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, General

Stimulus, continued: Why did Wyden and Merkley vote with Coburn?

February 7, 2009 Bob Hicks 3 Comments

Works Progress Administration poster, 1930s As reported earlier on Art Scatter and elsewhere, the U.S. Senate pulled a nasty Friday surprise by voting 73-24 in favor of an amendment to the national economic stimulus package that would ban any spending on a wide variety of arts and cultural projects — anything that would give federal reaction to the economic crisis the faintest whiff of a broad-based WPA solution.

For Oregonians, the biggest part of the surprise was that both of our senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, voted with the majority in favor of Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn’s monkey-wrench amendment.

Why? I haven’t talked with Wyden or Merkley, and I haven’t seen either explain his vote. But I think fellow Scatterer Barry Johnson is right. This was a vote about the numbers — the Democrats needed to swing three moderate Republican votes to reach the required 60 to pass the stimulus bill, and the moderate Republicans could afford to break party rank on the overall bill only by mollifying conservative Republicans on the details.

Surely there’s no love lost between Oregon’s senators and the Coburn gang, especially after Coburn’s one-man holdup last year of the Mount Hood wilderness bill that Wyden had spent several years helping to prepare. And Merkley, as the new kid on the block, is going to have to line up with party leadership on a vote like this. So, giving Wyden and Merkley the benefit of the doubt, we’ll just point out that part of politics is knowing when to lose a battle so you can win a war.

But another, equally important, part of politics is for voters to remind their representatives vociferously that they don’t accept the deal-making, and to push for what’s right regardless of political maneuvering. That’s why it’s urgent that Wyden and Merkley get this message. Otherwise, in the rush of business, they might not stop to clean up the mess they helped make. And this IS a mess. It’s punitive, wrong-headed, bullying, the kind of “populism” that isn’t in the people’s interest at all but instead makes political capital by demonizing anything that smacks of intellectualism.

Our friends at Culture Shock have been following this issue, too, and I urge you to check out their take on it all. They include the most important information: How to contact your senators and let them know that you want the cultural economy to be a part of any economic stimulus plan. You can contact Wyden, Merkley, and any other senator through a format set up by Americans for the Arts.

Here’s a portion of the Culture Shock post, complete with a link to the Americans for the Arts messaging site:

Arts advocates need to quickly contact Senators Wyden and Merkley and express our extreme disappointment in them for voting for the Coburn Amendment. We need these Senators to know that their vote would detrimentally impact nonprofit arts organizations and the jobs they support in their state. Americans for the Arts has crafted a customized message that can be sent automatically to the appropriate Senator simply by entering your zip code. (For our friends from out of state, the system will recognize if your Senator voted against the Coburn Amendment and will send them a thank you letter instead.)

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has repeatedly pointed out, this is no time for silly political games. The world economy faces its biggest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and ordinary rules of engagement — the automatic-pilot tinkering with the free-market controls — isn’t going to work.

This crisis calls for a massive creative response, and although the times and details are different, the New Deal and its broad-vision Works Progress Administration provide a good model to work from. So far the response has been mostly “boys-club”: build roads, shore up the banks, get Wall Street back on its feet, throw a lifeline to crumblng industries. All necessary, even if the precise approach is open to argument. But equally important are the “girls-club” issues, the sustenance of the nation’s creative capital: its schools, its health system, its cultural and historical institutions, its environmental and conservation stewardship, all of which nourish the new ideas that help drive the larger economy in addition to providing millions of necessary jobs on their own.

If not now, when? If not us, who? If not Wyden and Merkley, why?

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Dance, Environment, Food, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Tom Coburn and his wilderness of ideas

February 4, 2009 Bob Hicks 20 Comments

UPDATE, 1:55 p.m. Friday, Feb. 6: MISCHIEF WINS, “SMALL POTATOES” LOSE: I didn’t think he could do it, but he did. Today the U.S. Senate, by a ridiculous 73-24 vote, passed Sen. Tom Coburn’s amendment to the economic stimulus bill to bar anything with even the faintest whiff of culture from getting any stimulus money. Here’s the requisite passage from Congressional Quarterly:

“Lawmakers also voted 73-24 to adopt a Tom Coburn , R-Okla., amendment to place tighter restrictions facilities that can be built with money from the bill. The Coburn amendment would bar spending on casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses, swimming pools, stadiums, community parks, museums, theaters, art centers, and highway beautification projects.

