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, Cities, Environment, Food, General, Theater, Visual Art

A Very American Breakfast with Sojourn

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home_image_onthetableHere’s the thing. Arts people have been around a very long time, and no matter how hard you kick ’em around, they keep popping back up.

In Portland recently, people ponied up $120,000 in a single week to save the annual summer Washington Park music festival. They tossed in more than $850,000 to keep Oregon Ballet Theatre from folding.

In the middle of the worst recession/depression since the 1930s, people are somehow helping to pay for things they believe in, and they just keep going to shows. Maybe they’re looking for bargains. But they’re looking, and they’re going.

It’s an ingrained human need, as John Noble Wilford suggests in this morning’s New York Times. Wilford, the Times’ fine science writer, reports on the discovery of a five-hole bone flute in a cave in what’s now southwestern Germany. It’s a sophisticated instrument, apparently with harmonic possibilities not too far removed from a modern flute’s. And it’s at least 35,000 years old — maybe 40,000. It was discovered, Noble reports, “a few feet away from the carved figure of a busty, nude woman, also around 35,000 years old.” As the researchers keep digging I’m hoping they’ll discover the remains of an ancient flagon and complete the Ice Age trifecta: wine, women and song.

So, yes, right now a lot of artists have their hands out. And what’s amazing to me is that so many people are pausing among their own economic problems and doing what they can. Another example: The Portland Ballet, the “other” classically oriented dance company in town, has collected $15,000 from a public drive specifically so it can have live music for its annual performance of the holiday-season ballet La Boutique Fantasque. I don’t know if this is exactly what Barry Johnson meant in his recent Portland Arts Watch post about democratizing the arts, but it’s sure active and participatory.

So just for fun, let’s make the argument that art is as much of a human need as food — or, if that’s too rash, that the urge to make art is as ingrained in the human psyche as the necessity to eat is imprinted on  the human body. Sure, you can survive without art. But the artistic impulse is there, I’ll suggest, in your heartbeat. Everyone’s got rhythm.

And that link between food and art brings me to Sojourn Theatre and its upcoming benefit, A Very American Breakfast, which is happening 7:30-9 in the morning on Wednesday, July 1, at Disjecta, that big inviting space for all sorts of things in the percolating old Kenton neighborhood of North Portland. (Disjecta is having its own first-anniversary party for its Kenton home from 8 to 11 Saturday, June 27; no cover, cash bar.)

Eric Bowman, Oregon Farm, 2007/Froelick GallerySojourn is a Portland-based company that tours the country, developing and performing community-based plays that usually coalesce around specific themes. For the last year, among a myriad of other activities, it’s been working on a new piece called On the Table that looks at food, and how it’s grown and distributed, and the choices we make about it, and the impact it has on various communities. A lot of field reporting (in this case, literally) goes into a typical Sojourn show, and that takes time and resources. Company director Michael Rohd figures the project has another year to go: “The show will happen Summer 2010 simultaneously in PDX and a small town 50 miles from PDX, and explores the urban/rural conversation in Oregon, culminating with a bus trip for both audiences and a final act at an in-between site,” he says.

The benefit breakfast costs $50 (you can make a reservation here, or if that’s too much or too little or you’re going to be out of town, make a donation) and will feature food from Phresh Organic Catering. Disjecta is at 8371 N. Interstae Ave., Portland.

Sojourn doesn’t make a habit of putting its hand out, but there comes a time and place. Here’s part of what Rohd had to say when he spread the word:

“So, we are busy.
And we don’t have a building.
And we are engaged in the most ambitious project of our nearly ten years together.

And, its going to be tough.
This moment right now is tough.
But we believe — go big, or go home.”

In the meantime, breakfast in the shadow of Kenton’s giant Paul Bunyan statue sounds good.

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Another way to look at food and art and cities and rural life: Froelick Gallery‘s exhibit Town & Country: Oregon at 150, which continues through July 11 at the gallery, 714 N.W. Davis St, just off Broadway. This juried group show takes a look at Oregon through its urban/rural geographical divide, which sometimes is a connection as well. That’s Eric Bowman’s 2007 painting “Oregon Farm” above.

Who knows? Maybe someone’s sitting behind the barn, playing a five-hole bone flute. And maybe that’s just all right.

