Monthly Archives: December 2009

General

The holiday isn’t over until the rotund gentleman sings

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S. Claus, world-class gourmand and right jolly old elf

Merry Christmas, one and all. The rotund gentleman above may not be singing, but neither is he hawking a Coke, and we’ll take that as a sufficient act of saintliness. Regular Scatterers may recall that the jigsaw puzzle pictured was begun and completed over the Thanksgiving weekend by the Large Smelly Boys. We showed a close-up of the old gent’s face a while back and promised that if you were good, we’d show the whole puzzle. Well, our secret operatives inside The Google have been keeping a sharp eye on you and have reported that on the whole you’re a pretty sterling lot, so here’s the picture. Congratulations: Well done!

Now quietly shut down your computers and join your friends and families for a cup of good cheer. Art Scatter World Headquarters is closed for the holiday.

Barry Johnson, Bob Hicks, General, Journalism, Visual Art

Comings and goings, farewells and hellos

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Odin, slayer of the Frost Giant, riding Sleipnir. 18th C. Icelandic, Danish Royal Library/Wikimedia Commons

Three days before Christmas and a day past Winter Solstice, our lives are a crazy mixup of anticipation and loss. The longest night has given way to the rebirth of light. Summer’s a bare blip beyond the horizon, but we’ve turned the corner. Old Father Time is creaking toward New Year’s Eve, when that perky bouncing baby takes over with all the foolish optimism of inexperience. Christmas presents? Yup, we’re looking forward to ’em. Midwinter indeed, but hope is on the rise.

It’s a season for goodbyes and hellos and reinventions, and as we say a few farewells we suspect the people involved are like the seasons: This is a passage to something invigorated and refreshed.

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Fifty-two Pieces, one of Art Scatter’s favorite blogs, is about to enter its fifty-second week, and for its authors, Amy and LaValle, that will mean an ending and a beginning. They started their blog on Jan. 1, 2009, with the express intent of continuing it for fifty-two weeks and then letting a good thing go.

Each week this year they’ve chosen a single artist in the collections of the Portland Art Museum and explored his or her life and work in all sorts of fascinating ways. We’ve enjoyed the journey immensely, and now it’s almost over. We can hardly wait to see what comes next. God Jol.

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Father Christmas riding a goat; origin unknown. Wikimedia CommonsOur good friend Barry Johnson, the original Scatterer, who had the idea for this blog and brought it into being before parting amicably to pursue his own arts column and Portland Arts Watch blog for The Oregonian, has come to another parting. Friday, Dec. 18, was his final day with The Oregonian: He took one of the buyouts that have become business as usual in the newspaper racket, following Mr. Scatter’s example from two years ago. Time to reboot, Barry said in his final column. Out with the old. In with new ideas.

Some of the newest ideas he’s packing with him. We welcome Barry with open arms into the outside world, where we’re sure he’s going to have a key role in reinventing arts journalism for the post-print universe. Have your people call Mr. Scatter’s people, Barry. We’ll do coffee. (Lunch, in the post-paycheck economy, is a rarer commodity, but hey, we might spring for that, too.)

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As newspapers continue their freefall toward what every sane observer hopes will be a soft landing spot of shrunken but lively equilibrium, a lot of other former colleagues from The Oregonian have accepted their walking papers, too. Informed opinion has it that the 30-plus in the newsroom who accepted the latest buyout aren’t enough, and next time around, for the first time, it’ll be layoffs — maybe as early as February. Oh, yes. It’s midwinter, all right.

A few from the class of late ’09 (there was a spring class, too; Mrs. Scatter got her diploma then) I don’t know, or barely know, or in a few cases, such as photographer Olivia Bucks, don’t really know except through their often exemplary work.

Let me mention a few I have known and admired and enjoyed as colleagues. As the song says, the best is yet to come:

Inara Verzemnieks, a wonderful storyteller whose stories are only going to get bigger and better. We swapped ideas and talked about writing. I even learned how to spell her name without looking it up.

John Foyston, a terrific feature writer and a good amateur painter who was a bracing antidote to journalism by Ivy League degree. Not many newspapermen are also experienced motorcycle mechanics. Fortunately he’ll continue writing his yeasty beer column for the O.

Don Colburn, a damn fine poet; Jonathan Brinkman, who knows how to make business writing lively and engaging; Abby Haight, a model of journalistic flexibility; Gordon Oliver, quiet competence and all-around good sense incarnate.

Ralph Wells, an articulate gentleman and former cab driver (and husband of Carol Wells, a freelance theater critic who’s brought some sparkle to the O).

Copy editors Jan Jackson and Pat Harrison, who on many occasions quietly saved me from myself. Copy editor Ann Ereline, an Estonian who gave me good advice about visiting there 10 years ago. And copy editor and old friend Ed Hunt, who was at the O and its late sister the Oregon Journal even before I was, and who helped me through a post-merger crisis when a long-departed editor was gunning for me. Ed’s advice was stunningly simple and practical: Go over his head.

Photo guy Mike Davis, who fought for visual storytelling.

