The Seed Remembers: works by Ellen Picken
In the hidden object there is potential energy; the seed yet to grow, the secret, the intuition before knowledge. Is the treasure buried in order to preserve its power or to protect the seeker from its force?
Each of these paintings represents a state between vulnerability and protection, revelation and obscurity. The symbols originate in dreams I've been given from childhood on.
Just as the dreams come from my surroundings, so do the materials I use. I collect bricks, shells, ochre, charcoal, pinesap and beeswax from my home in Spokane, Washington. The materials reinforce the symbolic meaning of the paintings. Iron rich basalt mixed with oil is like our own blood. Eggshell and river clams are protective shields. Ponderosa having given its life in fire becomes charcoal, necessary for the future growth of the next forest.
Detour Film Series: Dry Leaf (2025)
Join us for the Portland premier of Alexandre Koberidze’s DRY LEAF (2025)
DryLeaf: AlexandreKoberidze's low-res road movie is a quietly political ode to the ordinary. The Georgian director invites us to try a new way of seeing in a subdued low-tech portrait of a post-Soviet nation between two worlds, shot on a 2008 Sony Ericsson phone. (BFI)
BFI review:
May Wall Press presents three works by three local writers
Kaya Noteboom is a writer often found entering or exiting rooms. She is co-host of Access Code, a monthly critical theory and cultural criticism reading group, and recently launched the Perfect Medium reading series with Fonograf Editions.
Judy Thorn is a writer with good manners. She is editor of May Wall Press and curator of Bloomers Poetry Club, a monthly poetry cabaret for emerging writers and artists in Portland. She was going to be on Think Out Loud, but it was cancelled last minute.
Violet Pitsker is a writer whose favorite flower is not a violet, but a daphne. She is a McCormack Writing Center scholar and is working on her first novel.
**NOON EVENT!**: Ricardo Domeneck, Chris Daniels, and David Abel
Come on over at noon on a Sunday for readings by poets Chris Daniels & David Abel, with Ricardo Domeneck live from Berlin via video-alchemy.
Brazilian poet and writer RICARDO DOMENECK has published ten collections of poems and two of short prose in Brazil and Portugal. Selected volumes of his poems have appeared in German, Dutch and Spanish, and his most recent poetry collection, Cabeça de galinha no chão de cimento (Chicken Head on a Concrete Floor) won two of Brazil’s most prestigious literary awards, the Prêmio Jabuti and the Prêmio Alphonsus de Guimaraens. Domeneck has lived and worked in Berlin for the past two decades. Working with sound and performance, he has presented work in several museums and galleries such as Museu de Arte Moderna (Rio de Janeiro), Museo Experimental El Eco (Mexico City), Emalin The Clerk (London) and Studio Hanniball (Berlin). First Epistle to the Amphibians is the first book of his poetry to appear in English translation.
CHRIS DANIELS is a feral translator of global Lusophone poetry. He has published seven books of translations: On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids by Josely Vianna Baptista, with artwork by Francisco Faria (Manifest Press); Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro and Collected Later Poems of Álvaro de Campos by Fernando Pessoa (Shearsman); The Hammer by Adelaide Ivánova (Commune Editions); un cuerpo negro / a black body by Lubi Prates (Nueva York Poetry Press), co-translated with Grace Holleran; One Impossible Step: Selected Poems of Orides Fontela (Nightboat); and Sometimes I Wonder If Fred Was Happy Here by Adelaide Ivánova (Tripwire).
(World Poetry) https://worldpoetrybooks.com/books/first-epistle-to-the-amphibians
DAVID ABEL is a writer, editor, and interdisciplinary artist, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. A founding member of the Spare Room Reading Series. His latest book, Strange Attractors, is published by airfoil Press.
Tom's Book Club: Gerald Murnane’s “Inland”
Join us for a discussion of Geral Murnane’s “Inland.”
From the & Other Stories website:
Inland is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves across the grasslands of its narrator’s imagination – from Szolnok County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of the journal Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator’s own native district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri, where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. ‘No thing in the world is one thing,’ he declares; ‘some places are many more than one place.’ These overlapping worlds are bound by recurring motifs – fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours white, red and green – and by deep feelings of intimacy and betrayal, which are brought to full expression as the book moves to its close.
