All posts by Barry Johnson

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

Turning up the “Volume” on planning in Portland

9 Comments

Art Scatter regular Tim DuRoche, a man of wide-ranging interests, has allowed us to post this account of Portland’s “Summer of Planning”, which is rapidly becoming a “Fall of Planning”. We’re especially happy to have his report of Portland planning chief Arun Jain’s talk on the last day of the “Volume” art exhibition, organized by Portlandart proprietor Jeff Jahn, in some ways the clearest expression of the uneasy relationship between art and urban planning. Tim writes about planning, urban design topics for Portland Spaces’ Burnside Blog.

By Tim DuRoche

With all the hubbub about cities and planning in arts circles—Sojourn Theatre’s Built, the Lawrence Halprin Fountain-centric City Dance, visual arts group shows Volume and the Thomas Sieverts-inspired Suddenly for starters, you kind of have to wonder—is urban planning the new black?

Or in the context of the lo-fi, local artscape, is an embrace of placemaking and the language of planning yet another double-coded, wink-wink social-practice gambit from the legions of folks making art that’s rife with sewing circle/swap meet simplicity?

The marquee-prominence of planning in cocktail-conversation Portland thrives because of civic engagement, while on the viz art end, Portland’s social-practice artists bank on a street-level participation that’s one part community charrette, part tea party, part cracker-barrel confession, and many parts Tom Sawyer whitewashing.

So what happens when an architect-planner meets a young-and-restless art posse head on?
Continue reading Turning up the “Volume” on planning in Portland →

General

Scatter gives its dear readers a break

Leave a comment

Art Scatter could generate yet another lengthy post on the nature of an American city that looks a lot like Portland, with special attention paid to its remotest precincts. But the reptilian side of Art Scatter’s hard drive is twitching at the very thought of it. Art Scatter’s tongue just darted out to gather in more protein on the wing — thwiiiip! (Yuck, a moth…)

OK, so instead, we’ll search the horizon for tasty links:

Director Julie Taymor’s Broadway version of “Spider-Man” may cost something on the order of $40 million to produce, according to the New York Post. Scatter hopes that local designer and Taymor regular Michael Curry is getting his fair share. Aw, c’mon. We KNOW he is!

And speaking of Money and the Theatre, much of the rest of Broadway and the not-for-profit theater world of Manhattan is cowering in the corner because of the Wall St. meltdown down the block, at least per the New York Times. The Conventional Wisdom that in bad times people flock to the theater to forget their troubles is going to be tested.

Louise Bourgeois is not a brand, she’s a creator of some of the most provocative art work in the past century, almost all of which she’s lived through (she’s 98). How potent is she? Just read the very personal account of Guardian critic Will Gompertz on how the Bourgeois show at the Tate Modern gave him a good wrenching. That’s her spider above. Julie Taymor, take note!

Barry Johnson, Environment

More thoughts on the edge (with a little gloom attached)

11 Comments

The comment thread on the On the edge (of cities) post right below shows there is a lot of passionate interest in the topic — Thomas Sieverts’ idea that architects need to lift their eyes from the city core and regard the outer limits of the city with the same intensity and, well, we’ll say it, love that they have for the traditional European city center. Whether that interest is also broad we’ll test with another post on the matter, this one arising from two Monday night events: Metro president David Bragdon speaking with Portland Spaces editor Randy Gragg at Jimmy Mak’s; and a big-name concluding panel at PNCA that featured Sieverts, architect Brad Cloepfil, Reed Kroloff (who runs Cranbrook Academy, supervised our tram design competition and who was dean of architecture at Tulane when Katrina hit), and Matthew Stadler as moderator.

The topic of both the panel and the Bragdon-Gragg exchange went something like this: What can governments do to encourage good design? And it frequently kept to the question, though this “healthy” topic also generated a number of tasty digressions and frankly was never as dry as the question seemed to promise. And thanks to Stadler, the Sieverts analysis/prescription was always lurking in the background.

I know from the clock on the wall that I won’t be able to give a full account of what happened in this post (I know what you’re thinking: O sweet mother of the Titans, don’t tell me there’s a third post brewing; what is this, the Halprin fountains?), but I will get a few thoughts out there, and perhaps the Scatter regulars at the event can fill in some details.

