Monthly Archives: October 2009

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Northwest Dance Project joins the PDX renaissance

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Wen Wei Wang / "Chi" / 2009. Photo: Blaine Covert

Above and below: “Chi,” by Wen Wei Wang, Northwest Dance Project, summer 2009. The Project dances downtown Friday and Saturday. Photos: Blaine Covert


It’s not all about Oregon Ballet Theatre.

Sure, the OBT story’s fascinating. Scrappy little company grows into rising national star. Stumbles into economic abyss. Gets saved by outpouring of bucks and extravaganza featuring top dancers from around the country. Dumps its executive director after noisy staff revolt. A day later, triumphs onstage. It’s like Pauline’s perils. Or the Comeback Kid. And there could be cliffhangers yet to come.

But while OBT’s sucked up most of the attention, Portland’s been enjoying a modest renaissance of dance. The two big pieces are OBT — a sterling company in spite of its backstage adventures — and White Bird, the presenting company that’s rejuvenated the city’s contemporary dance scene by bringing in a lot of the best the world has to offer.

And there’s much more.

The popular dance/movement troupe BodyVox, which tours the country, has opened its new dance center in Northwest Portland. Another contemporary troupe, Polaris, has its own new digs. The Portland Ballet, a well-regarded training company, is once again readying its charming holiday production of La Boutique Fantasque — this time with live accompaniment from the Portland State University Symphony performing Rossini’s playful score. Ghe downtown dance center Conduit, despite its own bump in the road, continues to serve the contemporary scene well. Veterans such as Mary Oslund, Josie Moseley, Gregg Bielemeier and Linda Austin are creating vital new work. Movement-inspired theater companies like Do Jump and Imago (which reopens its innovative teeter-totter version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit on Friday, with a terrific-looking cast) cross disciplines audaciously. Mike Barber’s Ten Tiny Dances pop up all over town. The aerialists of Pendulum Dance Theatre keep on floating new ideas. Newcomers like POV Dance, which specializes in site-specific work, are turning out some dizzying stuff — in the case of POV’s August piece at the Conduit benefit, literally: The performers were poking over and out from the four-story open stairwell at the Pythian Building as the audience gazed over guardrails, stomachs flipping.

What we have here, folks, is a scene.

And there’s more. Like, for a pretty big instance, Northwest Dance Project, the brainchild of choreographer and teacher Sarah Slipper, which got its start in 2004. Slipper, a Canadian who did her training there and in London and danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, came to Portland as ballet mistress for OBT back in the James Canfield days. Although deeply rooted in classical ballet, her temperament, like Canfield’s, is more contemporary.

photo: BLAINE COVERTNorthwest Dance Project began as a summer training program for young and mostly professional dancers, ages 16-25, who came to town from across the country to work with leading national choreographers for a few weeks and then put on an end-of-workshop public performance.

That still happens. Dancemakers such as Canfield (now at Nevada Dance Theatre in Las Vegas), Nashville Ballet’s Paul Vasterling, Bebe Miller, Susan Gaudreau of BJM Dance Montreal, Lucas Crandall of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Washington Ballet’s Septime Webre have offered classes.

But things have expanded. Now the Project has an eight-member resident company that does some touring: It’s doing a residency next month at the Flying E Ranch, a 20,000-acre working dude ranch in Arizona’s Sonoran desert that also hosts arts groups, and follows that with a performance in Tucson. And it’ll perform Friday and Saturday nights at the Newmark Theatre in downtown Portland.

This summer the Project moved into its own new studio space in a handsome old ballroom just off North Mississippi Avenue at 833 North Shaver Street, right across from the popular Equinox Restaurant and Bar and barely a skip from the hot spots Gravy and Cup & Saucer Cafe. This part of town is hopping, and a lot of people peek in from the sidewalk to watch the dancers jump. The studio’s bathed with natural light from its big windows, and out back, behind the studio mirrors, the view opens to a sweet little pocket park. It’s a good place to call home.
Continue reading Northwest Dance Project joins the PDX renaissance →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General

Portland dresses up for the high-fashion parade

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Joe Btfsplk, honorary grand marshal of Portland’s High Fashion Parade.

