Music Upper Extremities #8: A Casual Encounter With Something Fierce It was only three weeks ago that I slobbered all over Something Fierce and its masterful Don’t Be So Cruel in my special corner of the internet, and I heaped still more praise upon Houston’s pop-punk geniuses in    More

Movie Reviews & Stories As of this writing, the Oakland Athletics (full disclosure: my Oakland Athletics), who have not posted a winning season since 2006, are 18 games out of first place in the American League West, a div   More

Movie Reviews & Stories The great German dervish Rainer Werner Fassbinder, still only 27 years old and already fairly deep into a frantic career of unceasing productivity—he seemed to know he would die young—dipped his   More

Music Upper Extremities is a weekly punk rock column by Chris Stamm
Nearly every mote constituting my being was devoted to Musicfest NW since last week’s column, which itself was devoted to Musicfest NW. I’m afraid I had very little time to experience anything—musical or otherwise—that did not involve my Heineken-sponsored wristband. So here I am, landing a few more left hooks into the rotted...   More

Arts & Books I caught a few episodes of Whispering Pines, multimedia wrangler Shana Moulton’s deranged New Age soap, when the artist visited Portland for 2008’s PDX Film Festival, so I knew what to expect, more or less, fr...   More

Music A weekly punk rock column by Chris Stamm I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time in the last couple of weeks plotting my Musicfest itinerary. Trust that I feel about as pathetic as you’d like me to feel. Be that as it may, the intense(ly misused) mental energy expended on resolving scheduling conflicts did lead me to a few possibly meaningful thoughts about this year’s festivities. Perhaps m...   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Alex de la Iglesia’s glossy grindhouse lark, The Last Circus, opens with a nasty, over-the-big-top bloodbath. We’re in Spain. It’s 1937. Franco’s on the rise. A newly conscripted Republican    More

Music Chris Stamm's weekly punk rock column.
I’ll buy anything Portland’s mighty Dirtnap Records puts out, no questions asked. They’ve become, in the last few years, the 21st century answer to Lookout Records, at least in my house. That Dirtnap arm, like the jaunty Lookout logotype of yore, is all I need to see before the cash is on the counter. In honor of Dirtnap’s revamped retail/distro ...   More

Movie Reviews & Stories John Sayles’ career is a maddeningly prismatic thing. So varied is the ambidextrous writer-director’s list of accomplishments that James Franco, following an ill-advised perusal of Sayles’ Wi   More

Food & Drink Longtime WW contributor Chris Stamm broke our hearts and moved to Seattle a few months ago. We asked him to give us his assessment of the Emerald City's version of PDX cuisine. Feel free to leave your own 5 Spot taste test notes in the comments.

As Ruth Brown    More