Monthly Archives: October 2008

Barry Johnson, Theater

Memories of “Vladimir, Vladimir”

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Memories fade. They begin vividly and then start to decay. And worse than decay, they start to deform. Until they are no longer very reliable. Valuable perhaps but not reliable. And then they vanish altogether. That’s one good way to think about memory.

Another way to think about it. We store our memories in a honeycomb of chambers. Sometimes we wander into one of the chambers and it’s dried out and empty. Nothing there of consequence. And then maybe the chamber collapses entirely. Much of the time, though, the chambers contain SOMETHING — a little drama, a smell, a lesson, maybe a song, sung just so by James Brown (Please, Please, Please). Weirdly, we are often rummaging around these chambers, yes, even when we are young.

We could come up with some other metaphors, too, I suppose, but I want to consider these two a bit, and how they relate to Imago’s Vladimir, Vladimir,
which I saw earlier this month and having succumbed to germs (among other things) never got back to. So this discussion about memory isn’t about Imago, really, it’s about me! Though we will get to Jerry Mouawad’s Vladimir, which closed last weekend, one way or another and soon.
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General

Autumnal thoughts: John Keats suffers to write blues

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She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine . . .

 

John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”

 

It is the most anthologized poem in the language, reportedly. (Who thumbed pages and tallied that?) Ron Rosenbaum offers perennial praise to it as the “greatest lyric poem in the language.” And days like the past few make it clear why John Keats‘ “To Autumn” is my favorite poem, celebrating the fullness of fall and accepting the deliquescence of the all-in-all that follows.

 

I think of Malcolm Lowry’s strange story “Strange Comforts Afforded by the Profession.” Lowry’s alter ego, Sijborn Wilderness, steps into the house in Rome where John Keats spent his last weeks before dying at the age of 26 in 1821. (It is the building, now a museum, to the right of the Spanish Steps.) The time of Lowry’s story is shortly after World War II, and Wilderness wonders at Keats’ suffering for his art, but against the broader background of Europe’s 20th century cauldron – the war and the Holocaust.

 

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Bob Hicks, Books, General, Theater

A trip to the moon on ‘Gossamer’ wings

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Gossamer has lost weight since its robust Middle English youth. These days we think of gossamer as light, airy, elusive, delicate, evanescent. Yet in its original form it was a simple compound of the terms for goose and summer. A sturdy word, with physical impact. The squawk and peck and heft of a barnyard bird. The good green moss and fern by the banks of a summer stream. Things you hear and feel and smell and touch.

Yet all that is solid fades away, and in that disappearance is the essence of gossamer. Gossamer flits in and out of physical reality. Now you see it. Now you don’t. A memory, a tickle, a promise, a hint. A window between worlds, whispered.

Tuesday morning, in the faded light of a perfect autumn day, I drove into downtown Portland to the Dolores Winningstad Theatre to take in the premiere of Gossamer, Newbery Award winner Lois Lowry‘s stage adaptation of her own children’s novel, with a crowd of fifth through seventh graders. Yes, Oregon Children’s Theatre‘s production has its shimmery moments — it’s about dreams and the benevolent, more- and less- than human race that creates them — but director Stan Foote keeps things grounded in the physical. These supposed creatures of the ether, with their impetuous curiosity and sturdy country ways, seem like yeomen and women of the goose-summer days. They’re like characters from Piers Ploughman.

Little wonder. Lowry’s dream makers, who aren’t quite sure themselves exactly who and what they are, exist in the imagination — and in this formulation, “exist” and “imagination” carry equal weight. They are caretakers of humans (and animals, too), and therefore linked to corporeality, even if they are only fleetingly embodied themselves. Like so many good stories for children — Mary Norton‘s The Borrowers, William Mayne‘s Hob and the Goblins — they give concrete form and personality to unexplainable things. And like the Christian transcendentalists of children’s lit, Madeleine L’Engle and C.S. Lewis (you could add Tolkien, but in spite of his grand-scale moral dualism he seems so much more thoroughly earthen to me), Lowry creates a world in which an unseen battle between good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, love and anger is just offstage of the human characters’ lives, determining the actions and reactions of what they see.

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General

Some cheerful Monday Scatter links

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One of our very favorite art critics, Jerry Saltz, looks on the bright side of the Impending Economic Turmoil. No, it’s not the part where 40 New York galleries close, an art magazine folds and a major art fair collapses. It has more to do with taking the commercial out of art.

What, only a thousand? The Guardian’s art critics have made a list of 1,000 artworks you should see before you die. And that means YOU! And Art Scatter! And anyone else walking around sentient. (We’re actually not sure if Art Scatter qualifies…) OK, it’s a crazy idea on the face of it: We solve the whole Canon Problem by including just about everything. But still, it’s the Guardian, so it’s pretty interesting.

