The Dill Pickle Club is organizing a honking huge art show, bookshop and event series at the Eyeful Gallery that opens Thursday, December 3rd at the First Thursday artwalk. Go here for all the details.
I’m making four short videos to promote the event, one to be released each week of the month long show. Here’s the first installment.
WORK | PROGRESS also celebrates two publications I produced for the Dill Pickle Club — Brains, Brilliancy, Bohemia: Art and Politics in Jazz-Age Chicago and Art for the Millions: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA. Head to the store for more info and to pick up a copy.
Political dissident artist collectiveJust Seeds treats Portland to not 1 but 2 shows in November: both opening this Thursday (Nov 5)! SEA Change hosts Opposable Thumb, a show about the effects of the human hand, while Reading Frenzy presents Charting our Course, a show about education, literacy and books. Just Seeds runs this fantastic website, as well as producing individual and collective work about political issues and social movements. They also recently printed this Celebrate People’s History poster I helped design on The Dil Pickle Club.
Then, on Friday (Nov 6), Artichoke Music (3130 SE Hawthorne) hosts The Salmon Nation Artist Project, a tribute to our bio-region for the love of fish. The event features readings by several songsters and long-time fisher poets, including: Pat Dixon, Dave Densmore and the always formidable Moe Bowstern. Having been to The Fisher Poets Gathering for the last several years, I can safely say this is a fascinating and unique look into an amazing folk art/ working class subculture working at the grassroots level. You’d be sorry to miss it.
Last week I noticed something different in my new neighborhood. A block from my office, a speaker could be heard in the background. I went to go check it out, and saw people milling about the Central City Concern building, a relief agency that provides temporary housing.
Installed at the intersection of the Broadway and NW Everett, at the old Golden West Hotel, is a new display honoring the contributions of what was once the heart of Portland’s first African American community. From roughly 1890-1920, the area around the Golden West consisted of many African American businesses, including restaurants, barbershops, hotels and more. As someone deeply interested in social history, this came as news to me.
The display, which is artfully done, consists of six panels and a visitor activated loud speaker playing recollections of long-time African American residents. Organized by the Old Town History Project (I can’t seem to find any information about this group — does anyone know anything about them?), the project was funded by the City of Portland Vision Into Action program and Oregon Council for Humanities.
I remember reading Joel Schalit’s columns in Punk Planet as a teenager. A longtime writer for zines and independent magazines (he was editor of the great zine Bad Subjects), Schalit has moved on to author and edit books, including Jerusalem Calling and The Anti-Capitalism Reader.
On Monday, November 9th Schalit will be at Powell’s Book @ Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton to read from Israel vs. Utopia, a new collection of essays about America’s controversial political involvement in the Middle East.
From Akashic, the book publisher:
In his new book, Israel Vs. Utopia, Israeli American journalist Joel Schalit distinguishes between the Israel he knows, and the image of it that exists in the imagination of Americans. Israel is a state of mind, Schalit argues, as much as it is its own sovereign state. Exploring this tension, in America, in Israel, employing a combination of personal observation, political, and cultural commentary, Schalit defines the instability of Israel, as a metaphor, and America’s troubled love for it, as only an Israeli American would know.
a short list of some happenings around town in the coming weeks:
1. Noam Freakin’ Chomsky is speaking at the First Unitarian Church in Portland, Friday, October 2, as part of EcoNverge, a conference exploring solutions to the global financial and environmental crises. The weekend conference features an impressive lineup of lectures and workshops, and has nearly 50 participating organizations. From their site:
The Northwest region of the United States has pioneered effective responses to environmental and economic problems in the past. A decade ago the “Battle for Seattle” during the World Trade Organization Ministerial meetings sparked a critical reevaluation of neoliberal globalization. Now that this model has been discredited, it is time for us to collectively determine what comes next.
