Art & Entertainment

Spring Arts Guide 2013

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:48:00 -0800

MARCHFOURTH MARCHING BAND
CRYSTAL BALLROOM // MARCH 3 and 4

Most Portlanders have encountered that instant change of mood, let’s call it an M4 moment, where you thought you were doing one thing—commuting over the Hawthorne Bridge, wandering a crowded street fair, standing outside the Schnitz—when suddenly, with the crash of drums, the ring of horns, and the holler of stilt walkers, everything changes and you’re wrapped up in a Sgt. Pepper’s Technicolor Carnival Marching Band hallucination.

Image: Courtesy Joshua Timmermans

Marchfourth Performs At The 2013 Jam Cruise

There was a time in the mid-’00s when the MarchFourth Marching Band was everywhere, pulling up in its signature fire truck, playing every festival and Alberta event, winning Willamette Week’s Best Local Band, ringing the hallowed atrium of City Hall like a cymbal for former Mayor Sam Adams’s swearing-in celebration, and always leaving just before the police arrived (at least that one time it put on an unpermitted parade with Tom Green for a segment on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno).

But you’d be excused for realizing it’s been a while since you last heard their rallying cry, “Joy Now!” That’s because they’re now on the road 175 days a year, a modern coterie of merry pranksters touring music halls across the country.

Image: Andy Batt

Celebrating its 10th birthday at the Crystal Ballroom this month, the band has come of age with modern Portland. With its home-welded drum harnesses, upcycled uniforms, globe-spanning music mash-up, and entrepreneurial drive to succeed at a seemingly outrageous project (a band that supports 24 people!), MarchFourth basically plays the anthem for Portland’s weird-leaning DIY makers with big dreams. And like the city itself and many of its arts organizations, over the past decade the ensemble has grown up—into a polished, professional, collaborative project that is just on the edge of full sustainability.

Image: Andy Batt

“They’re ‘a little ol’ marching band’ just as Portland is a ‘little ol’ city in the Pacific Northwest’: neither is going to be hemmed in by what other people think,” says Adams, now the executive director of City Club. “Portland marches to the beat of its own drum, and MarchFourth makes sure that beat is always changing.”

The band started when five friends—John Averill on bass, Dan Stauffer on percussion, Nathan Wallway on stilts, and dancers and twins Faith and Nayana Jennings—roped in two dozen other musicians to play a one-off Mardi Gras party on March 4, 2003 (thus the multivalent name). But when the US invaded Iraq two weeks later, they decided to march in the first antiwar protest, playing their six cover songs on repeat. The effect was musical alchemy, transmuting anger into a clapping, dancing crowd of followers.

“Here was this band that was even more joyous and fantastic than Pink Martini,” recalls Pink Martini bandleader Thomas Lauderdale, who was among the crowd. “From the beginning it was this perfect Portland progressive project that was musical, activist, galvanizing, and inspiring, even in the bleakest situations.”

Image: Andy Batt

Pink Martini hired MarchFourth to open several concerts, which sparked corporate gigs and local events, which in turn bought MarchFourth time to hone its unique, percussion-driven mixed drink of New Orleans brass, Latin big band, funk, Balkan, Afrobeat, Middle Eastern, and whatever else members found inspiring. The ragtag rabble grew into 30-plus musicians, dancers, and stilt walkers. They were admittedly sloppy, but their sloppiness paled next to their spectacle and enthusiasm.

Given the group’s size, few onlookers envisioned a life beyond beloved local house band status. But band members’ ambitions were ignited by a last-minute madcap trip to Germany during the World Cup in 2006. They went to perform at the Altonale Festival, where they beat out 50 groups from around the world for “Best in Show,” but they picked up Cup-related gigs along the way. “The whole world was in Germany,” says saxophonist Robin Jackson, who has since left the group to cofound Joy Now, a circus, music, and performance program taught by band members. “The magic was out of control. We marched down the red-light district; we invaded the subways and busked on the streets.”

Image: Andy Batt

So the band started to tour. First to one-offs, like New Belgium Brewing’s Tour de Fat festivals and an appearance with Pink Martini and Carol Channing at the Hollywood Bowl. Then in 2007, MarchFourth bought a bus off eBay for $10,000, fixed it up (naming it “Razzle Dazzle” after Channing’s trademark song), and went on a national tour: 22 cities in seven weeks with some 35 people on board. “This band is not going to be sustainable if we hang out in Portland,” says bandleader Averill, who continues to split management duties with the four other founders. “Without a bus, MarchFourth doesn’t work. We cook on the bus; we sleep on the bus. It’s kind of like a mobile home for 24 people.”

The bus led to a booking agent in 2010, which was the final catalyst. Distant gigs were no longer just fun field trips: MarchFourth was now a touring act. It put 250,000 miles on Razzle Dazzle before she died in Arizona, spurring them to raise $50,000 via Kickstarter for a newer model.

VIDEO
MarchFourth Web Archives
Portland's merriest marching band shares some videos from the vault.

With the transformation came a shift in personnel. Part-timers with day jobs and families pulled back, making room for new, mostly full-time members willing to scrape by on a small day rate in order to be part of something magical, supplemented by side projects such as making merchandise for the band’s pop-up boutique. Against all odds (and presumably rational thought), MarchFourth Marching Band has become the primary occupation of two-dozen people. “One of the biggest assets is the fact that there’s no one central figure,” says Nayana Jennings, the founder in charge of general management. “People can come and go because it’s greater than the sum of its parts.”

Over the years, MarchFourth has streamlined, added electric guitar, moved into more rock-influenced original material, and released four records, shedding its early exuberant sloppiness for a tight, hard-driving show with polished dance routines that’s earning it invitations to ever more prestigious festivals, from the Telluride Jazz Fest to Jam Cruise. The goal now is for the band to be truly sustainable, providing a fully livable wage and health insurance. Managers believe it’s possible if they keep building audiences the old-fashioned way (while crossing their fingers for a late-night-show invitation or viral video), because they’ve learned that, just as they transformed that antiwar protest 10 years ago, they have the same effect everywhere they go.

“We strike a chord in the consciousness of America wherever we travel,” says dance team coordinator Aaron Lyon. “People believe in what we’re doing: ‘There’s that traveling band of misfits who are doing it together, altering the way people live.’” —Aaron Scott

Iris DeMent | Mar 22 at 8

A musical fixture in the folk scene during the ’90s, this Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter collaborated with everyone from Emmylou Harris to Merle Haggard, her distinctive vibrato able to confess as well as testify. After a 16-year absence of original material, she’s back with a critically lauded new album. —Gino Cerruti

Low | Apr 5 at 8

Releasing its 10th studio album, The Invisible Way, produced by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, on its 20th anniversary, Low proves its career is like its music, slow burning but incredibly resilient. The trio, fronted by husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, is known for stripped-down shows so transcendent that they’ve kept audiences sitting cross-legged and spellbound on the floor. —AS

Jeff Bridges and the Abiders | Apr 7 at 8

Bridges may have won an Academy Award for his role as an aging country singer in Crazy Heart, but he wasn’t content just to act. He released his second album of country tunes (with production by the renowned T-Bone Burnett) in 2011 and has been touring whenever he’s not on a movie set. The Dude definitely abides. —GC

Blind Pilot with the Oregon Symphony | Apr 27 at 7:30

Like Pink Martini, the resident masters of crossing from music club to symphony stage, the indie-folk group Blind Pilot casts a musical spell so joyous that it wraps up listeners of all ages, making it impossible to leave a concert anything but beaming. —AS

For ticket prices and showtimes, click on the event's title to visit the event's listing.

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Image: Courtesy Portland Opera

Portland Opera’s 2009 collaboration with the Portland Baroque Orchestra, La Calisto

Rinaldo
PORTLAND OPERA // MARCH 15–23

Portland Opera’s annual Newmark productions are always among its most anticipated, not just for the intimate nature of the theater, but for the ability of the company to take risks. With the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia as its coproducer, the opera is tackling an original production of Handel’s Rinaldo, a fantastical tale of a knight in the First Crusade who must battle sorcerers, spirits, and dragons to save the woman he loves—a fitting plot for the opera that first introduced magic effects and magnificent stage machines to London audiences in 1711. Fortunately, our knight will have at his side the fine musicians of Portland Baroque Orchestra as his accompaniment, the second such collaboration for the two organizations. (PBO will also perform its own Handel concerts March 22–24). —AS

Image: Courtesy Oregon Symphony

Storm Large will perform with the Oregon Symphony.

Premonitions | May 4 & 5

Fronted by singer Storm Large and a full cast, the Oregon Symphony will tempt us with the satirical ballet chanté (“sung ballet”) of German composer Kurt Weill, The Seven Deadly Sins, which follows a girl as she travels through the US, encountering a deadly sin in each city. Macabre compositions by Schubert, Ravel, and others round out the evening. —Genevieve Hudson

Third Angle Ensemble | Mar 21 at 7:30

Now in its second year, Third Angle’s Russell New Ideas in Music competition awards three composers—one regional, one national, and one international—and invites audiences to the first performances of the winning compositions. —AS

Cappella Romana | June 16 at 4

Few local groups cover more ground—musically or in the breadth of their touring—than this a cappella ensemble. This performance is no exception. Titled “From Constantinople to California,” the program takes a 1,000-year journey from Ancient Byzantine chants to contemporary Greek-American choral music, a similar journey to the group’s own that resulted in its 2011 recording Cappella Romana Live in Greece. —Sam Coggeshall

Chamber Music NW Summer Festival | June 24–July 28

At age 43, this festival remains one of the city’s most anticipated and enjoyable events, with performances running over five weeks in the lush climes of Catlin Gabel School and Reed College. This year’s highlights include the Darrell Grant Ensemble, the Miro Quartet, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, and violinist Philip Setzer. —SC For concert times and locations, call 503-294-6400 or visit cmnw.org.

For ticket prices and showtimes, click on the event's title to visit the event's listing.