I was shocked — shocked! — this morning when I sat down to make my daily blog rounds and discovered Mighty Toy Cannon’s report at Culture Shock on Portland’s rankings in Travel + Leisure magazine’s latest assessment of America’s Favorite Cities.

Sitting in my plaid pajama bottoms and red T-shirt (not the best choice, granted, in a household with a 16-pound white lap cat) I tugged with frustration at my hair — which, all right, was already a trifle on the unkempt side, and three weeks overdue for a trim.

The nerve! There it was, as Mr. Cannon so indignantly pointed out: Portland, 17th out of 30 cities for “Attractive People.” As the magazine so delicately put it, Portlanders “… may not conform to most visitors’ standards of ‘normal’ beauty.”

Mrs. Scatter was lucky she’d departed for her spacious corner office overlooking the sartorial splendors of Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, or she’d have got an earful.

The larger of the young lunks known collectively as the Large Smelly Boys had taken his carefully curated rumpled clothing and his head of organic free-range pasturage off to high school. (His last haircut was in April or May; we believe he’s planning on attending Halloween functions as Cousin Itt.) The smaller lunk, also a few weeks tardy from the barber chair, is taking on a mildly stylish Prince Valiant look. He’s the fashion pate of the family: All of his T-shirts, the only kind of shirt he wears, must be single-colored and devoid of words or company logos.

The ultimate in Cleveland style./Wikimedia CommonsPortland didn’t do as badly as Cleveland, which rated this jab: “(T)here’s no getting around the fact that its residents are uniformly hideous to look upon.” Ouch! Except for a night spent sleeping on the grassy knoll of a freeway cloverleaf around 1970, I don’t know much about Cleveland. I do know Drew Carey and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame come from there, and I know Mr. Carey usually wears a nice suit and tie. (He still looks like Drew Carey, but he makes himself presentable, and what more should an upscale magazine ask?)

What do Travel + Leisure’s travelers and leisurites want, anyway? It’s not as if Portlanders were babes in the backwoods when it comes to fashion. Just last night Mrs. Scatter and I were driving through our Highly Cultured Pearl District when we spotted an Eddie Bauer outlet. “I thought they went Chapter 11,” I said. Yet, there they were, scant blocks from REI, “the world’s premiere outdoor gear store.” L.L. Bean catalogs arrive at the Scatter house regularly, and I eagerly flip through them to find out which plaids are in fashion this season. You won’t catch me visiting North Portland’s Paul Bunyan statue in last year’s lumberjack shirt.

I own a tuxedo, and I try to make sure to wear it once a year. It blends nicely, I think, with the black turtlenecks and berets at our more cutting-edge neo-Marxist coffee shops. Plus, how many cities can match Portland for the style and lavishness of our tattoo designs? “I like your arm,” I found myself saying the other morning to the newish barista at our neighborhood coffee joint.

She looked at me a little funny, but I assume that’s because she’s new to town.

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

An ‘Emerald’ out of the rough: second thoughts on OBT

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Balanchine's Emeralds at OBT. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

Once again Art Scatter is pleased to have the considerations of dance critic Martha Ullman West appear in our august corner of virtual space. Martha, who also reviews ballet for The Oregonian, is working on a biography of dancer and choreographer Todd Bolender. Plus, she’s a charter member of Friends of Art Scatter and the League of Tough-Guy Arts Observers. Her thoughts after seeing the first two performances of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Emerald Retrospective:

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The critic was wrong, and she admits it. After filing my review of Saturday night’s opening performance for The Oregonian, I went to the Sunday matinee performance of Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s Terpsichorean relay race known as the Emerald Retrospective and was moved to tears by Artur Sultanov’s and Alison Roper’s rendering of the pas de deux from James Kudelka’s Almost Mozart.