“Thatâ€™s broader than prohibition in the House-passed bill, which applied only to casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses and swimming pools.”

The vote is astonishing, and preposterous, and I can only guess that the amendment was passed with so little thought or debate simply because the Senate is in a pedal-to-the-metal rush to get this thing off the assembly line and onto the streets. Coburn may be a fool, but he’s a canny fool — he knows how the system works, and he knows how and when to manipulate it. This ugly bit of mischief could still disappear from the final bill, of course, but now it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of ruckus-raising. It’s officially time to get mad, get on the horn, bug your congressional delegation and get something done about this.

Timberline Lodge, funded by the WPA/Wikimedia Commons

News flashes from all sorts of fronts today about the latest Molotov cocktail from Sen. Tom Coburn, the Republican from Oklahoma known for his quixotic attempts to deliver America from the clutches of common sense. It was Coburn, Oregonians might recall, whose threat of filibuster scuttled last year’s otherwise certain passage of the Lewis & Clark Mount Hood Wilderness Act. That act finally passed the Senate last month, as part of a broader wilderness bill, on a 73-21 vote — over Coburn’s objections.

This time out Coburn’s tackling the omnibus economic bailout plan — surely a target for some tough critical thinking: How many Dutch boys with their fingers in the dike does it take to keep the thing from bursting, anyway? Unfortunately, it’s not just Coburn’s finger that’s all wet. His Amendment No. 175 to the economic stimulus bill is tough, and it’s critical. But it’s utterly lacking in thinking.

Here’s how Coburn proposes to guard your pocketbook:

“None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, arts center, or highway beautification project, including renovation, remodeling, construction, salaries, furniture, zero-gravity chairs, big screen televisions, beautification, rotating pastel lights, and dry heat saunas.”

Note that. No money for museums, theaters, arts centers, aquariums, zoos, highway beautification, apparently any sort of beautification at all. I’m not really sure what a rotating pastel light is, but none of that, either. Fortunately I don’t golf. But I do like a good sauna now and again.

It’s easy to laugh this off as just another crackpot amendment that’s going nowhere — except that Coburn has a history of making this sort of thing stick, at least temporarily. I doubt it’ll work this time, because with the Democratic gains in the Senate from the last election he’s lost his biggest tool, which was his ability to forestall a 60 percent Senate vote to halt filibuster. His power has always been the power to make mischief, not the power to actually create anything.

Still, it’s a very good idea to call your senators (the Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121) or zip off an email to them. If you live in Oregon, that means Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley. If you live in Washington, it means Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray. If you live in another state, check here for contacts. The danger isn’t that anywhere near a majority of senators agree with Coburn. The danger is that, in their eagerness to get some sort of broad-stroke stimulus package passed as quickly as possible, a majority will be willing to horse-trade away this “small potatoes” stuff. In D.C., that’s how mischief’s made.

It seems silly to even have to bring it up, but here goes: Museums and theaters and aquariums are part of the economy, too. And they’re a potentially multiple-payoff part of the economy. They don’t just create jobs for themselves, they feed tourism, hospitality, construction (which means such things as logging and mining and steelmaking). Increasingly, in our information-driven society, the arts play a big role in driving entire regional economies: People move to cities specifically for their arts scenes. That’s certainly true of Portland. Oh: And all that “beautification”? It creates good, lasting things. The picture at the top of this post is of Timberline Lodge. It’s on Mt. Hood, and it was built during the Great Depression as a project of the federal government’s Works Progress Administration.

The WPA was good to the arts, and in return the arts were good to America. From murals in small-town post offices to architectural treasures like Timberline Lodge to theater and dance and music projects to photographic documentation of the Depression to the wonderful, sadly unfinished, collection of writings about American foodways, our previous mass economic stimulus package had the good sense to recognize that an “economy” is only a financial blueprint of a whole society.

Am I nervous about the economic stimulus plan? You bet. But I’m a lot more nervous about the Tom Coburns of the world than I am about helping a museum keep from falling into the abyss of economic failure. Keeping our shared culture alive, I’m confident, is a very good idea.

Bob Hicks, General, Language

Apostrophe’s and groundhog’s: on promiscuous punctuation

February 1, 2009 Bob Hicks 8 Comments

Courtesy of Jeffrey Beall, Flickr Creative Commons
As the great lexicographer Bob Dylan might have asked, “Where have all the apostrophes gone?”

