Gossip Should Have No Friends

[January 7th, 2009]

• YES WE CANDY: Dane Artman had a dream. “I had made a set of sculpted chocolates,” recalls the Newark, Calif.-based screen printer and chocolatier: “white chocolate Biden, milk chocolate Obama and dark chocolate First Lady, in a really detailed White House box.” So he gathered his troops at Neapolitan Printing Company and set to work on Choc-O-Bama, a 3.5-inch milk chocolate bust of the first black president (“We all HOPE the future tastes as smooth,” reads the box) that has made its national debut in four local shops: Cacao, Tilde, Grass Hut and Elsa Sam. The choco-Barack costs $20: “Everyone just seems to smile,” Artman says, “and no one has been tremendously offended to my knowledge.”

• MEAT ME ON THE EASTSIDE: Last week Simpatica closed its longtime meat headquarters, Viande, inside Northwest’s City Market. But it’ll be back this spring when they open their new eastside restaurant-cum-butcher shop at—according to a proposal filed with the Bureau of Development Services—3155 E Burnside St., in the former Laurelhurst Market. Former Viande employees Paula Marcus and Eric Finley have taken over the City Market space and rechristened it Chop. Bonus: Simpatica brunch junkies also got good news—the dining hall’s now serving Saturday brunch every week.

• BIRD ON BOARD: A packed week for Portland documentarian Dan Viens, who announced that his Chapman Elementary School swifts documentary On the Wing will air on OPB on Wednesday, Jan. 7, even as he prepares to travel to Bamako, Mali, this month and begin shooting a second film about “international artistic exchange, a family journey, the African AIDS epidemic and the search for a worldwide HIV vaccine.”

• SHALL WE DANCE? Today you have a chance to share a dance with M. Ward, local troubadour. He’s filming a video for his new single, and the theme is “formal school dance.” All you have to do is show up in a suit or sequins at the Wonder Ballroom at 3 pm on Wednesday, Jan. 7, and you might make the cut. Ward’s newest release, Hold Time, is out Feb. 17 on Merge Records, but you can stream the whole damn thing for free starting at midnight on Jan. 12 at NPR Music.

• PORTLAND: skateboarder-scene doc Rip City has been selected to the X-Dance Film Festival, an action-sports movie gala Jan. 16-20 in Salt Lake City.