I still think it’s gimmicky –the dancers never let go of each other as they wend their way through Kudelka’s sinuous and steely choreography; and the costumes, as a friend said, look like an ad for bodybuilder Charles Atlas. However, these dancers’ commitment to Mozart’s mournful music and the anguish expressed by their bodies made me relive some profound personal losses.

Is that good? Yes. Great performances heal; the Greeks called it catharsis.

One of those losses (to the art form I love, and tend to take personally,) was Dennis Spaight, who died of AIDS in 1993, not yet forty. Once a tribute program had been performed in 1994, his work got buried with him, at least as far as OBT was concerned. I hope the bits from Gloria on this program are a trailer if you will for mounting the whole, and soon.

Or perhaps Frauenlieben leben, or Theatre Dances, or Rhapsody in Blue — or, if the money can be raised for live orchestral accompaniment, Scheherazade, that luscious, lavish deeply moving re-telling of the Arabian Nights story that has sets designed by Henk Pander, elegantly louche costumes designed by the late Ric Young, and lighting designed by Peter West, whose lighting for Gloria was handsomely reproduced by Michael Mazzola.

The Eugene Ballet and Nashville Ballet have performed Scheherazade in recent years. Crayola, parts of Gloria, and Irish Suite have been done by schools around the country. It’s a shame not to have Spaight’s work where some of it was made, and where some of it was polished and changed by the choreographer for specific dancers.

Continue reading An ‘Emerald’ out of the rough: second thoughts on OBT →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music

Lithe Talented Dancers wow Large Smelly Boy

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obt_emeralds

“Did you notice how the first lady soloist started dancing just with her hands?”

Intermission had just begun Saturday night at Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s season-opening performance, which had so far consisted of the company premiere of George Balanchine’s green dream of a dance, Emeralds. Mrs. Scatter had scarpered to the coast for one of her intermittent weekends of popping corks and doing crafty stuff with her girlfriends, and Mr. Scatter was in the company of the Small Large Smelly Boy, two weeks shy of his twelfth birthday and taking in his first non-Nutcracker ballet.

“No, Dad,” the SLSB replied patiently. “It was her whole arms.”

So it was.

Those arms belonged to the highly talented Yuka Iino, the fleet princess in this picture-book of a ballet to Alison Roper’s imperial queen.

Premiered in 1967 and seeming older than that (this is definitely a pre-Beatles universe onstage) Balanchine’s ballet is a visual stunner: Karinska’s glittering emerald costumes; the spare vivid set with its falling sweep of white drapery and its lone elegant chandelier high above the stage; the astonishing lighting (originally by Ronald Bates, executed here by OBT’s masterful designer Michael Mazzola) that reminds me somehow of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, with its conceit that there are old worlds and new worlds, and that in the new ones everything is brighter, more vivid, more cleanly outlined, and the air seems alive.

But the SLSB, freshly showered for the occasion, isn’t looking at the set. He’s looking at feet. This boy is an observer (and, I think, more a classicist than a postmodernist), and he’s captivated by something that’s captivated millions of people for almost two hundred years: toe work.

obt_speak“How do they dance up on their toes like that?” he asked. “Do they have to work a lot to do it? That must be hard!”

“Yes,” I replied. “That’s called dancing en pointe. It’s very hard. You have to practice for years and years. Even professional dancers keep practicing it, all the time. Dancers are athletes, did you know that? They have to be as athletic as anybody in a sport, plus they have to be artists.”

“How do they know what to do?”

“Well, the dancemaker, the choreographer, decides on how they’ll move to the music. There are five basic positions that your feet and legs can take, and then there’s lots of variations and different ways you can combine them. But it all starts with those five positions you need to learn. And you work on those all the time.”