In Birmingham, England, it turns out, they’ve been long time passing: According to an Associated Press report via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, city bureaucrats have been dropping the little floating comma from Birmingham’s street signs since the 1950s. So it’s no longer “St. Paul’s Square”; it’s “St. Pauls Square.” And, as some critics are sniffing, it’s no longer the Queen’s English, it’s the Queens English (which sounds, if you think about it, like the argot of a particular borough of New York City).

Here at Art Scatter we like to think of punctuation as little road signs along the great linguistic superhighway, helpful warnings that a curve is coming in the road and you need to slow down, or a thought has run its course and you need to stop. Pay attention to the road signs and the meaning comes clear, not to mention the rhythm that is playing in the author’s head, and which presumably she or he would love to plant in your own intellectual pulse.

The presence or absence or substitution of a punctuation mark can alter meaning. “What do you mean?” is most likely a simple interrogative: “Can you please explain yourself a little more clearly, so I can understand what you’re saying?”

“What do you mean!” is more likely a challenge, even an exclamation of outrage: “You can’t be serious! I reject with every fiber of my being the very principle on which you build your argument, and I am shocked that a purportedly civilized human being could hold such an errant point of view!”

Groundhog/Wikimedia Commons More poetically (and less argumentatively), the use of punctuation is a handy writers’ tool in the construction of mood and suggestion: “He’s driving fast fast fast” is simply faster to a reader’s eye than “He’s driving fast, fast, fast” — and if the blur of speed is what you’re trying to get across, using commas is like driving in the Indianapolis 500 with your emergency brake on.

Here in The Great Republick That Our Forefathers Built (or is it Forefather’s?) we seem to welcome all those apostrophes banished from Birmingham: As the photo at the top of this post illustrates, we like to throw them into words willy-nilly, like candy confetti on top of a cupcake. For an amusing exploration of the subject, see The Care and Feeding of Apostrophes.

Nor is the comma the only mistress of Americans’ punctuational promiscuity. Over at Blogorrhea, the courtly Mr. Mead Hunter has introduced us to the perverse pleasures of The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, a photographic compilation of signage screwups that are, as the MasterCard commercials say, priceless. And Art Scatter itself confesses to a fondness for the colon that verges on the indiscreet: Like a politician with a wayward passion for that little taste of danger, we let ourselves be seen in public with the slatternly Ms. Colon on our arm far too frequently.

What to do, then, when, punctuationally speaking, we’re not sure what to do? Americans are a practical people (as a nation we are Rome, not Greece; engineers, not artists) and the obvious answer is: avoidance. Just don’t let it be an issue. Around Portland, that means eliminating the historical struggle between Sauvie’s Island and Sauvies Island by settling, at least officially, on Sauvie Island. Nationally, let it be noted that tomorrow morning, when Punxsatawney Phil pokes his head out of his burrow and sniffs around for signs of spring, he will not be marking Groundhog’s Day or Groundhogs Day. It’ll be a singular event: Groundhog Day. And if he casts his shadow just right, maybe we can avoid misplaced apostrophes for six more weeks.

Note: Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Beall, Flickr Creative Commons

Bob Hicks, Books

Rabbit, rest: John Updike, 1932-2009

January 27, 2009 Bob Hicks 3 Comments

10924397 RABBIT’S AT REST.

At least, we can wish so for John Updike, the creator of the vivid American everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who through several novels fell from the heights of high school basketball stardom into the cultural maelstrom of the 1960s and ’70s, tried the straight and narrow, made a fool of himself over women, became desperate, became rich, became old, and always, always, kept searching for … for what? For whatever it is we search for in this nervous, impatient nation of ours.

Today, at the early age of 76, Updike died from lung cancer in a Massachusetts hospice near his home. A novelist, short-story writer, essayist and poet of prodigious output whose work was praised for its grace and humor and panned for all sorts of reasons, up to and including the purported clumsiness of his sex scenes (just last November Britain’s Literary Review magazine awarded him the Bad Sex in Fiction lifetime achievement award), Updike seemed an unlikely subject for the occasional exasperation and pettiness that his work attracted. Maybe it was because he and many of his characters were unapologetically middle class in their underpinnings — too high an aspiration for some of his critics, too low an aspiration for others. Mark Feeney, writing in today’s Boston Globe, quotes Updike: â€œWhen I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.â€

To me, there was honor in that so-American attempt to create myth from the everyday and supposedly mundane, as he did in his Rabbit novels and in such writings as his early novel The Centaur. Stylistically the two writers had almost nothing in common, but it’s apt to note that, in the theatrical world, Arthur Miller did the same thing. And wasn’t Walt Whitman, when he sang the possibilities of the men and women of this adolescent country, thinking of the same sort of people who would come to find themselves caught in the webs that Updike strove to understand?

