Monthly Archives: February 2010

Bob Hicks, General

Art Scatter new looks: a fuzzy stab at comparison

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Try as he might, Mr. Scatter can’t figure out a good way to let you look at the three redesign possibilities we’re considering for Art Scatter.

Copyblogger Web themeRegulars Brett and Charles have both asked for such a thing, and it’s not just a reasonable request, it’s a no-brainer. Unfortunately Mr. Scatter’s brain just says no when he tries to figure out how to make it happen.

Veryplaintext 3.0 Web themeThe best he can manage is a fuzzy screen photo of each candidate taken with his inadequate Blackberry phone, in the hopes that the pictures will help jog your memories back to what you saw in the last couple of days.

Artsemerging Web themeWhat you see, from the top, is:

Copyblogger, the jazziest of the candidates, with red headlines and a tabloidy staccato feel.

Veryplaintext 3.0, with a crisp, beautifully design serif type and an old-newspaper feel.

Artemerging, the theme Art Scatter has had since its birth but is getting ready to shed.

And, you’re reading this in Modern, the third candidate and today’s theme.

Mr. Scatter sincerely hopes this helps. And he promises not only to make a decision soon, but to explain how and why.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

This ‘Cosi’ is a farce. You got a problem with that?

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Cosi fan Tutti. Photo: Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

Chatting with a friend in the lobby of Keller Auditorium during halftime of Portland Opera’s Cosi fan tutte on Friday night, Mr. Scatter became aware of a controversy he hadn’t realized existed.

“Audiences tend to love this production,” my friend, an exceptionally knowledgeable follower of the opera world, sighed. “And critics tend to hate it.”

Up to this point I’d been having a rather jolly time myself, although I knew the production, which originated in 2003 at Santa Fe Opera and emphasizes brisk farcical shtick, wasn’t strictly traditional. So I stuck his comment in the back of my mind, returned to my seat for the second act, and continued to have a jolly time along with the rest of the audience, right up to the curtain call.

And this morning I did a little researching. It’s true. A lot of critics (though by no means all) have found this Cosi distressingly populist. “A gag-filled, vulgar romp,” J.A. Van Sant wrote in Opera Today, reviewing Santa Fe’s 2007 revival. That might sound like a good ad quote, but he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Since Van Sant seems to speak for a lot of other critics, let’s give him a little more room to explain himself:

Politely put, (stage director James) Robinson’s Cosi was a gag-filled, vulgar romp. Such is not Mozart’s Cosi, an elegant, ironic comedy – not an ambiguous study of human nature requiring Regietheatre treatment, as is the present day style with this piece. To make Cosi into slapstick comedy combined with faux psychological exploration of the characters is to miss the point.

Essentially a bittersweet comedy of character types, set to some of Mozart’s most exhilarating and beautiful music, Cosi indeed has dark edges that serve to heighten amusement over the foibles of human nature.

You shouldn’t overdo the darkness, Van Sant continued, but you shouldn’t sacrifice the elegance to showy gimmicks, either.

A couple of other points emerged from other critics.

  • First, the not-too-reluctantly philandering sisters in this play (the story is by Lorenzo da Ponte, who also wrote the librettos for Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni) and their gentleman-and-an-officer lovers have traditionally been played by older singers, suggesting that these erotic foibles are less the result of sheer youthful exuberance and more of something innate in human nature.
  • Second, the play is very much about social convention at a level of society in which adherence to social convention is extremely important. These characters, if they’re going to sin, would do so cautiously, with a sense of decorum, not with casual friskiness. To give Cosi the sheen of 1950s naughtiness that this production does is historically misleading and saps some of the intellectual vigor from an opera that has a far subtler soul.

Objections noted. And on this one, I’m going to side with the audience.

Continue reading This ‘Cosi’ is a farce. You got a problem with that? →

Bob Hicks, General

Art Scatter’s new look, Variation 3

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Call us vain, but here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we’re still obsessing over the way we look.

Photo: Max Wehite/Wikimedia CommonsDoes this typeface go with our headline style? Should we go Friday casual, sober-suited, country corduroy or maybe uptown funk? Do we want to look reliable, or available, or maybe flirtatious but with strict limits?

Today we’re feeling sleek. And no wonder, after trying on the last of three costumes we’ve been contemplating, a Web presentation theme called Modern. Yesterday we showed you the jazzier Copyblogger, and Thursday we kicked off with the simple but typographically elegant Veryplaintext 3.0.

One of these three designs will replace the format we’ve been using since Art Scatter was a newborn in February 2008, Artsemerging. Why? Because we feel like a change. But we want to make sure it’s the right change.

