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, Cities, Environment, General

How about a bridge we can live ON?

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Drawing of London Bridge from a 1682 London map. Surveyed by: Morgan, William, d. 1690. Published: London, London Topographical Society, 1904. Wikimedia Commons

By Bob Hicks

Once again the fates have flung Mr. Scatter to the far reaches of Ecotopia, where yet another dismal drive through the 90-mile sprawl of the great Seattle megalopolis has underscored how little eco is left in this topia of ours. They paved Paradise and put up a freeway that’s a parking lot.

Well, sometimes you need a car. And cars need roads. And roads, when they run up to little impediments like the mighty Columbia River, need bridges. And bridges, we hear, can cost a cool four billion bucks. And four billion bucks (plus interest), we understand, will be coming out of everyman’s collective wallet for a long, long time to come.

Interstate Bridge between Portland and Vancouver. Source: Cacophony/Wikimedia Commons.Up to now Mr. Scatter has stayed out of the fray over the Columbia River Crossing bridge, the proposed replacement for the aging Interstate-5 span between Portland and Vancouver, Wash. Should the bridge be an architectural icon, a splendid work of art? Should it be a utilitarian get-‘er-done, a cheap and (presumably) practical slab of concrete designed to move the traffic and not much else? Truth is, Mr. Scatter doesn’t really know, although he’s grouchily beginning to ask himself a more basic question: Do we really need to bother with the damned thing at all?

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Bob Hicks, Books, General, Theater

97 Hamlets, going on 116 — this year

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Dan Donohue as Hamlet at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Photo: David CooperMrs. Scatter has unearthed this piece by Bill Varble in the Medford Mail Tribune about Alex Ainsworth, 12, of Ashland, who at the time of the story had seen the Oregon Shakespeare Festival‘s current Hamlet 97 times and was shooting for 116 — Hamlet No. 100 is due Wednesday. Amazing! Why so many times? “You learn more,” she told Varble.

Our own take on OSF’s Hamlet and Dan Donohue’s remarkable title performance is here. But we’re guessing Ainsworth could teach us a thing or three about the show.

Dan Donohue as Hamlet at OSF. Photo: David Cooper

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Environment, General, Visual Art

Rushdie to judgment: Idaho journal

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First snow hits the blade of the Sawtooths north of Ketchum, Idaho, in September.


By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter has been traveling the byways of America quite a lot of late, and by a quirk of fate he found himself in an open pavilion in Sun Valley, Idaho, on the eve of September 11, listening to Salman Rushdie talk about Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Sarah Palin, the nonpolitical and political natures of art, the difficulties of free speech and the true perils of reactionary jihadism.

The unlikeliness, and yet the unabashed Americanness, of this event occurring in this place and at this time, nine years minus a few hours after the jihadist suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, was perhaps less ironic than celebratory. It was proof, in a way, that in a world wracked by violent religious and cultural insanity, good sense and mere goodness can survive.

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Bob Hicks, Environment, Food, General

A prune by any other name smells sweet

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By Bob Hicks

Mrs. Scatter shovels a tiny spoon beneath my nose.

“You need to taste this new mustard,” she commands.

What’s this? New mustard? Mrs. Scatter’s been making the same mustard for so long it’s plastered on our sensory memories like the one tattoo you don’t regret. It’s Old Faithful, the house standard, the creme de condiments. If you can’t trust the house mustard, what can you trust?

Is this a prune? Naming goes plum loco.So trying out a new recipe seems slightly slatternly: are we cheating? But the weather’s changing. Restlessness is in the air. And there’s the little matter of those three mostly full bottles of regrettably bland wine that need to be used up.

I hesitate, then dutifully down the little spoonful of coarse new mustard, which has a sweet-and-sour, unknitted, wait-and-see tang.

“It needs to age,” I say.

Mrs. Scatter nods. She knows that. This is only a test.

