Monthly Archives: July 2009

General, Journalism, Laura Grimes, Music, Visual Art

Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story

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Rick Bartow: Crow's Delusion (He Who Must Be Obeyed). Courtesy Froelick Gallery

By LAURA GRIMES

Today my current first husband and I can legally drink. We’ve been married 21 years.

We can’t legally drink and celebrate together because I’m spending our special day with my mom. But it’s not the special days that make a marriage special. It’s the everyday little things. Like laughing and teasing. Like coffee together in the morning.

The first Christmas we spent together, my current first husband gave me a coffee maker. Sweet? I was pissed. But I gotta admit, that coffee maker was our loyal morning friend for 20 years, part of many a happy moment. Good memories are made of many a happy moment. Good marriages, too.

There’s one moment, though, that I will always hold dear.

***

My current first husband wrote a post recently and described a certain look in my eyes. Damn, but he beat me to it. Because little did he know that I have been working on a certain story that has just such a look, albeit a tad bit different and a shade bit farther … and on a certain somebody else. Actually, I’ve been tooling this story around in my head for many years. But a recent event swept through my brain like a tornado in Kansas and collected all the disparate thoughts, lifted them up, swirled them around and plunked them down again.

***

I met Rick Bartow a few weeks ago, and now I understand.

I understand a story I first started hearing years ago.

Rick Bartow. Courtesy Froelick GalleryIt was early 2002. Mr. Scatter and I and the large smelly boys – who were not so large and not so smelly back then – were driving several hours north to visit family. To visit my mom, in fact. The not-so-large not-so-smelly boys must have been blessedly quiet in the backseat for a long stretch of road. We’ll just chalk that up to divinity and not ask why.

Mr. Scatter had recently visited Rick at his home and studio in Newport, Ore., for research to write a story. He had been typing away on it for a few days. But he was at loose ends. I could tell. Because he was talking about it incessantly, as much to figure out a throughway for the story as he was just plum excited.

He was trying to get his arms around a giant octopus and he hadn’t quite figured out how to land it.

***

After meeting Rick and seeing him perform, now I know why. Rick and two of his musician buddies did a show with Portland Taiko on July 2. Mr. Scatter is on the board of Portland Taiko, so even though I was looking forward to finally hearing Rick, I figured it would be an evening of smiling and shaking hands. I fretted about taking the right handbag.

It had been a blistering hot day and the event was taking place on the roof of the DeSoto Building in the Pearl, above Froelick Gallery. Frying came to mind. But by evening, the temperature had cooled to balmy, a slight breeze had kicked in and the sky was an uncanny even blue, deepening darker as the night wore on and lending a crisper backdrop for a half moon that lifted and slowly shifted through the show. It was magic.

Rick was even better. He was immediately open and generous, a magnetic guy who took a blues song and elevatored it down to deep dark basements faster than you can push a button. His songs were earthy and mystical and wrapped in rich, complex storytelling. He didn’t hold back.

What a gift. He talked of his past substance abuse, Vietnam, friends who have died, the beginnings of songs, the ends of songs. He wasn’t afraid of ugly. And he wasn’t afraid of sweet.

His stories unspooled for anyone lucky enough to have a seat. Friends. Strangers. He opened up for everyone. It was the gift he gave.

Afterward, Mr. Scatter and I chatted with him. I asked if he ever played at the Blues Festival, which was happening at the same time at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. He said no, he just can’t take the crowds. His nerves get to him.

I understand that, too. He seemingly wears all of his nerves on the outside. He takes in everything, absorbs it, feels it, and gives it back. For someone to perform like that, he must be perceptive to the slightest vibrations. And when you’re that sensitive, when all your pores are open to everything that comes in, crowds can be overwhelming. It’s too much all at once. There’s a lot of good in there, but the bad comes with it.

I want to say that Rick is a big man, but that doesn’t sound right. He’s a big spirit. At once gentle and rough.

Continue reading Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story →

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Music

Boll weevil blues: Singing the heat wave away

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What makes your head so red?
Tell me, what makes your head so red?
I been workin’ so long in the hot hot sun,
it’s a wonder that I ain’t dead.

My father used to sing that sometimes, sleeves rolled up, shirt open at the collar, head tilted back for the high notes. Just a snatch of a song, I always figured, part of something bigger, but that was the part he sang. So do I, now, when it sounds in my head, a short burst that makes me think of high heat and hard work in fields that I have rarely known.