I was afraid the SLSB might be bored by Emeralds. It’s hardly the cutting edge of contemporary ballet, after all, and although I love Gabriel Faure’s music, it can be deep and reserved. Perkiness is not its game.

I shouldn’t have worried. My son’s attention was perfectly focused through this long dance, absorbing it, homing in on particulars. He caught the importance of the shoes in absorbing the impact of the weight and pressure on those elevated feet. (Later, watching Dennis Spaight’s fluid and sassy Ellington Suite, he was also impressed that the dancers can dance in high heels.)

The second act of this expansive evening of dance consisted of 10 shorter pieces, in whole or in excerpt, from the company’s history — including one, a scene from The Sleeping Beauty, performed by the young dancers of the company school. This is OBT’s twentieth anniversary season, and it kicked off with a celebration of the company’s past, although with a gaping hole: For reasons that I don’t understand (I know he was asked) the program includes no dances by James Canfield, artistic director for the company’s first fourteen years.
Continue reading Lithe Talented Dancers wow Large Smelly Boy →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Ulsh is out, Stowell gains leverage at OBT. Now what?

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A day before the season opener, the turmoil at Oregon Ballet Theatre has taken an unsurprising turn.

Photo: Lambtron, distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.Jon Ulsh, the embattled executive director, is out. Artistic director Christopher Stowell picks up some of his role, and chief operating officer Doug Wells will assume day-to-day management. The Oregonian’s Barry Johnson has the story on his Portland Arts Watch blog.

The ballet’s board says its decision isn’t a response to the overwhelming vote of no confidence in Ulsh by staff and dancers. But once the company’s letter of concern to the board became public, something had to be done — and this seemed the most likely outcome.

Development — read, fund-raising — apparently will become mainly the board’s responsibility. How it handles that task will be crucial to the company’s success.

Stay tuned. This story isn’t over.

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

Portland Open Studios: what’s behind the gallery walls

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Portland loves process — a politician here can barely duck out for coffee without holding several public meetings first to thrash out which coffee shop she should hit in which geographically underserved corner of the city — and that extends to its arts scene.

Mar Ricketts, master kitemaker and fiber artist, in his Southeast Portland studio.Lectures, tours, workshops, open rehearsals: If it’s a behind-the-scenes peek, we’re there. It’s not enough just to see the finished project. We want to know how it got there.

What was the idea? How was it built? What were the stumbling blocks? Was getting there really half the fun?

In the visual arts, something else kicks in, too: sweet reassurance.

Galleries and museums intimidate a lot of people. They don’t know the language. They might know what they like, but they suspect the cognoscenti would laugh at them. In galleries, they think they’re getting the once-over (and in a few, they are): Is this person a potential buyer? Does she count? Is she worth my time?

It’s not so much that people are afraid of wrestling with tough ideas, it’s that they’re afraid they don’t know the rules. They’re not specialists — and in the minds of the many, the art world has become the province of the anointed few. (In certain rigorously theoretical cases, of course, this is true.) Add to all this the sense of mystery — the popular idea that with artists, something magical happens, beyond the ken of mortal souls — and it’s little wonder that fear keeps people outside the gallery doors.

In fact, the actual making of art is usually a tactile, pragmatic, hands-on thing; down-to-earth in a sometimes literal sense. For all the metaphorical calisthenics in writing about art, artists themselves tend to be practical problem-solvers: What is this thing that’s wormed inside my head, and how can I work it out? Most artists grapple with chance and improvisation more than most of the rest of us, but the good ones do it with method and structure. In spite of C.P. Snow’s famous lament in The Two Cultures (or maybe in support of it), the worlds of art and science aren’t all that far apart, at least in a rudimentary sense. Both involve hypothetically based searches for truth, and in that search both find beauty.