For all of Rabbit’s importance, and for all the fuss his Witches of Eastwick and other novels sometimes kicked up, I have an abiding affection for another Updike character: Henry Bech, the irascible, august fictional novelist who eventually ascends from the mess of his everyday existence to become a winner of the Nobel Prize. Bech is the central character in what may be the funniest scene ever written about writer’s block — when he sits on a Caribbean beach, drinks and nubile companionship and fat publisher’s fee at hand, with no task but to autograph a huge pile of one of his novels, and finally becomes so paralyzed that his pen freezes in midair: He’s forgot his name.

We’ll not forget the names of Bech, and Rabbit, and John Updike. Rest well, gentlemen. You deserve it.

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Film, General, Language, Music, Theater, Visual Art

From Lar to PAW: a Monday link and scatter

January 26, 2009 Bob Hicks 1 Comment

Lar Lubovich Dance Company. Photo: ROSE Things have been busy here at Scatter Central the last few days; so busy that we haven’t had a chance to post since we left poor Jean-Paul Belmondo in the clutches of all
those nasty French critics. Never mind, Jean-Paul. As far as we’re concerned here on our far side of the puddle, you’ll always throw a mean left hook.

So, time for a little update.

Lar Lubovitch, a genuine. living and working part of American dance history, shows up Wednesday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, and the White Bird dance series reports it still has good tickets available. The Lubovitch company hasn’t toured in 10 years, and it’s been a good deal longer than that since it’s been in Portland, so this is a good opportunity. The program looks intriguing, and all of the dances are relatively recent: last year’s Jangle, Four Hungarian Dances, set to Bela Bartok’s Rhapsodies #1 and #2 for Violin and Piano; 2000’s Men’s Stories, A Concerto in Ruins, with audio collage and original score by Scott Marshall; and 2007’s Dvorak Serenade, set to Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade in E Major. Plus, Lubovitch will be on hand for a question and answer session after the show.

White Bird has some deals on tickets, including 30-buck Level 3 seats, in addition to its usual student/senior rush tickets two hours before the 7:30 curtain. Details here.

mandy_greer_dare_alla_luce_05 Over at his alternate-universe home, Portland Arts Watch (or PAW, as we like to call it), Scatter impresario Barry Johnson has been following the proposed merger between two Portland art stalwarts: the financially struggling Museum of Contemporary Craft and the recently vigorous Pacific Northwest College of Art. Good idea? Bad idea? Necessary idea? In his Monday column in The Oregonian and on Oregon Live, Barry comes down with a case of cautious optimism. Read it here.

And speaking of synchronicity (we were, weren’t we?) my review of the craft museum’s two newest exhibits, by installation artist Mandy Greer and textile artist Darrel Morris, will run on Friday, Jan. 30, in The Oregonian’s A&E section and on Oregon Live. Look for it then.

Did we say alternate-universe homes? We’re embarrassed to reveal that only recently have we discovered the second virtual home of one of our best online friends, the ubiquitous and perspicacious Mighty Toy Cannon of the invaluable Portland arts and culture site Culture Shock. Seems MTC also maintains a fascinating, if less regular, music site called, appropriately, Mighty Toy Cannon. From Nick Lowe and Richard Fontaine to Ruth Brown and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, MTC takes a welcome and refreshing curatorial approach to the wonders of the YouTube musical world. Give it a look, and a listen.

Meanwhile, who’d have guessed that the path to understanding Henry James runs through William Shakespeare’s most infamous stage direction? (That’s “exuent, pursued by a bear,” from The Winter’s Tale, by the way.) The grapevine that slithers through our mutual abode tells us that Part Five of Laura Grimes’ running riff on all things Jamesean, coming Sunday, Feb. 1, in The Oregonian’s books pages and on Oregon Live, is going to be a doozy, complete with Shakespearean bear. In yesterday’s Part Four, Grimes — Friend and Supporter of Art Scatter First Class — gets caught up in a neighborhood book group and unveils a Henry James contest, complete with a prize. Read it here.