2. Matthew Stadler is directing an interesting new project, Publication Studio, at the Ace Hotel. In addition to printing and binding small run books on demand, the Publication Studio will apparently host social gatherings and conversations with its published authors. The hours appear to be somewhat irregular, so your best bet is to check their site.
3. Local documentarian Ivy Lin has recently completed a new film, Come Together Home, a documentary on a Chinese burial ground in Portland in which as many as 1,500 bodies were exhumed and shipped to China amongst anti-foreign sentiment in the 1920s. In the film Lin documents her journey back to China to investigate the whereabouts of the remains. Come Together Home premiers at the Someday Lounge, October 11th, and is a fundraiser for Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery (an initiative to save the burial ground-turned vacant lot).
4. The Oregon Cultural Heritage Commissionand the Littman Gallery at Portland State University have teamed up to present “Dorothea Lange in Oregon: 1939 Farm Security Administration Photos,” an exhibition of WPA photos Lange took during her time in Oregon. I had the privilege to see an advance copy of the exhibition catalog, and it looks phenomenal. The show opens Thursday, October 1 and runs through November 25. A schedule of related talks is posted on OCHC’s website: http://www.ochcom.org/.
2. I, Marc Moscato, am speaking at the Multnomah County Library as part of “Zinesters Talking,” Tuesday, October 6th, from 6:30–7:45 p.m. I’ll be giving a slide lecture on organizing the Dill Pickle Club’s Art for the Millions bike field trip. More info on the lecture series here.
3. My film The More Things Stay the Same is screening as part of “Visible Histories” at Other Cinema in San Francisco, Saturday, October 17th. My piece will show alongside work by long-time friends Vanessa Renwick, Erick Lyle and Dara Greenwald. Should be a great show.
4. This site has been quiet as of late but big plans are in the works; keep tuned.
Ariana Jacob has initiated a new poster campaign and seeks your participation. The project poses open ended questions displayed as posters in public windows. The first installment asks: How much is the fate of this place all ours? Respond by calling her special response “hotline” @ (503) 575-9031.
Jacob, currently a student in PSU’s social practice program, has been making curious and thought-provoking images for several years. Her previous silkscreen works (often found wheatpasted on public buildings) are some of the more moving images I have seen since I have lived in Portland. She has also recently designed a poster for the Dill Pickle Club’s upcoming field trip HOW ARE THINGS MADE.
This Saturday, August 22, Loren Sonnenberg will be at the Waypost in Portland to screen URFest, a 97-minute program of activist-inspired documentaries from Buffalo, NY. The films highlight Buffalo’s urban issues such as sustainable housing, community building projects, cooperative ownership models and community food sharing.
URFest, while however loose in its curatorial vision, looks to be a timely and relevant show. The program presents a nice complement to Tough Stuff, with more of a documentary/ activist take on contemporary media practice in Buffalo. For more info, check out the site blog here.
Bill Brown is one of my all-time fave filmmakers. I first met him when I set up a screening of his work @ the WOW Hall in Eugene, with Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and S.M. Gray. I can’t remember much about the show except the sound guy took all the money and I could only pay Bill like $50, even though the show was packed.
I later became Bill’s “personal press agent” in my work at Peripheral Produce, which released his excellent “The Next Best Place” DVD collection, as well as at Microcosm Publishing, where I promoted his “Dreamwhip” fanzine-turned-book.
In any event, the dude makes good films. 16mm beautifully composed filmic essays. Poetic, funny, smart, a little political. Sort of a wanderlust, dreamy quality to them.
This Saturday, August 15, Bill and his sweetheart Sabine Gruffat will be @ Disjecta (8371 N. Interstate) to present Time Machine, a multimedia performance of “video, spoken word, scratchy records and 35mm slides.” According to their website, Brown’s performance involves reading about roadside attractions paired with a slideshow, while Gruffat live mixes video and audio feedback. Weird, possibly interesting, and, if Brown’s previous projects are any indication, something definitely important and worthy of checking out.
Political dissident artist collective
