Gossip Should Have No Friends

[May 20th, 2009]

• RESTAURANT APOCALYPSE NOW: What an excellent week for Portland’s underemployed—not only did no restaurants close (that we know of), but WW arts and culture freelancer Matt Singer became the job-seekers’ poster boy in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal The Journal’s article (on college graduates flooding Portland despite its economic woes) also included a name-check of WW’s Restaurant Apocalypse Web feature, which is good news for the underemployed because…well, it isn’t really. But it’s great news for us!

• AGAIN, FROM THE TOP: Portland Center Stage announced big changes Thursday to the 2009-2010 season presented in February, mostly for economic reasons. The biggest changes? Aaron Posner’s adaptation of The Chosen will move from the studio theater to the main stage, replacing August Wilson’s spendy Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. A remount of The Receptionist, which PCS assistant artistic director Rose Riordan directed for CoHo Productions in October, will replace The Chosen. The company has also delayed the premiere of a new musical commission, The Best So Far, which requires more resources than the economy can support, in favor of Mike’s Incredible Indian Adventure, an autobiographical comedy by Mike Schlitt. Whew.

• ROCK OUT: Die-hard fans of The Rick Emerson Show, the geek-centric local radio program that emigrated to KUFO Rock 101.1-FM from sister CBS Radio station AM-970 in March, have started a campaign for more talk, less music during the show’s new 5-9 am time slot. Two weeks ago, CBS Radio slashed Emerson and crew’s talk time to a meager 90 minutes over the course of four hours. Fans like “Save the Rick Emerson Show” website creator Seumas Froemke (save-res.blogspot.com) are apoplectic about the change—especially since KUFO programming manager Chris Patyk had promised on air to keep the format the same. Angry listeners have contacted KUFO and CBS Radio—and left 200-plus comments on wweek.comsince we posted a story on the changes last Monday. CBS Radio’s general manager for Portland, Dave McDonald, says he doesn’t think the old RES format works for a “morning-drive show.” “The entertainment biz is built on people who like [the shows] and numbers that can help sustain it,” he says. “...I just can’t resist trying to make [Emerson] work on a platform that is commercially viable.” Emerson himself finally piped up via email yesterday: “I respect CBS and their history,” he wrote Scoop. “I believe that they, in turn, will respect the wishes, desires, and loyalty of the Rick Emerson Show’s audience.”

• CORRECTION: Aaron Mesh’s review of The Limits of Control (see “Ivory Tower of Babble,” WW, May 13, 2009) misspelled the name of the movie’s cinematographer. His name is Christopher Doyle.