Continue reading More thoughts on the edge (with a little gloom attached) →

Barry Johnson, Books, Environment, General

On the edge (of cities): past and present

20 Comments

We’ve been MIA on Suddenly the set of exhibitions, lectures and events exploring the shape of our cities through the lens, primarily, of German urban designer/theorist/architect Thomas Sieverts. But we did make it to Sieverts’ lecture and a panel discussion Friday afternoon at the UO’s new architecture school branch in the White Stag building in Portland’s Old Town, a suitably central (or maybe, paradoxically central) spot to consider the remaking of suburbs, I suppose.

Matthew Stadler (a Scatter friend) did the introductions and moderated the panel, which was appropriate, because it was his reading of Sieverts’ book Cities Without Cities that suddenly changed his thinking about where the energy in cities really is these days and started this “movement” going. I think I’m getting ready to argue that Matthew’s was a creative misreading of Sieverts, though I’m waiting for one more event, another panel on Monday night, to confirm my first impressions, especially since I haven’t read the book(!).

Fairly early on in Sieverts’ lecture another friend of Scatter wondered about the intelligibility of his argument. But I think I understood the gist. The thought line he presented went something like this. 1) European cities are “splash” cities, meaning they no longer have compressed central cores. Instead, they sprawl a lot like American cities. In Sieverts’ powerpoint, charts and graphs showed just how “splashy” specific German cities had become. 2) The edges of this sprawl are chaotic and featureless. 3) German cities are shrinking in population, which makes it hard to change the edges through growth: It takes transformation. 4) Architects should address the problems of the edge, supplying aesthetic “meaning” and cultural coherence to them, even though planners tend to ignore them because they are so nondescript. 5) If these “edge cities” are going to compete in the global economy, they are going to have to attract “creatives” (Richard Florida’s young creatives, though Florida wasn’t mentioned), and that makes the transformation of these featureless suburbs, between spaces, crucial.
Continue reading On the edge (of cities): past and present →

General

The Portland Jazz Festival lives (after all)!

Leave a comment

We wanted a Sugar Daddy and we got one! The Portland Jazz Festival has been rescued from oblivion — heroes include Nick Fish, Sho Dozono and Alaska Airlines, among others — which we learned from Luciana Lopez’s story in The Oregonian this morning (we’ll link you up when the story is posted on OregonLive, UPDATE: and is now.), and I’m not sure why exactly I’m feeling so pleased about it. After all, festivals wax, festivals wane, festivals disappear altogether. Even jazz festivals in Portland. These days, the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival continues to roll along under the St. John’s Bridge, fueled mostly by our local players. And the Mt. Hood Jazz Festival, which itself went into eclipse for a while, is back and seems to be growing again, returning this past summer to Mt. Hood Community College, where it once dominated the summer festival scene. Of course, either you know this or jazz festivals don’t interest you, so I’m not sure why I feel called to speak of it. Maybe just as a sort of accounting.

But the Portland Jazz Festival has had major aspirations (some would call them pretensions, I suppose), specifically to bring top-of-the-line international musicians to the city. And I appreciate the impulse. Plus, it comes in February. In February, we’re needing all the inspiration we can get, any good reason to get out of the house, fellow fans of the improvisatory art to consort with. In February we’ll pay almost any price for a lively brain, and the jazz festival has encouraged our synapses to snap their fingers and bop along. The city should fund the whole thing just for the overall improvement in the mental health of the citizenry. Call it jazz therapy.

So, I’m excited about the 2009 festival, which will celebrate Blue Note Records, more excited than I should be, I suppose. After all, there are lots of clubs in town now that feature jazz, and we have lots of terrific musicians, legends even. You could assemble a little mini-festival every week of the year. And really, there’s nothing quite like following the development of a fine jazz mind over time, something that’s possible only with a local jazz mind. Still. I like the concentration of talent. I like watching recordings come to life. I like the idea that for a little while, all jazz ears are cocked toward Portland. I like to feel as though I’m playing with the Big Boys and the Big Boys (and Girls) are playing for me. So yeah, I’m happy about it, and if I could order tickets right now, I suppose I would.

