Archive for September, 2010

My Secret Service Couch

My friend B. Frayn Masters just sold me a couch that has a secret service serial number tag on the back. She got a beautiful new cream living room set and I took the secret service couch to my classroom for my Reading Lounge.  I like to make reading seem more attractive by providing comfortable furniture and an area rug.  I’m not sure how the couch got to Portland.  I think B. Frayn found it in a vintage store.  I told my kids in the credit recovery class that it was a secret service couch.  I don’t let the other classes use the couch except during SSR so they don’t have that much time with it.  Credit recovery is independent study though.  The kids sometimes sit on the couch to do offline assignments and if they finish early, chat about the heavy metal band they’re in together or skateboarding.  They wanted to pull it out and look at the serial number tag.

A lanky kid with long black bangs helped me move it out and back so they could look.  It’s really heavy.  It definitely could withstand whatever couches go through in a secret service waiting room.  The kid said, I think joking, “What if it’s bugged and they’re listening to our conversations?”

Matt Bors’ Burqua

Last night I was at a party at Shannon Wheeler’s and Matt Bors brought over this burqua from Afghanistan where he was on a cartooning journalism junket.  Matt is a Village Voice contributor and his stuff on Afghanistan is pretty fascinating — check it out on his blog here.  He (and Shannon) can also be seen in the Voodoo Doughnut eating contest in the upcoming Body Show Benefit on Nov. 3rd.   I’m the height of modesty here in my high heels holding one of Shannon and Rani’s baby chicks, looking through the little holes of the mesh guarding my face from the camera. Matt said that in Afghanistan, women don’t go out without burquas because if you went out dressed the way I was, in a little librarian wrap dress with moderate cleavage, or even with a knee-length skirt and neck-covering button-up shirt, you’d likely be attacked.

NEW OREGON INTERVIEW SERIES VISUAL ART NIGHT

MB02 NOISwebbanner HOST NORA ROBERTSON WITH MICHAEL BROPHY, STEPHANIE SNYDER AND SHAWNA GORE NOVEMBER 11TH, 2009

The New Oregon Interview Series brought three prominent Portland art makers together for an evening of intimate conversation. Painter Michael Brophy, Cooley Gallery director Stephanie Snyder and Dark Horse Comics editor Shawna Gore sat down to discuss their work and how our visual art culture is evolving on November 11th at Urban Grind East. Collected by the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum and Microsoft, Brophy’s work was the subject of a Tacoma Art Museum exhibition, “The Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy”, and appeared in their recent 9th Northwest Biennial. A 2007 Getty Foundation Fellow, Snyder is the director/curator of the Cooley Gallery at Reed and has co-hosted the Back Room discussion series. An editor at Dark Horse since 2003, Gore’s work on the CREEPY Archives and the Herbie Archives hardcover series earned her two 2009 Eisner Awards. Host Nora Robertson conceived the New Oregon Interview Series to find out how Portland’s blossoming creative culture has developed and where it’s headed. “A lot has changed in the past decade,” Robertson says. “The best perspective comes from the artists themselves—and the designers, writers, chefs, and venues who make things happen here.” “A lot has changed in the past decade,” Robertson says. “The best perspective comes from the artists themselves—and the designers, writers, chefs, and venues who make things happen here.” The Oregonian’s Barry Johnson remarked “at this point, we don’t know whether we’re headed back where we left off 18 months ago or whether we’re going somewhere completely new. That question is at the center of the New Oregon Interview Series.” The New Oregon Interview Series is presented by New Oregon Arts and Letters, a 501c(3) nonprofit organization formerly known as 2GQ, the publishers of 2 Gyrlz Quarterly.

LISTEN FOR YOURSELF

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Noisf9227 A native Oregonian, Michael Brophy’s paintings are truly indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. His grand-scale oil paintings pay homage to Oregon’s natural landscape, ranging from the coast to the mountains to the desert, exploring nature on its own terms, as well as in the ways it intersects with human experience. Brophy’s work is heroic in scale, poignant in content, and shows great virtuosity of technique. Michael Brophy graduated in 1985 from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he has also taught. He has shown extensively in the Northwest in both solo and group exhibitions. Most recently he was included in the Tacoma Art Museum’s 9th Northwest Biennial. In 2005, he was honored with an exhibition, “The Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy,” by the Tacoma Art Museum and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University. He is a recipient of multiple honors including a NEA Westaf Grant, a Pollock Krasner Grant, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. His work is in collections including Microsoft, the Multnomah County Library Collection, the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, OSU Library in Corvallis, and the City of Portland, OR. Public commissions include Portland’s City Hall and the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in Wasco, OR. Currently he is working on a commission for Mount Rainier High School, through the Washington State Arts Commission.

