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The weeks leading up to Sasquatch! Music Festival, all I could focus on was the chaos that would ensue Memorial Day weekend, May 22-25. Alongside countless new faces and friends, I camped five nights in The Gorge. I forgot my pillows. I forgot my blankets. I even forgot my water bottle. It was the best. Continue reading
Jenny Lewis cruised into town on a rainbow Tuesday night, and she left a pot of gold. For a weeknight performance on the same night that Shakey Graves performed at McDonald Theatre, the WOW Hall was packed. Alt-country songstress Nikki Lane opened. Afterward, the stage was transformed into Lewis’ playground with the Monty Python-esque rainbow imagery from her 2014 album The Voyager. Continue reading
The fashion documentary has become a bona fide film genre. In the past decade alone, filmmakers have spun out more than two dozen docs, from the delicious Vogue insider flick The September Issue to the incredible story of a global fashion editor in Diana Vreeland: The Eye Must Travel and, of course, the quirky life of New York Times street-style photographer in Bill Cunningham New York. Continue reading
It’s fitting for a band obsessed with Anne Frank to be reclusive. After a 12-year vanishing act, Neutral Milk Hotel is touring again. The group has entered a gilded age, and rightly so. Continue reading
Oregon Contemporary Theatre artistic director Craig Willis recalls hearing a reading of a new play, Dontrell, Who Kissed The Sea, at a 2013 showcase for the National New Play Network (NNPN) he attended in San Diego. “Clearly, this play inspired the most reaction that weekend,” Willis says. “You could tell that there was a special voice behind it.” Continue reading
Nearly every situational comedy in the history of television — Three’s Company being the purest and most salient example — can trace its ancestry to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, which in turn divined its easy, effervescent form from the classical Aristotelian unities of action, time and place. Continue reading
How is it the board game Clue has so captured our imaginations? One would never consider creating a film out of Chutes and Ladders, and I can feel my eye start to twitch just thinking about what Monopoly: The Musical might look like. But a dramatization of Clue? We’re so there. The who-done-it game has inspired stage and screen adaptations, and Actor’s Cabaret of Eugene’s current production focuses the energy on the 1993 musical for dinner theater fare. Continue reading
The apocalypse has come, and it’s the work of men. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, after three Mad Max movies that saw the world getting progressively darker (even as the third movie went to a strangely playful place that felt more Goonies than Road Warrior). It’s unclear when, exactly, Fury Road takes place in the Mad Max timeline, but it doesn’t matter. The world is in ruins, and Max (Tom Hardy) is (still) just trying to survive in what’s left of it. Continue reading
Austin singer-songwriter Alejandro Rose-Garcia, better known as Shakey Graves, wants to scratch all of your respective itches. Drawing from myriad sounds that prove difficult to solidly place a finger on, he dwells in a dusty sonic landscape somewhere between Two Gallants and M. Ward. However, Graves has never needed the aid of a Zooey Deschanel to lure out or take the blame for his pop sensibility. Continue reading
The May 26 show at WOW Hall is a bit of a rare bird as far as Eugene goes: The lineup features two badass acts, both women. Over the phone, I mention to singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis how unusual this is, to have a show here with nary a beard gracing the stage. “I’ve always tried to be fair with picking openers,” Lewis says. “It’s just cool to have all females on the bill.” Continue reading