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Featured, Words March 17, 2018

St. Patrick’s Lament

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By Ross Blanchard St. Patrick sits at the edge of Heaven looking down at Earth. His bare legs stick out from his white, flowing robes and dangle over the edge of the cloud upon which he sits. It is March 17th and he watches the multitudes bedecked in green begin to gather as evening approaches. St. Peter wanders up. The head of security and Heaven’s main bouncer has just finished with his shift at the Pearly Gates. He’s holding a cigarette and a martini, wearing sleeveless robes to accentuate his muscles and to show-off his banded tattoos. His hair is pulled back in a ponytail. He leans over St. Patrick’s shoulder. “What’s happening down there, Paddy?” St. Peter asks, exhaling puffs of smoke into space. This startles St. Patrick slightly. He half looks over his shoulder frowning, grunts, and looks down at the little planet again. “Oh,” says St. Peter observing the mass of green spreading out into city streets. “It’s your day again, huh. That’s right. Your people took quite a liking to you. It’s pretty much only you and the big Junior who get celebrated down there anymore.” “Mmmph.” grunts St. Patrick, not taking his eyes away from…

Booze, Featured, Words July 21, 2015

The Kommie, the Yank, and the Holy Gose Ale

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I am a former Soviet, smuggled over the Iron Curtain in my parent’s gonads like some Cold War technology and assembled in the USA. The other night, I was at the Alberta Street pub, listening to the musings of local Slavic rock band Chervona. I should have been drinking vodka. Instead, I was slowly nursing a New Belgium 1554 Black Lager for a period much shorter than my own gestation but surely a longer process than usual. It was like reading a fine book. Each sip was a page revealing another character. In a moment of emotional flavor, at only 5.6 ABV, I could feel the warmth of the beer moving slowly through me. Its nutty taste made me happy, and its chocolaty aftertaste gave me the feeling of being privileged, decadent, and pampered. Soon my bar stool buddy and I were having an intense discussion about the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. You would think that when two former Soviets discuss history, things might turn crazy quickly. But, since we were drinking craft beer and not vodka, the conversation stayed nice and calm. It dawned on me that the craft beer I was drinking is revolutionary in itself and that drinking…

Arts, Featured May 13, 2015

Dear Artists, Toss the Instructions and Forget the Critics

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Discussed in this essay: – What Painting Is, by James Elkins, Routledge, 1999. – Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, by Alva Noë, Hill and Wang, 2009. – Ways of Seeing, by John Berger, et al, Copyright 1972; Penguin, 1977. This article focuses on painting, but if you’re into something else—music, dance, ceramics—these ideas probably apply to your creative endeavors, too. I’ve been working full-time as a painter for four years. Before that I earned a Ph.D. in Theory and Cultural Studies at Purdue University where I taught courses on an array of topics from film theory to ballet. In both of these lines of work I’ve found that the way we usually talk about painting blows right past the most important thing in painting: the paint, mixed and applied by hands that try and err and retry. What’s going through a painter’s head as she works? Let me put most answers to that question into two categories: “Art History” and “How-to.” This is an overgeneralization, but follow me. Under “Art History” we have critics and historians in coffee-table books, documentaries, classrooms, and museums. Their goal isn’t so…

Featured, Words April 23, 2015

Squirrel Benediction

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By Mike Allen I finally took the leap and fried up a batch of squirrel—gray city squirrel harvested from my backyard. I’ve been halfheartedly killing them for a while now because I hate them and everything they stand for, except free lunch. It’s clear from the little bites taken from each and every piece of unripe fruit on the trees that the squirrels expect a free lunch. I’d been watching them from the kitchen, climbing up into the trees, eating all the figs and persimmons, digging their little walnut stashes all throughout my raised beds, where they might return sometime in the spring to dig their booty, carelessly tossing my seedlings aside. I was helpless as a baby in the sewer, since my .20 caliber Sheridan Blue Streak blew a gasket a few months ago. It sat impotent in the garage, as I stood at the window. But thanks to the good people at Ollie Damon’s (not the counter dude, he’s a dick), I got my long arm back, working better than new. It was time to rain hellfire on these vicious little rodentia. And I did. But after a few carcasses tossed carelessly into the city compost, guilt began…

