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Familiar things are sometimes best interpreted by strangers. International musician Monk Parker knows this better than anyone. Splitting his time between the states and the U.K., Parker’s music is influenced by his English mother — an avant-garde, minimalist sculptor — and his more traditional American father. Continue reading
In 2009, unhappy in Sarasota and wanting to get outta Dodge, so to speak, Jason Pancoast found himself Googling “What is the opposite of Florida?” Oregon kept popping up in the results. And so it was: Pancoast hopped a plane and settled in Eugene without knowing a soul. Continue reading
José Cruz grew up dancing in his home country of El Salvador before moving to L.A. 20 years ago, traveling up the coast and settling in Eugene. Locally, Cruz has been teaching dance — mostly salsa — for 16 years with his school Salsersos Dance Company, now housed in the Vet’s Club Building. “Coming here,” Cruz says, it’s “a great thing to teach the dance that I grew up with.” Continue reading
Now that Armageddon is actually breathing down our necks, it’s sort of cute to look back at all our quaint, fancy ideas about how the end might pan out — especially in movies, where post-apocalyptic scenarios are less a warning than an enticement to some grand new adventure where hunky good guys in steampunk rags wage war against evil fuckers in spiked hockey masks for the last drop of water, gas, food, etc. Continue reading
Gentrification: a word spoken in hushed and frightened tones, as though it’s the black plague, a zombie virus or artisanal ice cubes. Five years ago, Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist Danielle de Picciotto decided to do something about Berlin’s gentrification, skyrocketing rents and creeping homogeneity. Continue reading
Eugene’s The Sawyer Family has been crafting blistering tales of death, murder and suffering since 2001. The psychobilly-cum-swampy-stoner-metal act has seen lineup changes, growing pains and years of touring since its early rockabilly days, elevating themselves into a genre-defying monster. As tends to happen at home, though, this act often goes unnoticed. Continue reading
Since Matt Bishop and a group of University of Washington friends started up Hey Marseilles back in 2006, the six-piece chamber-pop band has released two full-length records, secured accolades from NPR and Seattle Weekly and played hundreds of shows all over the country. All of which has given Bishop plenty of time to think about, well, being in a band. Continue reading
The Eugene Symphony has long-enjoyed a reputation as Oregon’s most forward-looking orchestra. Particularly after visionary music director Marin Alsop ascended the podium in 1989, the Eugene Symphony Orchestra’s programming of contemporary and especially American music put it — and Alsop — on the national map. While the usual 19th-century classics have always dominated the repertoire, Alsop’s successors Miguel Harth-Bedoya and Giancarlo Guerrero continued to feature more 20th- and 21st-century music than typical American orchestras. Continue reading
A curious girl can raise only so much hell for a totalitarian regime: When Ximena makes too much noise, the state takes away her voice. Literally. Set in a faceless authoritarian state, Degenerate Arts Ensemble’s Predator Songstress — produced in conjunction with the new Oregon Performance Lab — sets out to examine repression, surveillance, interrogation and the power of noise. The play runs Friday and Saturday, Aug. 28 and 29, at Lane Community College’s Ragozzino Hall. Continue reading
Oh, to see what James Gillray might do with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would be delicious. Considering the British illustrator’s searing and scatological observations of blowhards, we’d expect some orange, bloated mass punctuated with what the internet has succinctly deemed “butthole lips.” But alas, Gillray, considered the father of the political cartoon, passed in 1815. Continue reading