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.

The Green Gift Guide

Gift-giving may take a different form this year, and the Chinook Book Green Gift Guide aims to help Portland-area residents shop locally, give experiences and save money. A partnership of the Portland Arts Coalition and Chinook Book, the guide is available free in print and digitally at www.greengiftspdx.com.

Over 30 local arts groups participated in the guide, including the Oregon Symphony, Oregon BalletTheatre, Portland Opera, BodyVox, The Portland Art Museum, Whitebird, Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland Playhouse and US! Many offered an exclusive discount in the guide. For example, Portland Center Stage will double the value of a gift certificate when the guide is mentioned, and Oregon Symphony offers 2-for-1 tickets for selected performances.

The Chinook Book Green Gift Guide also contains several pages of information on reducing waste around the holidays. Ideas for wrapping gifts and listings for how to recycle holiday detritus – from batteries and cardboard to ribbons, bows and electronics – are included. These messages were sponsored by the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.

How did this all come together?

Over a year ago a small group of leaders from a handful of Portland’s arts and culture organizations gathered to hold a conversation about new ways to seek collaboration and partnership. That gathering quickly grew to a bi-monthly luncheon with over 50 representatives from those groups in attendance. From discussing latest trends in audience development and philanthropy, to nuts and bolts topics like ticketing software, to sharing ideas on deepening connections with the region, this group aspires to make the Portland arts and culture community more sustainable in many ways.

The Regional Arts and Culture Council, and KINK-FM also provided significant support for the Chinook Book Green Gift Guide.

Download your own free copy right here.

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

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.

Portland Center Stage is very happy to be hosting three vital conversations that touch upon three vital threads of Portland DNA:  Education/Youth Activism;  Bike Culture/DIY enterprise; The Arts & Evolving Audience.

The conversations are  part of The New Communicators, a three-day festival of events, being held October 28-30 throughout Portland. The festival is intended to inspire,  educate, and invite questions on the evolving nature of conversation in a rapidly changing public realm.

Conversation is the thing. The sociologist Richard Sennett gives us a high-five on that: “rethinking the practices of urbanism is involved in creating a place in which people can talk to each other, and this is huge issue. You can’t have a public realm. . .if people don’t exchange with another and the element of exchange is talk.”

The New Communicators is a series of events created to share experiences and inspire discussion about how we communicate with others using both online and offline media. It is for anyone interested in exploring new ways of creating conversations in our personal lives, within our communities or in business. It is a chance to share ideas, experiences and lessons learned.

NEW COMMUNICATORS day#1:
Youth Power: Speaking for the Future
Wednesday, October 28, 8 – 10 am
Gerding Theater at the Armory
FREE

Youth are an often overlooked, sometimes hard to reach constituency, but one that (as the “youthquake” of the presidential election proved) has the ability to activate great social change.  Not only do they represent a whole new generation of makers, doers and thinkers, they are a critical mass of highly savvy renaissance-thinkers who can offer new perspectives, innovations, flexibility and passion for the future.

Evolving social media technology is a powerful tool that offers incredible possibilities in the realm of engaging youth in social causes and empowering them to become a generation of leaders for change, as well as for leveraging new approaches to education and participatory democracy. Today’s youth has moved far beyond the traditional “old-growth media” of newspapers to a more open-source, thriving omniverse, rich in digital-connectivity and grassroots creativity.

Discover ways to leverage youth engagement and how youth can contribute not only to your success, but to building the future we want for the region.

Voicebox Media (part of the Multnomah Youth Commission) is a media production company operated by and for youth, whose recent projects include the Regional innovation Forum and Activate Oregon, events fostering youth voice and social activism–from grassroots to public policy.

A CONVERSATION featuring:
Travis Huntington is a strategic communications and grassroots social marketing consultant, as well as a commercial multimedia producer and the founder/leader of Voicebox Media: www.ourcommission.org/youthvoice

Catherine Leedy is a nonprofit and leadership development consultant, was on the design team of the Regional Innovation Forum, and led the Activate Oregon Youth Summit

Liz Grover is an expert in new media communications and engaging the youth audience for social causes

Martin Tull is a leader and activist for Climate Change and serves on the Governor’s Global Warming Commission.

Moderated by  Tim DuRoche, cultural advocate and Community Programs Manager, Portland Center Stage.

RSVP and see you there!

NEW COMMUNICATORS day#2:
Creating Conversations Through the Love of Bicycles
Thursday, October 29th, 8am – 10am
Gerding Theater
FREE

There are many people who love bicycles. But how many can take this love and turn it into a business? And once they’ve started their cycling-related business, how do they engage their audience, market and brand their company?

Join us for a conversation with a group of cyclists who are creating conversations through their love of bicycles… a panel of four cycling and communication experts will talk about why they’re doing what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and what’s next for cycling as communication.

The panel consists of:
Jonathan Maus, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of BikePortland
Slate Olson, General Manager of Rapha, North America
Natalie Ramsland, Founder and Framebuilder of Sweetpea Bicycles
Heidi Swift, Newspaper Columnist, Freelance Writer, Photographer and Bike Racer
David Lowe-Rogstad, Co-Founder of Substance and former road racer (he’s back on the bike for Cross Crusade this year), will be moderating the panel.

Coinciding with Oregon Manifest , this panel is an opportunity for framebuilders, cycling enthusiasts, and business owners of all sorts to learn how different companies are utilizing events, technology and stories to create conversations.

RSVP and we’ll see you there.

NEW COMMUNICATORS day#3:
10,000 Invitations:
A roundtable on arts institutions and new/social media
Friday, October 30, 4 to 6 pm
The Gerding Theater at the Armory

Hosted by Lisa Radon, Portland Monthly’s Culturephile.

Good minds from Portland arts institutions share the ways they’re using new and social media to engage audiences.

The Portland Art Museum creates conversational videos about works in the collection, creates a community website for its China Design Now exhibition, and tweets as M.C. Escher. Portland Center Stage creates show preview videos that go viral and uses Twitter in innovative ways. The Museum of Contemporary Craft creates video and podcast and invites audience response. PICA integrates Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube into its TBA Festival blog.

In education, programming, and marketing, we’ll talk about what’s worked and what’s on the horizon as the landscape continues to change with new tools and new challenges all the time.

Participants include:
Christina Olsen, PhD – Director of Education & Public Programs, Portland Art Museum
Beth Heinrich – Director of Marketing & Public Relations, Portland Art Museum
Cynthia Fuhrman – Marketing and Communications Director, Portland Center Stage
Patrick Leonard -Public Relations, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
Rebecca Burrell-Public Relations and Marketing Specialist, Museum of Contemporary Craft
Namita Gupta-Wiggers -Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft

RSVP and we’ll see you there!

As the brain-trust behind New Communicators writes: “This is not a traditional sort of conference. ..Anyone can attend and anyone can organize an event. Whether you are a individual, an existing organization who already holds regular events or a business, you can organize a New Communicators event. …If you have an event idea, are willing to organize it and can find a venue to house it, you are welcome to.”

The only limit is your imagination, after all as Benjy Barber tells us, “Imagination is the link to civil society that art and democracy share. . . . It is the faculty by which we stretch ourselves to include others, expand the compass of our interests, and overcome the limits of our parochial selves. Only then do we become fit subjects to live in democratic communities.”

Hope to see you here, contributing to conversation and communication’s evolution!