Oregon Shakespeare Festival Soothes the Souls of Those Afflicted by Interesting Times – Today More Than Ever Every season of Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a song cycle. Each tune thrills on its own, but take in the entirety of the album, and the meaning of its parts deepens quicker than the distrust of sun celebrations after seeing “Midsommar.” Even viewing
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This isn’t a eulogy for Anthony Bourdain. It’s a celebration of rock and roll. Which in its way is a celebration of that which Bourdain loved. Rather than focus on the man who’s gone, let’s hoist a fucking chalice to the man who’s still here, Ethan Miller. Miller might not have inspired a love of travel, untold stories, or unconsidered
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This one might be a bit of a bummer. Or maybe not. Let me tell you a story about my buddy Ben Metzger. The man’s a dreamer. As far back as I can remember, he’s always wanted to be a rapper. Also, he’s from Corvallis, which makes that goal tenuous at best. I’ll cut to the chase; he became a
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It ain’t over until the floating fat man soars. That’s the hope anyway. When I say “over,” I mean the debate raging in my mind about cinematic space exploration. Perhaps “suspended until a later date” would be more accurate. The fate of big-screen science fiction seems to hang in the balance right now, and director Denis Villeneuve might just be
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Dissent is patriotic. Music makes life suck less. I hold these truths to be self-evident, especially on Independence Day. Doesn’t matter what kind of music you’re into. Doesn’t matter who’s in office. We should all be thinking critically all the time, and we need a proper soundtrack to kick our powers of incredulity into high gear. Plus, music sends audio
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The Iguana Tree is empty tonight. We stand under it, searching the monochromatic foliage for bursts of radioactivity – neon oranges and greens signaling the presence of Earth’s once and future overlords. We’ve already been food-poisoned, but as with radiation sickness, we won’t know it until it’s too late to do anything about it. New Year’s Eve 2017. Woo-fucking-hoo. Walking
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Approaching a fine bottle of wine, I resemble nothing so much as Derek Zoolander and Hansel attempting to crack a computer. I know that the wine is in there, and that it’s reputed to be filled with flavors so sublime that they make yuppies wax faux-poetic like Janet Jackson in a self-indulgent John Singleton movie. But how to coax out
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Still feeling the soul glow from San Francisco. Tony Joe White called it Soul Francisco, and that was no joke. Saturday night I felt the fire and brimstone of Heron Oblivion at Mississippi Studios, and it cast my memory back there, lord, to two weekends ago when I wandered the streets that gave birth to that bad-ass band and so
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Memorial Day was once a day of the dead for me. We’d climb in my parents’ minivan and drive to the cemetery in South Town. This was a time to place flowers on the graves of my great-grandfather and a neighbor who’d made sculptures out of matchboxes and pipe cleaners for us as kids. I never really understood what my
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Every trip begins with music. It’s a door to foreign cultures for which you need fashion no key. Your brain is a lockpick kit, capable of jimmying any sound. Film and literature are similarly functioning gateways, provided you have subtitles or translated editions, but the magic of music is you need not know the words. Even if you have no
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