All posts by Barry Johnson

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

Democracy saved? Not so much…

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UPDATE: An astute colleague pointed out this morning that I’d foolishly missed the symbolic importance of yesterday’s election result. As any compelling narrative might, President Obama’s election saga has the possibility of altering and re-orienting our personal stories in a way that changes our relationship to the civic sphere of things, to our self-government, she said. I don’t disagree with her, and consider that the hopeful part of yesterday, though perhaps it suggests another post on the power of the story in politics.

Well then. National elections are never of a piece. The creepiest “political” position can find some company somewhere if it knows where to look. Even on an Obama night. Even in Oregon returns. Maybe especially in Oregon returns. One election can’t eliminate the rot in the system, the rot in our politics, the rot that may yet undo us. Sorry. It just has to be said.

And on that count, I disagreed with President Obama’s victory speech. This election wasn’t a demonstration of the strength of our democracy — maybe a spasm that shows that we haven’t extinguished it completely, but hardly a demonstration of strength. An election is the easy part, and the most easily distorted. The day-to-day effort to apply the wisdom, true wisdom not lizard-brain reaction, of the people to our day-to-day problems, that’s the hard part.

In this morning’s Oregonian, Steve Novick, whom I admire, said that the first step to addressing the major challenges that face us is to “do a better job of explaining to people what the problem is.” I agree with that, and I would add that the people can do a lot of the explaining themselves: They just need a forum for their own explanations, and then for their solutions. And I would suggest that the solutions to the biggest problems (Novick lists health care reform, global warming, and big deficits; my list would be different), which are enormous and impossibly complex, might be found at ground level, where ordinary people can find them and do something about them. The smartest talk I’ve heard about sustainability hasn’t come from political leaders; it has come from people working to improve the technology and then working to apply that technology.

I’m not really saying that “now the hard part begins.” No. The hard part has been going on for a long time. We just haven’t been doing very well at it, and to me that’s the biggest problem: Why have we governed ourselves so poorly? How do we fix that? Every day is a good day to think about it, not just the day after an election.

Barry Johnson, General

Art Scatter says vote often

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When I was much younger, I marveled at Election Day, this First Tuesday in November when Americans en masse, from sea to shining sea, returned to the polls to exercise the primary ritual of a democracy. The idea of it as a collective enterprise, the voting I mean, just made me happy somehow, even when I despaired over the outcome and had profound doubts about those we elected, even on the rare occasions when I actually voted for them.

That was when I equated voting with democracy, before I realized that people could vote and have almost no effect on their government or its policies or that the manipulations of skilled and extremely well-funded propagandists (and I use this charged word deliberately, though I could simply have used “ad men”) could change an election. And over time, erode the democracy itself by diminishing our very capacity to make informed choices. Voting is not the same as democracy. I can’t show up every four years to vote for the lesser of two evils and think of myself as doing anything so important as participating in a democracy. A lot of the time, that’s what I’ve done. Democracy requires a lot more participation than that.

We know this has happened. Fully one-quarter of us aren’t registered to vote. Of those of who are, one-third won’t. So fifty percent of us acknowledge the futility of voting, understand that once our representatives get to Washington they make thousands of decisions that have nothing to do with our welfare, nothing to do with “representing” us, become entangled in networks of power that defy their abilities to change things, if they still have the heart. Those of us who do vote have become cynical about it. Let me re-phrase that: I have become cynical about it. Because I don’t want to speak for you. I vote and I walk away. I vote and I turn my nose. I am bad for democracy.
Continue reading Art Scatter says vote often →

Barry Johnson, General

A little pre-election scatter to help the obsessed

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Suddenly, the great David Clark Five song came to mind, which must mean I’m in pieces, bits and pieces. And indeed I am.

Our friends at Culture Shock, specifically MightyToyCannon, have been assembling a growing soundtrack of songs to get us through the election. As of this morning the clips numbered 17, and the last one was Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime. We feel some degree of participation because of our Leonard Cohen suggestion (Democracy, below), and we should have tipped you off earlier, because it does ease the anxiety level to hear, say, Ray Charles singing Hit the Road Jack or Curtis Mayfield landing on We Got to Have Peace.

