Scoop: The Shins and M. Ward Snub Portland

1. CARRIE ON: The sun came up, so it was another big week for Carrie Brownstein. Undeterred by her Mayoral Madness loss to Victoria Taft, Brownstein announced April 2 that she’ll publish a memoir with Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin. It’s a different book than her last proposed memoir, The Sound of Where You Are, which had been announced in 2010 with HarperCollins. “This one feels more organic, less academic,” Brownstein says. She’s done a lot of stuff since then, like making appearances on NPR game show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! and Marc Maron’s podcast WTF to round out her March.

1. SNUBBED! Two of Portland’s most iconic acts, the Shins and M. Ward, have failed to add Portland dates to their tours for new albums. While both acts flirt with other home bases—the Shins’ James Mercer hangs out in L.A., Ward kicks it in Austin and Europe—we had expected some kind of homecoming celebrations. Instead, local fans will have to wait for the Sasquatch! festival in late May. And now a short list of inferior cities on the artists’ respective tours: Nelsonville, Ohio; Missoula, Mont.; Reno, Nev.; Upper Darby, Pa.

1. PLAYED LIST: A reader complained that KZME 107.1-FM, the Portland station that plays only local music, has shifted gears since a recent fundraising drive. Actually, KZME is just expanding its genre-independent playlist, says volunteer Chris Guy. “We’ve been adding more new music,” he says. “So they’re not just hearing the same thing over and over.”

1. HOLE LOTTA BAKIN’ GOING ON: The bagel wars continue, as Michael Madigan, the owner of Pearl District commissary kitchen KitchenCru, is joining the fight. Madigan told WW in an interview last year that there’s “no way” he would open a restaurant: “I’ve just seen it grind up too many good people.” Now he plans to open an Old Town bagel shop called Bowery Bagels, inspired by the New York bagels of his youth. Madigan gave away 500 bagels (flavors included soy-miso and truffle salt) at KitchenCru on March 31 to promote the shop and road-test his recipes. Scoop enjoyed an excellent everything bagel—the real test will be whether it can scale up to a commercial level.

1. GHOST OF A SEASON: The Rose Garden is getting spoo-ooky. Grimm stars David Giuntoli (plain-looking detective dude) and Silas Weir Mitchell (awesome werewolf dude) showed up April 1 to watch the Blazers beat the Timberwolves in a game of minimal NBA-wide consequence. Weird, right? Then, at halftime, all sorts of weird monsters stormed the court and begin to brawl! (It was mascot night.) Then, in the fourth quarter, a crazy and/or heavily intoxicated man (with superhuman strength!) barreled into the arena and had to be dragged out by a gang of ushers and security guards. Reports of what happened next are fuzzy, but our source says that once outside the arena, the man cackled, turned into a bat and flew away. Grimm is totally real.

WWeek 2015