So, here you have it. Three new suits. Each with strengths, each with weaknesses. Let us know which one appeals to you and why — and if one of them really grosses you out, let us know that. too. After all, we just make this stuff up. You’re the ones who read it.

Hit that comment button and let us know what you think.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Language, Poetry

Friday link: Discovering Updike country in verse

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Today in Scatterville we’re taken with Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times of Tony Hoagland’s new book of poetry, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty.

tonyhoagland1For one thing, that’s just a terrific title, even better than the review’s zinger of a headline (based on a quoted poem set in a grocery store), The Free Verse Is in Aisle 3.

Mostly, though, we’re happy that Mr. Hoagland has a new collection on (or in) the market, and that Mr. Garner has so cheerfully brought it to our attention.

The review draws comparisons in Hoagland’s poems to Randall Jarrell, Frank O’Hara, Marianne Moore. And we love the way that Garner fixes not just Hoagland’s poetry but an entire school in the firmament, in the process defining both what Mr. Hoagland is as a poet and what he is not:

“On a superficial level Mr. Hoagland’s poems — he writes in an alert, caffeinated, lightly accented free verse — resemble those of many writers in what one is tempted to call the Amiable School of American Poets, a group for which Billy Collins serves as both prom king and starting point guard. But Mr. Hoagland’s verse is consistently, and crucially, bloodied by a sense of menace and by straight talk.”

That makes Hoagland, in the Scatter Book of Literary Comparison, akin to the great John Updike, poet (in prose and verse) of suburban middle class unsettling awareness. Something growls, softly, beneath the placid surface. Think of that as you read these excerpts, from a poem set at a wine-tasting, that Garner quotes from Hoagland’s 2003 collection What Narcissism Means to Me:

But where is the Cabernet of rent checks and asthma medication?
Where is the Burgundy of orthopedic shoes?
Where is the Chablis of skinned knees and jelly sandwiches?
with the aftertaste of cruel Little League coaches?
and the undertone of rusty stationwagon? …

When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.
But when a man is hurt, he makes himself an expert.
Then he stands there with a glass in his hand staring into nothing
as if he was forming an opinion.

Bob Hicks, General

Art Scatter’s new look, Variation 2

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As regular readers know, here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we’re contemplating a visual overhaul.

Photo: Max Wehite.Wikimedia CommonsA facelift, if you will. A little cosmetic plastic surgery to bring the fresh bloom of youth back to our chubby literary cheeks.

After an online lifetime of presenting ourselves in the guise of the Artsemerging Web design, we’re ready to move on, and we’re considering three candidates. Yesterday we slipped inside the skin of Veryplaintext 3.0. We like its serif type design a lot. Today we’re trying on something a little racier, the zippy Copyblogger design, which has (brace yourselves) red headlines and a slightly tabular, hot-off-the-presses feel. Tomorrow we’ll give you a shot at the sleek Modern design.

Help us, O Brave & Loyal Scatterers. Show us the path. Take a look at these three possibilities and tell us what you like and dislike about them. We’re committed to shedding our wrinkly old skin. But which new skin should we slip into? And does our insurance plan cover this procedure?

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Grupo de Rua: The best soccer team in town

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Grupo de Rua/Courtesy White Bird Dance

“These guys would be the best soccer team in town,” our friend Barry, a noted aficionado of both international football and contemporary dance, whispered. “They’d beat the Timbers!”

He’s probably right. I was thinking more along the lines of Romeo and Juliet — not the soppy love scenes, but those great, adrenalin-rushing street fights when the heat and idleness of summer in the city get too much and Tybalt and Mercutio and Romeo get into their fatal smackdown.

“Oh, yes!” our friend Catherine said afterwards. “That hip hop choreographer from Philadelphia actually did that. What’s his name? Reggie …”

“Watts,” Barry replied.

In fact, it was Rennie Harris; see the comment below. But never mind the memory lapse.

Wednesday’s opening night performance of Bruno Beltrao‘s Brazilian dance troupe Grupo de Rua inspired a lot of extreme mental-calisthenic stretches, although none could match the athleticism of the nine men on stage at the Bison Building in close-in industrial Northeast Portland. The latest offering in White Bird‘s Uncaged season, Grupo de Rua’s residency runs through Sunday, and all performances are sold out, although you could take a chance on nabbing a standby ticket.

Beltrao’s movement is based on street dance, and freely incorporates hip hop and capoeira and other styles that tend to be intensely personal, macho, competitive. But as Isabelle Poulin writes in her program essay, Beltrao “felt the desire to exploit otherness, the territory of the brother who is not the enemy.” So these brothers test each other, take each other’s measures, but not necessarily with the aim to determine victor and victim. Maybe Beltrao’s not the right guy to choreograph that street brawl in Verona, after all.