Fair Game Reading Series
Rachel Attias is a writer, educator, and editor from the Hudson River Valley of New York, though she now calls Portland home. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Porter House Review, Portland Review, Columbia Journal, and more, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University. Her writing and her heart are concerned with relationships both present and ancestral, our changing natural world, memory, time, and everyday absurdity. Learn more: www.rachelattias.com.
Colleen Burner is a writer, editor, and artist whose short fiction has appeared most recently in Annulet and Buckman Journal. They are a co-editor of surely magazine, and their debut novella, Sister Golden Calf, was published by Split/Lip Press in 2023.
Melia Jacquot is born and raised Floridian but is now a Portland based writer whose work has appeared in The Fine Print, Prairie, and elsewhere.
Ed Komenda is a writer based in Tacoma, Washington. His stories have appeared in 3:AM, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Farewell Transmission, and BULL. His debut chapbook, SIX STORIES, is out now with Sand & Gravel Press. Find him: @edboywrites / edboywrites@proton.me
Commuter, Feed Fatigue, Carousel, 96 Year Old Foot
An evening of sound with:
Feed Fatigue: https://feedfatigue.bandcamp.com/album/like-weeds-toward-god
Commuter: https://phagetapes.bandcamp.com/album/tokyo-pure-decadence
Carousel: https://budtapes.bandcamp.com/album/summer-wine
96 Year Old Foot: https://abhorrentafterdeath.bandcamp.com/album/mycetoma
Music Sets You Free: A discussion of Ryuichi Sakamoto's life and work with Sam Bett and Alexa Frank
Synth pioneer, film composer, and environmental activist Ryuichi Sakamoto takes us through the hills and valleys of a five-decade musical career in his new autobiography Music Sets You Free, published in English by HarperVia. Join the translator, Sam Bett, and his editor, Alexa Frank, for a discussion of Sakamoto's life, work, and philosophy, along with a lively conversation of the translation strategies Sam and Alexa used to arrive at an English voice for Sakamoto's life story.
Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator of fiction by Osamu Dazai, Izumi Suzuki, Akira Otani, Yukio Mishima, and Mieko Kawakami, including books shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Awards. A recipient of the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award from the Japanese government, Sam is a winner of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize and the CWA Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation.
Alexa Frank is an Editor at HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the Fulbright Program, she has edited titles such as Tomihiko Morimi’s The Tatami Galaxy (shortlisted for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize) and Lin Yi-Han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise (shortlisted for the Baifang Schell Books Prize). Her forthcoming titles include books by Francoise Sagan, Hitomi Kanehara, and Sabina Urraca. She has guest lectured at Bard College, Hunter College, and Waseda University. Alexa also translates Japanese manga, such as Fumiko Takano's Miss Ruki (nominated for the 2026 Harvey Awards), Kyoko Okazaki’s River’s Edge (nominated for the 2024 Eisner Awards) and Nazuna Saito’s Offshore Lightning (winner of the 2024 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Collection). In 2024, she received the Sophie Castille Award for comics in translation. Her translation of Nekojiru’s Nekojiru Udon is forthcoming from the New York Review of Comics.
Book Release: Penitents by Madeline Blondeau
Madeline Blondeau’s PENITENTS, a debut trans tribute to New French Extreme cinema and ’70s grindhouse horror set on the rain-slicked coast of the Pacific Northwest, in which a writer runs afoul of a local violent family while attempting to take some space from her partners, set against a backdrop of desperate hook-ups and polyamorous infidelity, this roaring revenge romp spans the course of one blood-soaked weekend around Astoria, Oregon.
Reading: Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Gabriel Palacios
Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Bad Woods (Sidebrow 2026); Meadow Slasher (Black Ocean 2017); and Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (Winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, 2006). His work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, the Believer, Boston Review, Fence, and in Postmodern American Poetry (W.W. Norton). He is also the author of two novels: Trouble Finds You (Fonograf 2023) and Inner Sunset due out in 2027 from Buckman Publishing. He lives in Portland, where he works as a psychotherapist.