Andrea Benson, weaving yarns in encausticSo let’s take the pressure off and take a relaxed look at how this art stuff really works. That’s part of the idea behind Portland Open Studios, the annual fall tour of artists’ studios across the greater Portland area. In its 10th year, the event includes 100 studios (they’re juried in) and runs the next two weekends: October 10-11 and 17-18. Most studios are open both weekends; the Web site has details.

It’s always fun to see where other people work. I visited three studios before the kickoff, and each represented a different approach to the artist’s workspace.

Bonnie Meltzer‘s studio in North Portland is a storybook sort of place, a small building steps away from the back door of an old farmhouse on a double lot that also holds gnarled fruit trees and a pretty terrific vegetable garden. The studio strikes a balance between orderly and cluttered, with all sorts of tools that a home handyman would be comfortable with, and a motley collection of globes destined to find their way at one point or another into her mixed-media works. A deck outside the studio is set up for sawing and bashing at big pieces of stuff.

Encaustic artist Andrea Benson works from a small studio at Troy Studios, a big brick former commercial laundry building in industrial Southeast Portland that’s home to about 25 artists. She can bike or walk there from her home, and likes having a separate space. A few blocks away, Mar Ricketts, whose fabric pieces range from aerodynamic kites and mobiles to temporary structures for big outdoor events, works in a big single-story space that allows plenty of floor room for laying out his sometimes gargantuan pieces. His studio isn’t a recycled industrial space: It is an industrial space.

Continue reading Portland Open Studios: what’s behind the gallery walls →

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General, Language, Music, Visual Art

China, Wordstock, studios, ballet: What a weekend!

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Days at the Cotton Candy #4, copyright Maleonn

ABOVE: “Days at the Cotton Candy #4,” copyright Maleonn, in China Design Now. INSET BELOW: “Graphic Design in China,” poster for the 1992 exhibition, copyright Chen Shaohua. Both photos courtesy Portland Art Museum.

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Quick notes on a Thursday evening:

CHINA DESIGN NOW. I took a much too rapid walk through the installation at the Portland Art Museum this afternoon, and this show’s going to be a dazzler. It opens Saturday and runs through Jan. 17, and you won’t want to miss it. The sheer eye candy is amazing: China’s surge into the 21st century grabs hold of the nation’s traditional love for brilliant color and reshapes it in amazing ways. The show, which originated at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, is barely a scratch on the surface of the new China. But, my, the things you see! An important show for Portland because of the Pacific Rim connection, it’s also a whole lot of fun. I have a short table-setting preview in Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, and D.K. Row, the O’s lead art critic, will analyze the feast soon. Look for both.

Graphic Design in China, poster for the 1992 exhibition. Copyright Chen ShaohuaWORDSTOCK. Portland’s annual writers’ frenzy heads into its big weekend at the Oregon Convention Center with talks, workshops and publishers’ booths Saturday and Sunday. About a zillion Northwest writers will join such A-list types as James Ellroy and Sherman Alexie. Jeff Baker ran a good preview last week in the O. Willamette Week had some good interviews with participating writers on Wednesday, and I had a handful of interviews with participating writers (young adult novelist Rosanne Parry, mystery man Pierre Ouellette/Pierre Davis, Pendleton Round-Up historian Ann Terry Hill, poet Mark Thalman, kids’ writers Dawn Prochovnic and Brian Martin) in this morning’s Washington County edition of the O. The Wordstock Web site has the schedule; should be a kick.

PORTLAND OPEN STUDIOS. This weekend and next, 100 artists’ studios across greater Portland will throw their doors open and welcome visitors. You can see who, where and when here. I should have a bigger piece posted in a few hours. Grab your map and make your plans.

OREGON BALLET THEATRE. Time to forget the offstage drama and remind yourself of why we care about this brilliant troupe of dancers. This retrospective program, which opens Saturday in Keller Auditorium, features George Balanchine’s celebrated Emerald plus excerpts from a whole lot of highlights from OBT’s own history: Dennis Spaight’s Gloria and Ellington Suite; Trey McIntyre’s Speak; Bebe Miller’s A Certain Depth of Heart, Also Love; Julia Adam’s il nodo; Yuri Possokhov’s La Valse; James Kudelka’s Almost Mozart; and artistic director Christopher Stowell’s Eyes on You and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That’s a knockout of a program. Details here.

