Monthly Archives: November 2008

General

Paul Goldberger’s cities of the future: lecture tonight

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So, we’ve been preparing for Paul Goldberger’s lecture tonight on the future of cities in the 21st century. It’s 6 pm tonight in the White Stag building, $25. Why spend that kind of money on an architecture critic whose Sky Line column you can read in the New Yorker? Well, mostly because a lecture is a totally different form — more elastic, if only because of the presence of the audience, one that allows for a bit more speculation because its opinions aren’t frozen forever in print (or a digital file).

Spending some time with Goldberger’s columns and other work (for Vanity Fair, say) is a comfortable experience. He’s smart and observant, of course (he did win a Pulitzer for his criticism in the New York Times before moving to the New Yorker), and he’s also careful and even-handed (perhaps a result of those long years in daily journalism). So, he can give a measured opinion about the heavy hand of New York’s master planner Robert Moses, without giving the impression that he’s fallen in with the Moses revisionists seeking to spin some of the truly awful things Moses did to New York (and even Portland — until we revolted the same way New York did). Moses did some good things ; some bad things. That was the tenor of his review of Brad Cloepfil’s 2 Columbus Circle building, too — he found a mixed bag, perhaps less than hoped for outside and more than hoped for inside.

The reason I plunked down for a ticket, though, is that I really liked his investigations of Beijing during the Olympics, and those columns give the topic of his lecture even more gravity. If the future is Beijing and Shanghai, what does that tell us? Because frankly, it chills me to the marrow. The massive towers of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, Singapore and China seem so futuristic somehow, but not in a good way. Dystopian. Like Blade Runner or Orwell. In a way, I see them as the ultimate triumph of Robert Moses, perhaps, or Le Corbusier, the next sterile, logical step. They seem such perfect machines for control of those within, for detection of the thought-crimes they commit. The smart building. The panopticon. The luxury prison.

And then what’s going on outside those “smart towers”, which generate their own energy, purify and condition their own air? Those arks designed to lodge the “lucky” as they sail into the future? Outside, it’s a killing field of crazy tropical infections brought about by the Warming, scarcity as populations explode and then crash, increasingly polluted, increasingly dangerous, increasingly uninhabitable. Thought crime inside the tower is punished simply by expulsion into the chaos outside.

Whew! It felt good to get that out of my system! And I’m hoping that Mr. Goldberger will be able to put my fears to rest. Twenty-five bucks would be a small price to pay…

General

A little scatter, light and local

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It’s Tuesday night, and we have lots of half-baked posts on our minds. Possibly quarter-baked. OK, totally raw. So, we hit the local channels on the Internet…

Art Scatter has been completely oblivious to the steampunk movement, just generally and specifically as it relates to costume design. And most especially as it relates to the Oregon Children’s Theatre production of James and the Giant Peach and designer Sarah Gahagan. Our thanks to Culture Shock for the entertaining education!

Keeping it tuned to theater, Steve Patterson gives us a taste of the play that won the Oregon Book Award for drama, Lost Wavelength over at his site, Splattworks. Let’s see the whole thing!

Brian Libby at Portland Architecture gave a good summary of the proposal to change the rules of engagement in the Skidmore National Historic District to allow taller buildings on five sites in the district. I went to the City Council meeting that his post advanced last week, and I’ll be following it, because both sides of the dispute make reasonable, articulate arguments. Look for more on this later — City Council takes it up again on Dec. 18. Brian’s site is a terrific way to follow Portland architecture developments.

One of our regular stops is the Portland Mercury’s Blogtown, which bubbles along with a combination of news and views from Portland’s creative underbelly. Or overbelly. Or whatever. We don’t have a particular link in mind — we just liked the combination today.

