photo credit: Tom Oliver

Our November artist Ali Ippolito, has invited her dear friend, the deeply talented Singer-songwriter Levi Cecil (of Heroes and Villians, KBOO Midnight Mixtape and Destination DIY fame) to sing songs and share the riches this weekend.

“If the Northwest has its own musical sound, it’s exemplified on Leviethan Cecil’s 2007 release, Monuments in Memory of Nothing So Far. It’s vintage indie-rock made modern. The lyrics have a dreamlike quality, beautiful and deep. Monuments gets a place in my Top 10 CDs of 2007.”
-Amy Atkins, Boise Weekly

Building a strong following through the noble art of storytelling and song, Cecil’s music brims with evocative melody and emotion, harmony and a certain honesty and earthiness—values that Portlanders have an insatiable yen for.

Not only does he have a hammer, he uses it, hammering in the morning, producing, “the kind of lo-fi bedroom pop the Northwest seems to have perfected,” according to the PTrib’s Barbara Mitchell.

Cecil’s kaleidoscope presents mesmerizing strands of steely independent punk conviction and a lyrical underpinning of elliptical, folk-rock imperative that seems equal parts Elliot Smith, the Minutemen, Neil Young , Skeleton Key and Fugazi, Sandy Bull, Utah Phillips and Syd Barrett. The result: a keening, inspired tonic that both charms and enlightens.

“As compelling as anything in recent memory.”
-Casey Jarman, Willamette Week

Ali Ippolito will be back next week to finish out the month–and December heralds the return of Grammy-nominated Nancy King!

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.

Ali Ippolito is back this week, TODAY (Saturday, Nov. 14) at 5 pm with Sweet Williams Ghost, the kind of luxurious music that lives in the dreamy recesses beneath the floorboards of roots-rich Americana. It features Ali with Dean Gorman (guitar, vocals) and Ben Cartwright (dobro, lap steel, guitar). And it’s damn fine. You’ll rarely have a chance to hear this kind of thing, this up-close and FOR FREE.  Pull up a chair, get an Armory cocktail and simmer in the sounds. 

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

Join us THIS Sunday, following the 2 p.m. matinee of Josh Kornbluth’s Ben Franklin Unplugged for Formative Stages: Theater and the Life of the Mind, copresented with The Oregon Psychoanalytic Center.

For this installment, Dr. Nancy Winters will delve into issues of independence, family and parental disappointment, and self-reliance in Kornbluth’s play. Winters quipped that Kornbluth’s play is “a great example of psychotherapy in action,”  encouraging, as it does, Josh’s journey to find his own inner Ben Franklin.

One-part cocktail conversation/one-part talk-back session, the lively series, now in its third year, puts theater on the couch and the audience in the conversational driver’s seat for post-show discussions that reveal that the world on the stage is truly a glorious microcosm of life. Join us for this field trip into the nooks and crannies that theater inhabits—from humor and mannered whimsy to the insatiable lust for life to the menage-a-trois between power, justice and truth, to idiosyncratic family dynamics and taboo.

Formative Stages: Theater and the Life of the Mind
Nancy Winters, MD on Josh Kornbluth’s Ben Franklin Unplugged
When: November 8, 2009 (following the 2 pm matinee)
Where: Ellyn Bye Studio , Gerding Theater at the Armory

Discussions take place in the theater directly following the 2 pm matinees. Free with theater admission

Another exciting  IDEAS IN PLAY program
IDEAS in PLAY are free public programs offered by Portland Center Stage that bridge conversations around theater and the arts, sustainability, history, and community. How can we use the lens of the theater to talk about who we are, what we believe and how we connect to one another? IDEAS in PLAY inspires stories to come to life in unexpected ways through conversation-based programs that ask: what’s the big idea here?

more posts about Ben Franklin: Unplugged || Get the Details on the Show || Buy Tickets

They’ve been arriving into the building all week and the results have been beautiful, thought provoking, and so tactile…in each case the direct interaction of plate with paper is clearly visible. Today’s digital printing may be speedy, high resolution and efficient, but it sure doesn’t have the sheer tactile pleasures of a letterpress.

This cell phone photo does not even remotely do it justice, but just to give you a sense of the creativity being brought to the project:

The exhibit will be up in the Armory’s lower lobbies throughout November and December, but this week we are hosting two very special events to kick things off on a celebratory note.

Join us Thursday, November 5th from 5 pm to 7 pm for a First Thursday reception where you can browse the work and then head off on further Pearl District gallery adventures (or stay and see the show that inspired the exhibit, Ben Franklin: Unplugged, at 7:30 pm).

Or bring the kids on Saturday, November 7th from 10 am to 1 pm for a Letterpress Fair and Demonstration in the Armory Lobby. In addition to browsing the exhibit, you’ll get to see a demonstration of a working letterpress, a short film about the last letterpress edition of the NY Times, and meet many of the PDX letterpress printers at work here in Portland. Afterwards, stay for the 2:00 pm matinee performance of Ben Franklin: Unplugged.

more posts about Ben Franklin: Unplugged || Get the Details on the Show || Buy Tickets

One very fun part of Benjamin Franklin’s printing career was the creation of Poor Richard’s Almanack , a collection of little nuggets of wisdom, or aphorisms.  To celebrate Ben Franklin Unplugged, we ran a contest on Twitter to coin your own 21st Century aphorism and tweet it to @pcsghost. Here are some of the results:

@nicolealane An invitation in the inbox is worth two in the mailbox

@clairewillett Early to bed and early to rise makes a man a terrible college roommate.

@BethMcShane Energy and persistence conquer all things….except H1N1

@little_panther Politicians are good for making excuses & seldom good for anything else

@trishamead A penny saved is an inappropriate waste of strip mined natural resources.

Thanks everyone for the tweets! We’ll draw the winners of the Ben Franklin Unplugged tickets on November 1st.