Hot enough for ya?Today, in the throes of an infernal Pacific Northwest heat wave that has the thermometer rattling up toward 107, that red-baked head is on my mind again. Kind of blue, kind of hot, an oddly triumphal moan, mixed of resignation and endurance and somehow coming out on the sweet side of things: I ain‘t dead.

I come from a singing family. (And a whistling family, too, for that matter.)

My father tended toward old country-style things, like “Goodnight, Irene”:

“Sometimes I live in the country,
sometimes I live in town.
Sometimes I take a great notion
to jump into the river and drown.”

Or “Froggy Went a-Courtin'”:

“Without my uncle Rat’s consent,
I wouldn’t marry the president!”

On rare occasions he’d pull out his old battered guitar and strum. More often he’d just start to sing.

My mother had a pretty, Jo Stafford sort of voice, and her songs were more from the pop charts, often with a ’40s derivation, definitely pre-rock ‘n’ roll:

“Shrimp boats a-comin’, there’ll be dancin’ tonight!”
“It was fiesta down in Mexico, and so I stopped a while to see the show …”
“Your Daddy’s rich, and your Mama’s good-lookin’ …”


My father is 93 now, and my mother is 89, and they don’t sing much anymore: The old vocal cords just aren’t what they used to be. But for most of my life I remember singing as an utterly casual yet plainly important part of their lives. They had seven kids and not a lot of money and precious little time to themselves, but singing they could do. Singing was a pleasure, and to most of their children they passed it along. To me they even passed along a certain taste. I’m much more likely to start singing “Hey, good lookin’, whatcha got cookin’?” or “If I’m gonna marry it’s the butcher boy for me!” or even a rollicking old church tune than anything by the Beatles, much less Madonna or Cheryl Crow or Smashing Pumpkins.

Our town was surrounded by dairy and berry and bean farms and it rained a lot and in winter we got silver frosts with icicles hanging like troll-knives from the eaves. Summers were short and warm and grew things that got us out in the fields, rustling through strawberry bushes to earn clothes money for the coming school year. The music in the fields tended toward the tin beat of transistor radios and pop-40 tunes: “Call my baby lollipop, tell you why, his kiss is sweeter than an apple pie …”

People made their own music. That’s always been and always will be, despite the corporate push to turn us all into spectators for carefully controlled musical spectacles. (Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the masses; apparently he never saw MTV.) People made music at church. They made music on the porch or in the back yard. Kids gathered on sidewalks and chanted their proto-raps: “Made ya look, ya dirty crook, ya stole your mother’s pocketbook!” “Miss Suzy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell, Miss Suzy went to Heaven, the steamboat went to Hello operator, please give me number nine  …”

Continue reading Boll weevil blues: Singing the heat wave away →

Environment, General, Laura Grimes

Scorching temperature: The long and the shorts of it

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Desperate times call for desperate measures.Here in the Art Scatter sauna we wouldn’t stoop to wearing a muu muu, but we have fantasized about it.

Are we the only ones to pitch all decorum in this stifling heat? One of the large smelly boys* walks around in boxer shorts and the cat sleeps on the dining table.

I know. Gross. But I don’t have the heart to discourage it. The cat knows where to find the best air flow.

But back to the boxer shorts. They remind me of the mom who once told me that they have a rule in their house.

“If the blinds are up then everyone has to wear at least underwear.”

(pause)

“And that goes for everyone.”

— Laura Grimes

—————————————————–

*Identity has been blurred to protect the guilty.

Bob Hicks, Environment, General

Temporarily incapacitated: Please go away

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Old Sol, with spots. NASA/Wikimedia Commons

The temperature on the surface of old Sol, often referred to as “the sun,” is 5,510 degrees Celsius.

The temperature in Portland, Oregon, United States of America, western and northern hemispheres, planet Earth, is 105 degrees Fahrenheit.

Close enough.

Art Scatter gives up.

If something eventually gives, we will emerge from the basement.

Until then, we are OUT OF ORDER.

Our apologies.

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Television, Theater

Farewell, frontiersman: Dallas McKennon, 1919-2009

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One day in 1978 a shadow fell over my desk at the old Oregon Journal in downtown Portland. I looked up and there stood a giant of a mountain man, beard down to his chest, big grin peeking though from the bramble of hair, hand outstretched in greeting.

