All posts by Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson has edited and written about the arts in Portland since 1979.
Barry Johnson, Environment

Paul Goldberger, please save me from the Towers of Dubai

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OK, the experiment in blending semi-officially begins. Last night, I went to hear Paul Goldberger talk about the challenges facing cities in the 21st century. I blogged about the lecture at length today on OregonLive. If you’re looking for a fairly close account of what Goldberger said, that’s the place to go.

Here’s a paragraph from that post:

To my mind, the most important idea in Goldberger’s lecture is his description of the public realm It’s a squishy idea, maybe, comprising the things we as citizens of a specific city, Portland, have in common and the common ground on which we meet, the sense of community and the place of community, the generation of specific culture and its transmission through the city. The sprawling, atomized, privatized, cities that Goldberger is arguing against can’t be as vital, as integrated, as creative as the traditional city that Portland has tried to preserve, aggressively since the defeat of the Mt. Hood Freeway proposal in the 1970s and its replacement with light rail. Or at least that’s what his argument for the public realm suggests.

Goldberger isn’t the first to worry about the public realm, the erosion of our common ground, the withdrawal from the drama and information and diversity of the street. We even worry about it here on Art Scatter, if only because we worry about it in our own selves! It’s related to our concern about democracy — which can only be successful if the public realm is open and active and fluid. The promise of democracy is that it will produce BOTH better decisions AND decisions that people will support. Better decisions depend on the diversity of opinion and creativity of mind that the public realm encourages. And wide support depends on the trust and breadth of discussion that the public realm creates.

Although Goldberger couldn’t have been more complimentary about “Portland” as an attempt to produce and preserve a vigorous public realm, I think his instincts as a journalist, meaning I suppose his professional skepticism, might have made him wonder just how far-reaching and solid our achievements really are. If I could, I would have asked him about that. The popular impression, he said, is that Portland is the “anti-Houston”; but I doubt that he traveled far outside the central core of the city to areas that are as placeless as any nowhere corner at the intersection of major arterials in the Houston mega-plex. Our experiment in the “public realm” is incomplete, we’d all agree.

Ultimately, did Goldberger make me feel “better” about the future of cities? Not really, but that wasn’t his goal. He simply located some areas we should be vigilant about. But there are other more vicious threats out there. Goldberger didn’t mention climate change, for example, or even more lethal applications of technology than atomization and its resulting anomie or my own favorite — something plague-like that does an end run around our compromised worldwide centers for disease control. Or, for that matter, the social turmoil that comes from the unequal distribution of resources in a world of resource scarcity. I still see the towers of Dubai in my head…

General

Paul Goldberger’s cities of the future: lecture tonight

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So, we’ve been preparing for Paul Goldberger’s lecture tonight on the future of cities in the 21st century. It’s 6 pm tonight in the White Stag building, $25. Why spend that kind of money on an architecture critic whose Sky Line column you can read in the New Yorker? Well, mostly because a lecture is a totally different form — more elastic, if only because of the presence of the audience, one that allows for a bit more speculation because its opinions aren’t frozen forever in print (or a digital file).

Spending some time with Goldberger’s columns and other work (for Vanity Fair, say) is a comfortable experience. He’s smart and observant, of course (he did win a Pulitzer for his criticism in the New York Times before moving to the New Yorker), and he’s also careful and even-handed (perhaps a result of those long years in daily journalism). So, he can give a measured opinion about the heavy hand of New York’s master planner Robert Moses, without giving the impression that he’s fallen in with the Moses revisionists seeking to spin some of the truly awful things Moses did to New York (and even Portland — until we revolted the same way New York did). Moses did some good things ; some bad things. That was the tenor of his review of Brad Cloepfil’s 2 Columbus Circle building, too — he found a mixed bag, perhaps less than hoped for outside and more than hoped for inside.

The reason I plunked down for a ticket, though, is that I really liked his investigations of Beijing during the Olympics, and those columns give the topic of his lecture even more gravity. If the future is Beijing and Shanghai, what does that tell us? Because frankly, it chills me to the marrow. The massive towers of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, Singapore and China seem so futuristic somehow, but not in a good way. Dystopian. Like Blade Runner or Orwell. In a way, I see them as the ultimate triumph of Robert Moses, perhaps, or Le Corbusier, the next sterile, logical step. They seem such perfect machines for control of those within, for detection of the thought-crimes they commit. The smart building. The panopticon. The luxury prison.

