Category Archives: Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson, Books, General

Bernard-Henri Levy brings some dapper French political philosophy to Portland

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Bernard-Henri Levy (BHL, as he is known in France) arrived at Powell’s last night (Tuesday) just a little late, fashionably late, actually, because he looked great in his black suit and deep purple shirt. He’s been here before, two years ago, to read from American Vertigo, his travelogue through American places and faces, and so he knew the landscape — the smallish Powell’s lecture nook packed with… well, really I have no idea, maybe “fans.” The woman sitting next to me had heard him on OPB and decided to come hear him in person. She was grading papers from a high school French class and speaking French with those around her. Which gave me pause when I first took my seat. Would BHL be lecturing in, horrors, French?

No, he would not. Accented English, yes, but confidently employed, expressive English. And what was his subject? One of his favorites since his first big book (Barbarism With a Human Face) more than 30 years ago — the problems with the Left. Of course, the problems then were much bigger than now, specifically the embrace of Stalinism, either actively or passively, by Left and Left-leaning parties and intellectuals. Now, the Left in Europe is ineffective and practically “broken,” or so it feels in France, I suspect, after the election of Sarkozy, an old friend or “buddy” of BHL’s, who appeared in BHL’s talk (and the beginning of his new book) several times.

So what’s left to criticize? BHL argued that the Left (or Liberals, in the American formulation, though Liberal doesn’t quite have the historical depth or granularity of the European Left) has abandoned many of its core principles to embrace another ideology, another Grand Narrative, that of anti-Imperialism, American Imperialism. And in dividing the world into Evil (the U.S. and Israel and their supporters) and Good (the rest of the world), the Left manages to overlook little things like the genocide in Rwanda, the bloodbath in Darfur (BHL doesn’t think it qualifies as genocide at this point), the suppression of democracy in Iran or the rights of native peoples in Ecuador. These don’t fit the Narrative.
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Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

The Halprin fountain dance, one week later

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I thought I was done with the Halprin fountain “event” or “happening” or “dance” — I still can’t quite name it — that ended the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland last Sunday (that would be Sept. 14). But I keep getting flashbacks of the performance, replaying little bits in my mind, thinking about some of the music I heard. You know what that’s like: Something more than random neurons firing.

I’ve had a couple of aids in this. The first is visual. Art Scatter received a very nice email from writer Brett Campbell, who was also very taken with the Halprin happening and said he was working on an essay of his own. When he completes it, we will link to it. This is right down his alley: He’s working on Lou Harrison book and Harrison was in the middle of the San Francisco milieu of Lawrence and Ana Halprin. But as a memory igniter, Brett’s wife, photographer CaroleZoom, was actually more important, because she sent us some images of the event. Quite beautiful ones, which explain the adulatory comments I heard about the first piece of the performance choreographed by Tere Mathern — which I was unable to see (I was late, it was too crowded). So, I’ve posted those here.

And there was the thread to the original post… Randy Gragg, one of the key organizers, responded a couple of times. Carolyn Altman, who was a Portland dancer/choreographer/writer, wrote in from Georgia, where she now lives, with memories of the fountains. Dance writer Martha Ullman West got things going and left us wanting more of her eye on the dances themselves.

And realizing that I missed Martha’s eye made me understand how inadequate the description of things in the original post was/is. If I could do it over, I would try to tell you how the dancers moved, more than simply saying it was “old-style” modern dance, carving space, attending to changes in topography and water flow, operating at scales tiny and grand, how they rolled and buckled and ran, the qualities in the momentary tableaux, the muscle groups engaged and relaxed, the dancers and the way their dance personalities emerged. The music would be harder for me — help us, Brett! — fleeting, sporadic, in search of original impulses to propel it, guide it, original impulses to communicate to us.
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Barry Johnson, General

More about money and art: Lehman Brothers, Seattle Art Museum, Oregon Symphony and Brad Cloepfil

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So we will continue our meditation on the connection between art and money. Which really, we hate to do — the connection makes things messy in so many ways, and when we are thinking about the connection we aren’t thinking about the art. But we are thinking about the conditions that make art possible, for better or worse, so we will persevere, at least through a series of related links.

