Author: Louie Opatz

“I wouldn’t want to live in a world without art and music,” said Portland State professor and filmmaker Dustin Morrow, whose feature-length musical Everything Went Down screens this evening at the Northwest Film Center.

“Thirty-four men, 11 names,” narrator Robert Longstreet intones in his husky baritone, laying out the arresting and poignant details of the heinous crime at the center of the recent documentary Massacred for Gold. “They might have helped build railroads, drain land, farm crops…They lived mostly anonymous and they died anonymous,” Longstreet says, their remains “crushed as fine as the gold they once mined.”

Roe v. Wade is 40 years old and the United States still struggles to talk rationally about women’s reproductive rights. In one of the most prominent (and dubious) recent attempts, former Missouri legislator Todd Akin (in)famously stated that, in cases of “legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down” (the “whole thing” here being pregnancy)—and then stuck around long enough to garner 39 percent of the vote in his 2012 U.S. Senate bid.

I woke up on an apartment floor in Chinatown at 8:30 a.m. and did not feel well. I had intended to take it easy the night before, to down some Sleepy Time tea (with extra honey), read some self-serious essay on an ecological disaster or the education gap and hit the hay. The moment of truth came after the Trail Blazers’ ignominious loss to the Lakers (kuck Fobe), when I knew that I should leave the bar and head home for my date with my magazine and teapot.

After a three-year wave of success that featured number-one albums from Rick Ross (Deeper than Rap and Teflon Don), Wale’s successful reboot, Ambition, the eclectic but entertaining crew-rap compilation, Self Made Vol. 1, and Ross’ monster Rich Forever mixtape, Maybach Music Group has hit a rough patch.

“Reading The Listeners is like being gently electrocuted,” local author Alexis M. Smith said as she introduced the author of the novel, Portland State professor Leni Zumas. Zumas’ novel is “a story of humanely sloppy punk-rock love,” Smith told a crowd of about 50 last week at the Angry Pigeon Gallery in the Pearl District.

Welcome to DJ Data, a collaboration between the Vanguard and KPSU, Portland State’s 24-hour student-run radio station. Each week, DJ Data will shine the spotlight on an individual KPSU DJ and give that DJ an opportunity to give a small taste of what his or her radio show has to offer.

“I’m a young 72,” said Lourdes Markley, a student at Portland State’s Senior Adult Learning Center, by way of introduction. Markley was taking a brief break during a practice for White Bird Dance’s performance of Sylvain Émard’s Le Grand Continental, which Markley and approximately 159 other nonprofessional community members will perform this Sunday at Pioneer Courthouse Square.

“Tension and foreboding. Seediness, despair.” These are the attributes of classic film noir, according to Morgen Ruff of the Northwest Film Center, and they will be projected in all their 35mm-glory this weekend at the center’s celebration of noir, “Dangerous Desires: Noir Classics.”