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.
Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Bad Boys, baby dolls and dance as schlock therapy

2 Comments

Regular Art Scatter contributor Martha Ullman West, a noted national dance writer, went to see White Bird’s presentation of the Bad Boys of Dance at Portland’s Newmark Theatre on Thursday night. She was not amused. But as usual, her take on the performance is both amusing and enlightening. Here’s her report:


I’ve never much cared for dancing dolls, including those in the first act of The Nutcracker; Coppelia, in which there are a slew of them; and Petrouchka. Mary Oslund made an interesting piece with dolls as a metaphor of sorts some years ago — Reflex Doll it was called, and it was a witty antidote to The Nutcracker, since it premiered in December. And Mark Morris made an extremely unpleasant and powerful piece about child abuse called Lovey, in which his dancers performed with small, naked baby dolls.


But the Bad Boys of Dance really took the mickey on Thursday night when they came pouring onto the stage of the Newmark Theater in the fourth piece on a program of entertaining enough if derivative dances bearing life-sized inflatable mannequins (boynequins?) that looked a hell of a lot like sex dolls. And accompanied, for god’s sake, by a recording of Maria Callas singing the habanera from Carmen. The audience adored it. I wanted to walk out.

Continue reading Bad Boys, baby dolls and dance as schlock therapy →

Bob Hicks, General, Music

Willa Dorsey, 1933-2009: Farewell to God’s golden voice

2 Comments

Sad news in this morning’s Oregonian, as reported by Nancy Haught: Willa Dorsey, the great gospel singer who lived in Portland between her worldwide rambles, died Jan. 5 after a series of strokes. She was 75. Her funeral will be at 11 a.m. Wednesday at the International Fellowship Family, 4401 N.E. 122nd Ave., Portland.

Despite her high-flying career, Dorsey wasn’t terrifically well-known in her adopted home town — except in church circles and among fellow musicians. She was a sweet woman with an amazing voice, and a fine pianist, and she somehow managed to combine down-home humility with a regal air. I spent some time with her in 1991, working on some stories for The Oregonian on gospel music and its influence on American art and culture, and I’ve remembered her fondly ever since, although in the succeeding years I ran into her only two or three times. In her memory — and to introduce Willa to those of you who never knew her or her music — I’m going to post two stories that originally ran in The Oregonian on Dec. 22, 1991. These are time capsules, but they get at something of the spirit of Willa’s music and remarkable life. This post is a profile of Willa; the one below is its companion story about gospel music, and it includes more information about her. Goodbye, Willa. As you would have said, God bless.

———————————————————————

It might have been 1939, she thinks. Young Willa Dorsey, maybe 6 years old, was playing outside, idly running through a few tunes she’d heard at church.

Suddenly she heard her mother, alert and mildly worried, calling sharply from inside:

“Who’s out there with you?”

“I said, `No one,’ ” Dorsey recalls with amusement.

“She said, `There has to be. I heard someone singing.’

“I said, `That’s me.’ ”

Dorsey pauses, then leaps into her punchline:

“And she didn’t believe me!”

No wonder: It just sounded too good. But a couple of quick demonstrations convinced Mr. and Mrs. Dorsey that their daughter had been hiding a special talent — “a God-given gift,” as Willa firmly puts it. Soon she was singing on stages in her home town of Atlanta, Ga.

For half a century, she hasn’t stopped.

Now 58, Dorsey is Portland’s most prominent gospel singer, though most of her performances are out of town. She can look back on a career that’s taken her to national television audiences, to presidential prayer breakfasts (“Mrs. Bush and I are friends,” she says offhandedly. “We correspond.”), to featured roles in several Billy Graham crusades, and around the world for acclaimed performances in countries as far-flung as Germany, Sri Lanka, Brazil and Japan. She’s as comfortable with a 90-piece symphony orchestra or a 2,000-voice choir as she is alone behind a piano keyboard.

And she’s still singing those songs she heard in church.

Continue reading Willa Dorsey, 1933-2009: Farewell to God’s golden voice →

Bob Hicks, General, Music

The river of gospel, running through America

2 Comments

Like the post above, this story — which ran originally in The Oregonian on Dec. 22, 1991 — is a tribute to the great gospel singer Willa Dorsey, who died in Portland on Jan. 5 at age 75. Above is my profile of Dorsey from 17 years ago. Here is its companion piece, about the role of gospel music in American art and culture, with more contributions from Dorsey. May she sing with the angels.

