Monthly Archives: March 2009

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Cut to the quick: PCS axes Mead Hunter, four others

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Mead Hunter, portrait by Gwenn SeemelI come home from a few days in the rainylands to the north to discover that it’s been pouring in Portland — not just rain, but bad news.

Portland Center Stage, the city’s flagship theater company, has laid off five people, including literary manager Mead Hunter, one of the most popular and respected people in the city’s theater scene.

Mead’s assistant, Megan Ward, also got the pink slip, as did workers in the box office, information technology and facilities departments. At a company that has staked its identity largely on its commitment to developing new plays, Hunter and Ward were the entire literary department. It ain’t no more. I’m not sure this is what Samuel Beckett had in mind when he came up with Endgame, but the word does have its applications.

And the economic hurricane keeps howling on. On his Web site Blogorrhea, one of our favorites, Mead gave the reason for the layoffs as “disastrous budgeting miscalculations paired with the moribund global economy.” Trouble is, the moribund (a kind word, given the circumstances) global economy has rendered budgeting calculations disastrous all over the place. This story is being repeated over and over, with adjustments in the details. To all of those people who think the arts are expendable frills that can be cut without harming anyone: a laid-off teacher or automotive worker or line cook or newspaper editor or mill worker or theater employee are the same. Not a one of them has a job any more, and unless they had the luck to nab a tinted parachute of some sort, not a one has an income.

Mead Hunter’s name doesn’t mean much to the theatergoing public. He’s not an actor. He’s not a director. He doesn’t run the company or give curtain speeches. But every business has its insiders, the people who know how things work, who get things done, who put things together, who teach and support and reach out and sometimes keep things loose by cracking exactly the right joke at exactly the right time. In Portland theater, Hunter was that guy. People in the business know him, and respect him, and like him very much, and a lot of them have him to thank for nudges he’s given their careers, in subtle and sometimes prominent ways.

Hunter’s role has been far bigger than his title. Portland Center Stage is the elephant in the living room of Portland theater, the great big company that gets all the attention, and almost inevitably that has bred resentment among others on the scene. Mead may have been the company’s finest ambassador. He paid attention to the rest of the city’s theaters and theater people, took them seriously, lent his services, nurtured them when he could, always with gentlemanly courtesy and competence. You can’t buy public relations like that. Sometimes you can’t pay for it, either.

This is a tough day for Hunter, and his four laid-off co-workers, and Portland Center Stage, and the city’s theater scene in general. In one sense the layoffs are a modest cut, especially compared to the huge slashes that have rocked some other industries: Center Stage had 105 names on its staff roster before the cuts, which makes the reduction less than 5 percent. But in every organization, a few people represent the soul of the place, and when you lose them you lose something indefinable but vital. Read the comments on Hunter’s Web site — well over 40 the last time I looked — and you’ll get a sense of what I mean.

For other good perspectives, see this post on Culture Shock by CS regular Cynthia Fuhrman, Center Stage’s marketing and communications chief, and these comments by fellow Scatterer Barry Johnson on his Oregonian blog, Portland Arts Watch.

Barry Johnson, Theater

Portland Center Stage will miss Mead Hunter

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As many of you know by now, Mead Hunter has been let go by Portland Center Stage as part of another round of budget cuts at the company. We wish him the very best, and we’ll be getting back to this at a later date. Frankly, we’re confident that Mead will negotiate this turn of events in fine form, but Center Stage will have to get along without his wise counsel. And that won’t be easy.

General

A weekend of Holcombe Waller, BodyVox, arts and politics

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BodyVox's Jamey HamptonSo, Art Scatter had an interesting weekend, with the odd charm’s of BodyVox and Holcombe Waller taking center stage. We’ve posted about this on Portland Arts Watch, and we’ll just take a moment to emphasize a point or two from that post.

