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“chestnuts roasting on your nose…”

photo: Kenneth Aaron (kdaphoto.com)”>

Here’s how we’re going to begin our month-long revelries. PICA’s picked the perfect spot for their Holiday Cabaret in Wilf’s Piano Bar and Lounge (800 NW 6th), adjacent to the beautiful Union Station. It’s normally a cozy spot evoking another era at which one might have a highball or at this time of year a Tom & Jerry. On December 4, Wilf’s will find its ambient energy level turned up a notch or three as PICA fills the evening with holiday musical favorites presented by emcee (and TBA:06 alum) Holcombe Waller, JamieLee Christiana, Hand 2 Mouth Theatre, and many more.

This benefit for PICA’s artistic programming starts with a patron reception from 6-9 PM ($75) with drinks and hors d’oeuvres and opens up from 9-midnight for um…karaoke…and other performances $5 general/$3 member.

At the TBA Festival noontime chat with Mark Russell, he speculated on what he could do with grander budget for the festival. We’d like to see PICA get the funding they need to make the festival as extravagant as they can imagine it to be. TBA is one of Portland’s cultural treasures.

Jayme Hansen. photo: Marne Lucas from “Sitting City”

Marne Lucas latest project, “Sitting City: Portland Artist Portraits,” is her PDX-centric answer to Andy Warhol’s screentests, but in a far more cinematic vein, ironically, than Warhol’s essentially still (“don’t even blink”) 3-minute motion picture portraits. This makes the result more fun for us and surely the process more fun for Lucas. Photographer, multidisciplinary artist, and subversive provacateur, here Lucas turns her lens on a small, eclectic slice of Portland art-makers including M.K. Guth (Red Shoe Delivery Service, etc.), performance artist/musician Jayme Hansen (Fleshtone), filmmaker Chel White, writer and artist Harvest Henderson, plus three Panders, Bruce Conkle, Trish Grantham, and pop-installation artist Chandra Bocci.

Jayme Hansen. photo: Marne Lucas from “Sitting City”

The exhibition of color photographs from the project opens this Friday, December 1 with a reception from 6-9:30 PM at Mark Woolley’s Woolley at Wonder (128 NE Russell). Lucas says, “The portraits were conceptualized with a very intuitive approach to my instinct about the artist�s personality, whether I was well-acquainted with them or not. The balance between art direction and personality in the images was a gift….” So Paul Green is depicted as a figure out of one of his own paintings while M.K. Guth’s portrait finds her in a modification of a childhood memory…ice fishing, but at a hockey rink. Go see.

show of music posters of all genres and types from all over the country just reminds us to appreciate PDX-based designer all the more

If there was only one Very Good Reason to get to the Goodfoot (2845 SE Stark) on November 30 for the opening of The Art of Musical Maintenance, it would be the work of designer, Dan Stiles. And that would be reason enough. His signature posters for shows in Seattle and Portland are super modern, idiosyncratic, and hand-screened. Yum. The Art of Musical Maintenance is in its third year as a show/sale of music posters from artists from all over the country. You’ll understand why we’re rooting for the home team. Skills.

Disjecta is entering the home stretch of fundraising to build out its multidisciplinary arts space in the Templeton Building at the east end of the Burnside Bridge. Already, the space has played host to large group shows (the Portland Modern show was a highlight) and performances ranging from bands to Jennifer Monson’s dance piece Flight of Mind for PICA’s TBA Festival. (And stay tuned for Cydney Wilke’s and Mike Barber’s Impasse.)

As much as we’d rather that the interior of the building not be polished up–we love it as is–we can get behind the effort to make sure the space lives up to its potential. So Saturday, December 2 from 7-10 PM, we’ll be there (5 SE 3rd) for Disjecta’s Auction 2006 with work on the block by a million artists (almost) including Chris Johanson & Jo Jackson, Holly Andres, Mark R. Smith, Brad Adkins, and Chandra Bocci. AC Dickson will serve as auctioneer which alone is worth the $10 admission.