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Clybourne Park
PORTLAND CENTER STAGE // APRIL 9–MAY 5

Image: Courtesy American Conservatory Theater

The West Coast premiere of Clybourne Park at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco

This “spiky and damningly insightful new comedy,” according to the New York Times, begins in a house in a white Chicago neighborhood in 1959 that the owners are selling to an African American family (in fact, the very house the Younger family planned to move into in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun), stirring the outrage of their hilariously horrifying neighbors. Then the story jumps 50 years ahead to the same house, only this time it’s a black family selling to white buyers as the neighborhood flips white again. Written by Bruce Norris and here directed by Portland Center Stage Artistic Director Chris Coleman, the play grapples with the fraught topical issues of identity, race, and gentrification with such wit and entertainment that it won a holy trinity of dramatic awards: a Tony, an Olivier, and a Pulitzer. —GH

Ten Chimneys | Apr 23–May 26

Carol Channing once said of the legendary Wisconsin estate of Broadway power-couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne: “What the Vatican is to Catholics, Ten Chimneys is to actors.” Jeffrey Hatcher’s comedy follows a rehearsal of The Seagull on the estate, during which life begins to mirror Chekhovian dysfunction. This play about power players will fittingly be our first chance to see Artists Rep’s new artistic director, Dámaso Rodriguez, at work. —AS

The People’s Republic of Portland | Apr 30–June 9

Just when we thought no jokes were left to make at the expense of our fetishized city, along comes comic-pathos powerhouse Lauren Weedman. A veteran of The Daily Show, Hung, and a slew of one-woman performances, Weedman has the chops (and the narcissism) to make it about her, instead of the same old jokes about PDX, and maybe even help us see our city in a new light. —AS

The Left Hand of Darkness | May 2–June 2

It’s hard to imagine a more utopian project: Portland Playhouse, the city’s most heavy-hitting young theater, teams up with the multi-media performance mavens Hand2Mouth Theatre to tackle the most significant work of the most significant local writer, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness—otherwise known as the book that elevated fantasy to high literature. —AS

A Bright New Boise | May 31–June 23

This breakthrough tragicomedy by firecracker-hot Idaho playwright Samuel D. Hunter tells the story of a small-town big-box employee waiting for the rapture. In a coup, Third Rail’s production will be directed by John Vreeke, who directed it at DC’s renowned Woolly Mammoth. —SC

For ticket prices and showtimes, click on the event's title to visit the event's listing.

M4 Moments

Image: Andy Batt

Right after Joy Now [a youth performance program taught by members of MarchFourth] lowered our minimum age to 11, an 11-year-old girl, the shortest student yet, came in clutching her mom’s hand. I was worried it wouldn’t work out, but by the end of the day, she had put stilts on, had a huge smile on her face, and didn’t want to take them off. She recently gave a big speech at our fundraiser about how she’s never felt so accepted.

—Ariel Brantley-Dalglish, Joy Now cofounder (second from right, with the Joy Now team)

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Image: Courtesy Blaine Truitt Covert/Oregon Ballet Theatre

Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s 2008 production of Trey McIntyre’s Just

American Music Festival
OREGON BALLET THEATRE // APRIL 18–27

More often than not, music plays a central but unsung role in dance. But not in Oregon Ballet Theatre’s penultimate show of the season, which will place American, and even Northwest, music front and center in works by three of contemporary ballet’s most exciting choreographers. Ever on trend, Boise-based Trey McIntyre feeds the hunger for all things indie by choreographing his new OBT commission to the dreamy music of NW folk band Fleet Foxes. “Trey has a very long history with OBT and has been at the forefront of contemporary ballet in the US,” says OBT’s interim artistic director, Anne Mueller. “His work is, at the same time, accessible and of the highest artistic value—a rare combination.” A second world premiere involves a collaboration between composer (and Portland native) Ryan Francis and Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg. Rounding out the lineup is At the Border, choreographed by Matthew Neenan, the inaugural winner of the New Essential Works Fellowship from the nationally prestigious Jerome Robbins Foundation, and scored by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer John Adams. —Rachel Rasmussen

Northwest Dance Project | Mar 28–30

This year’s Spring Performances bring new collaborations with some of the company’s besties. Expect new works by artistic director Sarah Slipper and French knight and world-traveling choreographer Patrick Delcroix, the man the Los Angeles Times called “the fastest dancer on the planet,” as well as an old favorite by Wen Wei Wang. —RR

Paul Taylor Dance Company | Apr 4–6

For its 15th anniversary season, White Bird brings back the first company it ever presented. Ironically, the piece the Paul Taylor Dance Company will perform, The Uncommitted, set to music by minimalist Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (a favorite of Björk), is all about the inability to form lasting relationships within a modern society. Happy to know Portland is the exception. —RR

Circa | Apr 10–13

Combine the joyful freedom of a circus clown’s falls, the nail-biting suspense of an acrobat’s stunts, and the aesthetics and emotions of a modern dance company, and you’ll get Circa, a small but wondrous troupe from Brisbane that’s taking world audiences by storm. The Guardian calls this program of the company’s greatest hits “knee-tremblingly sexy, beautiful and moving.” —RR

PICA Symposium | June 6–9

Building on the success of last year’s Symposium, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art has invited two artists to town for a long weekend of performance and social events: Alaskan Yu’pik dancer Emily Johnson, who contributed “The Thank-you Bar” to PICA’s Time-Based Art fest in 2010, and visual artist Anna Craycroft, who is collaborating with local participants throughout the summer to create a new shared language spanning Chinook Wawa, fractal geometry, and more, called “C’mon Language.” —AS For a schedule of events and venues, visit pica.org.

For ticket prices and showtimes, click on the event's title to visit the event's listing.

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Image: Courtesy Portland Art Museum

Cyclepedia: A Century of Iconic Bicycle Design
PORTLAND ART MUSEUM // JUNE 8–SEPTEMBER 8

Drawing from the one-of-a-kind collection of Viennese designer Michael Embacher, this exhibition promises something pure and simple: bike porn. From landmark racing models and vintage cruisers to folding bikes, a parachute bike, and even an ice bike (with a skate for its front wheel), the collection showcases not only the engineering behind the simple, sweat-powered vehicle of locomotion, but the sheer artistry that has elevated it from a tool to an obsession. Having been displayed just a few times in Europe, the collection makes its first and only stateside stop at the Portland Art Musuem—another yellow jersey for our town’s growing cycling cred. —AS

Critical Art Ensemble | Mar 14–June 2

The internationally renowned, politically provocative arts collective Critical Art Ensemble is tapping economist Edward Wolff and mathematician David Sommer to create an installation illustrating the country’s relative wealth distribution, ranging from a two-foot hole in the ground representing debtors to a banner 450 feet in the air representing the top 20 percent. —Madelynn Vislocky

Image: Courtesy Disjecta

An installation by Saya Woolfalk

Space Is the Place | Mar 23–Apr 28

With one foot in 1970s funk and the other in an outlandish future, Afrofuturism has reinterpreted the standard constructs of science fiction to explore connections between gender, race, and technology. In the final exhibition by curator-in-residence Josephine Zarkovich, work by David Huffman, Saya Woolfalk, Wendy Red Star, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña (who recently won a United States Artists Fellow Award) will show that the movement doesn’t stop at George Clinton. —GC

Photo Month | April

Now entering its third year, Photolucida’s Photo Month plasters Portland’s finest galleries, museums, and unlikely spaces with the still image in all of its complex, two-dimensional glory. Highlights include Hungarian photographer Tamas Dezso at Blue Sky Gallery, keynote speaker Alec Soth, and a portfolio walk through the works of 160 photographers from around the globe.—AS For festival info, visit portlandphotomonth.org.

Michelle Ross | June 6–29

Among the artists featured in the art museum’s NW Contemporary Art Awards exhibition in 2011, Portland painter Ross continues her exploratory mix of materials, paint, print culture, and abstraction. For this show, she turns to magazine pages, riffing on the chemical reaction of pigment and ink. —SC

For ticket prices and showtimes, click on the event's title to visit the event's listing.

M4 Moments

Image: Andy Batt

What Last Thursday became has to do with the people who started MarchFourth. We were practicing at Medicine Gallery, where Trade Up Music and Petite Province are now. There was pretty much just Chez What?, Guardino Gallery, Dandy Lyon, and HiiH lamps. Friends of ours and people involved with the band were having fashion shows and parades. We were basically trying fun stuff to entertain ourselves because there wasn’t much going on, and so for our first year, we would go parade down the street every Last Thursday.

—Dan Stauffer, cofounder, cymbal player, and tour manager

Fall Arts Preview: The Collaborative Way

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:42:00 -0700

There’s a running joke in Portland that, instead of six degrees of separation, our art scene has a mere one and a half. Bands collaborate with dance companies whose video installations are made by visual artists who design album art for other bands—until the city resembles some creative primordial soup in which inspiration is swapped like snippets of DNA. It’s little surprise then that many of this fall’s arts events involve dynamic partnerships. Here are six notable collaborative pairs, along with our top picks for the season, to guide you in your fall arts adventures.

PAUL WATSON | THE WAR JOURNALIST

DAN O'BRIEN | The PLAYWRIGHT

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The Body of an American
Portland Center Stage
Oct 2–Nov 11
Gerding Theater
pcs.org

Image: Dan Gay

Dann O'Brien: The Playwright

In the electric heat of violence, photographing a decisive millisecond demands journalistic courage. But to circle back for another try because the first shots didn’t work requires a particularly thick rebar in the spine. Canadian photojournalist Paul Watson mustered such will in 1993 when he realized the pictures he had just taken of a dead US soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu showed the man’s genitals—something no American newspaper would publish.

His second shot won a Pulitzer Prize, unleashed a public backlash that pushed the Clinton administration to pull out of Somalia, and sent Watson into post-traumatic stress, addiction, breakdown, and, finally, redemption with the book Where War Lives.

Playwright Dan O’Brien heard Watson speak on NPR and was so moved by the conversation that he e-mailed the photographer. For the next two years the men corresponded earnestly, finally meeting face-to-face at Watson’s new journalistic post: the Arctic. Now the story of their transcontinental dialogue, in the form of a play, will have its world premiere at Portland Center Stage under the direction of Bill Rauch, artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The play has already won the prestigious Weissberger Award from the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Image: Dan Gay

Paul Watson: The War Journalist

More than just a portrait of a troubled war correspondent, O’Brien explains, his play is “about two people who feel pretty haunted, making a connection.”

For Watson, the dialogue became another release. “I truly believe,” he writes from his home near Vancouver, BC, “that poets and playwrights can get at the crucial truths that obsess me with much more visceral clarity than I can as a journalist.”

The two-act play weaves together the men’s lives, with the second act turning to the first 10 days they spent together in the Arctic—the bleak, incongruous landscape of which, O’Brien says, proved to be the perfect setting for a play.

