Monthly Archives: August 2008

Bob Hicks, Dance, Film, Food, General, Music, Visual Art

Pre-Labor Day Scatter: Red shoes, hot peppers, art scams

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So here it is just hours before Labor Day (to be celebrated by much of America by a trip to the mall, where many people will be working for minimum wage or a skoosh over it) and this corner of Art Scatter is thinking about a few things.

Such as Josh White, who is playing on the stereo (we reveal our age by using such an antiquated term), who has just finished singing and playing “Strange Fruit” (if you think Biilie Holiday‘s astonishing version is the whole story, give this one a listen) and has moved on through his hilarious, haunting “One Meat Ball” and is now into his definitive “St. Louis Blues” and — hold it — a killer “Careless Love.”

And Art Scatter’s wife’s amazing ability with a dirty martini.

And the hot peppers of Hatch, New Mexico, where his 92-year-old father lived for two years in the 1920s, and one of which has entered a soup still simmering on the Art Scatter stove, and which (the town, not the pepper) this corner of Art Scatter did not visit on a recent eight-day trip to Santa Fe and environs, which experiences this corner of Art Scatter will discuss shortly. (A shout-out to Southwest Airlines, perhaps the last of the decent air carriers.)

And now Josh White is singing “Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin’ Bed,” and this corner of Art Scatter could almost die happy.

But not before recommending a few things.

Such as Alistair MacAulay’s excellent revisit to the 1948 Michael Powell/Emeric Pessenburger movie The Red Shoes, which Friend of Art Scatter First Class Martha Ullman West has recently promoted as one of the greatest movies of all time. If you’ve done what we often do on holiday weekends and let your newspaper sit untouched, do pick up your Sunday New York Times.

You’ll also find in your Sunday Times a wonderful story by J.D. Biersdorfer about a late 18th century art scam that pulled in the American painter Benjamin West and eventually other leading painters with its promise of revealing the secrets of the great Venetian ancients. It was, of course, a hoax, of P.T. Barnum proportions. A ruefully delightful tale.

Finally, check out Friend of Art Scatter D.K. Row’s challenge to the Portland art scene in the Sunday Oregonian, a piece bemoaning the city’s lack of a contemporary art center to goose the city’s art scene and push it into the national mainstream. We couldn’t agree more. The city that thinks it’s cool has a long way to go, and it’s lucky it has a few people like Row to speak the truth to its press-ageantry-lulled sense of self-satisfaction.

Happy Labor Day!

Barry Johnson, Visual Art

Beach scatter: final chapter

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Nose pressed to the glass, we watch mist clouds roll wetly off the Pacific onto the beach and when we get to the point of exposing our own flesh to the elements — mostly water in various incarnations and sand — we remark that this feels like the memory of an amniotic bath, except that it’s cool not warm, even though we know that we can’t have this memory, couldn’t possibly, though we don’t abandon it because we like the metaphor, the need it expresses and our need to express it.

The visual “play” outside that window all week is why we come, every bit as much as entering those scenes ourselves, nudging long strands of kelp and other sea “trash” left at high tide or feeling that chilly north Pacific nipping at our ankles and, watch out, knees and thighs. Everyone who comes here is affected about the same way, yes? Sky, surf, land in perpetual rearrangement, sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic, three elastic elements readjusting to each other. You don’t have to watch every second, that’s not necessary — but every short while you look up and locate the difference, how the pattern has changed.

