Monthly Archives: June 2008

Environment, General, Music

Scatter’s got fly IQ, Mahler 9 and other numbers

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We are SO species-centric. It’s all about US, homo sapiens, and when it’s not about ALL of us, it’s about our specific, little cultural norms. The buzzing you hear in our cognitive apparatus? We’re it. Buzz. Buzz. More buzz.

I’m referring particularly to the Discovery.com post entitled “Dumb Flies Live Longer Than Clever Ones.” The key finding of the University of Lausanne study: “negative correlation between an improvement in a fly’s mental capacity and its longevity”. And what was the “improvement” in the fly’s mental capacity? Why, a course of study, Pavlovian in design, that “taught” the flies to connect certain smells with food. The life loss was significant. Natural flies live 80-85 days; the smart flies only 50-60.

The researchers accounted for the lifespan deficit with an obvious, to them, conclusion — that increased neuronal activity drained their life-support systems. Not so fast Swiss scientists! What about the Pavlovian training itself? The rewards and punishments. Learning “unhelpful” connections. The sheer fly confusion. The sheer fly coercion. That takes its toll — ask any high school student — and by itself could account for early death. I’m only half-joking.

Mahler 9 Not to be Art Scatter-centric or unduly self-referential or too much like a Swiss scientist, but we read with interest a recent review in the New York Times of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony by critic Anthony Tommasini and noted that he had not taken to heart our own musings on the limitations of connecting biography to music. Frankly, I just don’t see what Tommasini has added to the discussion other than that he was pleased that Lorin Maazel’s clear or “Apollonian” approach seemed to work just fine with such “intense and transcendent” music. He spends most of the article rehashing the upsets in Mahler’s life at the time he composed the symphony and converting that biography into quasi-musical description: He imagines Mahler by turns gazing into the abyss with resignation and then sneering at death — in the music. I maintain that this is simply silly: Point to me the moment that you think he’s sneering at death and I will come up with an equally colorful, biographical and unprovable “explanation”: He awoke from his nap with a crick in his neck, for example. OK, maybe not colorful exactly. Or poetic. But it may be every bit as true as the “sneering at death” line.

94 in 4 To keep to our Scatter-centric theme: Our very unofficial record-keeping system at Art Scatter has revealed that we have been in existence something on the order of 4 months and we’ve formulated 94 posts. We’ve been SO busy! (Admittedly, some of these posts were merely stating the obvious: Hey, the server was down!) We’ve gotten lots of response, much of it positive (thank you!), and that has kept us bent to our chores. Is it possible to do somewhat longer, free-ranging “takes” on the web and find willing readers? Are we the right “Swiss scientists” to conduct the experiment? So far, the answers would be, in order, “yes” and “I dunno…maybe”. At any rate, we’ll keep at it this summer, though perhaps not at the same rate due to vacations, weddings, new grandchildren, anniversaries, grilling catastrophes, and other transitions. Stay tuned!

Barry Johnson, Books, General, Theater

More clowns gone wild via Carol Triffle

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Thanks to Carol Triffle, this is an unplanned Part Two of the previous post on Monica Drake’s recently published nove Clown Girl and Triffle’s play at Imago The Dinner. To make utter and complete sense of it, insofar as that’s actually possible, you’re going to have to take a peek at the original post, below, which is fairly long. If you’re like me, though, you’ll just charge on through THIS post, figuring things out on the fly, and then decide whether or not you want to spend yet MORE time on clowns later! But really, that’s false advertising, because the posts aren’t about clowns themselves, they are more about the creation of clowns.

After I had written “Clowns are wild,” I sent the link to Ms. Triffle, just so she’d be up-to-date on the slanders and misapprehensions about her play that I’d committed to digital eternity. She was kind enough to respond, and here’s part of what she said in two pieces:

It’s funny that you wrote about the book Clown Girl because Chuck Palahniuk wrote the introduction to that book and his book Choke got me thinking of doing a show about the etiquette of dining. I haven’t read Clown Girl but I will.

So, for starters, a coincidence chain, with Chuck Palahniuk in the middle: Choke to The Dinner, Palahniuk to Clown Girl, (and then my connection of Clown Girl to The Dinner). This is common enough in Portland, I suppose, this overlapping, and part of the reason for an emergence of a certain “Portland style” or “approach” or maybe “embrace” — that I would venture to say that involves a mix of risk-taking, craft, humility (with self-confidence), consciousness of the social (both in the form of the audience AND of the work’s context), and, well, we might go on, but this is the subject for a Ph.D. thesis perhaps, not a parenthetical paragraph in a post about other things.
Triffle continues:

Like the line Dolores says in The Dinner “I fall down and then I get right back up again” that is my description of the human condition. The funny part is that she does it over and over again with not much success. Lecoq once told me to stop walking into walls and do what comes naturally. I did think of Lecoq while writing and directing this play. [A] Lecoq clown has a risky rawness that exposes our inner naivety and desires. Lecoq showed me that movement and timing can sometimes say as much as words.

