Third Angle New Music Ensemble gave the world its first listen to Portland composer Tomas Svoboda’s newest quartet, String Quartet no. 10, Opus 194. I’m not adept enough to enter it very deeply from that one encounter, but I liked its spirit and its invention. The program notes said that it is dedicated to [...]
Yesterday, I had lunch with a prominent local theater director, who shall go nameless because he didn’t actually know he was speaking “for the record.” He gets around a lot, visiting other cities that are engaged with The Theatre, and he was concerned. He wondered just how “theater centric” Portland is these days, because he’d [...]
Today’s newspaper contained the sad news that Joel Weinstein, the publishing genius behind one of the city’s late, great magazines, Mississippi Mud, had died of lung cancer in Puerto Rico. (I wrote the obituary.)
I was surprised to calculate that Joel left the city in 1994 — my memory of him is still so vivid. [...]
UPDATE: An astute colleague pointed out this morning that I’d foolishly missed the symbolic importance of yesterday’s election result. As any compelling narrative might, President Obama’s election saga has the possibility of altering and re-orienting our personal stories in a way that changes our relationship to the civic sphere of things, to our [...]
When I was much younger, I marveled at Election Day, this First Tuesday in November when Americans en masse, from sea to shining sea, returned to the polls to exercise the primary ritual of a democracy. The idea of it as a collective enterprise, the voting I mean, just made me happy somehow, even when [...]
Suddenly, the great David Clark Five song came to mind, which must mean I’m in pieces, bits and pieces. And indeed I am.
Our friends at Culture Shock, specifically MightyToyCannon, have been assembling a growing soundtrack of songs to get us through the election. As of this morning the clips numbered 17, and the [...]