Category Archives: Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson, General

A little pre-election scatter to help the obsessed

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Suddenly, the great David Clark Five song came to mind, which must mean I’m in pieces, bits and pieces. And indeed I am.

Our friends at Culture Shock, specifically MightyToyCannon, have been assembling a growing soundtrack of songs to get us through the election. As of this morning the clips numbered 17, and the last one was Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime. We feel some degree of participation because of our Leonard Cohen suggestion (Democracy, below), and we should have tipped you off earlier, because it does ease the anxiety level to hear, say, Ray Charles singing Hit the Road Jack or Curtis Mayfield landing on We Got to Have Peace.

Scatter does occasionally recognize a fellow-Scatterer — in this case it’s Richard Kessler, who writes the Dewey21C blog at Artsjournal. (We often look over the Artsjournal blogs, btw.) In his latest post, Kessler discusses how he came, finally, to enjoy Steve Reich. The key paragraph:

The first time I remember really finding my way with Reich’s music was at a dance performance. There was something about following the dance, the visual aspect, that allowed me to take the music in, in an entirely different way. I wasn’t listening for a certain progression, a certain phrase, a certain architecture–all the things I had been trained to listen for in music, but instead I felt the music, took it in–allowed it to wash over me. Watching the dance made it possible. It was as if a switch was flipped.

But the trip to that moment and then his circling back to his main concern, art education, is, well, quite a scatter. We are big Reich fans, too, and when we hear something by Philip Glass that we really like, we often discover that it’s really by Steve Reich. (Aw c’mon, that’s mean!)

Studs Terkel, who died last week at 96, practiced an engaged, passionate kind of journalism, the kind that fights for and celebrates the little guy against the big guy, the kind we don’t see much of these days as the “profession” has “professionalized”. And it does have its limits — that radical a reduction of the doings in the monkey tree is bound to leave some things out and to become predictable after a fashion. Except that Studs explored the particular manifestations of the little guy and his (or her) struggle against the bully, the boss, the powers that be, the particular stories, the particular characters, and suddenly predictability wasn’t an issue. Scatter friend Tim DuRoche remembered Terkel, the urbanist, on his Burnside Blog at Portland Spaces. William Grimes’s essay in the New York Times is also well worth a read. The Chicago Tribune (in
Terkel’s hometown) also remembers him at length.

We are reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and we finally figure out why. Chabon is coming to Portland to speak as part of Congregation Beth Israel’s 150th anniversary. His speech (5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 23, 1972 N.W. Flanders) is entitled, Imaginary Homelands: Themes of Jewish Identity in Popular Fiction, which fits nicely with the The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which is about an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska. My favorite part from last night’s reading: The bad guys have tossed the unconscious main character, Detective Landsman, into a detention cell which contains a child’s wastebasket. Gradually, Landsman’s comes to.

“Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy. An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.”

Oh, yeah.

Barry Johnson, Theater

Memories of “Vladimir, Vladimir”

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Memories fade. They begin vividly and then start to decay. And worse than decay, they start to deform. Until they are no longer very reliable. Valuable perhaps but not reliable. And then they vanish altogether. That’s one good way to think about memory.

Another way to think about it. We store our memories in a honeycomb of chambers. Sometimes we wander into one of the chambers and it’s dried out and empty. Nothing there of consequence. And then maybe the chamber collapses entirely. Much of the time, though, the chambers contain SOMETHING — a little drama, a smell, a lesson, maybe a song, sung just so by James Brown (Please, Please, Please). Weirdly, we are often rummaging around these chambers, yes, even when we are young.

We could come up with some other metaphors, too, I suppose, but I want to consider these two a bit, and how they relate to Imago’s Vladimir, Vladimir,
which I saw earlier this month and having succumbed to germs (among other things) never got back to. So this discussion about memory isn’t about Imago, really, it’s about me! Though we will get to Jerry Mouawad’s Vladimir, which closed last weekend, one way or another and soon.
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Barry Johnson, General, Music

Leonard Cohen: “Democracy” to the rescue!

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OK, you know I’ve been moaning about this election and the Death of Democracy, ad nauseum. But it’s a sunny October Saturday, and courtesy of my brother-in-law, a little hope just blew in, a reminder really, in the form of Leonard Cohen’s Democracy. Now, I can’t embed this video for you (I’m just not that good a hacker), but I heartily recommend following the link.