John Hamlin, who moved from news and design (he was once a managing editor) into the strange new world of computerization and ably helped the rest of us do the things we needed to do.

The brain drain in the newspaper industry has been swift and barely fathomable. While a few nitwits in the blogosphere celebrate this, it’s creating a crisis for the great American experiment in representative democracy.

But the days are getting longer. A whiff of hope is in the air. Some of these people will be finding solutions to the newsgathering crisis. All of them will move into fresh new lives. It’s cold, but it’s also kind of exhilarating.

Goodbye and hello, my friends. And thanks.

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Illustrations:

  • Top: Illustration from an 18th century Icelandic manuscript of Odin riding his steed Sleipnir after defeating Ymir, the Ice Giant. In the midst of darkness, let there be light. Danish Royal Library/Wikimedia Commons
  • Inset: Father Christmas riding a goat; origin unknown. Wikimedia Commons.
Dance, Film, General, Martha Ullman West

I love Paris at the Opera Ballet (but not the movies)

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Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief international dance correspondent, took in “La Danse,” Frederick Wiseman’s documentary film about the legendary Paris Opera Ballet. How does it go wrong? Let her count the ways:

From "La Danse." Paris Opera Ballet

Last night I took a friend to Cinema 21 to see a benefit screening of La Danse, documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s take on the Paris Opera Ballet. Before I scatter a little venom about this highly uneven film, I would like to express my profound gratitude to Cinema 21 for supporting Oregon Ballet Theatre, the beneficiary of the screening.

Wiseman likes to be a fly on the wall with a camera (conjuring interesting visions of Vincent Price, come to think of it) at various kinds of institutions, from high schools to juvenile courts. And he’s no stranger to ballet: In 1993 he did a similar film on American Ballet Theatre, Ballet.

A scene from Frederick Wiseman's LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLEThat one was OK, but just OK, though I quite loved the scene of then artistic director Jane Hermann losing her temper on the phone with the Lincoln Center administration, using language she did not learn at tea in the James Room at Barnard College.

La Danse isn’t quite the worst dance film I’ve ever seen — Robert Altman’s The Company, not quite a documentary but not quite a feature film either, is probably worse.

But what these two directors seem to me to share is really lousy taste in choreography.

In The Company, which is about the Joffrey Ballet, all the revelations of the inner workings of the company culminate in a performance of the ghastly The Blue Snake, choreographed by Robert Desrosiers.

In La Danse, we see a lot of rehearsals and a pretty lengthy slice of performance of Angelin Preljocaj’s Medea, which culminates in the murder of her two children and the gorgeous ballerina Delphine Moussin covered in fake blood. There are literally buckets of the stuff on the stage, and post-infanticide, she carries a large piece of red fabric in her mouth.

Scatterers who are familiar with Martha Graham’s Cave of the Heart, which has no fake blood on a stage defined by Isamu Noguchi’s extraordinary set pieces and props, surely will feel as outraged as I was by this cheap knock-off.

In Graham’s masterpiece, Medea seems to pull out her own guts, which are represented by a red velvet rope: It’s a brilliant piece of theater that makes me shudder every time I see it. Preljocaj’s buckets of blood would have given me the giggles if I hadn’t remembered Melina Mercouri laughing her way through a performance of Medea in Jules Dassin’s movie Never On Sunday.

The rehearsals recorded in La Danse are quite interesting, especially when Preljocaj, having set the ballet, tells Moussin that it is now up to her, giving her a good deal of freedom to interpret the role.

Moussin is hardly the only perfectly gorgeous dancer we see in the film. All the dancers he films are lovely to look at, with extraordinary technique, and he shows them working in studios with raked floors, high up in the Palais Garnier, the arched windows overlooking the Paris rooftops. (Those shots, as well as exterior shots from the roof of the building, made me want to jump on the next plane to Paris).

We see them taking a break, eating in their own cafeteria (in which the food looks neither healthy nor like haute cuisine), getting on the elevator, walking down long corridors, being made up.

A scene from "La Danse"/Paris Opera BalletWe also see them being coached by long-retired dancers, in one session a man and a woman (unidentified; typical Wiseman) arguing with each other about whether a leg should be raised or lowered. It’s all very amusing and quite lovable, like the old dancers in that most excellent of ballet films, Ballets Russes, by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller.

But that seems to be Wiseman’s only real bow to tradition. He completely omits the Paris Opera Ballet School, which is where those poor murdered children in Medea, forced to huddle with buckets over their heads, came from. For a good look at the ethos of the Paris Opera Ballet, and how students rise from the ranks, through a fixed hierarchy, there is an old, black-and-white French film called in English Ballerina that tells you a lot more about it than La Danse.

In a piece of directorial self-indulgence that makes this 158-minute film much, much too long, you do become extremely familiar with the corridors of the upper floors and the subterranean passages of the Palais Garnier. I did quite like the fish who, in the words of a colleague, had set up housekeeping in a flooded passage, and the metaphor of the beekeeper on the roof of the building was not lost on me: With providers of food, costumiers, set builders, accompanists, janitors, cleaners, ballet masters and Brigitte LeFevre, the queen bee who is the artistic director of the company, the building is indeed a hive of activity.

