Monthly Archives: July 2008

Barry Johnson, General, Music, Visual Art

Back to the caves for some paleolithic multi-media

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Art Scatter has declared its keen interest in Cave Doings in the past. What attracts us? Maybe it’s just that we see ourselves. Not ourselves specifically, of course, not with our sense of direction, not rooting around in the back of a cave where carbon dioxide levels are high enough to induce hallucinations and strange blind fish look up at us from cold, mineral drenched water, perhaps attracted by the pungent aroma of our dingy torches. Do fish smell? I mean with their own olfactory devices? I digress.

Those cave people, homo sapiens, were us, at least in terms of the intelligence they brought to bear on their environments. I haven’t ever seen any studies that suggest the human brain has evolved dramatically during the past 50,000 years or so. If you have, please let me know, because that would be interesting, too. So, their brains were operating in the world like ours, except without the same sort of technology, which has “evolved” over time. What we can piece together of their creativity in the face of the universe can’t help but be interesting in a deep way.

So we are preambling toward something — Judith Thurman’s story on cave art in The New Yorker. Thurman’s story examines a couple of recent books on cave painting, tests their propositions with experts studying the caves on the ground and then eyeballs those paintings itself (or rather herself). In her lead-in she cites the famous Picasso observation about the Lascaux paintings, reported by his guide: “They’ve discovered everything.” The list of painting “advances” includes perspective, Pointillism and stenciling, various colors and brushes and as Thurman points out, the “very concept of an image.” What I like about the article was the sense of amazement that Thurman conveys at just how perceptive the cave painters were — both about the caves themselves and the surfaces they offered for image-making AND the animals they created on the walls. But the primary point is to describe the dispute among cave historians, which basically comes down to this: To what extent is it possible to interpret accurately the “meaning” of the paintings.
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Barry Johnson, Environment, General

pdXPLORE: Thinking about Portland

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Before all of the thoughts generated by the pdXPLORE panel discussion on Tuesday exit my brainpan altogether and my notes go stale, I wanted to get something in a post, even if it’s not completely organized. The five panelists — Carol Mayer-Reed, Rudy Barton, Michael McCulloch, architect William Tripp and Richard Potestio — have each produced elements for an exhibit at PNCA that makes a few stabs at how we can think about Portland’s future in a creative way. I haven’t spent a lot of time with the exhibits, but they didn’t seem integrated into a whole “concept,” at least not to me, so perhaps a more haphazard report makes some sense. So we’ll just jump directly into the highlights.

Portland is a river city. Well, yeah. But both Mayer-Reed and Barton pointed out that the city does a poor job of celebrating its rivers, reaching out to them, dipping its collective toes in them, especially the Willamette. I’ve been hearing this comment a lot lately, which makes me think that the idea of burying I-5 on the east bank of the Willamette may be back in play in a more serious way.

Portland isn’t as green as it thinks it is. Mayer-Reed pointed this out, based on her researches that compared the city to its near West Coast neighbors San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., but several of the panelists mentioned that Portlanders shouldn’t be smug about their density and sustainability initiatives because other places actually have had better results along these lines.
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Barry Johnson, Theater

The Shakespeare festival is so theatrical!

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We were in Ashland for our summer run at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: five plays in all this time, meaning we missed some good ones, Othello, Our Town, and Fences, most prominently. Our colleague Bob is heading down THIS weekend so perhaps will set up a little online back-and-forth when he gets back to talk about the individual shows we have in common and the festival in general.

What was I looking for? Well, the usual, I suppose. New descriptions of old plays, new descriptions of my reality, a little inspiration here and there, something dazzling, the OSF comfort food (reliably good acting and good production values). But something else, too. This is the first year in the reign of Bill Rauch as artistic director of the festival, and I was looking for changes. I wasn’t expecting MUCH. OSF is the aircraft carrier of American theater companies, the largest non-profit theater company in the country (at least it once was) with many decades (since 1935), even centuries one might say (enter Shakespeare), of tradition to uphold. But maybe, I thought, I’ll be able to detect a new hand at the tiller. When Henry Woronicz took over from Jerry Turner in 1991, some changes were immediately apparent, notably the company’s far wider recruitment and employment of minority actors, part of the “color blind” casting movement that has become common at regional theater companies (you know I think that’s a good thing, right?). On the other hand, Libby Appel continued many of the initiatives that Woronicz started when he left the festival abruptly in 1995 (yes, we know the gossip). Her interests emerged and colored the festival more slowly and less dramatically.

