Monthly Archives: December 2010

General, Humor, Laura Grimes

Getting right to the point

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A cheap die-cast Roman catapult with a built-in pencil sharpener costs only a few bucks and can be found at any tourist trap in London, but it earned Mrs. Scatter enormous clout with her catapult-loving son.By Laura Grimes

Dear Felix/Martha:

Remember that time when I was halfway around the world and I would write sneaky blog posts that would not-so-secretly reveal exciting news? Remember how I would slyly tell about the special presents I was bringing home, knowing you would be thrilled? And how you would come home from school every day and go to your computer, read the daily post and instant-message me, while I stayed up really late in my time zone? Remember our silly game of including lots of exclamation points? Remember how you instant-messaged me that you were in the middle of reading that day’s post (I thought, Oh, good, here it comes … ) and you innocently chatted away and then you wrote … “You got me a catapult?!!!!!!!!!!”? I loved that moment. Remember how fun that was?

Yeah, well, this isn’t one of those times.

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Bob Hicks, General, Music

Sergiu Luca: bon vivant, goodbye

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By Bob Hicks

I remember Sergiu Luca in the steamy July heat of a makeshift concert hall at Reed College, sweating with the audience and instrumentalists through a little gem of a summer music festival he’d begun in 1971 called Chamber Music Northwest.

Sergiu Luca, dead at 67.I remember him beaming above the breakwaters at Cascade Head on the Oregon Coast, a glass of good wine in one hand and the other sweeping through space in accompaniment to a robust story.

I remember him meeting and greeting people at the even littler Cascade Head Music Festival he began in the tiny town of Otis and later moved to Lincoln City after Chamber Music Northwest became too much of a production, smiling and joking with people ranging from local fishermen to high-powered musical figures such as Joan Morris and William Bolcom who’d come to the beach to sing and play with their old friend.

Most of all I remember Luca with a fiddle in his hand — a very old and rare and beautiful fiddle, which he played with the light and grace and airiness of a man who had not just the right but the joyous responsibility to own and play such a wondrous concoction of wood and glue and string. With a violin tucked beneath his chin, Luca created music that was much more than precise and correct. It had swagger and pleasure and verve. If you wanted to call it classical, OK, but you could never call it boring or musty: it was a living, shifting, up-to-the-minute thing.

Sergiu died Monday night in Houston, where he was even better-known than in Oregon. Sarah Rufca has the story on Culture Map Houston. The Oregonian’s David Stabler has this report on Oregon Live, and Allan Kozinn has this obituary in the New York Times. Things Rufca revealed: Luca was born in 1943 in Romania, and began to learn the violin at age 4 from a Gypsy, and made his debut at the Haifa Symphony in Israel when he was 9. He died of bile duct cancer, and there is little doubt that, although he died too young, he lived a rich life and enjoyed pretty much all of it.

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Cities, General

Norm Winningstad: Taps for an original

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Norm Winningstad: bigger than life. Photo: John Foyston

A lot of recent Oregonians know the name “Winningstad” mainly because of the Dolores Winningstad Theatre, the little red jewel box in the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. Those who’ve been around longer vividly remember Dolores’s husband, Norm, the high-flying tech pioneer and philanthropist who represented the sort of freewheeling Western spirit that seems to have been largely swallowed up by the grayness of the new international corporatism. Norm never had an opinion he didn’t like to share, and in retirement he spread his views freely and frequently in venues such as the letters column of The Oregonian. After Norm took his life on November 24 at age 85, The Oregonian ran this obituary, this analysis of his business impact, and this editorial tribute. Norm was in considerable pain from severe health problems, and it’s good to think that he chose his exit with the same courage and flamboyance with which he lived his life. Friend of Scatter John Foyston was a longtime friend of the family, and he was on hand for yesterday’s memorial service. He files this report.

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By John Foyston

Yesterday, I was one of the 500 or so people who attended the memorial for Norm Winningstad, the brilliant high-tech entrepreneur and philanthropist. I’ve been lucky enough to know the family since 1963, when Dick and I became friends in the eighth grade.

Norm was the smartest man I’ve ever known — scary brilliant — and he did not suffer fools. But he was also incredibly warm, generous and funny. He was a true mensch, and Oregon is a better place because of him.

The memorial was pitch-perfect for Norm, held in a huge hangar at Global Aviation with bizjets, a jet helicopter and a Ferarri at one end. There was a simple stage with a large-screen slide show of Norm’s life: his days in the World War II Navy as a radar technician; with his wife Dolores and their family; in the office at Tektronix, Floating Point Systems and Lattice; with his beloved bulldogs; and at the controls of his helicopters, airplanes and fast cars — and his 1953 MG-TD, which was not so fast, but which he also loved.