I think what makes me happiest about this song is how Cohen links this very abstract idea, democracy, with what it’s like to knock around on the ground in U.S.A. (or anywhere, really). And I especially like his suggestion of the erotics of democracy! (Its toward the end.)

Barry Johnson, General

Art Scatter sniffles through the campaign

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Some precincts of Art Scatter have been ill. Not desperately ill, not hardly. But sick enough to stay home and do battle with cold germs that are tougher than Scatter is. We are not looking for sympathy, though, not for the interminable snuffling and sniffing and, um, draining, because we know that’s just part of the cold game since mankind’s days on the savannah, except now we have delicate tissues to caress our even more delicate membranes and powerful decongestants that suck every drop of liquid from the nasal system at the same time they addle the senses, a trade that seems reasonable enough when you make it.

What do we deserve some sympathy for? Well, for several days we followed the presidential campaign. On television. From the major networks to the news cable channels, from Tom Brokaw to Rachel Maddow, from Fox News to Bloomberg News, from clips of Joe Biden suggesting melodramatically that somewhere even as we watch bad men were planning to “test the mettle” of a President Obama in some drummed up foreign crisis or another soon after the election to clips of John McCain yapping about Joe the plumber as though he actually WAS a real plumber and as though we actually cared.

A few important things happened — Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, for example, a model of direct, pertinent argument. But his arguments weren’t taken up, explored, tested, extended, refuted. No, they were immediately swallowed up by the horse race, by the media chattering heads, by the spinners, who as always embarrassed themselves in the process, but never mind, they’ve done it over and over and over again in the past. And then they disappeared in the charges that Obama is a socialist for advocating tax policies that McCain supported in 2000. Or that Palin is a hypocrite for wearing $150,000 worth of fancy clothing that no real soccer mom could afford, even though soccer moms rarely face TV cameras day after day after day as they run for vice-president. Of course, this trivial criticism is matched by a legion of trivial comments made by the candidate herself, most of them serving merely to belittle herself.
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Barry Johnson, Dance, General

Art Scatter goes to dance appreciation class

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Oh man, we left you hanging there for a couple of days with Thomas Hobbes! Art Scatter can be SO cruel. What can I say? We watched some debate. We watched some Project Runway (Leanne won!). We prepared to meet a roomful of students in Linda K. Johnson’s dance appreciation class at Portland State University. We didn’t blog.

Maybe I should say a few words about that dance appreciation class. First of all, it sounds like a great class. Linda, who has been involved in some of the very most interesting projects around the city in the past decade (and more!), including the Halprin fountain City Dance event and overseeing a year of artist-in-residencies in the South Waterfront district, has set up a pretty rigorous course of study. For example, the class sat in on a rehearsal of Swan Lake, which became a sort of lecture-demonstration because artistic director/choreographer Christopher Stowell was so open to explaining what he was trying to do. Their writing assignments sound quite interesting, too, which maybe was where I came in — to talk about writing about dance.

This is something I love to talk about, even though I’ve actually done it far less than I would have liked. Time machine time: In 1978 I wrote about a visit to Seattle by Twyla Tharp’s modern dance company. That was the first time I committed an act of criticism with intent. To publish, I mean. And it caused me a great deal of grief and excitement and a couple of all-nighters spent writing and re-writing and throwing my hands up in despair. How could I possibly bottle in words what I’d seen onstage (not to mention the interviews I’d conducted with the dancers; Twyla wasn’t along on the tour), for consumption in a newspaper (the Seattle Sun, RIP)? Well, I had an excellent guide, who was in the process of developing a deep understanding of newspapers, though he knew even less about dance than I did, and we muddled through.
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Barry Johnson, Books, General

Would Hobbes approve of the Dow Jones bounce?

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As Art Scatter stoops to post, it’s a Monday night and all the major markets were up substantially, around 10 percent during the day, making up a big chunk of the beating they took last week. Actually, I hate to anthropomorphize the “markets” like that. Took a beating? I don’t think so. They are just numbers. We know how illusory they can be, right? Real and illusory at the same time. Neat trick. Do we think that the “fundamentals” have been fixed so everything is all right now? Pour a few hundred million into some banks, take an equity stake in them, and it’s all good? Art Scatter doesn’t know its economics but … all we can do is shrug.

