FRI • AUG. 4
Batter up! The Lesbian Community Project
hosts its 21st annual Softball Tournament of
Choice through Aug. 6 at Prairie Fields in
Brush Prairie, Wash. Raffle prizes, games,
food, camping. Spectators welcomel 113599
NE Prairie Road letsplaylcp@comcast.net .)
Myshkin's Ruby Warblers, Ashleigh Flynn
and many others perform during the eighth
annual Pickathon roots music festival
through Aug. 5 at Pendarvis Farm on Mount
Scott. (Noon-11 pm Friday, 9 am-11 pm
Saturday 16581 SE Hagen Road $85 from
www. pickathon com.)
( gi A
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Pink Martini makes its only Portland
appearances this summer through Aug.
5 at the Oregon Zoo. (7 pm. 4001 SW
Canyon Road. $22 from Tickets West)
Out Dancing's beginning rumba class starts
tonight and continues every Friday in August
at Ankeny Street Studio. Intermediate
waltz class follows. (7-8 pm rumba ($24 for
God-Des and She perform Aug. 4 and 5 at the E Room.
month], 8-9 pm waltz ($32 for month].
Southeast Ninth Avenue and Ankeny Street
Biker poet Samantha Barrow reads from Grit and Tender
503-236-5129. www.outdancing.info.)
Membrane, a compilation of tales from her first cross
country spoken word tour on her motorcycle, at In Other
God-Des and She, a hip hop duo featured on the season
Words. (7 pm. 8 NE Killingsworth St.)
finale of The L Word, perform through Aug. 5 at the
ÆoA The Egyptian Club presents Taste—a free non-
smoking dance party featuring house, trance,
electronica, underground and classic music
spun by DJs Epitome, WildFire and Nada—every
Thursday. (9 pm. 3701 SE Division St.)
Egyptian Club. (8 pm. 3701 SE Division St. $10.)
SAT • AUG. 5
Portland Frontrunners take a 2.7- to 6.5-mile run along
the Willamette River, followed by brunch. Meet at the
Queers get down during Homo a Go Go 2004 in Olympia, Wash. The biennial festival kicks off Aug. 1.
intersection of Southeast Main Street and the Eastbank
Esplanade. (9 am www.portlandfrontrunners org.)
Alley Productions and One Wicked Party present Portland's
premier theme party, Luau Extravaganza Proceeds ben
efit Esther's Pantry (9 pm. 2119 N Kerby Ave $35 at the
door, $30 in advance from www onewickedparty.com.)
SUN • AUG. 6
Biker poet Samantha Barrow presents Healing the Body
Erotic, an erotic writing workshop for survivors of sexual
abuse. (1-4 pm. $10-$35 donation. RSVP to dutch house
@hotmail com.)
Bring your bats to C.C. Slaughters, because the Sisters of
Perpetual Indulgence are going to be pulling bingo balls to
help the Cubs, Bears and Grizzlies softball teams travel to
out-of-state tournaments to represent Portland. (4 pm.
219 NW Davis St. $15 first packet, $25fortwo.)
The Broadway Baritones perform during What a Swall
Party This Is, an evening of Broadway jazz celebrating
the 25th anniversary of the Mt. Hood Jazz Festival and
the 10th anniversary of the American Classics Theatre
Festival, followed by a wine and champagne reception
at Mount Hood Community College Theater in Gresham.
(7 pm. 26000 SE Stark St. $25 from 503-665-7800.)
Doug Fir Lounge presents Blowoff, the infamous queer
DJ/video/art/live performance night transplanted fresh
from the 9:30 Club in Washington, D C., featuring Bob
Mould of Hiisker Du and Sugar. (9 pm. 830 E Bumside St.
$10 from Tickets West.)
We've Come a Long Way. Baby
Ang Leo (Brokeback Mountain) and John Waters [Pink Flamingos)
are two of the directors interviewed in Fabulous! The Story of
Queer Cinema.
If 1995’s The Celluloid Closet showed, very entertainingly, how
movies reflected the repression of queers in society, Fabulous! The
Story of Queer Cinema demonstrates, if not always effectively, how
far we’ve come by 2006.
Showing 9 p.m. and 1 a.m. July 24 on the Independent Film
Channel, Fabulous! is a breezy, MTV-style mix of clips, mostly from
the ’80s and ’90s, and talking heads. The heads comprise a veritable
who’s who of homo and homo-sympathetic culture. The inescapable
John Waters waxes pithy (“Before Andy (Warhol], gay men were
kind of boring”), activist Michelangelo Signorile finds an upside to
the pandemic (“AIDS reinvigorated gays and lesbians to create bet
ter works”), and archivist Jenni Olson wittily assesses a trashy poster
for the dykesploitation film Daughters of Sappho (“It’s lesbian visibil
ity...not exactly what we had in mind!”)
The clips cover what the filmmakers view as the highlights of
homo cinema, from early pioneering work like Warhol’s infamous
Blow Job and Kenneth Anger’s experimental probings of macho
icons to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Making Love, Bound (which
gets extensive coverage) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Fabulous!
also dips into the National Endowment for the Arts scandals and
rightly hails Will & Grace as clear evidence of the sea change in
homo portrayals that happened in the ’90s.
Surprisingly, the movie skips over some of the indisputable
landmarks of queer cinema like The Boys in the Band in favor of
extended discussion of dreary works like Deseit Hearts, reflecting
filmmakers Lisa Ades and Lesli Klainberg’s slant toward lesbian
films. At least trans movies get the occasional nod here, with one
commentator noting, “Transgender film is where gay film was 20
years ago.”
Queer culture critic B. Ruby Rich, lauds the New Queer
Cinema of the 1990s—movies like Swoon and Go Fish—as revolu
tionary in more or less ignoring the closet in favor of unapologetic
gay characterizations. But the clips show how badly some of these
films, particularly Gregg Araki’s amateurish The Living End, have
aged. Maybe at this point it’s good to recognize that while overstat
ing the value of a work has merit in building community and iden
tity, it’s equally—perhaps more—important to start applying artis
tic standards, and demand that a film be more than simply queer.
Waters puts the argument succinctly: “Just gay is not good enough.”
—Gary Morris
Starring WADE McCOLLUM
ART/Mainstage
Hedwigpdx.com • tripro.org
July 13 - August 12
9
Presented by
nrndMtSûnî! TR|ÛNGLE
prOuUCTIOnS! productions !