Gabriel Palacios works with word and sound in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign (Fonograf Editions, 2024) and Lunar Hilton Elegy (Kuhl House Poets / University of Iowa Press, 2026). Guided by a devotion to late-analog and early-digital sonics, his work as Spanish Trail Motel adapts work from these collections into tape- and synth-textured soundpoems and poemsongs.
KineKlub with Jacquesrates
Come celebrate the wild world of mind-fuddling, outré-beat-cult cinema with your host Jacques Boyreau.
This month we will debut Portland filmmaker Ryan Webb’s “A Man With A Mullet Seeks Revenge On The Devil That Murdered His Mother.”
A discussion of "Nazis at the Water Cooler" with Jacob Boas & Terrence Petty
Join us for a discussion & readings from Nazis at the Water Cooler.
Germany has long been praised for the way it has confronted the Nazi past. But the accolades are only partly deserved, as meticulously documented by Portland author Terrence Petty in his book Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies.
Petty exposes a truth that German and American officials kept buried well into the 21st century: after West Germany’s creation in 1949, thousands of ex‑Nazis were hired into government jobs — including men involved in mass murder, in drafting antisemitic laws, in persecuting Hitler’s opponents, and in other depravities.
Petty documents how former Nazis who had established an early foothold in postwar government agencies helped each other get government work by writing letters of recommendation called Persilscheine. These “Persil Certificates,” named after a popular detergent, made an ex-Nazi’s recorded past just as clean as fresh laundry, Petty writes. Ex-Nazis were given preference for government jobs even over victims of Nazi policies and anti-Hitler resisters. They swapped Nazi uniforms for suits, Hitler salutes for handshakes.
Very few of these civil servants were ever investigated for potential war crimes, Petty shows. They worked until retirement, collecting generous government pensions, and many received plaques thanking them for their public service.
Based on six years of research, including Petty’s examination of declassified CIA and German government files, Nazis at the Watercooler reveals the depth and breadth of this long‑hidden injustice — and the reckoning Germany delayed for decades.
Terrence C. Petty is a writer and retired journalist. He worked for the Associated Press for thirty-five years. Based in Bonn, Germany, from 1987 to 1997, he covered German and European affairs, the pro-democracy movement that toppled the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, neo-Nazi violence, and 1995 ceremonies at Dachau, Buchenwald, and other former concentration camps marking the 50th anniversary of their liberation. From 1999 to 2017 he managed the AP’s news operation in Oregon. He is also the author of Enemy of the People: The Munich Post and the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler. Petty, his wife Christina, their son Tristan, and two cats — Atticus and Helen — make their home in Northeast Portland, where they've lived for 26 years. A ninth-generation Vermonter, Petty has a bachelor of arts degree in history from the University of Vermont. He worked as a photographer, reporter and editor for newspapers in Vermont and upstate New York before joining The AP.
Jacob Boas was born in Transit Camp Westerbork (1943), the concentration camp in northeastern Holland from which the bulk of Dutch Jewry was sent to the killing centers in the East. Liberated in 1945, Boas grew up in Amsterdam and Montreal before moving on to California, where he earned a Ph.D. in history. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Patricia. His books include Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork (1985); We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust (1995); Mr. Holocaust (I Presume) (2005); Writers' Block: The Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935 (2016); Until Further Notice ... Theresienstadt on My Mind (2024), and Burden of Proof: Fragments of a Surviving Remnant (2026).www.jacobboas.com
Heiken Gallery Art Opening: The Seed Remembers: works by Ellen Picken
In the hidden object there is potential energy; the seed yet to grow, the secret, the intuition before knowledge. Is the treasure buried in order to preserve its power or to protect the seeker from its force?
Each of these paintings represents a state between vulnerability and protection, revelation and obscurity. The symbols originate in dreams I've been given from childhood on.
Just as the dreams come from my surroundings, so do the materials I use. I collect bricks, shells, ochre, charcoal, pinesap and beeswax from my home in Spokane, Washington. The materials reinforce the symbolic meaning of the paintings. Iron rich basalt mixed with oil is like our own blood. Eggshell and river clams are protective shields. Ponderosa having given its life in fire becomes charcoal, necessary for the future growth of the next forest.