First, of all, Bloomberg’s Lindsay Pollack notes that bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers has something on the order of 3,500 contemporary art works in its collection and wonders what will happen to it now. There must not be an accessible list of the art, because Pollack’s own list is rather sketchy — though it includes work by Louise Nevelson and Jasper Johns, not to mention Damian Hirst. But the article does give us a sense of the long history of the Lehman name in art circles — there is a Robert Lehman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, after all, named after the grandson of the founder of the bank.

Closer to home, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Regina Hackett notes the VERY close connection between the Seattle Art Museum and Washington Mutual, the huge savings and loan which is both under great financial pressure and looking for a buyer as we type this. The two share a building in downtown Seattle in a complex arrangement that the museum used to finance the extension, designed by Portland’s own Brad Cloepfil. The museum says it has its bases covered, no matter what happens to WaMu, but Hackett has found some folks who aren’t so sure.

Closer still, Art Scatter friend David Stabler, at The Oregonian, found out that the Oregon Symphony hasn’t detected any deterioration in the financial commitments of its patrons. This could be a “Planet Arts” phenomena (see post below), but it is encouraging, nonetheless. And he found the silver lining in all of this:

How many times have we heard that the arts should be run more like businesses? Well, Brian Dickie, General Director of Chicago Opera Theatre in Chicago (the small company, not Lyric Opera), hopes he never hears that again, “given what CEOs with MBAs from the major business schools have managed to do to some of the country’s largest financial institutions.”

All we can say is, sweet!

And finally, speaking of Brad Cloepfil, he’s at the heart of the beast in New York City, where his redesign of 2 Columbus Circle is unveiling. Another Scatter friend, Inara Verzemnieks, is there and she’s been posting about it on OregonLive and had a front page story about it in today’s Oregonian. For us the key quote came at the end (consider this a spoiler alert):

One of the criticisms that has been leveled at Cloepfil’s building is that it is not bold enough, not enough of a break with the past. But this blurring of past and present seemed to be what Cloepfil wanted. He seemed to like playing with the tension between what you thought you remembered — is that the lollipop building? — and what you now see. That it was possible for the two to occupy the same space.

“The ambiguity of memory,” he said. “Isn’t that sometimes the nature of cities?”

We’d much rather end with the ambiguity of memory than the ambiguity of money.

Barry Johnson

Will the arts follow Lehman Bros. into the tank?

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When the economy gets bad, Recession bad, the common understanding is that the arts suffer even worse. And the Wall Street, sub-prime loan crash looks like it may kick the rest of the economy into R-word land, once and for all. So, arts groups are headed for the hills, where they will attempt to hunker down and hold out to the last mime, right? Well, no, not according to David Segal and Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post, who surveyed arts groups in New York, mostly, but also Washington to see what the mood was.

Segal and Trescott, perhaps expecting to find panic, ran into a pocket of relative calm. Maybe it’s that corporate giving to the arts is so low in the U.S. — the article says 3 percent of all contributed income — or maybe it’s just blind optimism, but the executive directors refused to buckle. The key quote came at the end:

It’s an article of faith among theater honchos that when the going gets depressing, the depressed go to the theater.

My own theory is that Planet Arts, as the article colorfully calls it, is used to operating near the edge all the time and has confidence in its coping skills. The garden out back. The chickens. The Dumpster diving. Or maybe, as the article suggests, it simply takes a while for economic problems to reach the far-flung planet. Portland isn’t Wall Street, and we have missed much of the direct sub-prime misery that has afflicted California and Florida. But we are not in a bubble here, and the indirect effects are now hitting us (checked your stock portfolio lately? Art Scatter refuses to investigate the one share of Bear Stearns our granny left us).

So, what happens here on our little piece of Planet Arts? I’m not sure. I’ve heard rumblings of majors in trouble for some time now. How resilient will they be if we are facing a one- or two-year Recession? And if the majors ramp up their requests for money from individuals and foundations, will the mid-sized and smaller groups start to feel the pain, too? That’s an honest question… I know lots of Scatter readers work for or are near to arts groups in town. What do you think? What have you heard? Where are we headed? Use the comments section OR if you need more anonymity than that, email us at artscatterpdx@gmail.com.