BodyVox’s “The Foot Opera Files” was very close to something special thanks to the strangeness of trained voices from the Portland Opera’s studio artists program taking on the songs of Tom Waits; the downscale theatricality of the costumes from the wrong side of the tracks; live music from an excellent little combo; the raw space that will become BodyVox’s new home. What it needed to go all the way was the darkness of Waits, the sorrow, as a contrast to the vaudeville shtick, which sometimes was quite good and sometimes wasn’t as startling as it needed to be. Without the sorrow, it can all seem like an “adventure” in the tenderloin or like playacting. Which it is, of course, but that’s probably not what you’re hoping to convey. Anyway, it runs again Wednesday-Sunday, and I’d love to compare notes.

Holcombe Waller is pretty amazing. “Into the Dark Unknown: The Hope Chest” was basically a concert featuring Waller with his back-up band, the Healers, but it had video and multiple performing locations on the stage, including a table on which Waller sat or on which were stacked boxes on which Waller sat. All of the details seemed carefully choreographed and rehearsed, which was nice, an antidote to our reigning informality, which sometimes slips into territory best called “sloppy.” Waller has an entirely different aesthetic going on, and good for him.

I also like the clarity of Waller’s voice, which also shows great attention to detail, and his songs are carefully made too, simple and dramatic, with stylish effects, both for voice and instruments. The concert wasn’t for the depressed: I’d say the overall emotional tone was “plaintive.” And as I said on Arts Watch, I liked the pieces best that had some fight in them.

Waller is a singular performer in Portland, though he is working in San Francisco and New York, too, these days, he told us. I hope we stay a point on his triangle because it will be interesting to watch him balance some contradictory impulses in his art.

In my column in The Oregonian today, I talked about art and politics, inspired by last week’s “24/7” show at Wieden+Kennedy. And what I was trying to say, really, was something simple: The wisdom inherent in a great work of art is a model for us to emulate in the rest of our lives, including our citizenship in a democracy, an insight of John Dewey’s really. And that’s an interesting way to think about art — how wise is it? What forces does it balance? What conflicts does it resolve? How useful are its descriptions of reality — either the external or the internal? What paths does it blaze for us in our thinking about art itself or in thinking about life?

Barry Johnson, General, Journalism

Warning: Much idle thought about newspapers below

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Miehle Newspaper Press at the Provost News in the '60s
Art Scatter has followed with more than passing interest the ongoing debates over the future of journalism in the U.S. I started to type “newspapers,” because the rapid decline of the large corporations that own most of the larger daily newspapers in the country has already wiped out thousands of journalist positions in the country, at exactly the moment that television and radio news have also hit the skids. But we now understand that “newspaper” and “journalism” are not synonymous, that in fact journalism of wildly varying quality can be found just about everywhere, from newspapers to electronic media to digital media. Even at comedy clubs.

Just to get everyone up-to-date with the latest arguments about the decline of journalism and how to reverse it, we have some links!

The most radical suggestion I’ve heard recently for saving the free press comes from Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, writing in the The Nation. I knew Mr. McChesney back when we both worked at the Seattle Sun, a now-defunct alternative weekly paper, in the late 1970s. In fact, he succeeded me as publisher at the Sun, though I don’t think he lasted as long as I did before he escaped to academia. He’s now a professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Illinois, and he’s devoted his career to describing and critiquing the power of tightly controlled corporate media in various manifestations.

McChesney and Nichols argue that our idea of a free press needs to be expanded exponentially and funded by government subsidies. Some would be indirect in the form of $200 tax credits for taxpayers who subscribe to a daily newspaper of their choice. “We could see this evolving into a system to provide tax credits for online subscriptions as well.” For a paper like The Oregonian, that would add up to something approaching $60 million, though McChesney and Nichols are hoping for something better than The Oregonian. And, in fact, they are hoping that competitors to The Oregonian enter the field.

They also want direct subsidies to fund public journalism along the lines of European models. They even want to fund extensive journalism programs in public schools — how else can you get young people excited about what’s going on their world? And really, that’s the role of journalism in a democracy: to keep we, the citizens, both and informed about and engaged in our government, our culture and our sports teams. OK. I added those last two part myself.