And it was a pleasure, a profound pleasure, to see these dancers performing some bits of Paquita in the grand tradition — and what a contrast to the rehearsals of Rudolf Nureyev’s unspeakable staging of The Nutcracker, which would appear to be completely free of children.

Wiseman does know how to film dancers: He isn’t obsessed with their feet, and he does show the whole body. On the other hand, a lot of the time, in the studio, he filmed them from the back so we saw their reflections in the mirrors — somewhat distorted, at that.

In the end, La Danse provides a pretty distorted view of a company that is one of the best in the world, and that’s a pity. It deserves better, and so do we.

General, Laura Grimes

Penny dreadful, part 5: the best seats in the house

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1948 American Standard pink bathroom

Many months ago I showed up at a friend’s beach cabin and before I could walk even a few feet in the door she regaled me with a story about how when she arrived at the cabin the kitchen was perfectly pristine except for a piece of paper, conspicuously propped up. Excited, she picked it up, thinking a family member had left a special note. It said something close to:

Milk
Eggs
Thyme
Toilet seat

Puzzled, she looked around. She checked the fridge. She checked the toilet seats. She wondered what someone was trying to tell her. She called her mom. She pressed me about what it could mean.

I stood there still wearing my coat and holding my bags, and we fully discussed how it was a tiny town and there wasn’t a hardware store around for miles. We discussed how you couldn’t just run to the little local grocery store and buy a toilet seat. We discussed that at a store you couldn’t just stick a toilet seat on a conveyor belt with milk and eggs. We discussed that you would have to buy a toilet seat in the city and bring it with you, but you wouldn’t buy the milk and eggs in the city.

Why was the list at the beach? Why was it displayed so prominently? Like a message. Like a toilet seat is a perfectly normal thing to have on a grocery list. We looked at each other, baffled. This was a strange mystery we couldn’t crack.

And then we laughed our guts out. We couldn’t stop laughing. We cried. We laughed so hard we kneeled nearly to the ground. I had to kneel. I’d been driving a long time without a pit stop.

We got up the next morning and both confessed we had woken up early, thought of the list, and convulsed silently into our pillows so we wouldn’t wake up the other.

So when I decided to buy toilets, I sent her an e-mail: “I have a grocery list that includes two toilets. Do you suppose I can find them at the beach?”

She said, “Absolutely!” and recommended a certain kind. She said she loves hers. And then she wondered if that was possible.

Apparently so.

Just ask a plumber. Or better yet, don’t.

Because otherwise you’ll learn all about top-of-the-line deluxe model toilets and a whole lot more than you bargained for.

You’ll learn about his own toilet, which has a bidet, a warm seat and a hot water thermostat that can be programmed for different temperatures for different people. And it comes with a remote.

You need warm water?

Yeah, apparently at first his wife thought the toilet was a waste of money, though he explained he got it for free. But now she likes the warm water.

Really?

I tried to act very cool and nonchalant, like it was a perfectly ordinary, everyday thing to stand in my kitchen talking to two men who were total strangers and listening to how this guy’s wife likes warm water on her tush.

What are you going to say? Tell me more about her habits?

He didn’t look away or shuffle his feet. This was serious plumberspeak.

But I get that. I talk writerspeak. Mention commas and I get all juiced up. I can go on for days about quotation marks. Singles and doubles.

I figured I could unabashedly talk plumber with the best of  ’em. “It comes with a remote? Like a TV?”

Let’s just change the channel and end it there, shall we?

–Laura Grimes

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1948 American Standard bathroom. Not a remote in sight.

Environment, General, Laura Grimes

Penny dreadful, part 4: DIY port-a-potties

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An ancient Roman public toilet. Wikimedia Commons

E-mail to colleague first thing: “I won’t be at the office this morning. I’m getting new toilets.”

And just in time. The hard-to-lift boxes had to get out of the Large Smelly Boymobile before Dungeons & Dragons Dad picked up six Large Smelly D&D Players.

Sound familiar?

The last story started there but veered to pants. And kilts.

Mr. Scatter pointed out in a baffled, you-gotta-be-kidding voice, “You don’t talk about toilets again?”

Mrs. Scatter: “Uh … no.”

Mr. Scatter: “What happened to the toilets?” (As if he personally doesn’t know how the story ends and what’s in our bathrooms.)

Mrs. Scatter: “Uh … I ended up talking about pants.”

Mr. Scatter (in the same incredulous voice): “When are you going to finish talking about toilets?” (As if this were a perfectly normal question.)

Mrs. Scatter: “Uh … in another post.”

Let’s refresh the story so far – including the wayback blog parchment days ago:

Which somehow brings us to chauffeuring toilets all over town.