Portland’s stages have been simply aburst with fresh new work, thanks to the citywide Fertile Ground festival of new plays. At The Oregonian, Scatter friend Marty Hughley kept up with some of the most recent action in Monday’s paper: Read it here.

Scatter’s been hitting the festival, too. We’ve already run our report on Apollo and Vitriol and Violets. And my review of Northwest Children’s Theater and School‘s new jazz version of Alice in Wonderland also ran in Monday’s Oregonian; read it here.

reGeneration: 50 photographers of Tomorrow, a traveling exhibit that’s just landed in the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, is a chilly but pretty darned fascinating look at 50 young photographers worldwide whose work, the shows’s curators believe, will still be vital and important in the year 2025. My review ran in brief in Monday’s Oregonian; for the much more complete version, see it on Oregon Live here.

Finally, we’ve been amused and bemused by the misadventures of operatic tenor Jon Villars, who walked off the stage during a dress rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, reportedly because he didn’t like the conductor’s tempo. Here at Art Scatter, we confess to skipping out on a show early a time or two over the years, too. But not when we were part of the cast.

Bob Hicks, Film, General

Jean-Paul Belmondo: Tough guys finish first

January 22, 2009 Bob Hicks Leave a comment

Hillary Clinton got a quick stamp of approval from the Senate, President Obama rolled up his sleeves and got to work, Caroline Kennedy withdrew from the New York senatorial race, LeBron James steamrolled the Trail Blazers, the Pacific Northwest College of Art agreed in principle to take over the ailing Museum of Contemporary Craft and Portland Mayor Sam Adams fought an uphill battle for his political life.

But for my money the best read in the Thursday papers was Elaine Sciolino’s report in the New York Times on the French movie god Jean-Paul Belmondo and the release of his latest film, Un Homme et Son Chien (A Man and His Dog), based on Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 neorealist classic Umberto D.

Belmondo, he of the broken nose and the seductive grin and the street-tough physique, is 75 now, and people don’t like to see their physical idols grow old: Think of the matronly-plump Elizabeth Taylor, all comfortable at last inside her expansive body, or the Botoxed-so-hard Sophia Loren, so tight in the face that her eyes seem stretched halfway around her temples.

But Belmondo committed a deeper sin. Not only did he age, he also degenerated. He had a stroke in 2001 that left him speechless for six months, with a basically useless right side. He’s struggled back, and speaks now, with difficulty, and has regained some of the use of his body. But he is now plainly, as they say, disabled. And that’s how he plays his new role, as an aging, stoved-up, slowly disintegrating man. “It’s me,” he tells Sciolino, “without any special effects.”

The French press has not been amused. As Sciolino reports, Un Homme et Son Chien has been greeted with responses ranging from so-so embarrassment to downright outrage. “One can only be staggered by this portrayal of decrepitude ….,” the magazine Le Point moaned. Le Monde complained about “melodramatic overstatement” and “the effort visibly made by the actor in the dialogue.” Le Matin, swinging for the fences, pronounced the entire enterprise “absolutely despicable.” Even Belmondo’s onetime co-star Arielle Dombasle (Amazon, 2000) got into the act. “He is not cerebral,” she said. “People want to see their hero. To see him as an old man who loves his dog is ridiculous.”

All of this makes me want to see Un Homme et Son Chien very much. As anyone who’s ever read Norse mythology (or Greek, for that matter) knows, even gods die eventually. And it strikes me as monumentally courageous of Belmondo to own up to that profoundly simple fact and let us look in on the process. Maybe the movie’s lousy: I don’t know. But I can only admire a god who comes to even an uneasy peace with his mortality and quietly makes it part of his never-ending story.

*********************

Gods do die, of course, and we remember them in their prime. For Cary Grant it’s The Philadelphia Story or North by Northwest, not Father Goose. I don’t know why thinking about Belmondo got me also thinking about Grant — their screen personas are very different — but it did. Maybe it’s because they were both stars in the old-fashioned sense: magnetic actors who played themselves, no matter what their role happened to be. We have wonderful actors on screen now, and several of them “better” than Belmondo or Grant, in that lose-yourself-in-the-role-and-create-something-new protean sense. But do they have the same impact?

