Monthly Archives: September 2008

Barry Johnson, Books

Farewell to David Foster Wallace

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I have been brooding about the suicide of David Foster Wallace since hearing about it last weekend. I thought of him as a sort of “family friend,” primarily because my son Nathan, one of his biggest fans, and my wife once had dinner with him (and a table full of other people). When I heard that he and Nathan spent a large chunk of time talking about movies, I couldn’t have been more pleased — and proud that my son could keep up with him. I don’t think I could have.

I think of Art Scatter as a sort of argument in favor of breadth. But it’s the shadow of the shadow of the argument made by DFW himself, whose supple brain could wrap itself around thorny mathematical ideas (his book on infinity is a wonder) and cruise ships with equal facility. I started to type “felicity,” so that, too.

Unlike a real “family friend” might have, I have no interpretation of the specifics of his death that makes a bit of sense. It just makes me profoundly sad. I heard about the death of William Gaddis right before taking a cruise of my own, found my way almost unconsciously to a bookstore and picked up a Gaddis book I hadn’t read, A Frolic of His Own, which weirdly proved to be an excellent commentary on the trip, not as direct as DFW’s own but equally keen to the absurdity. Now, I’m feeling called to do the same for David Foster Wallace as he joins the company of Gaddis. It’s the best I can do.

Barry Johnson, General

Scatter links to various and Tuesday

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Some hot buttered links to get you thinking? The first one involves money. Big Money.

1. The James Patterson phenomena! How does Patterson keep five separate lines of books going every year and pile up $1.5 BILLION in sales per annum? Teamwork, baby, teamwork.

2. “The Bonesetter’s Daughter”: how revolutionary IS the new Stewart Wallace-Amy Tan opera? The NY Times’ Anthony Tommasini and the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman were consulting their superlatives dictionary.

3. The importance of the site: theater is the theater. Well, maybe. LA Times theater critic Charles McNulty argues against Peter Brook’s famous “open theater” formulation, suggesting that local conditions affect productions in important ways. The article takes a quick tour of LA’s theater spaces and their “meaning”.

Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

Sunday in the park with the Halprins (while Rome burned)

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So, while Wall Street Giants shuddered, pivoted and crashed to the ground, Art Scatter was amusing itself at “City Dance,” the celebration of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, specifically Lawrence’s Portland plazas and fountains, Anna’s dances and early ’60s San Francisco art music, which somehow affected both. I will type (or is it keyboard, technically?) as long as I can, until the shock wave takes us off line… oddly it seems appropriate to muse on subjects such as these during times of economic crisis.

We’ve already set up the fountains, and to a lesser extent the dances, in a post below. To summarize, L. Halprin was hired by Ira Keller and the PDC to provide some public spaces for Portland’s first major Urban Renewal project, the demolition of the South Auditorium district and its replacement by a Skidmore, Owings, Merrill office/residential park. Keller was so happy with these, that he later asked L. Halprin to finish off the set with a plaza/fountain in front of what was then Civic Auditorium. It’s now the Keller Auditorium and the fountain is now Keller Fountain, though old-timers will be excused for calling it the Forecourt Fountain.

Fast forward 40 years or so. The fountains and plazas, important icons in the history of urban landscape design, could use a little conservation work, and so architecture writer/magazine editor Randy Gragg, the Halprin Conservancy, Third Angle New Music Ensemble and four Portland choreographers (Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilks, Linda Austin and Linda K. Johnson) banded together to help raise our collective consciousness about the Halprins’ work by staging a moving concert through all four sites (Keller Fountain, Pettygrove Park, Lovejoy Fountain, Source Fountain).

