Arts: Page 386

Romance of the West

Local photographer sets out to capture the fading glory of the Western frontier

Visual Arts

Never mind DeLoreans, phone booths or Einstein’s theory of relativity, local photographer Dmitri von Klein has cracked the secret to time travel: a 60-year-old Graflex camera. The lens of his 4X5 large format camera is like a wormhole into the history of the American West, rediscovering places like the “almost ghost town” of Shaniko in northern Oregon or the full-blown ghost town of Bodie in central California. Continue reading →

Arts Hound

Visual Arts

• Instead of bringing art to lobbies, bring the lobbying to art. April 25 is Advocacy Day, and arts and culture advocates from around Oregon will be heading to Salem to put pressure on the legislature to renew the Cultural Trust tax that is set to expire. See oregonculture.org to get involved. Continue reading →

Eating Weeds

Urban forager and author comes to Cozmic

Books

The first time she pulled weeds out of someone’s yard in Portland and made them into a salad, Rebecca Lerner didn’t much like them, saying they had “an unpleasant texture that suggested I was eating lawn clippings.” For five days she boiled slugs, made nettle broth and munched burdock root. She wound up not eating the slugs, she writes in her book, Dandelion Hunter: Foraging the Urban Wilderness, after “their skin turned white and their guts burst out in green goo.” Continue reading →

Morgan Spurlock’s Shadow

Eugene’s honorary stoner, comedian Doug Benson, returns to our green valley

Comedy

April 21 may as well be the new 4/20, as far as Eugene and comedian Doug Benson are concerned. The seminal stoner and star of Super High Me returns to WOW Hall for his 3rd annual celebration of giggling and giggle weed, hot off releasing his on-the-road documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Rolled — to continue in the vein of pot variations on a Morgan Spurlock theme — on Chill.com. Also the host of the Doug Loves Movies podcast, Benson sounds off on his favorite and most despised films of 2013, smoking with the stars and legalizing marijuana. Continue reading →

Dance Diplomacy

U.S. State Department selects DanceAbility teachers to share their method abroad

Dance

“I was part of the contemporary dance scene at the point when everyone was pushing for equality, respect of all people and the idea that all people could dance,” says Alito Alessi, artistic director of DanceAbility International. “But no one was doing anything about it, including myself. So I said, ‘Well, what would it look like to do what we say we all believe in?’” Continue reading →

Mental Illness and the Police

Film

Cinema Pacific, the annual festival featuring films from Pacific-bordering countries, is in full swing, and like any good film festival there is a dizzying array of options for movie buffs and casual cinemagoers alike to choose from. This year’s focus will be on films and filmmakers from Singapore, Mexico and the U.S. West Coast. Continue reading →

Fathers and Sons

Film

The Place Beyond the Pines is an ambitious, beautifully filmed follow-up to director/co-writer Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine (2010). That bleak bruise of an indie darling gave a stamp of greatness to the careers of Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, and it divided viewers, who thought it was a searing portrait of a dissolving marriage — or thought it had little to say.  Continue reading →

Music, Mountains and Mythology

Music

Jessica Raymond has gathered several musical influences since she arrived in the PNW: Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, the North Cascades and the Olympic Mountains. “I’ve spent a lot of the past couple years in the mountains,” says Raymond, singer-songwriter and guitarist for The Blackberry Bushes, an alt-folk progressive bluegrass trio based in Seattle. “It influences what I do. They stick with you.” In fact, Raymond attended Evergreen State College in Olympia and deemed her concentration “Music, Mountains and Mythology.”  Continue reading →

Keep Them Like A Secret

Music

If you’ve never heard Built to Spill, let me first ask you this: Have you been living on the moon for the past 20 years, or in a subterranean cave with no light or sound? ’Cause if you haven’t, then there’s really no other excuse to have missed out on some of the most vital and interesting guitar rock produced in the Northwest since Nirvana.  Continue reading →

The Nickatina Experience

Music

I noticed a Kickstarter campaign the other day; someone is transcribing the flow of popular rappers into traditional music notation and wants help funding a book about it. I hear you can study “turntablism” at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Does this mean rap is dead — or that it’s finally part of the establishment? Neither, if San Francisco-based indie rap icon Andre Nickatina has anything to say about it. Continue reading →