OPB's State of Wonder

We meet the contenders for the general nonfiction category: Tracy Daugherty, Andi Zeisler, Kathleen Dean Moore, Bill Lascher, and Sue Armitage.

Chuck Close Portraits Heat Up The Pendleton Art Scene

It's not every day that a small town arts center gets to pick works from a blue chip artist like it's checking out library books, but that's basically how this show came to be.

Sam Hamilton Brings His Films And More To PAM's APEX Gallery

The fresh face at Portland Art Museum is Grace Kook-Anderson, the new curator of Northwest art. It’s her job to make sure the museum reflects regional work, but she also has a strong feel for contemporary art. And that is reflected in her first choice for the Museum’s APEX Gallery: fellow recent Northwest transplant Sam Hamilton, whose playful interdisciplinary work interweaves films, music and installation. Who else would mix Carl Sagan, David Attenborough and Kenny G in one show?

Oregon-Born Play Wins Pulitzer

Playwright Lynn Nottage premiered her play “Sweat” in 2015 as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “American Revolutions” series exploring key moments in U.S. history. With the announcement Monday that the play received the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Nottage made history as the first female playwright to win the prestigious award twice.

"Sweat" is one of only two shows by women to open on Broadway this season. The other, "Indecent" by Paula Vogel, was also commissioned by OSF's "American Revolutions" project. The Bard might say: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival doest slayeth it.

Get Ready To Shake Your Booty At The Soul'd Out Festival

This week, Portland is gearing up to make some moves — dance moves, that is. It's the annual Soul’d Out Festival (April 19–23). Legendary soulful acts from around the country are on the bill with new breakers of soul, from the popular hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco to the prophetic R&B queen Solange.

The Guttery Writing Group: Tough Book Love That Will Get You Out Of Your Pajamas

The collective proclaiming itself “Portland’s second most-famous writers’ group” challenges the idea that great work is produced in cloistered solitude. The authors in the writing group "The Guttery" are like a literary engine: at least five published this past year.

opbmusic Session With Wild Ones

Does the smattering of recent sunny days have you dreaming of summer? There’s no better album to feed those dreams than Wild Ones’ “Heatwave.” Its songs of long summer nights and big-city adventures smolder and delight.

Vancouver's North Bank Art Gallery Shuts Its Doors Next Month

North Bank Artists is a co-op gallery on the city’s Main Street. Its presence and work downtown since its founding in 2003 — including the creation of a city art walk — has helped spur other galleries and cultural institutions to open, earning the area the moniker "The Vancouver Arts District." But after rent hikes and an uncertain future, the art gallery that served as a linchpin for Vancouver’s downtown revitalization will close at the end of May.

Diana Abu Jaber Weaves The Story of Her Life With Layers Of Pastry Dough

Diana Abu Jaber is a novelist, a professor and a cook. She is the daughter of a Jordanian father and an American mother, and her most recent book, “Life without a Recipe,” tells the story of growing up in both countries.

As a girl, Laini Taylor wanted to be a writer. She would dream up magical worlds filled with witches and monsters. But once she got into high school and college, she started reading literature — all those serious books about the real world that serious people read. And she stopped writing.

“I had no life experience,” she laughs. “And really nothing to say. I felt a lack of ability to contribute to that body of work.”

Then years later, she read a little book you might’ve heard of. Harry Potter? And her childhood imagination rose up like a phoenix.

“That whole ‘write what you know,’ you don’t have to do that,” she says. “I find it much more fun to imagine what I don’t know and want to figure it out.”

Since then, Taylor has imagined stories to incredible success. Her early collaboration with her husband, the illustrator Jim Di Bartolo, “Lips Touch,” was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” trilogy is an international best seller.

We sat down with Taylor at her Portland home. It’s sunny and bright and filled with wonder: paintings of her characters, small figurines of magical creature, princess dresses for her daughter Clementine Pie, and a library with a grand fireplace and floor-to-ceiling book shelves that seems right out of a fairy tale. Which is fitting: Taylor launched a new series this week about a young librarian who also has big dreams, “Strange the Dreamer.”

Taylor will read from the book and talk with Sara Grundell of the YA website Novel Novice at Powell’s at Cedar Hills Crossing on Apr. 6.

Jack Perrin is not your typical science teacher.

“I really love hands on stuff,” he told me last month when I visited him in White Salmon, Washington. “If kids can use their hands, learning goes a lot deeper.”

Perrin was my science and math teacher all through grade and high school at a small private school in the Western Colorado town of Paonia. He caught my attention right away, when he introduced a course titled 'bubble-ology' to my second grade class. By the time I was in high school, his lessons had evolved in a more athletic way: we would pop off to Utah for a week of backpacking, learning how to start a fire with flint or cook pasta inside a sleeping bag.

“I think for me, teaching has always been about relationships,” he says. “Paying attention to the relationship made it possible for us to do a lot of things that we wouldn’t have been able to do if I just regarded you as the girl that takes math from me one period a day.”

Perrin grew up in Portland and moved back to the Northwest to be near family a couple of years ago. Besides his part time job teaching science at White Salmon High School, he runs the Gorge Makerspace, a workshop currently housed in the basement of the youth center in White Salmon.

The center picks kids up from school every day and gives them a place to play and do homework until their parents get off work. On Tuesdays, Perrin opens up the Makerspace and facilitates different activities that any of the kids can participate in. They’ve done everything from puppetry classes and sticker-making to building marble runs. Last summer, a small group of pre-teens wielding hammers built a clubhouse in the youth center yard.

On a recent Tuesday, Jack had a group of kids, ages 7-11, working with Spheros—little spherical robots that look like pool balls come to life, or the droid BB8 from Star Wars without the head. Perrin was interested in how the kids could hack the basic robots, challenging them to build a carriage that they could attach to the Spheros.

The game was to transport plastic pandas, via robot, across an obstacle course and back to the zoo. The students were using cardboard and recycled yogurt containers to construct their wagons. There were hot glue guns and electric cardboard cutting saws, and everyone wanted to work with the drills and power tools.

“It’s a little more funner,” said 11-year-old Rosalinda about creating at Makerspace versus her school classes. “We get to cut things, more sharper things, we get to learn how to use [tools].”

Getting tools in the hands of kids is a big part of what Perrin does.

“I think the message kids get at public school is: you don’t know what you are doing, you’re not any good, what’s wrong with you,” he says. “I want every kid to feel like they can do something well, and they can feel good about what they do.”

The Gorge Makerspace is getting a new home. They are expanding into the Bethel Church across Main Street from their current home. The larger space will allow Perrin to put together a more extensive class list, including spring break and summer camps, and some Saturday camps for all ages. Perrin plans to keep expanding and helping kids continue to keep on creating, and to never, ever, stop learning.

Ever passed a gallery and seen something that looked interesting through the window, but found yourself thinking "I could never afford it" or "I probably wouldn't get it?"

Well, you're not alone.

"Galleries can be really intimidating places—I'm sometimes intimidated to walk in," says artist and writer Jennifer Rabin, which is saying a lot, given that she's paid to know art. Since 2015, she's been the visual art critic at "Willamette Week," although she will depart at the end of March.

After watching nine Portland galleries and one museum close in the first nine months she was at WW, Rabin grew alarmed. Then President Donald Trump proposed eliminating the national endowments for the arts and the humanities, and Rabin had to do something.