I think of Steven Berlin Johnson as a futurist who sees the future in the past, and his speech at SXSW in Austin on the future of media does exactly that. He extrapolates from his experience with the rapid expansion of tech journalism during the past 25 years or so, and doesn’t really see a problem. Sure, there will be dislocations, but the quantity and quality of journalism as a whole is likely to expand as rapidly as the quality of one of its parts, tech journalism. And frankly, when I think about it, he might be right already for national-level issues. But it’s the local where we live, and the local where we have the greatest fear about the loss of journalism. Twenty fewer commentators on the stimulus package wouldn’t be such a great loss. One fewer person covering Portland Public Schools on a regular basis would get us down to near-zero. Would a little niche-ecology of bloggers rush in to fill the void? I’m thinking of greater outreach by the school district itself and the teachers’ union, maybe the PTA, along with various educational observers of various stripes. Maybe so. Johnson is a smart guy, so he could be right. And his suggestion can be easily followed — do nothing!

Which is where Clay Shirky, an Internet theoretician, ends up in his looping essay on the history of information revolutions. We can debate his “read” of recent American media history, which boils down to expensive printing presses losing out to cheap online servers. (McChesney and Nichols, for example, would probably suggest that the mega-media corporations became addicted to the massive profit margins of newspapers and failed to invest in them, instead wringing every penny out of them that they could.) But his essay is still a fascinating tour of the press since Gutenberg.

We’ll stop for now with an short essay by Alan Mutter from his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog. Mutter has been a journalist, though he moved on to the Silicon Valley, and his blog attempts 1) to describe how dire things are for the news business, and 2) what positive signs he sees out there for the future. That’s what the linked post does.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

The craft of merging: Thoughts on a museum in flux

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Tip Toland at Bellevue Arts Museum

What is craft? What is art? What is folk art? Outsider art? Contemporary art?

Are the distinctions real? Do they matter, or are they intellectual games people play, rococo road blocks in the path of direct emotional response to aesthetic objects?

Oh — and what’s a museum supposed to be, anyway?

Dumb questions, maybe. Or, as I prefer to think, basic questions — and sometimes, when you’re staring a big change in the face, basic questions are very good things to ask.

Here’s another one: How many museums does a city need to have a healthy critical mass?

Like a lot of people, I’ve been pondering the impending takeover of Portland’s financially sinking Museum of Contemporary Craft by the expansion-minded Pacific Northwest College of Art, a merger that might become final next month. The question at this point is no longer, “Is this a good idea?”. Barring the sudden swooping down from the heavens of a previously unsuspected angel, some sort of merger seems necessary if the museum is to survive, and this is the one that’s been worked out. So the question now is, “How will this work to the best long-term advantage of both institutions?”

Continue reading The craft of merging: Thoughts on a museum in flux →

Barry Johnson, Cities, General, Music, Theater

A light Scatter of arts+newspapers+urban matters

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Rough Rider WeeklySo, lots of things bubbling about with Scatter implications, of a Monday evening.

First, a tip from regular TdR, who posts at Portland Spaces’ Burnside Blog — and got to the whole gag reflex to the idea of a Rose Quarter “entertainment district” (mentioned below) WAY before Scatter did. I confess, all I can imagine is the most sanitized experience possible, which is the very antithesis of a good “entertainment district.” Thanks to MTC, we’ve also corrected our link to the Burnside Blog.

We’ve threatened to talk about media, and given the origin myth of Art Scatter, that frequently means “newspaper,” which back in the day transmitted “news” to a populace eager to be told what “news” was. Clearly those days are not these days. The financial pins of the whole newspaper business have been knocked hither and yon by various nefarious forces (as you’ve no doubt heard), and the most recent example of this in action was reported today at The Oregonian, where significant pay cuts and layoffs of part-time staff were announced, among other cost-cutting measures. My rules of engagement forbid me to talk about this in a substantive way, and even if I could, I don’t know exactly what it means except the obvious. The chatter about how to put Humpty Dumpty together again is ongoing on various journalism blogs, and soon we’ll do a little summary for our interested Scatter community.