An 1800s Dutch bidet with Chinese porcelain. Wikimedia Commons

  • On a sunny Sunday afternoon, two muscly guys lifted two heavy big boxes full of spanking new toilets into the Large Smelly Boymobile.
  • The two boxes were way too heavy to get back out of the Large Smelly Boymobile.
  • The two boxes were way too big to leave around the house.
  • The two heavy overbig boxes were left in the van.
  • I called a plumber and left a message.
  • I drove the two heavy overbig boxes to the office.
  • I started to worry when I didn’t hear back from the plumber.
  • I drove the two heavy overbig boxes to a meeting with a lot of colleagues.
  • I drove the two heavy overbig boxes to a board member’s house.
  • The plumber called, and we made an appointment for Thursday morning.
  • Thursday was perfect, I thought. Just in time to get the hard-to-lift boxes out of the Large Smelly Boymobile before Dungeons & Dragons Dad picked up six Large Smelly D&D Players.

Sound familiar?

The plumber arrived. He made a bunch of noise in the bathroom and then said, “Where do you want the old toilets?”

“Great,” I said. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

I opened the back of the van and realized a chunk of my day would be shot getting rid of crappy porcelain.

The plumber’s boss arrived.

We got two new toilets that flush and don’t wiggle.

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After the plumbers left, I zeroed in and got a bunch of work done. The clock ticked away. It inched into the afternoon. Long past lunchtime. And then I remembered. I had old toilets in the back of the van. I had to drive to the recycling center in the hell-and-gone suburbs and be back in time for D&D Dad to take the van. It was either that or he would have to chauffeur six Large Smelly Boys while two toilets clunked around.

I had a deadline. I had to scoot. As one of the plumbers said, “Be careful around the curves. That bowl can go flying.”

To be continued … one more time.

— Laura Grimes

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Illustrations, from top:

An ancient Roman public toilet: The group approach was perhaps the rise and fall of the Roman Empire … going … going … gone. Wikimedia Commons

An 1800s Dutch bidet with Chinese porcelain: A creative mix and match elevates the idea of crappy porcelain. Wikimedia Commons

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Scatter happy holidays edition: puzzling out the season

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Santa Claus jigsaw puzzle (detail)

Here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we’re used to friends and associates grumping about Christmas and the holidays. “Bah,” they say. And again, “Humbug.” A seasonal deficit disorder afflicts our closest circles of civilization, and we’ve learned to grump along with the chorus, just to keep things running smoothly.

But the truth is, we sort of like the holiday season. Yesterday afternoon the Scatter Inner Circle brought home its Christmas tree and got the lights and some of the ornaments artfully arranged before settling in to watch Christmas in the Clouds, an affable, low-key romantic comedy about life at an American Indian-operated resort lodge, with terrific wintry scenery from the grounds of the Sundance Institute in Utah. Graham Greene plays a vegetarian chef who tries to scare all of his customers out of ordering meat, and M. Emmett Walsh plays a foul-tempered drunk who has a change of heart, and the DVD arrived from friends in New Mexico who sent it just because they’d enjoyed it and wanted to share it, and that’s kind of what the holidays are about, isn’t it?

Of course Mr. Scatter is way behind on shopping (and several things need to be sent, which requires the sort of logistical hoop-jumping that often ties Mr. Scatter’s brain, if not his stomach, into knots). And many dozen cookies remain to be baked: The Small Large Smelly Boy insists. Never mind. It’ll all get done. Holiday CDs are pretty much in continual loop here at AS world headquarters (we’ve been listening to 16th and 17th century carols from the Baltimore Consort) and some members of the inner brain trust have been doing serious damage to the national eggnog supply.

The picture of Santa Claus above is a detail from a jigsaw puzzle assembled over Thanksgiving weekend in Port Angeles, Washington, mainly by a junior member of the Scatter clan. The corporate brain trust discovered a shop in downtown P.A. that specializes in mostly used jigsaw puzzles — and actually assembles every puzzle before offering it for sale, to make sure no pieces are missing. It’s apparently an obsession. This particular puzzle comes from a little artisanal outfit in Kansas City called Hallmark. If our records show that you’ve been good, we’ll run a photo of the whole completed puzzle before the season ends.

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Among other things, December is a month of beautiful music, and in Portland there is far more of it than a person can hope to take in. We regret, for instance, missing the medieval caroling of the women’s ensemble In Mulieribus, Portland’s answer to the Anonymous 4, and London’s Tallis Scholars, who know how to put the pedal to the pedagogy and make it soar.

On Friday night the Scatter clan braved the threat of ice and trekked to the Aladdin Theatre for Holidays with the Trail Band. It was well worth it. We hadn’t seen the Trail Band in a few years, and it was worth making the reacquaintance. The Trail Band is the baby of Marv and Rindy Ross, who back in the 1980s had a shot of national success as leaders of the pop group Quarterflash, and earlier were the core of the terrific bar band Seafood Mama. Since starting the Trail Band 16 years ago to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail, they’ve been digging deeper and wider into the roots of popular music, and the result is a smart brand of musical eclecticism that is what it is and doesn’t really care what the tastemakers think.