Cut to the chase. What do I think I detected? I will enumerate! But first the caveats: I saw five of 11 plays on schedule this year; veterans of the festival might say, “I’ve seen them do that before,” and may even by right (though I think my points will still stand on the matter of degree); memory is a tricky thing.
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General, Vernon Peterson, Visual Art

Thirteen ways of looking at The New Yorker

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“It is never entirely safe to laugh at the metaphysics of the man-in-the-street.”
— J.W. Dunne, An Experiment With Time

I’ve spent three weeks in a state of distraction. Ten minutes here and there, cracks in time, I browsed the summer fiction issue of The New Yorker (June 9 & 16, 2008). I found several scattered signs of our times.

1. Peter Schjeldahl on a Jeff Koons retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Koons is a “major artist,” one of those who can “X-ray the cultures that give rise to them,” Schjeldahl begins portentously. But the culture that gives this particular rise is one in which “intelligence is obsolete.” Koons’ iconic “product line” sculptures–the latest of which, a huge steel heart, looks “incredibly costly” and “as sweet as dime-store perfume”–are turned out in a factory employing some 90 assistants. (“Rabbit,” shown here, is a stainless-steel cast of an inflatable bunny.) The steel heart, chirps Schjeldahl, “apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking scads of money in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste.” And that major artist, X-ray vision-ness? “We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably amount to wanting a better time.”

2. Annie Proulx, “Tits-Up in a Ditch.” This is the sloppily-tricked-out, unreinforced Humvee underbelly of the want-of-a-better-time-to-live-through. A story about Dick Cheney’s Wyoming and Dick Cheney’s Iraq War, in which a young woman, Dakotah, begins her “descent into the dark, watery mud” of our time, when she discovers that the only words she has to describe her Iraq experience are the gnawed-end clichés of the grandfather she hates.

3. Ron Chast cartoon book: “How to Live on One Hour of Sleep Per Night.”
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General

Scatter fourth and multiply

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Art Scatter has an acquaintance with the Declaration of Independence, and the first part of that great second paragraph, Scatter can recite (with a little prompting):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

On the other hand, we feel distant from these founding principles, and not just in time and place. This is the kind of government we signed on for — derived from the consent of the governed — and yet everywhere we look, we, the people, are thwarted. As all political science students know, we measure a democracy by the distance between two points: the will of the people and the policy of the government. The closer, the more democratic. And so on this celebration of American independence, of American democracy, we find our government in need of repair, profound repair: because that distance is so great; because so many powerful forces are determined to keep it that way; because it all seems so irreparable.

Government of the people. I spent the morning in Ashland, Oregon, watching that city’s Fourth of July parade, and if you know Ashland at all, you know it was, well, idiosyncratic. Would the Naked Lady of Ashland show up and if so, would she be wearing a bikini as she said she would, for propriety’s sake, or would she be skating, um, free? I count it a triumph of the Pursuit of Happiness that she was indeed skating free (though not in the official parade) and that though she was skating fast, it wasn’t because she was being chased by the Civil Authority. The city’s hula society paraded and so did its belly dancers, its gymnastic and circus academies, its veterans and its peace activists, various small bands and one large one assembled on three large flatbed trucks. The ACLU marched with some members dressed in orange prison suits with Abu Ghraib sacks over their heads. I could go on.

And then as the last drummer passed by, the street was filled with the unofficial part of the parade, the citizens of Ashland themselves, transformed from onlookers to participants, strolling down the street on a cool morning, enjoying the freedom of walking what has become a very busy street over the years. You know already where I’m going with this — onlooker AND participant, the perfect metaphor for a representative democracy. We watch and we join in. It’s crowded, it’s painful, and sometimes you think no intelligent consensus can possibly come from all of these people walking down this street — except there we all are, walking on that street, freely and with good intent. It’s enough by itself to make you want to fire a rocket in the air.

Books, General, Vernon Peterson

Summer reading: William Gibson’s “Spook Country”

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spook countrySpook Country is the place of no fixed boundary, where official governments and their shadowy minions mingle, betraying friends and arming future enemies. The Dick Cheneys of the world assure us that what they do there is all for our own good and that we should sleep better at night for it, but we suspect that more than a little of what comes of it feathers their own beds. And more and more we know they really don’t have a clue.

In the age of post-9/11 neo-surveillance, counter-terrorism is the new terrorism, and every cultural production, be it furniture, appliance, weapon, art work, act of Congress or staged event such as political rally or act of terror, is authentic only if it is inauthentic; if, in other words, it is, as William Gibson suggests, “a very elaborate artifact, mass-produced by artisans of one culture in vague imitation of what had once been the culture of another.”

