Cheapskate Got a great deal? Email it to us at deals@wweek.com. SWEAT! SWEAT! Hot Yoga for Life is offering 10 yoga classes for $10—that’s $1 per class! You’ve got three weeks to try power v ... More

Cheapskate Got a great deal? Email it to us at deals@wweek.com. CHEAP READS: Beaverton-based online bookseller McKenzie Books is donating 100 percent of the proceeds from its third annual sidewalk sale to Don ... More

Cheapskate Got a great deal? Email it to us at deals@wweek.com. RIDEON GOES CITYWIDE:RideOn, the nonprofit that drives your drunk ass home in your own car, has extended its range to anywhere in Portland prope ... More

Cheapskate Got a great deal? Email it to us at deals@wweek.com. BITCH, PLEASE: The grass is always greener when its stains are on your clothes, so grab some duds and swing down to Jupiter Hotel this weekend f ... More

Cheapskate Got a great deal? Email it to us at deals@wweek.com. SOLID-COLOR SALE: Are you an aspiring young porn director? Do you need to fill your porn wardrobe with porn clothes? For cheap? American Apparel ... More

Cheapskate Got a great deal? Email it to us at deals@wweek.com. GET ROCKED: Our annual, always awesome Best New Band show is this Friday. As of deadline for this column, I don’t know who’s playing ... More

Cheapskate Got a great deal? Email it to us at deals@wweek.com. SPECIAL FORCES: White Fang, Guantanamo Baywatch and Orca Team, who collectively sound like the hardest-partying secret military missions ever, w ... More

Cheapskate Got a great deal? Email it to us at deals@wweek.com. FEELGOOD FEST: I admit I have a hard time figuring out what City Repair does—they build benches out of mud, I think, and paint mandalas at ... More

Cheapskate Got a great deal? Email it to us at deals@wweek.com. AMPLE SAMPLES: Every Friday at Gusto Bistro, 10 bucks gets you four wine tastes and four tapas bites. Tasty! Gusto Bistro & Marketplace, 467 3rd ... More

Cheapskate Got a great deal? Email it to us at deals@wweek.com. PIX FLIX: David Byrne swoops in to observe and break the fourth wall in small-town Texas: 1986’s True Stories, showing at Pix Pâtiss ... More

Cover Story The day is coming, not long from now, when you will have to go inside.
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Cover Story “See everybody’s striving for that same shit/ To get paid and make it/ And I’ll be honest, I’m trying to become famous” —“Ego” (2005) Ben Haggerty has lost his train of thought. Mom ... More

Cover Story Colin Meloy was always bound to write a kid’s book. For years, the hyper-literate bard and lead singer of Portland’s internationally lauded band the Decemberists has been spinning bedtime yarns ... More

Cover Story “I have an idea,” our publisher said, charging headlong into my cubicle, “for Best of Portland. This is the 26th year. ... More

Cover Story Photos by Clyde KellerKen Kesey could have been America’s greatest writer. He had the talent. Certainly he was the finest novelist Oregon ever produced. By age 26, he had penned two canonical no ... More

Cover Story In her 10 years as a Portlander, Carrie Brownstein has been many things: a guitarist, an actress, a blogger, an advertising writer, a dog trainer and, most recently, the creator of a TV series... More

Cover Story In 1983, Portland’s Chinatown was, by all accounts, a real shithole. Peppered with empty lots, boarded-up storefronts and dealers pushing cocaine and heroin as casually as a grocery store clerk might ask “paper or plastic?”—it was a part of town best avoided altogether. It was in the heart of this dubious neighborhood that George Touhouliotis, a 36-year-old Greek immigrant and former cab driver with a fondness for poetry and rebellious youth culture, opened an equally dirty bar called Satyricon... More

Culture Carrying a big green kayak down the sidewalk in Lake Oswego gets attention. “You know you can’t just go in there?” “They’ll ding ya if they catch ya in there!” To hear it described by townsfolk... More

Culture It’s possible to cycle across town on the coldest, wettest day Portland has to offer without even the slightest chill.  I suspect it is, anyway. Call me naive, but with an unlimited budget ... More