The holiday show featured a great lineup including the highly talented guitarist Cal Scott (who’s also blowing a mean cornet these days); Phil and Gayle Neuman of the Oregon Renaissance Band, who bring the likes of pennywhistles and flageolets to the party; fine fiddler Skip Parente; the subtle and attentive drummer/percusussionist Dan Stueber; and Mick Doherty, who rescues the hammered dulcimer from the yellowing pages of history and revives it as an exciting contemporary instrument. Plus, guest shots from actor/comedian Scott Parker, who gives the nativity story a hilarious spin; flash guitarist Doug Fraser, the Rosses’ old Quarterflash sidekick, who rocks and roars through a funky little ditty called Mustang Santa; and the hugely talented Michele Mariana, whose warm, deeply measured Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas brought pulses in the house to a halt.

Try as we might, we just can’t grump about a show like that.

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On Saturday night Mr. Scatter and his younger lad went to Northwest Children’s Theater and School to see the company’s musical play Narnia, based on C.S. Lewis’s children’s fantasy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A small review ran in Monday morning’s Oregonian; here’s the link to my much longer online review on Oregon Live, in which I touch lightly on the phenomenon of Christian parable in 20th/21st century kids’ lit, from Tolkien to Lewis to L’Engle to Rowling.

How, you might wonder if you followed the link, did Robert Frost get into the mix of the longer essay? Credit goes to the book group with which I’m loosely associated, an erudite and genial collection of lawyers, writers, classical musicians and even an actor who gather once a month to eat, drink and do lit talk. One member happens to be a noted Morris dancer; a couple have been getting their jollies recently by writing dueling sonnets based on rousing biblical tales.

December in this group is poetry month, and this year’s reading choice was Frost. So the ice man was fresh in my mind when I sat down to write about Lewis’s ice queen, and I discovered that Frost fit the discussion neatly. Fire and ice, baby. You can’t get much more Narnian than that.

And, oh yes: Father Christmas puts in an appearance in Lewis’s tale. He’s very welcome, thank you.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Visual Art

Friday Scatter: Remembering Izquierdo and Hoving

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Manuel Izquierdo untitled self-portrait/Laura Russo Gallery

An arts scene is a movable feast, a passing parade of people and ideas. Today’s Portland is vastly different from the big town of the 1950s to the 1980s, when the scene was small and sometimes rowdy but seemed somehow containable, as if you could experience all of it if you tried hard enough.

Glazed terra cotta, early 1980s. Laura Russo Gallery Impossible to even think about that now, which must mean Portland’s evolving into a city at last.

A few dominant figures from that smaller but vigorous art scene remain, among them artists Mel Katz, George Johanson and Jack McClarty. They and others like the late Michele Russo, Sally Haley, Hilda Morris and Carl Morris (and even Mark Rothko, who fled Portland for New York as a young man) continue to exert a significant influence on the shape of art in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest.

In whatever ways art here has morphed, it’s built on what these artists and others accomplished — and they, in turn, built on the work of even earlier artists such as the Runquist brothers, Maude Kerns, Amanda Snyder, C.S. Price and Charles Heaney.

Manuel Izquierdo mother and child, early 1950s. Laura Russo GalleryAnother big player in those midcentury years, sculptor and printmaker Manuel Izquierdo, died in July. Notable (like so many of his contemporaries) as a teacher as well as an artist, he was also one of the artists who connected the Northwest’s sometimes insular scene to international ideas. He was born in Madrid, left Spain during the Civil War, and spent most of his adult life in Portland. But he brought a European spirit with him.

Laura Russo Gallery has a memorial exhibition of Izquierdo’s work — most of it from the early 1950s through the 1980s — until Dec. 24. I have a review of it in the A&E section of this morning’s Oregonian; you can read it here. The O ran photos of several of Izquierdo’s more mature abstract sculptures. For a different look, I’m showing some of his other, smaller work here, including the self-portrait at top.

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Thomas Hoving, the Indiana Jones of museum directors, died Thursday in New York at age 78. Randy Kennedy has a good obituary here in the New York Times.

Hoving's 1993 memoirs of his swashbuckling years at the MetHoving was a swashbuckler, a showman, a democratizer, maybe even something of a pirate. When he took over the great Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan in 1967, at the age of 35, he declared it moribund and set out to make it the most popular show in town.

To the extent that he succeeded — and he radically shifted things before leaving in 1977 — he helped establish the concept of the blockbuster exhibit and set a tone for a whole generation of museum directors: Certainly John Buchanan, former director of the Portland Art Museum and now running the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, is a child of Hoving.

The Hoving style is out of fashion — you get the feeling that a lot of priests in the museum world don’t want their temples sullied with actual paying customers — but Hoving figured out a couple of key, simple things for which we can all be grateful: (a) great art is exciting; (b) the potential audience for great art is a lot bigger than the gatekeepers believe. That led, inevitably, to (c) if you make a Big Event out of it, you can get people knocking down the doors to get in.

The excesses and occasional inanities of the blockbuster style eventually put it in disrepute, and the current economic collapse has given it at least a temporary knockout punch: Museums are saving money by reconsidering what’s already in their collections, and in a lot of cases that’s a good thing.