Thanks to Mighty Toy Cannon, one of the forces behind Culture Shock, for a heads up on this, too. MTC may well have had Portland blog priority on the “scoop,” though I first learned about it from Luciana.

Barry Johnson, Environment, General, Visual Art

Monday scattered like the New Carissa

Leave a comment

With the late September sun blazing and the pinot noir grapes sweetening by the minute, Scatter attempts to move its attention from dreams of wine-y complexity to almost anything else.

1. The New Carissa. We met the news that the salvage of the stern of the New Carissa on the coast near Coos Bay was nearly complete with some unexpected sadness. Remove it as though it never happened? The derelict New Carissa was a formidable adversary, defying our best efforts to… well, do anything with her that we wanted. Just the saga of the bow section — towed (with great difficulty) out to sea for burial, it breaks free in a storm and re-grounds near Waldport, gets a tow back out to deep water where it is blasted by a destroyer and sunk by a torpedo into 10,000 feet of water — is incredible. It would have all been completely comic if oil from the ship hadn’t leaked and destroyed marine wildlife nearby. Put us in the camp with those who would have left a hunk of stern on the beach, not as a tourist attraction, mind you, which would have been silly, but as a monument to our folly, a permanent metaphor. (That’s Henk Pander’s Wreck of the New Carissa, above.)

2. WaMu, Seattle misses you. We linked you to Regina Hackett’s story in the Seattle P-I that detailed some worry about the fate of Washington Mutual and the building-sharing agreement it has with the Seattle Art Museum. Now, of course, WaMu has turned into a subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase & Co. and her new story with John Marshall talks about the worry at many other Seattle arts organizations that WaMu’s extensive arts funding will diminish or disappear. This is just the direct fallout from the sub-prime loan mess; we have yet to see how much deeper this blade will cut.

3. Mark Rothko at the Tate. Scatter follows Rothko pretty closely — he went to Lincoln High School, after all, and was a friend of Portland painters Carl and Hilda Morris — even though we sometimes don’t know what to make of him. Or maybe it’s that we think different things about him at different times. In any case, the show of his late work (1958 when he famously withdrew from his Four Seasons restaurant commission in the Seagram buildling until his suicide in 1970) at the Tate Modern in London is drawing similarly mixed responses. We recommend a reading of Laura Cumming’s review in the Observer, which describes an exhausted Rothko and locates the figurative elements threatening to bust loose in all the abstraction. Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the London Times, however, finds something altogether different — a lighter, brighter, soaring Rothko. Let’s see: exhausted or soaring? Maybe a trip to London to sort all of this out would be in order if only the Scatter piggy bank didn’t rattle so forlornly.

Barry Johnson, Books, General

A little book biz talk — “Wild Beauty,” “Sweetheart,” “The Tsar’s Dwarf”

2 Comments

Art Scatter made its way to a book “opening” Thursday night at the spiffy new p:ear digs in Old Town, which was jam-packed with fans of Terry Toedtemeier, John Laursen and the Columbia River Gorge. They will become devotees of Wild Beauty, the history of photography that Terry and John have assembled/written/curated, too, because the book is beautiful, plain and simple. Not that I’m a neutral observer. The ways I’m mobbed up here are countless — I’ve known Terry for decades, I’ve collaborated on a museum catalog with John, my wife Megan helped them get the project rolling and did various sorts of things to keep it that way, I’m fascinated by both the geological and human history of the Gorge… I could go on. But still, I like to think I’m a tough sell. Wild Beauty convinced me. You can look it over yourself at a bookstore (Oregon State University Press is the co-publisher), buy a copy through the Northwest Photography Archive online or pick one up at the Portland Art Museum, where an exhibition of photographs from the book will open on Oct. 4. It’s not cheap ($75) for a book, but it is cheap for a work of art, and that’s what it is (and produced entirely in Oregon). I’ll probably talk about it more once I get a chance to live with it for a bit.