“Paul’s book is the book of a reporter: very externally focused on events,” O’Brien says. “I’m almost too internal.”

“We are all waging our own internal wars,” Watson adds, “and much of the noise of organized religion, the news, entertainment, social networks, and other things that consume most people’s time in the 21st century are efforts to avoid confronting what frightens us most: ourselves.” —Randy Gragg

Shows to Know: THEATER

Courtesy Joan Marcus The Broadway cast of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

And so it goes

Sept 4–Oct 7 With this world premiere adapted from Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House, Aaron Posner is again serving as both playwright and director à la his recent adaptation of Sometimes a Great Notion at PCS. This time he leads a local star-studded cast through three intertwining stories embedded in a mythological 1962 small-town New England, channeling Vonnegut’s quirky style into a lyrical case study of raw human love. —John Murray $25–50. Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison St. 503-241-1278. artistsrep.org

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sept 18–Oct 21 It seems sacrilegious that PCS got through a quarter century without a single Sondheim play. To make amends, the theater is kicking off its 25th season with the musical maestro’s murderous masterpiece. This story of an olde English barber’s quest for revenge—aided by his neighbor’s grisly pie business—reached a whole new generation thanks to Tim Burton’s adaptation starring Johnny Depp, but that version lacked a certain pizzazz. We hope PCS can restore it. Have a little priest? —AS $39–70. Gerding Theater at the Armory, 128 NW 11th Ave. 503-445-3700. pcs.org

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Oct 11–Nov 11 Portland Playhouse’s first musical is an emo rock coming-of-age tale for both the first populist president and his nation. If you always thought that colonial America needed fewer pantaloons and more skinny jeans, then be prepared to see your wildest eyeliner dreams brought to the stage in what the New York Times called “... the most entertaining and most perceptive political theater of the season.” —JM $12–35. Portland Playhouse, 602 NE Prescott St. 503-488-5822. portlandplayhouse.org

Othello

Oct 12–Nov 4 Northwest Classical Theatre Company may have pulled the theater coup of the season by coaxing Bill Alexander to our little theater hamlet. Perhaps best known for directing the iconic 1984 Antony Sher “bottled spider” version of Richard III, Alexander brings a titanic Shakespearean résumé, including an Olivier Award, 10 years as associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and another 10 as artistic director of famed Birmingham Rep. But his lengthy credits include only three jobs in the States—all at major theaters—making this trip not only a historic one for NWCTC, but for the entire Pacific Northwest. —JM $18–20. Shoebox Theater, 2110 SE 10th Ave. 971-244-3740. nwctc.org

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CHRISTOPHER STOWELL | The CHOREOGRAPHER

JOHN GRADE | THE Sculptor

••••••••••••••••••••••••

Body Beautiful
Oregon Ballet Theatre
Oct 13–20
Keller Auditorium
obt.org

Image: Dan Gay

Christopher Stowell: The Choreographer

When Christopher Stowell, the director of Oregon Ballet Theatre, heard that Greek and Roman statues would fill the Portland Art Museum under the title The Body Beautiful, he instantly saw synergy. OBT already had two pieces based on Greek myths in the repertoire: Apollo

by George Balanchine and Orpheus by Stowell’s father, Kent. A dance by the popular contemporary choreographer William Forsythe, whose highly athletic pieces call for superhuman feats by the dancers, seemed an easy third. But Stowell wanted more: a centerpiece collaboration with a visual artist. PAM’s chief curator, Bruce Guenther, gave him a list of names, but he didn’t have to look beyond the first one: sculptor John Grade.

“It was the simplicity of it,” says Stowell of his first glimpse of the Seattle artist’s massive, organic installation sculptures, which won Grade PAM’s Arlene Schnitzer Prize last year. “He takes one good idea and develops it, and that’s something I try to embody myself.”

Image: Dan Gay

John Grade: The Sculptor

Coincidentally, Grade had just finished designing a pair of sculptures that an Atlanta choreographer then created a dance around. Collaborating from the ground up was the natural next step. “It’s not as though I’m designing something for Christopher, or he’s designing something for me,” says Grade. “The most significant part of it is that Christopher and I are beginning this thing together.”

The two settled on the myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the themes of reflection and transformation. Grade designed an floating forest of giant paper-lantern-like tree trunks that will hang from the ceiling, rising and falling with the dance. He is making the components out of Tyvek in Seattle and will bring them to Portland in September to be assembled by several hundred volunteers. Meanwhile, Stowell is busy choreographing how the dancers’ interaction with the sculptures—between them, inside them, and manipulating them like bendy straws—and giving Grade feedback on design.

“I like to take a material I’m very familiar with and another I don’t have experience with,” Grade says. “In this case, I’m working with Tyvek, but the other material is the body, and that’s completely unknown to me. Christopher is the conduit.”

—Aaron Scott

SHOWS TO KNOW: Dance

LA Dance Project

Sept 26 Building off worldwide acclaim as the choreographer of the Oscar-winning film Black Swan, former New York City Ballet principal dancer Benjamin Millepied founded LA Dance Project. Thanks to White Bird’s pull, Portland will be the company’s first stop after its world premiere at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The program includes Merce Cunningham’s controversial “Winterbranch,” William Forsythe’s “Quintett,” and a premiere by Millepied himself, set to a new score by the wunderkind composer Nico Muhly.

—Laura Lundberg $26–64. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway. 503-245-1600. whitebird.org

New Now Wow!

Oct 4–6 Northwest Dance Project kicks off its season with world premieres from three award-winning contemporary choreographers. Patrons will remember Ihsan Rustem from his 2010 NWDP premiere, State of Matter, which won the 2011 Sadler’s Wells Global Dance Contest and was performed by NWDP at London’s Cultural Olympiad. Alex Soares, who moonlights as a musician and filmmaker, won NWDP’s 2012 Pretty Creatives Residency Award. And Gregory Dolbashian has won numerous choreographic competitions, including Ballet Austin’s New American Talent/Dance Competition. —JM $25–39. Lincoln Performance Hall, 1620 SW Park Ave. 503-828-8285. nwdanceproject.org

Image: Courtesy Conduit Dance

Conduit Dance’s Tere Mathern

Gather: A Dance about Convergence

Oct 25–Nov 3 Conduit Dance is on a collaboration roll. First there was its Dance+ performance series in July, where dancers paired with musicians, visual artists, and writers. Now Conduit backbone Tere Mathern is teaming up with local jack-of-all-sounds Tim DuRoche and the far-out jazz of Battle Hymns & Gardens to bring together six dancers and five musicians in a project inspired by ideas of convergence, interdependence, and synchronicity. —AS $14–17. 918 SW Yamhill St, Ste 401. 503-221-5857. conduit-pdx.org

Sunshine

Nov 9–11 Innovative local choreographer Tahni Holt’s press materials for Sunshine begin: “Cardboard boxes: architecture, little cities, modern abstract sculpture...homeless camps, forts.” And the list goes on. If her work-in-progress performance at On the Boards in June was any indication, the stage will be a landscape of cardboard that is danced with, lived in, destroyed, and otherwise manipulated by dancers Lucy Yim and Robert Tyree in this postmodern pop exploration. —AS $12–16. Bodyvox Dance Center, 1201 NW 17th Ave. tahniholt.com

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JORDAN SCHNITZER | THE COLLECTOR

STEPHANIE SNYDER | THE CURATOR

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Kara Walker
Sept 4–Nov 18
Cooley Gallery
reed.edu/gallery

Image: Dan Gay

Stephanie Snyder: The Curator

When Stephanie Snyder hung Kara Walker’s paper cutout The Humane Acquisition of Chitlins at the Cooley Gallery in 2008, she recalls getting “an earful” about the artist’s send-ups of antebellum black-white relations, not from students, faculty, or the public, but from one of the other artists in the show: Faith Ringgold.

One of the grandmothers of black feminist art, Ringgold is hardly the only African American artist of her generation to find Walker’s work, which has hung in solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, discomfiting. Artist Betye Saar bluntly called it “revolting” in the hundreds of letters she sent to institutions nationwide in an attempt to stop the showing of Walker’s art.

Undeterred, Snyder is now presenting an entire show of Walker’s prints, maquettes, and a new film, Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale. But no less surprising than Ringgold’s ire last time is the enthusiasm for the art in this show from the local collector lending most of it: Jordan Schnitzer.

Image: Dan Gay

Jordan Schnitzer: The Collector

“[Walker] takes this elementary form,” Schnitzer says, recalling the similar cutouts he made as a child, “and puts the most intense images in our face. There’s nowhere to go from her work: she makes us deal with this history.”

Snyder plans to steer clear of the most notorious of Walker’s images, in which she brutally and exuberantly sexualizes (and often recasts) the power dynamics between slave and master. Instead, the show will focus, Snyder says, on “the more intimate dialogue her work has with history”—the prints riffing on Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War and the film on 19th-century dioramas and vaudeville. She knew nothing of Schnitzer’s interest until Walker’s New York gallery told her about the “Portland collector who owns not only editions of all of Walker’s prints, but the only two series of steel cutouts she has made”—precisely the work Snyder wanted to accompany the film. “I’ve never heard Jordan speak so richly about an artist’s work before,” she recalls of her first meeting with him about the show.

Walker will lecture on October 2, and Snyder is working with Reed’s new VP for institutional diversity, the poet Crystal Williams, to develop programming for both a campus and a city that have had uneasy race relations.