Contemporary film has no Cary Grant. Hugh Grant may come the closest to Cary Grant the light comedian, but for all his comic skill, Hugh has no dark shadings. Harrison Ford approaches Cary Grant’s impact as a dramatic actor, but Ford hasn’t struck a funny note since the Star Wars movies, and even in those it was comic-book comedy. If you could somehow fuse Ford and Hugh Grant you’d get one genuine old-fashioned movie star.

Think about that the next time you watch Bringing Up Baby or Indiscreet. And think about what an extraordinary actor Cary Grant was.

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

‘Apollo’ and ‘Vitriol’: New plays, old obsessions on stage

January 20, 2009 Bob Hicks 3 Comments

The big buzz this week on Portland’s art scene is Friday’s official kickoff of Fertile Ground, a citywide festival of new plays big, small and in between. The sheer ambition of this thing is impressive and endearing and a little scary: How ever will we manage to get to all this stuff?

Well, we won’t.

But we did get a head start over the weekend, taking in last Friday’s opening night of Nancy Keystone’s gigantic Apollo at Portland Center Stage and, on Saturday night, a preview performance of the new and improved Vitriol and Violets, this time with songs and lyrics by the astute and clever jazz composer and pianist Dave Frishberg.

In the theater world “new” plays almost always emerge out of a long process, and both of these have, well, a little history behind them, in a couple of senses. Keystone’s been playing with Apollo for eight years, and its first two acts have been produced before, in Los Angeles. Act Three, funded in part by Center Stage, now joins them for the first time in this new production, creating the complete play. V&V, the Algonquin Round Table play written by Shelly Lipkin, Louanne Moldovan and Sherry Lamoreaux, has also been around the block with a couple of previous work-in-progress productions. This one is the first with Frishberg’s witty songs, and it’s also undergone a lot of streamlining (a few characters have been banished to the wings) and some welcome shaping, making it feel more like a finished play — although the authors say they’re still making adjustments.

More to the point, both plays are about the American character, as measured through real historical characters and events, and both deal with the gap between the buoyant public perception and the tougher reality of the historic episodes they choose to portray.

Oddly, they go about their similar tasks from almost opposite directions.

Keystone’s Apollo is epic theater — “total theater,” this sort of thing is sometimes called — with a grandiosity that splashes wide, wide, wide and occasionally focuses down to the human particular. It comes at you in waves of choreographed sight and sound. And out of its cold sweep of history, a few vivid personalities eventually emerge.

Vitriol and Violets is far more traditional in its theatricality, reeling you in with the particular human comedy of outsize characters such as Alexander Woollcott and Dorothy Parker and letting the history tumble out almost unannounced. Having seduced you with laughter, it doesn’t announce its more serious attentions: It quietly lowers the boom.

Continue reading ‘Apollo’ and ‘Vitriol’: New plays, old obsessions on stage →

Bob Hicks, General, Language

The inauguration: a high-flying day to remember

January 20, 2009 Bob Hicks 22 Comments

Our neighbor Barb had a bunch of people over this morning to watch the inauguration ceremonies, and the mood was festive: Coffee and bubbly for breakfast will do that. But it wasn’t just the refreshment. There was relief, and anticipation, and — OK, yes — hope. A sense that, as another neighbor, Karen, put it, “now we can have our flag back.” And indeed, she and her husband Ted had hung theirs on their front porch. Inspired, my wife followed suit. Beats all those years we’ve had the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag folded in the bedroom drawer.

What struck me most during this long but compelling (and by the looks of it, very cold) morning was that the power of language has reasserted itself at the center of our national conversation. Like Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. and his model, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama speaks with a plain but lofty straightforwardness. He assumes a certain level of intelligence on the part of his listeners, an ability to follow an argument. He was gracious in victory, which might be a tougher task than being gracious in defeat. He talked down to no one, but encouraged everyone to look up. When he spoke to a particular constituency it was not, as is usual with politicians, with an air of pandering or cynical duplicity but with a measure of inclusiveness and respect. And he melded, as no other politician I can think of since John F. Kennedy, the descriptive and inspirational aspects of language: a vision, yes, but also a caution that realizing a vision requires hard work. Obama’s pie is not in the sky. It’s grounded, practical, sustaining. And if it’s his recipe, it takes a lot of cooks.