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

Columbia River School: The art landscape in the Gorge

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Jasper Francis Cropsey, Misty Afternoon, 1873. Collection Dr. Michel Hersen & Mrs. Victoria Hersen

“In my opinion a museum cannot and should not be showing only art by dead people.”

Lee Musgrave was sitting in his little ground-floor office at the Maryhill Museum of Art, away from the sweeping view just outside of the Columbia River Gorge and the eastern face of Mt. Hood. He’d just told me that after 14 years as the museum’s only curator he was getting ready to retire — he leaves at the end of July — and he was in a relaxed, expansive mood.

Maryhill Museum with spring lupines. Photo: NYLAND WILKINSOf course, I’d just driven the 110 miles east from Portland to see a bunch of paintings by dead people: the museum’s show Hudson River School Sojourn, which is on view through July 8.

But then, I was also curious to see the newest incarnation on the museum grounds of Musgrave’s annual outdoor-sculpture invitational, Maryhill’s lively contemporary response to its historic collection of Rodin sculptures in the indoor galleries. And if this quirky, oddly intoxicating little museum hadn’t begun to pay much more serious attention to the contemporary world in the past couple of decades, I might have just left it dozing away in the desert and never gone visiting at all.

These days, I consider it a personal requirement to drive to Maryhill at least once a year, and I freely confess that although I find the museum an intriguing place — I can’t think of any institution anywhere else, even in the wild-and-woolly West that it so quintessentially represents, that’s quite like it — a lot of the allure is simply that it offers a great excuse to make one of the most drop-dead gorgeous drives in the United States. The improbable fortress that is Maryhill, perched high on a cliff in that stretch east of The Dalles where forest has given way to desert, is the end-of-the-road payoff to a journey that’s already been its own reward.

“In my time here,” said Musgrave, who on the day of my visit was in a genial summing-up mood, “I’ve done 59 contemporary shows and exhibited the work of 258 Northwest artists.”

Those figures might come as a surprise to people who tend to think of Maryhill in response to its historical collections, an assembly of oddments that make it seem a little like a far-west cubby-hole annex to the Smithsonian Institution, “America’s Attic.” There are the chess sets, the Russian icons, the Rodin plasters, the old weapons, a good Native American collection, the road plans of visionary engineer and rural utopian Sam Hill, memorabilia of the turn-of-the-century dance sensation Loie Fuller, the Queen of Romania’s furniture, the peacocks strutting around the grounds (they scare away snakes), the nearby concrete replica of Stonehenge, the French high-fashion dioramas of Theatre de la Mode.

Francisco Salgado, Falilia, painted steel, 2009 Outdoor Sculpture InvitationalBut as crucial as those things are to Maryhill’s identity (a prominent art historian told me the other day that the museum should concentrate on its “creation myth”), they’re not the whole story. Musgrave, a practicing contemporary painter who’s been showing his own work since the late 1960s in California, the Northwest, and even Australia and Japan, has nurtured relationships with contemporary-art collectors such as Portland’s Jordan Schnitzer. He’s worked directly with a lot of artists, and he’s nurtured at least a nascent sense that in this place, time can mingle. “My favorite thing to do is to take contemporary artists and combine them with things in the permanent collection,” he says.

The annual outdoor sculpture show is a good example of how Musgrave’s connections with contemporary artists have influenced what the museum does. On his first day on the job in 1995, he says, he told his new co-workers, “I can’t believe you’ve got 6,000 acres and no sculpture outside.” So he started the sculpture program.

Continue reading Columbia River School: The art landscape in the Gorge →

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Elegant, physical, forward dance: The pleasure was ours

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Phase Phrase, tere Mathern. Photo: Performance Works Northwest

Our partner-in-scattering Martha Ullman West, taking a break from the balletic battles, scurried over to Performance Works Northwest over the weekend for a shot of contemporary-dance fresh air. Here’s her report:

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“I am wired for skepticism. I cannot leave the questions alone. They unravel everything. My skepticism is like an old screen door. There is a metal smell and old dust that stings my nose. There is a tiny hole in the screen, which I can’t help but worry larger with my finger.”