Scatter does occasionally recognize a fellow-Scatterer — in this case it’s Richard Kessler, who writes the Dewey21C blog at Artsjournal. (We often look over the Artsjournal blogs, btw.) In his latest post, Kessler discusses how he came, finally, to enjoy Steve Reich. The key paragraph:

The first time I remember really finding my way with Reich’s music was at a dance performance. There was something about following the dance, the visual aspect, that allowed me to take the music in, in an entirely different way. I wasn’t listening for a certain progression, a certain phrase, a certain architecture–all the things I had been trained to listen for in music, but instead I felt the music, took it in–allowed it to wash over me. Watching the dance made it possible. It was as if a switch was flipped.

But the trip to that moment and then his circling back to his main concern, art education, is, well, quite a scatter. We are big Reich fans, too, and when we hear something by Philip Glass that we really like, we often discover that it’s really by Steve Reich. (Aw c’mon, that’s mean!)

Studs Terkel, who died last week at 96, practiced an engaged, passionate kind of journalism, the kind that fights for and celebrates the little guy against the big guy, the kind we don’t see much of these days as the “profession” has “professionalized”. And it does have its limits — that radical a reduction of the doings in the monkey tree is bound to leave some things out and to become predictable after a fashion. Except that Studs explored the particular manifestations of the little guy and his (or her) struggle against the bully, the boss, the powers that be, the particular stories, the particular characters, and suddenly predictability wasn’t an issue. Scatter friend Tim DuRoche remembered Terkel, the urbanist, on his Burnside Blog at Portland Spaces. William Grimes’s essay in the New York Times is also well worth a read. The Chicago Tribune (in
Terkel’s hometown) also remembers him at length.

We are reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and we finally figure out why. Chabon is coming to Portland to speak as part of Congregation Beth Israel’s 150th anniversary. His speech (5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 23, 1972 N.W. Flanders) is entitled, Imaginary Homelands: Themes of Jewish Identity in Popular Fiction, which fits nicely with the The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which is about an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska. My favorite part from last night’s reading: The bad guys have tossed the unconscious main character, Detective Landsman, into a detention cell which contains a child’s wastebasket. Gradually, Landsman’s comes to.

“Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy. An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.”

Oh, yeah.

Barry Johnson, Theater

Memories of “Vladimir, Vladimir”

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Memories fade. They begin vividly and then start to decay. And worse than decay, they start to deform. Until they are no longer very reliable. Valuable perhaps but not reliable. And then they vanish altogether. That’s one good way to think about memory.

Another way to think about it. We store our memories in a honeycomb of chambers. Sometimes we wander into one of the chambers and it’s dried out and empty. Nothing there of consequence. And then maybe the chamber collapses entirely. Much of the time, though, the chambers contain SOMETHING — a little drama, a smell, a lesson, maybe a song, sung just so by James Brown (Please, Please, Please). Weirdly, we are often rummaging around these chambers, yes, even when we are young.

We could come up with some other metaphors, too, I suppose, but I want to consider these two a bit, and how they relate to Imago’s Vladimir, Vladimir,
which I saw earlier this month and having succumbed to germs (among other things) never got back to. So this discussion about memory isn’t about Imago, really, it’s about me! Though we will get to Jerry Mouawad’s Vladimir, which closed last weekend, one way or another and soon.
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General

Some cheerful Monday Scatter links

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One of our very favorite art critics, Jerry Saltz, looks on the bright side of the Impending Economic Turmoil. No, it’s not the part where 40 New York galleries close, an art magazine folds and a major art fair collapses. It has more to do with taking the commercial out of art.

What, only a thousand? The Guardian’s art critics have made a list of 1,000 artworks you should see before you die. And that means YOU! And Art Scatter! And anyone else walking around sentient. (We’re actually not sure if Art Scatter qualifies…) OK, it’s a crazy idea on the face of it: We solve the whole Canon Problem by including just about everything. But still, it’s the Guardian, so it’s pretty interesting.