So on Sunday afternoon, sunny and warm, several hundred Portlanders, unaware perhaps that financial Redwoods were crashing, assembled to watch the show on the last day of the Time-Based Art Festival. Maybe there were more than that, adding the two concerts together. The second concert was so packed that when I arrived right before it began, I couldn’t get close enough to see anything much at the first site, the Keller Fountain, but that’s not going to deter me from my posting. Because there were three more sites to visit.
Continue reading Sunday in the park with the Halprins (while Rome burned) →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Language, Music, Visual Art

Thursday scatter: cool nicknames, a new guy at the Met

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One of our favorite Portland writers, Fred Leeson, has a sweet cover story in the inPortland section of today’s Oregonian on Sweet Baby James Benton, the smooth-singing jazz guy who is one of the last links to the great old days of the city’s North Williams Avenue jazz scene.

That scene was pretty much wiped out, along with the thriving black neighborhood that nourished it, by the midcentury sweep of urban renewal that also obliterated the bustling working and ethnic neighborhoods of south downtown, which at least led to the terrific Lawrence Halprin fountains that will be celebrated this weekend.

But enough of the heavy stuff. What we’re thinking about now is cool nicknames (Benton was being called Sweet Baby James at least a decade before James Taylor wrote that unavoidable song).

Jazz and blues and pop music have ’em. Count Basie. Duke Ellington. King Oliver. (Do we detect a pattern here?) Big Mama Thornton. Wild Bill Haley. Doctor John.

Football has ’em. Crazy Legs Hirsch. Whizzer White (who whizzed all the way to the United States Supreme Court bench). Night Train Lane (who gets honorary musical billing, too: He was married to the great Dinah Washington).

Baseball has ’em. Three Finger Brown. Big Poison Waner. Little Poison Waner. Stan the Man Musial. Moose Skowron. Catfish Hunter. Blue Moon Odom. Nuke Laloosh. (We don’t count sportswriter inventions such as the execrable “Splendid Splinter” for Ted Williams, or even “The Bambino” for George Herman Ruth: “Babe” was quite enough.)

We confess to a longstanding if not deeply felt regret for our own un-nicknamedness. A few people in our youth called us Hopalong: Although it’s true we once created a whole Hopalong Cassidy comic book with a fresh storyline by carefully cutting apart several old Hoppy comics and rearranging the panels in a way that fit our desires, the monicker was tied more directly to our unorthodox running style, which included a couple of hops and a jump. And a few people, knowing both our middle name and our family roots in the rural South, refer to us as “Bobby Wayne.” But those aren’t real nicknames. They don’t stick.

So, the big question: How about you? Got a favorite nickname for a public or semi-public figure? (Arianna Huffington, it seems, has annointed Sarah Palin with “The Trojan Moose,” but we have a feeling the honoree should actually be willing to accept the honor.) Something you were tagged as a kid that has sadly (or not so sadly) drifted away? A name you’d really like to be known by, if only someone else would get the ball rolling? Hit that comment button. All of Art Scatter really, really wants to know.

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THE CHANGING OF THE GUARDS:

Big news at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which some of us consider one of the coolest spots on Earth. Thomas P. Campbell, a late horse in the running, has been selected to replace the venerable Philippe de Montebello as director and chief executive. Campbell is 46 and widely respected by those who know him; his specialty is European tapestries. Montebello is 72 and has run the Met, extremely well, for 31 years; he retires next year. With Campbell, the Met went in-house and chose someone with impeccable professional credentials — no sure thing in the go-go museum world, where directors, like college presidents, are often chosen more for their ability to haul in the bucks than for their artistic or academic chops. Of course, Campbell’s going to have to raise tons of money, too. Good luck! Carol Vogel has the story in the New York Times. Plus, a compelling analysis from the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Alexei Ratmansky, artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, is leaving Moscow for New York to become artist in residence at American Ballet Theater: The internationalization of the ballet world continues apace. Again, The Times has the report.

And up the freeway in Seattle, Gerard Schwarz has announced he’ll retire as music director of the Seattle Symphony in 2011. He’s 61 now and will have been at the helm in Seattle for 26 years , guiding the orchestra, among other achievements, into its splendid home at Benaroya Hall. His leavetaking will not exactly be met with wailing and gnashing of teeth by a number of orchestra members, who have chafed under his autocratic leadership. But others at the symphony are stout defenders, and he’s put this orchestra on the map. A lot of potential replacements are going to consider this a plum job. Reports from the Seattle Times and the New York Times.

Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

Deep Portland history: Lawrence Halprin and Ira Keller

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Monday night, Randy Gragg and Portland Spaces magazine staged another of its Bright Light City Discussions; this one featured historian Carl Abbott and was part of the Time-Based Art Festival. We took notes! More importantly we learned a lot about Lawrence Halprin and a provocative piece of Portland history. There was lots of information, some of which we may have gotten wrong. Don’t hesitate to correct our record!

Before the start of the Randy Gragg and Carl Abbott presentation on the history of the old South Auditorium district and the Lawrence Halprin fountains and plazas that replaced it, I happened to sit across from Robert Perron. This was lucky. Perron taught landscape design at UC Berkeley in the early ’60s when Halprin was there and knows a lot about him and his aesthetic impulses. And his knowledge of Portland is deep, possibly because he’s worked on so much of it, including the Salmon Street Fountain, Terry Schrunk Park and the First Presbyterian Church garden park. Because of that he understands the accidents, unintended consequences and budget shortfalls that affect the design of our cities and therefore our lives.

Shrunk was the mayor and Ira Keller was the chairman of the newly formed Portland Development Commission (PDC) when the decision was made in the late ’50s to bulldoze the aging neighborhood south of downtown and replace it with a utopian Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) residential and commercial district with impressive towers surrounded by green space. And in the green space, Keller decided, there should be a series of plazas and fountains designed by Halprin.
Continue reading Deep Portland history: Lawrence Halprin and Ira Keller →

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

TBA dance: “Pichet Klunchun and Myself”

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Dance writer Martha Ullman West, a charter member of Friends of Art Scatter, files this report on her meeting two years ago with Thai dancemaker Pichet Klunchun on his home turf in Bangkok, and on Klunchun’s public appearance in Portland a few days ago. On Sunday night, Klunchun took the stage at PICA’s annual TBA festival of contemporary performance in a conversation/performance with French dancemaker Jerome Bel.

In February of 2006, I interviewed Pichet Klunchun for an hour and a half on the ninth floor terrace of the Oakwood Hotel in Bangkok, at sunset. That’s important: Due to acute air pollution, Bangkok sunsets are spectacular, and watching Klunchun demonstrate some of the movements of Khon — traditonal Thai dance — against a sky that looked like a painting by J.M.W. Turner animated with time stop photography, made the experience as magical as it was informative.

Klunchun, wearing very western-looking jeans and a tee-shirt, told me many things that evening — some of them the same, and phrased in the same way, as he told French contemporary choreographer Jerome Bel in Pichet Klunchun and Myself, switch-and bait-interviews observed by an enthusiastic TBA audience on Sunday night in Lincoln Performance Hall. To wit: Klunchun identified himself as a professional dancer, omitting how difficult that is in Thailand, and talked about his attempts to professionalize dance as we do in the West. He spoke of Khon as a lost art and his desire to restore it as part of the culture. On Sunday night in Portland he pointed out that it has become a commercialized tourist attraction — tourists in this context are westerners, although there are plenty of Thai and Chinese tourists in Bangkok. But on Sunday night he omitted the information that he had directed Khon performances in Bangkok in which he fused the Western theatrical values that Bel self-consciously rejects with traditional movement and storytelling, reducing to 70 minutes what usually takes a week to perform.

On both nights he spoke, too, of the difference in energy between Western and Asian dance — the former outward toward the audience, the latter inward, circular, contemplative — but left out his own training in western dance and his own practice, not to mention the influence of William Forsythe, who has radicalized the classical vocabulary, deconstructed and fractured it, on the way he thinks now about traditional dance.

When Klunchun, dressed on Sunday night in clothes he could dance in, demonstrated at Bel’s request Khon technique — the seemingly impossible turned-back movements of the fingers, the turned-out legs, the aggressive stomps, the subtle gestures of characterization — he was as charismatic as he had been doing the same things in jeans in Bangkok. But at TBA his demonstration accounted for at most 10 minutes of a nearly two-hour performance — and performance it was — from which the magic was decidedly missing.