— Sarah Hart

What that text had to do with the movement, the elegant, thoughtful, considered and highly physical dancing presented at Performance Works Northwest last weekend beats me, but Daniel Addy’s installation, consisting of a screen door with a moist green landscape projected behind it, and on the other side of the studio, a window with a watery view, framed The Portland Project handsomely.

TouchMonkey. Photo: Performance Works Northwest The show began with TouchMonkey, in the persons of Carolyn Stuart and Patrick Gracewood, who are longtime practitioners of Contact Improvisation, a form based on trust and the ability to make on-the-spot kinetic connections. Stuart was wearing a black cloth over her eyes, which meant her responses to Gracewood were entirely by touch and contact.  Their duet, titled Special Alembics, (nice pun!) was performed to music played live by Eddy Deane, Alley Teach, and David Lyles of The Contact Lounge Band.

The performance was at once sensual and intellectual, and downright suspenseful. My God, what are they going to do next? I thought at one point, as they entwined and re-entwined their bodies on the floor, becoming at times a single body that appeared to have eight misplaced limbs. Nobody “wired for skepticism” can dance with a partner blindfolded, it seems to me, particularly one on whom she depends to shape the next step in the dance.

Tere Mathern, one of this city’s most cerebral choreographers, came next with Phase Phrase, performed by Hannah Downs, Sally Garrido-Spencer, Vanessa Vogel and Mathern herself. As they went along they embellished the propulsive phrase they performed and then stripped it down again, characteristically geometric and angular.  The four women to some degree played off one another, but this dance was pretty clearly planned ahead of time, with plenty of contact — one dancer touching another on the shoulder, causing that dancer to extend her arm in a straight line — but little improvisation. Tim DuRoche created a score that was minimalist to the Nth degree; I’ve liked his previous collaborations with Mathern and Mary Oslund, but this one I found exasperatingly repetitious.

Sometimes dancing is just about dancing, despite the program note about Gregg Bielemeier‘s Tracings that explains it is a duet working with the idea of distilling form, vessel and shadowing. And what a pleasure to watch Taylor Alan Young, a recent arrival in Portland, incorporate Bielemeier’s relaxed-appearing movement style into his own body. That kind of ease, that comfort in one’s own skin, is hard to come by, particularly the juxtaposition of small movements of head, neck, hands, against large, traveling ones.

What all three choreographers have in common isn’t Hart’s intriguing text, but rather the experience and wisdom to abstract from it a mood, or an atmosphere, or a dance that expands the horizons of the audience and at the same time provides a great deal of pleasure.

The Portland Project was skillfully curated by Anne Furfey, who produced it along with Linda Austin as part of Performance Works Northwest’s Alembic series.

Taylor Alan Young (left), Gregg Bielemeier. Photo: Performance Works Northwest

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

In memoriam: Philemon Reid, 1945-2009

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Long before DIY became a Portland catch-phrase, Philemon Timothy Reid was quietly doing it himself. A self-taught artist, Reid spent a lifetime doing the things you need to do. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, he spent nine years in the service, went to night college, and worked many years for the Bonneville Power Administration. He settled in Vancouver. He raised a family.

r520And through it all he did the thing he loved to do, which was to paint and sculpt images of the African American musicians who played the blues and jazz. He often listened to Coltrane or Miles or Ella while he was making his own art.

“Phil” Reid died June 9 of pancreatic cancer, and while for many people who knew him that was a very personal loss, for me he was a missed journalistic opportunity. I never met him, and for a long time I meant to. I just didn’t get around to it.

There are a million stories out there, and every writer knows that for every one you manage to tell, a hundred get away. Phil Reid’s story was one of my many hundred untold tales.

As far as I know Reid wasn’t much aligned with any particular group of Portland artists. He wasn’t part of any art-school crowd. He wasn’t avant-garde. Technically, there wasn’t much novel in what he did: He adapted familiar Cubist techniques to his own subject matter, although he maintained more representational roots than Picasso, whom he cited as a major influence: I think that might have had to do with the African American tradition of storytelling and its superreality, although I don’t know for sure. He had a loyal, even enthusiastic following, but for the most part it didn’t seem to include the people who haunt museums and galleries.

Yet every time I saw his work it made me stop and think. And usually smile, because invariably there was a gusto, a joy, in the images he made. And I’d think, this is an interesting guy. I should look into this. His sense of men and women at work, immersed in the pleasures and tribulations of their trade, harked back to the social realists of the 1930s.

