Arts: Page 374

The Fantastic Songs of Miwa Gemini

Music

Miwa Nishio has recently started listening to The Carpenters again, and for the first time, she knows what Karen and Richard are crooning about.  “When I was little I used to sing along but I had no idea what the words were,” she says. Nishio grew up in Kyushu, Japan. While most kids were following Japanese pop music, Nishio was singing along to her parents’ records, namely The Carpenters and The Beatles. “I was definitely one of those weirdo kids in the neighborhood,” she says over the phone from her Brooklyn, N.Y., home. Continue reading →

When Life Gives You Lemons

Music

I remember commuting to a soul-eating server job in Minneapolis I had post-college graduation. It was one of those faux fancy steak-and-seafood joints where businessmen come for lunch in business suits to talk business and inhale their food without looking at it. Servers might as well have been robots for the amount of eye contact exchanged. Continue reading →

Arts Hound

Visual Arts

Black lights? Check. Clowns? Check. Burlesque? Check. Good times? Check! Trudy Debauchery brings The Ultraviolets Black Light Burlesque all the way from Hawaii to Sam Bond’s. This is a silly and sexy day-glo show not to be missed 9:30 pm Thursday, July 18.   Dot Dotson’s is hosting a gallery opening reception for photographer Ben Ficklin 5 to 6 pm Friday, July 19. In his work, Ficklin only uses film but manipulates it to look like a photography-painting hybrid, reminiscent of Portland photography darling Olivia Bee. Continue reading →

Hannah and Her Critics

Film

Like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt has an all-encompassing biopic title, but focuses on one key moment of its subject’s life. In 1961, the German thinker and writer Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) went to Jerusalem to cover, for The New Yorker, the trial of Adolf Eichmann. It was a chance to get up close to the horrors of her past; as a young woman, she had been held in a camp in France. Continue reading →

Love These Giants

Music

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when the collaboration between perpetually cool David Byrne and doe-eyed avant-pop upstart St. Vincent was hatched. If you aren’t familiar with Byrne, let me first waggle a disapproving finger at you, and then list his resume: “Once in a Lifetime,” Stop Making Sense, “Burning Down the House” and “Psycho Killer” to only skim the surface.  Continue reading →

Better Days

Music

The last time EW checked in with the rollicking indie-grass rockers The Harmed Brothers was in the summer of 2010; hot off Cottage Grove’s Jug-R-Not festival, the band was about to kick-off a cross-country tour. Ray Vietti (guitar, vocals) and Alex Salcido (banjo, vocals, harmonica, piano) are still the faces of the band, but a lot has changed in the past three years. Continue reading →

Holly Go Darkly

Music

Legacies can be a blessing or a curse. How often do you see children wilt under the pressure of trying to be just like their parents? Can you imagine the number of times Holly Williams has been compared to her father and grandfather, Hank Jr. and Hank Sr., throughout her life? But Williams has risen to the challenge over the last decade and established herself as a notable singer-songwriter on her own merits.  Continue reading →

They Dreamed a Dream

Les Miz dazzles at the ACE

Theater

On its surface, Les Misérables, the operatic adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel, can come across as a maudlin chain-yanker that nabs every low-hanging fruit it can reach, including issues of abject poverty, human degradation and the tragic death of a good-hearted prostitute. The show seems, in a way, beneath common dignity, if only because it strives so hard to achieve it. And because of this, people of high-aspiring intellect (snobs) tend to avoid Les Miz, ranking it on a level with Cats and other shitbird musicals by Andrew Lloyd Weber. Continue reading →