Time Based Puppets

The Time Based Art Festival gets under way on September 9th in Portland, with dozens of one-off and one-of-a-kind music and art performances from the likes of Rufus Wainwright, The Wooster Group and Charles Atlas. The full schedule is here, and Redefine Magazine is sifting through some of the more compelling acts here.

The opening night show features the experimental shadow puppet collective Night Shade collaborating with art-rocking skatepunkers Japanther. The haunted world of underground rock-n-roll puppet shows gets hauled out of dingy New York basements and onto the stage at the Old Washington High School Auditorium at 531 SE 14th Ave. The show starts at 10:30 pm and admission is free.

You can buy tickets for other festival events here.

Crumb's Genesis in Portland

All 207 individual pages from Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis are on display this summer at the Portland Art Museum. The book was the comics event of 2009, and seeing the artwork in person is awe inspiring. The obsessively perfect brush strokes fill the page with black ink, yet all of his forms are rendered so clearly and naturally. It’s also great to see the human touches on the page, little dabs of white out, a bit of the pencils underneath, the precision and passion that Crumb brings to his work.

In a 2005 public interview with Robert Hughes at the New York Public Library, partially transcribed at Time‘s website, Crumb discussed the challenges of drawing the character of God:

He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I’ve got God.

Admission to the Portland Art Museum is free on fourth Fridays from 6-8pm. Check their schedule for a full list of events, including an appearance by film maker Terry Zwigoff and guest speakers from the comics community through August. The show is up now and runs through September 19.

Filmed By Bike

The Eighth Annual Filmed by Bike film festival takes place at Portland's Clinton Street Theater April 16-18. The festival features nothing but short films, eight minutes or less, all of which prominently feature bikes. The films have almost nothing else in common, hailing from all over the world, and ranging from love stories to travelogues to serious documentaries to animated fantasies to music videos. The juried selection of 40 films are compiled into two separate programs which rotate through the weekend.

The festival opens on Friday the 16th with a famously well attended street party sponsored by New Belgium Brewery and featuring bands, sets from DJ Anjali and Incredible Kid and lots and lots of bikers in their Spring finery. Go here for full festival schedule and ticket information.

Hard Rain Falling

The 1966 novel Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter is an extremely well regarded "forgotten work" of American realist fiction, highly praised by lovers of classic crime novels and scholars of Northwest literature. The book was recently reprinted by the ever reliable New York Review Books, and I've been looking for an open window of time in which to start reading it. I'm even more eager to crack it open after reading George Pelacanos' appreciative essay in a recent edition of The Rumpus.

[Hard Rain Falling] is the kind of infrequent reading experience that can only be described as a revelation. Inexplicably long out of print, its republication by New York Review Books is cause for celebration...

Having escaped from his orphanage, [protagonist Jack Levitt] now runs with a group of hard teenagers who hang on the corner of Broadway and Yamhill in Portland, Oregon...Carpenter’s descriptions of pool halls and the intricacies of various billiard games are top shelf, as are his tours of the rooming houses, diners, and boxing arenas of the Pacific Northwest. After an incident involving a break-in, Jack is sent to reform school in Woodburn...Jack’s next stop is a stint in the state mental institution in Salem. He is released, boxes semi-professionally, does jail time in Peckham County, Idaho for “rolling a drunk,” and gets work in eastern Oregon, “bucking logs for a wildcat outfit.”

“I’m an atheist,” said Carpenter, in a 1975 interview. “I don’t see any moral superstructure to the universe at all. I consider my work optimistic in that the people, during the period I’m writing about them, are experiencing intense emotion. It is my belief that this is all there is to it. There is nothing beyond this.”

The complete essay is here. More about Don Carpenter here.

Addict's Almanac

Tye Doudy writes a weekly column for Portland's Street Roots newspaper about life on the streets as a heroin addict. The incredibly powerful and gripping column, called Addict's Almanac, began as a six-week series in August 2008. The columns were picked up by other street papers in the U.S. and in Europe, generating huge responses, positive and negative. On July 24 of this year, Doudy picked the column back up and now writes weekly about living on the streets, the people he meets, the violence he encounters (and is often part of) and wrestling with his addiction.

In the first column in the new series, Doudy describes meeting "Ashes" and going back to his squat to score.

