All posts by Bob Hicks

I've been observing Portland and its culture since 1974, for most of that time as a writer and editor at The Oregonian and the Oregon Journal. I finally left The O in December 2007 so I could spend more time hanging around coffee shops and catching up on good books. My journalistic wanderings have led me into the worlds of theater, dance, music, the visual arts, literature and food. I'll continue writing about those and broader cultural subjects for Art Scatter. They're terrific windows onto the great mysteries of life, and thinking about them makes the mendacities of our wayward national political culture a little more bearable.
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.

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

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.

Continue reading Gulliver’s Travels, unbowdlerized →

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

The canvas goes blank: Farewell to Nathan Oliveira and Beth Van Hoesen

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Nathan Oliveira, "Nineteen Twenty-Nine," oil on canvas, 1961. Smithsonian American Art Museum/Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 1969.

By Bob Hicks

We’ve arrived at a time when many of the bright figures of 20th century art are slipping away into that final blankness that artists seem to anticipate better than the rest of us. Maybe it’s because artists begin each day with a blank canvas or paper and understand that the void is both an opportunity and an inevitability.

In the past week two fine West Coast artists, both based in San Francisco but well-known in Portland art circles, have died. Nathan Oliveira, who died last Saturday, was 81. Beth Van Hoesen, who died on Tuesday, was 84.

Beth Van Hoesen, "Boris," aquatint, etching, and dryprint, 1981.Both were figurative artists, although in very different ways and with very different outlooks and techniques. Oliveira, who is represented in Portland by Elizabeth Leach Gallery, was primarily a painter and sculptor (he also produced a lot of very good prints) and he was very much a modernist, an artist who explored the psychological dark corners. Van Hoesen was primarily a printmaker and an observer of the small wonders of life, a meticulous craftswoman and traditionalist whose skills and approach harked back to the likes of Durer. You can read Van Hoesen’s obituary here.

Continue reading The canvas goes blank: Farewell to Nathan Oliveira and Beth Van Hoesen →

Bob Hicks, Film, General

‘Farewell Wake’: small world, big bang

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By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter had so much fun doing his cameo for Charles Deemer’s new micro-movie The Farewell Wake that by the time he actually saw the movie he was surprised by how complex the whole thing was.

Rick Zimmer stars as a performance artist/provocateur in Charles Deemer's micro-movie "The Last Wake."He shouldn’t have been, of course. After all, Deemer knows this stuff. He teaches screenwriting at Portland State University, and is a terrific playwright, and a pioneer in the expanded-universe form of hyperdrama, and he’d already done another ultra-low-budget film, Deconstructing Sally, which we wrote about a little over a year ago here.

Still, when you’re having fun you forget about such things. And not a lot could have been easier than Mr. Scatter’s day on location, which consisted of meeting Deemer at a downtown coffee shop, sitting outside, doing two quick improvised takes for what turned out to be about a minute’s screen time in a 96-minute film, and then shooting the breeze for a few minutes until we both trundled off in our  separate directions. Plus, Deemer himself was the cameraman, and his camera, such as it was, wasn’t much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Not much danger of stage fright under those circumstances.

Continue reading ‘Farewell Wake’: small world, big bang →

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?

Continue reading Home on the range: separated at birth? →

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.

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

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.

Continue reading Don’t call us, Ishmael. We’ll call you. →

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.

Continue reading Jack Levine: farewell to a great satirist →

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