In the last two weeks, Rabin launched two programs, Art Passport PDX and Artists Resist, to get more people looking at art and standing up for why art matters.

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/jennifer-rabin-art-passport-pdx-artists-resist

Greg Ewer of 45th Parallel and Tristan Bliss talk about digging deep to resolve an online spat and forge a deeper conversation about welcoming new audiences for classical music.

Jayanthi Raman has been staging Internationally renown shows in Portland for nearly 30 years. This one had a small hiccup.

We talk with Eutectic Gallery's Brett Binford about the onset of NCECA in Portland this week.

Rack up the brackets: we are in the midst of a tournament to find the most sorrowful of songs! Elliott Smith or Franz Schubert? Billie Holiday or the Pogues? Dive in and simmer in the sad.

During a rehearsal in Northwest Dance Project’s light-filled Portland studio for a new adaptation of “Carmen,” set in part in ‘50’s-era beauty salons, the company is trying to observe one of childhood’s cardinal rules: never run with scissors.

“That’s a good point: Where are they going to be when you’re running?” resident choreographer Ihsan Rustem says when dancer Kody Jauron asks how to incorporate a menacing pair of shears that are over a foot long into the choreography.

“I’m wearing a lot of black,” says Jauron about his costume, joking that it would likely hide any accidental blood stains.

It’s one of several problems Rustem is wrestling with as they near the show’s world premiere March 16–18 at the Newmark Theatre. There’s also how to deal with Jauron’s whiplash during the preceding scene in which the male dancers, acting as a gaggle of barbers, twist his head every which way, and several points of nigh-impossible movement.

If Northwest Dance Project has built its identity around commissioning world premieres from budding international choreographers, they’ve found a true creative love affair in Rustem. The company’s first commission from the then little-known British-born dance maker in 2010, “State of Matter,” went on to win leading global dance competitions in England and Germany. Five works later, “Carmen” will be the company’s first story ballet and by far Rustem’s most ambitious piece yet, with “Harper’s Bazaar”–inspired glamor and costumes by “Project Runway” winner Michelle Lezniak.

“Going to the theater is an experience, so you want to come out having gone on a journey,” he says. “And that’s my greatest challenge.”

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/nw-dance-projects-carmen-ihsan-rustem

Two artists on impermanence, their process, and the joys of the 8 x 10 view camera.

The bandleader who drove students to top-level performances is served an indictment for sex abuse charges.

Artist Leila Del Duca is wrapping up her amazing series with Joe Keatinge, "Shutter". We talk to her about her new YA graphic novel with Georgian Kit Seaton, "Afar".

Imagine a gallery where you can step into a painting, fly through the ceiling to the heaven’s above, or learn a dance from a virtual flamingo. It’s not a world far off. Virtual and augmented reality stand to transform the art world, and the tech incubator Oregon Story Board is on the front lines.

As a December snowstorm raged around OSB’s office in downtown Portland, the artist Kristin Lucas was dreaming of flamingos.

“I’m interested in making an augmented reality experience for the HoloLens,” she said, referencing Microsoft’s new augmented reality glasses that make it look like the digital object is floating in the room in front of you. “In which they receive a dance lesson, and they’re doing a multi-species dance with a flamingo.”

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/virtual-reality-artists-oregon-story-board

From “Wayne’s World” to “UHF,” public access television often seems to serve more as a satirical punching bag than a respected media form. But that’s about to change.

Portland Community Media is renovating its building and rebranding itself as Open Signal, a media arts center where you can learn not only TV, but storytelling, podcasting, coding, mixed reality, and other forms of digital media. They’re celebrating the transformation with an open house on Feb. 25.

“The fact that the city has this asset, where anybody can come off the street, for practically free of charge, and learn how to tell a story,” says Justen Harn, “it is amazing.”

Harn was part of the team that transformed the Hollywood Theatre from a dilapidated, second-run movie house into an innovative cinema and community hub. He we hired as the executive director at PCM a year ago with the instructions to create a more global vision for the organization, focused on programs, equity, and the future. With a budget of roughly $2.5 million drawn mostly from fees paid by cable service providers, PCM oversees five cables stations that serve an audience of 2.5 million.

Harn gave us a tour, along with the director of strategy and development, Rebecca Burrell, who signed on to work with Harn from her post as the head of the Right Brain Initiative at the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Here are highlights from our conversation.

Ten years ago, two silvery orbs began floating 3,000 feet between Marquam Hill and South Waterfront over the roofs and backyards of one of Portland’s oldest neighborhoods. Millions of rides later, Portland’s aerial tram can now be seen as one of the city’s most transformational projects ever, leading to the dramatic waterfront expansion of OHSU and the creation of a new neighborhood, and paving the way to the successful $500-million Knight Challenge that is positioning the university as a global center for cancer research.

The tram’s elegant towers and cars came courtesy of the city’s first international design competition since the early ‘80s and have since grown into a glittering landmark, making it easy to forget that when it was being conceived, it was the center of a brutal political fight.

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/from-controversy-to-icon-portland-aerial-tram

The man who re-imagined John Shaft, Night Hawk, and Power Man talks to us about the new Luke Cage standalone series he's writing, starting in May, what he thought of the Netflix series, and why Black Mariah has to be the smartest person in the room.

Portlanders love to love their airport. There’s the Stumptown coffee, the Powell’s bookstore, the local restaurants, and perhaps the most photographed carpet in the world. So what else could PDX put in front of passengers? While other airports add yoga rooms and rooftops pools in the quest to tempt travelers, PDX has welcomed an outpost of the iconic Hollywood Theater to be America’s only airport cinema.

On a typical January morning at the Portland International Airport, a not so typical passenger unloaded at the departure drop-off area.

A team used a crane to transfer a 28-foot-long sign from a flatbed trailer to a set of wheels. Anyone who’s driven down Portland’s Sandy Boulevard would recognize it: it’s styled after the Hollywood Theatre marquee.

“I get goose bumps watching it roll in,” said Hollywood’s executive director, Doug Whyte, in front of the Delta ticketing booth as the team pushed the sign past the Portland Roasting Company kiosk. “Usually things come in through the causeway, but it’s too big, so we actually have to bring it in through the front door. And it has to go through TSA, so it should be an interesting day to say the least.”

Since taking over in 2011, Whyte has overseen the transformation of the nonprofit theater into one of the leading art house cinemas in the country. Then he read an article about an Imax theater at the Hong Kong airport and saw an opportunity to reach a bigger audience: some 18 million pairs of eyes a year.

“We approached the airport, and funny enough they had actually been thinking it would be cool to have a movie theater,” he said. “It was kismet. We worked it out so it could go under their public art program.”

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/hollywood-theatre-opens-at-pdx-airport/

Director Elizabeth Huffman talks to us about the play she's directing this weekend by Turkish playwrite Sedef Ecer, and her a one-woman show juxtaposing a wealthy Syrian refugee with Marie Antoinette. She performed the show in Germany last year, and visited refugees camped in Bremen, awaiting permanent resettlement.

While America spent last winter wondering why the National Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was taking so long to reflect the face of America, some amazing features were in the works, featuring African-American directors, writers, and actors — films like "Fences," starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, "Moonlight," featuring Naomi Harris, and "Hidden Figures," with the ever-talented Octavia Spencer, have all gotten Oscar nods. If those films made you hungry for more, get ready to head over to the Hollywood Theater for the Portland Black Film Festival. Creator and co-curator David F. Walker talks to us about some of the films on screen Feb. 9-22nd.