That loss I must lay in part at Bel’s self-serving door.

Continue reading TBA dance: “Pichet Klunchun and Myself” →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

BodyVox jumps for joy about its new home

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While we’re all worrying about arts organizations going bust (let’s just hope there’s life and vitality in the Portland Jazz Festival yet) and arguing about whether the city needs a covered plaza as a gateway to the downtown arts district, let’s take time out for a spot of good news.

BodyVox has a new home.

OK, right now it’s a big old mostly empty warehouse with 1890s brick walls reminiscent of a 1970s restaurant rehab (Art Scatter happens to be fond of old brick walls and brawny posts and beams, if not necessarily hanging ferns). But Jamey Hampton, who runs the popular dance and movement troupe with his wife and fellow performer/choreographer Ashley Roland, says the space will be ready for the company’s spring show, and adds that the troupe’s architects, Portland’s BOORA, are estimating a complete makeover by next June. Well, maybe some of the office spaces won’t be quite done by then, Hampton says: Depends on the money.

Portland is a talk-big, think-small town, and that’s both bad and good. The bad part is that it supports its large organizations poorly and doesn’t really think, despite its sometimes fawning press notices, that it can play in the big leagues. The good part is that modest-sized organizations such as BodyVox have learned how to get the most bang for their buck and have an impact far beyond the size of their budgets. It’s a corrolary to our economic self-image: We define ourselves as a small-business-friendly city because we don’t have much in the way of big businesses, and then turn that into an advantage.

BodyVox’s new building, which it rolled out in a convivial tour/party late Monday afternoon, is at Northwest Northrup Street and 17th Avenue, a nice, relatively quiet urban stretch that’s tucked neatly between the Pearl District and the city’s more traditional Northwest neighborhoods. Easy to get to, relatively easy to find a parking space, and a mortgage, not a lease. Nice work if you can get it, and BodyVox did.

The building, which began life as Portland’s Wells Fargo building (the main space was for carriage storage, and there were also stables and a dormitory for the drivers) and more recently was the printing and publishing space for Corberry Press, came to BodyVox through Henry Hillman, the arts supporter, photographer, glass artist and owner of several properties. As Roland tells the story, Hillman had been advising BodyVox in its hunt for a new, bigger space, and kept pointing out the shortcomings of several possibilities: too small, not at street level, too hard to rehab. Finally, Hampton said, “Well, what about your building?” And Hillman said, “Hmmm.” Hillman keeps his glass studio next door, and as a bonus has a decent parking lot that BodyVox can use in the evenings.

Continue reading BodyVox jumps for joy about its new home →

Barry Johnson, Music

Wanted: Portland Jazz Festival sugar daddy

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We’ve added a couple of updates below, as jazz bloggers around the country start to weigh in on the collapse of the Portland Jazz Festival.

Today’s paradox: Portland has a small and by some measures thriving jazz scene; and Portland can’t keep a national-class jazz festival going to save its buttons. Today’s announcement — that the Portland Jazz Festival will “cease operations” next week unless a sponsoring sugar daddy is found who will take a $100,000 plunge — was one of those depressing pieces of news that reminds us just how fragile our arts bubble is. It’s hard for me to imagine this year without Ornette Coleman in it, and Ornette was here only because of the PJF. He came at just the right time for me, just as I was thinking seriously about the problem of creativity, and I loved his utter pragmatic dedication to sustaining his creative flow.