Fall and food go together in the Scatter household — perhaps you’ve seen Mrs. Scatter’s posts on pickles and chutney and such — and matters of the stomach have been popping up all day.

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Bob Hicks, Cities

Guvs duck art; pick a peck o’ PICA

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By Bob Hicks

Over at Oregon Live, Friend of Scatter D.K. Row reports that Oregon’s two major gubernatorial candidates, Demo John Kitzhaber and the GOP’s Chris Dudley, have pretty much nothing to say about how they would or wouldn’t approach statewide funding and other support for the arts. Both ducked a request by the statewide lobbying group Cultural Advocacy Coalition to talk it out in a town hall meeting before the election. And both ducked the chance to comment to D.K. for his story.

Timberline Lodge: the last word in Oregon cultural funding? Photo: Kelvin Kay/Wikimedia CommonsNo surprise here. With the state budget circling the toilet bowl and getting ready for the big flush, neither candidate is likely to come out promising anything to anyone about arts and culture. Remember last year, when the Democrat-dominated legislature raided the state’s supposedly sacrosanct Cultural Trust fund in an attempt to pay the bills.

Portland city commish Nick Fish, who’s also a board member of the Cultural Trust, called the candidates’ no-talk “a missed opportunity.” But even some arts leaders expressed sympathy for a pair of guys caught between a rock and a hard place. “When I think of the immense economic problems the next governor has to solve, my stomach hurts,” Chris Coleman told Row. “The notion of even advancing a cultural agenda would be hard right now. So I understand. If I was running for governor, it’d be hard for me to find time for the arts.” Coleman is artistic director of Portland Center Stage. He also happens to be board president of the Creative Advocacy Network, Portland’s coalition of arts boosters in the political ring.

Whoever wins the governor’s race, don’t be expecting a neo-WPA, folks. The feds are pretty much out of this picture, FDR’s kicked the bucket, and we already got our Timberline Lodge. Arts and culture will be looking at a lot of pay-as-you-go. Oops. That’s sort of what the Cultural Trust was before the big raid, wasn’t it?

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The trouble with TBA, the annual late summer/early fall festival thrown by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, is that it always hits town in late summer/early fall.

A lot of people set their annual calendars around this thing. Here at Art Scatter, it always sneaks up on us, and, too often, slips right past us. We tend to be traveling a lot this time of year, and preparing young heathens for schooling, and tending to such crucial matters as putting up the annual supplies of pickles and chutney.

All of which is to say that (like the guv guys on arts funding) we have pretty much nothing to say about TBA this year. Fortunately, several other keen observers do. Here are a few places to look for news and comment:

Arts Dispatch. Barry Johnson sees and extrapolates.

Urban Honking. PICA’s own site invites such luminaries as Mead Hunter of Blogorrhea to do the Monday morning quarterbacking.

Oregon Live. Expect steady updates from The Oregonian’s cultural squad.

Culturephile. Anne Adams and Claudia La Rocco have been pickin’ em and writin’ em for Portland Monthly’s blog.

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PHOTO: Timberline Lodge: the last word in Oregon cultural funding? Kelvin Kay/Wikimedia Commons

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland 5: Hal, Jose, a throne of blood

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Lord Kuniharu gathers his generals to hear the news of the rebellion. Ensemble. Photo by Jenny Graham.

By Bob Hicks

Art Scatter interrupts its regular programming to bring you a message from the future: It’s not your Daddy’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival anymore.

Not entirely, anyway. You remember the “Ashland style.” Elizabethan costumes on the Elizabethan Stage, broad low comedy breaking up flights of earnest declamation, lines delivered clearly and concisely so you understand the purpose if not always the interior fever of the plays. For decades the festival has made a virtue of old-fashioned verity, and if that’s the way you like it — a goodly number of people do — this season’s Henry IV, Part I is for you: an unruly time bomb of a Prince Hal (John Tufts), a broken-down and overpadded blowhard of a Falstaff (David Kelly), a hot and hardy Hotspur (Kevin Kenerly). This is Shakespeare in the festival tradition, solid as a burgher, tried and true.