And what is the most primitive human artifact still in use? The container: bag, box, pocket, backpack, diplomatic pouch, car bomb, micro-chip, cargo container.

You may not know what it is, or what it contains, but in Gibson’s latest novel, Spook Country, now in paperback (Berkley Trade, $15.00), Bobby Chombo can tell you where in our undifferentiated global grid it is right this minute. Chombo is geek squad gone over the edge. His GPS grid-induced paranoia leads him to divide his warehouse into squares and he never sleeps twice in the same spot. Trained in militarily valuable applications of Global Positioning, he now freelances for conceptual artists like Alberto Corrales, for whom he triangulates complicated bits of computer-simulated reality on location. Slip on a custom helmet and you see a life-like hologram of River Phoenix dead on the street or pale F. Scott Fitzgerald dying in a bar. Corrales’ latest piece involves Charlie Manson and Sharon Tate.

But Chombo also works for an unnamed old man, seasoned, avuncular, who may be a rogue CIA operative, and who appears to bear the scars of betrayal from as far back as the Bay of Pigs. The old man has Chombo tracking a cargo container bound for North America.

What’s in the container? Perhaps it’s smuggled arms, or a weapon of mass destruction, or human cargo, or a huge chunk of small bills the U.S. shipped to Iraq and then lost. Or perhaps it’s simply an al-Qaida dry run to test Homeland Security. Or perhaps container and cargo are another virtual creation, an element of the “consensual hallucination,” as Gibson calls the internet.
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Barry Johnson, Books, General

Happy birthday, Franz Kafka!

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Yes, July 3 is the date of Franz Kafka’s birth in 1883. If he hadn’t died of starvation brought on by tuberculosis in 1924, he would have been 125 years old today! I imagine the news report: “A doddering Franz Kafka celebrated his 125th birthday today surrounded by friends and the uncomfortable notion that he had unwittingly invented some of the more profound absurdities of the modern state.”

Did Kafka actually prove that the worst and darkest ideas operating in the deepest recesses of the human dreamscape will eventually manifest themselves as government/business policy? I think maybe he did, though it took a while for us to get it. He got the very heart of our paranoia — the ways in which we don’t trust ourselves. It’s a little strange to toast such a thing, but there you go.

To one of the Titans of the Art Scatter pantheon, happy birthday!

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

A “Laramie” lawsuit: Footing the bill for censorship

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Here we go again: More trouble over a school play. Don’t these people ever learn? I mean the principals and school boards who do the censoring and always seem to do it so clumsily, as if critical thinking were anathema to education and free speech were a legislative inconvenience to be swatted away on a whim — usually the whim of a frightened administrator or a few right-wing parents determined to make everyone else line up with their rigid view of the world. Where do they think they are, Guantanamo Bay?

The play in question this time around, almost predictably, is The Laramie Project, Moises Kaufman’s moving and mostly even-handed exploration of how the brutal murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in 1998 affected the people in his town of Laramie, Wyoming. This one’s just too much for the great 16th century thinkers who seem to be running, and running roughshod over, our public schools. Controversy? Perish all thought.

As Melissa Navas reported this morning in The Oregonian, Portland actor and onetime teacher Wade Willis has sued the Beaverton School District for $125,000, claiming he was “harassed, intimidated and humiliated” for his attempt during the 2005-06 school year to bring The Laramie Project to the stage at Southridge High School, where he had been a music, drama and language arts teacher. Shattered by the experience, Willis quit a job that he presumably loved.

His lawyer argued, Navas reports, that “a wrongful discharge lawsuit can be filed when an employer ‘maintained specific working conditions so intolerable’ that a person would resign.” Navas also reports that Kaufman had given permission to take out the play’s profanities to make it appropriate for a school audience, and she points out that although the play is about a hate crime against a gay man, it’s not about sex.

I don’t know Wade Willis, but I’ve seen him many times on stage, and he’s always struck me as an actor who approaches his job in a totally professional manner. (Right now he’s on stage in Broadway Rose Theatre Company‘s critically hailed production of the musical Les Miserables.) The loss to the students who no longer get to learn from him is of course impossible to measure, but I imagine it is significant: Here is a man who understands music and theater from the inside out, deeply respects his craft, is exceptionally good at it, and was willing to pass that knowledge along. Further, he wasn’t afraid to confront his students with topics that demand critical thinking — and what greater skill can a school hope to impart to the children in its care?
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