(everyone else is doing it!)

Days on the Cotton Candy #4 © Maleonn
  • Days on the Cotton Candy #4 © Maleonn

VISUAL ART

Marjorie is duly impressed by China's clear economic and artistic superiority, currently on display in the Portland Art Museum's China Design Now.

In conjunction with the exhibit, tonight and tomorrow the art museum is hosting a concert of contemporary Chinese music, performed by the Third Angle New Music Ensemble.The concert features special guests "Professor Ye Xiaogang, the Beijing Olympics composer; with zheng virtuoso Haiqiong Deng"; a Q&A w/ Ye Xiaogang will follow the concert. That's at 7:30 at the Fields Ballroom, $20 for museum members & seniors, $10 for students,$30 for everybody else.

BOOKS

I review Jonathan Lethem's great new novel Chronic City, an ambitious stoner epic that reads like a Charlie Kaufman script as directed by Woody Allen.

Ace intern Jane Carlen introduces straight-parented Portland to the term "queerspawn," in her review of Melissa Hart's Gringa.


THEATER

Imago Theatre relaunches their ever-popular production of No Exit, which sets Sartre's infernal parable on a tilting stage. This iteration of the long-running show features two of my favorite local actors, Tim True and Maureen Porter.

The Re-Theatre Instrument has hands-down produced some of the worst plays I've seen in Portland. But after receiving an email from Re-Theatre director Jason Zimbler offering to let me "smack him in the face" if I didn't like their new show... well, I still didn't go see it. But I sent another writer, and was pleasantly surprised by her conclusions about the show.