But a couple of things got lost in the counterrevolution. First, Hoving really knew his art, and what he was selling was usually first-rate. Second, not all blockbusters are equal. A surprising number of “big” shows have also had a high level of historic, academic and aesthetic interest. The blockbuster was (and will be again: These things go in cycles) a style of presentation, not a definition of quality. That the style itself, regardless of content, offended a lot of people is … well, interesting.

I like this quote from Philippe de Montebello, Hoving’s successor at the Met, in Kennedy’s obituary for the Times: “People criticized him for his excesses, but you have to remember that it is not the timorous who climb life’s peaks. He has left us with a changed museum world.”

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Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, General

Seattle’s Elliott Bay Books writes a bold new chapter

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Good news for travelers to that sprawling town on Puget Sound. Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company isn’t going out of business, after all: It’s relocating in the spring from Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill. Melissa Allison has the story in the Seattle Times.

logoAt 20,000 square feet, the new building (at 1521 10th Avenue above downtown) will be smaller than the one in Pioneer Square but will have more shelf space because of better layout. Plus, it’ll have lots of nearby parking and good foot traffic day and night. And it won’t have the Pioneer Square grunge factor or the business-killing onslaught of baseball and football fans to the nearby stadiums on game days.

Elliott Bay has anchored this part of town for 36 years, and if it isn’t quite on the level of its fellow independent, Powell’s City of Books in Portland, it’s been an outstanding book store and a great place to hang out. I love its warrens, its smarts, the walk down that giant stairwell to get a cup of coffee downstairs.

The place feels civilized, an oasis from the intransigent seediness nearby and the commercial clatter to the north, although it is itself of course a commercial enterprise. The place has personality, and in a different building that will change. I’m guessing, though, that store and customers and new space will adapt to one another fairly rapidly.

Every now and again I take the train to Seattle, and I’ve loved being able to walk from the train station up to Elliott Bay to see what’s new, and also what’s old. Like all good bookstores, it’s a comfort and a stimulation.

I won’t be walking up to Capitol Hill, so my visits to Elliott Bay will probably become less frequent. But I’m thrilled that the store has found a new and hopefully friendlier location.

Much as I admire and enjoy it, Elliott Bay Book Company isn’t for me. It’s for the people of Seattle (including the illustrious and well-read OED, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter’s Older Educated Daughter). May it live long and prosper.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Television, Theater

Juniper Tavern: After 25 years, we’ll drink to that

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A quarter-century after a literary landmark in Oregon, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Let’s see. Urban/rural split, with a vengeance. A recession in the city, which means a depression in the small towns and countryside. Newcomers wide-eyed with enthusiasm over their new home; old-timers narrow-eyed with suspicion and mistrust. Jobs disappearing as fast as the trees and fish. An almost desperate love for the land. Merry Christmas, everyone!

The script, published by Arrowood BooksA few evenings ago I sat down and re-read Charles Deemer‘s 1984 stage comedy Christmas at the Juniper Tavern. It was maybe the third or fourth time I’ve read it in the 25 years since it debuted, to great acclaim, at the old New Rose Theatre in Portland. In that time I’ve scratched my head repeatedly over why some Portland theater company doesn’t revive it for a December run. It’s topical, it’s seasonal, it has terrific characters and it gets to the heart of that elusive thing called the Northwest spirit. I’m convinced that with a good production it’d be a hit.

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Well, maybe next year. In the absence of a fresh production, the next best thing is a trip on Wednesday evening to the Blackbird Wine Shop, at Northeast Fremont Street and 44th Avenue in Portland, for a 25th anniversary showing of Juniper Tavern‘s original broadcast on Oregon Public Broadcasting. A digitized version of the broadcast will be shown 7-9:30 p.m. Dec. 9. Admission’s free, and wine tasting is five bucks.

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The DVD version, a copy of which Deemer sent me, is a mixed bag. It’s pretty much a point-and-shoot affair, a visual recording of that terrific original production, without the kinds of camera movement and visual rethinking that a higher budget might have brought to the project. That makes it, cinematically, more static than it ought to be.

But it also faithfully reproduces what was a top-notch stage production, solid across the board but sparked by the chemistry between Vana O’Brien as down-to-earth bar owner Stella and the late Rollie Wulff as Frank, an unemployed mill worker trying to make sense of a rural world that’s falling apart on him.

Their story is interrupted and amplified by a drinking binge, a stolen Rolls Royce, an abortive kidnapping, an angry mother in pursuit of her blissed-out daughter, a Christmas pageant, and — oh, yes — original director Steve Smith’s shockingly funny performance as Swami Kree, an Indian guru whose followers, who are building an ashram in the Central Oregon desert, have given him 26 Rolls Royces and one cool cowboy hat.

Deemer wrote Christmas at the Juniper Tavern at a time when a New Agey international religious group called the Rajneeshees and their guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, had taken over the tiny town of Antelope in Central Oregon and renamed it Rajneeshpuram.

It was one of the unlikeliest and most sensational stories in Oregon history. The split between the mostly wealthy Rajneeshees and the locals was sharp and radical. In a plot to take over Wasco County politically, members of the ashram under the direction of the bhagwan’s right-hand woman Ma Anand Sheela (echoed smartly in the play by Jane Titus as the waspish Ma Prama Rama Kree) spread salmonella poisoning through several restaurants in The Dalles, hoping to sicken enough voters that their own members would dominate the coming election. Rajneesh, who at one point had 90 Rolls Royces rolling in and out of the ashram, was eventually deported back to India.

