This Wednesday the 9th, come see a GREAT comedy variety show at Ash Street Saloon at 9PM- Grand Theft Pizza Party! Hosted by the very funny Andy Wood, see sets by Bobby Hacker, Holli Pappan, Virginia Jones and the PNW’s legendary Dwight Slade, short videos, and sketch comedy from THEM, featuring the former cast of the Famous Mysterious Actor show- Also, we’ll get a visit from world-renowned motivational speaker Ed Foreman!
The spooky, velvet-caped Powers That Be have blacklit New Rotic DJ’s Retrograde and Retrovirus for a DJ slot at the Convergence 13, in sinister Portland, over the weekend of May 25-27. We will be dusting off the black vinyl, and the records too. Keep your glassy, web-worn orbs here for details on when you can catch a set of time-tested D-rock and forgotten goffic dance hits. We’d love to see you there. Or, your presence might bring a wry smile to play on these world-weary lips. Or something.
Holy Vernal Equinox! I saw an undeniable sign of Spring this morning- two squirrels fighting in a tree. They’re chittering away at each other in a ferocious manner, circling and chasing around on the branches, and I know they were telling each other “No, YOU get out!” in squirreltalk. They only fight during mating season, because each squirrel is trying to keep his bachelor pad sleek and sexy and free of other males, and stocked with fresh nuts and Zima for the ladies. Just like you do.
I just ran across this event coming up in Portland on March 13th: You’ve got yer Nick Cave music and your modern dancers and you mush it all up with costumes by Imitation of Christ and that’s what you’ve got.
Here’s a really over-compressed short video about the show.
Some of the songs included in the program are: Wild World, Mercy Seat, The Carny, The Weeping Song, The Ship Song, Stagger Lee, and Death is Not the End. The dance opens with a reading from his novel, “And The Ass Saw The Angel.”
Songs Least Likely to Appear In A Nick Cave Dance Program: Scum, 6″ Gold Blade, and Little Empty Boat.
Postscript: Wow, was I wrong about not using Stagger Lee in the program! When it started as a very intense, Apache-style duet between the brute and the maiden, and the first F-bomb dropped in, I heard the row of nice fifty-year old ladies in front of me take in breath sharply, and I thought, “wait until we get to the line about crawling over fifty good p*ssies to get to a fat boy’s assh*le.” A couple disgruntled ballet fans walked out, but I think the fifteen year old dance students were pretty psyched about a getting to hear a filthy dirty song. My review of the ballet is a million, jillion gold stars, flecked lightly with blood. It was so super, I can’t tell you. If you hear about it coming through your town, I highly recommend it.
A Damien Hirst exhibit got me out to the Portland Art Museum’s modern art branch, the Jubitz center (Paid for by the people who brought you The World’s Classiest Truck Stop!) It’s really nice, with four floors of famous and less-famous artists, bringing Stumptown face to face with its first Kenny Scharf, Philip Guston, Francis Bacon, and more. It’s great to have a contemporary art wing to the sometimes fusty and provincial museum.
Once I had enjoyed Oldenberg’s giant, breathing icepack (later visited its brother in the lobby of Cedars-Sinai hospital when my friend Lola broke her leg), a nice assortment of Duchamp stuff, and the Longo crawling-drowning-yuppie sculpture, I made it to the top floor of Hirst pieces. Two of them were giant, one Pharmacy installation and a glass display of many, many animal skeletons. The other two pieces were a drug-spot painting and the above painting of sliced brains, that looked a lot like homemade seitan.
“But for me, from my point of view, I don’t mind if it falls over… if you break the glass you replace the glass, if the sheep falls out you can always get a new sheep.” – Damien Hirst
It’s good for me to go to the museum, not only because I love art, but it’s also a helpful reminder of how tired my whole nosering-and-glasses, bob-haircut, art-chick schtick is. It’s like coming to the place in Battlestar Galactica where all your identical Cylons live.
2015 Update: I was excited to see the Away from the Flock at the Broad this week. He’s beautiful and sad and it’s like meeting a celebrity who is also a dead lamb in formaldehyde.
I am back from my first trip to glorious Bend, OR, where I went on a comedy pilgrimage to see Emo Philips. Although it took seven hours to drive there and back, and we got pulled over in Redmond for looking weird, and we had curly fries and vodka for dinner, and we sat with a retiree couple who were just glad to be out of the house, we knew it was all worth it when the emcee took the stage and said “I’ll bet you can’t wait for your headliner, Elmo Philips!”
Emo is, dare I say it, even more dashing at 50 than he was at 30, and his jokes are as surreal and mean-spirited as ever. He has gained approximately 3 pounds, so you can no longer see his hipbones rub together when he walks. He was kind enough to chat with us in greenroom afterwards, although I mostly just talked nonsense at him. I’m petitioning to bring him to Portland in July for a show. He’s aching to join us in our pinko outcast majesty, and I believe he has an inkling that he might well serve as our king.
From the bus stop at 7AM- I thought things might go badly.
Thank goodness we had five inches of white stuff dumped on us Tuesday, because after MLK day on Monday, we might have had to work four days *in a row*. Unfortunately, that much snow keeps Portland at a standstill, because we don’t really have much by way of chains or snowplows, and essentially we depend on local children building snowmen to clear the streets. Multnomah county is bussing in snowman-hungry children from as far away as Nevada to get the city back to normal.
Bulldogs, annoyed that the snow is up to their elbows.
