Monthly Archives: February 2009

Books, Cities, General, Vernon Peterson

The world is small in places, we know

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180px-spanish_steps_arpCousin Rick, a far-flung Scatter-friend, writes from Paris. Writes! On writing paper, with hand-formed, fully-formed letters and elegant sentences. Like tooled leather, it seems to me.

Cousin Rick works for a large international “software solutions” firm, recently merged with a larger firm. “With a merger of this size,” Rick tells us, “it can take months for the new teams to be formed. This has left me as a salaried employee, averaging 3-4 hours work a week.” Cousin Rick is young, too young to tell us “I’ve started calling this period my ‘2d Retirement.’ (I took 6 months off when originally relocating to Paris.) My brother, an involved father of two young children, prefers the phrase ‘too much unstructured free time,” and I think my mom has started mentioning something about ‘idle hands. . .’”

Rick has moved to a new apartment. “For Paris it is good size for one person. The building is about 200 years old, and retains some original touches, like the crown molding. It’s what I would have pictured as very Parisian before moving, with high ceilings, two large ‘French’ windows overlooking a busy street scene, and large courtyard area in back, away from the street. The neighborhood is central, gritty and colorful. Lots of Turks, Greeks and Africans. Still probably 10-12 years from being ruined by people like myself.”

“Would make a perfect base for the Art Scatter team,” he teases.
Continue reading The world is small in places, we know →

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Dear Sen. McCain: It’s the arts economy, stupid

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Lincoln was a Republican. The WPA didn't mind.So much for bipartisanship. All of a sudden it feels like we’re back in the bad old days of the 1980s and ’90s “culture wars,” when the right-wing juggernaut raised fears of chocolate-coated performance artists to push its narrow view of American culture and its broad view of the body politic as a happy economic hunting ground for the plucking of the many by the few. Maybe the language isn’t as strident as when Annie Sprinkle was flashing and Jesse Helms was waxing apoplectic, but the tactic’s still there, as Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (whose daughter, ironically, is a prominent opera singer) and the recently right-wing-radicalized John McCain are making clear.

For Coburn’s arts slashing-and-burning, see here and here.

And listen to McCain’s recent take on the economic stimulus plan, which he apparently fears might benefit someone other than brokers and bankers if he doesn’t act swiftly to stem the unwashed tide:

“$50 million in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts — all of us are for the arts. Tell me how that creates any significant number of jobs? After-school snack program is probably a good idea. Do we really want to spend $726 million on it?”

Hell, no. Let them eat Twinkies. On their own dime.

Now, listen to the response to McCain from Tim DuRoche, Portland arts administrator, drummer, and writer of the smart Burnside Blog at Portland Spaces magazine. Tim sent us a copy of his letter:

Dear John–

I understand you are not aware of how funding for the arts creates jobs and stimulates the economy. So, I’d like to tell you what I do for a living and what our organization contributes to the economy. I work in community programs for a major theater company in Portland, OR—providing outreach, access and public programs to local and regional audiences and schools (approximately 200,000 people a year visit our theater), all of whom buy tickets, eat in restaurants, pay for parking, shop, and ride public transit, activities which dramatically fuel the local and regional economy.

The construction and operations of our theater (which opened in 2006) is predicted to produce a total economic impact of $116.4 million during construction and the first 10 years of operations. Investment of these funds were associated with the provision of 510 temporary jobs during the 24-month construction period, and 12 permanent jobs created and then retained during operations of the theater.

In addition, 104 existing theater operations jobs were retained through this project. An estimated total of $46.7 million in direct, indirect and induced wages will be paid during the construction period and ten years of operations. $15.8 million in Federal, State and Local tax revenues are estimated to be generated over twelve years, including $6.7 million during the 24-month construction period, and $915k annually over 10 years when fully operational.

