Categories
Arts Review Profile

Lenny Bruce and the Freedom He Went Without

Remembering Lenny Bruce and what he gave, fifty years after his death. Fifty years ago today, Lenny Bruce, born in Long Island as Alfred Leonard Schneider, died in his home overlooking Los Angeles, California, at the age of forty. He didn’t have a quarter. Over the course of five years he blew through a fortune […]

Categories
Festival Music Photography

Sixth Annual Quiet Music Festival, A Photo Journal

Only one music festival turns off the loudness button for a weekend. Stephanie Leet and I split coverage of the QMF, she attended on Friday and I went on Saturday. It was Steph’s first time and reading through her notes on the evening, it was an imaginative experience for me — she was in The Jungle Book […]

Categories
Theatre

Worst Monday Ever

Portland Experimental Theater Ensemble pushes the manila envelope in Procedures for Saying No. While the Portland Experimental Theater Ensemble (PETE) brings a good amount of anarchy to any topic, it’s clearly carried out with an extra degree of relish here, as they set their sights on workplace manners. Smart-casual clothing is abandoned along with all […]

Categories
Festival Film

The Instruction of Evil

Hannah Arendt and the cold behavior of ideology. Today opens the Portland Jewish Film Festival, presented by Northwest Film Center. Over the next two weeks, 15 films will screen from directors across the globe, strung together in the telling of Jewish history and culture. I first watched Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt, which screens on […]

Categories
Music Records

Stressing Strings Out

Stressings by Jordan Dykstra: How to make the viola cry. Sometimes we need to question the difference between beautiful and pretty. I’m not about to tackle such a lofty rhetorical exercise, but it should be safe to say that your concept of pretty, beautiful, is not mine, and not least Jordan Dykstra’s. He is a […]