Category Archives: Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson, General, Television, Visual Art

Scatter’s “Project Runway” infatuation

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OK, let’s just put a few cards on the table: There is a certain variety of reality television show that can be practically irresistible to Art Scatter, at least its lesser precincts. Bravo’s Project Runway,” on which younger or youngish or young-in-spirit fashion designers compete each week for exposure, of course, and some fabulous prizes, of course, has become one of them. The affinity began with This Old House, which managed to consume ALL of our home improvement impulses in one easy, painless half hour a week that didn’t involve ego-destroying contact with dangerous tools. Perfect! Others that have attracted us include Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan, who attempts to show you how to reduce your dogs to a state of “calm submission” and even Supernanny, who attempts to reduce human children to a state of “calm submission.”

Back to Project Runway, though. Which is different for me because I have absolutely no desire to design clothing and there’s no calm submission involved. In fact, chortling at the fashions in the New York Times has always been something I shared with my wife, a way to bond. Who thinks up these get-ups, I’ve often wondered. Thanks to Project Runway, I now know, and not only that, I get to see them work in the most stressful situations — and frankly, after last night’s episode, it looks as though the stress is starting to win.

So is Portland’s own Leanne Marshall! Leanne (aka Leanimal) has won two consecutive episodes (or “challenges”). We LOVE her. For a while, she looked like the least likely to succeed, so fragile personally and so quirky of spirit and design. But Leanne has untapped reservoirs of spunk, and to go with her coolness under pressure, she’s developed a cool designing style that has won over the judges, who included Diane von Furstenberg last night. By cool, I simply mean sleekness of silhouette, luxurious fabrics, impeccable craftswomanship and coherent design ideas (see! I’m learning my terms!). Quirks lurk but they don’t take over — they add charm and visual interest. There are some other excellent designers, too, and I wouldn’t be crushed if, for example, Korto won. She has great ideas and sticks by her guns (a yellow highlight on a black and white print last night, which Tim Gunn, who acts as a sort of designer handler for emcee Heidi Klum, had serious reservations about during the process, but which Korto insisted on using). We love you too Korto!

I can’t wait to get to work to talk last night’s episode over with Kristi Turnquist, who is a devout follower of the show and posts on Oregonlive.com about it after every episode.

Barry Johnson, General, Music

Classical music and the Portland Cello Project

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I’m not sure why I’m so fascinated by the problems of classical music. Possibly it’s just that it’s hard not to root for an art form that seems to be running so against the drift of the culture itself. I say seems not to waffle but to suggest that it’s not too late for a little adaptation.

A William Weir story in the Chicago Tribune today starts with an account of the difficulty composer Kenneth Fuchs has broadcasting his music out into the world — and Fuchs is well-known as far as contemporary composers operating in a “classical” context go. He then suggests that the answer for Fuchs may be to get his music out of the “classical confines.” I disagree with him that the death of classical music stores is a good thing, but his suggestion that the blurring of genre lines that separate classical from other kinds of music does sound right. He then cites a few new-music organizations such as Bang on a Can and the Wordless Music series as examples of moves in the right direction, as well as cellist Matt Haimovitz, who couldn’t be more popular among the country’s few remaining classical music critics because he is so involved in both genre destruction and operating outside traditional classical music confines.

This leads us, inevitably to the Portland Cello Project, which went to the top of Amazon’s classical music chart this weekend per the group’s website. Congrats! I’ve listened to Cello Project’s CD a lot the past couple of months, and it is a movement in genre-blurring all by itself, a mix of hip-hop, folk, indie, old classical and new classical, by turns witty and moving. The PCP invited several other excellent local musicians to play on the record, so if you’ve been lagging behind the local music scene a little bit, the CD helps catch you up.