Additionally the building is a LEED-certified Platinum historic renovation that was redeveloped on a brownfields site, engaged high-performance green technology that reduces overall potable water usage by 89%, diverted 95% of construction waste from landfills, and retained over 79% of the existing 1891 structure, among other sustainable features—ensuring that every system was designed to maximize the health of users and reduce the energy use of the building.

This is triple-bottom line proof why Sen. Coburn’s Amendment 175 is so off-base. Investing in arts and cultural infrastructure is an investment in the American spirit, it produces jobs, creates an economic multiplier effect that buoys our city’s mobility and freedom to dream, and translates into dollars that make sense for communities. It is not just social capital that the arts produce but hard capital, economic impact on the highest order–and one you can applaud nightly.

Thank you so much for asking what I do.

Sincerely,

Tim DuRoche

Community Programs Manager

Portland Center Stage

————————–

Our friends at Culture Shock have also been following this closely. They found this provocative challenge to the arts world from Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones for its “stunning political ineptitude.” Time to think tactics, ladies and gentlemen.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Portland onstage: of ghosts and vampires

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The Turn of the Screw/Portland Opera“This score is my bible,” David Schiff, the Portland composer of the chamber opera Gimpel the Fool and a lot of other good music, said with a big smile.

It was Friday night, and I’d run into Schiff as I was leaving the opening performance of Benjamin Britten‘s The Turn of the Screw at Portland Opera. Schiff loves Britten for several reasons, but in this case he was thinking of Britten as a shining example of how to orchestrate an opera for only a dozen instruments and have it sound full and brilliant and just right. He didn’t use the word “busy” about Britten’s score, but he talked about its muscularity, the way Britten used his limited number of instruments to maximum effect, stretching their sound and matching the dramatic texture of Myfanwy Piper‘s libretto, which is based on Henry James‘s mystifyingly open-ended ghost novella.

I’d been thinking about the opera’s orchestration because the topic came up in the pre-performance talk by Bob Kingston, who also writes the interesting blog dramma per musica. That got me to listening particularly closely to the orchestra, which was conducted with admirable precision by Christopher Larkin, and to noticing how well Britten combined tautness and lushness to bring out the strange, screw-tightening tensions of James’s tale.

Continue reading Portland onstage: of ghosts and vampires →

Books, General, Music, Vernon Peterson

Love, Forever Changes and The Ground Beneath Her Feet

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You are just a thought that someone
Somewhere somehow feels you should be here

Arthur Lee, “A House Is Not A Motel”

love“We change what we remember, then it changes us, and so on, until we both fade together, our memories and ourselves. Something like that.” This is Salman Rushdie on the way our lives intertwine with the history of rock ‘n’ roll. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999 ) is a novel about Ormus and Vina, Indians raised in Bombay, who become the first couple of international rock. Propelled by Ormus’ words and melodies and Vina’s voice, they blaze across the rock firmament as VTO (“Vertical Take Off”), their lives mirroring the rise and fall of many sacred monsters of rock the last half century.

200px-love_-_forever_changesI thought about Rushdie’s novel watching the documentary film Love Story, about the legendary L.A. band Love and their 1967 album “Forever Changes,” the best single album I’ve ever heard, and one of the most enduring albums of what folks still call the “the psychedelic era,” an odd term that reflects the cover art but not the bold lyrics, crystal clear vocals and resonant orchestral sound, acoustic guitars supplemented by symphonic strings and horns. The album is especially loved and respected in England, and British producers Chris Hall and Mike Kelly have made a quiet, fairly typical but informative rock history film, with vintage footage and interviews with Arthur Lee, the dark genius of the group, as well as Bryan MacLean and Johnny Nichols, who all played a critical roll in forming the band’s charismatic image as an early racially-mixed rock group. Recorded by folk the label Elektra, Love was not promoted very effectively in rock venues. They also refused to tour much outside L.A. Not burnt-out cases, really. They just faded out, disappeared. So the album “Forever Changes” has survived and thrived by word-of-mouth, although several years ago Rolling Stone placed it # 40 on the list of 500 greatest albums. My sons ride me for thinking it #1, but there you have it. “Forever Changes” is lodged there as firmly as Venus in my rock firmament.