The exaggerations of his shapes — great guitars that swoop across the canvas, eating up half of the picture; strong chord-plucking fingers that seem like limbs on a mighty Sequoia tree — suggest the tall tale: John Henry; the nameless narrator of St. James Infirmary Blues.

And his colors! Every time I saw them I thought about the pleasure that so many black people take in dressing vibrantly, in reveling in the brightest of rainbows. Remember how, in the movie Watermelon Man, Godfrey Cambridge dressed brighter and sharper the more he became immersed in his black identity?

Unfortunately, anything I say about Philemon Reid is guesswork, the flawed and incomplete deductions of long-range, occasional observation. I’m sorry about that. This is a story, I suspect, worth much more than I can tell.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Good news: OBT beats the bank — for now

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obt_thermometer1While Art Scatter was spending Thursday in the Columbia Gorge visiting the Maryhill Museum (more on that trip as soon as I get it written) our partner in crime Barry Johnson was busy reporting on Portland Arts Watch that Oregon Ballet Theatre has smashed through the ceiling of its emergency fund drive, raising $853,271 by the end of the day Wednesday.

Considering that its goal was $750,000 by June 30, that’s remarkable. And it doesn’t need to stop here. Maybe OBT can smash $1 million by June 30, which would help considerably in balancing next year’s reduced budget. OBT says it needs to raise $1.5 million in donations to meet its slashed-back budget of $4.8 million, down from a projected $6.7 million before the economy collapsed.

To break it down: A little more than $500,000 came from 976 individual donations, or an average of about $512. And it didn’t come just from Portland:  Money came from 26 states, which indicates how highly this company is thought of nationally. Eight donors gave $190,000 of that, in chunks of $25,000 or $20,000, which means there were a lot of $25, $50, $100, $150, $250 gifts from ordinary dance-lovers who dug deep, and their willingness to help made a big difference. In addition, last weekend’s big gala concert pulled in about $330,000.

Now it’s time for the heavy hitters to step up to the plate — the six-figure and seven-figure people. It’s essential to the long-term health of this company that it gain the confidence and regular support of the deep-pocket crowd. That $1.5 million for the coming year? It breaks down to about $29,000 a week — and that’s for a bare-bones budget. To build the company back to the $7 million level, and restore its full orchestra, is going to take a lot more than that.

The task has just begun. In the meantime, congratulations to everyone.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Visual Art

Wednesday hot links: Get yer fresh dogs on Rye!

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All right, so Mr. Scatter’s been doing this no-meat thing long enough now that veggie franks have actually started to taste good.

At least, if they’re slathered with enough mustard/relish/barbecue sauce/onions/sauerkraut/melted cheese.

And, no, no-meat doesn’t mean no fish or shellfish, or even the very occasional chicken thigh, or (once in a couple of blue moons) a blessed slice of crisp bacon.

Yes, I embrace the vegetable kingdom. No, I’m not fanatic.

Still, most of my links these days are of the virtual variety, a few of which I freely share with you:

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To Move, To Breathe, To Speak. Michele Russo, 1960PNCA at 100: Two good pieces on the new exhibit at the Portland Art Museum celebrating a century of the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which began life as the Museum Art School. A few quibbles, a lot of insights and an impressive parade of names from Oregonian arts writers D.K. Row, here, and Barry Johnson, here. Read ’em both and you’ll want to rush right down to see the show yourself. I haven’t yet. I will soon. And if your reflexes are slow, don’t worry: The exhibit stays up until Sept. 13.

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LOUISE NEVELSON, OUT OF THE BOX: One of the liveliest, best-written arts blogs in town is Fifty Two Pieces, a site that takes as its starting point artists and artworks in the collection of the Portland Art Museum and follows them wherever its muse travels. Right now the site is concentrating on the great and formidable Louise Nevelson, she of the black boxes. Dig back a few posts and you’ll find a series on Portland sculptor Lee Kelly. You should know this site!

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CULTURE JOCK DRIVES TO SEATTLE: … and sees the sights along the way. For anyone who makes that dreary I-5 drive semi-regularly (and don’t a lot of us?) CJ’s tongue-in-cheek record of his recent trip is priceless. Which means you can’t buy it with your Master Card. But you can read it free, here.