Maybe it’s simply a matter of what’s in a name. “Classical music” just doesn’t work very well for me. No thanks, I want to say. On the other hand, Mozart’s Quintet in C Major or the Mahler Nine? Huzzah! Right now, I’m listening to one of the concerts in the Worldless Music Festival, via their website (the link’s above). Is it “classical”? Not completely — Chopin and Scriabin, yes, but also French composer Colleen’s eerie music and the indie band Beirut. But it is surprising, complex, engaging to ear and mind and heart. The jump from one form to another isn’t jarring, not in these days of the iPod shuffle. And that perhaps is one of Weir’s points in the Tribune today: Part of our brain wants desperately to categorize things; the other part happily disregards those categories in practice.

Barry Johnson, Visual Art

Beach scatter: final chapter

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Nose pressed to the glass, we watch mist clouds roll wetly off the Pacific onto the beach and when we get to the point of exposing our own flesh to the elements — mostly water in various incarnations and sand — we remark that this feels like the memory of an amniotic bath, except that it’s cool not warm, even though we know that we can’t have this memory, couldn’t possibly, though we don’t abandon it because we like the metaphor, the need it expresses and our need to express it.

The visual “play” outside that window all week is why we come, every bit as much as entering those scenes ourselves, nudging long strands of kelp and other sea “trash” left at high tide or feeling that chilly north Pacific nipping at our ankles and, watch out, knees and thighs. Everyone who comes here is affected about the same way, yes? Sky, surf, land in perpetual rearrangement, sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic, three elastic elements readjusting to each other. You don’t have to watch every second, that’s not necessary — but every short while you look up and locate the difference, how the pattern has changed.

I’m not sure what this has to do with Titian, or specifically the two Titians that the 7th Duke of Sutherland (only seven?) is hoping to sell to “balance his portfolio.” These are great paintings, no doubt, and the Duke is willing to sell them to the UK’s National Gallery for one-third the price they would likely bring at auction, which is estimated to be 300 million pounds. And the scrambling for money and the gnashing of teeth over the public interest in keeping the paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland, where they have lived since 1945, has been intense and reminiscent of Philadelphia’s citywide debate over the future of Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic, which was headed to Arkansas until $68 million was raised to keep it where it was.
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Barry Johnson, General, Language

I spelled it my way: the future of spelling

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I wouldn’t say that Art Scatter is totally obsessed with spelling. We don’t employ a battalion of copyeditors to check our posts, after all, and I’m sure that strange letters pop up in strange places in the words we type sometimes. And we prefer some spellings, like “copyeditors,” that some sticklers might consider incorrect. I’m thinking of the spellcheck of this particular program, just for starters, which in addition to suggesting that “copyeditors” is two words also believes the same about our new noun “spellcheck.” We can be stubborn about this sort of thing, though. We believe our “variant” to be more useful than theirs.

Much of the time, even for the broadminded, variant spelling is the same as incorrect spelling. It’s no big deal, if you whiff on “accommodate” — though I’m about to argue the other side of this in a moment — because there’s no punishment, just a little hiccup in a reader’s mind as she encounters the misspelling, restores the missing “m” (the most frequent error) and moves on. She’ll never trust your spelling of a tricky word again, but that’s not a major consequence. We’re on the Internet for crying out loud! And she understands that. Don’t worry, she doesn’t trust us either…

The keyword here is “variant.” I bring it up because an article by Frank Furedi on the website Spiked (which we found via ArtsJournal, of course). Furedi suggests that a movement exists to “forgive” common spelling errors in British universities (such as truely) by treating them simply as variant spellings. No harm, no foul; we knew what the student meant.
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Barry Johnson, Environment, General

Beach scatter: Sandcastles under construction

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As we suggested earlier, some of Art Scatter is at the beach, and on the first nice day at the beach, what do we do? Why, we build a sandcastle, that’s what. Well, actually, we critique previously built sandcastles, do archaeological digs around sandcastle ruins and ponder the sandcastles we would build if were were adept at the craft. Which we aren’t. Hence the pondering. Here are a few designs we considered adapting to sand.