And suddenly, that makes it feel almost anachronistic.

Prince Hal (John Tufts, left), heir to the throne, finds the company of Sir John Falstaff (David Kelly) preferable to court. Photo by Jenny Graham.The festival is changing, reinventing itself in front of our eyes. It’s not a revolution, it’s a profound evolution: Ashland has joined the 21st century. This season’s fruit of reinvention includes American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose, a smart and often uproarious piece of agitprop by Richard Montoya and Culture Clash; and Throne of Blood, a visually ravishing stage adaptation by the masterful Ping Chong of Akira Kurosawa‘s 1957 film masterpiece, which was itself a radical reimagining of Macbeth.

That’s on top of a Hamlet with hip-hop overtones and an utterly charming She Loves Me, the exemplar so far of artistic director Bill Rauch’s devotion to the stage musical as a legitimate and important branch of the theatrical family tree. Watching this year’s Henry IV, Part I is edifying and at times even exciting, but it isn’t all that different from taking in an Ashland Shakespeare in 1975 or 1995. American Night, Throne of Blood, Hamlet and She Loves Me? It’s a whole new festival, baby.

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Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland 4: the quality of mercy, the surprise of love

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Antonio (Jonathan Haugen, left), Shylock (Anthony Heald, center) and Bassanio (Danforth Comins) discuss the terms of Antonio's bond. Photo by Jenny Graham.

By Bob Hicks

Art Scatter’s ramble through the Oregon Shakespeare Festival‘s 75th anniversary season is closer to its end than its beginning, and it strikes us once again how much this thicket of theater interconnects. A lot of that has to do with the nature of rotating repertory, which gives audiences the chance to see the same actors in a variety of roles and a variety of plays.

Amali Balash (Lisa McCormick) shows off her new dress for her first date with her anonymous pen pal. Photo by Jenny Graham.Brooke Parks and Christian Barillas, for instance, who play sister and brother Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, return as sister and brother Caroline and Charles Bingley in Pride and Prejudice. Lisa McCormick, who calculates her future so carefully as the practical Charlotte Lewis in P&P, stumbles headstrong into love as the shopgirl heroine in She Loves Me. Dawn-Lyen Gardner, survivor of rape and warfare in Ruined, becomes a lucky lady-in-waiting in The Merchant of Venice. One way or another, love is in the air all over these plays. And couldn’t Merchant almost have been titled Pride and Prejudice?

Sometimes the connecting game is tougher. What could the troubling and abrasive Merchant of Venice and the little musical gem She Loves Me have in common? Not a lot, unless you consider that the source material for She Loves Me (and for the movies Shop Around the Corner, In the Good Old Summertime and You’ve Got Mail) is the Hungarian play Parfumerie by Miklos Laszlo, and then go a step further to remember that the Hungary of 1937, the year that Laszlo wrote his little bubble of innocence, held little truck with Jews and would as soon have done without them — a desire that was in the process of being satisfied.

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Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland 3: Hamlet the Fool

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By Bob Hicks

Lanky and improbably lean-headed, with a cliffside of forehead pierced by a widow’s peak of bristling orange hair, Dan Donohue looks a little like the late-night television host Conan O’Brien — or maybe an O’Brien sired by Loki, the god of mischief.

Hamlet (Dan Donohue) considers the bitter business at hand. Photo by David Cooper.As Hamlet in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival‘s current production of the Danish play, Donohue wears his jester’s cap naturally, less like a disguise than a key accoutrement to an essential part of his makeup: Hamlet the Fool.

We’ve come a long way from Olivier, the quintessence of the romantically doomed heroic prince. Olivier once talked about the advantages of being not quite short and not quite tall: at about five-foot-eleven, he could shift the sense of his body big or small. Donohue is similarly poised between the comic and the dramatic, at ease in either direction and often, onstage, using elements of one to feed the other: He defies type. In the impenetrable yet irresistible question mark that is Hamlet, it’s an excellent place to begin.

