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If you're a fan of tea — scratch that — if you like tasty liquids, get yourself over to J-Tea's new Oolong Bar on 19th Avenue just south of the University of Oregon campus. It opened on May 20, and owner Josh Chamberlain says it's been thriving ever since. Continue reading
I squinted through the grimy glass of our office window on the 14th floor of Eugene’s oldest high-rise (and eyesore). I stared down at the city’s streets lined with flushed sweetgums and pin oaks. We’re warming fast — maybe too fast — zooming into summer, maybe another hot, dry vintage, promising big bold pinot noirs, not the cool-country delicacy we’ve come to know and love. The global news on climate change (warming) has been grim: retreating glaciers, sweltering droughts, disappearing species. Continue reading
The Lobster is the English-language debut of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. As far as I can tell, it’s a near-perfect film, a movie of surpassing oddness and eerie beauty, though hardly an easy one to digest. Nor is it very pleasant, in the conventional sense. Continue reading
Snow Tha Product is a pint-sized rapper who brings high-voltage ferocity to the hip-hop scene, drawing on her Mexican heritage with a twist of Cali-Texan influence. The self-made femme-c seamlessly creates rhymes that are on par with — if not better than — most mainstream artists of the same genre. Snow started sewing together rhythm and words at freestyle battles down in Texas, where she found her niche. Continue reading
For touring bands, finding a reliable person to run the merch table, selling assorted paraphernalia, can be a challenge. But on one of Jaill’s passes through Eugene, the band found a creative solution. “We were bringing an elderly man-puppet on tour to help sell merch,” recalls Jaill bandleader Vincent Kircher. “We were putting taquitos in its mouth, glasses on his face and people posed with the doll. That sounds dumb and unfun, but it wasn’t.” Continue reading
Don’t get me wrong — I’m absolutely thrilled that Autzen Stadium will host a July 24 soccer match between two very high-level European clubs with some of the world’s most talented players at the 2016 International Champions Cup. I definitely will be going to the match. Continue reading
Oil paintings of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Frida Kahlo and Abraham Lincoln, among others, lined the walls of downtown Eugene’s Townshend’s Teahouse amidst the chatter of conversation and the clinking of ceramic mugs against tabletops. These portraits are the work of Simon Graves, a Eugene artist whose current oeuvre is focused on the importance of the constructs of good and evil — and specifically the characters we tend to conceive as being good on an iconic, archetypal level. Continue reading
Purple pages: Storm Entertainment, a Portland-based comic and graphic novel company, has just released the comic book biography Tribute: Prince in honor of the late artist and his June 7 birthday. Michael Frizell wrote the 24-page comic and Ernesto Lovera and Vincenzo Sansone created the art. “His sound and lyrics defined the era for me in ways that Michael Jackson didn’t and, quite frankly, couldn’t,” Frizell says via press release. Continue reading
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson inspires millions, not with hype and bravado, but with intergalactic levels of cool. Through Tyson’s work as an astrophysicist, author, museum director, television and radio host, even the most novice among us can imagine the birth of stars; we can envision dwarf planets and ponder the very structures that define our home, the Milky Way. Simply put, he makes science accessible and fun. Continue reading