Barry Johnson, Books

Farewell to David Foster Wallace

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I have been brooding about the suicide of David Foster Wallace since hearing about it last weekend. I thought of him as a sort of “family friend,” primarily because my son Nathan, one of his biggest fans, and my wife once had dinner with him (and a table full of other people). When I heard that he and Nathan spent a large chunk of time talking about movies, I couldn’t have been more pleased — and proud that my son could keep up with him. I don’t think I could have.

I think of Art Scatter as a sort of argument in favor of breadth. But it’s the shadow of the shadow of the argument made by DFW himself, whose supple brain could wrap itself around thorny mathematical ideas (his book on infinity is a wonder) and cruise ships with equal facility. I started to type “felicity,” so that, too.

Unlike a real “family friend” might have, I have no interpretation of the specifics of his death that makes a bit of sense. It just makes me profoundly sad. I heard about the death of William Gaddis right before taking a cruise of my own, found my way almost unconsciously to a bookstore and picked up a Gaddis book I hadn’t read, A Frolic of His Own, which weirdly proved to be an excellent commentary on the trip, not as direct as DFW’s own but equally keen to the absurdity. Now, I’m feeling called to do the same for David Foster Wallace as he joins the company of Gaddis. It’s the best I can do.

Barry Johnson, General

Scatter links to various and Tuesday

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Some hot buttered links to get you thinking? The first one involves money. Big Money.

1. The James Patterson phenomena! How does Patterson keep five separate lines of books going every year and pile up $1.5 BILLION in sales per annum? Teamwork, baby, teamwork.

2. “The Bonesetter’s Daughter”: how revolutionary IS the new Stewart Wallace-Amy Tan opera? The NY Times’ Anthony Tommasini and the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman were consulting their superlatives dictionary.

3. The importance of the site: theater is the theater. Well, maybe. LA Times theater critic Charles McNulty argues against Peter Brook’s famous “open theater” formulation, suggesting that local conditions affect productions in important ways. The article takes a quick tour of LA’s theater spaces and their “meaning”.

Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

Sunday in the park with the Halprins (while Rome burned)

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So, while Wall Street Giants shuddered, pivoted and crashed to the ground, Art Scatter was amusing itself at “City Dance,” the celebration of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, specifically Lawrence’s Portland plazas and fountains, Anna’s dances and early ’60s San Francisco art music, which somehow affected both. I will type (or is it keyboard, technically?) as long as I can, until the shock wave takes us off line… oddly it seems appropriate to muse on subjects such as these during times of economic crisis.

We’ve already set up the fountains, and to a lesser extent the dances, in a post below. To summarize, L. Halprin was hired by Ira Keller and the PDC to provide some public spaces for Portland’s first major Urban Renewal project, the demolition of the South Auditorium district and its replacement by a Skidmore, Owings, Merrill office/residential park. Keller was so happy with these, that he later asked L. Halprin to finish off the set with a plaza/fountain in front of what was then Civic Auditorium. It’s now the Keller Auditorium and the fountain is now Keller Fountain, though old-timers will be excused for calling it the Forecourt Fountain.

Fast forward 40 years or so. The fountains and plazas, important icons in the history of urban landscape design, could use a little conservation work, and so architecture writer/magazine editor Randy Gragg, the Halprin Conservancy, Third Angle New Music Ensemble and four Portland choreographers (Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilks, Linda Austin and Linda K. Johnson) banded together to help raise our collective consciousness about the Halprins’ work by staging a moving concert through all four sites (Keller Fountain, Pettygrove Park, Lovejoy Fountain, Source Fountain).

So on Sunday afternoon, sunny and warm, several hundred Portlanders, unaware perhaps that financial Redwoods were crashing, assembled to watch the show on the last day of the Time-Based Art Festival. Maybe there were more than that, adding the two concerts together. The second concert was so packed that when I arrived right before it began, I couldn’t get close enough to see anything much at the first site, the Keller Fountain, but that’s not going to deter me from my posting. Because there were three more sites to visit.
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Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

Deep Portland history: Lawrence Halprin and Ira Keller

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Monday night, Randy Gragg and Portland Spaces magazine staged another of its Bright Light City Discussions; this one featured historian Carl Abbott and was part of the Time-Based Art Festival. We took notes! More importantly we learned a lot about Lawrence Halprin and a provocative piece of Portland history. There was lots of information, some of which we may have gotten wrong. Don’t hesitate to correct our record!