I’m not sure what this has to do with Titian, or specifically the two Titians that the 7th Duke of Sutherland (only seven?) is hoping to sell to “balance his portfolio.” These are great paintings, no doubt, and the Duke is willing to sell them to the UK’s National Gallery for one-third the price they would likely bring at auction, which is estimated to be 300 million pounds. And the scrambling for money and the gnashing of teeth over the public interest in keeping the paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland, where they have lived since 1945, has been intense and reminiscent of Philadelphia’s citywide debate over the future of Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic, which was headed to Arkansas until $68 million was raised to keep it where it was.
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Books, General, Language, Vernon Peterson

Ur-Scatter, primal scatter: Walter Benjamin on the prowl

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Walter Benjamin is the prophet of Scrounge Scatter. The German critic of things broken, Benjamin embodies the true spirit of Modernism. Susan Sontag quipped that his essays end just before they self-destruct. But not before I’m lulled to sleep, usually. He’s the philosopher in search of an interpreter who will synthesize his scattered observations. In other words, he is the must-cite (site) for any post- or post post- critical theory—or critique thereof. His famous essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” speaks volumes in its title alone, even before the age of endless links.

Benjamin’s Angel of History, based on an interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, stands breathless, back turned to the future, watching as the wreckage of the past piles up at his feet. Benjamin was chief forager in this cultural dustheap. I’ve spent the past week browsing an intriguing book, Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (Verso), drawn from the salvage of Benjamin’s odd collections and catalogs: notes, photos, picture postcards, toys, news articles and lists—endless lists, including, charmingly, the first words and phrases spoken by his son Stefan. Loads of it is reproduced (paper yellowed, cracked, water-stained, but without the archival dust that would have me wheezing and choking in a minute).

A short note titled “Excavation and Memory” contains this bit of Scatter lore:

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

These are images, treasures in a collector’s gallery. But it is not mindless scattering (and conjoining). There’s the time, place and circumstance of good historical research. We must mark “the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up.” The investigative report on authentic memory documents the strata of origination, “but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.”

Fragments, shards, shored against ruin, but tagged, referenced and carbon-dated.

(Compare the origin of Art Scatter.)

*Image: ”Angelus Novus”, Paul Klee (1920).

Barry Johnson, General, Language

I spelled it my way: the future of spelling

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I wouldn’t say that Art Scatter is totally obsessed with spelling. We don’t employ a battalion of copyeditors to check our posts, after all, and I’m sure that strange letters pop up in strange places in the words we type sometimes. And we prefer some spellings, like “copyeditors,” that some sticklers might consider incorrect. I’m thinking of the spellcheck of this particular program, just for starters, which in addition to suggesting that “copyeditors” is two words also believes the same about our new noun “spellcheck.” We can be stubborn about this sort of thing, though. We believe our “variant” to be more useful than theirs.

Much of the time, even for the broadminded, variant spelling is the same as incorrect spelling. It’s no big deal, if you whiff on “accommodate” — though I’m about to argue the other side of this in a moment — because there’s no punishment, just a little hiccup in a reader’s mind as she encounters the misspelling, restores the missing “m” (the most frequent error) and moves on. She’ll never trust your spelling of a tricky word again, but that’s not a major consequence. We’re on the Internet for crying out loud! And she understands that. Don’t worry, she doesn’t trust us either…

The keyword here is “variant.” I bring it up because an article by Frank Furedi on the website Spiked (which we found via ArtsJournal, of course). Furedi suggests that a movement exists to “forgive” common spelling errors in British universities (such as truely) by treating them simply as variant spellings. No harm, no foul; we knew what the student meant.
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Barry Johnson, Environment, General

Beach scatter: Sandcastles under construction

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As we suggested earlier, some of Art Scatter is at the beach, and on the first nice day at the beach, what do we do? Why, we build a sandcastle, that’s what. Well, actually, we critique previously built sandcastles, do archaeological digs around sandcastle ruins and ponder the sandcastles we would build if were were adept at the craft. Which we aren’t. Hence the pondering. Here are a few designs we considered adapting to sand.