Culture Whoever said doing the locomotion was easier than learning your ABCs—I’m lookin’ at you, Little Eva—wasn’t talking about biking. Pedaling healthily and efficiently requires at least A, B ... More

Culture It’s dark here. This far north, your commute is guaranteed to happen in the dark from the fall to the spring equinox, and our dismal weather makes for less-than-ideal visibility much of the rest ... More

Culture It may seem overwhelming at first, but the decision to commute to work by bike isn’t one you’ll regret. Maybe you’ve thought about it but haven’t figured out exactly how it’d work. Well, ... More

Culture If your bike is making ominous clicking, scraping or creaking noises—or, worse, if you can feel the equivalent of those sounds while pedaling—you need to take your bike into a shop immediate ... More

Culture When it comes to switching from cars or public transit to bicycling, actual pedaling is only half the battle. Unless you’re funemployed in July and your only cargo is the precious U-Lock in yo ... More

Culture Americans are disgustingly fat. I’m allowed to say so because not long ago, I was disgustingly fat. Three years ago, I weighed close to 300 pounds. I would like to tell you being a big, lazy s ... More

Culture Why are Portlanders so drawn to therapies outside the medical mainstream? Maybe it’s our general love of deviance, or just because we’re broke, unemployed and can’t afford a trip to Kaiser ... More

Culture So you’ve resolved to join a gym. Good for you! But how do you choose which is right for you? Here are the essential facts. ... More

Dr. Know Fifth generation Portlander, with tons of family, friends and neighbors. NONE of whom think the slogan “Keep Portland Weird” is amusing. Makes us look like fools. —K.H.Wow, a genui ... More

Fashion We love a good practical joke, but our nation’s current situation is getting out of control. It’s like the country is collectively living that damn Groundhog Day movie, only instead of the ... More

Fashion Purse, handbag, tote…whatever you call it these days, lugging around a bag o’ crap is part of a female’s DNA. Even though it’s a health hazard. You heard me: Big bags jam-pack ... More

Fashion If you visit Noun (3300 SE Belmont St., 235-0078), the little quirky-chic design and decor shop in Southeast Portland, you’ll think three things: (1) DANG, this place is cute; (2) DANG, let&rsqu ... More

Fashion Ever heard of the diamond sparkle spa set from Body Systems? You know, the $78 lotion and body scrub that supposedly contains 13.25 carats of real ground diamonds? Probably not, because it’s fuc ... More

Fashion You thought we’d pooh-pooh the whole Valentine’s thing, didn’t you? Maybe do an entire “Love is for Losers” column just dedicated to Morrissey, black roses and explicit i ... More

Fashion PHOTOS BY HEATHER ZINGERWe’d like to publicly thank Jebus for Frank James. No, not the less-famous outlaw and brother of Jesse, but Frank James the PDX store. Opened last fall, the boutique for ... More

Fashion Yeah, last week was sunny, but damn if the cold didn’t bite us right in the ass. Know what else bit us? A rhinovirus. That’s right: We have the nastiest lung-buttery malaise this side of t ... More

Fashion Judging from the rabble-rousing and ballyhoo that went down on the streets of Portland on Nov. 4, we’re guessing Jan. 20 is going to be off the hook. After all, Messrs. Obama and Biden are publi ... More

Fashion Happy 2009, fellow freaks! Woot! You and me and people across the world are taking a huge proverbial bubble bath, scrubbing out dirty and disgusting habits to emerge cleaner, healthier and holier than ... More

Fashion Picture this: You’re sitting there on Christmas morning. Your stomach is chock full of leftover booze and three cups of high-octane caffeine—all on about four hours of sleep. The only thin ... More

Featured Stories About 24 hours ago, I started playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 online in the middle of the Willamette Week office. I have stopped for food, bathroom breaks and occasional unescapable professio ... More

Featured Stories Last week’s funny pages found Pearls Before Swine auteur Stephan Pastis, who draws himself into his strip as a slouchy chain-smoker with a goatee and a backwards ball cap, feuding with a 9-year-o ... More

Featured Stories This Saturday and Sunday, the Oregon Convention Center will be overrun by some 150 novelists, journalists, poets and cartoonists for the 2011 Wordstock book fair. The big names on the marquee inclu ... More