So, last night we were seeking solace in philosophy, the refuge of scoundrels. Often we turn to Rousseau — we don’t even really count him as a philosopher. “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains!” But we were in a darker mood. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” was more like it. That’s Tennyson, but he pointed the way to the philosopher we wanted. Thomas Hobbes: “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Pretty close to “red in tooth” if you ask me.
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Barry Johnson, Environment

More thoughts on the edge (with a little gloom attached)

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The comment thread on the On the edge (of cities) post right below shows there is a lot of passionate interest in the topic — Thomas Sieverts’ idea that architects need to lift their eyes from the city core and regard the outer limits of the city with the same intensity and, well, we’ll say it, love that they have for the traditional European city center. Whether that interest is also broad we’ll test with another post on the matter, this one arising from two Monday night events: Metro president David Bragdon speaking with Portland Spaces editor Randy Gragg at Jimmy Mak’s; and a big-name concluding panel at PNCA that featured Sieverts, architect Brad Cloepfil, Reed Kroloff (who runs Cranbrook Academy, supervised our tram design competition and who was dean of architecture at Tulane when Katrina hit), and Matthew Stadler as moderator.

The topic of both the panel and the Bragdon-Gragg exchange went something like this: What can governments do to encourage good design? And it frequently kept to the question, though this “healthy” topic also generated a number of tasty digressions and frankly was never as dry as the question seemed to promise. And thanks to Stadler, the Sieverts analysis/prescription was always lurking in the background.

I know from the clock on the wall that I won’t be able to give a full account of what happened in this post (I know what you’re thinking: O sweet mother of the Titans, don’t tell me there’s a third post brewing; what is this, the Halprin fountains?), but I will get a few thoughts out there, and perhaps the Scatter regulars at the event can fill in some details.

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Barry Johnson, Books, Environment, General

On the edge (of cities): past and present

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We’ve been MIA on Suddenly the set of exhibitions, lectures and events exploring the shape of our cities through the lens, primarily, of German urban designer/theorist/architect Thomas Sieverts. But we did make it to Sieverts’ lecture and a panel discussion Friday afternoon at the UO’s new architecture school branch in the White Stag building in Portland’s Old Town, a suitably central (or maybe, paradoxically central) spot to consider the remaking of suburbs, I suppose.

Matthew Stadler (a Scatter friend) did the introductions and moderated the panel, which was appropriate, because it was his reading of Sieverts’ book Cities Without Cities that suddenly changed his thinking about where the energy in cities really is these days and started this “movement” going. I think I’m getting ready to argue that Matthew’s was a creative misreading of Sieverts, though I’m waiting for one more event, another panel on Monday night, to confirm my first impressions, especially since I haven’t read the book(!).

Fairly early on in Sieverts’ lecture another friend of Scatter wondered about the intelligibility of his argument. But I think I understood the gist. The thought line he presented went something like this. 1) European cities are “splash” cities, meaning they no longer have compressed central cores. Instead, they sprawl a lot like American cities. In Sieverts’ powerpoint, charts and graphs showed just how “splashy” specific German cities had become. 2) The edges of this sprawl are chaotic and featureless. 3) German cities are shrinking in population, which makes it hard to change the edges through growth: It takes transformation. 4) Architects should address the problems of the edge, supplying aesthetic “meaning” and cultural coherence to them, even though planners tend to ignore them because they are so nondescript. 5) If these “edge cities” are going to compete in the global economy, they are going to have to attract “creatives” (Richard Florida’s young creatives, though Florida wasn’t mentioned), and that makes the transformation of these featureless suburbs, between spaces, crucial.
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Barry Johnson, Environment, General, Visual Art

Monday scattered like the New Carissa

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With the late September sun blazing and the pinot noir grapes sweetening by the minute, Scatter attempts to move its attention from dreams of wine-y complexity to almost anything else.