Ryan Seward, Caspar Sonnet, Anthony Stillabower;{______________}; Emmet Martin & Patrick Barber
Join us for an evening of sounds with three of Portland’s best practicing iconoclasts in the musical idiom.
Valerie Hsiung, Jennifer (JP) Perrine, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Jeffrey Pethybridge, Consuelo Wise, and Carolina Ebeid
Valerie Hsiung is a poet who writes between worlds, where language meets ritual and abolition meets afterlife. Drawing on diasporic, ecological, and metaphysical inquiry, her books dissolve the borders of poetry, prose, performance and philosophy into a single listening body. She is the author of eight full-length books, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books), The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), To love an artist (Essay Press), and outside voices, please (CSU). Recipient of the Nightboat Prize, the Essay Book Prize, selected by Renee Gladman, and the CSU Poetry Prize, fellowships and residencies from the Camargo Foundation and Lighthouse Works as well as grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and PEN America, she teaches writing at the limits of language at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Her ceremonial work and pedagogy has been studied by researchers on the subject of emancipatory practices including Sophie Orlando. Born to Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the foothills of Colorado.
Jennifer (JP) Perrine is the author of five award-winning books of poetry: Beautiful Outlaw, Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Their other recent work appears in the anthologies Best Small Fictions, Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times, and A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid Lit Collection. JP lives in Portland, where they cohost the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, guide nature and forest therapy retreats, and manage an equity and environmental justice program for the state of Oregon. www.jenniferperrine.org
Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up three miles from the CIA and currently lives in Portland, OR. She is the author of Aerial Concave Without Cloud, That Gorgeous Feeling, Underground National, Solar Maximum, and No Comet, That Serpent In the Sky Means Noise. A former Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she also makes video and installation art. Find her silentbroadcast.com.
Consuelo Wise (she/they) is a Guatemalan American poet and visiting scholar at Portland State University. Her first book, b o y, was published in 2024.
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet. She is the author of Hide (Graywolf Press, 2026), You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press, 2016) and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts (Albion Books, 2023). Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, CantoMundo, the NEA, and a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Her work has been installed and screened at universities and galleries such as Stelo Arts in Portland, and Squeaky Wheel Film and Video Art Center. A longtime editor, she currently edits the multimedia site Visible Binary. Her current work explores the personal story of her family’s exilic and immigrant experience, the idea of home as an elsewhere, and the telepathic power of objects within the diasporas of Palestine and Cuba.
Jeffrey Pethybridge is a poet, editor, and curator; he is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise (Noemi Press), which was selected as one of ten best debuts of 2013 by Poets & Writers Magazine. His second collection Force Drift, an essay in the epic has recently been released by Tupelo Press. His writing and visual poetry appear internationally in journals such as diSonare (MX); White Wall Review (CA); Writing Utopia (UK); Volt; Best American Experimental Writing, and others. He teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he is Co-Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program.
Lucas Gunn, Alien Power Tools, Transparent Aluminum
Join us for a night of sound with
Transparent Aluminum https://transparentaluminum.bandcamp.com
Lucas Gunn https://lucasgunn.bandcamp.com/track/shadowy-movements-from-a-frozen-human-being-blues
& Bellingham, Washington’s Alien Power Tools
Fair Game Reading Series: Jonathan Aprea, Myles Early, Jaye Nasir, & Julia Wohlsetter
Jonathan Aprea is a writer living in New York City and a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program. His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Joyland, and elsewhere. He publishes Poet Tree Magazine.
Myles Early is a writer from Los Angeles. Their work can be found in HAD, VOLTA, Split Lip & elsewhere.
Jaye Nasir is a Portland based writer whose work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Strange Horizons, Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry and elsewhere, and has been supported by the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Hedgebrook, the Atticus Hotel and the Tin House Workshop. She won the 2024 Sundress Publications Broadside Contest and she was a 2025-2026 McCormack Writing Center Fellow.