Portland-based vocal ensemble Cappella Romana creates otherworldly mystic sounds with layers of harmony, plumbing that space where eastern and western sacred music meet. While most of their repertory involves the old world, occasionally they love to inject a little new music. One composer in particular embodies their approach to choral music—Arvo Pärt.

Cappella Romana has organized a festival of Pärt’s music, the first in the US, Feb. 5–12. Joining with Third Angle New Music Ensemble and other musicians, they will offer eight live chamber performances, documentary film screenings, and lectures interpreting the groundbreaking composer.

Pärt is the world’s most performed composer alive today. Growing up in Soviet-era Estonia, Pärt was considered a rebel in the world of composition. His early compositions broke both compositional and political rules in a very tense historical moment; some were even rejected for incorporating western techniques.

“He spoke with musically — such a directness and a simplicity and a sense of timelessness and calm,” says Alexander Lingas, the musical director and founder of Cappella Romana. “I’d just come off an undergraduate degree in composition…and here was someone speaking in the most straightforward language rooted in ancient things, but yet thoroughly contemporary.”

Goodbye Reading Frenzy, hello SW 4th Ave. We sit down with Portland's new City Commissioner, Chloe Eudaly. Her meteoric rise from indie bookseller to Council parallels the city's growing unease with growth, gentrification, and the status quo. This is the first of several check-ins we'll bring you this year.

For five years, Eliza Jane Schneider played most of the female characters on South Park: Wendy, Shelly, Mrs. Cartman, the Mayor — they’re all her. She’s created characters for everything from the animated film “Finding Nemo” to the TV series “King of the Hill” to video games like “Assassin’s Creed.” And to top it all off, she writes and performs award-winning plays and one-woman shows.

Her voices come from years spent traveling the world, studying and teaching dialects and touring as a musician. For Portland's Fertile Ground Festival of New Works, she’s premiering a piece called “Displaced,” based off of conversations she's had with houseless and displaced people across the globe. It runs Jan. 20–28 at Abbey Arts.

Subashini Ganesan and Oluyinka Akinjiola stop in to talk about their upcoming performance of new work, IGNITE. They’re from radically different traditions, but each embraces a marriage of traditional and modern forms.

A visit to Desert Rain, the Bend home of Tom Elliott and Barbara Scott that is the first single-family home in the world to earn certification under the Living Building Challenge.

When it comes to women, there are two things American culture doesn’t look so kindly on: age and weight. Tahni Holt’s newest show revels in both.

By the time the audience walks into the theater, the performance has already begun. A heap of dancers writhe across the floor in an undulating mass of brightly patterned skirts, splayed hair, and little flashes of gold lame, like some thrift store reenactment of a Gustav Klimt painting.

A tone slowly builds, and the six dancers eventually break into pairs, rolling, lifting and collapsing into each other.

“A lot of this work features women's bodies on the ground, experiencing or reveling in the weight of their bodies, the heaviness of their bodies, which is something we culturally cannot fathom or talk about,” says Reed College theater professor Kate Bredeson, who worked with Holt as a dramaturge, providing research and a second set of eyes and opinions. “It moves me regularly to tears because I watch these six women on the ground, and it's not about victimization at all, it's actually this incredible power, but it's mixed with a fatigue.”

Power and fatigue, weight and weightlessness, youth and age — these are just a few of the themes that Holt plays with in “Sensation/Disorientation,” running Jan. 18–22 at Reed College’s Diver Studio Theatre as part of White Bird’s Uncaged Series.

By 2015, the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education had a problem — the good kind of problem: It couldn’t accommodate the crowds that wanted to get into its exhibits and events. So it commissioned a study to see if it could afford a bigger building. Then director Judy Margles learned that the Museum for Contemporary Craft was closing its downtown Portland doors after 79 years.

“It was just absolutely serendipitous, as we were completing the study in February 2016, this building landed on the market,” Margles said. “We said, 'This building is perfect for us.' It had exactly what we needed: a changing exhibition gallery, space for core exhibitions.”

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/oregon-jewish-museum-new-home

Amid regulatory crackdown on Northwest glass makers, Eric Lovell transfers the business to California-based Oceanside GlassTile.

We listen back to what Ted Wheeler said as a candidate about his arts agenda for Portland, and talk with three bright guys in design, architecture, and planning about what challenges lie ahead for Portland during Wheeler's tenure.

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Ever been in an American Legion hall?

They’re not fancy, but for a certain generation they’re as familiar as the corner taproom. They're the place to go for a chat, cheap drinks and of course, monthly bingo — not to mention the assurance of finding people who’ve experienced military service.

Legion membership is shrinking nationally, but one hall in Northeast Portland — an old Quonset hut with a dropped ceiling and scuffed floors — found revival by embracing new people and new voices.

American Legion Post 134 on Alberta Street has become a home for all kinds of new voices. In the course of one evening, the audience heard a blazing variety of personal stories and essays, as well as poems and songs. Some writers are vets. Some aren’t. Post commander Sean Davis holds book release parties for veterans who are publishing their own work. The post even has its own small press and published an anthology of war stories.

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So how do you convert a failing American Legion post into an oasis of community and expression, where veterans rub shoulders with queer kids and street people mix with art curators?

We recently sat down with Davis, who — as you might remember — ran for Portland mayor last spring. He teaches writing at Mt Hood Community College and is the author of a memoir called "The Wax Bullet War." We were joined by Amelia McDanel — another Legion member, a Navy veteran and MFA grad of Antioch University-Los Angeles — who oversees the Legion Readers’ series at the post.

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/programs/state-of-wonder/article/portland-american-legion-post-134/

Mark Rothko is one of the 20th century’s most famous painters, and his formative years were spent in Portland: He immigrated here at age 10 from Latvia and took classes at the Museum School at the Portland Art Museum before graduating from Lincoln High School. In October, the museum announced plans for the Rothko Pavilion (see pictures), a new multi-story glass structure that will link the museum’s two free-standing buildings and include a number of new galleries and education and programming spaces.

The Rothko Pavilion is not just paying homage to this under-sung hometown hero in its name. The art museum also announced a partnership with Rothko’s children to cycle his works through the museum on a rotating basis. Christopher Rothko sat down with Aaron Scott at last month’s Wordstock.

And we talk with the museum’s brand new Curator of Northwest Art, Grace Kook-Anderson.

The Cult of Orpheus is reviving last year's popular original, one-act opera, "Viva's Holiday", based on the memoirs of the celebrated Portland exotic dancer, Viva Las Vegas. Think your family holiday gathering is complicated? Picture outing your life as a stripper to a minister father. Take a listen, and mark the calendar for the remaining four performances.
(photo cred. Gene Newell/Courtesy of the Cult of Orpheus)

Warm your hands on these picks from KMHD program director Matt Fleeger, and OPB digital producer David Stuckey. We talk about a few selections from KMHD's top ten albums of 2016, plus a few live shows that kept us jumping this year.
(Photo cred. David Stuckey)

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers.

“Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced."

To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner.

State of Wonder then recorded the weekly winners reading their stories and remixed them with music, as well as called up the grand prize winner to spill the beans, for your aural pleasure.

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers.

“Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced."

To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner.