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HOLDEN CAULFIELD, WON’T YOU PLEASE STAY HOME: For a 90-year-old recluse, J.D. Salinger is a pretty darned public cantankerous cuss. He’s made such a fetish of his desire for privacy and his insistence that his artistic creations are inviolable that by now he’s better known for his churlishness than for the 58-year-old novel, The Catcher in the Rye, that made us aware of his existence in the first place.

rye_catcherMr. Salinger does know the legal profession, and in pursuit of his vaunted rights has made liberal use of it over the years. The New York Times reports here that now he’s suing over copyright infringement — “a ripoff pure and simple,” as his lawyers put it — by the 33-year-old Swedish author of a book titled 60 years Later: Coming Through the Rye.

Now, I’m all for copyright laws and the right of artists to protect their creations. But Salinger has a pretty weird idea of what’s his and what’s out there in the ether to be grabbed and reinterpreted. In Salinger’s mind, John Donne got it wrong: One man is an island entire of itself. Donne, at least, seemed to intuit that life, and art, are about borrowing and sharing and rethinking and creating something new from something old. Salinger thinks they’re immovable ice statues, frozen in time.

According to the Times, Fredrik Colting, the author of 60 Years Later (which revisits Holden Caulfield as an old man of 76), says his novel is a “comment on the uneasy relationship between his imagined version of Mr. Salinger and the Holden Caulfield character: ‘In order to regain control over his own life, which is drawing to a close, “Mr. Salinger” tries repeatedly to kill off Mr. C by various means: a runaway truck; falling construction debris; a lunatic woman with a knife; suicide by drowning and suicide by pills.’

Sounds like Mr. Colting’s caught the contemporary point: Salinger himself is at the center of the Caulfield universe, and putting him there explicitly is a sufficient reinterpretation of and commentary on the original to qualify it as a discrete work.

I do wish, however, that Colting’s defense weren’t sprinkled with this sort of academic obfuscation: “In additional written declarations, Martha Woodmansee, a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, writes that Mr. Colting’s novel is a work of ‘meta-commentary’ and ‘is thus a complex work, more complex than’ Mr. Salinger’s novel.”

Really?

I have a toothache. Leave me alone.

Or I’ll sue.

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Martha Ullman West on Dance United: a personal take

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Like so many great art forms, dance is a series of interlinked relationships and memories, a tradition that continually redefines and reinvents itself. It lives in the past, and the present, and the future, and its story is written in the memories and associations of open-hearted observers as well as the muscles of dancers and the patterns in choreographers’ minds.

Dance writer Martha Ullman West, one of our best observers, took in last Friday’s Dance United, and for her it was like biting into a madeleine: The reminiscences and connections just began to flow. Somehow, no matter how far-flung, they all looped back to Oregon Ballet Theatre, its history and successes, and this extraordinary event to keep the company alive and vital.

Here is the link to Martha’s review in The Oregonian of the performance. And here, below, is her more personal report on what it all meant:

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Daniel Ulbright, New York City Ballet. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERTReally, it was a cross between a potlatch and an Obama rally, a gathering of the clans.

Dancers came from Texas, Utah, Massachusetts, Canada, Washington state, California, Chicago, Idaho, and that other geographical location, in New York called Downtown, here designated as Portland’s modern and contemporary dance community.

The gifts they brought were generous: their talent and their time. And they were welcomed to Keller Auditorium with the same enthusiasm as Obama’s supporters do and did, reaching into their wallets with many relatively small donations to keep Oregon Ballet Theatre alive. On Tuesday, OBT had in hand $720,000 of the $750,000 it needs to make up THIS season’s deficit.

I’ve been watching dance in Portland and elsewhere for more decades that I wish to reveal, and professionally since 1979, when I wrote an essay on postmodern dance in New York for Dance Magazine. In so many ways, this gala triggered some Proustian moments, also making me think of all the ways that dance and dancers are connected to each other.

