HEADOUT PICKS

Don't have any plans tonight? You ought to get over to Mississippi Studios and see Uprising, a short performance that a handful of talented...

People do weird things with their copies of Willamette Week. We were so intrigued by the photos a local artist named Klutch sent us earlier this...

Updated Friday, Nov. 6: Okay, taste-tested and approved. Aside from all the pre-opening hoopla, it's clear that the Sugar Cube's still got some...

At 2 pm this afternoon, Deschutes Brewery released the 2009 edition of The Abyss, a pitch-black seasonal imperial stout that's developed a cult...

The contracts aren't yet signed, and the legal beagles have yet to complete their sniffing and gnawing, but it seems highly probable that...

We just checked in with Bob Keith, owner of the Dragon Herbarium and purveyor of many of the legal, natural drugs in Oregon that we wrote about...

If our city planners have their way, Copenhagen will be the model for Portland’s urban transportation network. Mayor Adams has said he wants us to achieve the Danish city’s world leading levels of bicycle use  but we have a long way to go: bikes account for 55% of all trips there, and 37% of commutes; surprisingly, according to the Department of Transportation’s Cheryl Kuck, Portland doesn’t count the percentage of all trips and its comparable commuting number — near tops among large US cities and soaring in recent years — is a comparatively scanty 8%. And yet, Denmark’s best known advocate for Copenhagen biking and lifestyle claimed Thursday night that  “Copenhagen has no cyclists.” Say what?

Speaking, along with Adams, at last Thursday's reception for Oregon Manifest’s Dreams on Wheels exhibit (up through Nov. 8 at 10th and Hoyt), Mikael Colville-Andersen said that rather than the self-identified cyclists we see in the US (further subdivided into tribes like racers, mountain bikers, and hipsters), Copenhagen has people who just happen to ride bikes to get where they need to go. “They don’t understand the fuss” over specialized bike clothes or accessories, he said. To Danes, and many Europeans in general, a bike is merely an appliance, like a vacuum cleaner, rather than the fetish object so worshiped, or vilified, here. Americans need to see bicycling as mainstream and normal rather than a subculture phenomenon, he said.

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