Arts, Featured March 5, 2015

After The Faux

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Bumps and bruises heal and projects end, but creative, restless minds don’t quit. The Faux Museum in Old Town Portland closed its doors in February. Curator Tom Richards (pictured above. His bruises are from a jogging accident.) operated the art museum since June 2012. When PDX Magazine asked “What’s next for you, Tom?”, he replied with the following open letter to the museum’s fans and to the interested public in which he asks everyone to help him choose amongst myriad options available to an enterprising young man like himself. We’re glad to publish his query. — Ross Blanchard, Editor-in-chief Hello. My name is Tom Richards, and I was the curator/Janitor of the late The Faux Museum, which was a conceptual art museum based in Old Town Portland, Oregon. I say “was” because after January of this year we closed our doors. I know it may be kind of hard to imagine how a conceptual art museum claiming to be the oldest museum in the world could fail. After all we had a Woolly Ant! True, we were surrounded by social services that aid the mentally ill, recovering addicts, and houseless persons; and our neighbors who weren’t strip clubs or dispensaries were bars…

Arts, Featured November 3, 2014

Between Here and There: My Own Starlight Scope Myopia

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Blessed with great hearing and strong night vision, Army draftee Lance Grebner was often assigned night watch duty for his company in the Vietnamese central highlands during his 1968-69 tour. His story of becoming a go-to guy on the starlight scope brought up some Naval and academic memories for me. Then his narrative took a turn way beyond my field of vision—down a path not fit for sensitive readers. On that path I heard some scary things, recited some poetry, put my foot in my mouth, and tried my best to channel it all into half of a portrait. I work as a figurative painter. For the past few months, sculptor Christopher Wagner and I have been brushing and carving on a series of two-media portraits of combat veterans we’re calling Between Here and There, a project funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Right now, we’re in the middle of creating ten pairs, a sculpture and a painting of each vet created from live models, simultaneously. Setting aside the common image of the homeless, needy veteran or the uniformed vet just off the plane from Iraq, these portraits celebrate each of our subjects as an individual with his…

Photograph by Intisar Abioto
Arts, Featured July 8, 2014

Intisar Abioto’s ‘The Black Portlanders’ expands to all of Oregon with new partnership

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Local photographer and storyteller Intisar Abioto, who has worked on The Black Portlanders project since February 2013, is now packing up her camera and traveling throughout Oregon to expand the breadth of her photography subjects. Abioto is partnering with the Urban League of Portland to produce photo accompaniments and conduct interviews for the next edition of the State of Black Oregon. Abioto will serve as photographic director for the important report. This year’s State of Black Oregon is a follow-up to the 2009 report, which included stories and data that first made the troubling social and economic realities of black Oregonians visible. According to Abioto, 2014’s report will feature “exploratory photography/imagery, and narrative and lived experience to illustrate the social and economic reality of black Oregonians.” The Urban League and Abioto will travel together to Ashland, Eugene, Bend, and Coos Bay to conduct interviews and photograph participants. “My goal within the project will be to photograph and illustrate the diverse presence of black people in Oregon, both urban and rural,” remarks Abioto. “What does black Oregon look like? Who are black Oregonians? Where are we?” “I don’t have a working mental image of what black Oregon looks like. Do you?”…

Events, Featured June 3, 2014

Joshua Ferris and Narrative Mechanics

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By Ross Blanchard Above: PDX Magazine Editor-in-chief Ross Blanchard (left) and author Joshua Ferris at Dave Weich’s Narrative Mechanics event. A couple of Sundays ago Dave Weich, president of Sheepscot Creative, invited around a dozen guests to his home in Southeast Portland for his first Narrative Mechanics event. The gathering focused on interviews and discussions with strategic communicators. His first interviewee was Josh Ferris, who was in town on a book tour for his new novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour.  This was not a “meet the author, ask him about his typewriter” scene at all. From the moment I entered Weich’s home, I could tell that something different was about to happen. So could the other guests, most of whom it appeared, like me, didn’t have much of a clue what was going on either. There was a camera crew, a small staff, a bartender. Guests were handed tarot-sized cards with inexplicable quotes on the back. We were given small round stickers and asked to place them below similar quotes on posters hung on the dining room walls. The meanings of these activities would be revealed later, I was told (they were). Then we were invited to have a drink, to…