Top Things to Do This Weekend: July 2–5
Cracked out on cellos with PCP: Thursday at Ecotrust. Photo credit: Tarina Westlund.
MUSIC
Portland Cello Project
Thursday at 5:30 pm, Ecotrust
Ecotrust's Sundown concert series kicks off with a free outdoor show featuring the city's most rockingest string outfit. PCP is known as much for throwing Kayne into the acoustic mix as for partnering with the likes of Howe Gelb (and Garrison Keillor).
Tyler the Creator
Thursday at 8 pm, Roseland Theater
Baby-faced rapper Tyler Gregory Okonma gets a lot of negative attention: for cursing out model Kendall Jenner at Coachella; for his infamous goat commercials on behalf of soda maker Mountain Dew. (Hey, at least he’s got Frank Ocean’s back.) At 24, he’s got time on his side—and now, mature musicians like Roy Ayers and Leon Ware in his court, contributing to new album Cherry Bomb.
Buddy Guy.
Waterfront Blues Festival
Thursday–Sunday from 11 am to 10 pm, Tom McCall Waterfront Park
Launched nearly 30 years ago, the Cascade Blues Association’s multiday charitable croonfest has raised more that $10 million for the Oregon Food Bank. Talk about call and response! Heavy-hitting headliners this year include Buddy Guy, Stone Foxes, Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds, Jelly Bread, Galactic, and Macy Gray—all keeping it real on the sun-splashed banks of the Willamette.
FILM
Let me guide to the purple rain...
Rock Opera: Purple Rain
Thursday at 7:30 pm, Friday at 9:30 pm, Hollywood Theatre
The most amazing Minnesota melodrama of all time kicks of the Hollywood's month-long Rock Opera series. What is the only thing that can upstage Prince's epic glam rock? The Artist himself: bedecked in lace, straddling a CB400A Hondamatic with custom hot pink velour inserts, and lusting after actress Apollonia Kotero in this 1984 cult classic.
Michael Kerrigan and Samantha Van Der Merwe are "Subversive. Carnal. Improvisational." And at CoHo this weekend.
THEATER
The Dissenter's Handbook
Thursday, Friday, and Sunday at 7:30 pm, CoHo Theatre
For weekend four of CoHo's annual Summerfest, Shaking the Tree Theater Director Samantha Van Der Merwe directs Michael Kerrigan in The Dissenter’s Handbook: A Collection of Riotous Tales—a series of "commedia dell'arte style" political jibes from Nobel Prize–winning Italian folklorist Dario Fo, master of “illegitimate” theater.
VISUAL ARTS
OPENING Liz Harris: Idea of a Door
Friday–Sunday from noon to 7 pm, Portland Museum of Modern Art
Harris (well-known as the solo member of ambient dream-pop act Grouper) crafts dense, intricate black-and-white ink compositions, her almost-but-not-quite geometric patterns and shapes offering a quavering, organic take on Sol Lewitt’s sharp forms.
OPENING Korey Gulbrandson: Amor Fati
Thursday–Saturday from 10 am to 5:30 pm, Sunday from noon to 5 pm, Gallery 903
In a style sometimes referred to as “sculptural painting,” Portland-born Gulbrandson creates textured mixed-media compositions that refuse to stick to two dimensions. Flecks of reds and gold add [ornamentation] to his mostly gray canvasses, whose gloomy, bombed-out forms lend a dark twist to the show’s Latin title: “Loving One’s Fate.”
Terrace, Garden City, Cairo. 2010. By Paris Petridis. Courtesy Blue Sky Gallery.
OPENING Paris Petridis and Mila Teshaieva
Thursday–Sunday from noon to 5 pm, Blue Sky Gallery
For “The Void and the Country,” Greek-born Petridis shoots startling urban Egyptian landscapes devoid of people: a Nike swoop between scarred apartments, satellite dishes on trashed rooftops. Teshaieva spent years exploring the Caspian Sea for “Promising Waters” (also an award-winning 2013 monograph).