Over at Portland Arts Watch, we’ve been posting furiously on events we’ve been hitting. Like Imago’s “APIS,” Jerry Mouawad’s fusion of bees and prison. OK, you kinda had to be there, though the “wordless opera,” as Mouawad calls it, reminded me of the connection between Imago’s kid shows (such as “Frogz”) and its adult shows. It also exposed the “tragic” nature of the Imago approach, even its comedies. At least, that’s what I thought I saw.

I also caught the end game of “24/7,” which organizers Bill Crane and Thomas Lauderdale created to mark “7 years of war” with “24 hours of music.” Actually, it’s less than seven years of war in Iraq, but more if you count Afghanistan, which may be the war that never ends. Don’t you hate when Orwell is right? Anyway, the mostly classical program was inspiring, by all accounts, and by the time I got there for Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Wieden+Kennedy’s atrium was jammed and the musicians were playing free and easy and beautifully.

And my obsession with the PNCA-Museum of Contemporary Craft merger continued in a column in The Oregonian today. Bauhaus came up. Honestly.

Portland has a Major League Soccer team. We just had to type that one more time.

Barry Johnson, Cities, Environment, General

Urban matters: getting used to the idea

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The Walker Macy design for Waterfront ParkSo, yes, it’s taken some time for me to figure out how to occupy space at both Art Scatter and Portland Arts Watch, not that you were holding your breath or anything.

Here’s what I’ve come up with. My straight-ahead arts stuff will land at Portland Arts Watch, which is more or less business as usual. And I’ll try to be better about letting you know what’s cooking over there. And on Art Scatter, I’ll get very scattered and talk about urban design (especially as it relates to the arts and culture) and media (ditto), both of which I’m following closely these days, as well as more, um, speculative matters. I’m going to call the urban design bits “Urban matters,” just so you know what you’re getting yourself into (or not).

As a sort of intro, here are some of the city threads I’m following right now.
Continue reading Urban matters: getting used to the idea →

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General

Hold it right there: looking for a little relief

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phlushblue“What do you think of semiotics?” an owlish interrogator asked me.

This was deep in the drifts of a previous century, shortly after I’d been named movie critic for a now-dead daily newspaper, and my questioner’s tone made it clear that he needed to know whether I was a serious fellow worth paying attention to or just another star-struck hack.

“Not much,” I replied, knowing I was consigning myself in one mind, at least, to eternal hackdom. “It’s an ugly-sounding word, don’t you think?”

And that was the end of that.

I still think semiotics is an ugly-sounding word, and if you bring it up in conversation I’m going to have a sudden desire to slip off discreetly to the no-host bar.

A good sign, on the other hand, can be a wondrous thing, and so I offer a heartfelt tip of the Art Scatter hat to the creators of the one above. There can be no mistaking the meaning of those crossed legs, in any language or any culture on any spot on the planet.

The sign just came my way from a Portland-based group called PHLUSH, or Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human, and although we can joke about it all day long (feel free to insert your own sophomoric wordplay here) it’s a serious issue, and I’m glad PHLUSH is around to tussle with it. Take a look at the group’s Web site here.

What is an occasional inconvenience for most of us can be a matter of both humiliation and extreme physical discomfort for others who lack ordinary middle-class comforts. And around the world, hygiene or the lack of it can literally be a matter of life or death. That’s no symbol: That’s reality.

In the meantime, PHLUSH is planning to hand out its Public Restroom Awards, to “honor those whose efforts have increased public restroom availability in Portland,” at 5:30 p.m. March 24 at Orchid Salon, 203 NW Second Ave. in Portland’s Old Town. The public’s invited to show up and take a seat.

The need to go when you’re on the go can lead to ridiculous situations. I’ve been known to dash into a coffee shop and order a shot of Joe just so I can use the bathroom, and think about the long-term futility of that.

And in case you’re wondering what all this has to do with art, which is what we here at Art Scatter are supposedly in business to talk about, check this.

So, good luck, PHLUSH. We’re in your corner.
It’s a sign of the times.