“We want to be careful and circumspect about the show’s contents,” Snyder says. “We also hope to have serious conversation.” —RG

A still from Kara Walker’s film Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale

SHOWS TO KNOW: VISUAL ART

Happy Birthday: A Celebration of Chance and Listening

Sept 6–Nov 17 In prominent conceptual artist Paul Kos’s installation The Sound of Ice Melting, microphones surround two giant ice blocks to capture the elusive, entropic tones of ice turning to water. It’s but one of the pieces that sets the tone for this cross-media, 100th birthday tribute to John Cage, a giant of post-war art and music. Other highlights include a striking piece from Alison Knowles, whose award-winning work in the Fluxus movement drew on the radical techniques she picked up as an early student of Cage, and Portland-based artist Stephanie Simek’s solar- and plant-powered musical window-box experiment. —Kit Mauldin Free. Feldman Gallery + Project Space, PNCA, 1241 NW Johnson St. pnca.edu

The Body Beautiful

Oct 6–Jan 6 Landing on American soil for the first time here in Portland, The Body Beautiful explores the human form through priceless Greek and Roman works drawn from the British Museum’s collection, including the iconic discus-throwing Discobolus. To mark the occasion, PAM will partner with Nike and OHSU for a series of talks and programs looking at the body—classical, contemporary, and futuristic.
—JM $20. Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave. 503-226-2811. portlandartmuseum.org

MK Guth

Oct 7–Dec 9 When nothing else subsists, smell and taste remain is both a backward glance and a forward look for this homegrown art star. A book published by the Art Gym caps Guth’s interactive projects. Then the show itself initiates a new direction exploring the act of gathering to share food. It will include serving objects and recipe books that provide guidance and utensils for a series of dinners inspired by art, places, relationships, and milestones, such as Dinner for John Cage (based on the composer’s Mushrooms et Variationes) and Dinner for the Woods. There will also be weekly discussions about food, including one about German drinking songs, because Dinner for Crying involves crying in your beer. —AS Free. The Art Gym, Marylhurst University, 17600 Pacific Hwy, Marylhurst. 503-636-8141. marylhurst.edu

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ANGELA MATTOX | THE CURATOR

KEITH HENNESSY | THE ARTIST
••••••••••••••••••••••••
Turbulence (a dance about the economy)
Sept 11–14
Imago Theatre
pica.org

Image: Dan Gay

Angela Mattox: The Curator

It may be a cliché to call a performance art “dangerous” and “uncomfortable,” but Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s new artistic director, Angela Mattox, has long embraced those very traits in her collaboration with Bay Area dancer Keith Hennessy.

Seated in PICA’s office, Mattox ticks off Hennessy’s stomach-curdling acts under her tenure at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: directing a group of at-risk youth as they nailed one of their own into a plywood box; climbing into the rafters for unplanned aerial stunts; digressing into a candid, onstage discussion about how much the center was paying him. But the pinnacle of queasiness took place during a show called Auf den Tisch! Out of nowhere, Hennessy produced a two-by-four that he used as a balance beam between a table onstage and the shoulders of several audience members, including an elderly woman. “There’s no shutting down the show,” Mattox says. “He can make me uncomfortable, but that’s honestly what I look for as a curator. Otherwise, I’m not supporting art that’s potent or questioning enough.”

Image: Dan Gay

Keith Hennessy: The Artist

Traditionally, the curator/artist relationship is a one-dimensional one: the curator has the power. But when Mattox first moved to San Francisco in 2003 to head Yerba Buena, she reached out to Hennessy, not as an artist, but as a guest curator. “His viewpoint was incredible in terms of understanding the community and culture,” she says. “He really pushed us to access an experimental group of artists.”

After six years of beaming visiting curators in from afar, PICA hired Mattox last year as its first resident artistic director since founder Kristy Edmunds departed in 2005. Mattox’s charge was to expand year-round programming and interactive artist residencies. Hennessy was at the top of her list. She brought him to town for a weeklong symposium in June to develop his interactive ensemble premiere for the Time-Based Art Festival. Called Turbulence (a dance about the economy), it explores the financial collapse and economic injustice with Hennessy’s activist flair (picture a human pyramid of dancers wearing gold-sequined hoods—the Federal Reserve meets Abu Ghraib).

“My base is hyper-local and politically engaged,” Hennessy writes from an artist’s retreat in France. “With Turbulence, Angela dares me to take my work more seriously, to consider its influence on local, national, and international art ecologies.” —AS

SHOWS TO KNOW: TBA | TIME-BASED ART FESTIVAL

Image: Courtesy PICA

Big Art Group’s The People—Polverigi in Italy

Big Art Group

Sept 6–8 This New York performance collective has made an international name for itself as masters of multimedia, using acting and live video feeds to creatively warp space and perspective. For The People—Portland, they spent a week in May interviewing a range of locals about justice, community, war, and democracy. Using the interviews as a “chorus” of sorts, they’ll loosely retell the Greek tragedy The Oresteia by projecting the interviews onto the walls of Washington High School. —AS $15–20. Washington High School, 531 SE 14th Ave

Sam Green & Yo La Tengo

Sept 12 What do you get when you cross an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, a critically acclaimed indie band, and one of the most innovative thinkers of the 20th century? A mind-bending “live documentary” titled The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller. Drawing on footage of Fuller, documentary filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground) will narrate the film live while the mercurial but prolific band Yo La Tengo provides the soundtrack. It’ll be like a TEDtalk with a beat that, knowing Fuller’s vast imagination, will completely blow your view of the world. —AS $20–25. Washington High School, 531 SE 14th Ave

Image: Courtesy PICA

African choreographer Faustin Linyekula

Faustin Linyekula

Sept 13–15 Standing out in this year’s unprecedented global range of artists, Linyekula is a leading choreographer from the Democratic Republic of Congo whose “work in Africa constitutes a crucial link to the rest of the world,” according to director Peter Sellars. In the US premiere of his first solo work, Le Cargo, Linyekula translates memories of the brutal history of his war-torn homeland into hypnotic, fluid movements, mapping decades of pain and terror onto his own body. —AS $20–25. Winningstad Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway

Laurie Anderson

Sept 16 Closing out the 10th anniversary fest is the artistic polyglot Laurie Anderson—a fitting finale not only because she’s one of the mothers of contemporary performance art, but because her show, Dirtday!, is the third in a trilogy of solo works that she’s performed over the past decade in Portland. While Happiness, in 2002, tackled the search for contentment, and The End of the Moon, in 2006, explored space and her inaugural artistic residency at NASA, Dirtday! turns to the fear still present a decade after 9/11, and the Occupy movement’s response. —AS $15–75. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway

For info regarding all shows, call 503-224-7422 or visit pica.org.

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DANNY SEIM | the Multi-instrumentalist

JUSTIN HARRIS | the Multi-instrumentalist
••••••••••••••••••••••••
Menomena
MusicFestNW
Sept 7
Pioneer Courthouse Square
menomena.com

Image: Dan Gay

Danny Seim: The Multi-Instrumentalist

On a hot July afternoon, the two remaining members of Menomena, Justin Harris and Danny Seim, are setting up for their first rehearsal since last September inside the former pipe organ house that serves as both the band’s rehearsal space and Harris’s home. Seim assembles a drum set that looks child-size beside his six-foot-seven frame, and Harris plays a riff on his baritone saxophone before handing it to their newest touring bandmate, singer-songwriter Holcombe Waller.

“Doesn’t it start on a G?” Waller asks.

“Could be,” Harris answers, “it’s been so long since I’ve played it.” Which isn’t that unusual; Menomena has historically taken long breaks to record new albums, and this September marks the release of their fifth, Moms. The band’s last two critically lauded efforts established it as Portland’s homegrown answer to Radiohead. But that only sets the stakes higher for Moms: it marks the first record Menomena has crafted as a duo after the departure of the third founding member, Brent Knopf, in a breakup that was watched like a soap opera by local and national press.

Image: Dan Gay

Justin Harris: The Multi-Instrumentalist

Much has been made of the band’s unusually democratic, sometimes dysfunctional creative process, in which each member separately pens an equal number of songs. Journalists initially gave a software program Knopf created almost super-musical powers, describing an Oz-like matrix that would cut up rhythms and reassemble them into perfectly polished songs. (It was mainly just a recording tool they no longer use.) Then, during the troubled creation of their last album, Mines, the press reported that the band’s songwriting was done purely via e-mail. Neither process quite hits the mark, particularly now.

“It seems like no matter how hard we try to sit in a room together and write like traditional bands do, we can’t do it well,” Harris admits. Instead, he and Seim come together for some initial jamming; then they take those recordings home and refine them before passing them on to the other person for further embellishment—each handoff layering on lush complexities and musical turns more akin to plays with scenes than traditional verse/chorus construction.

“We’re adding stuff that the other person wouldn’t normally think of on his own,” Harris says, pointing to the first track, “Plumage,” which he initially envisioned with only hand claps—until Seim added driving drumbeats. In the past, this process resulted in a lot of strained compromise among three members pushing separate agendas. Now, with only the two, who’ve been playing together since high school, the process flows surprisingly smoothly.

“It’s less important these days to get our way, and more important to feel good about what we’re doing,” says Seim, shortly before breaking into the hand claps that begin “Plumage.” “In that regard, I’m more excited about this record than I’ve been in a while.” —AS

SHOWS TO KNOW: POP MUSIC

MusicFest NW

Sept 5–9 For one magical long weekend, over 165 bands fan out across 17 venues, lighting up the entire city like a sonic firecracker. Highlights this year include big-name indie darlings Passion Pit and Beirut, mash-up god Girl Talk, local groups with much-anticipated new albums like Helio Sequence, alt-rock throwbacks like Dinosaur Jr. and Portland’s long-defunct Hazel, and the launch of a tech conference component (to follow further in SXSW’s footsteps) called Portland Digital eXperience (PDX). —AS For ticket info, showtimes, and venue info, visit musicfestnw.com.

Crosby, Stills, & Nash

Sept 12 It’s been over 40 years since CSN invited us into their house. These three cats might’ve aged, but they’re still very, very fine in their vocal harmonies and overlapping guitars. They’ve even managed to survive long enough to see pop music rediscover the style they made famous (we’re talking about you, Fleet Foxes). —AS $48.50–90.50. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway. pcpa.com

Image: Thom Kerr/Courtesy Warner Brothers

Budding New Zealand pop icon Kimbra

Kimbra

Sept 27 This New Zealander stole our collective hearts while stealing the show as Gotye’s cameo lover on last year’s ubiquitous “Sombody That I Used to Know.” Did it come as any surprise then that the virtuosic vocalist would go on to bigger and better things? With an ear for both experimentation and melody, profusely live-looping and layering both vox and beats, Kimbra's on a fast track to becoming our new favorite pop icon. —KM $17.50–20. Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St. 503-284-8686. wonderballroom.com

David Byrne/St. Vincent

Oct 18 Inspired by a benefit concert by Björk and the Dirty Projectors, the dreamteam of Byrne and St. Vincent embarked on an intense collaborative songwriting process. So far their partnership has resulted in the album Love This Giant—12 songs blending the best traits of both artists and backed almost exclusively with bespoke brass arrangements. —KM $43–53.50. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway. pcpa.com

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catherine van der salm | THE SOLOIST

MONICA HUGGETT | The CONDUCTOR

••••••••••••••••••••••••

Choral Glory
Portland Baroque Orchestra with Cappella Romana
Oct 12–14
First Baptist Church & Kaul Auditorium
pbo.org

Image: Dan Gay

Catherine Van Der Salm: The Soloist

There was a moment during soprano Catherine van der Salm’s early 2011 performance of Bach’s The St. John Passion that was so beautiful, she started to choke up. The performance was a two-pronged collaborative experiment between Portland Baroque Orchestra and Cappella Romana, the internationally renowned vocal ensemble with which van der Salm sings. First, the two groups wanted to learn if there was an audience for vocal/orchestral efforts beyond the holiday tradition of Handel’s Messiah. (There was.) Second, they wanted to record a complete major work that would garner international attention. (It did: the prestigious French magazine Diapason called it “a major reinterpretation of the work.”)