Falling down and getting back up, yes, and from a certain perspective, it can be hilarious. Or “funny” as in “interesting.”
Continue reading More clowns gone wild via Carol Triffle →

Environment, General, Vernon Peterson, Visual Art

If stones could speak, perhaps I wouldn’t want to read

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I’ve not traveled to Stonehenge, located west of London on the Salisbury Plain. Others have during the past 4,500 years; including, remarkably, the “Amesbury Archer,” a seemingly wealthy metalworker from the Swiss Alps, who made it to Stonehenge and was buried there around 2,400 BC, only to be unearthed in recent excavations, as reported in Caroline Alexander’s fascinating article in the June issue of National Geographic. Parts of the monument itself traveled far. Some 80 stones, the “bluestones,” weighing up to four tons each, were hauled in from Wales, 250 miles away. Larger stones, some weighing up to 50 tons, were hauled 20-30 miles.

How many theories dance on the head of a bluestone? We’ve studied Stonehenge enough to think it was built for a purpose, but what? Alexander summarizes the explanations, so far, of its origin and meaning:

Secure in its wordless prehistory, it can thus absorb a multitude of “meanings”: temple to the sun—or the moon, for that matter; astronomical calendar; city of the ancestral dead; center of healing; stone representation of the gods; symbol of status and power. The heart of its mystique is, surely, that it excites in equal measure both zealous certitude and utter bafflement.

Its very mystery leaves us free to steal some of its power. My favorite mystery-thriller, Joseph McElroy‘s Lookout Cartridge, has a scene set at Stonehenge, a group of late 1960s hippie-pagans exorcizing the evil spirits unleashed by the Vietnam War. East of Portland 100 miles, Sam Hill built a replica Stonehenge as a monument to soldiers killed in World War I. A pacifist, Hill thought Stonehenge a place of ritual sacrifice, and his Stonehenge is cold concrete, a bitter place overlooking the Columbia River.

“Carhenge” near Alliance, Nebraska is chief among the playful henges, to include “Foamhenge” in Virginia and “Fridgehenge” in New Mexico. My own modest proposal is a temporary public sculpture in the Park blocks, made from frozen sides of beef. In the middle of summer, Beefhenge could speak loudly if not necessarily eloquently for veganism, I think, something in the counter-spirit of Hill’s monument. And I wait for the inspired used car lot construction of “SUVhenge” or “PeakOilhenge.”

The current issue of Tin House sports a photograph of “Carhenge” on its cover, an example of “Outsider” art; that is, art created “off the grid” or outside traditional boundaries. Tin House‘s Elissa Schappel explains that Carhenge typifies the “eccentric, amateurish, maybe even laughable” art “created by folks who wouldn’t necessarily even call themselves artists.” The naive, of course, doesn’t exhaust the rather limitless possibilities of “Outsider” art. See, for example, the definitions in “Outsider” art’s institutional publication, Raw Vision. But perhaps it is true that “Outsider” art can be described and defined as such only by . . . “insider” artists and critics? And if you were to build a monument as a symbol of that kind of status and power, what would it look like? Would we recognize it had a purpose, but wonder what?

Barry Johnson, Books, General

Conan, and we don’t mean O’Brien

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Sorry, but this is a post about Conan, and I’ll understand completely if you want to click right past it. It would be possible these days, when pop culture and pulp culture are respectable fields of academic study, to gussy up the attraction that Conan the Cimmerian had for me during several weeks in the early 1970s. But no. I’ll give it to you straight: Conan was simple and visceral and I was entering a world that was complex and, um, mental. I would only learn later just HOW mental, believe me. Simple and visceral: to face the enemy, destroy him and then on to wine, sex and song.

This was a boy’s fantasy, I suppose. No planning ahead, no negotiation, no “meaning.” Cunning was allowed, perhaps, but not reflection: Conan was Peter Pan with muscles and a serious libido, and reading Conan was a momentary escape from the fate of adulthood. Robert E. Howard, his inventor, sketched a world with enough space for my imagination to start percolating, where I could dispatch my foes without a second thought. And then, pretty quickly, it came to an end, the stories exhausted, and I moved on and started slipping into an adult world that Conan would have put to the sword — and for good reason!

This came to me as I read Seth Schiesel’s story in the New York Times about a new Conan video game. Schiesel must have his own Conan intersection, because he knows the material. Early in the story he quotes from a key Conan text, “Queen of the Black Coast,” considered by Conan connoisseurs to be absolutely prime Conan.