The parallels between the Rajneeshee movement and Christmas at the Juniper Tavern were obvious, and audiences and critics alike assumed the play was a comic riff on current events. Deemer declared his play was not about the Rajneeshees (more on that below) but people didn’t pay much attention. Now, the play’s broader themes are easier to see.

As neatly as it strikes the historical chords of an outrageous cultural clash, in a larger sense Juniper Tavern belongs with a series of plays Deemer wrote in the 1980s about the social and economic strains of mostly small-town life in the Northwest. He included it in his 2006 collection Country Northwestern and Other Plays of the Pacific Northwest, which also included the title play plus Varmints, Waitresses and The Half-Life Conspiracy. Those plays mark a considerable achievement in documenting, with insight and humor, both the stubborn will of the region’s hardscrabble rural romantics and the fading of a way of life.

Listen to Rex (Gary Brickner-Schulz) in his monologue at the top of Act Two of Christmas at the Juniper Tavern:

“The bottom line is, you gotta eat. I don’t know what Margie expects me to do. You won’t find a harder working sum-bitch than yours truly but I can’t open up the mill if the company don’t want it open. If the mill ain’t open, I can’t haul logs. It’s that simple.

“There was a time when I’d’ve hit the road by now. But, damn it, I love this part of the country. I love Central Oregon. I love Juniper, the home I’m buying, my neighbors, the kind of life we share. I wake up in the morning, look out my kitchen window, and see nothing but snow-capped mountains. A rich man can’t see anything prettier.

“But you gotta eat, is what I’m saying. And if there ain’t work in the woods, you gotta find something else. You gotta use your imagination.”

I’ve spent time this year in some far corners of the Pacific Northwest. Twenty-five years ago I couldn’t have used free wifi or probably found a good cup of coffee in LaGrande, and both are easy now. Still, a quarter-century on, Rex’s description of the problem and the vague search for a solution seems uncannily familiar.

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Back to Christmas at the Juniper Tavern and the Rajneeshees. A few weeks ago Deemer sent me this explanation for how the play actually came about:

“Now that you’re revisiting Juniper, maybe you’d be interested in the true roots of Swami Kree. They are different from what folks assumed at the time.

“In grad school, when I began teaching, I became interested in the possible pedagogic uses of paradox and contradiction. This culminated in a very controversial academic article, English Composition as a Happening, that was published in College English in 1967. … Later I discovered a thin book called Zen and the Comic Spirit. Historically, many zen masters used paradox and contradiction in their teachings. One was a 13th century monk named Teng Yin-feng. Teng presumably, as a lesson to his students, died standing on his head. In 1975, before moving to Portland, I wrote a one-act play called The Death of Teng Yin-feng. This was my first attempt at Swami Kree.

“In 1983 I was commissioned by New Rose to write the Moliere play [The Comedian in Spite of Himself; later revised as Sad Laughter]. I had a situation where I could live rent-free in Bend and went there. The papers there were full of Rajneeshee news, much more than in Portland. Also, the Bhagwan was on his vow of silence. This latter is hugely important. If he had been talking, he would not have fascinated me because once he talked, he just sounded like a politician to me. But silent, I could fantasize that he was a Zen clown.

“Bend was full of unemployed mill workers. What on earth would these two camps have to say to one another once the vow of silence ended? This was the question that created the play, fueled by my long interest in paradox and contradiction as methods of knowledge and enlightenment. Yes, the Rajneesh were an influence of sorts — but Eng Comp as a Happening and Teng Yin-feng are far greater contributors to the DNA of Swami Kree.”

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Theater

The Epidermis Episode: Costumes by God

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Emmanuel Proulx spins Mathieu Campeau in one of the signature moves of "Crepescules des Oceans." Photo: Fenis Farley

“How could they say ‘partial’ nudity?” Gentleman No. 1 asked wryly. “They were totally naked.”

Gentlewoman No. 1 nodded in agreement. “Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“Well,” Gentleman No. 2 replied, “they were all the way naked, but not all of the time. So maybe it was ‘partial’ nudity in the sense that sometimes they had clothes on and sometimes they didn’t.”

It was Wednesday night in the stripped-down lobby of the Eastbank Annex, and a gaggle of dance aficionados were talking about the piece they’d just seen, Daniel Leveille Danse’s Crepuscule des Oceans, or Twilight of the Oceans. Their attention had shifted to the curious easel-mounted announcement perched beside them in the lobby.

Lucas Cranach the Elder-Adam and Eve 1533.jpg Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553): Adam and Eve. Beech wood, 1533. Bode-Museum, Berlin (Erworben 1830, Königliche Schlösser, Gemäldegalerie Kat. 567)The sign’s message, or warning, that the performance included naked bodies had been hastily amended: A small piece of paper with the scrawled word Full had been taped over the carefully printed original word Partial, directly in front of the word Nudity. The smaller paper was taped on only at the top, so it worked like a flap, and as they were talking one of the group was flipping it back and forth — Partial-Full-Partial-Full-Partial — like a piece of sly performance art. Everyone laughed, which was more than anyone did during the show itself.