The polymath Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog) wrote, “All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.” Which is the core idea behind both the flexible house movement and Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s article on same in the Boston Globe. Why make houses that are so difficult and expensive to remodel, when we know that they must be to accommodate the changing lives of their owners? MIT has been doing some of the best research on the problem in the U.S.

Barry Johnson, General, Music

Leonard Cohen: “Democracy” to the rescue!

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OK, you know I’ve been moaning about this election and the Death of Democracy, ad nauseum. But it’s a sunny October Saturday, and courtesy of my brother-in-law, a little hope just blew in, a reminder really, in the form of Leonard Cohen’s Democracy. Now, I can’t embed this video for you (I’m just not that good a hacker), but I heartily recommend following the link.

I think what makes me happiest about this song is how Cohen links this very abstract idea, democracy, with what it’s like to knock around on the ground in U.S.A. (or anywhere, really). And I especially like his suggestion of the erotics of democracy! (Its toward the end.)

Barry Johnson, General

Art Scatter sniffles through the campaign

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Some precincts of Art Scatter have been ill. Not desperately ill, not hardly. But sick enough to stay home and do battle with cold germs that are tougher than Scatter is. We are not looking for sympathy, though, not for the interminable snuffling and sniffing and, um, draining, because we know that’s just part of the cold game since mankind’s days on the savannah, except now we have delicate tissues to caress our even more delicate membranes and powerful decongestants that suck every drop of liquid from the nasal system at the same time they addle the senses, a trade that seems reasonable enough when you make it.

What do we deserve some sympathy for? Well, for several days we followed the presidential campaign. On television. From the major networks to the news cable channels, from Tom Brokaw to Rachel Maddow, from Fox News to Bloomberg News, from clips of Joe Biden suggesting melodramatically that somewhere even as we watch bad men were planning to “test the mettle” of a President Obama in some drummed up foreign crisis or another soon after the election to clips of John McCain yapping about Joe the plumber as though he actually WAS a real plumber and as though we actually cared.

A few important things happened — Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, for example, a model of direct, pertinent argument. But his arguments weren’t taken up, explored, tested, extended, refuted. No, they were immediately swallowed up by the horse race, by the media chattering heads, by the spinners, who as always embarrassed themselves in the process, but never mind, they’ve done it over and over and over again in the past. And then they disappeared in the charges that Obama is a socialist for advocating tax policies that McCain supported in 2000. Or that Palin is a hypocrite for wearing $150,000 worth of fancy clothing that no real soccer mom could afford, even though soccer moms rarely face TV cameras day after day after day as they run for vice-president. Of course, this trivial criticism is matched by a legion of trivial comments made by the candidate herself, most of them serving merely to belittle herself.
Continue reading Art Scatter sniffles through the campaign →

Barry Johnson, Dance, General

Art Scatter goes to dance appreciation class

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Oh man, we left you hanging there for a couple of days with Thomas Hobbes! Art Scatter can be SO cruel. What can I say? We watched some debate. We watched some Project Runway (Leanne won!). We prepared to meet a roomful of students in Linda K. Johnson’s dance appreciation class at Portland State University. We didn’t blog.

Maybe I should say a few words about that dance appreciation class. First of all, it sounds like a great class. Linda, who has been involved in some of the very most interesting projects around the city in the past decade (and more!), including the Halprin fountain City Dance event and overseeing a year of artist-in-residencies in the South Waterfront district, has set up a pretty rigorous course of study. For example, the class sat in on a rehearsal of Swan Lake, which became a sort of lecture-demonstration because artistic director/choreographer Christopher Stowell was so open to explaining what he was trying to do. Their writing assignments sound quite interesting, too, which maybe was where I came in — to talk about writing about dance.