DOROTHEA LANGE IN OREGON. In the late 1930s the great photographic documentarian took a large number of photos of Oregon farmers and farm laborers for the federal Farm Security Administration, and the results are a rare combination of art, history and social comment. A selection from those 500-plus images has just opened in the Littman Gallery at Portland State University, and it should be worth going out of your way to catch. The campus paper, the Vanguard, has the story.

CLASSICAL RADIO’S FUND DRIVE. I’ve spent a fair amount of the last few days in my car (don’t ask), and that means I’ve been listening to a fair amount of classical station KQAC during its fall fund drive. Is it my imagination, or has it been a little harder than usual to shake money out of the tree this time around? Seems like every hour the station’s been falling short of its announced goal. I like this station. I wish it were more adventurous in its programming — I’d love to have a more liberal dose of contemporary and even 20th century stuff in the mix — and I shudder every time I hear a listener’s comment that classical music “soothes” them, as if it were some sort of handy on-demand muscle relaxant. But KQAC is an extremely important part of the city’s cultural fabric, and on the whole it does a good job, and it should succeed. Spare a buck?

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, General, Language, Poetry

Monday event: I met a traveller from an antique land

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UPDATE: Ixnay on Thursday’s bell-tower raising. Word arrives that the tower hoist at Central Lutheran Church (see below) has been postponed a couple of weeks because of some last-minute troubles that the structural engineers will have to sort out. Something about board & batten siding and a connectivity issue. Sidewalk superintendents will need to rejigger their schedules.

Harald Schmitt's 1991 photo of Lenin deposed.

China Design Now, the big exhibit from the Victoria and Albert Museum about the waking of the sleeping giant, opens Saturday at the Portland Art Museum, and that’s got me thinking about the rise and fall and rise of civilizations.

We are at war in the Tigris and Euphrates, the once-verdant “cradle of civilization.” We are also at war in Afghanistan, the destroyer of empires. More pragmatic Americans, looking to the inevitable shift of world power toward the east, are trying to figure out a best-scenario future that has us looking something like Scandinavia or the Netherlands. Russia, so recently brought low, is still a shambles but is beginning to shake its fist again.

This morning I ran across the compelling image above on Art Knowledge News, announcing a show at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin of photographs by Harald Schmitt, who documented the social turmoil in Eastern Europe and China in the latter 20th century. This one, taken in Vilius, Lithuania, is titled simply Lenin, thrown from the pedestal.

And that reminded me of another visit from a ghost of empire, this one in a famous poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1818. Happy Monday! Anybody feeling heroic?

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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n16769Also fast approaching for Portlanders is Wordstock, the celebration of writing that sprawls over the Oregon Convention Festival this weekend. And that got me to thinking about the series of fine profiles written lately by Jeff Baker, The Oregonian’s book editor and lead critic, of some key Northwest writers. If you’ve missed them, they’re well worth your time. Baker has a way of opening up a writer’s heart and mind:

  • Tess Gallagher, the fine poet, who lives in Port Angeles and still guards the legacy of her late husband Raymond Carver while continuing to expand her own rich body of work. Read it here.
  • Portlander Katherine Dunn, maybe the world’s greatest writer about the art of boxing, whose struggles with her long-awaited next novel are legendary in literary circles. Read it here.
  • Seattle’s Sherman Alexie, maybe the best-known Native American writer alive, who likes a good laugh and loves a good fight. Read it here.