State of Wonder then recorded the weekly winners reading their stories and remixed them with music, as well as called up the grand prize winner to spill the beans, for your aural pleasure.

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers.

“Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced."

To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner.

State of Wonder then recorded the weekly winners reading their stories and remixed them with music, as well as called up the grand prize winner to spill the beans, for your aural pleasure.

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers.

“Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced."

To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner.

State of Wonder then recorded the weekly winners reading their stories and remixed them with music, as well as called up the grand prize winner to spill the beans, for your aural pleasure.

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers.

“Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced."

To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner.

State of Wonder then recorded the weekly winners reading their stories and remixed them with music, as well as called up the grand prize winner to spill the beans, for your aural pleasure.

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers.

“Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced."

To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner.

State of Wonder then recorded the weekly winners reading their stories and remixed them with music, as well as called up the grand prize winner to spill the beans, for your aural pleasure.

Do you ever drive by one of the dozens of buildings going up in Portland and think, man, I wish I owned a slice of that masonry pie? Well, now you can.

In the middle of one of Portland’s biggest real estate booms, one building stands out, and not just for its name and psychedelic paint job. The Fair-Haired Dumbbell is the first building in Oregon and one of the first in the country to raise money via new crowd-funding regulation approved by Congress.

Read the full story:
http://www.opb.org/radio/article/fair-haired-dumbbell-crowd-funded-building

Few Portland artists can claim deeper ties to the city than Julie Keefe. She’s shot for everyone from the Oregonian to the New York Times; she’s done major community engagement projects like Hello, Neighbor, where kids in North Portland interview elders about how the neighborhood has changed; and she’s wrapping up four years as Portland’s first creative laureate.

But she might be best known, at least in Northeast Portland, as the primary photographer for the Skanner newspaper, where she’s documented Portland’s African American community since 1991, as see in the exhibition “Document of a Dynamic Community: The Skanner Photography of Julie Keefe," at the Oregon Historical Society through Dec. 18.

The hundreds of photos, drawn from the tens of thousands Keefe has shot, depict the everyday triumphs, challenges, and banalities of life in North, Northeast, and increasingly East Portland.

"What the Skanner did is said, 'here, we're going to show you our parades, and we're going to show the girl scout troupes and the chess clubs and the golf teams that are bringing people together," says Keefe. "They showed everyday life in a very dynamic, wide-ranging community in ways that we don't see in the [mainstream media] headlines. So I felt super privileged to be able to gain trust and respect in a community that I was an outsider in."

The Skanner was started in 1975 by husband-and-wife team Bernie and Bobbie Foster. Living just blocks away from its offices, Keefe started shooting for the paper in 1991. One entire wall of the exhibition is wall-papered in snapshots of everything from Juneteenth parades to political rallies to Rose Princess coronations, depicting hundreds of everyday Portlanders, political figures, and visiting dignitaries like President Obama.

Some of the photos carry bittersweet emotions for Keefe, like one showing the founder of Self Enhancement Inc, Tony Hobson Sr., shaking the hands of students on the opening day of the SEI Academy. The nonprofit has an incredible track record for improving the lives and educational experiences of at-risk youth, and when it was built in Unthank Park, it pushed out a lot of the drug activity. But that in turn led to new folks moving in, which accelerated the gentrification of the neighborhood, pushing out a lot of long-term residents, too, many of them Keefe’s neighbors.

And then there were the truly heartbreaking events.

"There were times when I was really emotional," she says. "I couldn't distance myself — I knew a lot of these people. I watched them with their pain. One of the first things I shot was a candle-light vigil, and then when I kept photographing them, it just never stopped. Kendra James was shot by the police three blocks from my house."

The exhibition includes three photos following the death of James: one of her memorial, one of a march against the shooting, and one of a public hearing with the police.

Keefe tells us what it was like to document a community in the interview above.

The creative firm behind such famous spaces as the Alexandria Library and the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has its eyes on Portland's waterfront, and there's good news and bad.

First, the bad: the James Beard Market Snohetta was set to design got booted from the Morrison Bridge site that folks were so excited about by the developer, Melvin Mark. This is at least the fifth time organizers have had to change sites in the past 17 years.

In good news, the partners behind Snohetta's other project, the Willamette Falls Riverwalk at the old Blue Heron Mill in Oregon City, have raised $19 of $25 million for the first phase, and Snohetta is deep in the design process with the public. Plus, the firm has signed on for a third project: to design plans for OMSI’s 16 acres of riverfront property in the central eastside.

Snohetta’s team was recently in town to gather public feedback on their designs — a process that engaged several hundred participants, ranging from two former Oregon City mayors to arts advocates to kayaking enthusiasts.

“What we're really hoping is to hear people's ideas," says Snohetta's head of landscape, Michelle Delk. "To have them start dreaming with us about these moments we've identified, that we know have potential to really be meaningful transformations of the site and integrated into the Riverwalk."

Snohetta, teamed with local firm Mayer Reed, works a bit differently than most firms. Rather than present three designs and ask the public to put green dots on one, they show a few rough ideas for the area and then play games to glean impressions about how they can be further shaped.

The River walk is not along pristine shores. It takes you over, under, through, and alongside years of accumulated industry. The participants honed in on some of the old mill’s most dramatic features, like a huge pipe chase—a 30-feet wide tunnel, really. They invited people to weigh in: do you want to walk on top of it, punch some openings in it so you can walk through it and see the river, or make it disappear entirely in favor of fish habitat.

There was also a big public plaza and a giant clarifier, and they had people pick cards representing what they wanted to do in them and how they wanted them feel — movie theater, play space, natural habitat, falls viewing platform, or something else altogether.

If you missed the public meeting, you can still give input online until Dec. 5. Snohetta will be back in February with the plan they are calling “the preferred alternative.”

A brilliant stylist of crime lit, Hobbs is remembered by editor Gary Fisketjon and Professor Robert Knapp of Reed College.

(photo cred. Leah Nash)

Best-selling author Hobbs wrote his New York Times bestseller,
"Ghostman" during his senior year at Reed College. At the same time he was working on his thesis with Robert Knapp, a professor of English and Humanities. Knapp shares memories of Hobbs, and explains the links between Hobbs' academic work and his neo-noir fiction.

Such a treat. The legendary dance-funk-art-rock band tells the story of their all-too-brief fall reunion, and what they love about playing together.

A collection of performance all-stars embark on a year-lond residenct with PNCA's Center for Contemporary Art and Culture. The first workshop session honed in on Takaihor Yamamoto's work-in-progress regarding consent. More over here, including video: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/physical-education-dance-collective-pnca/

Is your house historic—officially, as in listed on the National Register of Historic Places?

In Oregon, nominating a house to the register is solely up to the owner, unless one person—anybody—can convince the Portland Landmarks Commission and National Park Service that your entire neighborhood is historic.

If an effort by the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association to create a new national historic district is successful, hundreds of property owners could find their houses listed. The reason has less to do with traditional historic preservation than with stopping demolitions, new infill housing, and “monster homes.”

“The board's worked hard for about three years to try to get the city to deal with this through coding, zoning, and through the comprehensive plan,” says Eastmoreland’s president, Tom Hanson. “While we had considered historic district designation in the past, we had thought the other mechanisms were more appropriate to work through the city. But when they were not fruitful, then we moved to considering historic district designation.”