The pyramid shape has its attractions, of course, and this one, the Ziggurat designed by Timelinks, an environmental design firm in Dubai, will one day be inhabited by one million people if the press materials are to be believed. One million. And it’s designed to be carbon neutral. I’m not sure about the scale, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be on the bottom rung of this particular pyramid. The challenge in sand? That pointy top, not to mention those cool reflective surfaces. I am pretty sure the sand version is mostly carbon neutral, though, at least when it’s in full operating order.
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Barry Johnson, Books, Film, General

Beach scatter: J. Austen, E. Jelinek, M. Mouse

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The miracle (or the curse, depending on your point of view) of the Internet tubes is that they extend to the Oregon coast, and so, it is possible to share one’s vacation slides with the universe almost in real time. Not only that, it is possible to post from there/here, too. One suspects that it will be an excellent place from which to Scatter widely, if not consecutively, on such subjects as Jane Austen, Elfriede Jelinek and Mickey Mouse. So, having already 1) dipped nether digits into the briney Pacific, 2) ruminated on the pleasures the world offers while eating a smoked oyster from Karla’s Smokehouse (Karla is a genius of the delicate art of smoking), and 3) fought off the assaults of sand bugs attracted to smell of fresh meat from the city, we settle in to the broadcast booth to enter our code.
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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Portland Ballet: an invitation to the dance

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“There are more good dancers in the world right now than there have ever been,” Christopher Stowell told me soon after he arrived in Portland a few years ago to take over Oregon Ballet Theatre.

He wasn’t talking about great dancers — those streaks of lightning and passion who come along every now and then and rearrange our assumptions about the possibilities of the human body. He meant good dancers: well-trained, devoted, flexible, athletic, intelligent, capable of realizing the complexities of a choreographic mind. And he was right.

God knows why. You don’t strike it rich as a dancer — in fact, even if you work for a modest-sized professional company, chances are you’re waiting tables or slinging drinks in your off-hours to help pay the rent. But dancing, which like acting was once considered not much more than a variation on the world’s oldest profession, has become an honorable goal, even a noble one. And even as dance companies are struggling to keep their audiences and pay their bills, they are flooded with aspiring young dancers eager to join their ranks.

You can see the evidence all over town — and all over most towns of any size. Something important and time-honored is going on, something that feels like the best parts of the old medieval guild system: Those who have mastered the skills are passing them along to the next generation of artisans.

Stowell brought Damara Bennett from San Francisco to run OBT’s school, which does triple duty: developing new dancers for the company, preparing dancers to go on to other companies and schools, providing training for amateurs who will become the backbone of the future’s dance audience. Sarah Slipper has once again brought together several leading choreographers and young dance professionals for her summer intensive Northwest Professional Dance Project. The highly competitive Jefferson Dancers high school company continues to scatter alumni into professional companies and elite college programs across the country.

And in a small but handsome studio in Portland’s Hillsdale neighborhood, tucked between the farmers’ market and the feisty Three Square Grill, home of the flourishing Picklopolis culinary empire, The Portland Ballet continues to put its own spin on the city’s dance personality, quietly sending forth young dancers into the larger world. Founded under the name Pacific Artists Ballet in 2001 by husband-and-wife Nancy Davis and Jim Lane, Portland Ballet attaches “Academy and Youth Company” to the end of its name, and that’s a precise description: This is a school for young people who want to make dancing their profession.

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Barry Johnson, Film, General

Pupu Platter needs your help!

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Let’s just say we didn’t have enough audience polling of unsavory behavior going on right now. (Which actually we don’t!) We’d suggest joining MrMead at his Pupu Platter site and confess to the world what awful movies you love.

For me? The Vikings: Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis vie for the lovely hand of Janet Leigh, but when I saw it, circa 1958 or ’59, I was more interested in how to storm a castle, the talons of the falcon and the long Viking horn. But before you go, tell us 1) what words you mispronounce and 2) the movies that moved you in the appropriate slots below!

Bob Hicks, General, Language

Misled on Beijing: The words that twist our tongues

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(This is a reader-participation posting. You, too, can embarrass yourself thoroughly by fessing up to the words you’ve mispronounced, misconstrued or generally mistreated for most of your natural born days. Hit that comment button!)

Comes this, from the venerable Associated Press: Apparently the host city of the Michael Phelps Quadrennial Swimathon is Bay-JING, not Bay-ZHING.

Who knew?

