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Set in the less traditionally photogenic streets of Los Angeles — the ones lined not with palm trees and fancy lounges, but with doughnut shops, car washes and dicey motels — Sean Baker’s sun-drenched, scrappy, vibrant Tangerine follows the day-long quest of Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez). Flat broke and fresh out of prison, Sin-Dee is hell-bent on finding the cisgender white girl that her boyfriend-slash-pimp Chester (James Ransone) has been sleeping with. Continue reading
Idealized non-conformism is not a revelation. Forty years ago, the punk movement built its own little utopia on a foundation of middle fingers. But what causes a movement to become a factory setting? Isn’t there inherent irony in a generation of non-conformists conforming to non-conformism, especially when that generation seems hard put to define the word irony? Continue reading
Jazz sometimes gets slagged as mainly grooves for dudes, but women have always contributed enormously to the genre, even if they’ve not received attention proportionate to their contributions. This Thursday, Aug. 13 at The Shedd, the Oregon Festival of American Music (OFAM) showcases three of the most popular female jazz singers of the 1920s. Continue reading
Hot damn, Eugene! Prepare your peepers for overstimulation by all the art (both dead and alive) happening this week, beginning with the Mayor’s Art Show opening reception 5:30 pm Friday, Aug. 14, at the Hult Center’s Jacobs Gallery. While this annual juried show tends to lean heavy on artists of the safe, expected and over-50 variety (i.e. expect pastel landscapes and Ansel Adams wannabes), it’s worth going down to ferret out the innovators and old masters — look for works from Lynda Lanker and Rogene Manas, to name a few. Continue reading
Chicago duo Zigtebra is comprised of vocalist Emily Rose and guitarist Joseph Dummitt, two half-siblings that weren’t close as children. Fate led the pair to the Chicago-based avant-garde dance troupe, True Magical Love. “We reconnected there,” Dummitt tells EW, explaining the Zigtebra project was born from the Windy City’s experimental performance art scene. “We started getting weird on stage,” Dummitt jokes, “did a lot of experimental theater, short open mics. We played wherever would have us. It eventually turned into us writing songs.” Continue reading
New releases: Hot off playing the mainstage at Oregon Country Fair, local blues-rock band Blue Lotus is gearing up for a six-state tour to promote its new album, Across the Canyon, recorded at Ninkasi Studios. The band’s fifth album is “a collaborative experiment that weaves elements of progressive rock, jazz and improvisational rock ‘n’ roll with hints of ’60s psychadelia,” the band says via press release. Catch them before they hit the road for a Grateful Dead set Saturday, Aug. 15, at Blairally Vintage Arcade, 245 Blair Blvd. Continue reading
Entering into the gloriously tattered tradition of strung-out criminal lit ranging from Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn to Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Seattle rocker turned author Danny Bland has written a novel that reads like a beastly scream into the dark mythology of ‘90s Seattle — a gilded wasteland where junkies reared on Iggy and Sabbath turned filthy power chords into gold and cosmonauts of the apocalypse pimped hip to the culture vultures. Continue reading
The city of Eugene has lined up lots of family-friendly dance happenings as part of its EUGfun festival in August. Continue reading
Anyone who has dealt up close and personal with mental illness will tell you it can be an unmitigated hell — a black hole that devours solutions faster than they can be hatched. Families wrecked by schizophrenia and manic depression discover, all too quickly, that frustrated applications of love and discipline and pills and despair tend to come up empty in the face of a condition that, by its very definition, defies all reason. Continue reading