Son Dennis delivered a remembrance that must’ve made Norm grin in pride, and Harry Merlo also spoke about his old friend. At the end, the hangar door slowly cranked back and a military honor guard fired a rifle salute and a bugler played Taps. It was a fitting sendoff for a man the likes of whom we won’t soon see again …

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Norm Winningstad: bigger than life. Photo: John Foyston

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Film, General, Music, Theater

Hot links: hard nut, black swan, bad ‘Y’

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Mark Morris and his Dance Group in the Duffy Performance Space at the Mark Morris Dance Center, 2008. Photo: Klaus Lucka/Wikimedia Commons.

By Bob Hicks

HARD NUT: It’s been a lot of years since I’ve seen The Hard Nut, Mark Morris‘s pared-down version of The Nutcracker, but I’ve always more than liked it. It’s lean yet lush, beautifully framed, and intensely musical.

Nikolai Dimitriyevich Kuznetsov, portrait of Tchaikovsky, oil on canvas, 1893. State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow/Wikimedia Commons.You still occasionally hear people refer to it as Morris’s winking bad-boy spoof of the ubiquitous holiday story ballet, but people who think that about it (a) aren’t paying a lot of attention to the dance itself, and (b) apparently haven’t read the E.T.A. Hoffmann story on which both The Hard Nut and The Nutcracker are based. Morris took the narrative for his version, which premiered in 1991, directly from Hoffmann’s tale-within-the-tale, which is more sinister than your average sugar plum and which Hoffmann himself titled The Hard Nut. If you’ve never read the Hoffman story, it’s well worth it.

The Hard Nut returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music next weekend, and this morning’s New York Times carries a freewheeling Q&A interview with Morris by Julie Bloom. It offers a great inside look at Morris’s thinking and his approach to art. He declares himself a classicist in many ways, which I think is true, especially in terms of musicality. And he reveals that it was his love for Tchaikovsky‘s score that prompted him to create The Hard Nut in the first place.

Absolutely. Tchaikovsky strikes me as one of our most misunderstood major composers, a guy whose work is often dismissed as sweet and antiquarian. Hardly. Yes, his music is melodically gorgeous. Structurally, it’s like steel: tough and springy, and fully anticipating modernism. As Morris puts it, it’s “astonishingly advanced.”

Read the interview here. And don’t forget that Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s production of the Balanchine Nutcracker opens December 11.

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Bob Hicks, Books, General, Visual Art

Gulliver’s Travels, unbowdlerized

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Luis Quintanilla, illustrator, Yahoos fighting, "Gulliver's Travels," Crown Publishers 1947.

By Bob Hicks

It’s possible Mr. Scatter should have kept his mouth shut.

There he was, scanning the shelves at the local outlet of a mega-mega multinational book store, when a man and his son approached, trailing a clerk behind them. The boy looked to be 10 or 11, and he and his father had seen something on television about a new movie version of Gulliver’s Travels coming out later this month (Jack Black stars as a travel writer on assignment to Bermuda), and they thought it’d be fun to read the book before they saw the movie. But what version?

dscn0629“You probably want one of the adaptations,” the clerk said helpfully. “The language is modernized, and they’re a lot easier for kids to read than the original.”

Having fulfilled her function, she walked away, never having mentioned that most adaptations also snip out big uncomfortable chunks of the text.

Father and son stood undecided, not sure whether to go for the condensed version or the real thing.

“Buy the original,” Mr. Scatter found himself saying. “It’s lots better.”

Well, it is. Jonathan Swift‘s novel, first published in 1726 under the title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, is one of the most hacked-at and sanitized books ever written, and those are the versions, unfortunately, in which most people encounter it. That seems to be largely because its fantastical elements (little people, giants, talking horses, flying cities) tilt it toward the catch-all of children’s literature, despite its often coarse detail and sophisticated adult themes. It is, underneath the flimsiest tissue of whimsy, a scabrous satire on European morals and politics, and quite rude on the subject of bodily functions, and such things will never do for the young and tender-cheeked. (Nor is it the only book to be hogtied and forcibly hustled into the children’s playpen in spite of its original intentions. It’s a bit of a jolt to remember that the Grimm folk and fairy tales, which have been so resolutely cleansed and prettified for nursery and adolescent consumption in the almost 200 years since the brothers first published them, were themselves sanitized versions of older, even more savage folk traditions.) In brief: Take out the scruffy parts of Gulliver’s Travels and you’ve ripped out its heart and soul.

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