Well, more than a billion Chinese citizens, for starters. And probably Richard Nixon, may he rest in semi-peace, and Henry Kissinger, who (I never thought I’d say a thing like this) might have been a handy fellow to have around to fend off the Russia-Georgia hot-war tiff that seems to have been made possible partly by American diplomatic and political miscues.

But not me, until the AP set me straight. And not the majority of our television talking heads. And maybe not you.

Some people seem to gravitate to the soft-z Bay-ZHING because it sounds, well, foreign and exotic, according to the AP. But that, the news service points out, is like saying New ZHER-zey: It just ain’t right. (And there’s nothing much exotic about New Jersey, although the views of Manhattan from West New York are pretty darned killer.)

So, the big question: What other words have we been mangling, misconstruing, mixing up? Which words in our private lexicons have meanings or pronunciations known only to us, even though we blissfully believe the rest of the English-speaking world is fully attuned to our singular and quaintly idiosyncratic interpretations?

Some years ago — oh, say when I was in my early 30s — a friend confessed that when she was a kid she thought the word “mis-led” was “MYZ-uld.” Heh-heh, I replied, and never let on that until that moment “misled” had MYZ-uld me completely. Oh, I knew about mis-led, and what it meant. But I was under the impression that there were two words: ordinary, garden variety mis-led, which was merely descriptive, and the beautiful MYZ-uld, which meant mis-led, but with nefarious purpose — a pirate word, a word signifying skulduggery. I miss it still.

I did better on ATH-ens, only tumbling to its true pronunciation in fourth- or fifth-grade world history, when the teacher got around to talking about Mt. Olympus and the Acropolis and other stuff I’d been reading and dreaming about for a few years. Trouble is, I’d only been reading about it, and in my little personal classical cosmos the great city of the ancient world was AY-thens, with a “th” like “the,” not like “therapy,” which I almost needed to deal with the disillusionment.

Sure, there are others. But why embarrass myself still more? Time for you to embarrass yourselves. Give us the lowdown on your badspeak. All of Art Scatterdom wants to know!

Barry Johnson, Books, Film, General

Battle royal: Books v. movies

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Should we allow movies to pulverize the soft images in our brains of the books we’ve read, poor defenseless images that they are? A Guardian blogger thinks it’s time to fight back, and Scatter rummages around for a few thoughts.

So, for the past few weeks we’ve talked about movies and we’ve talked about books, specifically books we were embarrassed to admit that we hadn’t read and then a little later movies that moved us to the max. Reading David Barnett’s book blog in the Guardian yesterday, I realized that some of the books I hadn’t read, books I might feel I should read under ordinary circumstances, didn’t occur to me. I’d seen the movie. This would involve the collected works of Jane Austen, for example. I just love those movies; never picked up a copy of Pride and Prejudice and probably never will. Though never is a long time. Strangely.

Barnett argues that ANY film version of a book, perhaps even including brilliant film versions, is an affront to the reader of the book, who has invested many hours of imaginative time over days or weeks or (gulp) months recreating the text in her/his head. Barnett’s key sentence:

Can there be anything worse than lovingly engaging with a couple of hundred thousand words of prose over perhaps two or three weeks, drinking in the author’s dialogue and descriptions, creating your own vision of the work in the privacy of your head, only to have every man and his dog (special offer on Tuesdays at your local Odeon) blast your intellectual ownership of the book out of the water after spending 90 minutes slobbing out in front of a cinema screen?

Here at Art Scatter we don’t believe in this sort of “intellectual ownership,” but we do think reading is a pretty sweet thing. And in comparing the way I approach movies to the way I approach books, I find that I am far more casual, generally, about the movie. I didn’t spend nearly as much time with Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, to cite a very recent example as I did with Peter Nadas’s essays, but felt no reservation about plunking a post down about it for your reading enjoyment. I’d read and re-read those three Nadas essays many times, assembled notes, thought and thought, before I ventured to the keyboard. Would that movie withstand that sort of scrutiny? That’s another question. But some movies do.
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