I forgot to let you know about the publication of Art Scatter friend Chelsea Cain’s new book, Sweetheart, which continues the crime-fighting saga of Detective Archie Sheridan and his face-off with the sultry but deadly serial killer Gretchen Lowell. The serial killer thriller is usually not a genre I sample, but I scarfed up Chelsea’s first book in the series, Heartsick, even though a few early pages made me wince (a hammer, nail, ribcage, you get the picture), and now I’m launched on Number Two. Not that she needs the pub, really — the New York Times Book Review took good care of her. (Congrats, Chelsea!). Again, I’m mobbed up here… Chelsea writes a delightful column in The Oregonian that I’ve had some association with.

I’m also a fan of Hawthorne Books, which makes winsome, high-quality trade paperbacks of work by interesting writers from Portland and beyond (I wrote about Monica Drake’s Clown Girl in a post below, way below). So, I’ve also just begun The Tsar’s Dwarf by Peter H. Fogtdal, a Dane who spends time in Portland, and translated by Tiina Nunnally, who was the translator of Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow. I can already tell that I like it’s rhythms and picaresque sensibility. But again, more later, especially since its publication date isn’t until November.

General

Brett Campbell on the Halprin Happening!

Leave a comment

Portland music writer Brett Campbell was kind enough to develop a lengthy response in the comment section of our last (or latest) Halprin post, and we decided to give it a post of its own, accompanied by a photograph taken by his wife, CaroleZoom.

Very sneaky, Barry, trying to embarrass me into writing up an essay on City Dance by calling me out publicly. Well, it ain’t gonna work! As a full time non blockhead freelancer, I make it a point never to write except for money. Except this. Sadly, I couldn’t interest my primary national market in a story about City Dance (or another Portland phenomenon I consider equally newsworthy, Linda Johnson’s amazing South Waterfront Artists in Residence program), so I guess I won’t be writing that City Dance piece after all. But I do consider it an important and perhaps historic event in the city’s art history. The comment I overheard over and over was “I’ve lived in Portland xx years, and I’ve never been to Lovejoy Fountain / Pettygrove Park / Keller Fountain.” So in that respect, the event accomplished what Ron and Third Angle wanted: drawing Portlanders to these wonderful yet neglected public spaces. (Confession: I’ve lived a few blocks from Lovejoy Fountain for more than two years and had never been there.)

But I think it went beyond just re-energizing these spaces. Randy Gragg’s associated events (talks and lectures) used art to connect people to their city’s history. The proximity and connection to Sojourn Theater’s Built, Linda Wysong’s Backyard Conversations and the AIR project forged fascinating connections between Portland urban renewal of the 1960s and Portland urban renewal of the 2000s. I wasn’t able to attend the panel discussions, dammit — I asked Randy to consider posting a podcast or audio file — but certainly plenty of people learned a lot about the connections between architecture, dance and music as embodied in the Halprins’ relationship. Portlanders were also exposed to a vital element of our West Coast heritage: the pioneering music that emerged from the Bay Area in the 1960s. I bet plenty of listeners — 40 years ago and maybe even now — would have considered the music played at the fountains to be intolerably avant garde, but performed in that context (and brilliantly by Third Angle), it all seemed to fit. In particular, seeing Susan Smith wade into the fountain and strike the repeated chords to to Terry Riley’s landmark work In C (a piece as important to this century’s music, in its way, as the Rite of Spring or West End Blues or the Sun Sessions) while the dancers emerged and high school students played this once avant garde work and thousands looked on just brought tears to my eyes. (It still does, just remembering it, a sure sign of great art.)
Continue reading Brett Campbell on the Halprin Happening! →

Barry Johnson, Books, General

Bernard-Henri Levy brings some dapper French political philosophy to Portland

Leave a comment

Bernard-Henri Levy (BHL, as he is known in France) arrived at Powell’s last night (Tuesday) just a little late, fashionably late, actually, because he looked great in his black suit and deep purple shirt. He’s been here before, two years ago, to read from American Vertigo, his travelogue through American places and faces, and so he knew the landscape — the smallish Powell’s lecture nook packed with… well, really I have no idea, maybe “fans.” The woman sitting next to me had heard him on OPB and decided to come hear him in person. She was grading papers from a high school French class and speaking French with those around her. Which gave me pause when I first took my seat. Would BHL be lecturing in, horrors, French?