The opening scene in this company’s 50-minute dance H3 is performed in silence (that is, without music: the squeak of sneakers on floorboards creates its own insistent heartbeat) and from a position of stillness — a stillness so pronounced that I confess to getting itchy for something to happen.

Well, it did. The sporting aspect of this movement is undeniable: This is the aesthetics of top-flight athleticism. Spins, bumps, headstands, flips, the extreme magnetic control of hands and feet that seems to cry out for a ball to enter the performing stage — it’s thrilling, yes, and the thrills often come, as in a soccer or baseball game, in sudden blinding bursts of action that explode from a moment of repose.

There’s an amusing stretch when the playing field gives way to the barnyard for a simulated chicken strut, too, but for me the most astonishing thing was watching these aesthetic athletes run full-speed backwards, in pattern. It brought up the basic, forehead-slapping question you want every performance to pose: How’d they do that?

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Next up at White Bird is a return downtown to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for a mainstage performance February 23 by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. This adventurous troupe will perform dances by Ohad Naharin (Batsheva), Jorma Elo (Boston Ballet) and Johan Inger (former artistic director of Sweden’s Cullberg Ballet). I’ll be giving a pre-show talk at 6:45 p.m. in the Schnitz’s lower lobby. Don’t know what I’ll say yet, but I’m working on it. Inger’s piece Walking Mad is set to Ravel’s Bolero. Stop me before I start babbling about Bo Derek.

Bob Hicks, General

Art Scatter’s new look, Variation 1

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Yes, Art Scatter looks different this morning than it did yesterday.

Photo: Max Wehite/Wikimedia CommonsSince those ancient days almost two years ago when we began, we’ve been working on a design template called artsemerging, by Nathaniel Stern. But lately we’ve been thinking we want to shake things up. So we’ve been looking at some alternatives.

The design you see today is called veryplaintext 3.0, and it’s created by Scott Allan Wallick.

In the next couple of days we’ll switch to a pair of other formats that have caught our eye:

Copyblogger, designed by Chris Pearson.

Modern, designed by Ulf Petterson.

Serendipitously, this very morning we saw this statement by landscape designer Steve Straub, quoted by our old friend Kym Pokorny in The Oregonian’s HGNW: “There are two elements of design. Making it look right and making it work right.”

Bearing that in mind, we’re asking all of you to help us out. Take a look as the format changes over the next three days. Tell us what you like and what you don’t like. We’re in a muddle. Lots of new clothes in the shop, and we can’t quite decide. So, please, hit that comment button and let us know what you think. Does this design make us look fat?

Friends, Romans and Scatterers, lend us your eyes.

Bob Hicks, Food, General, Music

Why Oregon beats Pennsylvania this time of year

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Punxsatawney Phil says bundle up. www.groundhog.org

This chilling report just in (OK, actually it was in early this morning, but Mr. Scatter was busy) from the Official Website of the Punxsatawney Groundhog Club: Looks like Phil’s laid a six-week egg. Temperature in downtown Punxsatawney at 5:06 p.m. Pacific time: 31 degrees. Not too bad for Pennsylvania this time of year, actually.

Long, long ago Mr. Scatter lived within a groundhog’s toss of Punxsatawney — all right, it was 260 miles, but cold is cold — on the banks of the beautiful Chenango River. He stored quart bottles of locally brewed soda pop on his back porch. One morning he discovered twelve neat popsicles sticking up from a dozen bottlenecks, each crowned with a neat crimped cap. That’s what Phil’s talkin’ about.

Here at Scatter World Headquarters we haven’t watched Groundhog Day this season, but Mr. Scatter maintains the foolish fiction that given as many do-overs as Bill Murray got, he could play a mean piano, too.

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Instead of breaking off popsicles, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter donned their short-sleeve Hawaiian shirts last night and ambled over to Kaul Auditorium to catch the Kronos Quartet‘s three-encore show, presented by Friends of Chamber Music. A wonderful concert, which our friend David Stabler wrote about compellingly here for The Oregonian.

With music by a young Serbian woman (Alexandra Vrebalov, born 1970), a youngish Polish woman (Hanna Kulenty, born 1961) and an elder statesman of new music (Terry Riley, born 1935), plus fresh arrangements of a couple of moving traditional songs, the concert gave hope to the proposition that, nearly a decade into the 21st century, the music world is at last moving beyond the 19th.

Mr. Scatter has long thought of Kronos as invaluable curators of music from around the globe, bringing to our attention a wealth of sound we might otherwise miss. Last night’s concert underscored that. But we were hearteningly reminded as well that these are also superb musicians who have developed an uncanny ensemble sound. Someday we can tell our doting Scatter grandchildren that we were there when the great Kronos was more than just a recorded memory.