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Our friend Jane, who is executive director of the Architecture Foundation of Oregon and who sometimes leaves funny comments on Art Scatter posts, passes along this tip:

The bell tower, on the rise.Sometime on Thursday the shorn-off Central Lutheran Church tower, a lamented landmark in close-in Northeast Portland that had taken a Lenin-like tumble, will rise again. Good news!

The frame was prefabricated at Western Wood Structures and delivered a week ago to the church site at Northeast 21st Avenue and Schuyler Street for reassembly in the church parking lot. (That was after a 14-month delay while wading through the building-permit process.) If all goes well, the frame will be hoisted into place sometime between 9 and 11 in the morning on Thursday. Be there if you want to watch the fun. Things are looking up!

Bob Hicks, General, Journalism, Theater, Visual Art

Sweetheart, get me rewrite: We just hit an iceberg!

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The Titanic, proud prowler of the ocean, steaming into history

Above: The Titanic, proud prowler of the ocean, steaming into history. Inset below: The Titanic’s bow, as seen from a Russian MIR I submersible. Wikimedia Commons.

As you may have noticed, American newspapers are in a spot of trouble these days. Bad economy, sinking circulation, this newfangled thing called the Information Superhighway … the troubles just keep piling up.

So I’m always interested in seeing what our best and brightest newspapering minds are doing to stop the bleeding. The New York Times has this thing it cleverly calls The New York Times Store, because it’s, well, it’s run by the New York Times and it’s a store. As in, a place where you can buy merchandise that you probably don’t need but that might be fun to have, anyway. A sort of readers’ boutique.

The haul is tasteful, and handy if you need to score a quick birthday present for a happily retired stockbroker uncle in Montauk. It’s a little New York-centric, but that’s OK: Derek Jeter memorabilia, Yogi Berra signed baseballs, Authentic Yankee Stadium “Freeze-Dried Grass” Sod (!), Babe Ruth baseball jerseys. Looking westward, Edward Curtis prints seem to be a popular item. So are crossword puzzles, executive-desk knickknacks … you get the picture. The store’s a good idea: When the ship’s going down, any little bucket on deck helps.

About that bucket.

The other day I flipped to the back page of the arts section and saw the latest come-on from the Times store.

THE FLEET IS IN

AMAZING SHIP MODELS

the headline screamed, and there at the top was a photo of a splendid-looking model of The Titanic.

Ttitanic bow seenfrom Russian MIR I_submersible/Wikimedia CommonsJust $249 for the 32-inch edition, but let’s go whole hog: You can get the 40-inch model, complete with “accurate crow’s nest, metal propellers and railings, and intricate cranes, ventilators, ladders, funnels, steam pipes, benches and skylights,” for $379. It’ll look great on your mant …

Hold on: A newspaper’s selling a model of The Titanic!

Guys: Have you read your back issues? Is this really the image you want to put out there right now? How about a bronzed commemorative pile of molten debris from the Hindenburg? Have you been too busy rearranging the deck chairs to notice the iceberg out there in the fog?

Just sayin’, this might be a tactical mistake.

But I do like the idea of the company store. Lord knows, even in their current state of disarray the newspapers are raking in more money than this blogospheric whiz-bang buggy we’ve hitched our wagon to here at Art Scatter.

Anybody interested in a Mr. and Mrs. Scatter commemorative coffee mug?

How about a Large Smelly Boys minty air freshener for the car?

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater

Saturday scatter: too little time, too much to do

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Josh Kornbuth brings a contemporary edge to Ben Franklin. Photo: Owen Carey

Josh Kornbluth bringing a dash of deceptive comedy to Founding Father Ben Franklin in his solo show in Portland Center Stage’s basement. Photo: Owen Carey

We have truly entered fall, and it’s not just the fireplace weather that tips me off. The sad truth is, suddenly Portland’s jumping with things to do, and Mr. and Mrs. Scatter just can’t jump high or fast enough.

We’ll miss the great Mikhail Baryshnikov and dancing partner, Ana Laguna, and we feel very bad about that. Our friend and cohort Martha Ullman West filed this terrific review of the White Bird show in this morning’s Oregonian.