————————————————————————————–

“O sing unto the Lord a new song, for He hath done marvelous things. With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the Lord, thy King.” — Psalm 98

“Why should the devil have all the good tunes?” — John Wesley (1703-1791), founder of Methodism

Like a great river rolling underground, American gospel music is a fount of life bubbling just below public consciousness. Maybe you don’t know it’s there. But it’s been nourishing you all your life.

Born in the churches and nurtured as a celebration and protection against emotional harm, black gospel music has watered an astonishing amount of the country’s popular music — blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, street corner do-wop, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, even contemporary pop by the likes of Prince and Michael Jackson.

As Christmas approaches, Americans are caught up in other countries’ musical traditions: carols from England; high-church music from Germany and Italy; “Nutcracker” fantasies courtesy of a melodic, grandfatherly 19th-century Russian.

But there is also a sound of celebration much closer to the native grain: as close as the doors to such North and Northeast Portland churches as Maranatha and Mt. Olivet Baptist. In those vibrant congregations and others like them, the flame of a peculiarly American tradition is kept enthusiastically alive.

Continue reading The river of gospel, running through America →

Bob Hicks, Books, Environment, Film, General, Theater

Caroline, Jeb, Teddy and literary dynasties: Bully!

3 Comments

So Caroline Kennedy, holder of a fabled name, wants to take over the Senate seat of Hillary Rodham Clinton, holder of another fabled name — but not if Andrew Cuomo, son of a prickly politico also named Cuomo, has anything to say about it. And Jeb Bush, holder of a recently soiled name, has decided that this isn’t the greatest time to join the Senate from the great state of Florida, even if his dad, the founder of America’s most recent presidential dynasty, says Jeb would be a boffo president someday.

Why should anyone be surprised that politics is a family business? We’re used to it in the arts.

Theater and the movies positively wallow in it, from the Booths to the Royal Family itself, the Barrymores (I have a soft spot for the 2007 movie Music and Lyrics, with Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant, a piece of cinematic fluff that seems to me to catch a lot of the spirit of the old screwball comedies) to all those hard-to-sort out Baldwins and Arquettes and Sheens.

Writers, too. There are the Buckleys (I don’t care which way your politics lean; Christopher’s blog at The Daily Beast is one of the funniest things on the Web these days) and, as Rose City Reader reminds us, the Amises, and here in Oregon, William and Kim Stafford, and … you get the idea.

I’m reminded of all this familial overfamiliarity not just by the news but also by my current reading project, Candice Millard’s 2005 book The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, about Teddy’s near-fatal journey to the wilds of central South America in 1913 and ’14, after he’d lost his Bull Moose third-party bid for a third presidential term in 1912. (Another fellow named Roosevelt, of course, carried us through and past the Dust Bowl days.)

They don’t make presidents like Teddy anymore, which is a good and a bad thing. He was an imperialist meddler and a guy who longed to get into a good war; an impetuous can-do sort with all sorts of contradictions: One of our earliest and most important conservationists, he was also a voracious big-game trophy hunter. Teddy was an outsized personality, and John Alexander’s spot-on parody of him as a nut case charging up the stairs and burying stiffs in the basement in Arsenic and Old Lace brings tears of laughter to my eyes every time I see it.

Continue reading Caroline, Jeb, Teddy and literary dynasties: Bully! →

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General

Scatter links: BodyVox, more fun with Hank, read U.S.A.!

7 Comments

Friend of Art Scatter D.K. Row, the reporting machine of Portland’s art scene, has a good behind-the-scenes cover story in the O! section of the Sunday Oregonian about dance company BodyVox‘s bold move (especially considering the state of the economy these days) into its own space in Northwest Portland. Row doesn’t just get into the economics, he also touches on the sometimes bruised feelings and occasional jealousies on the dance scene: As Row points out, BodyVox has access to some deep pockets that other contemporary dance organizations can’t touch. Read Row’s story here. And revisit Art Scatter’s own report from last fall, when BodyVox first showed off its new digs.

Meanwhile, nobody seems to want to have a beer with Henry James, although a few people suggest a cup of tea, or maybe a sherry. The Oregonian’s Laura Grimes follows up on her delightful piece from last Sunday about trying to read The Ambassadors (see below) with a second report on her adventures with Hank — this time with a lot of sterling literary responses from readers. The online version here includes a lot more responses than the print version in this Sunday’s Oregonian books pages. (For some reason or other we feel compelled to reveal that Ms. Grimes is married to one-third of Art Scatter. We leave it to the mathematicians among you to figure out exactly what that means.)