The pyramid shape has its attractions, of course, and this one, the Ziggurat designed by Timelinks, an environmental design firm in Dubai, will one day be inhabited by one million people if the press materials are to be believed. One million. And it’s designed to be carbon neutral. I’m not sure about the scale, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be on the bottom rung of this particular pyramid. The challenge in sand? That pointy top, not to mention those cool reflective surfaces. I am pretty sure the sand version is mostly carbon neutral, though, at least when it’s in full operating order.
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Barry Johnson, Books, Film, General

Beach scatter: J. Austen, E. Jelinek, M. Mouse

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The miracle (or the curse, depending on your point of view) of the Internet tubes is that they extend to the Oregon coast, and so, it is possible to share one’s vacation slides with the universe almost in real time. Not only that, it is possible to post from there/here, too. One suspects that it will be an excellent place from which to Scatter widely, if not consecutively, on such subjects as Jane Austen, Elfriede Jelinek and Mickey Mouse. So, having already 1) dipped nether digits into the briney Pacific, 2) ruminated on the pleasures the world offers while eating a smoked oyster from Karla’s Smokehouse (Karla is a genius of the delicate art of smoking), and 3) fought off the assaults of sand bugs attracted to smell of fresh meat from the city, we settle in to the broadcast booth to enter our code.
Continue reading Beach scatter: J. Austen, E. Jelinek, M. Mouse →

Barry Johnson, Film, General

Pupu Platter needs your help!

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Let’s just say we didn’t have enough audience polling of unsavory behavior going on right now. (Which actually we don’t!) We’d suggest joining MrMead at his Pupu Platter site and confess to the world what awful movies you love.

For me? The Vikings: Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis vie for the lovely hand of Janet Leigh, but when I saw it, circa 1958 or ’59, I was more interested in how to storm a castle, the talons of the falcon and the long Viking horn. But before you go, tell us 1) what words you mispronounce and 2) the movies that moved you in the appropriate slots below!

Barry Johnson, Books, Film, General

Battle royal: Books v. movies

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Should we allow movies to pulverize the soft images in our brains of the books we’ve read, poor defenseless images that they are? A Guardian blogger thinks it’s time to fight back, and Scatter rummages around for a few thoughts.

So, for the past few weeks we’ve talked about movies and we’ve talked about books, specifically books we were embarrassed to admit that we hadn’t read and then a little later movies that moved us to the max. Reading David Barnett’s book blog in the Guardian yesterday, I realized that some of the books I hadn’t read, books I might feel I should read under ordinary circumstances, didn’t occur to me. I’d seen the movie. This would involve the collected works of Jane Austen, for example. I just love those movies; never picked up a copy of Pride and Prejudice and probably never will. Though never is a long time. Strangely.

Barnett argues that ANY film version of a book, perhaps even including brilliant film versions, is an affront to the reader of the book, who has invested many hours of imaginative time over days or weeks or (gulp) months recreating the text in her/his head. Barnett’s key sentence:

Can there be anything worse than lovingly engaging with a couple of hundred thousand words of prose over perhaps two or three weeks, drinking in the author’s dialogue and descriptions, creating your own vision of the work in the privacy of your head, only to have every man and his dog (special offer on Tuesdays at your local Odeon) blast your intellectual ownership of the book out of the water after spending 90 minutes slobbing out in front of a cinema screen?

Here at Art Scatter we don’t believe in this sort of “intellectual ownership,” but we do think reading is a pretty sweet thing. And in comparing the way I approach movies to the way I approach books, I find that I am far more casual, generally, about the movie. I didn’t spend nearly as much time with Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, to cite a very recent example as I did with Peter Nadas’s essays, but felt no reservation about plunking a post down about it for your reading enjoyment. I’d read and re-read those three Nadas essays many times, assembled notes, thought and thought, before I ventured to the keyboard. Would that movie withstand that sort of scrutiny? That’s another question. But some movies do.
Continue reading Battle royal: Books v. movies →

Barry Johnson, Film, General

“Vicky Cristina Barcelona” — Woody goes breezy

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I stopped trying to be a Woody Allen expert a long time ago. Too many movies, too much the same, lingering on the surface, hoping perhaps to be more than they were, but mostly content to just be there, or so it seemed, hoping to capture the zeitgeist the way Annie Hall did. Not that I don’t still go to some of Woody’s movies. Or watch them on video. He’s still an American antidote to Hollywood, a different sensibility, scale, ambition. And his work ethic is something of an inspiration.