This is something I love to talk about, even though I’ve actually done it far less than I would have liked. Time machine time: In 1978 I wrote about a visit to Seattle by Twyla Tharp’s modern dance company. That was the first time I committed an act of criticism with intent. To publish, I mean. And it caused me a great deal of grief and excitement and a couple of all-nighters spent writing and re-writing and throwing my hands up in despair. How could I possibly bottle in words what I’d seen onstage (not to mention the interviews I’d conducted with the dancers; Twyla wasn’t along on the tour), for consumption in a newspaper (the Seattle Sun, RIP)? Well, I had an excellent guide, who was in the process of developing a deep understanding of newspapers, though he knew even less about dance than I did, and we muddled through.
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Barry Johnson, Books, General

Would Hobbes approve of the Dow Jones bounce?

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As Art Scatter stoops to post, it’s a Monday night and all the major markets were up substantially, around 10 percent during the day, making up a big chunk of the beating they took last week. Actually, I hate to anthropomorphize the “markets” like that. Took a beating? I don’t think so. They are just numbers. We know how illusory they can be, right? Real and illusory at the same time. Neat trick. Do we think that the “fundamentals” have been fixed so everything is all right now? Pour a few hundred million into some banks, take an equity stake in them, and it’s all good? Art Scatter doesn’t know its economics but … all we can do is shrug.

So, last night we were seeking solace in philosophy, the refuge of scoundrels. Often we turn to Rousseau — we don’t even really count him as a philosopher. “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains!” But we were in a darker mood. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” was more like it. That’s Tennyson, but he pointed the way to the philosopher we wanted. Thomas Hobbes: “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Pretty close to “red in tooth” if you ask me.
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General

Art Scatter considers worst-case scenarios

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Look, Art Scatter is not an economics advice site. We only know what we read, and frankly, that’s pretty dismal these days. Where should you put your money? What money!?!?!?! We do think that there’s a moral dimension to all of this, though, beyond the obvious, and maybe a suggestion that the way we at Art Scatter have thought about the world, even the way we have conducted ourselves, hasn’t been quite “right”, hasn’t acknowledged certain “realities” that may turn out to be the realities we should have been paying attention to. We are so easily distracted in the monkey tree.

Worst-case scenarios. How bad are your worst-case scenarios? This isn’t a competition. You don’t get extra points for having a bleaker worst-case scenario in your mind than your neighbor does in hers. Your worst-case scenario is a fantasy, after all. Or maybe a nightmare. It’s hard to manage a worst-case scenario once it’s planted in your head. Maybe you should just play with it — stretch it, take it in some strange directions, try to get to know it a little better so you can test it with what you can actually see and touch and taste. Right now, I’m picturing myself in a long line of refugees walking eastward on the other side of the Cascades. (I’m wishing right now that I had a better backpack.) Where are we walking? I have no idea. I have this image in my head from various newsreels/documentaries/movies I’ve seen over the years. I’ve never really imagined myself IN the line before.

I don’t think I can prepare for my worst-case scenario. Maybe no one does, if only because we aren’t actually living it. Maybe we just keep pushing our worst case back as actual conditions worsen and we realize there’s room for yet more deterioration. But that doesn’t mean I can’t act at all. And figuring out what to do, maybe that’s the ultimate reductive act: So very little really matters. And yet I do so very little of it.

Art. Art points us to places we can’t talk about, where the idea of “this matters” is somehow forged and spit out into the universe. Among other things. I like to think of art as a description of things as they are, even interior things, a description that is more or less useful to me. I imagine a photograph of an expensive condo tower, maybe like one in the paper today. Today, it’s ironic. A suggestion of “things I don’t need”. Two year ago, it might have described something else: the dense, successful city of the future. Although that description might have been intended ironically, too. Things we don’t need: “Cities of the future.” (Maybe we need a city that works today and works better tomorrow. And maybe it includes condo towers; in fact I rather suspect it does.)

Art won’t tell you what to do with your assets, the shreds of your remaining assets, or the big fat zero that describes your “net worth”. It might make you reconsider what net worth means, though. So does a financial crisis, apparently. How is art like a financial crisis? They both give you an appreciation for what’s real.

This is Friday. Art Scatter has no idea what Monday will bring. (You knew that, of course.) Art Scatter can only promise that it will try to have a little more insight into what its business really is.