The Top Events in Portland this Week, August 14–21, 2025
Portland-based novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond.
You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.
On a Biblically rainy day this spring, I met the novelist Jon Raymond at Lauretta Jean’s pie shop to chat about life’s biggest questions, at least as far as they pertained to his latest book, God and Sex. (The bulk of that conversation wound up in a piece you can read here.) I arrived a few minutes early and watched pies and cakes as perfect as the ones in Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings spin in a round display. A small child holding a cluster of balloons pressed his face to the glass. “Sprinkles,” he awed. Bells jangled as Raymond rushed in, escaping the downpour with an overcoat stretched above his head, and it felt like we were in the opening moments of a Billy Wilder noir, like Raymond was about to tell me where he’d hid the MacGuffin over slices of strawberry-rhubarb and key lime.
God and Sex, which Raymond will talk about with fellow Portland novelist Justin Taylor at Powell’s Thursday (7pm, August 14), is not a noir. But it does unfold like one. Arthur, its poor, defeated soul of a narrator, tells of the hippie academia love triangle he built in Ashland, and perhaps destroyed, the same way Walter Neff spills his guts into a dictaphone in the scene that bookends Double Indemnity. Minding the funny setting we’d stumbled upon, and the neo-noir elements of Raymond’s previous novel Denial, I hazarded a question disguised as a joke, and wondered aloud if he was still musing on the genre.
In Denial, Raymond prosecutes environmental criminals in a set of Nuremberg-like trials. Vengeance grows more complicated when its climate journalist protagonist becomes friends with the former fossil fuel exec he’s tracked down, stirring an emotional conundrum Raymond has said was partially inspired by The Third Man.
More than a noir phase, Raymond is having a kind of intellectual affair with the late British author Graham Greene, who penned both The Third Man and The End of the Affair, a novel Raymond says inspired the theological confrontation at the heart of God and Sex. Both books force a more or less agnostic character to reconcile an answered prayer in the aftermath of a “no atheists in foxholes” moment, and both center a woman named Sarah. She is no femme fatale, however—these are crimes of lust, not capers or murder mysteries—and God is the only hitman in either story.
More Things to Do This Week
FILM It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley
VARIOUS TIMES | CINEMA 21, $9–11
The New York Times calls director Amy Berg’s new Jeff Buckley movie “a largely by-the-book, behind-the-music documentary,” while promising that this is the rare effort that justifies the form—an assemblage of talking heads and archival footage that coheres into an intimate if straightforward portrait of the artist who died at age 30 in 1997. And who hasn’t been waiting three decades to spend a couple hours with Buckley? Perhaps best known for his rendition of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah,” Buckley was a darling of the East Village scene in the early ’90s and released his muscular and theatrical debut, Grace, in 1994. He died in a swimming accident while at work on its follow-up.
MUSIC Horsegirl
8PM TUE, AUG 19 | ALADDIN THEATER, $23
Wailing shoegaze guitar lines swelled into soaring choruses evoking Siouxsie and the Banshees on the Chicago rock trio Horsegirl’s 2022 debut. The three young women were finishing high school at the time, but any School of Rock novelty burned off by the album’s first head-banging chorus. They put out Phonetics On and On in February, a follow-up produced by Cate Le Bon, and trained their gaze on a different set of throwback influences. This album stretches time and rhythm and falls into its hooks like a winsomely forthcoming Velvet Underground tune.
COMEDY Josh Johnson
7PM TUES–THU, AUG 19–21 | ARLENE SCHNITZER CONCERT HALL, $50+
Johnson is quickly becoming the most famous person you’ve never heard of. He recently debuted as one of the rotating hosts of The Daily Show—Jon Stewart hosts only on Mondays—and has worked on the show since 2017. Johnson has also recorded stand-up for Comedy Central and Netflix and toured with Trevor Noah. But he’s found the most traction online. In a recent profile, The New York Times reported that he released over 28 hours of stand-up on his social media in 2024, and was on pace to release even more this year (he’s 35 and has millions of followers on both the app for millennials and the one for Gen Z). Whichever stage or screen he’s on, Johnson translates the news in real time, flowing through current events with the poise of a burnished stand-up bit. Recently, that meant animating the news that Diddy once broke into Kid Cudi’s home and, sadistically, opened his Christmas presents.
Elsewhere…
- Casey Parks: “Mike had tried to assure his daughter she wasn’t the reason the family was leaving South Dakota, but the 10-year-old was savvy. She knew the state had passed a measure preventing transgender young people like her from using girls’ bathrooms.” (Washington Post)
- On a recent stop through Portland: “He entered to exuberant applause, wide grin adorned by a suit rumpled by regular wear, loafers, and flamboyantly-colored mismatching socks…. Ninety minutes later, Coppola had only answered three audience questions.” (Portland Mercury)
Share this content:
Author: Hey PDX
Hey PDX Team
Post Comment