That’s a long preamble to a short take on his newest movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which opened last night, and at least at the Lloyd, where it was almost chilly, played to an almost full house at the 7-ish p.m. show. We were not a young crowd. But we were laughing. Sure, the characters veered into stereotypes, as they so often do, but that’s part of comedy, dating back to commedia. And sometimes it seemed that Woody really did want to make a “serious” film about this subject — two young American women amusing themselves in Barcelona where they fall under the spell of a Catalan artist with a violent ex-wife lurking — instead of an amusing take on French films. But the look of the film and the acting was, well, I almost typed “fun” and that isn’t far off. Fun, amusing, lightly engaging, sensuous in a way.

I particularly enjoyed the way the characters and the actors so often channeled Woody, specifically the American ones. Rebecca Hall as Vicky, the more uptight of the two, was especially adept at this, a mess of contradictions and rolling eyes and confessions that somehow become funny. Patricia Clarkson is also excellently Woody-esque, and her scenes with Hall are the best in the movie, from my particular seat.

All the buzz is about the Scarlett Johansson-Javier Bardem-Penelope Cruz love triangle, and the kiss between Johansson and Cruz. Neither Johansson nor Bardem has much to do, acting-wise, until Cruz juices the energy level as the ex-wife. While they are playing it more or less straight, Cruz seizes her stereotype, shakes it, sends it to the gates of Utter Parody, brings it back to play nice with the others, then shakes it up again. I love the way she and Bardem go back and forth between English and Spanish.

I also love the travelogue feel of the movie. We get some sweet footage of Barcelona and as Woody said in an LA Times interview, bicycling in the countryside. It’s lush and pretty, the upper class version of Barcelona, the picture postcard version, but still… see, I almost did it again. Fun.

The Oregonian’s Shawn Levy IS a Woody Allen expert, and he is a supporter of the film, to a degree. For a plenitude of other reviews, there’s Rotten Tomatoes, where it’s currently measuring about 7 out of 10 on the Tomato Meter.

Barry Johnson, Environment, General

What would Epicurus say? It’s hot, but don’t sweat it.

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I love our words for “hot” here in the middle of August (and in Portland, anyway, it is hot, especially by wimpy Northwest standards). My favorite is “sizzling.” The nameless Oregonian headline writer today employed “baked,” “broiled” and “grilled” all in one deck that might have escaped from FoodDay. Good one! If it were a little more humid, it would be “steamy” or “sauna-like.” Of course, “boiling.” The more poetical might veer toward “molten” or such expression as “hotter than the underside of hell.” That one’s Southern, right? “Scorching,” “simmering,” and, yikes, “blistering.”

So what do our thoughts turn to on a blistering summer day, or rather, the relatively cool morning before the “furnace” of the afternoon? Why to Epicurus and Vesuvius and the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, naturally!

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.

That’s Epicurus. And he comes to mind today because of an article that ArtsJournal linked — which suggests that new technologies and some more digging will allow us to have a much more complete understanding of Epicurean philosophy. That’s because the blocks of carbon — into which an extensive philosophical papyrus library of the ancient world was turned by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD — may be “translatable” after all. Epicurus wasn’t all about eating well as “epicurean” would suggest; he had a LOT more on his mind, much of it involving the physical world but also the conditions that lead to human happiness. And the library may have the complete text of his most famous ancient treatise, On Nature..

So, what would Epicurus say about the heat, if we could research those carbon blocks (think Hans Solo in Return of the Jedi, perhaps)? Well, he’d probably say that today’s heat isn’t a visitation from the gods, because that was a big issue during his lifetime (341–270 BC). We are not being punished. Or rewarded. The gods do not manifest in the weather. It’s all just atoms. And then he might riff (in a Stoic sort of way): Extreme pain is of short duration (one way or another) and so tolerable; and mild pain does not preclude pleasantness. This is excellent advice! So, maybe a movie this afternoon? A dip in the pool? Or just a cool spot to read? Epicurus would approve.