Le Journal

You’ll thank Ben Harkins for this thrifty list of money-hoarding suggestions from Ben Harkins. by Ben Harkins [What follows is one of the many merry articles in the Mercury's Winter Guide 2025. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you're feeling generous this holiday season, support us here.—eds.] Season’s greetings from the war-torn Pacific Northwestern front! It’s the hour of the wolf. The economy has been hijacked by cultish tech-priests. Fascist goons strong-arm the innocent with impunity. Your vacuum cleaner is spying on you. Your phone is trying to kill you. The center cannot hold. If you’re like me, clutching your trembling loved ones close in the charmingly nuked-out ruins of this weird city, you probably only have one question on your mind: “Where can I spot a rip-roaring bargain this holiday season?” Stick to this cost-effective guide and I’ll show you how to SURVIVE and THRIVE the mad rush this holiday season. It’s a recession, it’s a depression, it’s a combination depression-recession-tech-bubble-fascism-whatever. It’s time to save money, in spite of the fact that all is lost! Host a holiday potluck, but don’t cook anything. Nothing in human history is more sacred than The Feast, a gathering of family, neighbors, loved ones, and whoever is screwing around with whomever. The holidays are a season of forgetting names immediately. It’s a season of forgiveness, setting aside past judgments/betrayals and focusing on what really matters: BEING TOGETHER regardless of who bothered to prepare a dish or contribute anything. Did you pay your rent? If yes, there is untapped social currency in your home, but only for those bold enough to host. A potluck is a great way to trick people into cooking for you. Offering up your home is an inviolable kindness for any holiday function. So why not get the most from that home field advantage? Despite the advantages of guests delivering home cooked food to your mouth, a meal can be a social pressure cooker, especially during the holiday season. Make sure to introduce everyone and prod them with lots of questions. Keep the pressure on those guests! Between tiptoeing around touchy political conversations and heartwarming stories from years gone by, chances are everyone will be too preoccupied to clock the fact that you didn’t prepare anything. When it’s all said and done, be ready to do the dishes. Guests will offer to help. Just say thanks for the offer and send them away with leftovers (keep some for yourself, too). Don’t give them time to consider who cooked and who didn’t make anything. Doing the dishes is a small price to pay for a day of free home cooked meals and an argument in good company. Get crafty. The spirit of giving is alive and well. Are you still practicing that awful hobby you picked up during lockdown? Knit a lousy cap, write a shitty poem, slap some paint on a flimsy popsicle-stick birdhouse and offload that trash. Give a second-rate piece of yourself to your friends. Nothing tells your extended family that you “tried” like home-made alcohol. Even a dumb craft from impressively unskilled hands can be made with love. Your bank account will thank you, even if your loved ones don’t. No gifts. Let’s just sit this one out. Every year, rampant consumerism strangles the charm out of our quaint holiday season and saps the life force of OUR PLANET! To give someone nothing for Christmas is to briefly spare them from the hell that is late-stage capitalism. It’s obviously cheap, but where is it written you can’t be cheap for a cause? Skipping gifts is a revolutionary act and should be celebrated as such. Think about it. Who are these kids, to be so expectant of gifts when the whole dang country is going down the friggin' tubes? The North Pole is melting, too. Santa will not save us. We are facing seven different apocalypses colliding into each other every day. Does the enviro-eco-techno-fasci-localypse take a break for the holidays? Does…

In the organization’s new theater, animated production Everest tells a harrowing true story. by Lindsay Costello [What follows is one of the many merry articles in the Mercury's Winter Guide 2025. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you're feeling generous this holiday season, support us here.—eds.] "This building gets us closer to the people,” says Portland Opera artistic director Alfrelynn Roberts. She’s showing off the organization’s new location, occupying three floors in downtown Portland’s World Trade Center complex. After the 2024 sale of its longtime southeast home base, Portland Opera announced a strategic decision to move across the river in early 2025. Continued activation of downtown Portland is important to Portland Opera, and its new location makes them a nucleus. “Everything that happens on the waterfront is visible here—the Starlight Parade, the Portland Marathon,” says marketing and communications director Christina Post. “We’re hoping to activate our plaza space during these and other events. Our outdoor opera program, Opera a la Cart, could be set up on the plaza.” One set plan connects Portland Opera with the upcoming Winter Light Festival, held February 6-14, 2026. An opera singer will kick off each night of the festival, belting from Portland Opera’s new balcony to a crowd in the plaza below. ”So iconic Portland,” Post adds. Additionally, the organization’s new offices bring opportunities for rental and collaboration. Post describes the music library as “tremendous,” and the space’s sound booths are bookable for private rehearsals and coaching. Portland Opera still plans to hold its larger performances within the theaters at Portland’5—”different locations mean different audience reach,” Post explains—but the organization’s new 200-seat theater will host niche, interesting works that might draw a smaller crowd. In mid-December, they’re presenting an immersive showing of Opera Parallèle’s Everest, described by the San Francisco company as a “graphic novel opera.” Projected on the theater’s three walls, Everest unfolds through the voices of talented singers, like mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and tenor Nathan Granner. Opera Parallèle recorded their movements along with their vocals, then illustrator Mark Simmons and cinematographer David Murakami translated those motions into emotive animations. Roberts and Post describe Portland Opera’s production of Everest as interactive. You’ll want to bring a jacket, because the World Trade Center Theatre will be chilly and scattered with fake snow. With a 50-minute runtime, Everest is also a low-stakes operatic work for the unfamiliar, and appropriate for viewers over 12—”you won’t see anyone fall off a glacier,” Post explained. That said, it’s a harrowing (and true) story. Composed by Joby Talbot with libretto by Gene Scheer, Everest’s fragmented, flashback-heavy tale follows three mountaineers as they summit Earth’s highest mountain in the spring of 1996, one of its deadliest seasons on record. Only one of the men made it down. Following two sold-out shows—last season’s The Shining and The Juliet Letters, based on the Elvis Costello album—Portland Opera has seen audiences respond to contemporary takes on the art form. “Surviving in a post-pandemic art world means finding different ways to speak to different people,” Roberts said of Everest’s unorthodox approach. “Ultimately, we want to tell a story that resonates.” Everest shows at Portland Opera’s World Trade Center Theatre, 121 SW Salmon, Fri Dec 12-Sun Dec 21, $56, tickets at portlandopera.org, 12+.

A new exhibition at Portland gallery Lumber Room compiles corporeal works by Louise Bourgeois and Isabelle Albuquerque.  by Lindsay Costello [What follows is one of the many merry articles in the Mercury's Winter Guide 2025. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you're feeling generous this holiday season, support us here.—eds.] The myth of feminine hysteria didn’t start in a Victorian sanatorium. Long before Freud heard about it and thought it sounded super legit, ancient Greek doctors imagined the uterus as a restless “wandering womb,” traversing the body and wreaking emotional havoc. In The Wandering Womb at Lumber Room, Los Angeles-based artist Isabelle Albuquerque revives and digs into that old myth. Her drawings and figural sculptures share space with multimedia works by modern art matriarch Louise Bourgeois.

Twenty-four of Portland's best cozy-weather soups—how many will you devour? by Andrea Damewood [What follows is one of the many merry articles in the Mercury's Winter Guide 2025. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you're feeling generous this holiday season, support us here.—eds.] Portland is a bountiful haven for delicious, cozy-weather soups. So we've gathered 24 (and where you can find them) in this convenient, bingo-style card. How many can you eat before spring arrives? Click here to download so you can play along!