Arts & Culture

Jeremy Spoon, a third-year assistant professor in Portland State’s department of anthropology, will deliver a lecture this Thursday at the Women’s Resource Center as part of the center’s second annual Social Sustainability Month.

Spoon will educate his audience on issues he encountered during his eight years of research in Nepalese Himalaya and his three and a half years in the Spring Mountains National Recreation Area and Desert National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada’s Great Basin.

“I will be introducing some aspects of the ecological knowledge and understanding of people in the Himalayas and the Great Basin,” Spoon said. The lecture will also address environmental, social and economic sustainability issues.

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.

As the temperature drops and the holidays draw near, it’s time to find ways to toast your insides and spread thanksgiving warmth and cheer.

This hot and fruity holiday cider recipe is a sweetly spiced way to make your guests feel at home. Don’t bother with cider mixes from the store, which are often cloying and sugary and lacking flavor. Cooking up this cider on your stovetop will fill your house with a rich and delicious welcoming aroma.

Peter Tomsen, the former special envoy on Afghanistan for President George H. W. Bush, will speak tonight in the Smith Memorial Student Union to promote his new book, The Wars of Afghanistan.

Tomsen’s book is an exhaustive, 700-plus page examination of Afghanistan’s modern role as what Tomsen calls a “shatter zone,” a term he uses to describe a country that has successfully withstood invasions by, most recently, the Soviet Union and the United States.

Tomsen argues that the American government’s inability to understand modern Afghanistan has led to the ineffective, often ill-advised military and intelligence operations that have undermined the U.S.’s status in the region.

PSU’s Chamber Choir, Portland’s Vox Femina and the Man Choir will combine voices Friday night at St. Mary’s Cathedral for the spirituality-based concert Shattered Faith.

The program explores the topic of faith with music ranging from Bach to Bollywood. Challenging emotionally for the audience and technically demanding for the singers, the varied pieces aim for more than light entertainment.

As Chamber Choir conductor Dr. Ethan Sperry explained, sometimes art requires more than casual attention from the audience. The rewards can make for deeper appreciation.

For 40 years, Portland’s own Northwest Film Center has been producing, promoting and showing films of all genres. On Friday, Nov. 11, they will be celebrating the past four decades with a birthday celebration and screening party, and preparing for their 40th anniversary season.

Northwest Film Center was founded in 1971 and incorporated into the Portland Art Museum in 1978. The center offers nearly 20 classes covering the fundamentals of film production and studies and hosts a number of film festivals annually. With an attendance of about 80,000 at various media arts offerings per year, the Film Center reaches one of the most diverse audiences in the community.

The new season kicks off with the opening of the 38th Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival and the Film Center’s 40th birthday party. The event commences the 2011–12 season of screenings and School of Film programs.

The year 1979 was important in the history of the civil rights and gay rights movements in the United States.

It was the year that the White Night riots took place in the streets of San Francisco after a jury found Dan White, who assassinated LGBT icon Harvey Milk, guilty of manslaughter. It was also the year of the Greensboro massacre, in which a group of five people were killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan during an anti-Klan rally, and each defendant was acquitted by an all-white jury.

Toward the end of 1979, graphic artist Rupert Kinnard had just arrived in the Rose City from the Midwest.

In spacious room 255 of Neuberger Hall, adjunct sculpture professor Robert Rhee’s 3D art class works tenaciously on their latest project.

Some help their colleagues glue wood together. Others discuss designs. The sound of hammering resonates throughout the room. To a passerby, this room would look like any other art class.

But the students in this particular classroom have embarked on a journey to redefine the way sculpture is seen in Portland.

There’s nothing quite like being kicked out of the comfortable, predictable reality we inhabit by a film that takes us to a very different world, especially if that world is bizarre and sexually perverse.

Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts (1986) is everything—and anything—you’d want it to be. Like a talented prostitute, it titillates and entertains in all the right ways. And it will be up on the big screen for all to enjoy this weekend at Portland State’s 5th Avenue Cinema.

When twin animal behaviorist brothers employed at the zoo lose their wives in a freak car accident caused by roaming swans, their reaction causes them to spiral into an obsession with death, decay and sex. They begin sleeping with the zoo prostitute, Venus de Milo, as well as a woman named Alba, who drove the car in their wives’ fatal crash.