Let me live deep while I live. Let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Except that Howard was never content himself.
Continue reading Conan, and we don’t mean O’Brien →

General

Tuesday wet scatter: Call it Snass

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The Chinook word for blackberries? KLIKAMUKS, with the accent on the KLIK. Actually, that’s Chinook Wawa, the trading language of the Northwest coastal tribes and French traders, and not proper Chinook, which pronounced the M as a B, all this according to George Gibbs’ dictionary of Chinook Jargon (or Wawa) published in 1863.

The Chinook tribes of the Lower Columbia, among the largest concentrations of native people in the United States, were diminished and then practically wiped out by successive epidemics of smallpox brought to them courtesy of Europeans. That’s why we don’t hear the hard K’s of Chinook mixed into the free consonants floating around around our favorite coffeehouses. Very few people speak the language, though tribal leader Tony Johnson is attempting to revive it.

Chinook Wawa came up recently in a conversation with Margot Voorhies Thompson about her painting show at the Laura Russo Gallery (never worry! a post is in the works!). Thompson, whose art was greatly influenced by calligrapher/polymath Lloyd Reynolds, was thinking about the loss of languages worldwide as we talked — which implies the loss of cultural experience, the ways that one culture adapts to its surroundings and creates something distinct. It’s akin to the extinction of a species, Thompson suggests: We lose the “DNA” of those creations, that history, those experiments, when a language dies

Thompson and I aren’t the only ones thinking about that problem, of course. Last month representatives of tribes around the country met with language experts to discuss the disappearance of their languages and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Faye Flam wrote about it. Flam suggests that when Columbus ran into the Western Hemisphere something on the order of 300 languages were being spoken in the United States. But this seems like a very low number, especially if the experience of Columbia tribes is any indication. Chinook Wawa was necessary because of the number of languages spoken in the Northwest. Even along the lower Columbia River, the dialects of various tribes generally considered “Chinook” were very different, according to Rick Rubin’s account, Naked Against the Rain: The People of the Lower Columbia river 1770-1830. George Gibbs, by the way, argued that Chinook Wawa was an “invention” of the French, suggesting that it had so many Chinook words because of the French traders at Fort Vancouver, but Tony Johnson believes that it existed before contact with the French exactly because it IS so Chinook dominant (with some useful French — like CALLIPEEN from CARABINE for rifle — and English words added along with borrowings from other Northwest tribes).

Somehow this June morning, after a drenching overnight drizzle that almost resembled actual rain at times, the Chinook Wawa word for rain sounds just about right to my ear. It rhymes with “moss”: SNASS.

Barry Johnson, Books, Dance, Visual Art

Monday chatter: Naipaul, Tharp, Moje

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Here is poet Derek Walcott on novelist/essayist V.S. Naipaul, both sons of the Caribbean and Nobel-decorated literary lions:

The plots are forced, the prose
sedate and silly
The anti-hero is a prick named Willie
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence
And whines with his creator’s
self-abhorrence

Nicely done! According to the Guardian, their antagonism stretches back to the ’70s, and it was mostly fanned by a Naipaul essay that praised Walcott’s early
work. Which must mean he hates the later work, right? Anyway, Walcott goes after Naipaul on the usual grounds — that he embraced the “Raj” of the English literary tradition, became a snobby pedant about it, then roamed the Third World trashing the traditions he found there. But Naipaul’s House for Mr. Biswas was good! (Turn about on the superiority of early work is fair play.)

Scatter loves a good literary scrap, and we doubt that Mr. Walcott will manage to wound Mr. Naipaul. I have followed Naipaul ever since Mr. Biswas — admittedly less in recent decades — and I’ve actually enjoyed his excursions to struggling countries around the world. I’m not sure how he manages those LONG quotes without taking notes or employing a recording device, but I’ve found him an antidote to any tendency I might have to idealize the Third World, and I don’t think he’s as Imperial as Walcott thinks he is, though undoubtedly far pricklier in person than I can imagine.

Quick thoughts on Twyla Tharp. The New York Times today has a story about Tharp’s preparations for a new ballet for American Ballet Theatre, mostly laudatory, though it does mention her recent Broadway fiascos based on the music of Bob Dylan and Billy Joel. Tharp’s high-energy, edge-of-disaster, comic approach to dance is firmly part of our internal choreography now, I think, not to mention a certain amount of slinky slithering and attendant sexual awareness. But I wonder: What does a world look like in which a choreographer with her considerable gifts has the financial security to maintain her own company over her lifetime as a choreographer AND work on various projects in Vegas or Hollywood or Broadway, not to mention other dance companies? What sort of investigations was she unable to pursue?

Finally, a couple of in-town mentions. We at Art Scatter strongly recommend that you take a peek at our Scatter-colleague Bob Hicks’s story about glass artist Karl Moje in The Oregonian this morning. Portland is going to be Glass Central this month! And also take a look at Inara Verzemnieks’s story on Horatio Hung-Yan Law’s Tai Chi project at South Waterfront — and Scatter kudos to Linda K. Johnson for her artist-in-residence projects in the district!