if I should place that somewhat queasy statement in quotation marks or simply note that, as an assertion, it drags the luggage of several qualifiers. Continue reading
Rick Levin
Staff writer for Eugene Weekly, Rick Levin been airing his grievances in newspapers for the better part of two decades.
Author: Rick Levin
The Hardest Working Troupe in Eugene
Phoinix Players rise again in Red Cane Theatre
It’s hot, humid and breezeless inside the Red Cane Theatre, a new Eugene venue sinking fresh roots at West 11th and Chambers. Right next door is Lava Lounge, the bamboo-and-thatch watering hole sprung like a tropical oasis within Ring of Fire Thai restaurant. It’s late afternoon, in an uncommonly flowery month of May, and from the adjacent lounge one of those tall, fruity drinks with a baby umbrella is calling. Continue reading
Night Moves
Driving people from here to there on the graveyard shift
Adam Korinek Continue reading
Birds of a Feather
On the hunt for Eugene’s (not so) wild turkeys
No less an enlightened American than Benjamin Franklin was royally pissed that the U.S. Congress, after six long years of deliberation, declared our national bird to be the bald eagle. Franklin, inventor of bifocals and the lightning rod, suggested a bird of a different feather altogether. In place of the dishonest, lazy raptor of “bad moral character” that is the bald eagle, this Founding Father suggested a fowl he deemed far less foul — the wild turkey. Continue reading
Guts & Gooseshit
Witnessing womens rugby with the Eugene Reign
*Everybody thinks we should have moustaches and hairy arses, but in fact you could put us all on the cover of Vogue. — Helen Kirk, … Continue reading
Among the Natives
Huffing Fumes at the Matt Court Monster Jam
Not to gloat but, on paper, my cultural resume is fairly sophisticated. I have eaten escargot. Every year I loyally re-up my New Yorker subscription. … Continue reading
Growing Pains
In 2007, Dee Rees wrote and directed a short film, Pariah, about a black teen in Brooklyn struggling to come to terms with her identity as a lesbian. Rees — who interned for Spike Lee’s 40 Acres program — went on to direct two more shorts before returning to the compelling drama of a teenaged protagonist who, in her search for sexual identity, shuffles through personas like masks at a costume ball. Continue reading
Exploding Something or Other
Just how bad is Exploding Love, the play? It is so miserably and flatulently bad, in fact, that it’s nearly inconceivable Exploding Love, the actual current LCC student production directed by Michael Watkins, could not also be bad. We’re talking inevitably, ineluctably bad, as in lipstick-on-pig bad. Not just ungood, but bad. Awful. Continue reading
America’s Greatest Rock Band, via Chicago
Wilco bassist discusses touring, playing and recording its best album yet
With R.E.M. having disbanded last year, it would appear that Wilco now stands pretty well unchallenged as the greatest American rock band. Since rising from the ashes of seminal post-punk country/folk/rock pioneers Uncle Tupelo in 1994, this Chicago-based band has released a series of albums that continues, with each successive drop, to challenge, confound, frustrate, mystify and amuse its fans. Continue reading
A Certain Sense of Weightlessness
A talk with The Jayhawks’ Mark Olson
Like that one ramshackle, half-collapsed barn you pass on the highway year after year, the music created by veteran Minneapolis band The Jayhawks is timeless — in a fragile, verdigised, sepia-toned, windblown, authentically American melancholia sort of way. Their sweetly bittersweet sound, all honeyed harmonies and landlocked blues and melodic rustic reverie, is like a soundtrack caught gorgeously between a hymn to our better selves and an elegy to how we’ve fallen short. Continue reading