But for van der Salm, the tear-jerking moment was triggered by the expressive dance of bow on string
during the penultimate movement, “Ruht wohl,” by PBO artistic director and world-renowned violinist Monica Huggett. “She’s so impassioned,” van der Salm says, “and in that movement, I was so full of emotion that it almost overwhelmed me.”

Van der Salm will have the opportunity to work even more closely with Huggett this fall when she performs as a soloist in the next collaboration, a concert of choral masterworks from the three giants of Baroque music: Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi (including Vivaldi’s blockbuster, Gloria).

Image: Dan Gay

Monica Huggett: The Conductor

Baroque music might not seem the richest soil for collaboration. The composers are long dead, the conductors call the shots, and the performers simply play their parts, right? Not when Portland’s most skilled period ensembles come together.

“I’m not the big maestro who sweeps in,” says Huggett of her rehearsals with the choir. At 16 players each, the two groups are small, and given the almost question-and-answer style of many Baroque compositions—where melodies echo between groups with improvised ornamentations—each performer
affects the whole.

“Every choice that Monica makes, for example,” says van der Salm, “from the way she plays a given melody to the notes she emphasizes, informs the way I sing a vocal line. We’re creating a greater whole together.” —AS

SHOWS TO KNOW: CLASSICAL MUSIC

Views from cascadia

Sept 27 Leading contemporary composer and Alaskan resident John Luther Adams named this concert-length composition with a line from an Inuit poem: Earth and the Great Weather. In this performance, Third Angle Ensemble will bring together its skilled base of musicians, four singers, and spoken recordings from native Alaskans and translators to take us on what Luther describes as “a journey through the physical, cultural, and spiritual landscapes of the Arctic, in music, language, and sound.” —LL $5–35. Agnes Flanagan Chapel, Lewis & Clark College, 615 SW Palatine Hill Rd. 503-331-0301. thirdangle.org

Gerhardt Plays Tchaikovsky

Oct 27 & 29 German cellist Alban Gerhardt has performed with orchestras worldwide to spectacular reviews, but he’s also known for playing in unusual venues. During a tour of Germany during which people called into radio stations to propose sites for free concerts, he performed in a train station, a commune, strangers’ living rooms, and a maternity ward. As the Oregon Symphony’s first artist-in-residence, he’ll bring the big, emotive fullness of his playing to Tchaikovsky at the Schnitz, but he’ll also take suggestions for other venues. So think twice before passing a guy with a cello at the streetcar stop. —Riley Stevenson $26–95. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway. 503-228-1353. orsymphony.org

Image: Courtesy Rosegg from the New York City Opera production of Don Giovanni

Bass baritone Daniel Okulitch as Don Giovanni serenades Keri Alkema as Donna Elvira at the New York City Opera.

Don Giovanni

Nov 2–10 How do you go about casting the world’s most famous rakish lover in one of the world’s greatest operas? You can start with the voice, but to really sell his anti-hero charm, it doesn’t hurt to also think of the body. Operachic.com called Canadian bass baritone Daniel Okulitch “a swaggering rock star” after his New York City Opera debut as Don Giovanni, but he’s likely best known for his full monty showing in Howard Shore’s opera The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg at the Los Angeles Opera. —AS $20 & up. Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St. 503-241-1802. portlandopera.org

Shanghai Quartet

Dec 3 & 4 One of the world’s foremost chamber ensembles, the Shanghai Quartet is famous for its mix of Eastern and Western music, classical and contemporary. The New York Times is especially taken with the fab four, declaring: “If there is a string quartet currently in circulation that produces a more beautiful sound than the Shanghai Quartet, the name doesn’t immediately come to mind.” For its Portland performances, the quartet will perform material by composers ranging from Beethoven to Dvo?ák to the quartet’s own Yi-Wen Jiang.—JM $27 & up. Lincoln Performance Hall, 1620 SW Park Ave. 503-224-9842. focm.org

2012 Oregon Book Award Winners

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:00:00 -0700

Last night, Literary Arts announced the winners of the 25th annual Oregon Book Awards. Standouts include Joe Sacco’s meticulously reported and drawn Footnotes in Gaza winning OBA’s first ever graphic novel award (yes, it took them 25 years to acknowledge that graphic novelists deserve a seat at the literary adult table—the book also won a 2010 Eisner Award), and Patrick deWitt’s novel about two murderous brothers, The Sisters Brothers, winning the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction (it was also a finalist for the Booker Prize).

Eloise Jarvis Mcgraw Award for Children’s Literature
Graham Salisbury of Lake Oswego
Calvin Coconut: Hero Of Hawaii

Leslie Bradshaw Award for Young Adult Literature
Emily Whitman of Portland
Wildwing

Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction
Kenneth J. Ruoff of Portland
Imperial Japan At Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration Of The Empire’s 2600th Anniversary

Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction
George Estreich of Corvallis
The Shape Of The Eye: Down Syndrome, Family, And The Stories We Inherit

Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry
Carl Adamshick of Portland
Curses And Wishes

Ken Kesey Award for Fiction
Patrick Dewitt of Portland
The Sisters Brothers

Pacific Northwest College of Art Graphic Literature Award
Joe Sacco of Portland
Footnotes In Gaza

Readers Choice Award
Lidia Yuknavitch of Portland
The Chronology Of Water

Walt Morey Young Readers Literary Legacy Award
Dr. Ulrich Hardt of Portland

For more about Portland arts, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

A Guide to Oregon’s Extraterrestrial Past and Present!

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0700

Slide Show

If you’re craving more UFO goodness, view our slide show of baffling photos taken by fellow Oregonians over the years.

LONG BEFORE OREGON became a magnet for the creative class, East Coast refugees, and retiring 20-somethings, our state was attracting visitors of a different kind: the alien kind. Not only was the term “flying saucer” coined here in 1947—unleashing a nationwide UFO frenzy—but two of the first-ever photographs of UFOs were taken just down Highway 99, at the Trent farm near McMinnville, in 1950. (See Close Encounters)

This month, thousands of curious onlookers, diehards, and experts will converge on McMinnville for the 13th annual UFO Festival—the second-most popular such celebration in the world, after Roswell, New Mexico’s—to commemorate the famous (and still controversial) photos.

But the Trent case merely scratches the surface of Oregon’s rich UFO history. By one estimate, Oregon has recorded more than 1,500 reported UFO sightings, making it third on the list of sightings per capita, close behind neighbors in Washington and Montana. We interviewed UFO investigators, debunkers, and historians to learn more about Oregon’s penchant for attracting the otherworldly. What we found just might surprise you.

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The Sleuths

When you see something wrong in the sky, Oregon’s chapter of the Mutual UFO Network uses science to solve the mystery.

Slide Show

If you’re craving more UFO goodness, view our slide show of baffling photos taken by fellow Oregonians over the years.

Image: William Puckett

This image, said to have been taken along Wagner Creek Road near Medford in the 1960s, was submitted to MUFON field investigator William Puckett in 2008. The lack of additional evidence or information precluded any further investigation.

ON AN EARLY FALL morning last October, Mercedes Corbin (note: not her real name) was driving west on Highway 26 when she spotted a tiny white light ahead of her hanging in the sky over North Plains. Still groggy from an early-morning flight, Corbin slowed to less than 40 miles per hour. The object grew larger and brighter until it hovered—soundless and wingless with flashing red and green lights—above a field just a few hundred feet away.

Heart pounding, Corbin took the next exit and circled back to the spot. But the strange object—which she described as a kind of Washington Monument on its side—had disappeared.

“I was not the only one who saw this,” she later wrote, noting that other trucks and cars had slowed down to watch it. “I am not crazy.”

Disturbed by the incident, Corbin began searching the Internet to find evidence of others who had seen the same thing. Instead, she found the Oregon chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). The national organization was founded in 1969 for the purpose of cataloging and investigating UFO reports. MUFON is—to borrow a phrase from Ghostbusters—who you’re gonna call when you see something unexplainable in the sky.

With the government, NASA, and even the SETI Institute (which takes its name from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) officially not interested, MUFON fielded some 100 reports of UFOs last year alone. But these guys aren’t some goofy Big Gulp–fueled pack of X-Files-ites, pointing to every passing satellite as proof of extraterrestrials. In fact, MUFON classified fewer than half of those 100 reports as “unidentified” (including Corbin’s flashing object), ruling everything else out as hoaxes, airplanes, weather balloons, or simply lacking enough evidence for thorough investigation. And, according to the Oregon MUFON chapter director, Tom Bowden, even those “unidentified” flying objects don’t necessarily mean we need to put together a welcoming committee.

“It means there’s something flying around that is not one of our aircraft, and somebody saw it,” says Bowden, a computer programmer for a financial firm who has been studying UFOs since his college years in Illinois in the 1960s. “It means that there’s a problem that has not been solved, and in order to solve it we need more data.”

Bowden’s pragmatism might seem somewhat surprising in a group that includes its fair share of eccentrics. (Some members believe UFOs come from another dimension.) But logic and science are at the core of MUFON’s beliefs. Like Bowden, many of MUFON’s top members have scientific or technical backgrounds: Keith Rowell, the group’s assistant director (and resident human encyclopedia), is a retired technical writer. William Puckett, an investigator, is a former EPA and National Weather Service meteorologist. And Bowden was an investigator from 1976 to 1988 for the now-defunct Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, a group of sober-minded scientists hailed by the air force scientific adviser on UFOs, J. Allen Hynek, as one of the country’s best civilian UFO groups.