If you haven’t heard it, it is never too late.
Continue reading Love, Forever Changes and The Ground Beneath Her Feet →

Bob Hicks, General

Stimulus, continued: Why did Wyden and Merkley vote with Coburn?

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Works Progress Administration poster, 1930sAs reported earlier on Art Scatter and elsewhere, the U.S. Senate pulled a nasty Friday surprise by voting 73-24 in favor of an amendment to the national economic stimulus package that would ban any spending on a wide variety of arts and cultural projects — anything that would give federal reaction to the economic crisis the faintest whiff of a broad-based WPA solution.

For Oregonians, the biggest part of the surprise was that both of our senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, voted with the majority in favor of Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn’s monkey-wrench amendment.

Why? I haven’t talked with Wyden or Merkley, and I haven’t seen either explain his vote. But I think fellow Scatterer Barry Johnson is right. This was a vote about the numbers — the Democrats needed to swing three moderate Republican votes to reach the required 60 to pass the stimulus bill, and the moderate Republicans could afford to break party rank on the overall bill only by mollifying conservative Republicans on the details.

Surely there’s no love lost between Oregon’s senators and the Coburn gang, especially after Coburn’s one-man holdup last year of the Mount Hood wilderness bill that Wyden had spent several years helping to prepare. And Merkley, as the new kid on the block, is going to have to line up with party leadership on a vote like this. So, giving Wyden and Merkley the benefit of the doubt, we’ll just point out that part of politics is knowing when to lose a battle so you can win a war.

But another, equally important, part of politics is for voters to remind their representatives vociferously that they don’t accept the deal-making, and to push for what’s right regardless of political maneuvering. That’s why it’s urgent that Wyden and Merkley get this message. Otherwise, in the rush of business, they might not stop to clean up the mess they helped make. And this IS a mess. It’s punitive, wrong-headed, bullying, the kind of “populism” that isn’t in the people’s interest at all but instead makes political capital by demonizing anything that smacks of intellectualism.

Our friends at Culture Shock have been following this issue, too, and I urge you to check out their take on it all. They include the most important information: How to contact your senators and let them know that you want the cultural economy to be a part of any economic stimulus plan. You can contact Wyden, Merkley, and any other senator through a format set up by Americans for the Arts.

Here’s a portion of the Culture Shock post, complete with a link to the Americans for the Arts messaging site:

Arts advocates need to quickly contact Senators Wyden and Merkley and express our extreme disappointment in them for voting for the Coburn Amendment. We need these Senators to know that their vote would detrimentally impact nonprofit arts organizations and the jobs they support in their state. Americans for the Arts has crafted a customized message that can be sent automatically to the appropriate Senator simply by entering your zip code. (For our friends from out of state, the system will recognize if your Senator voted against the Coburn Amendment and will send them a thank you letter instead.)

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has repeatedly pointed out, this is no time for silly political games. The world economy faces its biggest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and ordinary rules of engagement — the automatic-pilot tinkering with the free-market controls — isn’t going to work.

This crisis calls for a massive creative response, and although the times and details are different, the New Deal and its broad-vision Works Progress Administration provide a good model to work from. So far the response has been mostly “boys-club”: build roads, shore up the banks, get Wall Street back on its feet, throw a lifeline to crumblng industries. All necessary, even if the precise approach is open to argument. But equally important are the “girls-club” issues, the sustenance of the nation’s creative capital: its schools, its health system, its cultural and historical institutions, its environmental and conservation stewardship, all of which nourish the new ideas that help drive the larger economy in addition to providing millions of necessary jobs on their own.

If not now, when? If not us, who? If not Wyden and Merkley, why?

General

Want a little review with that play?

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UPDATE: The discussion at Portland Arts Watch on this post is getting robust as well. You might want to have a look.

