Arts: Page 346

Hard-Up Hemingway

Film

Remember when Jude Law was pretty? Go back and watch Existenz, or A.I. or Gattaca, when he was often blonde and proper, and always a little bit cold. Then watch Dom Hemingway, in which he is, in so many ways, the opposite: earthy and sweaty and living it up. His hair sweeps back from a sharply pointed hairline, dyed dark brown and never clean; he’s carrying just enough extra weight (by movie-star standards) that his clothes bunch and puff in the wrong places, like real-person clothes.  Continue reading →

American Musical Tapestries

From folk to jazz, Eugene bursts with the best American sounds

Music
Black Prairie performs at The Shedd May 3

American “classical” music often finds a more welcome reception in choral concerts than in orchestra halls. Maybe it has something to do with the enormous popularity of choral music; nearly 30 million Americans — a tenth of the population — sing at least occasionally in a choir of some kind, whether it’s in school or church, amateur or professional. Maybe that’s why American folk and choral music sometimes seem like kissing cousins. Continue reading →

Follow the Light

Music
Lynx

Lynx reminds me of a general — marshaling her beats, strings, digital bleeps and waves like orchestrated forces to create a united front. Or perhaps a captain is more apt. Her latest album, Light Up Your Lantern, sways like a ship in unknown waters on tracks like “Southern Skies,” leaving the listener a little woozy but eager for what lays ahead. Either way, Lynx is master and commander of her own fate, plotting her own folktronica course somewhere between the chilled mystery of The xx and the electronic exotica of Beats Antique. Continue reading →

Swamp Meet in the City

Music
Hillstomp

Portland’s own Hillstomp has found a way to blend Northwestern sense of place with the sludge and balm of a Louisiana swamp. The duo’s new album, titled Portland, Ore., out now on Fluff & Gravy Records, is a 10-track work that ebbs and flows, jives and stomps and howls, riots and then takes a nap. It begins with a rather heavy twosome — “Santa Fe Line” and “Life I Want” — that showcases the band’s ever-growing ability to find beauty in mosquito-bitten disarray. Continue reading →

Bubbly Bombadil

Music
Bombadil

Bombadil’s quirky 2013 release Metrics of Affection defies expectations from the start — sounding more like British Invasion pop from the ’60s than contemporary indie rock from North Carolina. Album tracks “Angeline” and “Learning to Let Go” recall the Ray and Dave Davies songwriting partnership of The Kinks. “We do sound very Brit-pop,” bassist Daniel Michalak says. “When we started we wanted to sound like Neil Young. Now we want to sound like Jay-Z and The Offspring,” he jokes. Continue reading →

Love Is All Around

LCC’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes magic

Theater
Michelle Nordella and Robert Newcomer

That Puck! What an imp, what a funnin’ fool. Should any wee hint of the grave or the dour threaten to shank the shambolic ether of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rest assured that frolicsome Puck, aka Robin Goodfellow, servant to Oberon (King of the Faeries), will hop to and eradicate all frowns with a sly spree of herkimer-jerkimer and utter tomfoolery. Nay, Puck ─ as the sprightly stand-in for Shakespeare’s bumptious side ─ will have none of our earnestness. Life, after all, is but a dream. Continue reading →

Arts Hound

Visual Arts

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art opens a new exhibit April 26: The Human Touch. Selected works from the RBC Wealth Management Art Collection will bring you face to face with the work of contemporary art masters such as Chuck Close, Lalla Essaydi, Elizabeth Peyton and Roy Lichtenstein.   Continue reading →

Kasher in the Rye

Standup comedian Moshe Kasher explores the dark underbelly of comedy — belly laughs ensue

Books
Moshe Kasher

“I couldn’t believe how stupid I was,” writes comedian Moshe Kasher in his new memoir Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16 (allusions to the Salinger teen-angst classic fully intended). Kasher brings his act to WOW Hall April 17. “It seemed like, in the face of the most obvious answers in the world,” he continues, “I always chose the dumbest thing to do. It was like I wasn’t in control of my own brain.”  Continue reading →