The 500s

Being a school night, the Portland Popfest last Thursday was a pretty wholesome affair, fueled by sugary juice boxes rather than the usual beer and hard liquor. Each act represented their own part of the pop spectrum: from hyper punk funjams to shimmery la-la-love and strummed quirky introspection, it was all there and worth staying up late for.

Ghosty

Bears

PWRFL Power

Check out more photos from the Portland Popfest here.

After missing a few great shows at SPACE over the last couple of weeks, I made sure not to miss the Russian-themed extravaganza this Saturday.

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Want to see something cool? Check this out:

This is a photo of godspeed you! black emperor when they played at SPACE way back in 2003! Man, that was a great show and we’ve since been graced with a bunch of return visits from gy!be members in various side projects (Silver Mt. Zion, 1-Speed Bike, Esmerine, Black Ox Orkestar, Triple Burner . . .).

But what’s even cooler about that photo is that it was uploaded into SPACE Gallery’s Flickr Pool by our pal Jon Donnell. We scientifically estimate that there must be trillions of photos taken of SPACE events that must be growing mold on hard drives and in cloistered Flickr accounts all around the country so we want to encourage you to add them to our pool. It’s really nostalgic and super useful for us to have them in the archives.

While you’re at it, have a gander at some of the videos in our YouTube account. Got some of your own? We’d love to see them, drop us a line with links, please. For example, check out this little documentary from the Barnstormers show a couple of years ago, shot by our friend Nikolai Fox:

This is Riley. He goes by the name of GC Typhois, a one-man band based in Portland, Maine. He is attempting to break the WORLD RECORD for “Longest Continuous Solo Guitar Performance”. The current record is held by James Brister of Louisiana, set on January 29th, 2006 at 50 HOURS. GC Typhois is attempting to push himself to 60 HOURS beginning Thursday, August 7th and ending Sunday, August 10th. He is attempting to perform a continuous mega-piece that will encapsulate the duration of the performance - a 60 hour generative improvisational experiment. Come check him out in the front window at SPACE. 

Portland admirers of Harmony Korine have two reasons to take note. Thursday, August 7th, marks the single Portland screening of Mister Lonely, the latest by the enfant terrible auteur of such cult films as Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy as well as the writer for Larry Clark’s Kids.

Mister Lonely follows a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator who’s taken in by a commune of fellow impersonators living in the Scottish Highlands, including Marilyn Monroe, her husband Charlie Chaplin and daughter Shirley Temple. In a parallel storyline, the German director Werner Herzog plays a priest who learns his mission of nuns posseses the ability to fly. The soundtrack features new music by Sun City Girls and J Spaceman (Spacemen 3, Spiritualized)

On September 11th, Harmony rears his head again in the documentary Beautiful Losers, a film adaptation of the celebrated book about the movement of mid-1990’s street artists, including Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee, Ed Templeton and Mike Mills.

Beautiful Losers trailer:

We told you that the Bon Iver show last week was sold out, and we were just as excited about it as all of you were. [Read more →]

Over A Cardboard Sea played a free concert in Post Office Park last Friday, July 25th, presented by SPACE Gallery.

This free outdoor music series continues this Friday, August 1st, in Congress Square with Brenda.

Let’s just say, it’s been a busy week at and around SPACE!

Crank Sturgeon began the night on Thursday, July 24th by leading the crowd outside and blowing up a gigantic plastic rendition of the Statue Of Liberty. This was, of course, because he intended to honor (and “give something back to”) Vialka, the French band playing on the bill. Friends and a backing band assisted in the gesture, which was interrupted by a (quite late) motorcycle gang of fashion photographers. There was a scuffle, a wardrobe malfunction, and lots of antics with tighty whiteys. Yup, you read that right.

Once he took the show inside, Crank Sturgeon’s musical performance was a frantic but focused assault of skronk and jazz and all-around explosive fun, though a bit “stripped-down.”

Always the gentleman, our good friend Crank introduced his pals Vialka, whose blistering drum/guitar/howl made for a compelling followup, certainly worthy of all the buildup. It was the last show in about 6 months of touring, and the band seemed happy to be heading home after so long on the road.

Following Vialka’s set was Bad Bus, which is an impossible to describe loose collective of varying and rotating membership and participation. I would have taken photos, but I was preoccupied with screaming my head off (in a highly inspired and musical fashion, of course) into a microphone that I’d taped to a kazoo. Anyone out there take some?

Check out a few more photos here.

Ever wonder what the naked baby from the iconic cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind has been up to lately? Read more about 17-year old Spencer Elden and what it’s like to have several million people own uncensored photos of your baby junk.

If you missed our screening earlier this year of A.J. Schnack’s excellent documentary about Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, About A Son, now’s a good time to visit your local independent video store (like Videoport!) and give it a watch. It’s a great film.

What initially appears to be a story of warm-hearted Western do-gooder-ism, quickly evolves into a complex, subtly-layered story in Nina Davenport’s latest film, Operation Filmmaker, playing Thursday, July 31st at SPACE. At first glance the film seems fairly one-dimensional and too simple and neatly packaged a story: Western actor (Liev Schrieber), sees struggling film student (Muthana Mohmed) in post-invasion Iraq reality TV spot, sweeps in and recruits him to intern on his latest film (Everything Is Illuminated). Hires documentary filmmaker (Davenport) to document said good deed. The End.

But looking closer, Operation Filmmaker, is a much more complex story about how idealized intentions are easily derailed when the situation is not as pat as it seems. When you start peeling the onion of Operation Filmmaker, good intentions quickly devolve into ham-fisted blunders and the situation emerges into what situations of this nature often are . . . not easily-repaired issues of black and white but something in that more complex grey zone.

Muthana is indeed charming, frank and the casualty of an unjust war. He’s also conniving, manipulative and an opportunist. As viewers, do we still maintain the ability to process a protagonist that is flawed and caught between a rock and a hard place? (There’s a bad, double-decker pun there you’ll get when you see the film).

In many ways, for Davenport, it’s a documentary filmmaker’s nightmare. What do you do when your subject turns on you and withholds his story, the plot of your film, hostage for money? You can imagine traumatized phone calls to mentors for advice on what to do. Somewhere along the way though, the payoff of Operation Filmmaker for Davenport comes in this layered tale, ripe for discussion and interpretation.

Hear a review on NPR’s Fresh Air here.

Operation Filmmaker trailer: