Category Archives: Bob Hicks

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

It’s First Thursday tonight. Walk the walk.

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Mary Ellen Mark, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, 1976 11x14” Vintage Silver Gelatin; Blue Sky Gallery.

By Bob Hicks

Most Portland galleries open their new shows on the first Thursday of each month, and have a little party to go along with it: They stay open, usually, from 6 to 9 in the evening on First Thursdays. This is a big deal for galleries in the Pearl/Northwest and downtown, but it’s far from the only game in town.

Jeffry Mitchell Untitled (foot vase) 2011, 10"x10"6" glazed ceramic; Pulliam Gallery.A bunch of Eastside galleries have First Friday openings instead. The renegades on Northeast Alberta opt for Last Thursdays, upsetting the applecart of neighborhood decorum in the process (although it’s not generally the gallery owners who relieve themselves drunkenly on the neighbors’ lawns). And a lot of places — the museums and college galleries, for instance — go serenely on their own schedules. Disjecta, the North Portland art center, is waiting until Saturday to open its quirky-looking show of folded miniatures, Portland Paper City.

But First Thursday includes most of the big mainstream galleries: It’s the art walk that gets the most horn-tooting. And as the guy who has sex only one time a year says excitedly, Tonight’s the night! Mr. Scatter put together a quick guide to some of the First Thursday highlights for this morning’s Oregonian; you can see it online here.

Kris Hargis, "The Fifth," 2010. Drawing: oil, conte, colored pencil, grease pencil on paper, 20.5 x 16.5 inches. Froelick Gallery. There’s more than this to it, but isn’t there always? Elizabeth Leach Gallery, for instance, holds over Matt McCormick’s historically potent video installation and photo show The Great Northwest from last month, and Bullseye Gallery does the same with Mark Zirpel’s Queries in Glass, an exhibit that merges aesthetics with the gadgetizing of 18th century and Victorian men of science.

Speaking of the Age of Reason, you don’t need to rush out to the galleries tonight unless you really enjoy the scene. The shows will be up all month. If you’re going to look, pick a time when you can see the art without being elbowed aside by the crowds. If you want to buy — well, the earlier the better. And remember that a lot of galleries let their buying customers see the stuff a night before the official opening. That’s why, sometimes, even if you’re there on First Thursday and see a piece you really like, it already has a little red dot beside it. If you think you might want to buy, ask if you can get in early. Next month, that is.

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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

  • Mary Ellen Mark, “Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon,” 1976. 11×14” Vintage Silver Gelatin; Blue Sky Gallery.
  • Jeffry Mitchell, Untitled (foot vase) 2011, 10″ x10″ x 6″; glazed ceramic; Pulliam Gallery.
  • Kris Hargis, “The Fifth,” 2010. Drawing: oil, conte, colored pencil, grease pencil on paper, 20.5 x 16.5 inches. Froelick Gallery.
Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Pardon the interruption, s’il vous plait

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Confessionals, Church Gesu Nuovo, Naples. Photo: Heinz-Josef Lücking/Wikimedia Commons.

By Bob Hicks

Bless us, Father, for we have sinned. It’s been six days since we entered our last post here at Art Scatter, which is just … embarrassant. Pardon, if you please. It’s not that we haven’t been busy. In fact, that’s the point. We’ve been so busy we haven’t had time to keep the faith and commit good bloggery. We’ll try to do better.

pandercatalogSo let’s play catch-up.

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On Friday, having survived the Great February Blizzard of 2011, which dropped all of a third of an inch of snow on the Chez Scatter front lawn but managed to snarl the city and shut down its schools, Mr. Scatter took a tour down the valley to the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem to catch Memory and Modern Life, an expansive retrospective of the oils, watercolors and drawings of Henk Pander, the Dutch-born Portland artist.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Coming up: Dance Flight with Delcroix

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By Bob Hicks

Snow? What snow? It’ll be gone by Sunday (that’s not a promise, only an extreme probability) and you’ll be wanting to get out of the house. Maybe over to Mississippi and Shaver in North Portland, where Northwest Dance Project has its studio.

Choreographer Patrick DelcroixThat’s where I’ll be, starting at 3 p.m., for NDP’s latest Dance Flight — an afternoon of sipping wine, watching rehearsal and then settling in for an informal dance talk with the choreographer. The wine will be French, and so is the choreographer, Patrick Delcroix, whom I’ll interview onstage. The chat should be nice and easy, and I’ll make sure anyone in the audience who wants to ask a question gets the chance. Dance Flight details are here.

Delcroix spent 17 years as a leading dancer with Nederlands Dans Theater, then became assistant to choreographer Jiri Kylian, whose pieces he sets on companies around the world.

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Bob Hicks, General, Music

On the corner of jazz and Tin Pan Alley

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By Bob Hicks

One of the signs that a town is turning into a city is that it can’t squeeze everything into a box. So, for instance, while the newest Portland Jazz Festival kicks into high swing (and bop), some terrific jazz is popping up in spots that aren’t connected to the festival at all.

Andy SteinWhile the likes of jazz festival headliners Regina Carter, Joshua Redman, Poncho Sanchez, Maceo Parker, Dave Frishberg and the newly Grammy-fied Esperanza Spalding are picking up a whole lot of highly deserved attention in Puddletown, they aren’t the only games in town. You might also have spent Saturday night at an under-the-radar gig with about 75 other people at TaborSpace, in the company of Andy Stein and Conal Fowkes.

Pianist Conal Fowkes with clarinetist Woody AllenWho’s that, you ask?

Stein is a violinist, a fiddler, an old-time jazz guy with his feet also planted in classical music and rock ‘n’ roll. He’s recorded with Perlman, Domingo, Marilyn Horne and Von Stade; toured with Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen; played with Dylan, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Tony Bennett, B.B. King and a whole lot more. And he has a special affection for the music of Joe Venuti, the granddaddy of jazz violin.

Fowkes — born in Zambia, raised partly in Mexico, an Englishman now living in New York — is a pianist with equal affections for early New Orleans jazz (he’s a stalwart of Woody Allen and His New Orleans Jazz Band, which is led by banjoist Eddy Davis and features Allen on clarinet) and the traditions of Tin Pan Alley, the great American songwriting system that runs parallel to jazz, routinely jumping the tracks to interlace with it along the way.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Anne Mueller: Goodbye and hello

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Anne Mueller with Jon Drake in Christopher Stowell's "Eyes on You," 2005. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.

By Bob Hicks

This afternoon’s top story comes from ace reporter Cole Porter, who broke the news  this way:

You’re the nimble tread
Of the feet of Fred Astaire,

You’re an O’Neill drama,

You’re Whistler’s mama!

You’re camembert.

In plainer English, Oregon Ballet Theatre announced today that principal dancer Anne Mueller, who has been with the company 15 years, will retire in May after OBT’s spring program, Song and Dance.

Anne Mueller and Lucas Threefoot in Trey McIntyre's "Speak." Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.The company also announced that Mueller, who has been preparing for her post-dancing career for several years, will remain at OBT as its artistic coordinator, following the behind-the-scenes lead of another fine dancer, Gavin Larsen, who retired from performing last year and joined the OBT School’s faculty.

Porter’s song You’re the Top (and Blaine Truitt Covert’s photo above of Mueller perched on Jon Drake’s shoulder, rising above the crowd in Christopher Stowell’s ballet Eyes on You) seems apropos for Mueller, whose ebullience onstage has helped make her one of OBT’s most popular performers.

Porter’s lyrics also include the line You’re the nose on the great Durante, which seems especially apt to describe Mueller’s carbonated comic spirit, which audiences will miss mightily. They’ll also miss, even if they aren’t fully aware of it, the hard-earned and impressive technical skills that have made Mueller a dancers’ dancer and allowed her to show off that personality so well.

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Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Link: killing cats in Inishmore

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Artists Repertory Theatre playbill logo

By Bob Hicks

On Saturday night, Mr. Scatter put on his professional drama-critic hat (it’s a metaphorical hat; it was a blustery evening, so he actually wore a rain jacket with a hood) and went to Artists Repertory Theatre to see Martin McDonagh‘s nasty little comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore. He means that “nasty little comedy” bit in the nicest possible way: Inishmore is savage and bloody and brutal, and it’s true that more than one cat, in addition to several humans, who seem to deserve it more, comes to a violent end. But it’s also genuinely funny, in that nervous why-am-I-laughing-at-this way.

A brief review ran in Monday morning’s Oregonian, and you can read Mr. Scatter’s much more complete version online here at Oregon Live. He can imagine a more violently scary  production, and he can imagine a more broadly comic one, but he thinks Artists Rep director Jon Kretzu and his cast got the balance about right.

McDonagh is a transgressive writer, dealing in that unruly space between myth and reality: another of his plays, The Pillowman, is about what happens when a writer’s tales of fantasy mayhem seem to be playing themselves out in real life. Like a lot of male playwrights (David Mamet and Neil LaBute come to mind) he’s fascinated with the nature and character of aggression, and his plays can slice both ways, reveling in the stuff as they dissect it. That makes the audience … not complicit, exactly, but responsible for sorting out its own attitudes on the subject.

Then again, that’s a good deal of what theater, or literature, or any art form is about: the beginning of a conversation. In the aggressive male metaphor, the first shot. It’s not just a conversation. The artist sets the terms, and to a significant degree is in charge of the show. But a willing and perceptive audience completes the connection and sets off ripples of meaning, each meaning a little bit different for every individual involved in the encounter.

McDonagh is a terrific storyteller, and he has some fascinating things to say about aggression, which if he’s wary about he also frankly enjoys. He’s got swagger and a bit of a bad-boy reputation, as this year-old story by Foster Kamer in the Village Voice suggests. It relates, among other things, McDonagh’s obscenity-laced threat to beat up fellow Irish playwright Conor McPherson (whose play The Seafarer was a hit for Artists Rep last season) for a perceived insult.

Just so long as he leaves McPherson’s cat alone.

Bob Hicks, Dance, Film, General, Martha Ullman West, Visual Art

Updates: Maryhill and ‘Black Swan’

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By Bob Hicks

The Plaza by GBD Architects. Watercolor rendering by C.S. Holmes.Maryhill Museum of Art officially breaks ground at 3:30 p.m. next Friday, Feb. 18, on its $10 million expansion project, which will give the Columbia Gorge landmark some much-needed elbow room. Between an expansive plaza and expanded indoor spaces, the project will add 25,500 square feet.  The museum will be open during construction: Maryhill’s 2011 season opens March 15. Read the update here on Art Daily. And read our original reporting here and here.

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Meanwhile, Scatterers who remember chief correspondent Martha Ullman West’s take on the Oscar-nominated movie Black Swan — “In several places I got the giggles,” she wrote here about the ballet-bloodbath melodrama — might also be interested in Alastair MacAulay’s take here on the same movie, in which the New York Times dance critic considers Black Swan in Bette Davis terms. “Let’s also admit there have always been striking parallels between the ballet classics of the 19th century and the Hollywood women’s movies of the mid-20th century,” he writes. Let’s.

Bob Hicks, Books, General

A Redwall hero falls: Brian Jacques, 71

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By Bob Hicks

He was on no one’s list of the great novelists of the 20th century. Many literary critics barely knew he existed. He didn’t create an overarching epic of good and evil like J.K. Rowling, or cause squeals of vampire lust like Stephenie Meyer.

Swashbuckling animal heroes in the Redwall universe.But somehow or other, while critical eyes were cast elsewhere, Brian Jacques sold more than 20 million copies of his books. Children of a certain age, and parents of children of a certain age, cherished him especially for the 22 novels in his Redwall series, which feature such characters as Martin the Warrior (a mouse), Mossflower (ditto), Slagar the Cruel (a fox), and Basil Stag Hare of the 47th Hare Border Rangers. Redwall, the first in the series, was published in 1986.

Jacques, a roustabout sort of fellow who had bounced from working-class job to working-class job before turning to the typewriter, died Saturday in his hometown of Liverpool. He was 71 and had just undergone emergency heart surgery. Margalit Fox has a good obituary here from the New York Times.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

For OBT, a season to give you the Wilis

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By Bob Hicks

The world of ballet has its share of exotic creatures, from lovelorn swan-women to a magical firebird to a princess who takes a hundred-year nap.

Lithograph by unknown of the ballerina Carlotta Grisi in en:Giselle. Paris, 1841. Image was scanned from the book "The Romantic Ballet in Paris" by Ivor Guest. Wikimedia Commons.But no one seems quite as oddball, or as eerily sympathetic and nasty at the same time, as the Wilis, those sad young spectres of girls who were jilted by their lovers before their wedding day and now spend their nights madly dancing young men to death before fading off into the sunrise.

Tuesday night, Oregon Ballet Theatre threw a little party in its studios to announce its 2011-12 season, and one of the highlights of the lineup is Giselle, the venerable story ballet in which the Wilis rose to fame.

Here’s the new season lineup:

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Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General, Journalism, Music, Poetry, Theater, Visual Art

Tuesday Scatter: arts world in brief

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  • Hot licks and good times with Andy Stein, Padam Padam
  • Closing the books: Powell’s layoffs, Looking Glass R.I.P.
  • Patrick Page plucks praise from “Spider-Man” carnage
  • In the room with Egypt’s fierce cultural protector
  • Alexis Rockman and good news at the Smithsonian

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By Bob Hicks

Hot licks and good times with Andy Stein, Padam Padam: My old friend and neighbor Jaime Leopold dropped me a note about his friend, Andy Stein, a fiddler who can often be heard on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. “Andy has been compared to jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli and he’ll be performing in a duo with Conal Fowkes, a Wynton Marsalis alum and wonderful pianist from New York,” Jaime said.

Jaime wanted me to know this because Stein will be performing Feb. 19 at Tabor Space. And as it happens, Jaime’s own band, Padam Padam, will be opening. If that sounds self-serving, I suppose it is a little bit, but mostly it’s not, because Jaime simply loves music, and when he knows good music’s coming ’round the bend, he likes to spread the word. If he says Andy Stein is worth going to see, I’m taking him at his word.

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