Gossip Should Have No Friends

[May 27th, 2009]

BRAA-AAA-AAINS: This week’s proof that zombies are the new pirates: Student Opera at Portland State University will premiere a new work by students Benjamin Emory Larson and Reed Reimer at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center titled Maelstrom: the Zombie Opera on July 10. The plot, according to organizers, involves four people trapped in a quarantined hospital overrun by brain-eating monsters. Who sing.
• BODY ART: Speaking of high-low culture mashups, if you’ve got ink, the Portland Art Museum wants to see it. Beginning June 20, PAM’s new show,Marking Portland: the Art of Tattoo, will showcase your mom hearts, ’90s tribal bands and tramp stamps as a way to present tattoos as a historical art form and a way to create a sense of culture and community. Museum curators are asking locals as well as out-of-towners with ink from Rose City shops to upload shots of their ink to the project’s Flickr account (flickr.com/groups/markingportland). A select few will be shown as a multimedia presentation in the Whitsell Auditorium. Marking Portland will be making its mark on the museum through September.

• ART BOMB: Portland’s Zoobombers, who’ve been careening down the Oregon Zoo hill on kids’ bikes since 2002, have long butted heads with the city over the placement of the “Holy Pyle,” the group’s tall jumble of free-use kiddie cycles—usually found downtown across the street from Powell’s Books. But now, the group’s joined forces with the Regional Arts Culture Council and local artists Vanessa Renwick and Brian Borrello to create an piece of public art that serves as a permanent home for their free wheels. On Friday, May 29, they’re throwin’ an unveiling bash to celebrate the Holy Pyle and Bicycle Library’s new home at Southwest 13th Avenue and West Burnside Street. The party, which will parade from the original pile site at Southwest 10th Avenue and Oak Street to the new location and boasts moves from the Sprockettes and words from Mayor Sam Adams, starts at 4 pm.

• Dept. OF SHAMELESS MAGICAL SELF-PROMOTION: WW webmaster Seth Raphael leads a double life as MagicSeth, a tech-savvy magician who travels around the globe performing cutting-edge tricks. His next audience? The über-prestigious TED (technology, entertainment, design) conference. Raphael was just chosen as one of 25 fellows for TEDGlobal 2009, held this July in Oxford, U.K. He’ll do a three-minute talk to the TED crowd about using magic and technology to spur innovation. The conference is slated to include speakers like Shock Doctrine scribe Naomi Klein and black hole specialist Andrea Ghez, as well as other arts and science luminaries. Raphael says he’s already trying to figure out his speech. “I’ve got to balance magic and message,” he says. Raphael’s company, XPollinate, holds creativity training workshops with companies like Disney that teach people to innovate though play.