But National Historic District protection comes with strict rules, design review and permit fees. For instance, if your house is designated a “contributing resource”—meaning it’s original and in the character of Eastmoreland’s ‘20s-era architecture—you might not be able to put energy efficient fiberglass windows in or solar panels or a skylight on your roof if it’s visible from the street. And, if you want to build something with those giant sliding glass doors like you see in Dwell magazine, forget it. It’s unlikely to be “compatible.”

A group calling itself Keep Eastmoreland Free has formed to stop the effort to nominate the neighborhood. They point out that fewer than 1 percent of Eastmoreland’s 1,500 or so homes have been demolished since 2003. The phrase they like to use is that they “don’t want their neighborhood pickled.”

“Eastmoreland was built and is continuing to evolve for 100 plus years,” says longtime resident Mary Kyle McCurdy. “We have all sorts of architectural styles here. There's isn't any one consistent theme or time period in which this was built or the houses were designed. So to call us all in one Historic District and freeze it now? Why freeze it in 2016?”

What’s interesting—and where a lot of the heartburn arises—is in the process of creating national historic districts. The only way the residents of the neighborhood can stop it is by gathering notarized petitions from the landowners—50 percent of them plus 1. Imagine a presidential election in which your only way of voting is by going to your bank and notarizing your ballot before mailing it in—all to vote for the candidate you don’t like.

What do the hit Broadway shows "Hamilton," "Matilda," "Hedwig and the Angry Itch," and "Pippin" have in common? Lake Oswego native-turned-Broadway producer Brisa Trinchero.

Trinchero grew up working the box office at the Lakewood Theatre Company. Turns out she had a knack for business: by her mid-20s, she was running the Broadway Rose Theatre Company in Tigard. After leading the musical theater company through the renovation of a new theater, she found herself wanting a new challenge.

"Having achieved my life goal, I had an early career crisis," she says from her office in New York. "I got addicted to high growth, high risk side of theater."

A jump from Broadway Rose to Broadway isn’t so far, right?

Now Trinchero splits her time between Portland and New York, where she produces plays with her company Make Musicals, runs a boutique publishing company, and is working on a ticketing start-up. State of Wonder’s Aaron Scott caught up with her during a recent trip to the big apple to talk the business they call show, including the hottest ticket on Broadway (#YayHamilton) and her involvement in the touring production of "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical," which plays Portland's Keller Auditorium Nov. 1–6.

A new theater company has cropped up in Portland to tell the stories of people of color, and women. The first production for Beirut Wedding World Theatre Project goes onstage at the end of the month. Founders Bobby Bermea (Badass Theatre, Baseroots Theatre) and Jamie Rea (Sojourn Theatre) say their intention is to shine a light on the stories of women and people of color. For their inaugural production, they chose Zayd Dorhn’s play, “Reborning”.

(photo cred. Russell J. Young)

The dynamic percussionist Colin Currie is back onstage this weekend with the Oregon Symphony. Midway through his artist’s residency, he’s performed with the Symphony as well as in non-traditional spots around the region. Currie visited our studio to talk about the composers and works that shaped him, and what he hopes new commissions can bring to life.

“Bright Half Life,” the sweeping story of lesbian soul mates, spans 45 years in little more than 60 minutes, which is a lot to keep track of if you’re an actor. So the company put up a timeline on the wall of the rehearsal room.

"It’s this brilliant thing we can refer to," says actor Maureen Porter, pointing to pictures on the timeline showing news events that the play references, like the Challenger explosion and the passage of gay marriage. "We come and say, 'what was happening in 2004 and what was the context for Vicky and Erica in their relationship?'"

Written by Portland-grown playwright Tanya Barfield, "Bright Half Life" runs at Profile Theatre Oct. 27–Nov. 13. [Hear Barfield discuss the play in State of Wonder's guest curator episode with her.]

Not only does the play follow these two lovers as they orbit each other for 45 years — through falling in love, two proposals, kids, divorce, joint custody — but it’s constantly shifting in time. In a matter of minutes, the scenes bounce from, say, signing the divorce papers, back to the couple's very first night together, then forward to navigating joint custody, and then back again to the kids' birth.

If that sounds confusing to watch, think about what it’s like for the actors to memorize and keep straight.

"It's a funny thing," says actor Chantal DeGroat, who plays Vicky, a successful, type-A businesswoman from a traditional family. "Some of these scenes repeat in the play, and come in and out, and sometimes it's just a fragment of the scene that will come back again. And so we'll be in one moment, and then realize this scene is done here, and we're flipping into this other thing for three lines, and then we're back out again."

With little more than a bare set, the actors have to signal each jump in time through changes in their tone and movement, with help from a slight change in the lights.

Challenging as it is, though, DeGroat and co-star Maureen Porter see the zigzagging narrative as mirroring the way memory works in real life: one memory leads to another, with no respect for chronology.

"As we’re working, we’re finding all the threads of what connects one memory to the next and why some of them repeat," says DeGroat. "So maybe we're having a conversation, and the words we're using are one thing. But you and I, as the people in the relationship, know we're talking about this incident from before — so decoding what it is we are really talking about, and saying, 'Oh, it’s just like the moment with the Gorgonzola!' It's just like that moment between them again."

"She's mapped it in a way that's remarkable," agrees Porter, "and it feels very much like a kind of duet."

Many of Barfield’s plays sparkle like this. They don’t seem like they should work on paper, but somehow they forge an aching emotional realism by abandoning theater’s conventional rules for realism.

"We all have those moments where history is suddenly present with us in this moment, and the things that we are thinking about for the future are present — and the ways in which those combine to make every moment feel both familiar and new is remarkable," says Porter. "She’s written that. It feels very much like a real relationship."

Here's our extended interview with Emily Glassberg Sands, Ph.D, who teamed up with playwright Julia Jordan for three studies exposing gender bias in how theater decision-makers view incoming scripts.

Playwright Tanya Barfield turns us onto research that puts the problem into painful detail.

One of Portland's top contemporary artists talks to us about new work on view at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland and Marion Goodman Gallery in London, and her move back from New York.

Portland art glass manufacturer Uroboros just announced that the company plans to close the plant that it has operated on North Kerby Ave. in Portland for over 43 years.

Pete Kreb’s career can be read as an index marker for Portland’s musical identity. He came up a scruffy kid when the city was a dark, dank proving ground for punk. He got his musical passport stamped at all the legendary clubs playing in bands like Thrillhammer and Hazel.

Pete Krebs has a big trifecta in October - he just released a career retrospective of songs called, “Hey Pete Krebs”. He’s also getting back together with Hazel bandmates to celebrate the release of a recently-unearthed 1993 live recording. And he’s about to be inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame.

Listen up as one of the city's great songwriters takes a victory lap.

(photo cred. Jeremy Balderson)

Podcaster extraordinaire Kahlief Adams of "Spawn On Me" gives us a preview of his upcoming talk at AffectConf — while playing, of course. He and his co-hosts hosted a Twitch session in January 2014 that raised $5000 in one weekend for Black Lives Matter and other causes.

Maria Bamford delivers the deets on her hit Netflix series, "Lady Dynamite", rebooting after a breakdown, and her magnificent range of voicings. Bamford headlines the All Jane Comedy Festival Oct 5-9.

The All Jane Comedy Festival scored big this year, landing Maria Bamford as headliner for the final night of the festival next month.