Finally, a shout-out to Liesl Schillinger for her review in this week’s New York Times Book Review of Louise Erdrich’s new collection of short stories, The Red Convertible. Quite sensibly, Schilinger writes admiringly about Erdrich: That’s as it should be. But what caught our eye was her opening salvo, a vociferous defense of American lit in general against the cold Arctic glare of those sneering Swedes of the Nobel establishment (she takes her argument, of course, much further than this, in some interesting ways):

“Last fall, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the group that hands out the Nobel Prize in Literature, disparaged American letters, saying our fiction was ‘too isolated, too insular’ and ‘too sensitive to trends’ in our own ‘mass culture’ (in short, too American) to matter much in the wider world. But it’s the very Americanness of our literature — the hybrid nature of our national makeup, our mania for self-invention and reinvention — that captured the international imagination at a time when most readers could never visit the country they dreamed about. It still does today.

“Americanness needs no apology; it’s the strength of our letters.


Thanks, Liesl. We needed that. Young and crude and immature we may be, but we are also creative and energetic and — yes — idealistic, and we still believe that art can and should be a democratic expression. Your question near the end of your essay — “(I)s the capacity for the quiet use of leisure, something essential to reading, on the wane?” — is pertinent to the entire world, a place that interestingly includes Sweden and the United States alike.

We hereby appoint Ms. Schillinger an honorary Friend of Art Scatter. Sadly, this honor comes with no Nobel prize money attached.

Bob Hicks, Environment, Food, General

Lighten up, lad: Diamond Jim, we hardly knew ye

9 Comments

Ah, 2008. The year when the fat got lean and the lean got leaner. The year when the big fat lie led to the big fat crash. The year when the faked memoir devolved from the merely mercenary and narcissistic to the unbearably sad and pitiable. The year, more cheerfully, when Obama won and the Yankees lost.

Oh, well. We’ll always have our heroes to look up to.

Oops. Turns out, Diamond Jim Brady was a fraud. Or maybe just a garden-variety (make that stockyard-variety) glutton. Or maybe it wasn’t him so much as his image-mongers, who seem to have larded the truth like it was a prize-winning pie crust at the county fair. David Kamp, in a mortally funny piece of debunkery in this morning’s New York Times, has pricked Diamond Jim’s balloon, reducing his reputation like so much Slim-Fast: Turns out Brady was the bloated beginning of a reputational Ponzi scheme that leaves us tail-enders holding a severely depleted bag.

Granted, Brady’s an odd sort of hero in the first place — not a role model so much as a bigger-than-life phenomenon, a sort of Zeus (or maybe Dionysus) of the foodie set. Anything you could eat, he could eat bigger. And did, so the stories go, four or five times a day, in all-out cram-athons, often in the company of his gustatory inamorata Lillian Russell, the even more fabled songbird of the Gilded Age, whose appetites seemingly rivaled Catherine the Great’s.
Continue reading Lighten up, lad: Diamond Jim, we hardly knew ye →

Books, Cities, Environment, General, Language, Visual Art

Scatter links: A beer with Henry James, a bail-in for Detroit, why NOT sell off some art?

7 Comments

Cool things to read in other places:

— Laura Grimes, charter member of Friends of Art Scatter, has a delightful piece in the Sunday Oregonian’s books pages about reading Henry James‘s The Ambassadors (or trying to read it) on the bus, and whether James was quite the sort of fellow you could sit down and have a beer with. Read it here.

— Also in The Oregonian, on Monday’s op-ed page, is a bell-ringer by Tim Smith on how to “bail in” the reeling auto industry instead of bailing it out. Smith, a principal at SERA Architects in Portland and a Detroit native, suggests: “(L)et’s reorganize GM to replace it. Why not fund a conversion of General Motors from a purveyor of private transportation hardware to a planner, fabricator and supplier of a renewed, nationwide public transportation system?” An elegant, provacative piece, with some historical sting. Read it here.

— And, in case you missed it in the New York Times the day before Christmas, this intriguing piece via Art Journal about the brouhaha over deaccessioning art at museums to raise bucks, a move that’s recently put New York’s cash-strapped National Academy Museum in hot-to-boiling water. Is it an idea whose time has come? Maybe so, maybe no. Author Jori Finkel talks with, among others, former Portland Art Museum director Dan Monroe, now at the Peabody Essex Museum in Masachusetts. Read it here.