Julia Wohlstetter is a poet and educator whose work has appeared in Brazenhead Review, Metatron-Omega, Bodega Magazine, and Reality Beach. She received an MFA from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship, a MacIntyre Fellowship, and a Stanley Fellowship for International Research. She is the co-creator of Poetry Practice Space at The Independent Publishing Resource Center and the author of the chapbook Please & Please / Forever Machine (2017). She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Nadia's Proust Group
Join us for a discussion of In Search of Lost Time, Vol. Four, Part 2
Film Screening: Wildwood, N.J.(1994)
Join us for a screening of the documentary Wildwood, N.J., 1994. (1 hr.). A look into the lives of the women and girls who inhabit the seaside town of Wildwood, New Jersey.
Poetry Reading: David Weiss & Maryrose Larkin
Although Maryrose Larkin lives in Tucson, AZ, her heart lives in Portland, OR. She is the author of several books and chapbooks, including The Identification of Ghosts (Chax Press), The Name of this Intersection is Frost (Shearsman), A Monster’s Topic Sentence (Magificent Field) and the newly published Bluebird Grift (Sonorous Anchorite). Maryrose was a founding member of Spare Room, and currently serves as a director of Tucson’s POG reading series.
David Weiss is a poet, publisher, & arts organizer living in Tucson Arizona.
David founded Sonorous Anchorite (2021), a not-for-profit literary arts press dedicated to publishing “innovative writing that tends toward the poem”. As part of Sonorous Anchorite hebegan A Moveable Beast, a poetical cabaret cultivating curious intersections between the varied practices of poets, musicians, artists, etc. He also volunteers as a book designer for ChaxPress.
David served as the Assistant Director at Chax Press & as a board member of POG, a community poetry & arts organizationfrom 2019-2022. His recent poems have appeared in the journals BlazeVOX, Alienocene, e·ratio, & Word for/Word. His book-length poem In Memoriam: in enquiry was published by ChaxPress in early 2022.
Half Shadow EP release show
Join us for an evening of music to celebrate the new EP release by Half Shadow https://antiquatedfuture.bandcamp.com/album/wind-inside
with Floating Clouds https://budtapes.bandcamp.com/album/with-a-shared-memory
& Violet Creatura https://violetcreatura.bandcamp.com/album/resonances-loops-volume-i
Animals In War film screening benefit for Ukraine
A boy flees an occupied village with a cow as his only companion. A rabbit and its young owner wake to a morning that changes their world completely. A sound engineer recording birdsong in a quiet reserve hears the war arrive instead.
ANIMALS IN WAR carries russia's* invasion of Ukraine through the creatures it left behind and through the people who stayed human enough to save them. Seven of Ukraine's leading directors each contributed a novella. Together the stories become a meditation on survival, compassion, and the choices war forces on ordinary people.
Academy Award winner Sean Penn, a steadfast friend to Ukraine, opens the film, and Imagine Dragons contributed the soundtrack. After its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, ANIMALS IN WAR screened across four continents and opened in theaters throughout Ukraine.
Join us for an evening that brings Ukraine's story directly to our community, with a discussion to follow the screening.
Ukrainian and English with English subtitles
*lowercase is intentional
Tickets:
WUNK presents MYSTERY DATE- a reading/variety show
Join us for an evening of readings & more from WUNK magazine
Chapbook release reading with Dan Raphael and guests Mike G & Claudia Saleeby Savage
How'd This tree get In is dan rpahael's 27th poetry collection, He is one of the host of Talking Earth on KBOO. Word Virus will be the 139th place in Portland where dan had performed his poetry.
Mike G--Poet of Stell--is one of the hosts of the Tony's open mike at the Wildwood Tavern on W. Burnside
Claudia Saleeby Savage is an Arab American performer, poet, essayist, and mama with MS whose work explores displacement and the landscape of the body.
Tom’s Book Club
Footloose and broke, the unnamed narrator of Gone Tomorrow hops on a plane without asking questions when his director friend offers him a role in an art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogotá, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grosvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than in shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the beautiful, nymph-like Michael Simard doesn’t seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film’s shady financier is sleeping with his mother, while a serial killer skulks about the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration begins in nearby Cali. But once the fiesta is over, all that’s left are ghostly memories and the narrator’s insistence on telling the tale. “Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels,” writes Dennis Cooper, “Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It’s a philosophical work devised by a writer who’s both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life.”