The polymath Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog) wrote, “All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.” Which is the core idea behind both the flexible house movement and Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s article on same in the Boston Globe. Why make houses that are so difficult and expensive to remodel, when we know that they must be to accommodate the changing lives of their owners? MIT has been doing some of the best research on the problem in the U.S.

Books, Vernon Peterson

A novel idea for the voter’s pamphlet

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the polling place.
The last couple weeks in the political season anything said on behalf of a candidate is artful lie; anything about the opposition is out-and-out lie. The crude lesson of Modernism is that we are, one and all, unreliable narrators slouching toward the polls bearing a fragmented, mythologized tale. It is a commonplace that hagiography, of politician or saint, is the telling anecdote burnished, brightened and mythologized. But these days even formal academic history is a jumble of preconceived ideas and abstract principles, pleading a cause, no matter how neutral the tone. Revisionist history responds by discovering a different cause or an opposite effect.

Has skepticism, the core principle of knowledge and education, led to the debasement of politics, or has the pervasiveness of politics geared us to accept the lie as the lowest common denominator of public discourse? No matter. The problem, I think, is that we continue to view discourse as some sort of continuum running from hard fact to fiction. We’d be better off if we acknowledged that it’s all fiction, and that we live within a series of intersecting novels. We ought to read Free Market Economy and War on Terror the same way we read Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, or War and Peace. Fiction, we believe, bears some element of the truth in the artful arrangement of its lies. What’s behind the words or between the lines? Is it something the writer’s hidden there? Or something that can’t be found out by either the writer or the reader? If it’s fiction, at least, we know we’re responsible for digging truth out. We never take fiction at face value. Well, almost never.

Or perhaps this is simply a rationalization for why, at the age of sixty, I read very little but fiction. In fact, it’s a novel that sparked my recent bitter reflections on American politics.
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Barry Johnson, General, Music

Leonard Cohen: “Democracy” to the rescue!

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OK, you know I’ve been moaning about this election and the Death of Democracy, ad nauseum. But it’s a sunny October Saturday, and courtesy of my brother-in-law, a little hope just blew in, a reminder really, in the form of Leonard Cohen’s Democracy. Now, I can’t embed this video for you (I’m just not that good a hacker), but I heartily recommend following the link.

I think what makes me happiest about this song is how Cohen links this very abstract idea, democracy, with what it’s like to knock around on the ground in U.S.A. (or anywhere, really). And I especially like his suggestion of the erotics of democracy! (Its toward the end.)

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Opera’s chamber of horrors: ‘The Medium,’ well done

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As the intrepid Mr. Mead has reminded me, a lot of cool-sounding stuff is pounding the boards of Portland’s performance spaces right now:

Bucky Fuller, Adam Bock, Dead Funny, Guys and Dolls, and despite the mixed reviews I’d like to see Artists Rep’s Speech and Debate — there has to be a reason it was such a can’t-score-a-ticket hit in New York.

But last night as I headed to The Someday Lounge, Halloween was on my mind. And not just because of the weekend trip to the pumpkin patch on Sauvie Island (corn maze, plump gourds, rowdy kids, horrific traffic) but because it was opening night of Opera Theater Oregon‘s The Medium, Gian Carlo Menotti‘s hour-plus 1946 psychological thriller of an operatic melodrama (the word, remember, means simply drama with music).

These days, when people think of Menotti they tend to think of his autocratic reputation in the legacy of the two Spoleto festivals, in Italy and South Carolina. Or they think of Amahl and the Night Visitors, his 1951 television opera, which has become a Christmas-season staple. But although Christmas is coming, the goose ain’t fat yet. This is the time of haunts and ghouls, and The Medium is in perfect pitch with the season.

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Barry Johnson, General

Art Scatter sniffles through the campaign

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Some precincts of Art Scatter have been ill. Not desperately ill, not hardly. But sick enough to stay home and do battle with cold germs that are tougher than Scatter is. We are not looking for sympathy, though, not for the interminable snuffling and sniffing and, um, draining, because we know that’s just part of the cold game since mankind’s days on the savannah, except now we have delicate tissues to caress our even more delicate membranes and powerful decongestants that suck every drop of liquid from the nasal system at the same time they addle the senses, a trade that seems reasonable enough when you make it.