Bob Hicks, Books, Food, General

Merry Chriftmas, one and all: Feaft like lords and ladies

12 Comments


Now Chriftmas comes, ’tis fit that we
Should feaft and fing, and merry be
Keep open Houfe, let Fiddlers play
A Fig for Cold, fing Care away
And may they who thereat repine
On brown Bread and on fmall Beer dine

(Virginia Almanack, 1766)


I have discovered, of late, a dangerous aisle at Powell’s City of Books. More accurately, I have discovered the center of an aisle, in the cookbook section, beyond the volumes by celebrity chefs (where, among the Paula Deens and Mario Batalis and the occasional Peg Bracken I Hate To Cook Book you can sometimes find an old copy of one of Vincent and Mary Price’s grand collections of old American recipes or recollections of their adventures in great world restaurants) and before you hit the Great Big Collections of Foolishly Complex Recipes From Famous Magazines.

Here, in the middle, is a small row of shelves labeled collectors books (aren’t all books in a bookstore for collectors?) and on the shelves sit a continuously rotating selection of scruffy old volumes. Some are from the beginning of the last century and most are of little consequence but every now and again the shelves yield a true find for anyone interested, as I am, in the history of foodways and its interconnection wth the daily life of the past. It was here I found, not long go, the daftly entertaining 1938 Cheddar Gorge: A Book of English Cheeses, edited capriciously by Sir John Squire and peppered with delicious illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard.

More to the seasonal point, here is where I found The Williamsburg Art of Cookery, or, Accomplifh’d Gentlewoman’s Companion: Being a Collection of upwards of Five Hundred of the moft Ancient & Approv’d Recipes in Virginia Cookery, a 1966 reprinting of a book originally copyrighted in 1938, which was itself a collection with commentary of receipts and reminiscences from the 1600s to the mid-1800s. This is where I found the quote from the Virginia Almanack at the top of this post. And it’s where I found this report, filed by “Monfieur Durand, a Frenchman journeying through Virginia in the Chriftmas holiday Seafon in 1686″:

We were now approaching the Chriftmas Festival. Milor Parker was, as I have faid, a Roman Catholic … He wifhed now to pafs Chriftmas Day in Maryland, and as we were only five or fix Leagues diftant and had no Defire to leave him, it was agreed that all fhould go to fpend the Night with Colonel Fitzhugh, whofe Houfe is on the Shore of the great River Potomac …

Mr. Wormeley is fo beloved and efteemed in thefe Parts that all Gentlemen of Confideration of the Countryfide we traverfed came to meet him, and, as they rode with us, it refulted that by the Time we reached Col. Fitzhugh’s we made up a Troop of 20 Horfe. The Colonel’s Accomodations were, however, fo ample that this Company gave him no Trouble at all; we were all fupplied with Beds, though we had, indeed, to double up. Col. Fitzhugh fhowed us the largeft Hofpitality. He had Store of good Wine and other Things to drink, and a Frolic enfued. He called in three Fiddlers, a Clown, a tight rope Dancer and an acrobatic Tumbler, and gave us all the Divertifement one could wifh. It was very cold but no one thought of going near the Fire becaufe they never put lefs than the Trunk of a Tree upon it and fo the entire Room was kept warm.


As your guests plow through the Great Blizzard of Aught Eight to get to your holiday table, may your fiddlers and clown and dancer and tumbler also arrive safely and happily. Even if it takes them 20 Horfe to get there.

Bob Hicks, Food, General, Visual Art

Merry solstice, pagans, scientists and true believers

2 Comments

Today is Winter Solstice, and as my late father-in-law used to say, have you noticed the days are getting longer?

Well, no, not in the afterdaze of the snowstorm that’s punched the Pacific Northwest and reminded me, if briefly, of my stint living in Upstate New York, a long time ago. In those days I knew how to drive in the snow — even a pathetic yellow Ford Pinto that would start only after I opened the hood and stuck a stick inside the solenoid so the fuel could get going and do its job. This required a procedure involving a return to the driver’s seat to turn the key, then another trip outside to take the stick out of the solenoid and slam the hood down, making sure I’d set the dodgy emergency brake in the meantime. It was a neat trick in winter weather that might be 15 degrees above or 15 below, but when you’re in your 20s you’re capable of miraculous things.