NOISE SHOW: Sean Keenan (SF), Organic Produce, Drunk Transaction, Body Shame
Sean Keenan is an experimental composer who will be performing on amplified gong and electronics. Local artists include Organic Produce (Emmet Martin (Water Shrews/Bud Tapes)), the debut performance of Portland's best-kept-secret project, Drunk Transaction (Shane Mcdonell (Carousel) / Joel Shanahan (Golden Donna)), and, last but not least, sleek, sophisticated noise artist Body Shame who's varsity expressions never fail.
Nadia's Proust Group
Join us for a discussion of In Search of Lost Time, vol. iv, pt. i.
Book Release Reading: The Phantasmogenetic Centre by B. Kearney
Join us for a celebration of the release of The Phantasmogenetic Centre (Hobo Borealis), a ghost-ridden pornographic antibildungsroman that was carefully assembled no more than two lines at a time from hundreds of public domain books digitized by Project Gutenberg.
An outlying milestone in weird fiction, socio-sexual satire and artisanal plagiarism, The Phantasmogenetic Centre is a timely, cruel repurposing of the untimely words of dead and largely forgotten authors.
KLUBKine with Jacquesrates
KLUBKine roks the avant merde. Before making Hippy Porn, Jacquesrates filmed two black&white experiments (for director B. Dammkoehler) called SANS SERIF & LA DIVINA. Both works (the latter produced by Todd Haynes) screen in simulvision on 16mm.
Tom’s Book Club
Join us to discuss Macunaima: The Hero with No Character by Mario de Andrade.
Translated from Portuguese by Katrina Dodson
With a contribution by Katrina Dodson and John Keene
Here at last is an exciting new edition of the Brazilian modernist epic Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character, by Mário de Andrade. This landmark 1928 novel follows the adventures of the shapeshifting Macunaíma and his brothers as they leave their Amazon home for a whirlwind tour of Brazil, cramming four centuries and a continental expanse into a single mythic plane. Having lost a magic amulet, the hero and his brothers journey to São Paulo to retrieve the talisman that has fallen into the hands of an Italo-Peruvian captain of industry (who is also a cannibal giant). Written over six delirious days—the fruit of years of study—Macunaíma magically synthesizes dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna, and pop culture to examine Brazilian identity. This brilliant translation by Katrina Dodson has been many years in the making and includes an extensive section of notes, providing essential context for this magnificent work.
Screening: BOOKWARS (2000)
The New York bookseller documentary BookWars is an independent film by Jason Rosette (produced by Camerado Media) about the life and times of New York City street booksellers.
Made on an ultra-low budget in a jazzy, impressionistic style reminiscent of the films of Robert Frank and poetry of the Beat Generation, BookWarsis notable as the only first-person documentary made during then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's controversial "Quality of Life" campaign, which sought to limit and control individuals engaged in informal economic activities on the streets of New York City.
BookWars was released in June 2000, winning the Best Documentary Award at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival and premiering theatrically at New York's Cinema Village. An advance screening review by New York Film Critics Circle critic Matt Seitz called the film 'Superb' and 'Mesmerizing' , with numerous other positive reviews following.
Despite its very modest budget, BookWars enjoyed numerous domestic and international TV sales, and is now part of the Circulating Film and Video collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Dao Strom, Camp Cataract, Joshua James Amberson with Otembaar
Join local PDX writer-musicians for a night of performance pushing slightly outside the bounds of their usual genres. Fiction writer Sara Jaffe, author of the recent Hurricane Envy story collection, will play a solo guitar set. Poet/hybrid artist Dao Strom will revisit songs from her 2022 ambient-folk album, Redux, reissued on vinyl this year, alongside material from her recent Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs project. Joshua James Amberson, author of the essay collection Staring Contest and bassist of Golden Tiles, will be accompanied by Otembaar. An eclectic mix of genres and atmospheres is sure to ensue, united by a commitment to creative impulses that traverse boundaries.
Detour Film Series
Detour Film Series presents: There’s Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956).
Book Release: Extremophiles by Rats Alice Trujillo
Book release reading for Extremophiles by Rats Alice Trujillo. A porn/horror novel about grief in the shadow of collapse. Transgender sex and ultra violence at the end of human existence. Featured reading by K.Y. Steinberg.