Sherwood in flames!

Well, not quite. But “Higher Ground,” the bully play by a middle school teacher in Sherwood,is managing to ignite passions. Coercion on the playground and coercion by a bureaucracy are a lot alike, as Bob points out below, and maybe we are dreaming if we think the adults should know better. It’s a little bit sick, a little bit sad, and a whole lot aggravating. But the show does go on! And that’s brilliant.

We might stop to talk a little about Eliot Spitzer if there was one iota of the story that hadn’t been been chewed over by multiple mouths. There’s an unfortunate image for you… But $80,000? We will say “The Wire” ended spectacularly, and when you hear members of the Fourth Estate complain about the way David Simon depicted the Baltimore Sun, they protest too much. Good stuff, and close enough to “real” to be recognizable, at least from here.

Taking a little darshan with Stephen Sondheim was a good antidote to an unruly week. Anything that makes you want to see lots more theater, that has to be a good thing, right? Apparently, a certain principal in Sherwood disagrees.

What’s next? I have no idea. We have entered deep improv mode here at Art Scatter. But something big is about to happen. I can just feel it.

Writing is the act of accepting the huge shortfall
between the story in the mind and what hits the page.

– Richard Powers

Richard Powers did not disappoint the small but very attentive group at his reading March 6. We accept on faith, I suppose, his claim that there is a shortfall between what is in his mind and what shows on his page, but we’ll never detect it, because what he writes is such a seamless weaving of disparate threads, as in the story he read that night. Called “Modulation,” and written special for his reading tour, it interweaves the stories of four people in places as various as Iraq, Sydney, Germany and an “I” state campus in the dead of winter. Different temperaments, different relations to music, but each trying to detect a secret harmony, a ghost tune they strain to hear in the global jangle of music, samplings and crossover genres, bootlegs and illegal downloads. Music – “the art that leaves nothing,” except the desire to read “Modulations” when it is published this spring in Conjunctions 50, a special anniversary collection of stories and poems by 50 writers.

Powers explored the theme later in response to a question about the fate of music, or any other “intimate art” such as reading, “in an age of technological ubiquity,” as he phrased it. He’s not worried. Every age, he believes, has produced a music “surprising for its moment.” Being grounded in our “now” is second nature in his novels.
Continue reading The Echo Maker: Powers of Attraction →

Do not be alarmed: below is a non-fiction comics super-post, which collects all four parts of last week’s series. It differs from the originals in some parts, but for those hardy souls who followed along, it is not necessary to read the edited version. Newcomers be warned: It’s long.

This is a good opportunity to mention a couple of the sites that have included Art Scatter in their deliberations. We were honored that Furious Nads, the One True b!X’s website, linked to us. If you don’t know the site, it is in the Scatter mode, too, mixing politics and culture in unlikely and furious combinations. We also have to give a nod to Portland playwright Steve Patterson and his Splattworks blog. Theater has been in the news lately, and Steve has helped us participate in the conversation. And DK Row at Oregon Live (not to mention The Oregonian) helped get us going in the beginning. Cheers, DK!

What’s coming up this week? Hard to say, but Vernon has been typing away feverishly on a Richard Powers post, and he may have something to say about a particular jigsaw puzzle artist showing at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Frank Rich and Stephen Sondheim are going to be in town on Tuesday and the usually heavy March flow of events is there for the fishing.