Dallas McKennonJoe Meek, maybe. Jedediah Smith. Liver-Eating Johnson. Jim Bridger.

Or, as it turned out, Cincinnatus, the frontier storekeeper on Fess Parker’s old Daniel Boone television series from the 1960s.

Dallas McKennon, the actor who played Cincinnatus, reveled in the rugged-outdoorsman role that was his bread and butter through several seasons of Daniel Boone and occasional shots on the likes of Gunsmoke, Laramie, The Rifleman, The Virginian, Wagon Train, and the Don Knotts spoof-Western movie Hot Lead and Cold Feet.

It fit him well. He was born in 1919 in the eastern Oregon town of La Grande, and although he became one of those familiar Hollywood faces (and even more familiar Hollywood voices) he loved that frontier image. I never saw him clean-shaven and surely wouldn’t have recognized him if I had. He was big and booming and glad-spirited, a happy salesman of himself.

I don’t remember what his particular purpose was on that day in 1978, other than to make himself known to the new kid handling entertainment news at the paper. My mind was filled with Big Stuff — the French New Wave, new German cinema, Important Literaure — and I wasn’t sure where to fit in a full-throttle show biz throwback to the American-frontier myth.

But McKennon was gregarious and patient and genially insistent — I’m here, he never quite said; you need to deal with me — and when he had a project going, he’d drop by for a few minutes and a fresh photo. He knew how the business worked: I’d make sure a line landed somewhere in the paper.

I really should have paid more attention. McKennon died July 14, five days shy of his 90th birthday, and if Oregon didn’t pay much notice to the passing of a native son, other parts of the world did. Here’s a fine obituary by Claire Noland from the Los Angeles Times.

Dallas (or Dal, as his old movie and TV credits often had it) was living in the Washington coastal town of Raymond, along Willapa Bay, when he died, but he’d spent many years in Cannon Beach on the Oregon Coast. It was there that he began to put together his own live-theater musical productions with titles such as Johnny Appleseed, Kaintuck and Wagons Ho. In the early 1950s he’d had a pioneering kids’ TV show in Los Angeles, and once he’d settled back in Oregon he’d sometimes show up on the old Ramblin’ Rod morning show in Portland.

He was never forgotten in Hollywood. Partly that was because of the old TV shows, but it was also for his prominence as a gifted voice actor. He worked for Walt Disney and Walter Lantz. He was the voice of Buzz Buzzard on Woody Woodpecker. He was Gumby, he worked on Mr. Magoo, he voiced part of the cartoon scene in Mary Poppins and did voice work on other Disney animated films such as A Hundred and One Dalmatians and Sleeping Beauty. He was the voice of Archie Andrews, the freckle-faced prototypical comic teen-ager, on TV. He even had a bit part in the Elvis Presley movie Clambake; according to a poster at www.cartoonbrew.com, during film breaks he and Elvis passed the time together doing dog barks.

That’s a life. Or part of one. Other things of note: He had eight kids. He married Betty Warner in Portland in 1942, and they stayed married: She survives him.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1, in the Cannon beach Community Presbyterian Church.

General, Language, Laura Grimes

The Write Brain Initiative: Wrong words stir up a storm

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Oklahoma! -- Photo: Wikimedia Commons/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

By LAURA GRIMES

The worst thing about Writer Brain is that it’s silent but deadly.

It wildly carries on in my head without anyone knowing it and then embarrassingly erupts at odd moments when I least expect it. The real problem? It’s not always quiet.

“I’m sorry,” I’ll murmur. But it’s too late. It’s out. And everyone heard it.

This happened to me at a very civilized dinner party of eight. This wasn’t during the unruly cocktail time when I could cough and hide in the folds of a curtain and hope the errant noise was covered by polite chatter and crunchy hors d’oeuvres. This happened while everyone was sitting thigh to elbow around the table and pleasantly eating salad and halibut.

I had been working for weeks on a gangly and lengthy poem that stretched well beyond the reaches of my imagination. It had started in a flash of brilliant clarity that was so pinpoint-exact that of course I could never find it again. Trying to describe it led me on an epic search from which I might never return. I wrote verse after sprawling verse.

