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I’m pretty sure truck-stop rocker James McMurtry was laughing into his dinner as he sat at Poppi’s Anatolia last time he came to Eugene. He was chilling out alone before his WOW Hall show, sitting one table over from me, and couldn’t help but to hear my friend Becky bitching me out for not putting hay bales around the bottom of my Airstream trailer in a sort of redneck insulation to keep it warm in the winter. Continue reading
Over the course of his long and storied career, maverick American director Robert Altman reeled off a handful of cinematic corkers: Nashville, M*A*S*H, Gosford Park. Among Altman’s lesser films, sandwiched between Popeye (yes, Popeye!) and Streamers, is an adapted play with the sesquipedalian title of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Folks of a certain age probably recall Cher in that one. And, like me, you may also remember it, vaguely, as a musical along the lines of Hairspray. But it wasn’t, and isn’t. Continue reading
“You show up to an audition in Eugene,” actress Emily Hart says, “and the play will have one or two women’s roles. Maybe they’re good, maybe they’re not, but there will be 30 women competing for them.” The toll this competition takes artistically is a serious one. According to Hart, “It becomes not so much about the joy of theater, but about how I beat other people out for roles.” Continue reading
Joel Pickford’s Le Monde Créole Continue reading
She showed up for a night of “sex to change the course of the world.” He locked the door behind her and duct-taped the air vents to save the human race. With a careful calculation of comet speed, fish sleep and personal hunches, biologist Jules has pinpointed the cataclysmic end of the world at about 7 minutes away, setting us up for a comedy that takes us for a philosophical swim through evolution and imagination. Continue reading
There are 27-year-olds who have their shit together, but I wasn’t one of them. If you were, you may watch Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha as a sort of anthropological study: the still-questing twentysomething, running into pitfalls and learning (the hard way, of course) that expectation goes hand-in-hand with entitlement, and neither are in sync with reality very often. Continue reading
Crow Quill Night Owls are an old-timey band dealing with some 21st-century problems. The musicians, based in Port Townsend, Washington, are all set to launch a Kickstarter campaign for a new tour vehicle and to upload their latest record to Bandcamp — only problem is they can’t get their computers to work. “I’m looking for the hand crank,” jokes vocalist-guitarist Kit “Stymee” Stovepipe. Continue reading
Nima’s Wish Foundation hosts its annual fundraiser concert SPRING FORWARD June 8-9 at Cozmic; $18-$30 (free for kids 10 and under). The two-day event hosts a smorgasbord of local musicians including headliners Reeble Jar and Sol Seed, Laura Kemp, Phoebe Blume, I-Chele and Zambuco Marimba. Funds go to providing aid for people in Gambia, where Nima Gibba’s father is from. The 11-year-old Gibba tragically passed in a car accident in 2009. Continue reading
On Nov. 3 1961, Dave Brubeck played at the UO’s McArthur Court for $2.50. Less than a year later, Brubeck joined Tony Bennett for the White House Seminar American Jazz Concert with the Washington Monument as a backdrop. On May 28, 2013, Tony Bennett & Dave Brubeck: The White House Sessions, Live 1962 was released after over a half century forgotten in a vault. Continue reading