Just last night we missed several one-time-only musical opportunities: the Portland Jazz Orchestra‘s Buddy Rich show; Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya; the promising-looking Paris Guitar Duo; Portland Vocal Consort‘s evening of Handel and Haydn.

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We did see monologuist Josh Kornbluth’s opening-night performance of Ben Franklin: Unplugged in the intimate basement space at Portland Center Stage, and given that you can’t see everything, it was a pretty good choice. Kornbluth and Ben will be playing the basement stage through Nov. 22, and I hope they get a good, packed run.

Kornbluth seems a little bit like a more extroverted, less dyspeptic Wally Shawn. He plays the nebbish role to the hilt, borrowing freely from Borscht Belt comic history and the vein of intellectual New York Jewish-radical neorosis that Woody Allen mines so freely. Starting with comic traditions that have served entertainers as diverse as Mort Sahl, Buddy Hackett and Neil Simon so well, he transforms them into a seemingly free-flowing riff that eventually doubles back on itself and makes structural sense.

To hear Kornbluth tell it, he became interested in old Ben when he looked into the mirror one day, inspected his receding hairline, and realized he’d come to look like the Founding Father. So why not do a show about him?

Like a lot of successful one-person shows, Ben Franklin: Unplugged takes its audience on a dual journey: one into the psyche and obsessions of the performer himself, the second into the performer’s discoveries about his external subject — in this case, Ben.

The link is fathers and sons: Kornbluth’s unresolved relationship with his own father, who died when Kornbluth was in college, and Franklin’s tortured relationship with his illegitimate but favored son William, who seemed the apple of his eye until the two took opposite sides on the issue of the Revolutionary War: the father the unrepentant radical, the son the extreme and sometimes ruthless loyalist.

Along the way Kornbluth creates a marvelous supporting character in the aged, accidental scholar Claude and unearths little pieces of fascinating biography in search of “my own Ben Franklin.” The wry blend of famous-man biography and obscure-entertainer autobiography makes for an engaging evening.

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Other stuff to keep you eyes on:

La Boheme. Tonight is the final performance of Portland Opera‘s lively, fresh and winning production of the Puccini favorite, which Art Scatter wrote about here.

A Chorus Line. Musical-theater history at Stumptown Stages. How does this groundbreaking backstage show hold up after 34 years? Mr. Scatter will be there tonight to find out.

The Trip to Bountiful. Profile Theatre kicks off its season of plays by Horton Foote, who died last spring just shy of his 93rd birthday and who is perhaps best-known for his superb screen adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Becky’s New Car. Steven Dietz’s comedy opened last week at Artists Rep, but I haven’t caught it. I like Dietz, though: He’s been turning out good, well-shaped plays for regional theaters for many years.

A Country Doctor. Somehow Defunkt Theatre‘s season opener slipped past me. I don’t know this play — it’s an interpretation of the Kafka story — but it’s by Len Jenkin, another writer who’s always worth a shot.

Jon Kimura Parker and the Oregon Symphony. Pianist Parker performs Brahms’ First Piano Concerto and the orchestra plays Bartok’s Divertimento for string and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1 in what could be a bell-ringer of a season-opening concert series Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Symphony violist Charles Noble, on his music blog Daily Observations, was enthusiastic about rehearsals.

Haochen Zhang. This year’s Van Cliburn winner plays Ravel, Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt and Mason Bates in a Portland Piano International performance at 4 p.m. Sunday in the Newmark.

San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble. Don’t know this touring group, but the program of Latin American sacred music sounds intriguing. 7:30 Saturday at University of Portland‘s Buckley Center, 4 p.m. Sunday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Salem.

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. The Southwest troupe performs pop-savvy Twyla Tharp’s Sue’s Leg at a White Bird performance Wednesday in the Schnitz.