“What we’re trying to do is study UFOs in a scholarly way—as academics would if they bothered to look into it,” says Rowell, who hopes to donate his personal library of 1,500 UFO-related books to a university after his death.

To that end, MUFON has developed an elaborate protocol for investigating UFO reports, all of it laid out in a 250-page investigator’s manual. When a report is filed, MUFON investigators interview witnesses, collect any photographic evidence (employing a strict, police-department-style chain of custody), and document even the most innocuous information they can about the sighting, from wind speeds to light levels. Then, the investigation begins in earnest. Drawing on astronomy, weather reports, and FAA flight logs, all possible earthly explanations are tested and discarded until they land on one that fits: planets, military aircraft, birds, atmospheric effects, flyovers of the International Space Station. If, in the end, nothing makes sense, the case is declared a UFO.

“Photographs by themselves are useless,” Bowden says. “They don’t have any evidentiary value. It’s just whatever someone says it is. We have to get to the original source of the photograph in order for it to be considered evidence.”

MUFON’s academic approach follows a long lineage of scientific exploration of UFOs dating back to the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book, a group of soldiers and scientists who began tracking and investigating “flying saucers” in 1952. When the military terminated the group in 1969, its work was left to volunteer groups like MUFON, which have become exceptionally image-conscious as a result of media and other groups painting them as kooks.

To wit: Monthly meetings are open to the public, but recording and photographs are typically prohibited. Case files are available online, but the names of witnesses and investigators are changed to pseudonyms. Interviews with members are granted, but only with reassurances that the purpose is not to poke fun—or worse. In an e-mail, prior to our interview, Bowden noted his concern: “They [the CIA] have operatives placed in many news organizations for the dual purpose of intercepting specific news items and for introducing propaganda.”

Some think this insularity has had a negative effect. “There’s not a lot of collaboration between groups,” says Puckett, who runs his own reporting website, ufosnw.com, though he has worked with Oregon MUFON on a number of investigations. “That’s a major problem.”

Indeed, methods of investigation, proof, and tracking vary widely across organizations and individuals. Without a centralized database or rigorous international standards of investigation, winning over a dubious public to the global UFO “phenomenon” remains a gargantuan task.

But it’s one Oregon’s MUFON continues to take on, united behind their common belief in science.

“I say look at the data,” says Puckett, who in 15 years of study has never seen a UFO himself. “You only need one case to be real, and there are thousands out there. Everybody can’t be crazy.”

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Close Encounters

Four accounts from our extraterrestrial past

Slide Show

If you’re craving more UFO goodness, view our slide show of baffling photos taken by fellow Oregonians over the years.

Photo: Courtesy Robert Sheaffer

CASE: THE FIRST “FLYING SAUCER”

Date: June 1947
Location: Oregon and Washington

Rescue pilot Kenneth Arnold (left), was flying east from Mount Rainier when he spotted nine silvery objects flying in an echelon formation at supersonic speed ahead of him. The objects moved in an “eerie” side-to-side fashion for about two minutes before jetting out of view, Arnold said. When he landed, Arnold recounted his tale in exceptional detail, noting the angle of the objects’ trajectory, their speed, and estimated size. The crafts, according to Arnold, were more triangular than circular—like curved wings. However, in his discussion with a reporter from the East Oregonian, he described the crafts as moving like saucers “skipping across water.” The paper ran a story about “flying saucers,” and the term was born. Arnold’s sighting may have been the first of its kind, but a veritable deluge of UFO reports across the country followed. The infamous Roswell “crash” occurred only one month after Arnold’s tale was published, and in 1947 and 1948 the military received hundreds of similar reports.

Photo: Courtesy Robert Sheaffer

CASE: THE FIRST PHOTO EVIDENCE

Date: May 1950
Location: McMinnville, Oregon

On a cool May evening, Evelyn Trent was feeding chickens on her McMinnville-area farm when she saw something unusual in the sky and called for her husband, Paul, to grab the camera. The two black-and-white snapshots the Trents took—the first photos of a UFO in the US—are grainy and dark, but the disc-like object hanging in the center of both images is crystal clear. Every grain of the Trents’ two black-and-white photos has been examined, analyzed, and reanalyzed over the past 62 years. Debunkers have argued that the Trents must have hung an object from the power line near the top of the photo, but UFOlogists have concluded the pictures are real. Despite the publicity storm that followed them, the Trents lived out their next 40 years (they passed away in the ’90s) quietly: they never sought to monetize their fame, never asked for their negatives back, and never reported anything similar again.

Photo: Courtesy Keith Rowell

CASE: MUTILATED COWS

Date: October 1990
Location: Vancouver, Washington

Between June and October, Richard Fazio, owner of New Columbia Garden Farms on the banks of the Columbia River, found five of his cattle dead and scattered across three different pastures. Many cows’ organs and parts had been carefully removed —eyes, ear, tongue, rectum, udder, genitals, belly skin. Oregon State University analyzed tissue samples and determined the wounds were consistent with “electrosurgical excision” and “heat-induced injury,” possibly from laser. None of the injuries matched the typical explanations for cattle deaths (disease, weather, or predators). Two neighbors testified they had heard unusual sounds in the night before the carcasses were discovered. One of them said she had been startled by a “little man” carrying a “flashlight” in one of the pastures. The Clark County Sheriff’s Office quickly closed the case—without ever charging a suspect in the crime.

Photo: Courtesy Keith Rowell

CASE: CROP CIRCLES

Date: July 1998
Location: Hubbard, Oregon

On his approach into Hubbard’s Lenhardt Airport, a pilot saw an intricate pattern of circles, lines, and arcs in the wheat fields below. Farmer Doug Aamodt claimed to not know anything about the design on his land, igniting a media frenzy and sending dozens of UFO experts to the site. After analyzing the formation’s measurements (about 250 feet long and 170 feet wide), soil samples, and swirls, researchers determined that it was consistent with other crop circles, but they remained uncertain about how it got there. No official explanation was ever found, but at least one witness claimed to have seen an unusually bright object in the area at night, just before the circles were discovered. Since then two similar crop circles have been reported in the same field. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the field had a history of crop circles as early as the 1920s, well before UFOs became part of popular culture.

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The Hot Zone

A look at local UFO sightings over the past 10 years*

Slide Show

If you’re craving more UFO goodness, view our slide show of baffling photos taken by fellow Oregonians over the years.

PORTLAND 93

30 Unusual lights
12 Flying orbs
4 Disc-shaped objects
4 Triangle-shaped objects
3 Cigar-shaped objects
40 Other objects

MOST RECENT
WHEN: March 9, 2012
WHERE: Southeast Portland
WHAT HAPPENED: Eleven orbs—glowing orange, red, and white—fly east to west across the night sky before abruptly veering north and vanishing one by one.

VANCOUVER 29

16 Other objects
8 Unusual lights
2 Flying orbs
2 Triangle-shaped objects
1 Disc-shaped object

MOST RECENT
WHEN: February 11, 2012
WHERE: Downtown Vancouver
WHAT HAPPENED: A witness sees a large, glowing orange orb hovering in the air in the distance. It appears to be ascending the north face of Mount Hood.

BEAVERTON 19

11 Unusual lights
2 Cigar-shaped objects
1 Triangle-shaped object
1 Flying orb
4 Other objects

MOST RECENT
WHEN: February 15, 2012
WHERE: Unspecified
WHAT HAPPENED: A bright light moving east to west zigzags, pauses, then shoots out of sight on an arcing path.

GRESHAM 11
HILLSBORO 8
MILWAUKIE 8
OREGON CITY 8
TUALATIN 4
CANBY 4
CORNELIUS/NORTH PLAINS 3
TROUTDALE 3
CLACKAMAS 3
ALOHA 2
TIGARD 2
SHERWOOD 2
WILSONVILLE 2
LAKE OSWEGO 2
WEST LINN 2
CAMAS 2
BEAVERCREEK 1
ESTACADA 1
CARVER 1
SANDY 1
WOOD VILLAGE 1

*Drawn from MUFON’s database of reported sightings

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Sight-Line

Oregon’s UFO History in Brief

Slide Show

If you’re craving more UFO goodness, view our slide show of baffling photos taken by fellow Oregonians over the years.

MAY 1949 A fishing party on the Rogue River spies an unusual hovering object through binoculars. The description of the saucer-shaped craft given by two of the men is very similar to the one in the McMinnville case (see p. 104) a year later.

SEPTEMBER 1959 A policeman and FAA employee at the Redmond Airport see a bright, reddish object hovering 200 feet off the ground. It registers on multiple nearby radar screens before rising out of sight with a “long yellow and red flame from lower side.”

JANUARY 1973 A veteran and his family driving south along the coast encounter three “yellowish glowing objects” near Coos Bay. The man gets out to inspect them and finds a large object made of a sparkling, gemlike material.

MARCH 1981 A man listening to police radio frequencies on his CB captures a 30-minute audio recording of sounds coming from a 30-foot-wide orange light hovering above the Columbia River near St. Helens, lighting up both banks.

FEBRUARY 1984 A 16-year-old driving home with her boyfriend around 11 p.m. near Fern Ridge comes across a black, triangular object hovering over a marshy area by the side of the road. Other drivers pull over to observe it and then speed off, frightened.

1985 A flight attendant on a trip to Portland serves a passenger with “very piercing eyes and an unusual forehead” traveling without any luggage. The passenger inquires about the mass and velocity of the plane but doesn’t know the names of everyday objects.

SUMMER 1989 Ranchers in La Pine report 35 cattle found slaughtered and mutilated over the course of a few weeks. The Deschutes County DA heads up a task force whose report remains secret to this day.

JULY 1992 Nine witnesses at Glenwood Park in Southeast Portland see a “very bright” and “intense” light hovering silently above the area for almost 30 minutes. An out-of-focus VHS recording shows a glowing red dot against the night sky.

MARCH 1996 Two witnesses capture a video of six glowing spheres hovering in the afternoon sky above Lake Grove. The unidentified orbs are gold, blue, and pink and appear sporadically over the next two hours.

DECEMBER 2004 A Springfield man photographs a “very, very bright” bluish circle with a red rim in the night sky—which he believes to be the under-side of a UFO. Investigators initially believe it could be a planet, but none should have been visible that night.

JULY 2005 A Eugene couple photographs a “bright reflective” saucer moving across the sky. The FAA won’t provide radar data to investigators, but witnesses report that three military jets show up minutes later and tail the object until all are out of sight.