Featured Stories 1985 - Best Pizza Thrower Dave Hite is something of a hero among working-class eaters. Before the bespectacled young man from Spokane, best known as the dapper saxophone player for the Fabulous K-T ... More

Featured Stories Best Multicultural Sports League The former British Empire can be criticized for a lot of things—plunder, slaughter, incest—but at sporting fields around the greater Portland area, you can also ... More

Featured Stories Best Total Toolbox You hear it on the news, or you heard it from Michael Keaton in Gung Ho: America just doesn’t make things anymore. The cars and iPhones are all offshored or down-bordered, while ... More

Featured Stories Best Cheap Date  After the second wettest spring on record, the sun is finally making brief public appearances in Portland. And so Portlanders are tentatively emerging from their holes, tattoos ... More

Featured Stories Best Divine Dilettantes If you’re in the market for a religious experience, Amanda Westmont and Joel Gunz might be able to lend you some wisdom. The pair has been attending a different Portland ch ... More

Featured Stories Best FanIt’s the summer of the Timbers, as Portland’s new Major League Soccer franchise has finally replaced Portlandia and the Stumptown sale (but not the weather—never the weather) as the de ... More

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Gift Guide  Printed1. Vegetable calendar by Little Canoe. $28.50 at Mag-Big, 3279 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 236-6120, magbig.com.  2. Portland poster by Ed Juan. $45 at Tender Loving Empire, 412 SW 10th Ave ... More

Gift Guide Amid all the recent furor over moving our money and designating days to buy or not buy and boycotting banks and big-box stores and all the rest of it, beneath the moralizing and recriminations, ... More

Gift Guide Santa Dec. 15: Photos with SantaAce Hotel and the Impossible Project present instant snaps of St. Nick. Ace Hotel, 1022 SW Stark St., acehotel.com/portland. 5 pm Thursday. Free. Dec. 17: Santa ... More

Gift Guide Langlitz Leathers2443-A SE Division St., 235-0959, langlitz.com.A Southeast Division Street institution, Langlitz Leathers has been making not only Portland bikers but motorcyclists from all over ... More

Gift Guide Boys Fort 600 SW 10th Ave., boysfort.com.Remember the treasure-filled clubhouse of your childhood? That’s Boys Fort, a rustic downtown pop-up shop adorned with dark wood and vintage hubcaps and ... More

Gift Guide Artistic Taxidermy 5700 SE Foster Road, 771-3337, pdxtaxidermy.com.You can’t walk into a bar, boutique or rock star’s living room these days without finding yourself face-to-snout with a stuffe ... More

Gift Guide ReRun 707 NE Fremont St., 517-3786, portlandrerun.com.Neighborhood consignment shop ReRun is the coolest garage and yard sale around. Outside, a sea of used furniture—both immaculate and questi ... More

Gift Guide Ed’s House of Gems 7712 NE Sandy Blvd., 284-8990, edshouseofgems.com.Somebody on your Christmas list just getting coal this year—because that’s what they wanted? Ed’s, a diamond in the ro ... More

Gift Guide Pistils3811 N Mississippi Ave., 288-4889, pistilsnursery.com.Walking in the store is like entering a jungle—tendrils of air plants snake down from hanging baskets and the walls are covered with ... More

Gift Guide Everything Jewish 6684 SW Capitol Highway, 246-5437, everythingjewish.biz.Because the Jewish calendar is based on the lunar cycle, Hanukkah hops around year to year, sometimes falling closer to T ... More

Headout Before people buy your wine, they want to pet your dog. Alex Sokol Blosser has accepted this. “I don’t know why—it’s gotta be that when you go to a farm, you expect to see a dog,” he s ... More

Headout Sometimes you’re toast before the green flag falls. We couldn’t compete with the swell of creative force fueling the Stumptown 40 adult Pinewood Derby. Past races have seen models made to lo ... More

Headout I had to squint, but the Elvis impersonator in the back row at Sophia’s wedding looked awfully familiar. That forehead. That weird mouth. Yes, Quentin Tarantino was on The Golden Girls. Oh, th ... More

Headout Horse races, like sex, are about mostly anticipation. And while the Kentucky Derby—like sex—only lasts two minutes, the elaborate celebrations around racing’s biggest event last all day. O ... More