Continue reading The Write Brain Initiative: Wrong words stir up a storm →

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Dance, Environment, General, Music

Monday links: Romancing the Rose Quarter

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TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLET GAME: Remember the flap over Memorial Coliseum? Tear it down? Fix it up? Turn it into the doorway to a suburban-style, cookie-cutter entertainment and shopping complex? Build a minor-league baseball park in its place, with a concession stand serving grilled architects on a bun?

Portland Memorial ColiseumNiel DePonte has another idea, and you can read about it on this morning’s Oregonian editorial page, under the headline Imagine the Rose Quarter Performing Arts District. I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth at City Hall now. Or is that the sound of stonewalling?

But DePonte — Grammy-nominated percussionist for the Oregon Symphony, music director and conductor for Oregon Ballet Theatre, president and founder of MetroArts, Inc., which is helping to find and train the next generations of artists — has some good ideas. And right now the Coliseum in specific and the Rose Quarter in general need some good ideas. Give it a read. And if you like the idea, or parts of it, pass it along.

FAREWELL TO FRANK: This morning’s New York Times has a good appreciation of Frank McCourt, the New York Irish character and sweet writer who died Sunday at age 78. In 1996 McCourt published Angela’s Ashes, his harrowing yet tender memoir of Ireland and America and poverty and drink and survival, and it became a phenomenon, staying near the top of the best-seller lists for two years.

A lot of bad writing’s been committed in the name of memoir. Let’s take time, then, to celebrate a man who did it right — who told the tale more for his readers than himself, and told it with an innate understanding of what storytelling means.

MTC TURNS 100: … and we’d be not just remiss but downright dumb to not point out Mighty Toy Cannon‘s perky celebration of his first century of blogging at Culture Shock. He’s mighty frisky for an old guy. Some writers have got in trouble for misrepresenting the past. MTC niftily sidesteps that problem by brazenly misrepresenting the future. Or is he dead right? Check back in 2109, when our great-grandkids might be comparing him to Nostradamus. Congratulations, old-timer.

Bob Hicks, Books, Food, General, Music

Why I like coffee shops on a Sunday morning

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First, on a day like today, there’s the walk. Just four breezy blocks beneath a cat-stretch sun and here’s our neighborhood coffee shop — Caffe Destino, where Ralph the Owner has been known to laugh and accuse Mrs. Scatter and me, as we’ve sat facing each other tapping away on dueling laptops, of playing Battleship.

John Dodge at Caffe DestinoNo computer screens today, though. On most Sunday mornings Destino offers a bonus: Guitarist John Dodge sits on a stool in the corner by the kids’ toys, small amp propped on a chair beside him, and gives the French blend and bagels a musical setting. It’s melodic, and just the right decibel, and a bit Robert Browning-ish in its simple elegance: All’s right with the world.

Destino sits on the corner of Northeast Fremont and 14th in Portland and has big towering windows that let the sun stream in, but today the place is sleepy: The weather’s so good that most people are out and about, not inside anywhere.

“A quiet morning,” Dodge comments, smiling. And then he begins to play Goin’ Home, one of the loveliest melodies in the American songbook. And I think about how this beautiful song, which many people believe is an African American spiritual, is actually the theme from the second movement of Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, his Symphony From the New World, which he wrote in 1893, during his four-year stay in the United States. The great Czech composer was fascinated with what he heard of Native American and African American music, and predicted that a new American serious music would be built on the foundation of black music. In a way, he was right: It’s called jazz.

So a Czech composer embedded a song on an American theme into a European-style symphony, and it became one of America’s foremost “folk” tunes, because the nature of American culture, like the English language, is to borrow and adapt from everywhere. Czech, Chinese, West African, Brazilian, Russian, Afghani: Once it arrives here, it’s all part of the mix.

People wander in, often with children, who are a regular part of the Destino blend. A sudden squall at the counter declares an emergency: A young lady has spied a cinnamon roll and it’s become her heart’s desire. Except her dad’s said no. Eventually, reluctantly, she settles on a grilled cheese.

Continue reading Why I like coffee shops on a Sunday morning →

Environment, General, Language, Laura Grimes, Visual Art

Splendor in the glass: Life, death, love, and crab shells

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Part of the collection. Photo: Laura Grimes

By LAURA GRIMES

Funny how inspiration can be found in the form of dead crabs.

While walking along the beach I found one crab shell after another and imagined stacking them up in a glass jar. I imagined crab shells all the same size stacked one atop the other, up up up, and enclosed in clear glass. So many. So fragile. So safe. And so dead.