I have no illusion that miracles will be worked. Barack Obama waves no wands, and he will make mistakes — probably a lot of them. He is only, it seems prudent to remind some of his more fervid followers, human. But he represents in so many ways the best of what being human means. And by loving and respecting language — by being able to articulate both his own goals and his vision of what our vast and intermingled culture can and ought to be — he helps all of us articulate our own roles in the body politic.

I’ve long believed that Abraham Lincoln is one of the tiny handful of genuine literary geniuses the United States has produced. In the beginning was the word, and it created reality. Oratorically, Obama is is no Lincoln, at least not yet: For clarity and conciseness and passion tethered to intelligence, nothing can match the Gettysburg Address. But clearly, from a literary point of view, Obama is in the Lincoln grain. He has the gifts to be, in the Lincolnian sense, a citizen artist. And it’s been a long time since the White House has seen the likes of that.

So, let the flag fly. Maybe this time, we can look at it as a promise and not a provocation.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Language

King, Obama, TR and Taft: thoughts about America

January 19, 2009 Bob Hicks 2 Comments

Today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’m thinking not just about the great civil rights leader but also about the state of the nation — where we’ve been, where we are, where we might be going. That leads me to reflections on a couple of former presidents, and also on the challenges facing our newest president, Barack Hussein Obama, who will be sworn into office tomorrow. And I’m thinking of what advice Dr. King, who never held a public office but was one of our greatest leaders ever, might have for Mr. Obama, who takes office at a time of multiple perils and instability.

So, first: to Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, the man who succeeded TR as president in 1908 and whose bid for a second term Roosevelt scuttled in his own failed third-party campaign in 1912, awarding the presidency to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. We don’t usually think of Taft as one of our more nimble presidential thinkers, but he did have his moments, as Candice Millard passes along in her fine book The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, which we discussed earlier here. Here’s what Taft had to say about the man who first put him into the White House and later kicked him out:

“The truth is, he believes in war and wishes to be a Napoleon and to die in the battle field. He has the spirit of the old berserkers.”

Roosevelt was a great man, but we’ve had enough of that. You can’t say George W. Bush has the spirit of a berserker — this is not a man who wants to go onto a battlefield and join in the carnage himself — but he has acted with an impetuous relish for war when patience and diplomacy would have served the entire world far better. Obama, we have the feeling, is not a rash man. Yet, as all presidents are, he will always be pushed by those advising quick and violent action.

So it’s good — not just today, but all days — to listen to Dr. King. Here are a few of his thoughts, for Barack Obama and for all of us:

“Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”

“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

“War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.”

“All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Food, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

We’re No. 1 with a dart! (pass it along)

January 17, 2009 Bob Hicks 8 Comments

Actually, it’s a multiply shared No. 1, a sort of pay-it-forward No. 1, a chain-letter pat on the back that feels nice and warm and fuzzy.

From somewhere out of the blue (OK, it was from our cyberspace friend Rose City Reader, the literary omnivore who in the real world hangs out just a few blocks away) comes to Art Scatter the Premios Dardo Award.

It’s not the Nobel, it’s not an Oscar or even a Pulitzer. But neither is it a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme. No money changes hands (isn’t that just life in the blogosphere, though?). The Premios Dardo robs no one of their dignity or life savings. It’s simply a way of saying, we like what you do, and we’d like you to tell us whose work you admire on the Web. Fair enough. A lot of wheezing takes place on the Net, and one good way to get to the fresh air is to listen to recommendations from people you trust.

We haven’t been able to track down where the Premios Dardo Awards began or who’s behind them, but it really doesn’t matter. By this point it’s a crazy quilt stretched loosely across the globe, and we’re happy to add our few stitches to the pattern. (As near as our feeble translating abilities can figure out, by the way, “Premios Dardo” means roughly “Top Dart.”)

Here are the rules:

1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person that has granted the award and his or her blog link.

2) Pass the award to another 15 blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.

3) Remember to contact each of them to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

So, here goes. Here’s our pick of 15, listed in that boring-but-still-useful old alphabetical order. If you haven’t already, give ’em a look. You might find some new friends:

Bunny With an Art Blog

Charles Noble’s Daily Observations

Culture Shock

Dave Allen’s Pampelmoose

Dramma per Musica

Little Red Bike Cafe

Mark Russell’s CulturePulp

Mead Hunter’s Blogorrhea

Port

Portland Architecture

Portland Spaces/Burnside Blog

Reading Copy Book Blog

Splattworks