So it’s come to this: In the ever more intellectualized world of contemporary performance, even skin’s become a mind game. This was opening night of the first show in White Bird’s Uncaged dance season, and if the sign was meant to defuse any shocked sensibilities it was probably superfluous.

This crowd seemed as if it knew very well what it was getting into, and it wasn’t going to let a little nudity throw it for a loop. Indeed, the nudity — and the opportunity to view it with an air of studied nonchalance — was undoubtedly part of the draw.

“I really liked the lighting,” Mr. Scatter found himself saying to a friend, and she nodded. Neither of them bothered to bring up how those Caravaggio marble effects were bouncing off of finely sculpted birthday suits.

For the record, anyone who goes to see Crepuscule (which continues its run through Sunday) looking for titillation would be better off to cross the Broadway Bridge and hit the Magic A Go Go or Mary’s Club. For that matter, they’d be better off staying home and watching television commercials.

Painting from Manafi al-Hayawan (The Useful Animals), depicting Adam and Eve. From Maragh in Mongolian Iran, ca. 1294-99. Wikimedia Commons.Skin has seldom seemed as somber as it does here in Leveille’s dance, which somehow manages to seem liberated and stern at the same time, like morning prayers at a Puritan nudist colony.

There are formal issues going on in this dance, and the nakedness serves a function. It’s an extension, I think, of the function that the unfettered human form served for the creators of classical statuary and Romantic painting: a contemplation of the physical fullness of the body, but in this case clear-eyed and unidealized (although, let’s face it, these are dancers’ bodies, and if they’re not exactly Michelangelo’s David they’re still in far better shape than yours and mine).

Mr. Scatter found himself thinking how right it can be that the line of the body is allowed to trace itself in its entirety, not stopping at the small of the back and continuing at high thigh; about how rarely we view reproductive organs in a nonsexualized context. In Crepuscule the body just is. It’s the thing we all walk around in, divested of illusions. It seemed, in this dance, to share something with the nakedness of the original Olympic games, maybe because Leveille’s choreography borrows a lot of movement from martial arts.

Still, nakedness sets off social alarms. There was a time, years ago, when nudity was so common on the stages of Portland that Mr. Scatter, in the course of scurrying from basement to loft in order to comment on productions in the pages of a certain large periodical of august sensibility, sometimes forgot to mention it. It was just the times. An all-nude production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit wouldn’t have been entirely surprising.

Thus, this memorable conversation. Since I’ve forgotten the production in question, let’s just slip Coward’s comedy in its place:

Mr. Editor: “Does-so-and-so’s production of Blithe Spirit have nudity in it?”

Mr. Scatter (searching his memory): “Uh … yeah. It does.”

Mr. Editor: “For god’s sake, man, why didn’t you mention it in your review?”

Mr. Scatter (sensing something has gone amiss): “I dunno. It didn’t seem important, I guess.”

Mr. Editor: “Not bloody important! A friend of [here, fill in the name of a high muckamuck editor of the time] went to see it after reading your review, and she was so horrified she complained to him!”

Mr. Scatter: “Well, I suppose it could be a shock to people who don’t go to the theater very often …”

Mr. Editor: “Those are our readers! And they deserve to know what they’re getting into, for crying out loud.”

Mr. Scatter: “Uh … that’s a good point, I guess …”

Mr. Editor (sarcastically): “A good point! Let me put it this way. When [high muckamuck editor] finds out from a friend that Madame Arcati doesn’t have her clothes on and we didn’t report it, he is not a happy man. When [high muckamuck editor] is unhappy he makes me unhappy. And when I’m unhappy I make you unhappy. So let’s make this clear. If they bloody take their shirts off, say so in the bloody review. Clear?”

Mr. Scatter (chastened): “Clear.”

And the warning signs started popping up in Mr. Scatter’s reviews, although usually without parsing whether the nudity was full or partial.

Gradually the times changed, too, and the postings became less necessary. When a revival of Hair came along and the young performers left themselves demurely, sweetly draped, it was clear that the culture had undergone a shift.

Apparently, with Leveille’s Twilight of the Oceans, it’s now undergoing a sea shift. Still, you’ll note, we’ve pointed out the nudity.

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Illustrations, from top:

  • Emmanuel Proulx spins Mathieu Campeau in one of the signature moves of “Crepescules des Oceans.” Photo: Denis Farley. Daniel Leveille Danse.
  • (Almost) full monty in the Garden of Eden. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553): “Adam and Eve.” Beech wood, 1533. Bode-Museum, Berlin (Erworben 1830, Königliche Schlösser, Gemäldegalerie Kat. 567). Wikimedia Commons.
  • How full is partial? Painting from Manafi al-Hayawan (“The Useful Animals”), depicting Adam and Eve. From Maragh in Mongolian Iran, ca. 1294-99. Wikimedia Commons.