Ashes ...is about as trustworthy as a rented snake, and he is the closest thing I have to a friend at this moment.

My first question is, of course, is he holding and second, can I get him to kick down a little something. Even a rinse would set me straight and buy me some time to make a plan. No junky wants to give up any dope ever, but I have some leverage as he has no hustle and he knows I will make some money today...

In order for me to get the fix, we first have to go back to the squat he shares with some other scumbags under the Jackson Street overpass...The squats that line the freeway overpasses are like catch basins for the refuse of the city. The mentally ill, sexual deviants, illegal immigrants, wanted fugitives, hardcore drunks, prostitutes, crusty train-hopping kids, tweakers, junkies, the unlucky, and the unloved. We all have called these places home. For a night, for a week, even years for some. It's easy to fly below the radar here. No rent, no responsibility, and nothing to worry about besides where the cops are and where your next fix or your next bottle is coming from.

My next fix is coming from Ashes and he is unrolling his works from a piece of leather he had up his sleeve.

Doudy's column offers a rare insight into a world that is very seldom seen first hand. His voice is both in your face and humble, poetic yet poisonous. It's not easy reading, but anyone interested in what's happening just out of view on American streets should check it out. You can keep up with the series at the Street Roots blog.

Anne Grgich

It was a sad day for Seattle when Outsider Art superstar Anne Grgich packed her bags last May and moved south to Portland. Grgich had been based in Seattle for many years, creating paintings, prints and her magnificent illuminated books for shows and galleries around the world. In 2008 and 2009 alone she had one-woman exhibitions in Nashville, Vancouver, Vienna, Port Au Prince and London, and she curated the traveling show Internal Guidance Systems, soon to open in New Orleans, which represents the very vanguard of contemporary visionary art. Sadly, recent sales of her work couldn't quite maintain a home and studio in Seattle, so she headed for our more hospitable sister city over the border.

Anne is prominently featured in the second edition Outsider Art Sourcebook, published in June by Raw Vision Press, and her first-ever Australian solo show runs from October through January at the Sydney College of the Arts.

Zoobomb Goes Semi-Legit

I've raved on about Zoobomb before - the unique Portland tradition in which people take kids' bikes on a public elevator up to the tallest hill in the city and then ride downhill as fast as possible past the zoo and into downtown Portland. It's a great way to spend a Sunday night and an awesome spectacle to behold, fully legal yet inevitably angering cops and drivers. One of the issues that has grown into a sore spot is that the zoobombers leave all the kids bikes - sometimes as many as 40 of them - locked up to a single bike rack across the street from Powell's books downtown. The city has been threatening for years to cut all the locks and throw away all the bikes, and a local reactionary politician maintained a failed push for a misguided law mandating no more than 6 bikes to a rack.

Over the last three years or so the Zoobombers have worked with Mayor Sam Adams, the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) and the Bureau of Transportation to secure $10,000 worth of public money for an officially recognized and sanctioned public art work that also serves as a brand new bike rack. Portland artists Vanessa Renwick and Brian Borrello led the design process, and they're keeping the new shape under wraps until the grand opening this Friday, May 29. The parade to the opening meets at 4:00 at the Old Pyle, and processes to the New Pyle two blocks away at 13th and Burnside. The opening ceremony will feature a dedication by Mayor Adams, performances by bike dance teams The Sprockettes and Chain Reaction, and a whole mess of swag. As always, animal costumes are encouraged and donations of working mini-bikes are gratefully accepted!

Thanks to Bike Portland for the pic!

Mini Bike Winter

Down in Portland, this Thursday marks the start of the sixth annual Mini-Bike Winter, a five-day festival of bike games and competitions, bike crafts, dancing, drinking, and the Mini-Bike Winter Fashion Show. Bike punks and cycling enthusiasts from up and down the West Coast show up to show off in blind chariot races, illuminated naked midnight rides, tricycle/beer relay races and, as the centerpiece of the small-bike themed party, bombing downhill at 40mph in the dark on tiny kids' bikes with no brakes.

Festivities include performances by bike acrobats The Sprockettes and Seattle's Bicycle Belles, music by Full Face Riot and Riot Cop, and the "super secret warehouse party" which you can only get to by participating in the Saturday night mass bike ride. Lots and lots of bike related mayhem, free for all, from Feb. 13th-15th. For the full weekend schedule see Zoobomb.