Monthly Archives: November 2008

Barry Johnson, Music

Hail! A new quartet by Tomas Svoboda!

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Third Angle New Music Ensemble gave the world its first listen to Portland composer Tomas Svoboda’s newest quartet, String Quartet no. 10, Opus 194. I’m not adept enough to enter it very deeply from that one encounter, but I liked its spirit and its invention. The program notes said that it is dedicated to violinist Lubomir Havlak of the Martinu Quartet, which recorded eight of Svoboda’s earlier quartets in Prague recently, and so “positive, energetic and playful with harmonic language of Bohemian flavor.” Which all seemed plausible at this first hearing.

Svoboda has Czech roots himself — his parents were Czech, though he was born in Paris in 1939 and spent the war years in Paris, returning to Prague in 1946 (according to his website), where he continued the musical studies begun in Boston. He was a sensation. He completed his first symphony at 16, and it was performed by the FOK Prague Symphonic Orchestra. He impressed the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu enough for him to leave his unfinished work to the young Svoboda at his death in 1959. Svoboda’s family moved to the U.S. in 1964, and he went to U.S.C., before coming to Portland State University in 1969 to teach. Here, he’s conducted a wide-ranging musical exploration, from brilliant and edgy small chamber works to a marimba concerto.

I bring up this all up simply to make the point that the occasion of a new quartet by Svoboda is a big deal and that I wish more of us had been at the Old Church last night to hear it: the rhythms that Hamilton Cheifetz dug out of his cello, the seemingly simple melodies that violinist Ron Blessinger started to toss off, only to have them complicate and deepen considerably, the sonorous trade-offs between cello and Brian Quincey’s viola that mirrored the activity in the upper registers between Blessinger and violinist Peter Frajola. Every time things started to get, well, obsessive and aggressive, Svoboda gave us an escape, a little musical gesture maybe, a touch of whimsy, even the crankier third movement. And the last movement, which started almost inaudibly with a melody that did indeed sound like a folk song, rolled into a full-throated barn dance that Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor would have been proud of. Terrific stuff.
Continue reading Hail! A new quartet by Tomas Svoboda! →

General

A Scatter poll: What’s up with theater?

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An Elizabethan theaterYesterday, I had lunch with a prominent local theater director, who shall go nameless because he didn’t actually know he was speaking “for the record.” He gets around a lot, visiting other cities that are engaged with The Theatre, and he was concerned. He wondered just how “theater centric” Portland is these days, because he’d observed audiences that were sparser and less intense than the audiences in Chicago or even the ones that used to fill Portland theaters. I couldn’t even begin to offer a thought about this, but I did find the inherent question interesting. And I’ve decided to turn to you for answers.

So, an open thread of sorts on the state of theater in Portland today. Is it:

1. Thriving, except for the director’s theater
2. Better than ever onstage, but audiences are a problem
3. Too expensive in these hard times
4. Lost its edge onstage, so of course the audience is going to seem dull
5. Just needs better marketing
6. Having a near-death experience
7. Other

If you’ve got a moment, please take this unofficial survey, and of course, add your comments and explanations!

Barry Johnson, Books, General

Farewell to Joel Weinstein, a proto-Art Scatterer

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Today’s newspaper contained the sad news that Joel Weinstein, the publishing genius behind one of the city’s late, great magazines, Mississippi Mud, had died of lung cancer in Puerto Rico. (I wrote the obituary.)

I was surprised to calculate that Joel left the city in 1994 — my memory of him is still so vivid. The Joel I remember is smart and intense and intensely opinionated. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but on the other hand he can sometimes get a little goofy, which definitely takes the edge off. He always is working on something “important” and always is the carrier of good gossip. And every year or so he has a little stack of Mississippi Muds under his arm, a magazine of many parts and many sizes, a little bizarre at times (in a good way), with odd graphics bursting off the page and dense, intimate packets of writing alongside. A chance encounter with Joel was a challenge; it brought out your good side, your creative side. You leaped to unfounded conclusions, made up outlandish opinions, imparted barely credible stories to him just to impress him a little. And then, after he left, you were left with your own mental mess AND the similarly strange stuff he had delivered himself. It was wonderful.

I would say I’ll miss him. But I’ve been in that state since 1994, really. So, I’ll just say what I’ve already said — I’m sad about it, deeply sad. Art Scatter’s heartfelt condolences to his partner Cheryl Hartup. Bye, Joel.

General

Democracy saved? Not so much…

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UPDATE: An astute colleague pointed out this morning that I’d foolishly missed the symbolic importance of yesterday’s election result. As any compelling narrative might, President Obama’s election saga has the possibility of altering and re-orienting our personal stories in a way that changes our relationship to the civic sphere of things, to our self-government, she said. I don’t disagree with her, and consider that the hopeful part of yesterday, though perhaps it suggests another post on the power of the story in politics.

Well then. National elections are never of a piece. The creepiest “political” position can find some company somewhere if it knows where to look. Even on an Obama night. Even in Oregon returns. Maybe especially in Oregon returns. One election can’t eliminate the rot in the system, the rot in our politics, the rot that may yet undo us. Sorry. It just has to be said.

And on that count, I disagreed with President Obama’s victory speech. This election wasn’t a demonstration of the strength of our democracy — maybe a spasm that shows that we haven’t extinguished it completely, but hardly a demonstration of strength. An election is the easy part, and the most easily distorted. The day-to-day effort to apply the wisdom, true wisdom not lizard-brain reaction, of the people to our day-to-day problems, that’s the hard part.