Headout “It’s way more challenging than it looks,” says Isaac Rochester. “Lots of people think, ‘I could get drunk and throw some shit at a wall.’ But it really is a game of millimeters.” ... More

Headout It’s a big weekend for the smug and self-congratulatory. Saturday is Record Store Day, a celebration of crass consumerism and the fetishization of impractical and outdated technology. Sunday i ... More

Headout Apes seem like hairier versions of ourselves—playful, inquisitive and quick to throw feces when angered. For decades, we’ve been dressing them as bellhops, teaching them to ride tricycles an ... More

Headout There is a war on Easter. Sure, I could try to sugarcoat it—to disguise the truth in shiny tinfoil—but the truth is that Obama and his fellow socialists want everyone to think this is a holida ... More

Headout If Ally McBeal taught us anything, it’s that unisex public restrooms would not lead to total social degradation, but rather to zany plot twists and dance numbers. Yet for all of our societal p ... More

Headout Forget mud, vegetable oil and Jell-O. In Pittsburgh, the ladies wrestle in pudding. Ashley Ryon, the woman who invented the sport, is hoping her particular brand of custard-based chaos will take off ... More

Hitched If you're looking for love in Portland, you might meet someone in a bar while watching the 2001 World Series, like Tina and Aaron Wermerskirchen, or while responding to your first online personal ad, ... More

Hitched When he fielded a call from a woman named Laila just before Labor Day of 2002, Trent Tribou's initial response was more telemarketer than smooth operator. Trent, now 28, assumed, wrongly, that this La ... More

Hitched For someone who works in an industry that identifies and determines the validity of suspicious situations, Linda King was blindsided when it came to Noi Phimmasone. If Linda--who works in the world of ... More

Hitched Back when she was a college student in southern Texas, Marlleen Martinez knew better than to give her phone number to strange men. Good thing, because the petite English major spent a lot of time with ... More

Hitched Here's the scene on March 5, 2004: Jeff Fisher, a self-employed graphic designer, was in a limo, on his way to the Cedar Rapids airport after a conference in Waterloo, Iowa. The sixth-generation Orego ... More

Hitched "I talk. He listens." You might think these words would suggest the marital confidence of a long-time wedded woman. Consider instead that they come from a young woman who has been married just under t ... More

Hitched Some couples find it awfully easy to forget special days, like wedding anniversaries. Let's hope Scott and Stacy Rust don't run into this kind of trouble. After all, the couple's anniversary date only ... More

Hitched Young. Tattooed. Into bondage. Together less than six months. All in all, Lucia and LeAnn aren't the kind of couple that gay-rights groups hand-picked to be the first faces of Oregon's marriage revolu ... More

Hitched For some time, bars have served as the proverbial breakup spot: not too private for the sake of soothing an awkward situation, and public enough in case something (or someone) goes wrong.On this after ... More

Hitched Here's what you'll notice when you walk up to Beren deMotier and Jannine Setter's home in Northeast Portland. You'll see the white minivan parked right outside, a signal of the kind of precious cargo ... More

NIGHT CABBIE “Son of a bitch, you’re running up the meter!” The old man is drunk, and furious that I was unwilling to make an illegal turn through busy traffic. “Hey, I told you I’ll ... More

NIGHT CABBIE “Hey bro, remember me? You wrote that story about me in the paper.” I turn around, and the figure pulls back its hood. He’s a year older and sporting tangled cornrows, but of course ... More

NIGHT CABBIE “It’s the Californians, man, the Californians are the worst.” The man is in his early 30s and we have been talking about Portland as I drive him to his home off Rosa Parks Way. &ldqu ... More

NIGHT CABBIE The middle-aged man I picked up at Vendetta is in a hyperactively verbose lather and likely on coke, though meth is a distinct possibility. He’s just finished regaling me with a barely intelligi ... More

NIGHT CABBIE [CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK] When I step into the obese old woman's apartment in Milwaukie, the smell is overwhelming and the air stifling. She has me wheel her cart of groceries entirely into the apar ... More

NIGHT CABBIE The obese old woman at Fred Meyer has a bad hip and a wheelchair, and needs to sit in the front seat. Which is fantastic, as it’s scorching hot and she doesn’t seem to have bathed in days. ... More