What do we deserve some sympathy for? Well, for several days we followed the presidential campaign. On television. From the major networks to the news cable channels, from Tom Brokaw to Rachel Maddow, from Fox News to Bloomberg News, from clips of Joe Biden suggesting melodramatically that somewhere even as we watch bad men were planning to “test the mettle” of a President Obama in some drummed up foreign crisis or another soon after the election to clips of John McCain yapping about Joe the plumber as though he actually WAS a real plumber and as though we actually cared.

A few important things happened — Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, for example, a model of direct, pertinent argument. But his arguments weren’t taken up, explored, tested, extended, refuted. No, they were immediately swallowed up by the horse race, by the media chattering heads, by the spinners, who as always embarrassed themselves in the process, but never mind, they’ve done it over and over and over again in the past. And then they disappeared in the charges that Obama is a socialist for advocating tax policies that McCain supported in 2000. Or that Palin is a hypocrite for wearing $150,000 worth of fancy clothing that no real soccer mom could afford, even though soccer moms rarely face TV cameras day after day after day as they run for vice-president. Of course, this trivial criticism is matched by a legion of trivial comments made by the candidate herself, most of them serving merely to belittle herself.
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Bob Hicks, Books, General

It’s a miracle! Dead bunnies revived!

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Hold the fort. Hold the matches. No book burnings in Halsey, after all.

Oregonian writer Joseph Rose files this report on Oregon Live: Apparently the angry mom who declared she’d burn the copy of Andy Riley’s cartoon book The Book of Bunny Suicides her son brought home from the school library has had second thoughts. Or maybe a clearer explanation of her first thoughts. Yeah, she said that stuff, she says now, but it was in the heat of anger: She didn’t really mean it. Although she still has a few stipulations before she’ll surrender the book to go back on the shelves.

Thank goodness. On the subject of book burning, Art Scatter sides squarely with Mel Torme. Chestnuts roast far better on an open fire.

Bob Hicks, Books, General

Bunny dies laughing; mom does slow burn

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So, this dyslexic guy walks into a bra …

Funny? Cruel? Crude? Pointless?

Yeah, probably.

Humor has a way of picking at scabs, and it loves taboo territory: The shock factor of transgression is liberating. So, George Carlin‘s seven dirty words. The flip-flopped race-baiting of Melvin Van Peebles‘ movie satire The Watermelon Man. The rank exploits of a supervillain chunk of flying excrement in Dav Pilkey‘s juvenile Captain Underpants comic books.

Humor can be rough when it deals with the “other” — the resented and ridiculed Micks and Wops and Yids and dumb Swedes, all butts of the joke of an emerging nation trying crudely to make sense of its own sprawling immigrant variety. And it can be every bit as tough when it looks inward: I just finished reading Michael Chabon‘s dark detective comedy The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and its feverishly over-the-top depiction of religious and cultural Jewishness (and, for good measure, Christian fundamentalist extremism) is hilarious and could only have been written by a Jew. In the annals of comic history, the seriously dimwitted — whether actually dumb or only considered dumb, for mocking purposes, by a core culture that thinks it needs an outcast — has always had a special role to play. Shakespeare had his Dogberrys and Aguecheeks. Sheridan had his Mrs. Malaprop. Texas has its village idiot. How many humorless pedants does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Until this morning I’d never heard of Andy Riley or his cartoon book The Book of Bunny Suicides. Then, there they were, both of them, on the front page of The Oregonian, in this story by Joseph Rose. The idiot bunnies and their creator are the focus of a book-snatching in the town of Halsey, between Corvallis and Eugene in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. A 13-year-old boy brought the book home from the high school library, which also serves middle school students. His mom looked at it. She was horrified and disgusted — and now she’s holding it for ransom.

Not ransom, actually. True, she’s filed an official complaint to have the book removed from the library shelves. In the meantime, though, she’s not giving it back. She says she’s going to burn it instead. Which is funny, in a perverse sort of way. Braised rabbit is a favorite fall dish in Oregon country.


Let me suggest that Riley’s bunnies are extreme dimwits, in a clever sort of way. As such, they’re a lot like the rest of us — and that’s what makes them funny.

I’m not about to anoint Riley with a crown of comic genius, at least not on the small sampling of his work that I’ve perused. It’s pretty juvenile — but then, it’s for juveniles, and a lot of humor gets its verve and sting from its immature prankishness, which allows it to view the careful concealments of adult convention and pull its pants down at it. I happen to be the father of boys 14 and almost 11, and every day I wince at some sort of boy crudeness or another. I try to herd them, rein them in, get them to understand the limits of civilized speech and behavior, for crying out loud, and I’m sure they’re thoroughly sick of all the nagging (they tell me so, regularly). But I’d also worry if they weren’t poking at the edges. Life is a scary thing, and if you can’t laugh at it, how are you going to bear it?
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