AUGUST 2005 In Eugene, several independent witnesses report “unusual” bright lights in the midnight sky, close to the ground and moving erratically. A grainy picture from one of the witnesses shows a red circular object, glowing yellow on the edges.

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Real or Fake?

The country’s leading UFO debunker, Robert Sheaffer, tells us why he doesn’t think Oregon’s famous Trent UFO photos are real.

GRAY SKIES The Trents’ photos show an overcast sky, but the Weather Bureau recorded clear skies for the entire day the Trents reported taking them.

SHADOWS The Trents claimed to have taken the pictures at sunset—but the angle of shadows on objects in the foreground suggests the sun was in the east.

SAUCER PLACEMENT If the object in the Trent photos were far away and moving, it should appear different in size and location in each of the images, which were taken roughly 10 feet apart. But when the two photos are compared, the UFO object remains in the same place and roughly the same size in relation to other objects in the photo (like the power lines above it).

SO … WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE? If you look at the picture long enough, Sheaffer says, the UFO starts to resemble a 1940s truck side mirror.

May 1949
Location: Rogue River
A fishing party on the Rogue River spies an unusual hovering object through binoculars. The description of the saucer-shaped craft (sketched in the official report above) given by two of the men is very similar to the one in the McMinnville case a year later (see next slides)—though investigators note its resemblance to a blimp.

Fall Arts Preview 2011

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:00:00 -0700

In the history of the arts, individual genius reigns supreme. But this fall, solo acts are giving way to duets as some of Portland’s most creative couples put heads and hearts together. From the stage to classical music to the visual arts, we introduce you to six pairs whose love for each other is inextricably bound up in their love for their art.

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Image: Nicolle Clemetson

Concerts

Empire of Two
Jared and Brianne Mees

Tender Loving Empire

For Jared and Brianne Mees, the giant upside-down cardboard city-scape hanging from the ceiling of Tender Loving Empire’s retail store is typical of the record label’s crafty, DIY aesthetic. But it could also serve as conspicuous symbol of their stubborn tenacity as a small business during tough economic times: “It used to fall down all the time,” says Jared, “and then one day it just stopped falling.”

If times are better now, it’s because the Meeses have gradually built and fortified their “empire” on the strongest bedrock they could find: their deep love of music and crafting. “Our excitement about an album can come through because we’re right there handing it over the counter,” gushes Brianne. Indeed, browsers who are lured into their SW 10th and Alder retail store in search of crafts often find themselves purchasing music instead, without having heard any of the label’s bands before. “We’ll play albums for them on the spot, and they can decide if they like it,” Jared says.

These days TLE doesn’t have much difficulty finding love for their music. They recently booked arena-folk act Typhoon on Late Night with David Letterman, while other headliners like Y La Bamba and Loch Lomond will have ample stage time at Portland’s upcoming late-summer concert juggernaut, Musicfest NW.

But Jared and Brianne, who met in Oxford, England, and married in LA before moving to Portland in 2006, are just happy that the business is now sustaining them, though they reminisce grimly about the times when they could barely pay their bills and had to pep-talk each other through the doldrums.

As it turned out, the greatest panacea to business worries was to draw a line in the sand. “We moved our computers out of our house,” says Jared of their decision to keep their sanity and happiness even as work and bills piled up. Perhaps “tender love” is a smart business strategy after all.—Anne Adams

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Theater

Image: Nicolle Clemetson

Romance of the Theater
Brian and Nikki Weaver

The Playhouse

The temperature rose at Portland Playhouse last March as actress Nikki Weaver, playing a social-climbing Hollywood party girl, bra straps off-shoulder, pounced on actor Leif Norby in Theresa Rebeck’s play The Scene. Offstage, Nikki’s husband, Brian Weaver, toughed it out from the control room as the stage manager started and stopped the makeout sessions with cue lights. “He was taunting me,” Brian says, “going, ‘Should I stop her now? How about now? Just a little bit longer!’”

The Weavers are no strangers to such trust exercises—or to taking risks. In 2008, they relocated from Boston with Brian’s brother Michael and started a playhouse in an old Northeast Portland church still fitted with old pews and a large stained-glass window. “The first play we did, one person showed up,” Nikki recalls.

Undaunted, Nikki began acting with other companies and teaching yoga classes, forging invaluable contacts in the theater community, while Brian put in 60-hour workweeks as creative director, poring over scripts, applying for grants, and helping manage the house day to day. Their efforts paid off, and Portland Playhouse’s audience gradually grew to almost 100 each night—but their fourth season brings new challenges.

In July, the Playhouse was suddenly (and they hope temporarily) forced to move from its sanctuary due to zoning concerns. Still, the Weavers are confident that their plan to produce six plays, mentor nine acting apprentices, and guide eight high schools through performances of Shakespeare’s Hamlet will go forward without a hitch. September’s offering, Gem of the Ocean, August Wilson’s redemptive drama about a former slave, will be performed at the World Trade Center, as will December’s Angels in America. Brian excitedly hints that audience participation might play a big role in the future.

Meanwhile, the pair maintains a united front even as their individual roles (like Nikki’s onstage necking) require them to divide and conquer. “I think in a relationship you’re supposed to think of lots of ways to keep the romance fresh,” Brian says, “so we try to use our work as artists to do that.”—AA

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Image: Nicolle Clemetson

Classical Music

Married—with Musicians
Charles Noble and Heather Blackburn

Arnica Quartet

Husband-and-wife musicians Charles Noble and Heather Blackburn like to say that they are part of a “four-way marriage” —artistically, that is. Along with violinists Shin Young Kwon and Fumino Ando, they make up the Arnica String Quartet, one of a number of local ensembles (among them Classical Revolution PDX and 45th Parallel) developed by Oregon Symphony players as side projects.

Though all four make their living playing variously in other ensembles, the quartet plays an important role in their musical lives. For Charles, who plays viola with the Oregon Symphony, and Heather, a cellist who freelances with groups like Pink Martini, the dynamism of quartet music is reinvigorating. “Even when I’m feeling jaded from putting in the hours at the symphony,” Charles says, “Heather’s like, ‘Let’s read some chamber music!’ and it gets me back in the spirit…. She’s just so passionate about string quartet.”

While Arnica prepares to tackle compositions by Benjamin Britten and Daniel Ott in September, the residents close to Charles and Heather’s Garden Home apartment (which sports a Tchaikovsky bust on the front door) will have plenty to be happy about, too. “A lot of our neighbors actually ask us, ‘Can you rehearse with the windows open?’” Heather says.—AA

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Image: Nicolle Clemetson

Dance

The Editors

Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton

In matching army-green jackets, BodyVox Dance Company’s two artistic directors form an indistinguishable blur of movement. As Jamey Hampton takes dancers through a new routine, his wife, Ashley Roland, retreats to a loftlike structure above the stage that the couple refer to as “the nest,” and begins tossing potential costume pieces out of a theater-facing window onto the stage. Ashley then jumps in for Jamey, coaching the perspiring troupe through steps that mimic a flock of sheep, while Jamey withdraws to his laptop to splice video clips together.

This jumble of motion is a fitting staging ground for the frantic energy of BodyVox’s October offering, Horizontal Leanings. Multimedia to the core, the dance studio steers clear of easy formulas, juxtaposing film and sound clips with live movement. “When we finish a show and the recipe is perfect,” says Ashley, “everything fits in place like a giant working clock.”

Jamey’s style leans toward graceful meditations on “beauty and longing,” while Ashley favors absurdist slapstick à la Bugs Bunny. To keep the balance, each wields an ironclad veto. But even for this seasoned pair—who joined forces 28 years and three dance companies ago—reaching that final unity of vision means hard work and late nights. “Even if we’re cooking dinner,” says Ashley, “we’re always throwing out ideas, constantly bantering back and forth.”

That creative closeness has other benefits, too. “If I went home to someone who asked, ‘What did you do today, honey?’” asks Jamey, “where would I start?”—AA

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Image: Roger Hagadone

Time-Based Art Festival

24-7 communication
Jean-Michele Gregory and Mike Daisey

Monologist Mike Daisey isn’t afraid to go all in. Not only did he once travel to China merely to track down the factory that made his iPod, he recently declared that his next performance will last an entire 24 hours. With this epic level of commitment, it wasn’t much of a stretch for the obsessively hardworking Daisey to marry his work—in the person of his director, Jean-Michele Gregory.

This setup, of course, presents pros and cons: “When things are going great, it just feels extraordinary,” says Jean-Michele. “But when things aren’t going well, it’s not like you can go home to your husband and complain about the a-hole you work with.”

But the inseparable couple make it work, and they spend about eight or nine months a year on the road together—Mike refining his unscripted monologues through repeated live performance, Jean-Michele providing necessary perspective and criticism. “When I’m not with Jean-Michele, I’m not as smart,” he says. “There are times when I’m like, ‘I don’t know how I feel about this or that; I’ll know later when I see Jean-Michele.’”

Mike met Jean-Michele 15 years ago while doing “very bad German expressionist theater.” They became instant friends, but their courtship progressed at a slow simmer. “I was so clueless at first,” Mike admits. “But I eventually realized that when a girl punches you and bites you—that might mean she wants you.”

Bruises and bite marks aside, as Mike gears up for the challenge of a lifetime, he’s counting on Jean-Michele’s counsel more than ever. In All the Hours in the Day, Mike will create and intertwine narratives from around the world in an attempt to “tell a gigantic road story, of sorts, of our entire planet and every time zone.” Audacious? Absolutely.—AA

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Image: Portland Art Museum

Visual Art

Model Relationship
Titian and “La Bella,” the Woman in a Blue Dress

In the hall of fame for artist-model confabs, there is Alfred Stieglitz’s obsessive photographic affair with Georgia O’Keeffe’s body, Francis Bacon’s painterly sadomasochism with his doomed lover, George Dyer, and of course Edouard Manet’s more chaste relationship with voluptuous Olympia. (He died of syphilis; she did not.) But what kind of encounter produced 16th-century painter Titian’s stunning La Bella we’ll never really know.

The unnamed subject, historians speculate, may have been a so-called “honest courtesan,” part of a class of Venetian prostitutes so beautiful, poised, and lettered they became fixtures in high society. Or maybe not. She may have been the same woman—a married duchess no less!—who sat for Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Or maybe not. What is known is that after commissioning the painting, its first owner, the Duke of Urbino Francesco Maria I della Rovere, became obsessed, later famously imploring the artist to quickly finish the painting “of that woman in a blue dress.”

