Author: Rebecca Cotton

The Portland State AB Lobby Gallery will present Venice in Portland, a documentary on the 2011 Venice Biennale by Horia Boboia, PSU assistant professor of art. The film will be shown in conjunction with the art exhibit Made in Italy currently on display in the MK Gallery.

In the film, which has no voiceover, Boboia guides viewers around one of Italy’s oldest artistic gatherings, the Venice Biennale. With Venice in Portland, Boboia seeks to provoke interpretive questions about the nature of art to his viewers. These questions include: What is art? When is art? How is art? Is this art?

Three Portland State choirs will sing songs of snow in the Winter’s Voice concert, to be held Friday, Dec. 2, at the First Congregational Church

The PSU Chamber Choir, Man Choir and Women’s Choir (a.k.a. Vox Femina) will perform pieces from Bach, Debussy and other composers, all themed to greet the changing season.

What happens when water, a vital element of life on earth, is privatized and therefore turned into a source of competition and monetary gain?

This question is answered in Irene Salina’s award-winning documentary, Flow: For the Love of Water (2008), which will be screened by the Women’s Resource Center Monday, Nov. 28, to celebrate Social Sustainability Month.

A gripping and unsettling account of the growing urgency of water politics, the film interviews activists and scientists in several fields to send a message of warning and of hope.

Filmmaker Yvonne Rainer will deliver a presentation at the MFA Visual Studies Graduate Visiting Artist Lecture Series Thursday, ornately titled: “Where Is The Passion? Where Is The Politics? Or, How I Became Interested In Impersonating, Approximating, and End Running Around My Selves and Others and Where Do I Look When You’re Looking at Me?”

“The title is a piece of art in itself, it seems like,” said Sean Carney, assistant to the dean of the Portland Northwest College of Art’s MFA Visual Studies program.

Wind turbines are being whipped up with big politics and even bigger problems in small towns across the country. What is generally pitched as an efficient, cost-effective and renewable power source is causing some communities ecological, health and industrial breakdowns to which energy corporations turn a blind eye.

How can turbines be fueled by greed and not green thinking?

I seriously love ice cream. Crunchy candied pralines in vanilla, fudge brownie chunks in chocolate, gooey caramel swirls…it’s just great. There should always be a couple foods in your life to make your day better by just thinking about chowing down on them, and ice cream is mine.

While living downtown a few years ago, I stumbled into Cool Moon Ice Cream on the corner of Northwest 11th Avenue and Johnson Street. Located across from Jamison Square Fountain, Cool Moon’s strange flavors and local roots make it a great place to visit.

A recent surge in media attention centers on the scientific construction of infidelity and monogamy.

Why do we do it? What is the function of love in an evolutionary context? What are alternatives to long-term, single-partner relationships, and are they the solution to infidelity?

One book that addresses these questions is the New York Times bestseller Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha.

When we think of science fairs, we often picture a bunch of retainer-mouthed middle schoolers, each with a giant poster board explaining why oil and water don’t mix or how to fashion a mini-volcano from baking soda and vinegar.

We tend not to picture balls of lightning in a bucket, a teenager who spent two years making a nuclear fusion reactor in his garage or millions of dollars in scholarship money.