Bob Hicks, General

Celebrating a year of the Artificial Me

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Bend it like Beckham/Gray's Anatomy

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, that great American bacchanal on a boisterous Irish theme, and here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we trust our stockholders are out on the streets whooping and hollering and downing tankards of green beer and generally celebrating the corning of the beef. Or not.

My own plans are slightly different. I figure instead on relaxing in my lush private retreat overlooking the grand garden estate I purchased with a small slice of this year’s Art Scatter upper-management bonus distribution — how else could we attract the best and the brightest talent in these tough times? — slowly savoring a fine Irish whiskey served by one of my several personal assistants as I contemplate the successful completion of a full year of the Artificial Me.

The funny thing is, I don’t feel in the least artificial, and I’m wondering if that makes me and Bernie Madoff blood brothers.

Yet here I sit, and stand, and walk, and even bend, things that had gradually become so difficult that a year ago today I found myself lying in an operating room at Providence Portland Medical Center, where a team led by the blessedly skillful orthopedic surgeon Dr. Steven Hoff scraped and jabbed and sliced into my left leg, stretching tissue wide enough to insert something very like a hockey puck into the degenerated space between my femur and tibia that had become the laughably inadequate remnant of a once solidly workable knee. (Strictly speaking this isn’t quite true. I didn’t “find myself” lying in the operating room; I never saw the place. By that point, swaddled in the sweet bassinet of modern pharmacology, I was deep into lullaby land, and thank goodness for that: This was no Civil War surgery, with hack saw and clenched teeth and a bottle of booze to stanch the pain.)

Today, after a few months of rehab under the gentle yet firm prodding of Providence’s physical therapy squadron, I’m happy to report the bailout was a success. For some time I’ve been back to “normal” — that is, under ordinary circumstances I don’t think about my knee any more than an AIG executive thinks about ethical responsibility. Sure, there’s a little tightness of the skin around the scar tissue, but that’s just the new normal: Think of it as one of those niggling oversight requirements that might go away if you just ignore it. Before surgery, stairs and even slight inclines on sidewalks were obstacles. Before surgery, I hesitated between walking-sticks and walking-canes, uncertain of which was more stylish/less obtrusive (and foolishly self-conscious in a way I hadn’t felt for years) but always with one or the other at hand. Now, sticks are long forgotten and stairs are just life.

In other words, everything’s natural — except for that highly artificial, nonorganic, composite hockey puck that separates bone from bone; that blessed chunk of shock absorber that takes the stiffness out of my ambulatory stride. I am artificially normalized — engineered into effectiveness. And while the whole process has hardly been on the order of a heart transplant — I join millions and millions of other people who’ve had knee or hip replacements — I have dipped my toes into the brave new world of Robot Man. I am, just slightly, less a biological being than when I began. And I feel good about it. I feel stimulated.
Continue reading Celebrating a year of the Artificial Me →

Bob Hicks, General

The choir sings: Let’s kiss and make up

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The angelic choir/Gustave Dore for "The Divine Comedy"Here at Art Scatter we just love a heavenly chorus. Harmony’s our thing, and we’re fond of kittens, too.

So why do we find ourselves hesitating to lend our voice to the call for a new song of reconciliation with the Oregon Legislature over its co-option of $1.8 million from the Oregon Cultural Trust? Maybe we just don’t like the tune. And maybe we think it’s not all that great an idea for everyone to be singing the same song.

Our friends at Culture Shock are taking the lead at keeping the Trust issue out in the open. Their latest reports are here and here, and they’re well worth reading, including the comments. Among other things, Culture Shock passes along in full yesterday’s tactic-shifting statement from the Oregon Cultural Advocacy Coalition on behalf of the Trust, a statement that includes this key passage:

Now is the time to change gears and recognize the difficult work of leadership. Legislators completed a brutal week where they voted on a package of bills that contained items they all personally disliked. They took votes that hurt and feel they did their best with few alternative options. They need some breathing room to get beyond the budget rebalance and focus on issues of the 2009 session.