Why?

  • I was taken with the pure imagery of it. Crabs and glass in one clean vertical line.
  • The delicate shells displayed so simply yet they have so much texture and immediately evoke a briny musky sense and a deep connection with the vast ocean.
  • Death and the way we stare at it, a fascination we can’t avoid … uneasy, perilous, precarious.
  • A glass jar that’s oddly both fragile and safe-keeping.

I love filling glass jars — an odd passion, I know. I buy them at Goodwill and wash them and then fill them with shells and rocks and sea glass and fossils and wasps’ nests and pinecones and bones and dead bugs and feathers and flower pods and leaf skeletons.

I fill glass jars now the way I filled my pockets with all these things when I was a kid.

When I was very pregnant with my first son I opened a package in front of a room full of people. Inside were three small jars and a note. When I read the note, I had to discreetly turn my face to hide my tears. I’d like to think it was the hormones. My mom had written that she had received the jars when my sister, 11 years older, was born. My mom had filled them with cotton balls and Q-tips and safety pins. The Q-tips were the old wooden kind. My mom was surprised to hear this. She didn’t remember the Q-tips being the old wooden kind. I saved them.

The small jars are now full of agates, lava rocks and old broken tile and are displayed in the old soldered windows of the dining room. The sunlight shines through them.

Continue reading Splendor in the glass: Life, death, love, and crab shells →

General, Language, Laura Grimes

The Write Brain Initiative: How to refuse the muse without really trying

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By LAURA GRIMES

I’m reluctant to write this.

Gregor Reisch, 1512. Margarita philosophica nova cui insunt sequentiaBut I’ve been fingered by Mighty Toy Cannon, one of my favorite blogforthers (sorry, I have others, too, though I don’t have so many that on ethical grounds I would be obligated to disclose them to my primary care doctor). The jig’s up. MTC said in a recent comment that he had just been wondering where I’d disappeared to.

I’ve been mostly out of town and handicapped by a dodgy internet connection. Which is just fine with me because I fully admit I had planned to disappear for a while. Until at least September. And my little off-the-grid plan would have worked if it hadn’t been for Writer Brain. I have distinctly told it to SHUT THE HELL UP, but it refuses to listen, which entirely ticks me off.

Writer Brain kicks off voices in my head. I know there’s medication for this sort of thing, but the only remedy for my particular syndrome is a full dose of typing fingers.

Fortunately, it has only taunted me lately with goofy, farfetched and absolutely true accounts about plunging and bras (though, unfortunately, not at the same time).

I knew I needed quiet time and summertime, balm time and … fermenting time.

But then words dance in my head and realign and won’t SHUT THE HELL UP.

Sure, they make me laugh. Sure, they make me want to sleep with my computer (I’m not confessing that to my primary care doctor any time soon, either). But – I know this is pathetic – I don’t want to be responsible for them.

I’ve said this before: I have as much discipline as a red balloon on a breezy day. And I want to keep it that way. I want to play on the beach and read and rediscover the fact that I have children.

My small large smelly boy recognizes the affliction when it comes on.

He says, “I’m hungry,” and I steadfastly continue typing, my eyes fixed and glowing as one with the screen. He says, “Mommy, it’s time to get out of bed.” He says, “Mommy, what are you mumbling?” He says, “Mommy, there’s a pedestrian.”

MAKE THE BAD NOISE STOP!

Sure, I’ve done the type-when-I-have-to thing. But this isn’t one of those times. I don’t need to muscle my way to any deadline. So what is it, then?

Could it be a … muse? Aren’t those suppose to be women frolicking in Grecian gowns? Let me make this absolutely clear: the bad noise in my head is not wearing a toga!

Why are muses always considered to be women, anyway? Is that sort of like boats? Why are boats female? Is it because old-timey sailors were always men and they needed a bit of estrogen along to complete the family picture?

MOVE AWAY FROM THE KEYBOARD!

Writer Brain is such a cad, sifting and sorting through several story threads at once. What might catch its fancy?

And yet, I’m relieved. It’s landed only on funny lately, teasing along choice bits until they’re good and ripe and pack just the right punchline.

But there’s something else there, too, something bubbling up from the yeasty depths, well below the frothy head.

What is that? I don’t want to know yet. I need more fermenting time.

So forgive me if I don’t blogforth for a while. I have a headache.

— Laura Grimes