There is no such thing as a definitive Hamlet. A lot of good actors have stumbled in the prince’s shoes, perhaps daunted by the familiarity of the language and previous performances, perhaps unwilling or unable to choose a Hamlet rather than reach for the Hamlet. Donohue is ready for the role. Consciously or subconsciously, he’s been preparing for Hamlet for a long time. On the Ashland stages he’s played Iago, Caliban, Mercutio, Prince Hal — all excellent prep for Hamlet. And anyone who recalls his Dvornichek in Tom Stoppard’s Coward-like farce Rough Crossing, or who sees his brief turn as the waiter in this season’s sparkling revival of the musical She Loves Me, understands his brilliance at deadpan comedy. He knows precisely who he wants his Hamlet to be, and that, combined with his potent craftsmanship and willingness at key moments to simply drop off the cliff and into the abyss, makes this one of the extremely few truly satisfying Hamlets I’ve seen. It’s a wonderful performance, and you really ought to see it.

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Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland 2: pride, prejudice, ruin, respect

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Mama Nadi's approach gets her girls' attention (from left, Chinasa Ogbuagu, Dawn-Lyen Gardner, Victoria Ward). Photo by Jenny Graham.

By Bob Hicks

Art Scatter, despite its name, is mostly about pulling things together. We examine the daunting scatter of incident that is contemporary culture — this endlessly broad turmoil of emotions, beliefs and events — and gather them together, looking for patterns, similarities, fragments of coalescence. Out of chaos, we seek structure and story. We do this for you, our readers, but also for ourselves, because story, we’ve come to believe, is how we make sense of the subterranean roil of chaos that is life.

Maybe that’s why the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has become an annual touchstone in our lives. Mr. Scatter first came to this company, many years ago, as a professional observer. He’s stuck with it, gradually becoming friend, admirer, devil’s advocate, occasional scold, and in his own small way, participant — as are all who feed the festival with their time, money and attention. Whatever its faults, the festival believes in story, and in the essential wrestling with chaos that story represents: the quest to wrest comprehension from the incomprehensible.

Ah, but how to make sense of a glorious day of theatergoing that begins with the iron filigree of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and concludes with the hellfire and brimstone of Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s corrosive drama of Congolese warfare and rape? How, that is, besides the minor comparisons of stagecraft, plot, style and technique (all of which, in both productions, are admirable)? These are two peas that at first, second and even third glance do not appear to come from the same pod.

Your Honor, we call to the witness stand Aretha Franklin and Rodney Dangerfield.

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Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland the first: night the twelfth

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Viola in disguise (Brooke Parks) discovers an affection for Orsino (Kenajuan Bentley), as Feste (Michael Elich, center), Curio (Fune Tautala Jr., back left) and Valentine (Jorge Paniagua) look on. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

By Bob Hicks

Ah, the adventures of the road. The brain trust at Art Scatter World Headquarters has packed up and squeezed itself temporarily into the Scattermobile, partaking of adventures large and small. We’ve ingested the oyster and the clam, descended into Devil’s Churn, gazed upon the gathered elk, spied osprey and eagle and hawk, felt the chilling spray of Hellgate Canyon as it soaked the curl from our hair. We’ve dined in the company of Jack London’s ghost at the Wolf Creek Inn. We’ve discovered disturbingly misplaced apostrophes on public signs, dangling hopefully like unacknowledged offspring at the reading of a rich man’s will.

Now we’re in Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where we’re settling in long enough to take in the nine plays still in repertory, having missed the already departed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Well. It’s a marathon that’s become a tradition of shared argumentation and pleasure. Mr. Scatter, Mrs. Scatter, the Learned Sister and the Large Smelly Boys experience it all, each from his or her own vantage, each with the advantages and handicaps of his or her own delights and prejudices. Late August is high season, and a good time to be doing this: The shows have hit their groove and become pretty much all that they can be.

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