Bamford has carved out a space as one of the most innovative voices in comedy. Her stand-up is a master-class in subversion, with a mild-mannered wide-eyed midwestern-ness is a great foil for just about anything she wants to talk about. But Bamford’s kicked it into fifth gear with her marvelously goofy Netflix series, “Lady Dynamite”. In it, she plays a fictionalized version of herself, and tells stories about rebooting her career after a serious mental health crisis.

We talked with Bamford about the series, her stand-up, and the work that keeps her most engaged.

The gut-wrenching conversation over safety and sexual assault continued this week in Portland’s music community. As police investigate claims against a local musician, deep dissatisfaction with the criminal justice response to sexual assault has some looking for workarounds.

The multimedia artist Anthony Hudson is best known around Portland for his drag queen persona, Carla Rossi — a white-faced clown of a queen who bills herself as the "ghost of white privilege."

But now Hudson is going to drop the make up, or, at least the wig, for a full-length performance exploring his own identity as a half-white, half-Native American kid that's called "Looking for Tiger Lily," at the Hollywood Theater Sept. 30 and Oct. 1.

"I'm German on my mom's side and Grand Ronde tribal member on my dad's side," says Hudson, who grew up in Keizer, Oregon. "I wasn't raised with a lot of traditions from my dad's side, and yet I would watch 'Peter Pan,' and 'Peter Pan' kind of became how I related to this idea of natives through pop culture, through Tiger Lily."

The opening of the show is Carla Rossi and a group of back up dancers reenacting the scene of where Tiger Lily and her Pickininny Indians are on the war path in the 1960 film of "Peter Pan" starring Mary Martin, Hudson's favorite version.

"Carla's always going to do the wrong thing: so she's going to open my show doing basically a minstrel number as Tiger Lily," says Hudson. "And then the rest of the show is me explaining where that came from and why, and ultimately, me pushing myself to do my favorite song from the Mary Martin musical, which is 'Ugg A Wugg.'"

Of course, "Peter Pan" isn't the only pop culture phenomenon that influenced Hudson sense of his heritage. Along with the Disney movie "Pocahontas," the image on the Land 'o Lakes butter box, and Indian Halloween costumes, there was also Cher's song "Half-Breed."

"'My father married a pure Cherokee, my mother's people were ashamed of me,'" he recites. "That song really hit me because, for the first time, I felt that somebody else was echoing exactly what I had felt all my life growing up. Except it's by someone who wasn't native...It is another example of a thing that doesn't come from the culture itself, and yet growing up with it in pop culture, I had such a response to it that it became integral to how I saw myself."

In addition to back up dancers, Hudson also brings the "dominatrix of a piano player" Maria Chobin as an accompanist who has re-arranged the songs Hudson sings, a slide show of photos from his youth and family, and polished, self-made videos riffing off things like "Jurassic Park."

"It's a cabaret, it's a play, it's a remixed version of story telling, it's a slide show," says Hudson, with a laugh. "This is basically my chance to invite an entire audience to a free therapy session with me."

One thing we love about the Portland band Loch Lomond is that, ever since Ritchie Young started it 13 years ago, it has operated as a revolving collective of musicians, depending on who’s available to tour and record. That means that every time they release a new album, they have to update the count. With “Pens from Spain,” out this month on Hush Records, it has grown to a whopping 75 musicians.

“It is really a big, rotating family,” says Young — a fact reflected in the refrain of the title track: “Friends are the new family.”

Pens from Spain is the band’s first US album in five years (although they released Dresses in Europe in 2013). More than any past album, Pens from Spain was a group collaboration, particularly between Young, Jesse Donaldson, and Brooke Parrott. The album’s lush orchestrations reintroduce some of the electronic sounds Young and the gang have played with over the years, ranging from the atmospheric morse code of “From Here to Iceland” to the poppy drum machine beats of “Be Mine & Be Kind.”

Watch videos of Loch Lomond's opbmusic performance: http://www.opb.org/opbmusic/series/sessions/loch-lomond-live-at-opb/

Among all the buildings going up in the biggest boom in Portland history, only one of them can be called the first of its kind in the nation.

It’s a simple four-story building called Albina Yard on North Albina Street. On the ground floor is Tanner Goods and a new bar, Wayback. The top three floors are office. But it’s the material stretching in between them that is the big deal. Instead of steel and concrete, the floors, ceilings and columns are made of cross-laminated timber, or CLT for short.

State of Wonder’s architecture columnist-in-residence Randy Gragg stopped by to discusses how CLT stands to revolutionize construction, offering a pre-fabricated material that is faster to build, more resistant to earthquakes, and more sustainable than traditional practices, not to mention stands to jump start rural economies.

“A good analogy for me is thinking of it like a very large IKEA cabinet, where each piece is precision machined and then assembled with steel connectors,” Thomas Robinson, a partner at Lever, the architecture firm that designed Albina Yard, told Gragg.

Last week, Lever received design approval for an 11-story high-rise in the Pearl district called Framework. The firm is in the final stages of proving CLT’s ability to withstand fire and support a building of such size with help from a $1.5 million Department of Agriculture grant and researchers at the University of Oregon, Portland State University, and Oregon State University.

CLT technology is used widely in Europe and Japan, and the state of Oregon is positioning itself to be a leader in the US. In addition to helping Lever clear the technology with regulators, UO and OSU have started the National Center for Advanced Wood Products Manufacturing, Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden plugged $3.5 million for it into the agriculture bill now stuck in Congress, and Governor Kate Brown has helped fund a CLT competition.

Sharita Towne’s photo exhibition on view this month at Newspace Center for Photography is designed to help people to see the gentrification of Portland in a new way. “Our City in Stereo” evolved through a residency at North Portland’s c3:initiative with research and a series of community events.

This weekend Towne and Newspace are inviting everyone to get in on the action, with an event for sharing photos and stories about Portland’s gentrification. The Cascade Stereoscopic Club will present some digital stereo photos they’ve collected as well.

We talked with Sharita Towne, and with Newspace curator Yaelle Amir, who helped steer the project.

E.M. Lewis tells five stories from her life that capture every side of the debate, from growing up with guns to being held at gunpoint.

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/em-lewis-the-gun-show-coho-theater

Last weekend, a Portland musician who plays in several bands made a shocking admission on his Facebook page. Joel Magid described in graphic terms how he’d tried to rape a woman, until, he says, a friend intervened. The response from women — and some men — in Portland music circles was swift and staggering. We spoke with some women who had had strong reactions.

This is one of a collection of interviews this week reacting to the very public revelation of a sexual assault by Portland musician Joel Magid. Listen to this week's show for more.

Sarah Clarke is the lead singer of the band Dirty Revival.

“What I’m struck by is there’s a lot of silence. It’s important for us to say, “Tell me what you think and let’s talk about this’.”

This is one of a collection of interviews this week reacting to the very public revelation of a sexual assault by Portland musician Joel Magid. Listen to this week's show for more.

Liz Elder is half of the creative team for the music podcast Party Boyz. She books talent for the Portland bar, The Liquor Store, founded the Lose Yr Mind Music Festival, and hosts a weekly radio show on XRAY FM.

“I think the first thing is the trauma. It’s something that’s so intimate — you don’t feel like sharing it.”

This is one of a collection of interviews this week reacting to the very public revelation of a sexual assault by Portland musician Joel Magid. Listen to this week's show for more.