And then what’s going on outside those “smart towers”, which generate their own energy, purify and condition their own air? Those arks designed to lodge the “lucky” as they sail into the future? Outside, it’s a killing field of crazy tropical infections brought about by the Warming, scarcity as populations explode and then crash, increasingly polluted, increasingly dangerous, increasingly uninhabitable. Thought crime inside the tower is punished simply by expulsion into the chaos outside.

Whew! It felt good to get that out of my system! And I’m hoping that Mr. Goldberger will be able to put my fears to rest. Twenty-five bucks would be a small price to pay…

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A little scatter, light and local

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It’s Tuesday night, and we have lots of half-baked posts on our minds. Possibly quarter-baked. OK, totally raw. So, we hit the local channels on the Internet…

Art Scatter has been completely oblivious to the steampunk movement, just generally and specifically as it relates to costume design. And most especially as it relates to the Oregon Children’s Theatre production of James and the Giant Peach and designer Sarah Gahagan. Our thanks to Culture Shock for the entertaining education!

Keeping it tuned to theater, Steve Patterson gives us a taste of the play that won the Oregon Book Award for drama, Lost Wavelength over at his site, Splattworks. Let’s see the whole thing!

Brian Libby at Portland Architecture gave a good summary of the proposal to change the rules of engagement in the Skidmore National Historic District to allow taller buildings on five sites in the district. I went to the City Council meeting that his post advanced last week, and I’ll be following it, because both sides of the dispute make reasonable, articulate arguments. Look for more on this later — City Council takes it up again on Dec. 18. Brian’s site is a terrific way to follow Portland architecture developments.

One of our regular stops is the Portland Mercury’s Blogtown, which bubbles along with a combination of news and views from Portland’s creative underbelly. Or overbelly. Or whatever. We don’t have a particular link in mind — we just liked the combination today.

Barry Johnson, Dance, General

Kidd Pivot’s got the power at Kaul

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Let’s say you’re in Portland and you don’t anything on for tonight, or maybe you have something on, but you’re dreading it. Or Saturday night. If you are in that circumstance, then Art Scatter suggests that you drop in on Kidd Pivot, at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. It’s that good.

Kidd Pivot is the brainchild of Crystal Pite (rhymes with kite), a Vancouver, B.C., choreographer, who danced with Ballet B.C. and Ballett Frankfort, where she worked with William Forsythe. She founded Kidd Pivot in 2001, though she continues to choreograph for other companies.

For the White Bird series, Pite and her company of six are performing Lost Action (2006). It’s a 70-minute, one-act (no intermission) concert that only lags a little toward the conclusion, primarily because of false ending or two. Until then, though, the action, lost or not, is totally engaging. For this dance, Pite has borrowed a little hip-hop, knitted things together with repeated actions and tableaux and employed a propulsive movement device: The dancers typically run pell-mell through a phrase that stops stock still; then they sprint off again. And even when they are doing slower phrases, they frequently end motionless.

She favors movements of the arms extended or bowed and shoulders, though in one delightful moment a leg extended above a dancer’s head descends in a soft S curved, a remarkable effect, which fortunately repeats! The dance is gestural, definitely, and some of the sections seem to tell a little story. In a recurring motif, a dancer collapses and other dancers stand above him looking down, eventually picking him up and “reviving” him in a sort of “passing” ritual. There’s a little parka section (O Canada!). There’s drama and tension and sadness. The solos are uniformly excellent, primarily because the dancers are, I suppose. Swift, athletic, open to the moment. They partner the same way: You don’t notice the precision at first because they make even difficult moments, and there are lots of those, look easy.

I especially liked the sections for the four men in Kidd Pivot. The specific physical attributes of men are frequently under-realized on dance stages, but Pite takes advantage of the power and speed and abruptness her men bring. Which isn’t to say that the other women are overwhelmed here. Pite is an amazing mover — powerful, agile, quick, bristling with kinetic energy. And Marthe Krummenacher and Francine Liboiron bring some specific talents to the table, one longer and expressive and the other smaller and sharper.
Continue reading Kidd Pivot’s got the power at Kaul →

Barry Johnson

A little note from the ex-editor

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Most Art Scatter readers know that I work at The Oregonian, right? Editing the writers of the arts staff (and a fine band they are!) insofar as they will let me? I haven’t talked about this much directly, mainly because I didn’t want Art Scatter to be a place where people came to criticize the paper or its arts coverage. That part of things has worked out well! I’m not sure how exactly I would characterize Art Scatter, but it isn’t a newspaper kvetch site, that’s for sure.

