Gossip should have no friends

[November 21st, 2007] MANEATER, PART II: Diva Jossie Pérez may have oversexed Portland Opera audiences with her bump-’n’-grind turn in the title role of i]Carmen[/i] this past September, but Portland hasn’t seen the last of her yet. Scoop’s heard that the sniffly singer—who bagged one Carmen performance citing a “sinus infection,” allowing Young Artist Hannah Penn to step up to the plate—is returning as Maddalena in a production of Verdi’s Rigoletto which may also star returning favorite soprano Maureen O’Flynn as Gilda (it’s a signature role of hers). Oh, and who else is on the Opera’s ’08-’09 as-yet-unannounced roster? That big cuddly bear of a tenor, the Met Opera’s Anthony Dean Griffey , making his Portland Opera debut.

WATCH FOR TINY PICKET SIGNS: First the Writers Guild of America, then Broadway stagehands. Now another group is staging a strike: Santa’s elves. A group billing itself as the “Portland chapter of the United Elves Guild” is staging a demonstration this Friday at Lloyd Center, urging patrons to reject consumerism on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. It’s part of the national Buy Nothing Day protest, begun in 1992 in Vancouver, B.C. “Elves on strike! What can I tell you?” says Nevette Previd, an entertainment marketer helping to coordinate the event. “Santa’s distributing faulty toys.” Of course, the fact that there’s “entertainment marketing” anywhere near this strike suggests that something is being sold, and indeed it is: The elves’ walkout also promotes the new Morgan Spurlock-produced documentary What Would Jesus Buy? , which opens at Cinema 21 the same day.

HEAR, HEAR: Chalk up another award for Portland filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky’s documentary Hear and Now. Brodsky’s movie on her parents’ cochlear implants has won the 34th Northwest Film&Video Festival Audience Award for best feature.

TRIP-HOP: A rock star moving to Portland is an old story—we get a new musical celeb once a week—but you don’t hear about many hip-hop artists relocating to the Rose City . The hilarious, oft-heralded underground MC Josh Martinez , who hails from Vancouver, B.C. (an equally unlikely hip-hop home base), recently made the move to focus on his group, the Chicharones. The group’s upcoming album—a hip-hop version of a ’50s musical —is in its early stages. Martinez’s MySpace blog documents his first week of snowballing PDX traffic tickets and wild nights with his new roommate, skateboarder Choppy Omega (“I’m gonna have to get used to being the Ralph Steadman,” Martinez says before describing Omega’s several public-urination incidents and a case of minor identity theft at a Blazers game). Martinez’s own next album, Josh Martinez and the World Famous Sex Buffet , is slated for a March ’08 release.