Music Stories Born: 1989 in Wyomissing, Pa. Sounds like: Avril Lavigne’s smarter, soulful, slightly southern gal pal For fans of: Radio Disney Emo Hour Latest release: 2010’s Speak Now, her third album, which    More

Performance Rock ’n’ roll and stage drama haven’t always made the best of pairings, but, despite a snarling blues-bar-of-the-damned T Bone Burnett score ably wrangled by live band Outland Prey, The Tooth    More

Performance Seating space: the final frontier. Rapidly growing and ever more eclectic (though, shall we say, far from diverse) crowds have overwhelmed the smallish amphitheater within Northeast Portland’s Wo   More

Music It’s Britneys, bitch! Scores of them. A small army flooded the Rose Garden of conscious-or-no impersonators representing every age, race, gender and, well, shape; for an icon who retains such an unparalleled grip upon tweener tastes, the audience appeared unexpectedly long in the tooth and tight in the leggings. Blame, perhaps, the $40 ticket price or four-hour length—the show finally endin...   More

Music Stories Whether because so few of our residents profess to own a television set or so many of our well-pitched homegrown larynxes manage to attract fans    More

Music Stories Formed: Out of the clay of Louisiana, Jive Records blessed her with the gift of fame, and so Britney Spears was loosed upon the earth.  Sounds like: Twenty-second-century Nashville. For fans of:    More

Music Stories Formed: In 1993, when a fight broke during a Dallas bar band rehearsal: “You put alt in my country!” “You put country in my alt!” Sounds like: Suburban cowboys tending their bar-brawl wounds a   More

Performance Portland Center Stage, inexplicably determined that its final show of the season pay tribute to a long-deceased blues belter of dimming celebrity, decided mid-season to shelve the originally schedul   More

Cover Story In 1983, Portland’s Chinatown was, by all accounts, a real shithole. Peppered with empty lots, boarded-up storefronts and dealers pushing cocaine and heroin as casually as a grocery store clerk might ask “paper or plastic?”—it was a part of town best avoided altogether. It was in the heart of this dubious neighborhood that George Touhouliotis, a 36-year-old Greek immigrant and former cab driver with a fondness for poetry and rebellious youth culture, opened an equally dirty bar called Satyricon...   More

Performance Hot Gun, the latest effort of producer Jedediah Aaker and director Jeffrey Wonderful—the men responsible for the amped-up, oversexed rock opera Chariots of Rubber—re-imagines the unironic ...   More