1. The New Carissa. We met the news that the salvage of the stern of the New Carissa on the coast near Coos Bay was nearly complete with some unexpected sadness. Remove it as though it never happened? The derelict New Carissa was a formidable adversary, defying our best efforts to… well, do anything with her that we wanted. Just the saga of the bow section — towed (with great difficulty) out to sea for burial, it breaks free in a storm and re-grounds near Waldport, gets a tow back out to deep water where it is blasted by a destroyer and sunk by a torpedo into 10,000 feet of water — is incredible. It would have all been completely comic if oil from the ship hadn’t leaked and destroyed marine wildlife nearby. Put us in the camp with those who would have left a hunk of stern on the beach, not as a tourist attraction, mind you, which would have been silly, but as a monument to our folly, a permanent metaphor. (That’s Henk Pander’s Wreck of the New Carissa, above.)

2. WaMu, Seattle misses you. We linked you to Regina Hackett’s story in the Seattle P-I that detailed some worry about the fate of Washington Mutual and the building-sharing agreement it has with the Seattle Art Museum. Now, of course, WaMu has turned into a subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase & Co. and her new story with John Marshall talks about the worry at many other Seattle arts organizations that WaMu’s extensive arts funding will diminish or disappear. This is just the direct fallout from the sub-prime loan mess; we have yet to see how much deeper this blade will cut.

3. Mark Rothko at the Tate. Scatter follows Rothko pretty closely — he went to Lincoln High School, after all, and was a friend of Portland painters Carl and Hilda Morris — even though we sometimes don’t know what to make of him. Or maybe it’s that we think different things about him at different times. In any case, the show of his late work (1958 when he famously withdrew from his Four Seasons restaurant commission in the Seagram buildling until his suicide in 1970) at the Tate Modern in London is drawing similarly mixed responses. We recommend a reading of Laura Cumming’s review in the Observer, which describes an exhausted Rothko and locates the figurative elements threatening to bust loose in all the abstraction. Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the London Times, however, finds something altogether different — a lighter, brighter, soaring Rothko. Let’s see: exhausted or soaring? Maybe a trip to London to sort all of this out would be in order if only the Scatter piggy bank didn’t rattle so forlornly.

Barry Johnson, Books, General

A little book biz talk — “Wild Beauty,” “Sweetheart,” “The Tsar’s Dwarf”

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Art Scatter made its way to a book “opening” Thursday night at the spiffy new p:ear digs in Old Town, which was jam-packed with fans of Terry Toedtemeier, John Laursen and the Columbia River Gorge. They will become devotees of Wild Beauty, the history of photography that Terry and John have assembled/written/curated, too, because the book is beautiful, plain and simple. Not that I’m a neutral observer. The ways I’m mobbed up here are countless — I’ve known Terry for decades, I’ve collaborated on a museum catalog with John, my wife Megan helped them get the project rolling and did various sorts of things to keep it that way, I’m fascinated by both the geological and human history of the Gorge… I could go on. But still, I like to think I’m a tough sell. Wild Beauty convinced me. You can look it over yourself at a bookstore (Oregon State University Press is the co-publisher), buy a copy through the Northwest Photography Archive online or pick one up at the Portland Art Museum, where an exhibition of photographs from the book will open on Oct. 4. It’s not cheap ($75) for a book, but it is cheap for a work of art, and that’s what it is (and produced entirely in Oregon). I’ll probably talk about it more once I get a chance to live with it for a bit.

I forgot to let you know about the publication of Art Scatter friend Chelsea Cain’s new book, Sweetheart, which continues the crime-fighting saga of Detective Archie Sheridan and his face-off with the sultry but deadly serial killer Gretchen Lowell. The serial killer thriller is usually not a genre I sample, but I scarfed up Chelsea’s first book in the series, Heartsick, even though a few early pages made me wince (a hammer, nail, ribcage, you get the picture), and now I’m launched on Number Two. Not that she needs the pub, really — the New York Times Book Review took good care of her. (Congrats, Chelsea!). Again, I’m mobbed up here… Chelsea writes a delightful column in The Oregonian that I’ve had some association with.

I’m also a fan of Hawthorne Books, which makes winsome, high-quality trade paperbacks of work by interesting writers from Portland and beyond (I wrote about Monica Drake’s Clown Girl in a post below, way below). So, I’ve also just begun The Tsar’s Dwarf by Peter H. Fogtdal, a Dane who spends time in Portland, and translated by Tiina Nunnally, who was the translator of Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow. I can already tell that I like it’s rhythms and picaresque sensibility. But again, more later, especially since its publication date isn’t until November.