I bring all of this up now because my assignment at the paper is changing. Starting soon, though maybe not until the first of the new year, I’ll be writing a column for The Oregonian with a significant online presence on OregonLive. I’m not exactly sure how Art Scatter will fit into this for me, but I’m hoping that the two can work together somehow, and I’m definitely hoping that you, the wisest and best blog readers in the whole dang blogosphere!, will take a peek at my posts on OregonLive from time to time. If I’m clever enough (stop that snickering!), the two should work together (that’s what links are for, after all), with more reported stuff at OregonLive and more, um, speculative and scatter-y stuff over here.

For me, this is a good change, one that I wanted, even though I’ll miss working with the arts writers and editors as closely as I have. That was really great. As I told them, I learned so much from them the past 7 years or so, so much about EVERYTHING, that I’ll never really be able to pay them back. But writing here at Art Scatter has rekindled my interest in writing in general (not to mention writing generally) and I’ll be able to do that full time now. I know. Be careful what you wish for.

But I should be able to explore and write about the cultural life of the city more directly than I have as editor. I’ll be out more, I’ll talk to more of you, and then I’ll try to report back . I’m counting on you to keep me honest, to give me suggestions and tips, to challenge me when I need it, to provide alternate (and better) descriptions and meanings of things that I have tried to figure out. Anyway, I’ll keep you, um, posted on developments with column and blog, and in the meantime, I should be building up lots of material for Art Scatter.

By the way, David Stabler has blogged about this himself, from his point of view meaning altogether too charitably, if you want to take a look.

General

An ode to a Portland Ganesha

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The world being what it is, the key question that the sweetest of our antiquities generates is who owns them. Who owns them. Not, what do they mean. Not, how do we preserve them. Not, how do we protect them when they are in the ground. Not, how do we make them available to scholarship. Nope, it’s all about who owns them. And that usually boils down to the government of the country of origin versus the museum or collector who has them in its possession and doesn’t want to give them up.

Sharon Waxman’s Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, which was just published and which I hasten to add I haven’t read as yet, has received a spate of reviews, an indication that antiquities matter to general readers, not just museum curators, government cultural offices and tomb raiders. Maybe that’s the Indiana Jones Effect. Maybe it has to do with the steady flow of blockbuster exhibitions of ancient art since King Tut demonstrated in 1977 that from the afterlife he still could rule the museum world. Maybe it has to do with their intrinsic beauty.

Or maybe we see a Grecian urn and a door unlocks, as it did for Keats.

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme

The pot or the stele or the amulet or the carving is simultaneously mysterious and informative, opaque and transparent, a subject of study and wild speculation. Who were we? And how does that explain how we got this way?
Continue reading An ode to a Portland Ganesha →

Barry Johnson, Books, Music, Theater

A Monday quick chatter

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Art Scatter hereby congratulates the winners (and the nominees, for that matter) of this year’s Oregon Book Awards, especially Steve Patterson, whom we track on his Splattworks blog, for winning the drama award for his “Lost Wavelengths.” If you think doing theater is hard in the provinces, writing theater is even less rewarding, and Steve had written something like 25 plays (per his website). So, bravo Mr. Patterson. UPDATE: We recommend that you link to Mr. Mead’s pupu platter for a longer take on Mr. Patterson!

Two other items grabbed our attention in our Monday morning Oregonian. First, Marty Hughley’s unabashedly positive review of Thom Pain (based on nothing) and its star Matthew DiBiasio, which requires us to go to Beaverton to see Will Eno’s one-man rumination about, well, pain.

Second, we were happy to see that James McQuillen concurred (mostly and more learnedly) with our happiness over Tomas Svoboda’s new string quartet and much of the rest of the Third Angle show. Art Scatter needs all the validation it can get for its musical taste, so thank you for that Mr. McQuillen. On a side note, in a comment to our original post on Svoboda below, Jane Jarrett mentioned that Bill Eddins had blogged about it. Well, our report of Eddins’ performance yesterday afternoon with the Oregonian Symphony couldn’t have been more positive — a full and interesting sort of lecture-demo of Brahms’ first symphony.

