Monthly Archives: November 2010

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Environment, General

Home on the range: separated at birth?

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Dead Eagle Trail, by Jane Hilton, front cover. Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam.

By Bob Hicks

Scatter friends Karen and John got home a few weekends ago from Hells Canyon Mule Days in Enterprise, in the Wallowa Valley of far eastern Oregon, and it got us to thinking about the big wide stretches and the places in America where work is still manual and landbound and practical in a vastly different and more elemental way than the workaday practicalities of living an ordinary urban life.

Heart of a Shepherd, by Rosanne Parry, front cover. Random House.It was the thirtieth anniversary of Mule Days, and Mr. Scatter, who was on the spot for last year’s festivities, which he wrote about here and here, was sorry to miss the big blowout. Of course, with about 1,800 people (plus another 1,000 or so just up the road in Joseph) Enterprise is a giddy metropolis compared to the landscapes of two books we’ve been pondering lately — British photographer Jane Hilton‘s Dead Eagle Trail and Portland area novelist Rosanne Parry‘s Heart of a Shepherd. Both books take imaginative looks at territories where the high lonesome is not just a fact but also, often, a comfort of life. And don’t these two cowboys just look like they’re cut from the same cloth?

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Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

In an evening of schoolhouse Martha Graham, Moseley’s lovely lament

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Josie Moseley teaching at the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre. Greg Bond/Oregon Art Beat/2010. Courtesy Oregon Public Broadcasting

The place to be in Portland Tuesday night was the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, where the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company was performing in town for the first time since 2004. As if that weren’t draw enough, the program provided the world premiere of Portland choreographer Josie Moseley‘s “Inherit,” a solo for Graham dancer Samuel Pott. Moseley’s piece was underwritten by White Bird, which presented the Graham company as part of its Portland dance season. Catherine Thomas’s review for The Oregonian is here. Art Scatter’s chief correspondent and resident dance critic, Martha Ullman West, was also on the spot and files this report.

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By Martha Ullman West

Ask a male modern dancer about Martha Graham technique and you’ll likely get a shake of the head, a roll of the eyes, and a lecture on how her pelvis-centered movement is difficult to impossible for a man’s body to do.

Portrait of Martha Graham and Bertram Ross, June 27, 1961. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection. Photo: Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964). Wikimedia Commons.This is definitely true of Lamentation, the gut-wrenching, writhing, keening solo Graham made on her own body in 1930, in which she absorbed and expressed all the griefs of a world as troubled as our own, at the same time providing the kind of catharsis the ancient Greeks found in the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus.  It’s no accident she later made dances based on Oedipus Rex (Night Journey) Medea (Cave of the Heart) and Agamemnon (the monumental evening-length Clytemnestra) all of them from the woman’s point of view.

Lamentation is the centerpiece of the Martha Graham Company’s current road show: We saw it twice at the Schnitz on Tuesday night, first performed with smooth elegance by Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch, her costume — originally a tube of knitted fabric as much a part of the solo as the dancer’s body — perked up with a red leotard underneath it.

Then, post intermission, to introduce the Lamentation Variations we saw Martha herself, on film, gnarled feet rooted to the floor, her seated body arching in a seamless cry. Let it be said that this 80-year-old solo of Graham’s is so emblematic of that period of modern dance that the editors of the International Dictionary of Modern Dance chose it for the book’s cover.

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Bob Hicks, Books, General, Humor, Journalism

Don’t call us, Ishmael. We’ll call you.

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By Bob Hicks

In his time Mr. Scatter has done a lot of editing, sometimes with the lightest of fingers and sometimes with a bloodied ax.

He has ruthlessly rewritten. Many years ago he was put in charge of “fixing” a writer so bad that he recomposed, and even re-reported, every inch of every story she turned in, begging all the while with his own boss that he please god please do the right thing and fire her so she could become an outstanding tax preparer or short-order cook or anything other than a newspaper reporter, which despite her byline and weekly paycheck she decidedly was not.

