Arts & Books Image courtesy of IFC's Portlandia Blog
The premise is, I suppose, simple: Take Portland on a tour, not merely in the pages of magazines and dailies, but actually as a place. Who says one city can’t visit another? But then of course, it is not so much Portland that is touring in live form to Seattle and New York and...   More

Movie Reviews & Stories “I find you disgusting.” These are the first substantive words spoken in director Steve McQueen’s sex-negative new film, aptly titled Shame. They are a misdirection, delivered after a craft   More

Food Reviews & Stories When tiny Central first opened a little over a year ago, it was planned as something of a craft-cocktail hipster speakeasy, unmarked and secreted away in a narrow back alley of otherwise chaotic   More

Movie Reviews & Stories George Clooney, who may be the closest thing we now have to a Cary Grant, seems of late to be reversing Grant’s career trajectory. While Grant went from pratfalling acrobat to ironically self-aware    More

Food Reviews & Stories The RingSide Fish House, perched on the mezzanine of the theater district’s Fox Tower, is the first addition to Portland’s staid RingSide steak empire in three decades.   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

News First things first: I did not attend the Occupy Portland protest on purpose; I was in Old Town for my own reasons.   More

Books Irish writer Sebastian Barry—twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, called by Salon “the best prose writer in the English language”—is one of the most ambitious writers today. His new b   More

Food Reviews & Stories Some of my fondest memories from my time in Chicago are of the Spartan, hole-in-the-wall, train-car Polish cafes in the northwest part of the city. These were Polish community gathering places cente   More

Arts & Books It is a common trope that reading is really the only art that requires skill from its audience; this is one of the reasons that the audience for serious literature will always be limited, whatever the countless perky entreaties of high school librarians. But in his 24-hour monologue, All the Hours of the Day, Mike Daisey demanded something even rarer than skill or education: he asked of his audience fortitude, character, sheer inhuman will. That or a large supply of trucker speed.
   More