NIGHT CABBIE “Yeah, I’m really hungry too, but I need to take a shower first and wash all of this blood off.” Occasionally, in severe cases, a firefighter or two will have to ride along in an amb ... More

NIGHT CABBIE “So I’ve got these two women in the back of my cab who just refuse to get out, and one of them’s puked all over the door, and the cops are understandably busy. What do I do?” I ... More

NIGHT CABBIE “My friend’s getting divorced, and he’s really drunk,” says the bartender as she leans through the passenger window. “Please don’t take advantage of him.” I g ... More

NIGHT CABBIE There’s nothing like a good Friday night, and I’m referring to the money. While the money can be very nice, Fridays often devolve into a desperate attempt at triage involving far too many ... More

Outdoors  testCHICKPEA GOODNESS: Fabulous falafel tops Cedo’s Plate. IMAGE: Mike Grippi  ... More

Outdoors GET HIGHCLIFF YOGANormally, doing yoga in nature seems like a good idea—a good idea for a way to get covered with ants, burrs, dirt and dung. However, on the Three Capes Scenic Drive off of U.S. ... More

Outdoors Put these 10 Oregonians in a room and they might not have much to talk about. The only thing they have in common is that they did something interesting, outside. But in the varied nature of their acco ... More

Outdoors 1. DRAFT DODGERSWhen you're riding on the trail, there are a couple of key rules: (a) if you keep pedaling, you can probably roll over it; and (b) dehydration is for suckers. To help you remain sucker ... More

Outdoors Throughout the course of my life, I have been exposed to the outdoors on a fairly regular basis. After all, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, specifically The Dalles, Ore.But nothing could have prep ... More

Outdoors On an electric Saturday morning in late September, when the sun was hot, the air was dry and Halloween seemed as far away as Christmas, pumpkins sailed through the cloudless, azure sky above North ... More

Outdoors The doorbell rings. I spring down two flights of stairs, almost breaking a leg when my feet shoot out from under me on a frictionless edge of carpeting. Of course there's nobody at the door by the ... More

Outdoors At the height of the fall hawk migration, I'm soaring like a raptor in a 40-year-old sailplane, silently corkscrewing through the sky 4,000 feet above the Sunset Highway just west of North Plains. ... More

Outdoors I've been feeling hawkish. So I think I'll take Friday off and drive to Government Camp, to meet some hardcore birders with high-clearance vehicles. Together, we'll caravan north on Highway 35 and ... More

Outdoors Self-awareness is a bitch. After all, according to Sartre, a self-reflective consciousness is what separates humans from animals. Truth be told, in the wake of Sept. 11's terrorist attacks, I'd gl ... More

Q & A Tree-humping dendrophiliacs aside, few interpret the mantra “Love the Earth” literally. Leave it to Annie Sprinkle, the porn star-turned-performance artist, to take it as far as anyone. Best ... More

Q & A When Roger Rabbit was bunnynapped, Camas Davis was blogging. The response to her daily updates on the Portland Meat Collective website wasn’t pretty. ... More

Q & A Chef Greg Higgins knows his way around a sausage. One of the forefathers of local, sustainable dining in Portland... More

Q & A It sounded like an absurdity. Patrick deWitt’s second book, The Sisters Brothers, had been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the redoubtable honor bestowed annually on the finest British novel. ... More

Q & A Finn Brunton is trying to figure out what the Internet “is”: What it’s doing, how it works, and how it’s evolving. Formerly a postdoctoral research fellow ... More

Q & A They’re out there. Clawing at your mailbox. Gnawing at your mind as you sleep. Ready to devour you and your family. They have no souls. They have no conscience. The only thing driving them is the ... More

Q & A For a 31-year-old, Peter D. Richardson has spent an uncommon amount of time pondering—and filming—the end of life. Last month, the Portland director’s movie How to Die in Oregon was awarded th ... More

Q & A  Marc Maron is twice-divorced, a recovering addict, a three-time failure as a liberal radio pundit and a veteran comic who over the past ... More

