A decades-old art heist. America's grandma. An unlikely friendship to rival Thelma and Louise's. Here’s what we’re reading and streaming at Portland Monthly this week. 

The Dee Wallace Oeuvre

Miss Benson's Beetle

Is anyone else having trouble focusing on a book these days? Objectively I know from past experience that I am a happier, gentler version of myself when I have a book to look forward to at the end of the day. In practice, and especially during this pandemic year, I’ve been too scattershot, too addicted to doomscrolling, to commit to a book. Every so often, though, there’s a happy accident, and so it was with Rachel Joyce’s Miss Benson’s Beetle, plucked off the shelf at Powell’s for me by my 12-year-old daughter who said, “Here, Mom. This looks like something you’d like.” She knows me too well. Set in post-World War II-era Britain (check), this is the story of the unlikely friendship between two women (check) who set off on an adventure to the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, about a thousand miles off the coast of Australia (check please!).

 

The Miss Benson of the title is a dispirited domestic science teacher with a lifelong pash to become an entomologist; after one humiliation too many at the hands of her pupils, she impulsively sets off on a quest to capture a rare golden beetle, rumored to be found only in the northern forests of New Caledonia. She places an ad for an assistant, and winds up with the unlikeliest of accomplices, a dishy blonde named Enid Pretty who is far more capable than she appears, and perhaps also not quite on the right side of the law.

 

The book follows their journey, from their passage by sea to Brisbane, trailed by a mysterious stalker, to the painstaking attempt to blaze a trail to the top of a tooth-shaped mountain, leaving no stone unturned in pursuit of the elusive beetle. It all reminded me of the book I recommend to anyone who asks me for a literary-yet-diverting read: Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple. Like that best-seller, there is self-discovery here, but it’s never maudlin and in the end, things turn out semi-okay, a little opaque, and certainly far better than doomscrolling. —Julia Silverman, news editor

Songs for Drella

Let's get this out of the way: Yes, I'm 25 years old. Yes, I'm only now having my Andy Warhol phase. This week alone I watched Flesh—Warhol’s pissed-off, Paul Morrissey-directed answer to Midnight Cowboy—and bumped The Velvet Underground enough to permanently alter my Spotify algorithm. After last week's treatise on The Rolling Stones, I've unfortunately morphed into a crusty record store ghost who has feelings about Dylan going electric and the heyday of Creem magazine. This is cute, perhaps, on an angsty 17-year-old cosplaying as a grown-up. But on an actual grown-up? No comment!

Anyway, my time spent with the Velvets led me to an unknown-to-me project by its two most high-profile members. In 1989, shortly after Warhol died during routine surgery, Lou Reed and John Cale set aside their creative differences (Cale unceremoniously departed the band after its second album) to produce a tribute to their mentor and former manager. The title is a nickname given to Warhol by one of his superstars, a portmanteau of "Dracula" and "Cinderella"—one he hated while he was alive, if that's any indication of the egos at play.

The songs are funny, poignant, theatrical, and alive, and Reed's fraught relationship with Warhol means they resist cheap hero worship. Warhol's demons, eccentricities, genius, and ridiculousness all feel fresh through the eyes of people who knew him as a person first and an icon second, and the Reed/Cale creative spark that animated the first two Velvet Underground albums is on full display. Cale vowed, after recording Songs for Drella, that he'd never work with Reed again, and he didn't. But Drella stands both as a truly human tribute to an artist who typified "larger than life," and as a reminder of the value in sticking to what works. —Conner Reed, arts & culture editor

This Is a Robbery