A Gilded Lounge Singer’s Many Day Jobs
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Adapting your résumé into a book is not the most advisable art project. But then most of us haven’t had Rex Marshall’s life. If you’ve ever sat at Keys Lounge and wondered how the man onstage in the gold lamé suit, the one singing into an Elvis microphone like an Oscar statue come to life—if you’ve ever sat back and wondered how that dude, who sings under the nom de scène Mattress, got there, have I got a book for you. All the Work I Never Wanted is Marshall’s account of shitty jobs, a slim and punchy “memoirella” from Portland small press Banana Pitch. The launch party is of course at Keys, Friday, May 1, at 7pm.
The book’s chapters come like stories told in smoky green rooms and the backs of band vans. Marshall is a raconteur. But he’s uninterested in packaging his CV into instructive fables. Stories of working at McDonald’s (twice), at Michaels Arts and Crafts, and at the Convention Center Holiday Inn (“Hotels are really all about sex and it was the horniest job I’ve ever had”) leave the reader to draw their own larger picture. Instead, Marshall’s work tales achieve the texture of one job leading to another, aggregating to a statement about how little say we often have in how we spend our time.
The book’s first and longest vignette tells of a newspaper hustle Marshall helped his dad with during high school summers. They lived in Vegas and worked overnight delivering the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which sounds like the most fantastically make-believe publication. His dad was cruel. Marshall bled into the newsprint most nights, loading 1,000 papers into the car, then folding, rubber-banding, and throwing them out the window—hopefully before the sun came up. One night, another of the delivery guys fails to show. They curse him, having to pick up his route. He no-shows the next day. And again until, as they’re delivering the Saturday paper, Marshall and his dad see a photo of the guy’s exploded gold Toyota melted into the Blue Diamond Highway.
More things to do this week
BROADWAY The Phantom of the Opera
APR 29–MAY 10 | KELLER AUDITORIUM, $75+
For the next week or so, a disfigured musical genius is boarding under the Keller. Phantom of the Opera ended its initial Broadway run in 2023. But Andrew Lloyd Webber’s iconic musical is back—they almost always come back—and currently on a multiyear tour of North America. Produced by Broadway and West End power player Cameron Mackintosh (a knight!), this run presents as a lightly revitalized version—the zhuzhing is all very tasteful, critics assure—of the now 40-year-old show.
MUSIC Unknown Mortal Orchestra
8PM THU, APR 30 | REVOLUTION HALL, $40+
Ruban Nielson described his latest EP, Curse, as “a silly kind of music,” pitching it as a salve for cursed times. While it’s hard to touch his band’s early megahits, your “Ffunny Ffriends” and your “Multi-Love”s, the extra something-something the New Zealander–turned–Portlander made his name on is certainly present, not least his signature airtight arrangements. This time around, Nielson’s gentle, spoken verses land on extra thick ’n’ crunchy riffs Tony Iommi and the Prince of Darkness would gladly dine on. “ONE HUNDRED BATS” could almost be a Black Sabbath song, even if it had a different title.
BOOKS Molly Crabapple
7PM SUN, MAY 3 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
Before Zionism rose as the dominant Jewish political movement, favoring a Jewish state over a diaspora, a party called the Jewish Labor Bund advocated for the opposite: freedom for Jews wherever they might be, adopting the term do’ikayt, Yiddish for “hereness.” The Bund, which was secular and socialist, was not to last. Crabapple’s latest book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, is a history of the movement, and an “authoritative” one at that, per a recent New York Times review. The endorsement is notable because Crabapple is known as much as an artist, albeit a devotedly political artist, as she is a writer. She reported, through illustrations, on Guantánamo Bay for both Vice and The Paris Review. Her Manhattan apartment was a base for Occupy Wall Street. But Our Country is her first devoted history text. This discussion with Omar El Akkad should be one for the books.
Elsewhere...
- Adventures in lesbian pregnancy, Lindsay Trapnell’s stunning photo essay “Trying.” (Oregon Humanities)
- “First, you’re atop a mountain and powdery snow is swirling around; then you’re in a mossy forest and a mycelium root system is growing from under your feet,” Rachel Saslow writes of OMSI’s new climate change exhibit. (Willamette Week)