In other words: The deal’s done, the point’s been made, and now the smart thing to do is back off, be team players, and work behind the scenes so we can get it back in the future and not lose even more. That’s the way politics works.

But that’s not the only way politics works. It also works by making noise. And if you’re lucky, the noisemakers and the peacemakers work in concert, each checking the other’s extremes and keeping them on course.

A little background, if you’re just checking in on this: The Oregon Legislature, in an attempt to fill an $855 million hole in the state’s current budget, made cuts across the board — including $1.8 million from the Oregon Cultural Trust, a state-administered fund that distributes grants to a variety of arts, cultural, historical, educational and tribal organizations in every Oregon county. Scroll down at Art Scatter and you’ll find several previous postings.

Unfortunately for the Legislature’s budget-balancers, the Trust’s money doesn’t come out of the state’s general fund: It’s donated by citizens directly and specifically for the Trust’s purpose. (In this case, the money came from sales of Oregon cultural license plates for people’s cars.) In normal circumstances — and certainly in private exchanges — money in a trust fund is inviolable: It can’t be grabbed for other purposes. To do so is, literally, a violation of trust, and that’s been the focus of this controversy.

So. Done deal or not — and I believe it is — the snatching of the Trust money has long-term implications, no matter how benevolent the Legislature’s short-term goals were. It’s still a violation of trust, its legality is still questionable, and it still raises the possibility that people will simply stop donating money to the trust because they have no assurance that their money will be used for the purposes they gave it. You can’t sweep that sort of stuff away. And you can’t sing it away.

You can work out compromises, using that old political one-two combo of kicking and kissing. Culture Shock’s Culture Jock passes along a KGW-TV news report that suggests Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose, is leading an effort to translate the hijacking of the Trust money into a loan. That’s a promising development, and worth tracking.

Culture Shock’s Mighty Toy Cannon points out in a comment on one of his site’s recent posts that “the Legislature’s ‘brutal week’ [to quote the Cultural Advocacy Coalition’s Wednesday statement] began with a caucus at which party leadership banned negotiation on individual items on the sweep list.” That’s important to keep in mind. This was a lockstep vote by state Democrats, who agreed beforehand that the budget sweep was an all-or-nothing deal — and because they know how to count, they knew it would be “all.”

To certain key segments of the state’s cultural interests, political reality now says “It’s time to kiss and make up.” These are mostly the people, including those at the Trust, who have to play in the political arena all the time; people whose overall effectiveness relies on their ability to maintain good working relationships with the politicians whose votes ultimately decide these things. This is, indeed, the song they need to sing.

That doesn’t mean YOU need to kiss and make up, or that it’s a good idea for you to do so. In fact, it’s a very good idea for a whole lot of people to stay on the offensive on this issue. A cardinal rule of politics is, if you don’t make noise, you get forgotten. Stay quiet, and the raiding of the Trust will be both history and precedent. It’ll be easier next time. The Legislature needs to be consistently reminded that the public knows what it did was wrong, and that people will remember — and that votes are attached to those feelings.

So, choose for yourself where you line up now. If you think that tactically it’s time to play nice, by all means, do so. If you think it’s better strategy, and truer to your gut, to kick up a fuss, keep kicking.

The Legislature can act in lockstep if it wants to. That doesn’t mean the public — especially the public in a healthy representative democracy — has to do the same.

*******

Postscript: I appeared Tuesday morning on KOPB public radio’s Think Out Loud public-issues show to talk about the Trust issue. Paul King of White Bird Dance and I were studio guests. Rep. Mary Nolan, D-Portland and Oregon House majority leader, spoke at length via phone, explaining the Legislature’s point of view, and Christine D’Arcy, executive director of the Oregon Arts Commission and the Oregon Cultural Trust, also spoke via phone. Other phone-in guests included Steve Dennis, owner of Earthworks Gallery on the Oregon coast, and Greg Phillips, executive director of Portland Center Stage. The discussion was lively, and you can download the show from the Think Out Loud site.