I just posted a version of this at Portland Arts Watch, and I’m thinking that I’ll extend it to these precincts as well, because I really do want to hear opinions about this topic. It’s something I’ve wondered about for a long time: How review-centric should newspaper/site coverage of the arts be? That boils down to a multitude of individual judgments, and I’d love to hear your thinking!

Guthrie Theater in MinnesotaEveryone knows that this an era of shrinking resources at your local newsgathering operation (which we once called a “newspaper”). That means fewer staff members and less space in the paper for just about every section and department. And that in turn means a reconsideration of almost all of the coverage habits that have been developed over the decades.

The arts and culture department hasn’t been excluded from this, of course, either at The Oregonian or at other operations across the country (where the trimming often has been more radical in arts than other sections). We’re not going to go into all of that now, but a couple of posts we picked up on ArtsJournal do single out and discuss one of those coverage habits in the arts — the daily review, theater in this case, but by extension, all newspaper reviews.
Continue reading Want a little review with that play? →

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Dance, Environment, Food, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Tom Coburn and his wilderness of ideas

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UPDATE, 1:55 p.m. Friday, Feb. 6: MISCHIEF WINS, “SMALL POTATOES” LOSE: I didn’t think he could do it, but he did. Today the U.S. Senate, by a ridiculous 73-24 vote, passed Sen. Tom Coburn’s amendment to the economic stimulus bill to bar anything with even the faintest whiff of culture from getting any stimulus money. Here’s the requisite passage from Congressional Quarterly:

“Lawmakers also voted 73-24 to adopt a Tom Coburn , R-Okla., amendment to place tighter restrictions facilities that can be built with money from the bill. The Coburn amendment would bar spending on casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses, swimming pools, stadiums, community parks, museums, theaters, art centers, and highway beautification projects.

“That’s broader than prohibition in the House-passed bill, which applied only to casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses and swimming pools.”


The vote is astonishing, and preposterous, and I can only guess that the amendment was passed with so little thought or debate simply because the Senate is in a pedal-to-the-metal rush to get this thing off the assembly line and onto the streets. Coburn may be a fool, but he’s a canny fool — he knows how the system works, and he knows how and when to manipulate it. This ugly bit of mischief could still disappear from the final bill, of course, but now it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of ruckus-raising. It’s officially time to get mad, get on the horn, bug your congressional delegation and get something done about this.

Timberline Lodge, funded by the WPA/Wikimedia Commons

News flashes from all sorts of fronts today about the latest Molotov cocktail from Sen. Tom Coburn, the Republican from Oklahoma known for his quixotic attempts to deliver America from the clutches of common sense. It was Coburn, Oregonians might recall, whose threat of filibuster scuttled last year’s otherwise certain passage of the Lewis & Clark Mount Hood Wilderness Act. That act finally passed the Senate last month, as part of a broader wilderness bill, on a 73-21 vote — over Coburn’s objections.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OklahomaThis time out Coburn’s tackling the omnibus economic bailout plan — surely a target for some tough critical thinking: How many Dutch boys with their fingers in the dike does it take to keep the thing from bursting, anyway? Unfortunately, it’s not just Coburn’s finger that’s all wet. His Amendment No. 175 to the economic stimulus bill is tough, and it’s critical. But it’s utterly lacking in thinking.

Here’s how Coburn proposes to guard your pocketbook:

“None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, arts center, or highway beautification project, including renovation, remodeling, construction, salaries, furniture, zero-gravity chairs, big screen televisions, beautification, rotating pastel lights, and dry heat saunas.”


Note that. No money for museums, theaters, arts centers, aquariums, zoos, highway beautification, apparently any sort of beautification at all. I’m not really sure what a rotating pastel light is, but none of that, either. Fortunately I don’t golf. But I do like a good sauna now and again.

