LIVE MUSIC EVERY SATURDAY!
PCS & Music Millennium, the place where people and music still matter, invite you to  SOUNDS. LIKE. PORTLAND—our new early evening showcase of the best in local music, every Saturday from 5-7 pm.

November’s artist-in-residence is vibrantly talented Ali Ippolito.

Ali Ippolito (of Heroes and Villians, Nick Jaina fame) writes music with a haunting poetry and quiet authority that simultaneously tugs, pulls, coaxes, vexes, and inspires.

A mezmerizing singer, Ippolito accompanies herself on piano, accordion, and the curious banjolele, giving us fading, sepia-tinged sonic postcards of love and loss. This is music that, to paraphrase the poet Mina Loy, “infects us with unendurable ease/touching nerve-terminals.” And that’s a good thing, folks

The spectacular Mary Flower, one of the country’s premier finger-style acoustic blues/ragtime  guitarists and the ineluctable  Peter “Spud” Siegel, pianist/accordianist, trumpeter and vocalist nonpareil fill the Gerding with song this Saturday following the Ragtime matinee.

LIVE MUSIC EVERY SATURDAY!
Music Millennium, the place where people and music still matter, joins forces with PCS to present SOUNDS. LIKE. PORTLAND—an early evening showcase of the best in local music, every Saturday from 5-7 pm.

SOUNDS. LIKE. PORTLAND, Music Millennium & PCS’s new early evening music showcase continues this Saturday (and every week) from 5-7 pm in the Lobby of the Gerding Theater. Free—and all ages.

For October, in conjunction with our production of Ragtime, we feature blues/ragtime guitar master Mary Flower, jazz-blues-gospel pianist extraordinaire Janice Scroggins +  Nafisaria Scroggins Thomas, Spud Siegel, Alan Hager.

Did I mention it’s free? Come early–it’s the weekend, it’s 5′0′clock,  areety: have a drink and a delectable snack from the Armory Cafe.

Recently I was talking to Terry Currier, the sage force and owner of Music Millennium, a 40-year-old icon of indie-biz that’s quite literally a “place where people and music still matter. After talking a bit we realized that the arts and the independent music and book fields share similar struggles—competing with online entertainment, building and retaining audience and the need to foster a larger sense of community to ensure a durable future.

I threw out the idea that while public spaces for creativity (theaters, clubs, art galleries) are vital we actually probably have a symbiotic relationship with “third-spaces” and creative free spaces like the indie-record store, bookstore, library, etc.—we both nurture wonder, conversation and the development of artists. I know that for myself, hanging out in the local record store, listening to the wise-acre behind the counter who knew every nook and cranny of jazz history was every bit as valuable as the teachers I studied with or the gigs I played in clubs.

So in an effort to support locally grown talent, locally grown business and give you all some good music to listen to in the process, Music Millennium joins forces with PCS to present SOUNDS. LIKE. PORTLAND—an early evening showcase of the best in local music, every Saturday from 5-7 pm in the Lobby of the Gerding Theater. Free—and all ages.

For October, in conjunction with our production of Ragtime, we feature blues/ragtime guitar master Mary Flower, jazz-blues-gospel pianist extraordinaire Janice Scroggins + special guests

“You should wear white more often—it becomes you.
The next person to speak to you will have a very intriguing proposal to make.
A lot of people in this room wish they were you.”—Frank O’Hara

À la recherche du temps Pardue

In conjunction with our Main Stage production of Grey Gardens , PCS is proud to host an exhibition of breathtaking white-on-white paintings by Portland visual artist Eugenia Pardue .

Please join us here for an Artists Reception on First Thursday, June 4 from 5-7 pm in the Lobby of the Gerding Theater at the Armory (128 NW Eleventh). Featuring the music of Grammy-nominated singer Nancy King and jazz pianist Steve Christofferson , refreshments and no-host bar.  Paintings will be on view until July 26. Exhibition made possible in part with the cooperation of the Heidi McBride Gallery .

A critically-acclaimed presence in the Portland visual artscape, Eugenia Pardue has had numerous solo, group shows and  international exhibitions (including at Linfield College, Jordan Schnitzer Museum, at Art Basel, Switzerland, at Mark Woolley Gallery and at the Nines Hotel in the coveted Presidential Suite).

Pardue’s stunning white-on-white works are concerned with nature, sensuality and ornament. In her studio, deploying gallon upon gallon of acrylic paint, the artist uses tools to braid, mold, and weave paint into shapes that are sometimes soft and graceful, sometimes spiky and dynamic.

Reflecting an inclination toward both the opulent decorative roots of painting and the heroic impulse of contemporary abstract canvases, Pardue’s work references, “flowers, vines, trees, seed pods, and other vegetative motifs I find in the world around me, as well as in antique floral prints, wall paper, tiles, tapestries, and jewelry design.”  The paintings are pure, meditative, and sacred, painterly and sculptural, minimalist and maximalist, serene and dramatic.

Whimsy and foreboding mix it up in the work of Pardue—inspiring a meditation on the color white in all its varieties:

White as elegance, cooling, hopeful balm or a blurring, burning intensity. Like the polarity between Grace Kelly’s wedding dress and the sweat-and sin-inducing velocity of Jimmie Lunceford’s big band playing White Heat (delivered at a blistering 364 beats-per-minute). White as hygiene, modesty, innocence, or for the Japanese–death and “deuil blanc” mourning. The color white can suggest an aching, minimalist ars poetica where white space is synonymous with silence and small gesture—think of John Cage’s 4′33”—the  little white dress of the avant-garde. White-on-white painting can conjure a slow-motion riot between translucence and opacity offering infinite variations, permutations, and transfigurations of white that are far from blank or meaning-free.

Simultaneously baroque, austere and threatening in their beauty, Pardue’s paintings mirror the promise of the 1940s-era Bouvier Beales, prior to going native and becoming what Kim Morgan describes as “exotic birds of a paradise lost–two real-life Daisy Buchanan’s gone Baby Jane Hudson.”

The paintings’ organic and botanical sensuality suggests echoes of another 1940s era siren:  the moral ambiguity of white-dressed Lana Turner in the Postman Always Rings Twice. Hollywood figured that “dressing Lana in white somehow made everything she did less sensuous.” Instead of purity or hope, Turnerian White took on a corrosiveness that was anything but neutral.

The works look lovely against the renovated 1891 walls of the Armory, but could easily fit into the collection of a Norma Desmond, Miss Havisham, Edie or any of those “rowdy girls that mesmerize us with their musty mansions, fierce honesty, and haunting presence.”

Like the wildly creative Little Edie, the paintings refuse to be held within the acceptable bounds of the frame —seeking instead to be alive in the world and in the minds of the viewer. The work straddles a fragile tipping-point between clarity and grace and danger and seduction and begs the ultimate white question: does illumination truly trump darkness?