Arts & Books
So it’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and we’re all gathered round to watch cars crash behind the high school. These same three cars crashed twice Saturday, and they will do it again in a few hours. I’m not sure what I had expected, exactly, but I know I had expected something else; I had been told that cars would be made to crash in slow motion, and had wanted perhaps a giant game of popcor...
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Books
Let’s get the obligatory journalism out of the way
quickly: Michael Dickman’s biography is interesting. He and his twin
brother, Matthew, are both terribly renowned young poets (if poets are
ev
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Books
In Portland-born animator Bill Plympton’s films, faces
might turn themselves inside out, explode, or puddle into primordial
goo; they come back blandly whole, the very soul of bureaucracy.
Featur
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A photographer’s ’70s-era portraits of Portland’s lost souls get a new life.
Culture
Whatever Ellis Island’s pleasant fictions
about the poor, meek or hungry, Portland’s Old Town has always welcomed
them in earnest. It has been a century-long home to the transient or
boozy, whe
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Books
It is a common thing, beneath the deafening noise of
America’s Lohans and Kardashians, to hear tell that our culture—as a
result of reality television, willful illiteracy, celebrity worship, the
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Movie Reviews & Stories
There are things you don’t do on film, if you want to keep
your viewer’s sympathy. You don’t shoot toddlers, for one—especially
not in front of their mom. You don’t burn innocents alive. Y
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Books
Perhaps no American writer of the past 25 years has
inspired more devotion, hope and resentment than David Foster Wallace.
When his dense-prosed, block-paragraphed doorstopper, Infinite Jest,
dropp
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Secret Kebab will serve you anything (sometimes), so long as it’s kebab.
Food Reviews & Stories
Secret Kebab, as the name might suggest, is a
kebab-smuggling operation, steered by the unseen hand of a shadowy,
mustachioed figure known as Alparslan the Turk, who is also suspected of
being a li
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Books
It is natural to assume that the topography of a city is
fundamentally constant—that some half-distant ancestors found a
promising patch of earth and proceeded to sow the seeds for what would
ripen, as if inevitably, into the place we know well. But cities are
things of tumult
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