Linda Austin’s thoroughly postmodern “anybody-can-dance, any-movement-on-stage-is-valid” Boris & Natasha Dancers (on catnip) took me back to New York’s SoHo and a performance created by Karole Armitage consisting of a group of dancers on their hands and knees, painting stripes on the floor, in humorless silence. They were not skilled at either painting or dancing, but it was the same democratic approach to the art form as Austin’s new dance, which featured such pillars of the Portland community as two Bragdons (Peter and David), Scott Bricker, James Harrison and Peter Ames Carlin galumphing across the stage, one of them wearing red sneakers that I wondered if he’d borrowed from White Bird’s Paul King. (Armitage, you may remember, also made work on OBT’s dancers on James Canfield’s watch.)

Sarah Van Patten Damian Smith, SFBallet. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERTThe Joffrey Ballet’s Aaron Rogers, performing Val Caniparoli’s Aria, recalled for me the profound pleasure of watching Val work with Portland dancers, first at OBT’s precursor Ballet Oregon, and then at OBT. Caniparoli’s kindness and courtesy in the studio turned out to be extremely productive when the company performed his Street Songs and other work. Rogers looked like he was enjoying himself, flirting with that mask, and certainly seduced the audience in the process.

And I thought about Mark Goldweber, ballet master at OBT under Canfield, then for some years at the Joffrey, and now at Ballet West. (He gave the only authentic performance in Robert Altman’s dance film The Company, in my view.) I wondered what Mark thinks about the way Adam Sklute, now Ballet West’s artistic director, staged this version of the White Swan pas de deux.

When I encountered this ballet’s real-life Prince Siegfried, Christopher Ruud, at OBT’s studios earlier in the week, I spoke with him about his father, who had helped Todd Bolender at Kansas City Ballet (Bolender is the subject of a book I’m working on). Ruud told me he had staged one of his father’s pieces on the company several years ago.

Continue reading Martha Ullman West on Dance United: a personal take →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater

Not out of the woods yet: Arts groups in a fiscal thicket

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Hansel and Gretel, illus. Arthur Rackham, 1909. Wikimedia CommonsThe smashing success of last Friday’s Dance United gala benefit notwithstanding, it’s a Grimm world out there right now for Portland’s arts organizations: There go Hansel and Gretel, trailing bread crumbs as they traipse into the thick of the woods, and here come the birds, pecking away at the crumbs so there’s no trail out again.

There must be some way out of here. What Hansel and Gretel and the Oregon Symphony and Oregon Ballet Theatre and all-classical radio and Portland Center Stage and the rest need is a financial GPS.

For arts groups here and elsewhere, the fissures of the global economic meltdown have become a chasm, a canyon carved by the raging River Deficit. Given the state of the financial union it’s astonishing that Oregon Ballet Theatre has managed to almost wipe out its $750,000 emergency shortfall in less than a month. Celebrate this as a victory, because a victory it surely is.

But the sobering truth is, it’s only the beginning. Now the hard, tough work begins. And it’s going to be extremely difficult keeping up the sort of adrenalin that has at least temporarily pulled OBT back from the brink.

This string of financial crises has predictably pulled out the trollers, the mocking wise guys who laugh and declare that if arts groups can’t survive in the marketplace, they deserve to die (presumably, like Bank of America and General Motors). These loudmouths understand nothing about the not-for-profit world, or if they do understand it, they despise it with every fiber in their rugged-individualist, social-Darwinist bodies. Ignore them. They are happiest when someone shouts back.

Even among arts people the current crisis has inspired a lot of hand-wringing about “dead art forms” and the possibility that in an age of radically new media and runaway-success popular art forms,  people just don’t care any more about things like dance and serious music.

I don’t buy it. In a way, the “traditional” arts have never been more popular. The Oregon Symphony, which has piled up a $1.5 million deficit in the just-ending fiscal year, sold more tickets in the just-past season than ever before. OBT is playing to packed, enthusiastic houses. Portland Center Stage keeps extending its Storm Large musical hit, Crazy Enough. Radio market share at KQAC, Portland’s all-classical station, is booming. As I make the rounds I see good-sized crowds at fringe events, too, from puppet shows to new vaudeville to cold readings of new play scripts. Dance and classical music, for all their financial woes, are undergoing a renaissance sparked by rigorously trained and exquisitely talented young performers — the very people who are supposed to have defected to American Idol and Twitter and “reality” TV. What’s more, they’re extending the boundaries of their art forms, reinterpreting them for today’s world even as they keep their heritages alive.

