Things to Do in Portland This Week
Advanced Pets, the latest from photographer Ari Seth Cohen’s Advanced Fashion series, celebrates pets as both companions and sartorial muses.
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The first rule of reporting is to always get the dog’s name. If you know the dachshund is named Fritz, the thinking goes, you probably have the rest of your details straight. Ari Seth Cohen, creator of Advanced Style, a blog, book series, and documentary focused on the fashion of the 60-and-over community, always gets the dog’s name. He also notes the names of the cats, pigs, and goats who make it into his photographs. But for him, pets aren’t merely symbolic. In Advanced Pets, the new book Cohen will read from at Powell’s City of Books Saturday afternoon (3pm, free), Cohen’s photos and interviews with excellently clothed women of a certain age and their pets make the case that a cat named Pinky or a turtle named Kitty can be equally priceless as both companion and accessory.
“The portraits show how communing with another species can, indeed, advance a person’s sartorial agenda,” writes Washington Post fashion critic Rachel Tashjian.
Cohen got his start making street-style pictures in New York. He moved to the city from California shortly after his grandmother, Bluma Levine, died in 2008, and began taking photos of stylish women he passed on the streets who reminded him of her. Soon his creative elegy took off. Readers wanted to crib style cues from their elders, sure, but his efforts truly pushed the cultural needle. Advanced Style, his original 2010 blog, is credited as a catalyst for subverting an ageist conception of beauty across not only fashion and advertising, but in the culture at large. Advanced Pets continues the progress in its own distinctly glamorous way.
More Things to Do This Week
Comedy A John Waters Christmas
8pm Thu & Fri, Dec 5 & 6 | Aladdin Theater, $42–125
Waters started his wonderfully transgressive take on the celebrity Christmas show in the ’90s and eventually began touring it around the country. The pencil-mustached queer icon is known for directing offbeat movies like Hairspray and Pink Flamingos and writing books like the 2022 novel Liarmouth (there are rumors of an adaptation starring Aubrey Plaza). But he can also work a crowd. Stand-up isn’t quite the word for what he does. The show is a perverse 90 minutes of topical bits—enrapturing rants, really—that hovers around Christmas and whatever else pops into his prodigious, campy brain.
T.E. Which Way Which Way? by Richard Serra from The Only Way to Hold a Weight at the Oregon Jewish Museum.
visual art Richard Serra
Thru Jan 12 | Oregon Jewish Museum, FREE
Serra, who died in March at 85, was known for his mazes of leaning steel walls—sculptures you have to step inside to experience. Despite weighing literal tons, their lack of visible supports gives an incredible lightness…and the impression they’re forever about to collapse. This show of 18 prints, The Only Way to Hold a Weight, asks if he captured the same energy in his lifelong drawing practice. Serra is said to have approached black as a material instead of simply a color, making abstract forms with extraordinarily dark pigments in an attempt to compress the raw power of his sculptures into two dimensions.
Dance Serious Seasonal Cupcakes
Various times Dec 5–14 | BodyVox Dance Center, $25–75
The confections are (mostly) metaphorical, here. BodyVox’s annual holiday-season run pairs its company dancers, known for their athletic prowess, with new work by independent choreographers. Programming varies between performance dates, and there’s usually a dash of “fresh-baked,” “peppermint-infused” holiday spirit in the air.
What We’re Reading About Elsewhere
- All Classical Radio’s new downtown digs, 100-seat performance hall and all. (The Oregonian)
- West Coast representation at the Venice Biennale. (Variable West)
- Mother Foucault’s is moving. (Willamette Week)
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