Arts & Books Stories Debut poetry and fiction doesn’t have much visibility in the publishing world these days. Enter Paul Martone and Erin Hoover, a fiction writer and a poet who paired up to create Late Night Libra ... More

Arts & Books Stories Mike Daisey, All the Hours in the DayMike Daisey is, at various times, an improvisational storyteller, a big-hearted observer, a lonely expositor of self or a sweat-drenched haranguer from the stage ... More

Arts & Books Stories This Thursday marks the beginning of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s ninth Time-Based Art Festival, a 10-day rush of dance, theater, comedy, music, film, visual art and other assorted w ... More

Arts & Books Stories If Halloween weekend wasn’t enough and you’ve still got a thirst for costumes and theatrics, local writers Megan Clark, Monica Drake, Delilah Marvelle and Jessica Morrell appear as Dangero ... More

Arts & Books Stories Spending a sweaty Saturday in an airless room silently touching strangers might not sound like a good time. But Information Studio—a combination of Twister, sociology experiment and art happenin ... More

Arts & Books Stories Here's a promising recipe for a riveting biography: Pick a scientific genius who made the remarkable jump to world icon from his otherwise-impenetrable field. Choose a subject whose life was a bubbli ... More

Arts & Books Stories Cassandra Devine is one pissed-off 29-year-old. An overworked whiz at an evil Washington PR firm (is there any other kind?), she's broke and miserable, and her taxes keep getting raised to boost the B ... More

Arts & Books Stories   Up until the age of about seven, Robert Cody Reuwsaat spent every October terrified because he was convinced that his parents turned into vampires at that time of year due to extensive ... More

Books In August 2010, a project called PDX 2 Gulf Coast took a group of 22 Oregonians to the Gulf of Mexico to get a firsthand look at the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that had devastated the e ... More

Books One of the signal pleasures of a nostalgic soap opera like AMC’s Mad Men-—or, more recently, ABC’s Pan Am—is the consistent appeal of discovering that our predecessors’ morality is roundly ... More

Books Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle (FSG, 315 pages, $26) quite literally describes a circle: Wheeler—a London-based journalist—travels counterclockwise, in pie-sha ... More

Books Until relatively recently—within the past 50 years, say—no one had to be told not to waste their food, and certainly not as an ecological or even public issue. It was simple common sense: Who th ... More

Books Cover songs are, of course, more than familiar—usually it’s the first step to becoming a musician at all. Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha (Publication Studio, 296 pages, $20) ... More

Books When one thinks of things associated with the politically unstable Balkans region, modern poetry isn’t exactly at the top of the list, although the ... More

Books “The first time I put on a dress, I was 37.” That’s a surprising statement coming from female impersonator Walter Cole, better known as Darcelle XV, doyenne of the West Coast’s longest-runn ... More

Books If you run in certain circles, you hear it every day: The publishing houses are dying, and books are therefore dying. Writers, we presume, are all also dying. The ... More

Books In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a young man named Ishmael leaves his home in New York for several years of adventures aboard a whaling ship. After sailing the seas collecting sperm oil, when it c ... More

Books You are not going to believe this, but not everything you see in Gypsy (the musical or the movie) is strictly true. Thank the goddess of burlesque we have no less a luminary than Karen Abbott (she o the best-selling Sin ... More

Dance  What’s the appeal of flash mobs? Canadian choreographer Matjash Mrozewski thinks it might be the endorphin-boosting power of moving in unison with a large group, ... More

Dance Yuka Iino has been feeling a little, well, emotional lately: “I tear up for small little things, not necessarily things that are making me sad,” she confesses via email. “I cry for somethi ... More

Dance We’re expressing ourselves through more channels than ever before, but what are we saying? That might well be the question driving this riveting new contemporary dance work by Portland performan ... More

Dance It’s been a banner year for Portland’s Northwest Dance Project, which specializes in dancing work by international contemporary choreographers. The company won two European dance competition ... More

Dance Fickle weather notwithstanding, Portland is pretty good about offering summer movie and concert series in parks all over the city. Outdoor dance series? Not so much, with the exception of Oregon Ba ... More

Dance Oregon Ballet Theatre has a new starting lineup of fresh faces this season, and OBT Exposed—the company’s week of free public programming July 18-23 at Director Park—offers a sneak preview of ... More