Books, General, Poetry, Vernon Peterson

Live from Reed, it’s Gary Snyder 52 years ago

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Gary Snyder , Lincoln High and Reed College graduate, made a return appearance in Portland Friday. In the Oregonian Jeff Baker reports the discovery of a tape of Gary Snyder reading at Reed College on February 14, 1956. Rather, it is a cassette copy a Reed student made twenty-five years ago from the original reel-to-reel tape that is now missing. Recall back in February of this year Scatter commented on Reed’s release of the tape of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” that same night and the likelihood that a second tape had captured Snyder’s reading, too. The release of the Ginsberg tape inspired the Reed graduate, Portland photographer Steve Halpern, to offer up the cassette he had made while doing research in Reed’s library. Baker’s story includes Snyder’s reaction to the discovery. Baker also reports that Snyder’s reading from the seminal work “Myths & Texts” gives a glimpse of how the text published in 1960 evolved from the early version he read at Reed.

Jack Kerouac wrote a fictionalized account of Snyder and Ginsberg during this time in The Dharma Bums, still my sentimental favorite among Kerouac’s novels. You can listen to the tape at Reed’s website, which also has extensive notes discussing the variations between the read and published versions of the poems. The recording is remarkably clear. Snyder’s rich outdoor voice complements nicely the environmental themes of the poems. In addition to “Myths and Texts,” Snyder read versions of poems published in later books, including Riprap (1959), although he did not read the title poem in that collection. Too bad, really, for “Riprap” is Snyder’s call to arms, hands and feet as a poet, as well as to the voice, mind and heart that grows through his work from beginning to end.
Continue reading Live from Reed, it’s Gary Snyder 52 years ago →

Barry Johnson, Dance, General

Kidd Pivot’s got the power at Kaul

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Let’s say you’re in Portland and you don’t anything on for tonight, or maybe you have something on, but you’re dreading it. Or Saturday night. If you are in that circumstance, then Art Scatter suggests that you drop in on Kidd Pivot, at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. It’s that good.

Kidd Pivot is the brainchild of Crystal Pite (rhymes with kite), a Vancouver, B.C., choreographer, who danced with Ballet B.C. and Ballett Frankfort, where she worked with William Forsythe. She founded Kidd Pivot in 2001, though she continues to choreograph for other companies.

For the White Bird series, Pite and her company of six are performing Lost Action (2006). It’s a 70-minute, one-act (no intermission) concert that only lags a little toward the conclusion, primarily because of false ending or two. Until then, though, the action, lost or not, is totally engaging. For this dance, Pite has borrowed a little hip-hop, knitted things together with repeated actions and tableaux and employed a propulsive movement device: The dancers typically run pell-mell through a phrase that stops stock still; then they sprint off again. And even when they are doing slower phrases, they frequently end motionless.

She favors movements of the arms extended or bowed and shoulders, though in one delightful moment a leg extended above a dancer’s head descends in a soft S curved, a remarkable effect, which fortunately repeats! The dance is gestural, definitely, and some of the sections seem to tell a little story. In a recurring motif, a dancer collapses and other dancers stand above him looking down, eventually picking him up and “reviving” him in a sort of “passing” ritual. There’s a little parka section (O Canada!). There’s drama and tension and sadness. The solos are uniformly excellent, primarily because the dancers are, I suppose. Swift, athletic, open to the moment. They partner the same way: You don’t notice the precision at first because they make even difficult moments, and there are lots of those, look easy.

I especially liked the sections for the four men in Kidd Pivot. The specific physical attributes of men are frequently under-realized on dance stages, but Pite takes advantage of the power and speed and abruptness her men bring. Which isn’t to say that the other women are overwhelmed here. Pite is an amazing mover — powerful, agile, quick, bristling with kinetic energy. And Marthe Krummenacher and Francine Liboiron bring some specific talents to the table, one longer and expressive and the other smaller and sharper.
Continue reading Kidd Pivot’s got the power at Kaul →

Barry Johnson

A little note from the ex-editor

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Most Art Scatter readers know that I work at The Oregonian, right? Editing the writers of the arts staff (and a fine band they are!) insofar as they will let me? I haven’t talked about this much directly, mainly because I didn’t want Art Scatter to be a place where people came to criticize the paper or its arts coverage. That part of things has worked out well! I’m not sure how exactly I would characterize Art Scatter, but it isn’t a newspaper kvetch site, that’s for sure.

