Category Archives: Bob Hicks

Bob Hicks, General, Language

Words to live by: revisiting MLK Jr.

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By Bob Hicks

1964, Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. Dick DeMarsico, World Telegram staff photographerTwo years ago, in this post, we passed along a few quotations from Martin Luther King Jr., whose spirit and birthday we celebrate today. In light of a frayed public discourse that verges on the ridiculous and the obscene, it seems an appropriate time to highlight King’s committed nonviolent approach to doing the right thing. Take a listen:

“Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society, shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”

“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

“War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.”

“All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”

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PHOTO: 1964, Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. Dick DeMarsico, World Telegram staff photographer. Wikimedia Commons.

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Bill Patton, gentleman and scholar: 1927-2011

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By Bob Hicks

Sad news today from Ashland: William Patton, the main man behind the scenes at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from 1953 until his retirement in 1995, has died. Bill was 83 and had been in failing health for some time. A true Southern Oregonian, he was born in Medford and lived in the Rogue Valley most of his life.

Bill Patton in 1989/Oregon Shakespeare FestivalThe mythology of the festival is that actor/director/artistic leader Angus Bowmer was the founding visionary, and he was. It was Bowmer who got things going in 1935, and when I began to go to the festival in the late 1960s and 1970s he was still around, still a quiet eminence, still a prominent spirit around the place.

But Patton, as general manager and later executive director, was already well established as the calm, steady hand who kept things rolling, who bridged the gap between festival and community by being an integral part of both, who paved the way for revolutionary changes by making sure that the present was always on an even keel. (He first showed up at the festival in 1947, and even did some acting in the early years.)

Bill was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word, always honest, always understated, devoted to the festival and its people and the audiences he considered part of the family. He was by nature a conservative man — I am not speaking politically here — who would think and think and think a thing through, and once he’d made up his mind, do what he thought good and necessary. No artistic leader could have asked for a better partner: Without Bill Patton, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival would not be the remarkable institution it is today.

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Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Visual Art

Budget ax takes forty whacks

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By Bob Hicks

All right, times are tough all over. But who’d’a thunk Lizzie Borden would be getting the ax after all these years?

Lizzie Borden, ca. 1889. Wikimedia Commons.This morning’s Art Daily passes along a brief item from the Associated Press reporting that the 40 Whacks Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is going out of business after two years: high costs, low attendance.

The museum’s existence in Salem, about 70 miles north of Fall River, where Borden was acquitted of hatcheting to death her father and stepmother in 1892, was a bit of a puzzler. But then, Salem, where Mr. Scatter briefly lived almost 40 years ago, bases a good deal of its economy on commemoration and re-creation of its past, from its witch trials to its seafaring days — so why not steal another town’s infamy?

Four or five years ago, on a visit to Massachusetts, Mr. Scatter took the Scatter family to see the house where he’d lived in old town Salem, only to discover it had been torn down to make room for the front lawn of the rebuilt Peabody Essex Museum — a very good regional museum, by the way, run by Dan Monroe, a onetime director of the Portland Art Museum. To assuage their keen disappointment, Mr. Scatter took the family to the New England Pirate Museum, where several T-shirts and a treasure map were bought.

When they saw what they had done, the Scatters cried, “The pirates won!”

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PHOTO: Lizzie Borden, ca. 1889. Wikimedia Commons.

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Visual Art

Sneak peek at the new Broad in L.A.

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Artist's conception of new Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles. Diller Scofidio + Renfro

By Bob Hicks

From Art Daily, the first look at designs for the new Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles. The 120,000-square-foot museum will house the expansive modern collections of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, and in at least one way it aims to be friendly: It’ll be known as “The Broad,” something in the manner of Portland’s Dolores Winningstad Theatre (“The Winnie”) and Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall (“The Schnitz”). Maybe it doesn’t have a lot of choice: It’s across the street from the supersonic flapping wings of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, as well as MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. It’ll build on what’s already a significant cultural district.

Designed by Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (which also handled the makeover of Lincoln Center in New York and created the not-yet-inflated “Bubble” at the Hirschorn in Washington, D.C.), The Broad will be a great big honeycomb with nearly an acre of column-free gallery space. It’s due to open in two years. The era of big-statement architectural designs for new museum buildings came tumbling down with the collapse of the world economy in 2008, but it’s not quite dead yet. It’ll be fascinating to see how the new Broad plays out.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Theater

On beyond Twelfth Night: upstaged

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"Malvolio and the Countess," 1859. Daniel Maclise (1806-1870), engraved by R. Staines. Wikimedia Commons.

By Bob Hicks

Yes, it’s over. Today is January 6, Epiphany, the day after Twelfth Night, traditional final day of the Christmas season, complete with twelve lords a-leaping and a partridge in a pear tree. Salute them in the rear view mirror, say a fond farewell, and let’s move on.