In this morning’s Oregonian, Steve Novick, whom I admire, said that the first step to addressing the major challenges that face us is to “do a better job of explaining to people what the problem is.” I agree with that, and I would add that the people can do a lot of the explaining themselves: They just need a forum for their own explanations, and then for their solutions. And I would suggest that the solutions to the biggest problems (Novick lists health care reform, global warming, and big deficits; my list would be different), which are enormous and impossibly complex, might be found at ground level, where ordinary people can find them and do something about them. The smartest talk I’ve heard about sustainability hasn’t come from political leaders; it has come from people working to improve the technology and then working to apply that technology.

I’m not really saying that “now the hard part begins.” No. The hard part has been going on for a long time. We just haven’t been doing very well at it, and to me that’s the biggest problem: Why have we governed ourselves so poorly? How do we fix that? Every day is a good day to think about it, not just the day after an election.

Barry Johnson, General

Art Scatter says vote often

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When I was much younger, I marveled at Election Day, this First Tuesday in November when Americans en masse, from sea to shining sea, returned to the polls to exercise the primary ritual of a democracy. The idea of it as a collective enterprise, the voting I mean, just made me happy somehow, even when I despaired over the outcome and had profound doubts about those we elected, even on the rare occasions when I actually voted for them.

That was when I equated voting with democracy, before I realized that people could vote and have almost no effect on their government or its policies or that the manipulations of skilled and extremely well-funded propagandists (and I use this charged word deliberately, though I could simply have used “ad men”) could change an election. And over time, erode the democracy itself by diminishing our very capacity to make informed choices. Voting is not the same as democracy. I can’t show up every four years to vote for the lesser of two evils and think of myself as doing anything so important as participating in a democracy. A lot of the time, that’s what I’ve done. Democracy requires a lot more participation than that.

We know this has happened. Fully one-quarter of us aren’t registered to vote. Of those of who are, one-third won’t. So fifty percent of us acknowledge the futility of voting, understand that once our representatives get to Washington they make thousands of decisions that have nothing to do with our welfare, nothing to do with “representing” us, become entangled in networks of power that defy their abilities to change things, if they still have the heart. Those of us who do vote have become cynical about it. Let me re-phrase that: I have become cynical about it. Because I don’t want to speak for you. I vote and I walk away. I vote and I turn my nose. I am bad for democracy.
Continue reading Art Scatter says vote often →

Barry Johnson, General

A little pre-election scatter to help the obsessed

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Suddenly, the great David Clark Five song came to mind, which must mean I’m in pieces, bits and pieces. And indeed I am.

Our friends at Culture Shock, specifically MightyToyCannon, have been assembling a growing soundtrack of songs to get us through the election. As of this morning the clips numbered 17, and the last one was Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime. We feel some degree of participation because of our Leonard Cohen suggestion (Democracy, below), and we should have tipped you off earlier, because it does ease the anxiety level to hear, say, Ray Charles singing Hit the Road Jack or Curtis Mayfield landing on We Got to Have Peace.

Scatter does occasionally recognize a fellow-Scatterer — in this case it’s Richard Kessler, who writes the Dewey21C blog at Artsjournal. (We often look over the Artsjournal blogs, btw.) In his latest post, Kessler discusses how he came, finally, to enjoy Steve Reich. The key paragraph:

The first time I remember really finding my way with Reich’s music was at a dance performance. There was something about following the dance, the visual aspect, that allowed me to take the music in, in an entirely different way. I wasn’t listening for a certain progression, a certain phrase, a certain architecture–all the things I had been trained to listen for in music, but instead I felt the music, took it in–allowed it to wash over me. Watching the dance made it possible. It was as if a switch was flipped.

But the trip to that moment and then his circling back to his main concern, art education, is, well, quite a scatter. We are big Reich fans, too, and when we hear something by Philip Glass that we really like, we often discover that it’s really by Steve Reich. (Aw c’mon, that’s mean!)

Studs Terkel, who died last week at 96, practiced an engaged, passionate kind of journalism, the kind that fights for and celebrates the little guy against the big guy, the kind we don’t see much of these days as the “profession” has “professionalized”. And it does have its limits — that radical a reduction of the doings in the monkey tree is bound to leave some things out and to become predictable after a fashion. Except that Studs explored the particular manifestations of the little guy and his (or her) struggle against the bully, the boss, the powers that be, the particular stories, the particular characters, and suddenly predictability wasn’t an issue. Scatter friend Tim DuRoche remembered Terkel, the urbanist, on his Burnside Blog at Portland Spaces. William Grimes’s essay in the New York Times is also well worth a read. The Chicago Tribune (in
Terkel’s hometown) also remembers him at length.

We are reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and we finally figure out why. Chabon is coming to Portland to speak as part of Congregation Beth Israel’s 150th anniversary. His speech (5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 23, 1972 N.W. Flanders) is entitled, Imaginary Homelands: Themes of Jewish Identity in Popular Fiction, which fits nicely with the The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which is about an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska. My favorite part from last night’s reading: The bad guys have tossed the unconscious main character, Detective Landsman, into a detention cell which contains a child’s wastebasket. Gradually, Landsman’s comes to.

“Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy. An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.”

Oh, yeah.