Jazz is one of the most frequently employed metaphors for creativity: the way it adapts and re-adapts, uses and reuses, improvises on the spot; the paradoxes it supports in the ordinary course of business, like its insistence on being in the moment and above the moment at the same time; its recognizable collision of technique, inspiration, individual play and teamwork; and well, we could go on. And maybe on that ground alone, as a metaphor, never mind the music and its place in our cultural history, I would argue for the PJF. We are beginning to understand how critical imagination and its practical application are to everything we do, especially in a city like Portland, which must live by its wits, not by its oil fields; jazz allows us to think about that in an especially delightful way. Somebody in Portland designed a better boot after hearing Ornette, I’m sure of it!
Continue reading Wanted: Portland Jazz Festival sugar daddy →

Barry Johnson, General

Scatter looks at its schedule

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The first post-Labor Day weekend is upon us, meaning the arts Big Time has begun in Portland. Which reminds us once and for all of our limitations: We simply can’t do everything. A&E’s Fall Arts Guide will give you a good idea of what’s coming up and some guidance about what might matter most, though Scatter believes the whole “mattering” thing is so very subjective, as you know.

Three areas of general interest:

1. TBA is up and running. This presents our difficulty in a nutshell. Just today there’s a site-specific work by Sojourn at
South Waterfront and performances by Reggie Watts, Leesaar the Company, Antony and the Johnsons, Neal Medlyn, Ice Rod and Khris Soden. Among others! Our cup runneth over. Often, we try to find out about what we missed by consulting Grant Butler and his gang of TBA bloggers.

2. First Thursday was last night/First Friday is tonight. Henk Pander, Sean Healey, Rene Rickabaugh, Hildur Bjarnadottir, Stewart Harvey, Ethan Jackson, Christine Bourdette, Michael Knutson… Seriously, this is impossible. And we haven’t caught up with Volume, the group show curated by Jeff Jahn yet, either.

3. Theater gets going with Blackbird at Artists Repertory Theatre. Artistic director Allen Nause gets to play another of the creepy roles he inhabits so well in David Harrower’s drama. Marty Hughley gives the show a nice preview in A&E.

We won’t see everything that attracts us, not by a longshot, but we will attempt to report back on what we do stumble upon. Unless, of course, it all gets to be TOO MUCH!

Barry Johnson, General, Television, Visual Art

Scatter’s “Project Runway” infatuation

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OK, let’s just put a few cards on the table: There is a certain variety of reality television show that can be practically irresistible to Art Scatter, at least its lesser precincts. Bravo’s Project Runway,” on which younger or youngish or young-in-spirit fashion designers compete each week for exposure, of course, and some fabulous prizes, of course, has become one of them. The affinity began with This Old House, which managed to consume ALL of our home improvement impulses in one easy, painless half hour a week that didn’t involve ego-destroying contact with dangerous tools. Perfect! Others that have attracted us include Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan, who attempts to show you how to reduce your dogs to a state of “calm submission” and even Supernanny, who attempts to reduce human children to a state of “calm submission.”

Back to Project Runway, though. Which is different for me because I have absolutely no desire to design clothing and there’s no calm submission involved. In fact, chortling at the fashions in the New York Times has always been something I shared with my wife, a way to bond. Who thinks up these get-ups, I’ve often wondered. Thanks to Project Runway, I now know, and not only that, I get to see them work in the most stressful situations — and frankly, after last night’s episode, it looks as though the stress is starting to win.

So is Portland’s own Leanne Marshall! Leanne (aka Leanimal) has won two consecutive episodes (or “challenges”). We LOVE her. For a while, she looked like the least likely to succeed, so fragile personally and so quirky of spirit and design. But Leanne has untapped reservoirs of spunk, and to go with her coolness under pressure, she’s developed a cool designing style that has won over the judges, who included Diane von Furstenberg last night. By cool, I simply mean sleekness of silhouette, luxurious fabrics, impeccable craftswomanship and coherent design ideas (see! I’m learning my terms!). Quirks lurk but they don’t take over — they add charm and visual interest. There are some other excellent designers, too, and I wouldn’t be crushed if, for example, Korto won. She has great ideas and sticks by her guns (a yellow highlight on a black and white print last night, which Tim Gunn, who acts as a sort of designer handler for emcee Heidi Klum, had serious reservations about during the process, but which Korto insisted on using). We love you too Korto!

I can’t wait to get to work to talk last night’s episode over with Kristi Turnquist, who is a devout follower of the show and posts on Oregonlive.com about it after every episode.