And audiences have responded. If there’s a crisis — and there is — it isn’t a lack of enthusiastic audiences, who are finding ways to continue to participate even in the midst of their own financial travails. The thirst for art is real, and our greatest hope for long-term optimism.

So what’s the problem?

Continue reading Not out of the woods yet: Arts groups in a fiscal thicket →

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Theater

Hair today, gone tomorrow: Ugly on the face of it

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Credit: THE DAILY BEAST

When I was not quite 19 and in fall term of my sophomore year in college I returned home for Thanksgiving dinner, bringing a housemate with me. I’d been growing a beard since beginning of term, two months before.

At dinner (and beforehand, while bustling over the Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes in the kitchen) my mother kept staring at me oddly, as if something strange was going on and it just wasn’t quite computing. Finally I asked her what was wrong.

“You have a smudge on the side of your face,” she said.

She wasn’t kidding. I was crushed. So much for my hirsute abilities — and I heard that line repeated, with guffaws, for the rest of the school year from my turncoat housemate.

At last Monday’s Drammy Awards I ran into actor Todd Van Voris, who’d been playing Andrey Prozorov, the henpecked brother, in Tracy Letts’ adaptation of Three Sisters at Artists Repertory Theatre, and was sporting a suitably Chekhovian growth.

“How long until you get to shave?” I asked him.

“One more week!” he replied enthusiastically.

Then he added that it never fails: In the dead of winter he’s cast as someone clean-shaven and maybe even bald-pated; once the weather turns warm he’s cast as someone with facial hair in full sprout.

Apparently he can do full sprout.

In the movies, of course, you don’t have to grow ’em, although of course you can if you want. If you don’t, makeup will cheerfully slap a facial growth on you. That’s why I liked this post (the photo montage above is just a sneak peek) from The Daily Beast, of the worst movie facial-hair moments. You could adapt this to country-western singers and male perfume and underwear models, too — those guys who have the perfect two-day stubbles around their gorgeously dimpled chins no matter what. John Travolta is a double winner (or double loser) in the Daily Beast sweepstakes, but I’m quite fond of the Jack Black growth, too.

P.S.: I’ve been wearing a beard for most of the past 40 years. Every now and again someone looks at me and says, “When did you start growing a beard?” I refer them to my mother.

General, Laura Grimes

Toilet plungers really do suck: They stick to faces

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By LAURA GRIMES

Call the health department. Plumbing disease is contagious.

We left town and all our drain problems behind and headed to the coast. I lugged everything into our tidy little place and made a bee-line to the bathroom when a guest* large smelly boy said, “Oh, that toilet is weird.”

I flushed it. It burbled back at me.

We have lugged everything to this tidy little place** for nearly 18 years. It has two toilets, two tubs and four sinks. Never, in all that time, have I had to plunge a large clump of goo.

The Mini Pro Sink and Drain Plunger: like a joystick. Monument ToolsAs I realized I was having another plumbing panic — my third in a week — part of me was in a suspended state of disbelief while the other looked for a plunger. In vain.

Here I had a lovely view of the Pacific Ocean, but I was roughing it. I did not have my impressive array of drain-cleaning implements.

I rummaged under sinks and in closets until I found one pathetic-looking plunger. It wasn’t a designer model. No sucky lips. No caddy.

I was embarrassed for its nakedness so I searched through the cupboards for a proper caddy. But remember, we’re roughing it. I didn’t find even a cheap Tupperware container.

I pushed the plunger up and down to no avail. It had a big problem. It didn’t suck. That’s when I did what any sensible amateur plumber would do. I went to dinner.

On the way home we stopped by a one-stop shopping store (yes, the very chain where the flashy, brazen garden nozzles are lined up in a red light district). My grocery list? Milk. Eggs. Juice. Plunger.

And cookie dough. We have a tradition at the beach of baking cookies each night. But remember, we’re roughing it. So we don’t actually make the dough. We just bake it. After we buy it.

One of the large smelly boys and I were picking out what kind of cookie dough to buy in a package when we both said, “Look, it comes in a tub!”

I compared prices. Sure enough. The tub was cheaper by volume. Then I realized we’d gain a bonus. We’d gain a plunger caddy. But we’d have to bake a lot of cookies.***

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