Mr. Scatter preparing to edit an unruly submission. OK, OK. Actually, it's "Destruction of Leviathan," an 1865 engraving by Gustave Doré. Wikimedia CommonsThen she took a batch of her rewritten stories, entered them into a prestigious professional competition, and strutted off with a passel of awards. That experience has made Mr. Scatter deeply suspicious of awards ever since. It also played a crucial role in the briefness of his own tenure at that particular less-than-august journal of news and opinion, a place that greeted him on his first day of work with a single rule, banning in-house sexual fraternization: Don’t dip your pen in the company ink. That the prize-winning “writer” was regularly inking and dipping with the publication’s owner did not help Mr. Scatter’s position, although it seemed to do wonders for her own.

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Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Jack Levine: farewell to a great satirist

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Jack Levine, "Street Scene #2," oil on masonite, 27 x 37.5 inches, 1938. Helen Thurston Ayer Fund, 43.5/Portland Art Museum

By Bob Hicks

One of the odd things about fame and notoriety is that they freeze people in time, to those moments or years when they were outsized public figures, no matter that they might have eaten breakfast and traveled and read books and made love and voted in the local county commission race and helped fix Thanksgiving dinner with their children for many years afterwards in a state of semi-obscurity. It’s the story Billy Wilder was getting at in Sunset Boulevard, I suppose, although he was more concerned with Norma Desmond’s unhinged inability to deal with her loss of celebrity than in the public’s collective amnesia about her.

The other day my friend John, who’d just been in Kentucky, excitedly showed me a snapshot he’d taken of an oil painting he’d discovered on a distillery wall. It was a Thomas Hart Benton, and a good one, which Benton had painted for the distiller in the early 1950s, a couple of decades after the artist’s brawny regionalist images had set him firmly in the public mind as a sort of Grant Wood with muscles. We were surprised that he’d created such a good and representative piece so late in life — or so we thought, until we looked it up and discovered Benton had lived until 1975, well into the Age of Aquarius. It wasn’t his fault that art and audiences had moved on to other things: He was fixed in our minds as a highly talented 1930s American regionalist.

Then, last night, I discovered while looking through ArtDaily.org that Jack Levine, one of my favorite American painters, had died on Monday at age 95. Here‘s the ArtDaily link, which pairs the Associated Press obituary by Karen Matthews with a good color reproduction of Levine’s wonderful 1946 painting of post-war avarice, Welcome Home. And here is William Grimes’s very good obituary from the New York Times.

Again, I was surprised, because I’d had no idea Levine was still alive. He seemed a figure from an earlier time, a social realist with a strong satiric bent, one of those admirable 1930s and 1940s characters who believed that art had a crucial and very public role to play in the great brawling melodrama of American democracy. Ben Shahn was another.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Theater

Friends of Scatter show their chops

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By Bob Hicks

The thing about so many Scatterers is that they don’t just observe, they also participate. Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead would be so pleased.

Heidi Stoeckley Nogoy in Martha Graham's Cave of the Heart. Photo: John DeaneTonight we head to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, where the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company trods a Portland stage for the first time since 2004. One way to think about modernism: The Great Graham was born in 1894, which would make this modernist avatar 116 years old if she were still alive and kicking, and very much of an antique. How do you keep modernism modern when it’s got so old?

One way is to keep the dancers themselves fresh and vigorous. Another, presumably, is to build on the legacy, and that’s where Friend of Scatter Josie Moseley comes in. We’ll be holding down the “observer” part of the bargain. Josie will handle the participating. Moseley, the Portland choreographer whose credits include work directly or indirectly with Jose Limon, Alwin Nikolais, Anna Sokolow and Mark Morris (among others), set a new solo on the Graham company’s Samuel Pott this fall, and it’ll be premiered tonight. Her piece is one of three new dances commissioned as responses to Graham’s seminal 1930 solo Lamentation. (The other two are by Larry Keigwin and Bulereyaung Pagarlave.) Moseley’s variation, Inherit, is set to music by jazz saxophonist and composer Joshua Redman.

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Wednesday night it’s to Northeast Portland’s Blackbird Wine Shop & Atomic Cheese to see Scatter friend Charles Deemer‘s debut screening of his latest online movie, The Farewell Wake. Deemer’s made two versions of the film — a shorter, more tightly edited director’s cut and a longer version, which includes some scenes and performers who’ll end up on the short version’s cutting room floor. The Blackbird screening is the long version, and it’s a special showing for all the people who took part.