Image: Portland Art Museum

Nearly half a millennium later, the dazzling piece should still be the talk of the town when it is unveiled at a single-painting show at the Portland Art Museum on November 25. Not only is the portrait fresh off of a three-year-long restoration in its usual home in Florence, Italy, but it will be the first Titian to ever be exhibited in Portland.

And, in the end, the identity of “La Bella” is less important than Titian’s brilliantly dexterous brushwork and his unprecedented vivid sense of color—not to mention the simple fact that when Titian sold her not as a portrait of a specific person but as a painting, he essentially created the modern art market.—Randy Gragg

The Destroyer

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:00:00 -0800

Image: Patrick Leger

The best-selling science fiction author has envisioned a postapocalyptic Oregon in his Emberverse series—complete with swords, castles, and a neofeudal empire centered on Portland. As he embarks on the eighth novel in the series, Stirling, who currently resides in New Mexico, opens up about the Rose City’s chances of survival at the end of the world.

The apocalypse is a venerable tradition in science fiction. It enables you to avoid the embarrassment of trying to write in the near future. If you write something set five years from now, you’ve got a ticking deadline, after which you’ll look completely ridiculous. Alternate histories, postapocalyptic or time-travel stories, they help you avoid that. My own conviction is that if you’re going to write in the future, you should write in the far future, when everything today is legendary.

The books start with “the Change,” which happens on March 17, 1998. There is a flash of light, a moment of intense pain, and all higher-energy technologies stop working. No electricity. No combustion engines. No explosives. Essentially, modern stuff doesn’t work.

The average city has a two-week supply of food. There’s no way to distribute it, there’s no way to communicate, no way to exchange information. You can’t even haul stuff on the roads because they’re blocked with cars that just stopped. No way to fight fires. No way to treat sewage. It’s a compendium of disasters.

Readers enjoy these stories because they like to think, “What would I do?” And in 99 percent of the cases, the answer would be: “Die.”

One of the things I like about this series is that I’ve given myself a canvas that has everything. I’ve got knights in armor, I’ve got neo-Celts, I’ve got cowboy stories, I’ve got Indians, pirates, you name it. I write for fun, and I read for fun. If it’s not fun, I’m not doing my job.

Before I started the series, I saw a long valley running north and south between mountains. For a little while I wasn’t quite sure whether it was the Willamette or the Shenandoah. Then I decided the Shenandoah was too close to the eastern megalopolis. And there were certain demographic things about the Northwest that were right for the story. Like there’s a heck of a lot of Wiccans in the Northwest, which figure prominently in the book.

The Pacific Northwest is the promised land of the bicyclist. We tend to lose sight of the fact that if you don’t have mechanical transportation, a mile is a long way. When the apocalypse hits, the bicycle becomes a serious political factor.

I needed a palace, and I wanted something fairly spectacular. I consulted my native guides, and one of them suggested the Multnomah County main library. It looked just right, both the location and the architecture. That becomes the city palace of the Lord Protector of the Portland Protective Association. The Park Blocks not far from the library become a jousting ground. And there’s a very large castle built just south of Portland.

Survivors tend to be mentally flexible. That’s why they contain a large percentage of rather eccentric types: they were mentally uncoupled from the status quo to begin with. It’s easier for them to assume that things have drastically and permanently altered. Anyone who sits waiting for the National Guard to arrive is toast. There’s a somewhat higher percentage of eccentrics in Portland. I’m afraid Seattle is completely wiped out.

Tears of the Sun will be published in September 2011.

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More from S.M. Stirling

I was actually born in France. My father was Canadian. He was in France with the Canadian Air Force in the early ’50s. We lived there and in Canada and in the States for a while. East Africa, too. We came back to Canada. Went to university there. Got a law degree. Went into writing. Married an American. Decided that I preferred the climate in New Mexico a heck of a lot more than I did Toronto’s, so I moved down here in 1995. I’m a naturalized citizen now.

I started reading science fiction and fantasy as soon as I was reading. You know, the usual kid stuff: H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, that sort of thing. I started telling stories as far back as I remember, when I was 5 or 6. I gradually, seamlessly segued into writing stuff down. Most of it of course was appallingly bad when I was young. But you learn. I published my first story in 1983 and sold my first novel in 1984. I went professional in 1988, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

I try to avoid returning to a common theme over and over. Writing springs out of the subconscious. There are certain tropes that resonate with you, and unless you watch it you’re gonna end up writing those things over and over again, under different names. I deliberately try to write as broad a spectrum of themes and characters as I can.

Most the mass dying happens offstage in the series. I write just enough to make people’s imaginations run riot. That’s actually the more effective way to deal with really bad stuff. Do it in strokes and then let people fill the rest in with their own minds. You’ve gotta know the details for yourself, but I generally don’t crowd a book with them.

The climate in Oregon is very suitable for the needs of the books. If you’re thrown back on your resources and you actually have to be a farmer, the Willamette Valley is about the best place in the temperate-zone world to do it. I needed something like Corvallis, too, for a university city-state. I had some fun with that. They eventually go into battle with Benny the Beaver flying overhead.

I’ve been through Oregon, though not as extensively as I’d like. Ideally, I would have liked to have spent months going over every place that I mention in the books. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible. I collected a massive amount of literature on the area: historical, geographic, economic, travel books, stuff on wildflowers and the birds. You have to know a great deal, even if you don’t put the stuff in the book. And besides, I’m a research fiend.

Spontaneous forms of neofeudalism occur in many areas after the Change because it’s more or less a default state when civilization collapses. But Portland goes the full monty.

If order collapses and the immediate problem is food, control of the means of production, is important as well as control and cultivation of land. Iowa is one of the places where this works out rather well because there’s a great deal of food there. California, on the other hand, does very badly indeed, I’m afraid. There are 14 million people in the LA basin, and without electric pumps the water would stop coming out of the taps within a couple of days.

Whenever you do a disaster series that involves a huge disaster, people accuse you of killing people off. I do like to point out that it’s fiction.

I write the book I’d like to read. Trying to write the market is usually futile and not much fun. And besides, the market’s a moving target. One thing’s fashionable one year, another thing’s fashionable the next year. You think you’ll write a vampire story, and the next year it’s zombies. So I just wrote a book I would consider fun, and the Change series seems to have struck with a fairly substantial audience. It’s very popular with the neo-pagan community, which is flattering. A lot of the characters are neo-pagans.

I do a fair amount of correspondence with fans, and in some cases they become part of my court of advisers. I like to build up a store of people who know about things, either places or occupations or ideas.

Whenever I’m writing a character who’s unlike me—a different gender or orientation or religion—I generally try to run what I’ve written past someone who’s closer to the character. That way you avoid obvious mistakes that you hadn’t seen. There’s an old saying, “It isn’t what you don’t know that will kill you, it’s what you think you know that isn’t so.” And that’s particularly so in cases like that.

It’s not that I’m anti-technology. On the contrary, I think it’s wonderful, and one of the themes of the book is that everything is harder and takes longer without it. But the people involved find out what’s in them when it’s taken away. Ordinary people are often capable of extraordinary accomplishments if circumstances demand them—a challenge and response thing.

There’s an element of luck to surviving. People have complained that the characters in my books are too lucky. But if you’re in a situation where 1 percent of the population survives, anyone who does is by definition a lottery winner. Somebody has to win.

I was a martial artist for a long time, and I’m interested in the history of small things people do to survive. Getting clean water, for instance. It’s really important to check the water you drink. Even the cleanest mountain stream may have a dead goat 300 yards upstream behind a tree and you don’t notice it. That’s why people more than a century or two back didn’t drink water if they could avoid it. They tended to cut it with alcohol. Part of it was just that they drank a lot. But it was actually a lot safer. Even a fairly dilute amount of alcohol in the water will kill a lot of the bacteria.

People don’t realize that up until about 150 years ago big cities were demographic sinks; they killed more people than were born in them. And the main reason was bad water. They were only kept going by people coming in from the countryside.

Even a cut finger is a deadly menace if you don’t have tetanus shots. I’ve noticed since my parents’ generation that people have become less cautious about contact with things that might be infectious, body fluids and such. We have more ways of dealing with infections than we used to.

Bubonic plague is endemic among ground squirrels in the West. There are a couple of cases in humans every year. But you put a lot of malnourished people without good medical care or sanitation together, and you’re going to get every plague known to humankind starting up again—to most of which we have no natural resistance because we weren’t exposed to any of the stuff as kids.

I don’t expect the Change to happen. But for more or less conventional disasters, the best thing is to have a certain amount of stuff on hand—preserved foods, water purification apparatus, gear, that sort of thing. And know how to get out of town. Also, know how to get out of town if you can’t drive.

It’s a dangerous world. None of us get out of it alive.

Art & Entertainment

Spring Arts Guide 2013

Fall Arts Preview: The Collaborative Way

2012 Oregon Book Award Winners

A Guide to Oregon’s Extraterrestrial Past and Present!

Slide Show

The Sleuths

Slide Show

Close Encounters

Slide Show

CASE: THE FIRST “FLYING SAUCER”

CASE: THE FIRST PHOTO EVIDENCE

CASE: MUTILATED COWS

CASE: CROP CIRCLES

Slide Show

PORTLAND 93

VANCOUVER 29

BEAVERTON 19

Sight-Line

Slide Show

Real or Fake?

Fall Arts Preview 2011

Concerts

Empire of Two Jared and Brianne Mees

Tender Loving Empire

Theater

Romance of the Theater Brian and Nikki Weaver

The Playhouse

Classical Music

Married—with Musicians Charles Noble and Heather Blackburn

Arnica Quartet

Dance

The Editors

Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton

Time-Based Art Festival

24-7 communication Jean-Michele Gregory and Mike Daisey

Visual Art

Model Relationship Titian and “La Bella,” the Woman in a Blue Dress

The Destroyer

More from S.M. Stirling

Empire of Two
Jared and Brianne Mees

Romance of the Theater
Brian and Nikki Weaver

Married—with Musicians
Charles Noble and Heather Blackburn

24-7 communication
Jean-Michele Gregory and Mike Daisey

Model Relationship
Titian and “La Bella,” the Woman in a Blue Dress