Ali Clarys is a singer and synth player, and performs with several bands: Tiburones, the Secret Drum Band, and Death Songs.

“We trust our peers to the utmost extent. That level of trust combined plus vulnerability from drugs and alcohol is a dangerous thing.”

This is one of a collection of interviews this week reacting to the very public revelation of a sexual assault by Portland musician Joel Magid. Listen to this week's show for more.

Jeni Wren Stottrup is a music journalist, producer of the Gritty Birds podcast, and host on the community radio station XRAY-FM. She’s performed her own original material and sung with Shy Girls.

“I was in a band that was all dudes. I was the only girl. They were lovely to me. I know that my experience has been different than other peoples’ experience.”

This weekend, Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square transforms into a weekend-long art party.
Libby Werbel of the Portland Museum of Modern Art (PMOMA) will take over the Square through a cool new residency series called Houseguest.
She’s also programming one night of The Works — that’s the raucous nightly afterparty for PICA’s Time Based Art Festival — with some of her Houseguest performers and a few choice Portland artists.

Werbel grew up in Portland, but left after High School to study and work as an art handler in New York’s Whitney Museum, the New Museum, and the storied exhibition space PS 1.
Returning to Portland, she couldn’t find work. Remember Portland’s art scene was small, and insular.

After a couple of years, she got a microscopic basement space in her friend’s music shop, Mississippi Records. She decided to start a gallery that was an homage of sorts to some of the amazing contemporary institutions she’d explored. The result is a tiny space that wittily challenges ideas about the nature of museums and the art-watching experience.

Take a listen to hear about the visual artists Werbel chose for her big stage, the thrill she got programming Fred and Toody Cole (Dead Moon/Pierced Arrows), and what she envisions next for PMOMA.

For a week, rumors have been circulating that Image Comics, the nation's third largest comic book publisher, is moving to Portland. OPB can now officially confirm the rumor.

Image plans to relocate its staff of more than 20 people to the Montgomery Park Building in northwest Portland by early next year, adding its $50 million in annual sales to Portland’s already booming comics industry.

State of Wonder explores what sets Image apart and makes it a dream team-up with Portland, before sitting down with the company’s publisher to get the first official word on the move.

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/image-comics-to-move-to-portland/

The husband and wife creative team of Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover are getting ready to publish “The House of the Green Mask”, the third volume of their effervescent creation, that Audrey Hepburn of master thieves, “Bandette”. The series won two Eisner awards for best digital comics series in 2013 and this year. Bandette is a pert, teen-aged thief living a barely-closeted life of crime. She steals to delight herself, leaping across the rooftops of the city to tweak the noses and egos of the real bad guys.
Bandette’s setting is identifiably French — a Paris of the imagination— but it’s time period is deliberately fluid. We talk with Tobin and Coover about the pleasures of fleshing out the world around a different kind of action heroine.

Imagine hundreds of horn players — trumpets, trombones, tubas, French horns — surrounding you in a warehouse, their notes surging, diverging, and sloshing from side to side, wall to wall, like whiskey in a barrel on the back of a bucking bull covered in glitter. And you are a small clown fish in that barrel, drunk on music.

Yes, it’s an outrageous metaphor. But it is, after all, the opening night event for this year’s Time-Based Art Festival on Sept. 8, where outrageousness is served in spades.

“Fanfare: Birth>Rebirth” is the mad-composer dream of the multi-instrumentalist Kelly Pratt. You might not know his name, but chances are you’ve heard him play. He was a long-time member of the band Beirut, and he has toured and recorded with bands ranging from Arcade Fire to David Byrne, Coldplay, and LCD Soundsystem. After hearing Pratt’s solo album under the moniker Bright Moments, Byrne even hired him to arrange the horns and direct the touring band for Byrne’s collaboration with St. Vincent, “Love This Giant.”
Pratt moved to Portland in 2012 when his partner got a job teaching at Willamette University.

One of his Byrne collaborators introduced him to the artistic director of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Angela Maddox, who invited him to kick off the TBA Festival.

Symbolically, it’s a big night. PICA has spent the last 21 years as a nomadic organization, often scrambling up to the last minute to find space to house TBA events and the late night gathering site called the Works. But earlier this year a donor bought them a warehouse and office building at 15 NE Hancock St. This will be the first time PICA hosts TBA in its own home.

“I’m really challenging myself to make it as poignant as possible,” said Pratt of the challenge the opening event presents. “I don’t want it to be just a nice piece of music; I want to splatter the walls with sound. Bathe it. Give it a ritual birth.”

Read the full article at: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/pica-tba-festival-kelly-pratt

Can Ages and Ages make songs about earthquakes and the end of civilization fun? Yes, yes they can.

No one can deny that the band Ages and Ages is infectious. All those hand claps and group harmonies have made songs like "No Nostalgia" and "Do the Right Thing" total NPR ear worms. But the band has changed tack on their new album, “Something to Ruin.” The music is just as infectious, but the subject matter has become much more topical, dealing with issues of booming real estate, mass consumerism, and, well, the impending Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. They played an exclusive preview of the music and talked about how the end of civilization could be a good thing.

Stay tuned for videos of their performance on opbmusic on Aug. 31. And catch them live at their Sept. 3 record release show at Mississippi Studios.

In about two weeks, Andy McMillan and Andy Baio will welcome several hundred makers what may be the last XOXO Festival.

The Fest is a mere four years old, but during that short run it became a premier destination for discussing creativity and technology. Over the years, attendees included a huge range of creatives: blog stars from Boing Boing, DJ sensation Dan Deacon, design fiends of all stripes, the makers of Cards Against Humanity, and social thinkers like feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, as well as design fiends, podcasters, comic creators, game developers, and so many more.

But despite strong attendance (they end up turning away hundreds of would-be attendees each year) the Andys are hitting the brakes. There will not be a XOXO festival in 2017.

We talk with Baio and McMillan about what's up at the Outpost, and where the Fest has taken them.

Filmed in Cottage Grove, Buster Keaton’s 1926 silent film, “The General,” is considered one of the greatest movies of all time. Telling the story of a blundering train conductor who inadvertently saves the Confederate Army during the Civil War, it mixed a then-unique blend of Keaton’s trademark slapstick with action and drama, not to mention one of the most ambitious stunts of the silent era.

In a celluloid coincidence of cosmic proportions, the Hollywood Theatre is also celebrating its 90th anniversary this year with a summer of special screenings and events, and what better way to celebrate than to throw a co-birthday party?

The Hollywood commissioned the well-known Oregon composer Mark Orton to create an original score for “The General” and tour it around the state with a live ensemble, starting at the Hollywood on Aug. 12 and stopping in Cottage Grove (Aug. 13), Coos Bay (Aug. 14), Bend (Aug. 16) and Klamath Falls (Aug. 17), before returning to the Hollywood on Aug. 19.

“I think Keaton’s humor is like no other,” says Orton of why he chose to take on the project. “He can do more with the absence of expression in terms of humor than people do with all their antics and gesticulation.”

Orton first came upon Keaton’s films in his 20s while working as an audio engineer for the Bill Frisell Trio, which toured Frisell’s own scores to some of Keaton’s films. Orton has since made a name for himself first as a member of Tin Hat, an eclectic ensemble that makes the kind of music NPR listeners love, and then as a composer for films, documentaries and performances. He has soundtracked everything from Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” to Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts” and episodes for "This American Life."