And here we are, 35 years later, in another season of miraculous things — or coincidental occurrences, or events fully within the statistical model of probability, depending on how you view these things. Last night at 11:38 my mother-in-law arrived at Portland’s Union Station on an Amtrak run from Seattle that had been scheduled to arrive at 5:50 but was slowed down by little inconveniences that included a derailed freight train and several frozen couplings that had to be unfrozen so her train could pass. No, I don’t know how they do that. Somewhere along the line, when it became apparent that the train was going to be several hours late, the Amtrak people offered their passenger-hostages a movie to while away the wait — if they paid four bucks. Some people will regard the train’s eventual safe arrival as a miracle. All people will agree that Amtrak’s version of hospitality under duress falls well within the statistical model of probability.

Today, on the solstice, all is well. We might not make it out of the house (or beyond the lure of snowballs in the yard, although both cats have ventured trepidatiously out of doors, and I’ve just been reminded that the neighbor across the street is throwing an open house later this afternoon, with lots of food and drink). But the larder is full, and a log’s on the fire — it’s made of compressed coffee grounds, which I’ve persuaded myself come from organically grown, fair-trade, visions-of-a-better-life beans. Tuaca and bourbon and cider and eggnog are available, and the resident 11-year-old, master of decorative gift-wrapping, has been busily bundling presents not destined for his own stash and then arranging them beneath the Christmas tree, which seems glowingly unaware of its dual role in Christian and pagan symbolism.

One of those presents, which my wife discovered a few days ago, is a Wiccan cookbook filled with delightful old woodcut prints and recipes that may or may not actually be useful: In a case like this, the recipes aren’t really the point. This one will be opened by a devotee of the culturally alternative and pleasingly esoteric. We like thinking about the old ways, even if we also think that electricity and modern medicine are pretty nifty things.

There will be no Wicker Man in our household this season. Our traditions are more Christian and, in my daughter’s case, Jewish. But these things get smudged and crossed and fused. We are all, inside our heads and traditions and belief systems, something like Frankensteinian monsters, stitched together from who knows what? — and that’s really not such a bad or alarming thing.

This morning I cruised through Art Knowledge News, a site I like to check out every couple of days, and discovered a pair of intriguing exhibitions arriving soon in England that illustrate, coincidentally, the hybrid quality of contemporary life. The first, to be shown starting in February at Yale and then moving to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, celebrates the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth by showing the effect of his revolutionary recalibration of natural causation on the world of art. The second, opening in April at the Tate Britain, is a restaging of William Blake’s only solo art show, in 1809, with all of its mystic, angelic, otherworldly vision of something vastly beyond the commonplace.

Somehow, historically and culturally, I find myself able to embrace both.

I suppose that’s a miracle.

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General

Architecture notes: Doyle’s demise, Sam’s folly

8 Comments

At the risk of making Art Scatter look like an architecture and planning blog (we’re deeply interested, but others cover the territory fare more systematically) a couple of things are sticking in our craw. Well, my craw, at any rate.

First, the Riverdale School District’s decision to tear down an A.E. Doyle-designed elementary school in Dunthorpe, a move that’s far from surprising but depressing and exasperating, nevertheless: You get the feeling that the board never took the preservation case seriously; it just bulled ahead and did what it wanted to do. Noblesse, you might say, without the oblige. We wrote about this a while back. Now, we can’t think of any response better than those from Scatter friends Tim DuRoche, on his Portland Spaces blog, and Brian Libby, on his Portland Architecture blog. Read ’em and weep. Or get angry. Or both. This 1920 school building isn’t major Doyle, but it’s a model of how to do a modest building the right way — and after all, aren’t most buildings in most places modest? If you get the modest buildings right, the major buildings will follow suit.


Second — and not wanting to pick on Mayor-elect Sam Adams, who has a lot of energy and a lot of ideas — but what in the pluperfect hell is with his insistence on building that white elephant of a convention center hotel? I thought Metro had finally stuck a silver spike in this 600-room monster’s heart, but no: Sam just won’t let it die the death it deserves. This truly seems to be a case where money interests are overruling common sense and good public policy, which really ought to go together.

Let’s be clear about a few things.

— First, the chances of this $227 million project ever paying for itself are about as good as Bill O’Reilly’s shot at acing out Hillary and becoming Obama’s secretary of state. And let’s not even get into how much that estimated $227 million would actually end up being.

Continue reading Architecture notes: Doyle’s demise, Sam’s folly →