That includes Mr. Scatter, in a very brief cameo as a guy named Art Scatter, and Scatter chief correspondent Martha Ullman West in a meatier supporting role. Will Mr. Scatter survive the final cut? He’s on pings and noodles. Martha, he knows, is a survivor. Here’s what we wrote about Deemer’s last video film, Deconstructing Sally. (And here’s what we wrote about his Oregon-classic play Christmas at the Juniper Tavern.)

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Sidney Paget (1860-1908): "Sherlock Holmes," 1904. Wikimedia CommonsFinally, Scatter regular George Taylor has taken a break from his sauerkraut fermentation duties to spin out yet another play, and this one sounds like a corker. It combines England’s favorite miser and its favorite violin-sawing, cocaine-snorting gumshoe into a comic mystery called The Strange Case of the Miser at Christmas.

You can see a free reading of it on Monday evening, November 29, at Theater! Theatre! under the auspices of the invaluable Portland Theatre Works (read what we had to say about them here). Among the promising-looking cast are Tobias Anderson, Dave Bodin and Maureen Porter.

What’s it about? PTW’s Andrew Golla passes this along:

It’s Christmas Eve 1882. A miserly businessman named Scrooge calls at 221B Baker Street with a problem. A series of ghost-filled dreams has made him terrified to go to sleep. He fears the last dream, which is to take place this night, may signal his last night on earth. Surely the “world’s greatest detective” can discover what, or who, is behind the dreams. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have to use a controversial form of investigation to solve The Strange Case of the Miser at Christmas.

Your participation is humbly invited.

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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

  • Heidi Stoeckley Nogoy in Martha Graham’s “Cave of the Heart.” Photo: John Deane
  • Sidney Paget (1860-1908): “Sherlock Holmes,” 1904. Wikimedia Commons
Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Link: Imago’s gorgeous jealous fit

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Rachael Parrell: the Desdemona dies twice. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

By Bob Hicks

The trouble with being a literary or theatrical icon is that you get into a loop, repeating yourself again and again and again. Think Captain Ahab’s going to catch that whale this time around and become a prosperous maritime merchant with a wife and brood of happy kids? Fat chance.

So, yes, poor Desdemona gets done in again. But because Imago Theatre‘s Stage Left Lost isn’t Othello, at least the circumstances change. And there’s some question about who actually done the deed. Jerry Mouawad’s “opera without words” is a brilliantly accomplished variation on Shakespeare’s themes, meaning that Mouawad and his collaborators aren’t bound by the ordinary rules of literary destiny. As compelling as the show’s emotional and psychological variations are, Stage Left Lost is even more a love letter to the conventions of the theater and a deft rethinking of its central elements: It reshuffles the balance among words (forget about ’em), movement and music to sometimes startling efect. And, of, yes: It puts the audience backstage — stage left, to be precise, from which vantage they view the action from inside out.

You really ought to give this one a shot. My complete review is in this morning’s Oregonian; pick it up in the dead tree version or link to it here.

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Rachael Parrell: Desdemona dies twice. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater

Holy holidays, hipsters. Is it that time already?

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The Oregon Symphony's annual "Gospel Christmas" concert rocks the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

By Bob Hicks

It’s true. Mr. Scatter, in his semi-official capacity as regional chronicler of the wintry festivities, has published a pair of guides to holiday concerts and shows in this morning’s A&E section of The Oregonian.

Three weeks before Thanksgiving. But not, in Mr. Scatter’s defense, before Halloween. (And in that regard, ask Mrs. Scatter sometime how the giant gargoyle on the front porch came to have its ugly little plaster mug smashed in.)

Finn Henell as Pinocchio and Josh Murry as Gerard the Shopkeeper in The Portland Ballet's "La Boutique Fantasque." Photo: Blaine Truitt CovertThe Twelve Shows of Christmas gives the lowdown on a selection of Portland’s big-deal holiday events — things like The Nutcracker and Tuba Christmas, which are not only inevitable but also oddly alluring. The Scatter Family is sure to hit several of them.