Dance Patrick Delcroix is a knight, but not the shining armor-wearing type. On a stormy evening at the Northwest Dance Project’s North Mississippi Avenue studio, he’s dressed in jeans and a long-slee ... More

Dance An exploding egg, electronic birdsong and dancing in the lobby: maybe not what you’d expect to find at the ballet, although you will encounter all three at Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Stravinsky Pro ... More

Dance  Portland loves to talk about its diverse art scene, says choreographer Robert Guitron, but when he challenges locals to name more than five Portland dance groups, they tend to trail off after White Bird ... More

Performance Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima’s work is filled with seeming contradictions: the confluence of sex and death, the modern grotesqueries that result from the unremitting pursuit of t ... More

Performance Horny teenagers are going to have sex whether it is explained to them or not. It’s in our nature, and desire can be repressed for only so long.  Following a group of kids growing up in a ... More

Performance The story of Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, is a classic American parable: A musician from a very early age, Ledbetter was unknown outside West Texas until 1933, when the gr ... More

Performance When I left Portland Playhouse after opening night of the first part of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s trilogy, I felt... More

Performance Tolstoy’s masterpiece Anna Karenina is a uniquely difficult novel to adapt into a play. It is a long and somewhat baggy affair that constantly swings between two contrasting main plots stitche ... More

Performance This weekend, the Bridgetown Comedy Festival will bring more than 200 comedians to nine venues along Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. That’s a lot of funny people. But how well do these so-calle ... More

Performance If you’re going to run from the swamp, you’d best keep running. Oya runs fast enough to earn a track scholarship, but stays behind to care for her ailing mother. When autumn rolls around again ... More

Performance Like the movie Memento, the play Betrayal and the musical Merrily We Roll Along, Portland Opera’s new production of Philip Glass’ Galileo Galilei proceeds backward in time. Directed by Kevin Newbu ... More

Performance Reversing entropy is no easy endeavor. “It’s crazy,” John Berendzen says as he crosses the threshold of the gutted office space where he’s summoning the ghost of Gertrude Stein. “I’ve ... More

Performance Let me tell you about David Mamet: He’s 64 years old, hasn’t written anything really good since Ronin and hates women. If you’ve ever seen a Mamet play, you already knew that last bit. His fem ... More

Visual Arts “Live in fragments no longer,” E.M. Forster urged in Howards End. “Only connect.” Today, 102 years after the novel was published, we increasingly connect by tweeting, streaming and texti ... More

Visual Arts If the Playboy Mansion were plopped down into the forests of Middle-earth and redecorated by Donald Trump, it would probably wind up looking and feeling like Tom Cramer’s woodsy, sensual fanta ... More

Visual Arts Oh, how we love to tart up death! Out with the blood, in with the embalming fluid, pancake the face, rouge the cheeks, and suddenly Grandma looks 10 years younger than when she died! The pervers ... More

Visual Arts It’s an image that could keep you up at night: a young man, his wife, and their child lay atop the bolted entrance to a family crypt. The parents’ eyes are closed as the child rests limply on ... More

Visual Arts Picasso drew and painted plenty of sphincters in his perverse erotic fantasias, but the necessary but generally unglamorous muscle doesn’t get a lot of face time in fine art—not even in nudes. ... More

Visual Arts Think of Margaret Evangeline as the Annie Oakley of the art world. The New York City-based artist creates her trademark abstractions by shooting stainless steel panels with handguns, shotguns an ... More

Visual Arts It is a gorgeous, heartbreaking image: A woman shooting heroin into her bruised leg while her boyfriend and a friend’s child sit beside her on a bed. As it turns out, she is baby-sitting the boy ... More

Visual Arts In two riveting, wildly different shows this month, one artist known for sculpture makes a jump to wall pieces while another artist known for wall pieces leaps onto the floor with a haunting ser ... More

Visual Arts Fledgling arts organization YU Contemporary announced last week that director Sandra Percival was suddenly leaving her post after less than two years at the helm. YU co-founders Curtis Knapp and F ... More

Visual Arts A feminist art show might strike some as a stale proposition at this late date. Then again, with chauvinist-chic TV shows (Mad Men, Pan Am, The Bachelor) all the rage, maybe it’s perfect timing for ... More