Before the start of the Randy Gragg and Carl Abbott presentation on the history of the old South Auditorium district and the Lawrence Halprin fountains and plazas that replaced it, I happened to sit across from Robert Perron. This was lucky. Perron taught landscape design at UC Berkeley in the early ’60s when Halprin was there and knows a lot about him and his aesthetic impulses. And his knowledge of Portland is deep, possibly because he’s worked on so much of it, including the Salmon Street Fountain, Terry Schrunk Park and the First Presbyterian Church garden park. Because of that he understands the accidents, unintended consequences and budget shortfalls that affect the design of our cities and therefore our lives.

Shrunk was the mayor and Ira Keller was the chairman of the newly formed Portland Development Commission (PDC) when the decision was made in the late ’50s to bulldoze the aging neighborhood south of downtown and replace it with a utopian Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) residential and commercial district with impressive towers surrounded by green space. And in the green space, Keller decided, there should be a series of plazas and fountains designed by Halprin.
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Barry Johnson, Music

Wanted: Portland Jazz Festival sugar daddy

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We’ve added a couple of updates below, as jazz bloggers around the country start to weigh in on the collapse of the Portland Jazz Festival.

Today’s paradox: Portland has a small and by some measures thriving jazz scene; and Portland can’t keep a national-class jazz festival going to save its buttons. Today’s announcement — that the Portland Jazz Festival will “cease operations” next week unless a sponsoring sugar daddy is found who will take a $100,000 plunge — was one of those depressing pieces of news that reminds us just how fragile our arts bubble is. It’s hard for me to imagine this year without Ornette Coleman in it, and Ornette was here only because of the PJF. He came at just the right time for me, just as I was thinking seriously about the problem of creativity, and I loved his utter pragmatic dedication to sustaining his creative flow.

Jazz is one of the most frequently employed metaphors for creativity: the way it adapts and re-adapts, uses and reuses, improvises on the spot; the paradoxes it supports in the ordinary course of business, like its insistence on being in the moment and above the moment at the same time; its recognizable collision of technique, inspiration, individual play and teamwork; and well, we could go on. And maybe on that ground alone, as a metaphor, never mind the music and its place in our cultural history, I would argue for the PJF. We are beginning to understand how critical imagination and its practical application are to everything we do, especially in a city like Portland, which must live by its wits, not by its oil fields; jazz allows us to think about that in an especially delightful way. Somebody in Portland designed a better boot after hearing Ornette, I’m sure of it!
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Barry Johnson, General

Scatter looks at its schedule

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The first post-Labor Day weekend is upon us, meaning the arts Big Time has begun in Portland. Which reminds us once and for all of our limitations: We simply can’t do everything. A&E’s Fall Arts Guide will give you a good idea of what’s coming up and some guidance about what might matter most, though Scatter believes the whole “mattering” thing is so very subjective, as you know.

Three areas of general interest:

1. TBA is up and running. This presents our difficulty in a nutshell. Just today there’s a site-specific work by Sojourn at
South Waterfront and performances by Reggie Watts, Leesaar the Company, Antony and the Johnsons, Neal Medlyn, Ice Rod and Khris Soden. Among others! Our cup runneth over. Often, we try to find out about what we missed by consulting Grant Butler and his gang of TBA bloggers.

2. First Thursday was last night/First Friday is tonight. Henk Pander, Sean Healey, Rene Rickabaugh, Hildur Bjarnadottir, Stewart Harvey, Ethan Jackson, Christine Bourdette, Michael Knutson… Seriously, this is impossible. And we haven’t caught up with Volume, the group show curated by Jeff Jahn yet, either.

3. Theater gets going with Blackbird at Artists Repertory Theatre. Artistic director Allen Nause gets to play another of the creepy roles he inhabits so well in David Harrower’s drama. Marty Hughley gives the show a nice preview in A&E.

We won’t see everything that attracts us, not by a longshot, but we will attempt to report back on what we do stumble upon. Unless, of course, it all gets to be TOO MUCH!