Q & A Cameryn Moore, a phone-sex operator, talk-show host and star of her own one-woman show, returns to her hometown this week with Phone Whore, an hourlong look into the life of a phone-sex operator. WW s ... More

Q & A The shop at Arciform, a North Portland-based antiques and home-refurbishing firm, is part carpentry center, part soapbox derby car garage. The Arciform crew has entered a team in the Portland Adult So ... More

Queer Window Sam Adams is my mayor. He is also a friend. When I saw that both The Oregonian and Just Out asked for his resignation and reported that many in the gay community wanted him out of office, too, I knew ... More

Queer Window The election of a black man as president has proven one thing: If you believe in something that seems impossible, it can and will happen. That’s a timely lesson in the wake of several defeats la ... More

Queer Window Craig Myers is a surprising pen pal for me. Myers is executive director of Concerned Oregonians, the group that tried—and failed—to get a measure on the Nov. 4 ballot that would have asked ... More

Queer Window Duncan Sheik is the gayest straight man I’ve ever met. I grasped that the night I took the singer-songwriter on a tour of local titty bars back in February 2006. As he sat in the back of my rus ... More

Queer Window Q Center Executive Director Kendall Clawson got two things in June: a donor willing to match up to $200,000 that she could raise toward a long-overdue new home for the gay center—and a new reaso ... More

Queer Window Back in the ’80s, my first encounter with a really big penis nearly made me faint. That’s actually a good thing, considering one needs to be barely conscious, or Zen-like relaxed, when dea ... More

Queer Window Oh. My. God. I just saw Pat’s penis. The Eagle Portland, a NoPo pub that once catered to working stiffs (when it was called Porky’s) but is now home to a group of hefty, hirsute homos call ... More

Queer Window For seven years, filmmaker Parvez Sharma followed a dozen devout gay and lesbian Muslims around the world. The result is A Jihad for Love, a documentary that screens at Portland’s Lesbian and Ga ... More

Queer Window “I hate Michael Phelps because he’s ugly,” says Alexis Stewart. “I’d hate him more if he were handsome.” The last frontier of the airwaves—satellite radio&mda ... More

Queer Window At 5 pm last Sunday, the Oregon Convention Center’s vast Portland Ballroom was virtually empty — except for a smallish meeting room next to it bustling with activity. That space had been t ... More

SCOOP CZECH, PLEASE: When Enzo Lanzadoro, owner of Enzo’s Caffe Italiano on Northeast Alberta Street, heads back to Italy on vacation this weekend, his restaurant will go with him. For three weeks, ... More

SCOOP WHY CAN’T THIS BE LOVE: Last week, someone dropped what we thought was a box of Voodoo Doughnuts at the WW office. Naturally, it sat for a few hours before anyone opened it. But in the box was s ... More

SCOOP BOOGIE BURGER: Now that cars are for losers, are old auto shops Portland’s new hotspots? Voodoo Doughut Too is in a converted car lot, and Tres Shannon planned to put the sadly unopened Portla ... More

SCOOP OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD: Portland weirdo-pop outfit Nucular Aminals has a recording date with famed producer Steve Albini in July, but the band hasn’t exactly figured out how to pay for it. Instea ... More

SCOOP WE EVEN LOST AT COFFEE: Portland’s competitive impulses are being beaten down. The Blazers sucked, the Timbers may suck... More

SCOOP R.I.P. THEORY: Portland MC and producer Gavin “Theory” Soens died of cancer April 10. The 27-year-old was in his home, surrounded by friends and family. Soens is best known for his band, Hives ... More

SCOOP EXTINGUISHED, ANGUISHED: Fire dancing has been more or less banned in Portland. The art of spinning burning things in the dark...
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SCOOP CARRIE ON: The sun came up, so it was another big week for Carrie Brownstein. Undeterred by her Mayoral Madness loss to Victoria Taft... More

SCOOP RECORD STORE LIVE: We’re still a few weeks out from Record Store Day on Saturday, April 21, and the exclusive releases are stacking up. The Flaming Lips’ four-sided, tie-dyed double albums m ... More

SCOOP HAM BUMMER: Hamburger Mary’s was worried its grim garage door was an eyesore on a street that already has problems with drugs, loitering and petty crime. So on March 16, managers got 10 graffi ... More