Oregon Shakespeare Festival Soothes the Souls of Those Afflicted by Interesting Times – Today More Than Ever Every season of Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a song cycle. Each tune thrills on its own, but take in the entirety of the album, and the meaning of its parts deepens quicker than the distrust of sun celebrations after seeing “Midsommar.” Even viewing
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This one might be a bit of a bummer. Or maybe not. Let me tell you a story about my buddy Ben Metzger. The man’s a dreamer. As far back as I can remember, he’s always wanted to be a rapper. Also, he’s from Corvallis, which makes that goal tenuous at best. I’ll cut to the chase; he became a
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Approaching a fine bottle of wine, I resemble nothing so much as Derek Zoolander and Hansel attempting to crack a computer. I know that the wine is in there, and that it’s reputed to be filled with flavors so sublime that they make yuppies wax faux-poetic like Janet Jackson in a self-indulgent John Singleton movie. But how to coax out
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Still feeling the soul glow from San Francisco. Tony Joe White called it Soul Francisco, and that was no joke. Saturday night I felt the fire and brimstone of Heron Oblivion at Mississippi Studios, and it cast my memory back there, lord, to two weekends ago when I wandered the streets that gave birth to that bad-ass band and so
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Memorial Day was once a day of the dead for me. We’d climb in my parents’ minivan and drive to the cemetery in South Town. This was a time to place flowers on the graves of my great-grandfather and a neighbor who’d made sculptures out of matchboxes and pipe cleaners for us as kids. I never really understood what my
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Every trip begins with music. It’s a door to foreign cultures for which you need fashion no key. Your brain is a lockpick kit, capable of jimmying any sound. Film and literature are similarly functioning gateways, provided you have subtitles or translated editions, but the magic of music is you need not know the words. Even if you have no
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Thankful is not my default setting. Open up the panel on my back, and you’ll find “Critical,” “Curmudgeonly,” “Crazy,” and “Skeptical Skeletor,” but “Thankful” is practically a hidden button, squirreled away in a tiny recess that can only be reached via a modified paperclip, like your car’s time-setting function. It’s not that I don’t have a thousand things to be
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“Double double, toil and trouble, these be bands to reduce you to rubble. An aural potion to fill you with fright, drown in these sounds on Halloween night. If you dare to take a listen, they’re sure to make your cake-hole glisten. Drool as you duel with undead waves, and pray you don’t stumble into an early grave.” – The
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Hey Ghoul, have you got plans for Halloween? Because I’d be terrified to spend it without you. (Pause while I wait for the phone to ring, and the people in charge of the Ryan Gosling meme to tell me that I’m everything they’ve been searching for.) No? OK then. Want to spend Halloween night in the Paris Catacombs? This isn’t
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I guess I just like having my face melted. It’s the only conclusion, really. Blistering rock and roll, spicy food, mind-liquifying literature, and looking directly into the Ark of the Covenant: I’ve done it all. Being the thrill-seeker that I am, I’ve done it all nearly to death. Oh, the tales my tummy could tell. There was the time I
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