I bring all of this up now because my assignment at the paper is changing. Starting soon, though maybe not until the first of the new year, I’ll be writing a column for The Oregonian with a significant online presence on OregonLive. I’m not exactly sure how Art Scatter will fit into this for me, but I’m hoping that the two can work together somehow, and I’m definitely hoping that you, the wisest and best blog readers in the whole dang blogosphere!, will take a peek at my posts on OregonLive from time to time. If I’m clever enough (stop that snickering!), the two should work together (that’s what links are for, after all), with more reported stuff at OregonLive and more, um, speculative and scatter-y stuff over here.

For me, this is a good change, one that I wanted, even though I’ll miss working with the arts writers and editors as closely as I have. That was really great. As I told them, I learned so much from them the past 7 years or so, so much about EVERYTHING, that I’ll never really be able to pay them back. But writing here at Art Scatter has rekindled my interest in writing in general (not to mention writing generally) and I’ll be able to do that full time now. I know. Be careful what you wish for.

But I should be able to explore and write about the cultural life of the city more directly than I have as editor. I’ll be out more, I’ll talk to more of you, and then I’ll try to report back . I’m counting on you to keep me honest, to give me suggestions and tips, to challenge me when I need it, to provide alternate (and better) descriptions and meanings of things that I have tried to figure out. Anyway, I’ll keep you, um, posted on developments with column and blog, and in the meantime, I should be building up lots of material for Art Scatter.

By the way, David Stabler has blogged about this himself, from his point of view meaning altogether too charitably, if you want to take a look.

Bob Hicks, Books, Food, General, Visual Art

Thursday scatter: ugly veggies, moral fiction

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Our old friend Giuseppe Arcimboldo is on our mind today, as he should be on yours. Arcimboldo, you may recall, is the great fruit and vegetable guy of the 16th century, the painter who made a splendid living by portraying people in botanic form, and he could twist a turnip like nobody’s business if that was what he needed to do to turn a proper chin.

The old agrarian image-monger comes to mind because of today’s news that the European Union, an outfit that really should have known better in the first place, has scrapped its rules banning the display and sale of ugly fruits and vegetables in supermarkets. Well, it’s lifted the ban, sort of. Come July, when the rules change, you can get a misshapen pea or plum but not, for instance, an ugly apple or tomato (and everyone knows the ugly tomatoes are generally the best-tasting). The continent that brought us such notable advocates of lookalike symmetry as Napoleon and Hitler will allow you to buy or sell certain misshapen produce so long as they’re labeled substandard or intended for cooking or processing.

Then again, how are the bureaucrats going to know what you do with your zany zucchini once you get it home? What if you slice it and eat it raw? What if you turn it into ratatouille? What if you make holes in it and hang it from your ears? What if you prop it on your kitchen counter and turn it into LIVING ART?

A Certain Member of Our Household is an inveterate (some might say shameless) collector of oddball fruits and vegetables, the more twisted and deformed the better, and it’s a trait we’ve come to cherish. Up with skewed squash! Down with boring, blandly beautiful Golden Delicious apples! Mutts of the botanical world, the battle is yours!

On a regular basis ACMOH arrives home from the grocery store or farmers market with something truly glorious: a turnip that looks as if it’s been trained by a psychotic bonsai artist; an eggplant with troll-size warts; a carrot with forked tongue; a tomato like lumpy gravy. It becomes the center of conversation, the subject of visual admiration, yea, the philosophical warrior of freedom in the great battle for variety as the spice of life. It holds center stage as it slowly deteriorates. Then it becomes compost, or dinner. And soon, a new beautiful monstrosity takes its place.

Europe, you disappoint us, although you seem to be coming to your senses. You never would have gone so stultifyingly astray if you’d kept your eye on Arcimboldo. And he’s a native son.

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Meanwhile, the curtain has come down semi-successfully on the latest act in the Sherwood Follies: The town’s school board has decided that John Gardner‘s novel Grendel will not be removed from the reading list in the sophomore honors English class, in spite of insistent complaints from a tiny group of distressed parents. (Sherwood is the Oregon town, you’ll recall, where a middle school principal last school year banned performance of a play about bullying, again prompted by a small number of angry parents.)