It’s easy to laugh this off as just another crackpot amendment that’s going nowhere — except that Coburn has a history of making this sort of thing stick, at least temporarily. I doubt it’ll work this time, because with the Democratic gains in the Senate from the last election he’s lost his biggest tool, which was his ability to forestall a 60 percent Senate vote to halt filibuster. His power has always been the power to make mischief, not the power to actually create anything.

Still, it’s a very good idea to call your senators (the Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121) or zip off an email to them. If you live in Oregon, that means Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley. If you live in Washington, it means Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray. If you live in another state, check here for contacts. The danger isn’t that anywhere near a majority of senators agree with Coburn. The danger is that, in their eagerness to get some sort of broad-stroke stimulus package passed as quickly as possible, a majority will be willing to horse-trade away this “small potatoes” stuff. In D.C., that’s how mischief’s made.

It seems silly to even have to bring it up, but here goes: Museums and theaters and aquariums are part of the economy, too. And they’re a potentially multiple-payoff part of the economy. They don’t just create jobs for themselves, they feed tourism, hospitality, construction (which means such things as logging and mining and steelmaking). Increasingly, in our information-driven society, the arts play a big role in driving entire regional economies: People move to cities specifically for their arts scenes. That’s certainly true of Portland. Oh: And all that “beautification”? It creates good, lasting things. The picture at the top of this post is of Timberline Lodge. It’s on Mt. Hood, and it was built during the Great Depression as a project of the federal government’s Works Progress Administration.

The WPA was good to the arts, and in return the arts were good to America. From murals in small-town post offices to architectural treasures like Timberline Lodge to theater and dance and music projects to photographic documentation of the Depression to the wonderful, sadly unfinished, collection of writings about American foodways, our previous mass economic stimulus package had the good sense to recognize that an “economy” is only a financial blueprint of a whole society.

Am I nervous about the economic stimulus plan? You bet. But I’m a lot more nervous about the Tom Coburns of the world than I am about helping a museum keep from falling into the abyss of economic failure. Keeping our shared culture alive, I’m confident, is a very good idea.

Barry Johnson, Books, Film, General, Television

John Maynard Keynes gets “Network”-ed

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Faye Dunaway in Network So last night, after the Super Bowl, I was channel-surfing. I’m not proud of it, but there you have it. Sometimes I think that’s the way the universe is trying to talk to me: If I happen upon the “Dog Whisperer,” I might conclude that I’m not calm and assertive enough (or maybe not submissive enough? Sometimes I get mixed messages). If “Ask This Old House” is working on someone’s water heater, then I immediately suspect that mine needs some lovin’.

Anyway, as I was surfing, I fell in with Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s great 1976 satire about television and society, just before the Howard Beale speech, the “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” speech. I knew it was coming and I waited for it, because to this day, it’s the single most subversive thing I’ve ever heard in a mainstream Hollywood movie. (Maybe you have others? We could make a contest of it in the comments.) And this time, it was a swift blow to the solar plexus.
Continue reading John Maynard Keynes gets “Network”-ed →

Books, General, Vernon Peterson

Zen and the art of Michael Dibdin (why I’m a serial reader)

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dibdin “I’m a stranger here myself.”

Odd this should be the last thing I hear from Aurelio Zen. I’ve just read Zen’s parting shot in Dead Lagoon, the Michael Dibdin mystery novel I’ve saved unread for several months. Didbin wrote eleven novels featuring Zen, the solitary, dark-hearted Italian police inspector. The first, Ratking, was published in 1988, when Zen is almost fifty and nearly washed-up as an investigator, and the last, End Games, was published in 2007, a few months after Dibdin’s death. Born in England in 1947, Dibdin taught in Italy for several years before beginning the Zen series. He died in Seattle in March 2007, having lived there many years with his wife, Katherine Beck, also a mystery novelist.

