Arts & Culture

Pear pancakes with maple syrup are a heavenly way to start your day. With just the right amount of griddled crispness and filled with rich, moist pear, you will fall head over heels for this meal, which is so sinfully good it makes for a swell breakfast and dessert.

Maybe it’s the sky. That constant, overcast gray looming overhead does wonders for daydreaming. Anyone on a bus or train can gaze outside and be a poet, if just for a moment. Ooligan Press is tapping into that phenomenon with its new poetry anthology, Alive at the Center. The collection gathers work from Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, in the debut release from Ooligan’s Pacific Poetry Project.

“It is not always easy for me, exposing some very intimate parts of my life through my work,” said Idan Cohen, one of Israel’s premier dance choreographers. Cohen is the recipient of numerous awards and currently choreographs and teaches at Amherst College for the Five College dance program, which will be coming to Portland for the first time ever.

“Short is sweet,” according to the coordinators of the EarthDance Short-Attention-Span Environmental Film Festival, which is coming to campus this Thursday. The films being screened range from three to 30 minutes in length. The festival is “about a planet where adventure is alive and stories matter,” according to the event’s website.

A beautifully designed room sits in the lobby of Portland State’s AB Gallery. It’s filled with scrumptious goodies that look good enough to eat. You might say it’s a sophisticated twist on Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, only it’s not edible and the materials used are not candy. There are two parts to this gallery, the interior and the exterior.

Let’s get one thing straight: Sweden practically invented metal and corpsepaint (black-and-white metal makeup), and after all the time they’ve put in, they’re entitled to do whatever they want with it.

I like to think I defy most pretentious film-geek cliches, but it would be difficult to pretend that I don’t love French film. Studying the language and developing a real interest in the culture probably resulted in my exposure to a lot of French cinema, but I also feel like you don’t need to speak a word of French to love their movies.

The Northwest Film Center is more than doing its part to expand the community’s knowledge of foreign film, showing Norway’s Thale last week and exhibiting the films of France’s Pierre Etaix this weekend and next.

Kicking off half an hour late, Beisbol was introduced to all sides of the room on Thursday. I sat, caught off guard by how incorrectly I’d been pronouncing the band’s name before finding out that it was just Spanish for “baseball.”

Fruits and vegetables—a staple commodity in American kitchens. Everyone eats them, but does anyone know how they get from field or orchard to our plates at home? Farmworker Awareness Week, organized by the Food Action Collective, Las Mujeres de la Raza and the Sustainability Leadership Center, kicks off next Monday with “Dinner, Documentary, and Dialogue,” which seeks to shed light on the questionable conditions of individuals working on farms across the United States.

The First Thursday art walk always fills downtown with a wealth of artwork and a stream of patrons touring the variety of galleries splayed across the Pearl. But Portland’s art world never sleeps, and each part of the city offers a similar night of art happenings on separate days throughout a given month. This month, the Vanguard made its way out to a collection of First Friday exhibitions in search of work produced by Portland State students and alumni.