Courtesy of Laura Russo Gallery

Noisf9265 Stephanie Snyder is the Anne and John Hauberg director and curator of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. Snyder’s curatorial projects at the Cooley Gallery include: China Urban, (2009, with co-curator Lisa Claypool); Liza Ryan, SPILL (2009); David Reed, Lives of Paintings (2008); suddenly: where we live now (2008, traveling); Working History: African American Objects (2008); Marko Lulic / Peter Kreider (2007, with co-curator Kristan Kennedy); Sutapa Biswas: Birdsong (2006); New Trajectories I and II: Recent Work from the Ovitz Family Collection, Los Angeles (2006); Mona Hatoum (2005); and Snapshot Chronicles: the Rise of the American Photo Album (2005, with co-curator Barbara Levine, traveling). Snyder graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College in 1991, and completed her EdM at Columbia University in 1998. Upon graduating from Reed, she was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to live and conduct research in Athens, Greece. She was appointed director of the Cooley Gallery in 2003. Snyder is the recipient of a 2007 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation in order to pursue her research on artist Daniel Spoerri. She is currently finishing her PhD in Art History at the University of the Arts, London. Snyder lives in Portland, Oregon with her son Theo and husband, Jonathan. She relishes the pleasures of writing, and creating space for unstructured time, Jewish ritual, and meditation.

 

READ MORE Suddenly “‘suddenly: where we live now’ at the Pomona College Museum of Art”, Afterall “Just Across That Stand of Trees: Lake Burien, Posters, Hooch, Google Earth, and How to Make Art of Land”, The Stranger

Noisf9251 Shawna Gore joined the staff of Dark Horse Comics in 1997 and has been an editor of comic-books, graphic novels, and art books for the independent publisher since 2003. Originally hired as the company’s first publicist, Shawna briefly left Dark Horse in 2002 to explore PR work in the music industry—before she came to her senses and realized she was burned-out on marketing, not on comic-books. Happily for all involved, Shawna was quickly re-hired as an editor by Dark Horse, where she has played a key role in building the company’s highly-acclaimed horror line of comics and books, as well as taking on many other genres. Today Shawna’s editorial schedule includes a variety of horror titles, Emily the Strange projects, an upcoming series with filmmaker Zak Penn, Too Much Coffee Man, and art books from pinup master Jim Silke. This summer Shawna’s work on the CREEPY Archives and the Herbie Archives hardcover series earned her two Eisner Awards—the comics industry’s equivalent of the Oscar. In addition to her work in comics, Shawna is an occasional writer, a longtime drummer, an avid cyclist, a compulsive crafter, a creator of bizarre baking art, and a friend to animals. She lives in Northeast Portland with her husband, Ian, two cats, and two rabbits.

Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics

KZME 107.1 FM Pre-Launch Party at Pe:ar: Boy Eats Drum Machine + Celilo + Hugs


KZME goes on the air at 107.1 FM this fall covering local music arts, arts and culture, and they’re having a party.  Hip-pop one-man performance Boy Eats Drum Machine, five piece indie/Americana band Celilo, and anglophile indie-poppers Hugs break it down for you, and there’s a raffle with tons of goodies from Akemi Salon, Trade-Up Music, Local Goods General Store, and much more. Beer and Cupcake Jones available.  Hosted by Tara Dublin at Pe:ar, Sat, Oct 2nd, NW 6th and Flanders, 8PM, $10 suggested donation, all ages.  Pre-show tickets at http://www.kzme.fm/happenings/ .
—Originally posted at New Oregon Arts & Letters.

The Body Show: The Humble Egg


A cooking show about boiling an egg leads to a surreal trajectory through Julia Childs territory.

A kitschy 60′s cooking show for housewives becomes the catalyst which hurls the host into a private world of tangential madness and repressed memories of her grandmother. The simple act of boiling an egg forces her to publicly contemplate a succession of images from the vaginal opening of a hen, to slaves working in salt mines, to the virgin-devouring snake god of Ghana. The seemingly non-sequitur imagery comes together as she remembers the horror and heartbreak of her grandmother being forced to assemble hundreds of deviled eggs for a Hollywood dinner party. Against this surreal backdrop, we are reminded that all food is ultimately an act of violence. Based on Robertson’s 2007 Pushcart Prize-nominated poem, “How to Boil an Egg.”

The Body Show trailer from Jason Bahling on Vimeo.

VIEW PRESSKIT HERE.