Not a lot of people have spotted the irony simmering at the bottom of this tempest-toss’d teapot, which was brought to a boil because of moral objections to some particularly gruesome violent acts on the part of Gardner’s central character, the notorious monster slain by the hero Beowulf. Gardner, back in the 1970s, loudly and prominently declared himself ON THE SIDE OF MORALITY — although his idea of morality was quite different from the hide-your-eyes-and-hunker-down version advocated by so many self-styled moral guardians these days. Here’s what Lore Segal has to say about Gardner’s stand in her fascinating, finely written introduction to a recent reprint of Gardner’s 1978 book On Moral Fiction. (The whole essay’s worth reading, and probably the book, too, which I found stimulating, even though I disagreed with large chunks of it, when it first came out. I haven’t reread it since):

“The purpose of criticism, said John Gardner, was not to belabor the distinctions between modernism and postmodernism but to look at the real end of all art, which is Beauty, Truth and Goodness, as decent folk have known all along.”


Even, apparently, a solid majority of the decent folk of Sherwood. Gardner, by the way, took a lot of heat for the position he staked out in On Moral Fiction, and its publication undoubtedly did serious harm to his career. But he was stubborn in his belief that morality is difficult yet definable, and that it plays a central role in art. Grendel had a case to be made, and Gardner let him make it pretty well. Caliban had a case, too. And Frankenstein’s monster. Ugly vegetables, all, perhaps, but fascinating — and instructive — in their own ways.

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West, Music, Theater, Visual Art

A native scatters in New York: Home sweet … hmmm

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(Friend of Art Scatter Martha Ullman West, she who knows a plie from a pirouette like nobody’s business, has recently sojourned in her home town of NYC and brings us back this Big Apple journal from October 21 to November 5, 2008. The city seems familiar, but …)

Can you actually be a tourist in your home town? At times I certainly felt like one on my recent visit to the city in which I grew up, quite a long time ago.

I attended a performance in a theater new to me — the Rose, where I heard a stellar rendition of Bach’s St. John’s Passion by Musica Sacra in a space that is usually relegated to jazz. And I felt so even more when I had to ask not one but two of the hordes of security police on Wall Street to direct me to One Chase Manhattan Plaza, the bank’s headquarters and the location of the Ballet Society/New York City Ballet archives. These are not exactly housed in a vault, but they have been relegated to the fifth floor sub-basement of that temple to Mammon for good reason: a board member of the Balanchine Foundation arranged for donated space.

There couldn’t be a worse place to work– no air, harsh fluorescent lights, a desk that was too high, a chair that was too low. But it was a gold mine of information regarding American Ballet Caravan‘s 1941 tour of South America, the first North American ballet company to go to the region, on a goodwill tour arranged through Nelson Rockefeller by Lincoln Kirstein for the overt purpose of a cultural exchange, and the covert purpose of undercutting anti-American propaganda disseminated by Germany before Pearl Harbor.

I spent two days delving into boxes of documents and photographs, physically uncomfortable, but psychically happy as the proverbial clam. The archivist, Laura Raucher, who has a degree in the science of dance from the University of Oregon, photocopied anything I wanted and spent more than an hour searching the database for the heights of various Balanchine ballerinas, information needed for another project.

A few days later I was at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, for which I daily thank Robbins, whose royalties support arguably the best dance library in the world, looking at film of Marie Jeanne coaching today’s dancers in her role in Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, created for her before that 1941 tour. I learned that the ballet, a high-speed visualization of the Bach Double Violin concerto, used to be performed even faster than it is today. The library is an extremely comfortable place to work, fluorescent lights notwithstanding, but there you must do your own photocopying and pay for it, sigh. Always something.