Barry Johnson, Music

Hail! A new quartet by Tomas Svoboda!

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Third Angle New Music Ensemble gave the world its first listen to Portland composer Tomas Svoboda’s newest quartet, String Quartet no. 10, Opus 194. I’m not adept enough to enter it very deeply from that one encounter, but I liked its spirit and its invention. The program notes said that it is dedicated to violinist Lubomir Havlak of the Martinu Quartet, which recorded eight of Svoboda’s earlier quartets in Prague recently, and so “positive, energetic and playful with harmonic language of Bohemian flavor.” Which all seemed plausible at this first hearing.

Svoboda has Czech roots himself — his parents were Czech, though he was born in Paris in 1939 and spent the war years in Paris, returning to Prague in 1946 (according to his website), where he continued the musical studies begun in Boston. He was a sensation. He completed his first symphony at 16, and it was performed by the FOK Prague Symphonic Orchestra. He impressed the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu enough for him to leave his unfinished work to the young Svoboda at his death in 1959. Svoboda’s family moved to the U.S. in 1964, and he went to U.S.C., before coming to Portland State University in 1969 to teach. Here, he’s conducted a wide-ranging musical exploration, from brilliant and edgy small chamber works to a marimba concerto.

I bring up this all up simply to make the point that the occasion of a new quartet by Svoboda is a big deal and that I wish more of us had been at the Old Church last night to hear it: the rhythms that Hamilton Cheifetz dug out of his cello, the seemingly simple melodies that violinist Ron Blessinger started to toss off, only to have them complicate and deepen considerably, the sonorous trade-offs between cello and Brian Quincey’s viola that mirrored the activity in the upper registers between Blessinger and violinist Peter Frajola. Every time things started to get, well, obsessive and aggressive, Svoboda gave us an escape, a little musical gesture maybe, a touch of whimsy, even the crankier third movement. And the last movement, which started almost inaudibly with a melody that did indeed sound like a folk song, rolled into a full-throated barn dance that Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor would have been proud of. Terrific stuff.
Continue reading Hail! A new quartet by Tomas Svoboda! →

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A Scatter poll: What’s up with theater?

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An Elizabethan theaterYesterday, I had lunch with a prominent local theater director, who shall go nameless because he didn’t actually know he was speaking “for the record.” He gets around a lot, visiting other cities that are engaged with The Theatre, and he was concerned. He wondered just how “theater centric” Portland is these days, because he’d observed audiences that were sparser and less intense than the audiences in Chicago or even the ones that used to fill Portland theaters. I couldn’t even begin to offer a thought about this, but I did find the inherent question interesting. And I’ve decided to turn to you for answers.

So, an open thread of sorts on the state of theater in Portland today. Is it:

1. Thriving, except for the director’s theater
2. Better than ever onstage, but audiences are a problem
3. Too expensive in these hard times
4. Lost its edge onstage, so of course the audience is going to seem dull
5. Just needs better marketing
6. Having a near-death experience
7. Other

If you’ve got a moment, please take this unofficial survey, and of course, add your comments and explanations!

Barry Johnson, Books, General

Farewell to Joel Weinstein, a proto-Art Scatterer

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Today’s newspaper contained the sad news that Joel Weinstein, the publishing genius behind one of the city’s late, great magazines, Mississippi Mud, had died of lung cancer in Puerto Rico. (I wrote the obituary.)

I was surprised to calculate that Joel left the city in 1994 — my memory of him is still so vivid. The Joel I remember is smart and intense and intensely opinionated. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but on the other hand he can sometimes get a little goofy, which definitely takes the edge off. He always is working on something “important” and always is the carrier of good gossip. And every year or so he has a little stack of Mississippi Muds under his arm, a magazine of many parts and many sizes, a little bizarre at times (in a good way), with odd graphics bursting off the page and dense, intimate packets of writing alongside. A chance encounter with Joel was a challenge; it brought out your good side, your creative side. You leaped to unfounded conclusions, made up outlandish opinions, imparted barely credible stories to him just to impress him a little. And then, after he left, you were left with your own mental mess AND the similarly strange stuff he had delivered himself. It was wonderful.

I would say I’ll miss him. But I’ve been in that state since 1994, really. So, I’ll just say what I’ve already said — I’m sad about it, deeply sad. Art Scatter’s heartfelt condolences to his partner Cheryl Hartup. Bye, Joel.