"Sauvie Island is my holy ground. I’m out there at least twice a week cycling or walking my dog. Topaz is just an amazing gift to the Portland community, and you can’t go wrong when the dinner’s in partnership with Fort George, an outstanding brewery.”

“I really wish she and I were best friends. I just think she’s milk-out-your-nose funny, and so brilliantly creative in the most warped way imaginable. I just can’t believe one family has that much talent.” 

“I love how easy it is to take a train up to Seattle and walk right into the arena. I just think Gabriel is such a remarkable musician and genius in so many ways. He hasn’t toured in years, so this will be my first time. Friends are flying in for it.” 

“This is truly the epicenter of my fall season. I’ve been in the book business for a very long time, and I, hands down, feel this is the best literary festival in the country. The staff and volunteers put on this astounding festival, with talented, important, engaging writers.”

“Tin House will publish her debut novel, The Liberators, in November, and it’s an absolute wonder: sweeping in scope, harrowing, extraordinarily beautiful, fiercely intelligent. She arrived on the literary scene back in 2020 with her award-winning memoir, The Magical Language of Others, and I’d say that she’s a very important writer to watch.”

“If you don’t think Exile in Guyville is one of the best debut albums, I will fight you. I’ve never seen her live, and I’m looking forward to her blowing my hair back.”

“I just can’t get enough ... see what I did there? I’ve been living a lot in the ’80s, especially during the pandemic. I think Depeche Mode isn’t hemmed in by that New Wave ’80s sound. I think they’re just as relevant today.”

“I got to work with John back in 2017 on his book Make Trouble, and some of the things that came out of his mouth and mind during our conversations were just so demented and devious, and I just admire how he keeps our world off-kilter in the best way imaginable.”

“It’s become an annual tradition with my wife and friends. I just love how the NowHere Band and the Rose City Circus come together to create such a bizarrely wonderful, almost full-sensory experience of blending the Beatles with holiday season spirit. And it’s so very Portland—I go slack-jawed thinking, ‘What is this?’ You have to get those tickets immediately—they sell out.”

“Cooley only does three shows a year, and they’re usually contemporary. Murry is a really interesting painter who is no longer living, so I would just look into that.”

“She’s a really interesting artist living in LA, and it’s a performance at Lloyd Center ice rink and connected multimedia installation at ILY2. I’m super excited to figure out what that looks like.”

“He’s a dancer, choreographer, and theatermaker, working on what he calls “the verbal and physical play of Black performance.” Here he’s basically taking stock photography and using stop-motion filmmaking techniques, and stringing them together to make a moving image. So it’s a really cool mixed-media installation and performances.”

“Boom Arts’ new curatorial program is really strong. This season is largely international theater. They do just a few, really good, things. She’s a Lebanese artist, and the show follows the stories of four contemporary women. The premise is that she’s jogging through Beirut, addressing questions about the fragility of now. It’s in Arabic with subtitles.”

“Jess Nickel has a roving gallery—it’s really worth checking out and seeing what she’s doing. I just watch her and follow her Instagram. She just did Taka Yakamoto’s wonderful Physical Education project.”

“She’ll have Willy Heeks and Pat Boas with her in September, who I love, and Sean Healy, who I also love. And in November and December, she’ll have Stephen Hayes, a phenomenal painter, and Malia Jensen, who is just a super interesting sculptor—they are mainstay Portland artists.”

“At PICA, TBA is on hiatus this year, but it didn’t make sense to make artists wait until 2024, so we’re running a little mini-festival, including this. It works on the tensions between Western society’s perceptions and Asian stereotypes and identity, through performances and community engagement with choreographers from Canada and Europe, Stephen Thompson and Andrew Tay, and a half dozen artists from all around the world. Two of our curators have seen it, or its work-in-progress, in New York.”

“She a Brazilian singer who comes from a family of such greats, like João Gilberto, and has that legacy aura about her. She’s done some wonderful work integrating contemporary electronic textures into that really harmonically sophisticated Brazilian music.”

“She’s done a lot of research into older folk forms and poetry, and has released some really fascinating material over the years. I haven’t heard her latest record, but she’s always somebody worth checking out. I have her album Motherland on my shelf.”

“Should be a fun one. A while back I was at a bar and complimented a gentleman on some rather fabulous shoes, and it was piano player David Saffert. He works with a singer, Jillian Snow Harris, and they do a big spectacular. I don’t think Liza and Liberace ever actually worked together, but it’s really fun and good holiday entertainment that’s not another A Christmas Carol.”

“She happened to pop up in my YouTube algorithm, and I watched a bunch of her clips and think she’s very sharp and funny, talking about cultural peculiarities from a woman’s perspective.”

“Hussain [of Shakti], with the banjoist Fleck and bassist Meyer, is a really fascinating combination. Meyer made more of his name in the classical world, but both he and Fleck were Nashville studio musicians. They’ve done a lot of bluegrass and classical overlap projects, and having this fabulous Indian percussionist in that mix will be fascinating.”

“Playwright Kate Hamill is dishy, clever, and quickly paced. She got her first successes on adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, and this show got really strong reviews in New York. I’ve tended to see horror as a manipulation for its own sake, but one of the responses I get lately is this notion of it as a very fruitful, feminist way to interrogate the kind of microaggressions and true dangers that women face in society. And that’s interesting to me.”

“I often avoid the suburban theaters, but I was so happy to see they’re doing this adaptation, which has been a family-favorite Christmas movie for me. It has wonderful songs: it was the show in which “White Christmas” was introduced, which became a megahit, but “Happy Holiday” was supposed to be the hit, and it’s one of my absolute all-time favorites. While it won’t be Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, I’m looking forward to that hit of deep, deep old-person nostalgia.”