No, he would not. Accented English, yes, but confidently employed, expressive English. And what was his subject? One of his favorites since his first big book (Barbarism With a Human Face) more than 30 years ago — the problems with the Left. Of course, the problems then were much bigger than now, specifically the embrace of Stalinism, either actively or passively, by Left and Left-leaning parties and intellectuals. Now, the Left in Europe is ineffective and practically “broken,” or so it feels in France, I suspect, after the election of Sarkozy, an old friend or “buddy” of BHL’s, who appeared in BHL’s talk (and the beginning of his new book) several times.

So what’s left to criticize? BHL argued that the Left (or Liberals, in the American formulation, though Liberal doesn’t quite have the historical depth or granularity of the European Left) has abandoned many of its core principles to embrace another ideology, another Grand Narrative, that of anti-Imperialism, American Imperialism. And in dividing the world into Evil (the U.S. and Israel and their supporters) and Good (the rest of the world), the Left manages to overlook little things like the genocide in Rwanda, the bloodbath in Darfur (BHL doesn’t think it qualifies as genocide at this point), the suppression of democracy in Iran or the rights of native peoples in Ecuador. These don’t fit the Narrative.
Continue reading Bernard-Henri Levy brings some dapper French political philosophy to Portland →

General

Scatter’s got the genius fellowship blues, or not

8 Comments

Art Scatter doesn’t have much to say about this year’s MacArthur genius grants, half-a-million bucks, no strings, no waiting. We usually get a bit queasy when they are announced, not because we ourselves are expecting the phone call (even Art Scatter isn’t THAT delusional) but because we fear that someone we know will be on the list, someone we can’t abide. So we are happy this year. We don’t know a soul. (We just saw The Big Lebowski again and have determined that we don’t use “abide” nearly enough, as in “The Dude abides.”)

Truth be told, I always LIKE the list, mostly people I’ve never heard of doing things that sound amazing if not impossible, a sort of scatter in its own right. This year seems heavy on the neuroscience. I have great respect for neuroscientists. I have no idea how one spends her day, of course. Peering into people’s ears with one of those ear-examiner things with a little light, except it’s a laser and they are picking up electrical activity in one lobe or another? That’s a bit like what I imagine. Or on darker days, slicing fresh brain into ultra thin slices. I started to add, “the size my mother wants her cake sliced at birthday parties.” Sorry. I’ll spare you my astro-physicist fantasies.

I did recognize a few of the fellows (that’s what we’ll be called when we are chosen: MacArthur Fellows), especially the ones in the arts. Jennifer Tipton is an amazing lighting designer — techies rule! I saw saxophonist Miguel Zenon at a two Portland Jazz Festivals (don’t get me started: bring it back!). Is he “creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st Century” as the MacArthur people suggest? Probably not, but he can really play and his combo of Latin, African and Caribbean influences IS really interesting and listenable. We’ve already written so much about Alex Ross, the New Yorker music critic who wrote “The Rest Is Noise,” that he probably thinks we are stalking him. No complaint there. I haven’t read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun about life in Nigeria after the civil war with Biafra, but the award makes me want to. And I don’t know Tara Donovan, who takes ordinary objects such as paper clips and straws and makes various sensuous shapes out of them. The photographs I’ve seen are pretty cool.

I think my favorite winner is John Ochsendorf, a structural engineer at MIT who uses the “wisdom” of ancient builders to solve contemporary engineering problems. He’s studied rope suspension bridges designed by the Incans, Romanesque church vaults and buttresses and he and his students designed England’s Pines Calyx dome, pictured above, “a robust, energy-efficient structure built from local resources using a tile vaulting system patented in the 19th century by Spanish architect Rafael Guastavino,” according to the MacArthur notes. My google-snooping suggests that this is exactly right. I think it’s important to our sense of history that we understand just how smart, just how adaptive those who came before us have been. So, well done MacArthur peeps, well done. (This is NOT sucking up!)