Continue reading A native scatters in New York: Home sweet … hmmm →

Books, Language, Poetry, Vernon Peterson

W. S. Merwin in other words

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Starting with A Mask for Janus, which W.H. Auden picked for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1952, W. S. Merwin’s first poems were written in a traditional mode, many on themes drawn from classical mythology. In the 1960s, Merwin opened up his forms, abandoned formal lines and punctuation, and infused his poems with anti-war and environmental themes. The Moving Target (1963) and The Lice (1967) revolutionized poetry in a manner different from the way the Beats did. Merwin’s poems still hit me in the gut. A mystical, searching quality sparked by everyday perception and simple language. “Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise” finds the poet recognizing gold chanterelles pushing through sleep and wondering “Where else am I walking even now / Looking for me”. He discovers that his “eyes are waiting for me / in the dusk / they are still closed / they have been waiting a long time/ and I am feeling my way toward them.” That from “Words From a Totem Animal,” Merwin’s characteristic evocation of the spirit haunting man’s relations with the natural world.

So when Kayak press published Animae, a 1200 copy chapbook, in 1969, I was ready for Merwin’s next leap into the unknown. I ordered it through a college bookstore, and when it arrived I loved immediately the paper bag feel of the green cover, the faded salmon pages. It was a shock–but not that much of a shock–to find the pages blank through the whole book. “Animae,” I thought, spirit manifest by its absence. A neat trick, and a low-budget effect, too, at $1.50, and whatever change for postage. I’ve returned to it over the years, as much probably as to any book I own with words. It is seldom listed among Merwin’s published books, and I’d never read about it until last year an academic article referenced it as containing poems about animals, as well as illustrations by Lynn Schroeder. Shocked again! Somehow, my copy ended up a misprint, or non-print. Now, of course, I see the words that are not there. I lived nearly forty years with my blank book and wish I could have it back.

Continue reading W. S. Merwin in other words →

General

An ode to a Portland Ganesha

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The world being what it is, the key question that the sweetest of our antiquities generates is who owns them. Who owns them. Not, what do they mean. Not, how do we preserve them. Not, how do we protect them when they are in the ground. Not, how do we make them available to scholarship. Nope, it’s all about who owns them. And that usually boils down to the government of the country of origin versus the museum or collector who has them in its possession and doesn’t want to give them up.

Sharon Waxman’s Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, which was just published and which I hasten to add I haven’t read as yet, has received a spate of reviews, an indication that antiquities matter to general readers, not just museum curators, government cultural offices and tomb raiders. Maybe that’s the Indiana Jones Effect. Maybe it has to do with the steady flow of blockbuster exhibitions of ancient art since King Tut demonstrated in 1977 that from the afterlife he still could rule the museum world. Maybe it has to do with their intrinsic beauty.

Or maybe we see a Grecian urn and a door unlocks, as it did for Keats.

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme

The pot or the stele or the amulet or the carving is simultaneously mysterious and informative, opaque and transparent, a subject of study and wild speculation. Who were we? And how does that explain how we got this way?
Continue reading An ode to a Portland Ganesha →

Barry Johnson, Books, Music, Theater

A Monday quick chatter

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Art Scatter hereby congratulates the winners (and the nominees, for that matter) of this year’s Oregon Book Awards, especially Steve Patterson, whom we track on his Splattworks blog, for winning the drama award for his “Lost Wavelengths.” If you think doing theater is hard in the provinces, writing theater is even less rewarding, and Steve had written something like 25 plays (per his website). So, bravo Mr. Patterson. UPDATE: We recommend that you link to Mr. Mead’s pupu platter for a longer take on Mr. Patterson!

Two other items grabbed our attention in our Monday morning Oregonian. First, Marty Hughley’s unabashedly positive review of Thom Pain (based on nothing) and its star Matthew DiBiasio, which requires us to go to Beaverton to see Will Eno’s one-man rumination about, well, pain.

Second, we were happy to see that James McQuillen concurred (mostly and more learnedly) with our happiness over Tomas Svoboda’s new string quartet and much of the rest of the Third Angle show. Art Scatter needs all the validation it can get for its musical taste, so thank you for that Mr. McQuillen. On a side note, in a comment to our original post on Svoboda below, Jane Jarrett mentioned that Bill Eddins had blogged about it. Well, our report of Eddins’ performance yesterday afternoon with the Oregonian Symphony couldn’t have been more positive — a full and interesting sort of lecture-demo of Brahms’ first symphony.