Resisting the early arrival of the holidays? includes a lot of smaller, often quirkier shows that appeal to Mr. Scatter’s sense of seasonal follies, including the neo-Piaf band Padam Padam and the sackbutt-blatting Oregon Renaissance Band. It also evokes the not-so-sainted memories of Alvin and the Chipmunks and the Harry Simeone Chorale. You’ll have to hit that link button (or pick up your dead-tree copy) to find out how.

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Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Onda calls it quits, Pander thinks big

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Henk Pander, "Leviathan," oil on linen, 69" x 101", 2009. Laura Russo Gallery.

By Bob Hicks

Bad news arrived this morning for Portland art followers: Alberta Street mainstay Onda Gallery is shutting its doors at the end of the year. I’ve always liked gallery owner Allan Oliver and appreciated his efforts to make a home in Portland for the art of Latin America. Three years ago Oliver sold the space to Pablo Merlo Flores, whose wholesale business, Pampeana, represents Latin American gift and craft items across the United States. Oliver continued as gallery director. I’m sorry to see Onda disappear, and wish Allan the best.

Poster for this month's Onda Gallery exhibit. The party's almost over, friends.Here are excerpts from his announcement:

After twelve years at the forefront of the Alberta Street renewal, Onda Gallery will close its doors at the end of the year. The holiday show, featuring art work from Pacific Northwest, Cuban and Ecuadorian artists, will be the last art event at the gallery.

After assuming sole proprietorship in 2001, Allan Oliver curated over one hundred art shows with their openings on the Last Thursday of each month. His mission has been to introduce the Portland area art public to fine artists from Latin American countries, many of whom have presented their work in person, and to young, emerging and mid-career Latino artists living in the Pacific Northwest. …

The public and media are invited to the gallery’s final party on Saturday, November 20, 6-9 PM.

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Today is First Thursday, which means new shows in a lot of the city’s galleries, and D.K. Row has several suggestions in this morning’s Oregonian on exhibits to hit. One to keep a special eye on is Henk Pander‘s exhibit of recent works at Laura Russo Gallery. That’s his painting Leviathan at the top of this post, and a leviathan is what it is — 69 inches tall and 101 inches wide.

Pander was born in the Netherlands and trained in the Dutch tradition, and he’s  been one of our most important artists for a long time. His technical skill is part of that. He’s also willing to go into psychological and social areas that are uncomfortable for a lot of artists and art viewers. As he gets older, his work seems to get even more profound. You may recall Martha Ullman West’s tribute to Delores Pander, his wife, who died in June of this year, and Henk’s piercing, loving, astonishing portrait of her that he painted the year before she died. I think we could be seeing some pretty amazing things in this show.

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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

  • Henk Pander, “Leviathan,” oil on linen, 69″ x 101″, 2009. Laura Russo Gallery.
  • Poster for this month’s Onda Gallery exhibit. The party’s almost over, friends.
Bob Hicks, Books, General, Journalism

Lost books: ‘Out of the Deeps’

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By Bob Hicks

About the time the icebergs started breaking off I realized that Out of the Deeps, John Wyndham‘s 1953 speculative-fiction thriller, was heading into some pretty interesting territory. The suspicion had been rising for some time that this was no ordinary, dated genre toss-off. But when I picked it up I’d had no idea it anticipated the global warming controversy by a full 50 years.

out-of-the-deepsI did have an idea it’d be an interesting read, at the least from a historical and sociological perspective. Wyndham (full name John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, born 1903, died 1969) was also the author of a novel called The Day of the Triffids, which I had never read but recalled vaguely as a pleasingly scary movie about an invasion of malevolent creatures from outer space. I happened upon Triffids on a shelf at Powell’s in a recent “rediscovered” edition, all tricked out in fresh literary wrap suggesting that someone at a publishing house somewhere thought it was worth a more serious look. It was selling for 16 bucks, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to put that much down for a gamble on an author I’d never read from a dubious pulp-genre background. But next to it was a used copy of Out of the Deeps for $2.50, and that, I decided, was worth the risk.

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