TICKETS $15

Doors, pre-show vending & music at 6:00 p.m.; Event at 7:00 p.m.
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THE EXPERIENCE

Are you ready to time travel back to the year 1990?! We’re thrilled to present a special screening of This Is Buzz: a documentary about a TV show called BUZZ, which aired in 1990 for one season on MTV as a “current affairs” show. The show’s collaged and non-linear format exploded storytelling as we know it and created a pop culture blender of music, culture, news, cinema, and more, and was a precursor to the future of information dissemination.

Come early to watch episodes of BUZZ during doors, and listen to a playlist created by Matt Pinfield (of 120 Minutes), and browse from a curated selection of records on sale from our friends at Music Millennium. 

Following the screening, there will be a moderated conversation and Q&A with Mark Pellington.  

This screening is part of our Plus Plus Festival. Check out the full program here!

ON SCREEN: This Is Buzz

2026. Directed by Mark Pellington. Runtime: 104 minutes. 

In 1990 MTV aired BUZZ, a television experiment in non-linearity & cut-up collage that drew heavily from—and presented—culture, music, cinema, cyberpunk, the avant-garde, and postmodern literary figures. Notable contributors and subjects included William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Jaron Lanier, Timothy Leary, William Gibson and many others. BUZZ exploded minds, confused execs, and paved the way for the chaos we now consume on our screens.

THIS IS BUZZ is the kaleidoscopic story of this show’s radical redefinition of what news and media could be. A window into a pre-internet global age of tech euphoria that saw the world’s dystopian problems as a non-narrative vision, THIS IS BUZZ is led by hypnotic audio and a music driven phantasmagoria of ideas, words, sounds, images all juxtaposed for us to make of it what we could.

ON STAGE:

Mark Pellington

Mark Pellington is an American filmmaker. He worked at pioneering video channel MTV from 1983–1990, winning awards as a promo producer and co-creating the seminal landmark TV image documentary series BUZZ . His video for Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” won four MTV awards in 1993, including Best Director and Video of the Year. 

Pellington has also created over 100 iconic music videos and worked with such musical artists as U2, U2 ZOO TV , Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, INXS, Alice In Chains, Demi Lovato, Imagine Dragons, Foo Fighters, Nine Inch Nails, Cage the Elephant, Linkin Park, Echosmith, The Fray, Dave Matthews, Michael Jackson, Public Enemy, Moby, Flaming Lips, Nada Surf, Damian Marley, Chelsea Wolfe and many more. He won a lifetime achievement award from the MVPA for videos in 2002.

HOSTED BY: Music Millenium

It was The Ides of March, March 15th of 1969, when Don MacLeod, his wife Laureen and brother in law Dan Lissy first opened an 800 square foot record store on the corner of 32nd & East Burnside. Specializing in mostly underground music not found in the department stores, drugstores or the couple of record stores which existed at the time, Music Millennium filled a niche for the Portland music community.

It’s over 55 years later and Music Millennium is the oldest record store in existence in the Pacific Northwest. Throughout our history, we’ve stocked the ever-evolving gamut of formats including LP, 45, reel-to-reel, 8-track, cassette, DAT, compact disc, mini-disc, DCC and CD-ROM.

As people who know and love music, Music Millennium has hosted an array of in-store performances and autograph appearances over the years, including the likes of Richard Thompson, Luscious Jackson, Loreena McKennitt, Maureen McCormick (aka “Marcia Brady”), Blue Rodeo, Shonen Knife, Matthew Sweet, Soundgarden, Mike Watt, Don Walser, Sheryl Crow, Randy Newman, Everclear, Jewel, Little Feat, Susannah Hoffs, Joe Strummer and Cheap Trick to name a few.