For our radio feature above, Orton gave us a tour of his studio, which is packed full of antique instruments, including period pieces like a field organ and minstrel banjo, before taking us through how he composed the score.

Over the years, Orton has visited many of the Cottage Grove sites in “The General.” Keaton, who also wrote and directed the movie, chose to film it in Cottage Grove because it had a certain old-timey, Southern feel during the 1920s, plus a stretch of low-traffic train tracks for the train chase scene. He employed some 500 Oregon Guard members as extras to play both Union and Confederate soldiers.

For those who want to retrace Keaton’s steps, the Cottage Grove Historical Society has scheduled a number of August events in and around the town to celebrate.

Not since Big Pink or the Interstate Bank tower has Portland produced a highrise that so many people have opinions about. We’re talking about Yard, the chocolate-brown, 21-story apartment tower recently finished at the east end of the Burnside Bridgehead. We check it out with State of Wonder's Columnist-in-Residence, Randy Gragg, of the University of Oregon's John Yeon Center for Archtecture and the Landscape.

There are a lot of reasons to visit Joseph, Oregon, beginning with the spectacular Wallowa Mountains. But for ceramic artists, there’s one very specific reason: a residency program that some have called the Shangri-la of ceramics.

But the LH Project is not the mental image you might have of an artists’ residency. There are no glasses of merlot, no berets, no still lives of lilacs and persimmons. LH is pure rock ‘n’ roll clay-slinging that attracts artists from around the world, including a group of veterans who return year after year.

It's the art road trip of the summer! Work on view in 13 Oregon cities. Milwaukee-based artist, academic, and curator Michelle Grabner curates this year's Disjecta Portland2016 biennial - we follow her process and she tells us her approach.

State of Wonder's Columnist-in-Residence, Randy Gragg, talks to designers of three new icons in the Portland Skyline: Park Avenue West, The Cosmopolitan, and Indigo @ twelve | west. To see some gorgeous drone's-eye views of all three, find the article at our website: http://www.opb.org/radio/programs/stateofwonder/

A show at Jeffrey Thomas Gallery addresses issues of memory through the work of 16 West Coast artists who emphasize or deny color in their work.

Visual artist Arvie Smith talks to us about his decades of work interpreting and subverting mainstream images of black life. His work is on view at the Portland Art Museum's APEX Gallery July 30th-November 13th.

In a world where we think we’ve seen everything, the videos of the shootings of Alton Sterling and, especially, Philando Castile were shocking because of the intimacy they offered. Anyone who watched Diamond Reynolds calmly addressing the police officer who shot her boyfriend, Castile, as he lay dying beside her, will never forget it.

Across the country, people took to the streets and to the internet. People mourned and raged on social media. And a number of prominent local writers shared an essay by a young writer that caught our eye: “I Don’t Want to Be Beautiful” by Melanie Alldritt. We invited her in to read for us and discuss how writing lets her work through experiences that are too horrible to talk about.

Alldritt is currently working on an essay about the grief of being a black woman that she’ll read at the Grief Rites reading series on August 8 at the American Legion Post 143.

We sat down with Rasheed Jamal and Mic Capes to talk about their writing, and next steps after Minneapolis, Baton Rouge, and Dallas.

Every summer, writers from all over the country head to the base of the towering Wallowa Mountains for Summer Fishtrap, a conference about writing and the West. This year, the festival runs July 10–16 with a slew of workshops, public events, and a keynote talk by the award-winning nature writer Robert Michael Pyle.

In anticipation of the event, we're going to listen back to a live show we did at the festival last year, where we talked with the National Book Award–winner Timothy Egan, several founders of the festival, and two up-and-coming Native writers.

01:00 A round table with festival founders Kim Stafford (writer and Lewis and Clark professor) and Rich Wandschneider (former longtime Fishtrap director and now head of the Josephy library), as well as festival board president Rose Caslar, a Wallowa County native who took her first Fishtrap class at 15. They talk about Josephy's influence, the place of Western writing, the reaction to hanging a four-point buck rack in a Lewis and Clark College dormitory and the area's troubled relationship with its original inhabitants, the Nez Perce.

13:30 - The Josephy Center for Arts and Culture director, Cheryl Coughlan, tells us about how the center helps to culture a creative life in a rural community.

17:56 - Keynote speaker Timothy Egan discusses reporting on stories hidden in plain site. Best known for his National Book Award–winning “The Worst Hard Time,” chronicling Dust Bowl stories, Egan has also written about the photographer Edward Curtis, the wildfire that gave rise to the U.S. Forest Service and western issues of all types for his regular op-eds in the "New York Times." His published the book he told us about, "The Immortal Irishman," in March.

25:10 - We venture to Fishtrap's lodge for a youth workshop on writing hip-hop theater with poet Myrlin Hepworth, who has a new mixtape out called "Eulogy in Blue."

29:10 - Roberta Connor, the director of the Tamastlikt Cultural Institute whose family includes Nez Perce, Umatilla and Cayuse ancestry, was invited to Fishtrap to talk about what happens when Native stories are told by white writers and to share some of the hidden stories that speak most deeply to her.

36:57 - We close with a discussion with two of this year's most rambunctious workshop leaders, writers Erika Wurth and Sherwin Bitsui. Wurth, who is Apache, Chickasaw and Cherokee, most recently published "Crazy Horse's Girlfriend" and is working on a novel about Native gangs. Bitsui is a Diné from the Navajo Reservation in White Cone, Arizona, and his most recent poetry collection, "Floodsong," won the American Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award.

The music in this week's show comes from Tony Furtado's newest album, "The Bell." Furtado has a number of Oregon shows coming up, including on July 28 in Bend at the Volcanic Theatre and on August 3 in Sandy at Meinig Park.

When Bonnie Laing Malcolmson started as a 17-year-old student at the Museum Art School at the Portland Art Museum in 1970, there wasn’t much of a Northwest art collection.

Malcolmson graduated and pursued a career in arts administration. She eventually served as the director of academic affairs at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and then the president of the Oregon College of Arts and Craft, where she spearheaded a nearly $15 million dollar expansion.

By the time Malcolmson returned to the Portland Art Museum in 2010, this time as the Curator of Northwest Art, a major gift from Arlene and Harold Schnitzer had transformed the two floors that used to house the Museum School into the Center for Northwest Art. And fittingly enough, artists Malcolmson had once gone to school with, or later admitted to schools, filled its collection.

This week, Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson retired. But not after rehanging the Center for Northwest ARt one last time. She talked with our producer Aaron Scott about seismic changes over the course of her career.

All those new apartment buildings going up all over Portland? They're not all created equal. What exactly are developers paying for when they engage architects to design a building? Our columnist-in-residence Randy Gragg peels back the layers with a look at the Lower Burnside Lofts, designed by Vallaster Corl Architects PC.

For nearly 40 years, dozens of artists have worked out of the historic Troy Laundry Building in Portland’s Central East Side. It's the oldest cooperative art studio in the city. But now the building has a new owner, and most of those artists are searching for new homes.

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/artsandlife/article/portland-troy-launry-building-studio-co-op-sale/

More on what's happening to hundreds of independent record labels left in the lurch by Allegro Media Group's liquidation.

In 2008, Bend-based Delia Paine found herself swept up in a moment that fused art, message, and community. She told us this story when we visited her to discuss her part in an installation at the High Desert Museum. Take a listen.