Arts: Page 296

Small Houses, Big Sounds

Philly-based musician Jeremy Quentin

Music
Small Houses

Philly-based musician Jeremy Quentin is one of those guy-that’s-a-band/band-that’s-just-one-guy types. He performs under the name Small Houses. The album art for Small Houses’ 2013 release Exactly Where You Wanted to Be shows Quentin standing alone, suitcase in his hand, staring into the middle distance, mustachioed like your dad in 1978. He could be laid-over at a Greyhound station — on his way to somewhere he’s dreading.  Much of the record sounds that way: lonely, lo-fi, heartbroken and introspective indie folk.  Continue reading →

Ringing in Ears

Megan James

Music
Megan James

There’s no telling what she’ll spin, but it’s likely that Megan James’ goal is to make you dance. The singer for Canada’s ghostly electro-pop duo Purity Ring has dabbled in the DJ booth for a couple years now. As she told the Santa Barbara Independent, “I’m just looking for what makes me dance.” Continue reading →

Hardly Strictly Caddies

The Mad Caddies are returning to Eugene in support of their 2014 Fat Wreck Chords release Dirty Rice

Music
The Mad Caddies

“We’ve been gravitating toward a New Orleans jazz kind of sound,” says Mad Caddies founding member Sascha Lazor, “while still keeping the reggae, ska and rock aspect to the band.” The Mad Caddies are returning to Eugene in support of their 2014 Fat Wreck Chords release Dirty Rice, perhaps the band’s most nuanced and varied record to date. Continue reading →

11th Annual Oregon Jazz Festival

Escape the winter doldrums with two nights of hot jazz

Music

Escape the winter doldrums with two nights of hot jazz for the 11th Annual Oregon Jazz Festival Jan. 23 and 24 at University of Oregon and Lane Community College. During the day, the festival consists of clinics for student jazz musicians and concert performances from high schools. This year, students will have the opportunity to work with festival clinician Branford Marsalis, a music educator, Grammy-winning saxophonist and Tony-winning composer. Marsalis will also be performing in a concert presented by the Eugene Symphony 8 pm Thursday, Jan. 22, at the Hult Center.  Continue reading →

Oregon Shakespeare Festival Premiers Three New Plays

Fingersmith, Head Over Heels and Sweat

Theater
Fingersmith

Just a few hours south on I-5 exists a dulcet community that my family has re-named “The Magical Twinkly Fairyland.” For the uninitiated, the village I’m referring to is Ashland, where good restaurants abound, creeks babble, deer wander and, from February through November, some of the finest theater glimmers across the stages of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Celebrating its 80th year, OSF’s 2015 season features three world premieres:  Continue reading →

What a Way to Make a Living

ACE Pours a Cup of Ambition with 9 to 5

Theater

In the iconic 1980 movie 9 to 5, workaday heroines Doralee Rhodes, Judy Bernly and Violet Newstead (played by Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin) suffer under — and ultimately triumph over — their “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss, Mr. Hart (rendered to oily perfection by Dabney Coleman). It’s a classic film, with a title song that’s been scientifically proven to be the foremost go-to karaoke anthem of all time. Continue reading →

Domestic Crimes in Arid Climes

Christmas is fakakta for the family in VLT’s Other Desert Cities

Theater
Brett French, Tracy Ilene Miller, Bill Campbell, Christine Hanks and Pamela Lehan-siegel in VLT’s Other Desert Cities.

No American playwright — and perhaps no playwright ever — was as adept as Tennessee Williams at pulling apart the icky, sticky tangle of hurt that one furiously guarded secret can exact on a family. In the humid atmosphere of a Williams play, a single skeleton in the closet can level an entire clan for generations down the line, by way of recrimination, jealousy, resentment, obsession, addiction and, most of all, fear. Shit gets ugly when we tamp down the truth. Continue reading →

Pressing On

In the Schnitzer’s new exhibit, Under Pressure, more than contemporary art is on display, but also a challenging reflection of our times

Visual Arts
‘The Pastoral or Arcadian State: Illegal Alien’s Guide to Greater America,’ Enrique Chagoya, 2006

Playing devil’s advocate, I ask art collector Jordan Schnitzer how contemporary art can possibly fulfill us in an age of flickering screens and attention spans. Immediately I regret siding with the devil, even if only momentarily. Schnitzer’s response is so passionate, so righteous and, frankly, so absolutely correct that his indignation at the thought that art could ever be irrelevant reverberates through the phone.  Continue reading →

Selma – a study on MLK Jr. and the work of leading

Film

Ava DuVernay’s Selma starts off so calmly that, despite what history promises, it’s a shock when the first moment of violence arrives. Four little girls walk down the stairs of a church. You know what this means. But what happens next occurs in a flash, a moment never explained.  What’s to explain? They’re there, and then they’re gone. It’s like the bottom drops out of the world. At that point, a man in my theater began to cry and I’m not sure he stopped.  Continue reading →