I became intrigued with Didbin after reading his short non-Zen novel, Thanksgiving, a disturbing, creepy Sam Shepard-like American tale set in the Nevada desert. The first Zen book I read was And Then You Die (2002), which picks up the inspector’s story as he recovers from an assassination attempt. I quickly moved through the somewhat grisly Medusa (2003), about caves and fascism; Back to Bologna (2005), a sly tale of soccer, bungled murder and an off-kilter semiotics professor out to get a popular TV cook; and finally End Games (2007), published posthumously, a strange, comically cynical end-of-world tale about the attempt to make a Mel Gibson-inspired movie about the Book of Revelations.
Continue reading Zen and the art of Michael Dibdin (why I’m a serial reader) →

Bob Hicks, General, Language

Apostrophe’s and groundhog’s: on promiscuous punctuation

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Courtesy of Jeffrey Beall, Flickr Creative Commons
As the great lexicographer Bob Dylan might have asked, “Where have all the apostrophes gone?”

In Birmingham, England, it turns out, they’ve been long time passing: According to an Associated Press report via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, city bureaucrats have been dropping the little floating comma from Birmingham’s street signs since the 1950s. So it’s no longer “St. Paul’s Square”; it’s “St. Pauls Square.” And, as some critics are sniffing, it’s no longer the Queen’s English, it’s the Queens English (which sounds, if you think about it, like the argot of a particular borough of New York City).

Here at Art Scatter we like to think of punctuation as little road signs along the great linguistic superhighway, helpful warnings that a curve is coming in the road and you need to slow down, or a thought has run its course and you need to stop. Pay attention to the road signs and the meaning comes clear, not to mention the rhythm that is playing in the author’s head, and which presumably she or he would love to plant in your own intellectual pulse.

The presence or absence or substitution of a punctuation mark can alter meaning. “What do you mean?” is most likely a simple interrogative: “Can you please explain yourself a little more clearly, so I can understand what you’re saying?”

“What do you mean!” is more likely a challenge, even an exclamation of outrage: “You can’t be serious! I reject with every fiber of my being the very principle on which you build your argument, and I am shocked that a purportedly civilized human being could hold such an errant point of view!”

Groundhog/Wikimedia CommonsMore poetically (and less argumentatively), the use of punctuation is a handy writers’ tool in the construction of mood and suggestion: “He’s driving fast fast fast” is simply faster to a reader’s eye than “He’s driving fast, fast, fast” — and if the blur of speed is what you’re trying to get across, using commas is like driving in the Indianapolis 500 with your emergency brake on.

Here in The Great Republick That Our Forefathers Built (or is it Forefather’s?) we seem to welcome all those apostrophes banished from Birmingham: As the photo at the top of this post illustrates, we like to throw them into words willy-nilly, like candy confetti on top of a cupcake. For an amusing exploration of the subject, see The Care and Feeding of Apostrophes.

Nor is the comma the only mistress of Americans’ punctuational promiscuity. Over at Blogorrhea, the courtly Mr. Mead Hunter has introduced us to the perverse pleasures of The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, a photographic compilation of signage screwups that are, as the MasterCard commercials say, priceless. And Art Scatter itself confesses to a fondness for the colon that verges on the indiscreet: Like a politician with a wayward passion for that little taste of danger, we let ourselves be seen in public with the slatternly Ms. Colon on our arm far too frequently.

What to do, then, when, punctuationally speaking, we’re not sure what to do? Americans are a practical people (as a nation we are Rome, not Greece; engineers, not artists) and the obvious answer is: avoidance. Just don’t let it be an issue. Around Portland, that means eliminating the historical struggle between Sauvie’s Island and Sauvies Island by settling, at least officially, on Sauvie Island. Nationally, let it be noted that tomorrow morning, when Punxsatawney Phil pokes his head out of his burrow and sniffs around for signs of spring, he will not be marking Groundhog’s Day or Groundhogs Day. It’ll be a singular event: Groundhog Day. And if he casts his shadow just right, maybe we can avoid misplaced apostrophes for six more weeks.

Note: Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Beall, Flickr Creative Commons