SCREENINGS
The Body Show Benefit, Someday Lounge, Portland, OR, Nov. 6th, 2010
Short Film Night, Someday Lounge, Portland, OR, December 15th, 2010
Arts in Bushwick Site Fest, Brooklyn, New York, March 5-6th, 2011

 

 

Q&A with Nora Robertson

Q: I’m a chicken farmer and see hens lay eggs all the time. What do the eggs symbolize?
A: I’ve known a lot of people who were wierded out by eggs. Maybe they had an unfortunate experience at a natural history museum, or working at a diner. It seems like it’s because they’re unable to ignore that an egg is a baby. I think it’s almost impossible to talk about how we go about getting and eating food without talking about violence. I’m really fascinated by the idea of the housewife who can keep her family safe through hygiene and home cooking, because I think it’s a lie.

Q: Where is this desert?
A: The desert was filmed on location in the Oregon dunes, which look amazingly like the Sahara if you just cut the Douglas fir trees out of the frame.

Q: What inspired all this?
A: A major inspiration for this piece was my grandmother, who was the wife of the president of Capitol Records during a time when they were producing the Beatles. She had George Harrison over for dinner once. She regularly had to host large dinner parties, and she had a lot of techniques for entertaining. She was a big fan of making things ahead and freezing them so that a big spread would still be homemade. The pressure to get things right must have been overwhelming.

 

 

ABOUT THE FILM
The poem that the Body Show: The Humble Egg is based on, “How to Boil an Egg,” is taken from a larger poetry collection, Body-making Cookery, that explores the many associations food has for us: personal history, politics, mythology, body image, desire. Gender, that reification. Food is almost never just food. It’s almost never just a way to keep our physical bodies going. Food, especially particular dishes, always has many connotations, and it’s my belief that when we take food into our bodies, we take all of those associations into the bodies of our selves. This is why people get offended when you don’t like the food where they come from, who they come from. By adapting this poem into a film, we explored certain iconic images of food and eating, our shared cultural notions of what is a wholesome way to feed ourselves.

 

 

I WOULD LIKE TO OWN THIS FILM
We are very happy about that. Please feel free to view our etsy listing, or you can buy directly from us.

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LIVE FROM THE PREMIERE
Our benefit cabaret and premiere screening was held at Someday Lounge in Portland, Oregon on November 3rd.  Performers included Arthur Bradford, B. Frayn Masters, Nathaniel Boggess, Margaret Malone, Gigi Little, and singer/songwriter Danielle Fish. A Voodoo doughnut-eating contest was judged by Shannon Wheeler, Tres Shannon, and Tiffany Lee Brown. Contestants included Brad Fortier, Matt Bors, Danielle Fish and Karl Kling. Sponsors included Voodoo Doughnuts, Bad Monkey Productions, Blackbird Wines, New Oregon Arts & Letters, She Bop, The Meadows and Pistils Nursery.  

LIVE at the Body Show Benefit: Nathaniel Boggess from Nora Robertson on Vimeo.

LIVE at the Body Show Benefit: B. Frayn Masters from Nora Robertson on Vimeo.

LIVE at the Body Show Benefit: Danielle Fish from Nora Robertson on Vimeo.

LIVE at the Body Show Benefit: Gigi Little from Nora Robertson on Vimeo.

LIVE at the Body Show Benefit: The Voodoo Doughnut Contest from Nora Robertson on Vimeo.

CREATIVE TEAM

Since moving to New York in 2010, Jason Bahling has premiered his latest experimental short video The Body Show with Nora Robertson, created a video installation for the 21st Biannual Electroacoustic Festival, worked as a gaffer and camera operator for two new screendances: one with Douglas Rosenberg and prolific choreographer Sally Gross; the other, an adaptation of Li Chiao-Ping’s “Pagoda,” set amongst the Wisconsin seasons. Jason recently performed in the piece “Spoken For” at the Raandesk Gallery and is currently exploring dimensions of color correction for film and video as a professional pursuit.
Nora Robertson writes fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays, which have appeared in such publications as Plazm, Redactions, Alimentum, Monkeybicycle, Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology, 2GQ, and Portland Monthly. Her recipe poem, “How to Boil an Egg,” was nominated by Redactions for the 2007 Pushcart Prize. Her performance work has been showcased in Portland in the Enteractive Language Festival, the Public Works series curated by 2 Gyrlz Performative Arts, Phase One: Words + Music, and Performance Works Northwest’s Alembic Series in Housebound; most recently, she produced and hosted the New Oregon Interview Series, which explores Portland’s evolving creative culture through interviewing the artists and culture makers themselves both live and for print. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Mark Russell is a writer and cartoonist living in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in publications such as Bear Deluxe and the McSweeney’s website. He is the author of The Superman Stories, God Is Disappointed in You and also runs a small press called The Penny Dreadful.