Special Events

The Big Float
Sunday, Tom McCall Waterfront Park
This year’s inner-tube jaunt down the Willamette River culminates in a downtown beach party at the Tom McCall Bowl, including a floating music barge. Proceeds benefit the Human Access Project, which isn’t a Children of Men reference, but an organization seeking to improve the health and accessibility of the Willamette. But is it safe to swim in the Willamette, you ask? Read our story.

Film

Top Down: Rooftop Cinema: Notorious
Thursday, Hotel deLuxe
If Pioneer Courthouse Square is the city's living room, then the top floor of the Hotel deLuxe's parking garage is its den, thanks to the Northwest Film Center's summer movie series. The series opens with Notorious. Despite the image of Biggie that just popped into your head, this bit of classic cinema comes from the mind of Alfred Hitchcock and centers around an FBI agent (Cary Grant) and his partnership with the daughter of a well-known Nazi (Ingrid Bergman). Pre-show music by St. Even.

Wes's World: The Royal Tenenbaums
Friday–Saturday, Whitsell Auditorium
Lovers of all things twee, rejoice! Track the evolution of one of modern filmmaking's most distinctive aesthetics with screenings of every Anderson film from 1996's Bottle Rocket through 2012's Moonrise Kingdom, paired with the works that influenced every high school hipster's favorite director. The Royal Tenenbaums screens this weekend, paired with The Magnificent Ambersons on Saturday, and Brewster McCloud on Sunday. Take our Wes Anderson quiz before heading out to the screenings to test your knowledge of Wes's World.

Concerts

Chris Isaak
Saturday, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
The chance to roll around in the sand with Chris Isaak for a "Wicked Game" or two is approaching, for those who are willing to cart their own sand into the Schnitz. Less obsessed fans will enjoy the performance from a healthy and respectful distance during a night that's likely to span Isaak's 30-year career of rock and roll in the tradition of Elvis, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo, plus Rick Springfield
Sunday, Oregon Zoo
This husband-and-wife duo have collaborated throughout Benatar’s string of chart-topping and karaoake-gold ’80s hits. Giraldo also penned Springfield’s classic “Jessie’s Girl.” Enough said.

Theater

JAW Festival
Friday–Sunday, Portland Center Stage
Four playwrights (chosen from more than 200 submissions) join actors, directors, and all manner of theater professionals for two frenzied weeks of workshops, rehearsals, and rewrites—a creative orgy that culminates in staged readings of the reworked scripts for the public. Chosen playwrites this year are Penny Penniston with her play, "Keys of the Kingdom," Juilliard-graduate Tommy Smith and his piece about DB Cooper's famous Oregon heist, Mat Smart with "The Royal Society of Antarctica," and New Dramatists alum and PCS favorite Adam Brock, whose play concerns the "simple... well, I guess, not really" life of Nate Martin (Brock also penned last seasons A Small Fire).

Bag&Baggage: La Dolce Love's Labour's Lost
Thursday–Saturday, Tom Hughes Civic Center Plaza
On the heels of March’s adaptation Lear, B&B Artistic Director Scott Palmer adapts another of the Bard’s plays for the company’s annual outdoor Shakespeare production. This time it’s a new take on Love’s Labour’s Lost that mashes up a Restoration-era adaptation of the text with celebrated Italian director Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

CoHo Summerfest: Cannibals & Cannonballs
Thursday–Saturday, CoHo Theatre
CoHo Summerfest brings four Portland-based playwrights, of starkly differing styles, together for a month of solo shows. Cannibals & Cannonballs: Living in the Late Now will close out Summerfest with a bizarre sojourn through the mind of Leo Daedalus. His simultaneous frustration and fascination with pop culture plays out in a late night talk show that perhaps echoes Andy Kaufman more than David Letterman.

Original Practice Shakespeare Fest's Laurelhurst Festival
Thursday–Sunday, Laurelhurst Park
OPS Fest tries to perform Shakespeare as it was done in the Bard’s day: little rehearsal, high energy, audience interaction. The festival includes two weekends at Laurelhurst Park, with 10 performances scheduled. This weekend features Comedie of Errors on Thursday, Macbeth on Friday, As You Like It on Saturday, and closes with Henry IV Part 1 on Sunday.

classical

Chamber Music Northwest
Thursday, Saturday–Sunday, Various Venues
This weekend brings the CMNW's Summer Festival to a close with performances of Mozart's Gran Partita and the Northwest premiere of John Steinmetz's Three Pieces for Ten Winds, with Steinmetz himself on bassoon.

Art

Catch these shows before they close at the end of the month:

Charles Hartman Fine Art - Seven
Celebrating its seventh anniversary, Hartman showcases seven works a week for seven weeks, revolving 49 of its represented artists, along with classic masterworks, through its doors, including Corey Arnold, Hayley Barker, Mark Steinmetz, and more.

Elizabeth Leach Gallery - Joel Shapiro's Maquettes and Multiples and Sean Healy's Extroverts
Coinciding with his installation in the art museum, internationally renowned–sculptor Shapiro's shows prints and sculptures that use abstract color and shape to delve into our perception and understanding of spatial forms. Meanwhile, multimedia artist Healy has made art for the FBI’s field office in Houston. Does that make him an art narc?

Upfor Gallery - Katie Torn's The End of Flutter Valley
Torn transforms the cast-asides of consumer culture into trippy, glossy three-dimensional worlds using computer graphics, photography, video, sculpture, and painting.

Blue Sky Gallery - David Pace's Sur La Route and selected work by Pentti Sammallahti
The San Francisco–based Pace lives two months of the year in a rural village in West Africa's Burkina Faso, where he photographs friends and neighbors as they commute by his doorstep, whether by bike, foot, or donkey. Meanwhile, the Finnish artist Sammallahti has traveled the world with his camera. These are but a few of the black and white images he's brought back.

PDX Contemporary Art - Mountain
This group show of fourteen artists, including Terry Toedtemeier, Heather Watkins, the French scientist-cum-monk (and "the happiest person in the world") Matthieu Ricard, and lauded Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, explores the use of mountains as metaphors.

Laura Russo Gallery - Betty Merken's Gravity and Whispers and new work by Geoffrey Pagen
Colorful linear paintings and monotypes from Seattle-based abstract artist Merken and bright ceramic wall works from the Portlander Pagen.

Cock Gallery - Cock Tease II
A group exhibition of "transgressive" artists. Just don't Google it at work...