The diarist Samuel Pepys seemed more than ready to turn his attentions elsewhere on January 6, 1663, when he recorded this among other observations of the day: “So to my brother’s, where Creed and I and my wife dined with Tom, and after dinner to the Duke’s house, and there saw Twelfth Night acted well, though it be but a silly play, and not related at all to the name or day.”

Design by Rachel Ann Lindsay; Typography by Michael Buchino; Art direction by Francesca RestrepoPepys had notoriously little patience for Shakespeare and his fripperies. What might he have thought, then, of Constance Congdon’s adaptation of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid, with David Margulies as the hypochondriacal Argan? We haven’t seen it (it opens next Friday, January 14, as Portland’s theater Second Season picks up speed) but the whispers blowing in from backstage are that it’s heavy on the flatulence jokes. Ah, the holy trinity of bodily-function comedy: Beavis and Butthead, South Park, Moliere.

Second Season gets off and running Friday night when Artists Repertory Theatre opens Tracy Letts’s Superior Donuts. The cast includes Bill Geisslinger and Linda K. Alper, a couple of top-rank actors from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, which opens its new season in late February. And the crossovers continue. OSF opens its production of Letts’s biggest hit, August: Osage County, in April. And the festival opens its own version of The Imaginary Invalid — this one adapted by Oded Gross and director Tracy Young, with the excellent David Kelly as Argan — in February.

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Bob Hicks, Film, General, Television, Theater

Aging grandly: Elizabeth McGovern

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The Earl and Countess of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern)

By Bob Hicks

One of the lasting impressions of Ragtime, director Milos Forman‘s 1981 version of the E.L. Doctorow novel, is of the ravishing freshness and physical innocence of the young actress Elizabeth McGovern, playing Evelyn Nesbit. Her beauty was dreamlike, the beauty of a creature only just discovering self-awareness.

Elizabeth McGovern in "Ragtime," 1981.Beauty fades, of course, or rather, it changes. Now, at 49, McGovern is still beautiful, but in a fully mature, more experienced, less unnerving way — which, from some vantages, makes her even more beautiful: It’s a beauty anchored by reality.

McGovern has lived in England for the past 18 years, and has recently co-starred in a hit period television series, Downton Abbey, which will be broadcast in the United States beginning Sunday on PBS’s Masterpiece Classic. Sarah Lyall has a good interview with her in this morning’s editions of the New York Times.

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Bob Hicks, Books, General

Between the covers: reading in 2010

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Source: wpclipart.com

By Bob Hicks

Just a year ago, in this post about his reading adventures in 2009, Mr. Scatter confessed that he is a lousy keeper of lists, and therefore couldn’t report with any certainty on what he’d read in the previous twelve months. Some books, he was sure, had simply slipped in and out of his mind without leaving much of an impression. Others might have left a deep impression, but by the end of the year he couldn’t recall whether they’d made that impression in the previous calendar year or in, say, 1994.

If this seems odd, bear in mind that most of Mr. Scatter’s reading tends to be not from publishers’ current lists but from that great deep river of bookmaking that extends back through the centuries, constantly refreshing itself when anyone dips in. Books are like that. At some point they’re new, but after a certain point the good ones are simply current — or in the current. If someone reads, for instance, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini for the first time in the year 2011, the experience throws that person into parallel universes: It is both 450 years old and current events. With that sort of time-traveling, no wonder Mr. Scatter gets a little scattered.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Felix/Martha goes a-nutcrackin’

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The Snowflakes in the grand finale to Act One of Oregon Ballet Theatre's production of George Balanchine's "The Nutcracker." Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.

As regular readers may recall, the Small Large Smelly Boy (a.k.a. Felix/Martha) is a lover of the ballet. Not so much contemporary dance — at 13, he’s a classicist at heart — but definitely the ballet. That made a trip to this year’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker at Oregon Ballet Theatre a command performance, so off we went on Wednesday night. Mr. Scatter had asked Felix/Martha if he’d like to blog about the experience, and he declined. But in the car on the way downtown, Mr. Scatter struck a deal: Write five sentences about the show after you’ve seen it, and I’ll write the post. Done, with a bonus Sentence No. 6. To maintain the verity of balance, Mr. Scatter decided to confine himself to an equal number of segments. Felix/Martha’s sentences are in bold, Mr. Scatter’s in more quotidian light face. Final performances are Thursday night and Friday noon.

By Felix/Martha and Bob Hicks

1. The music is brilliant, better even than the dancing. The story is compelling, and the mixture of it all — plot, dance and music — forms an arguable masterpiece.

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Bob Hicks, Books, Food, General

Goose, elk, and Pepys’ Christmas dinner

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By Bob Hicks

“How do you feel about elk meat for Christmas dinner?” Mr. Scatter casually asked the Older Educated Daughter over the phone.

The long hesitant pause, coupled with the complication that several of us no longer eat any sort of mammal or fowl, anyway, suggested that a nice fat slab of salmon should be added to the oven on the 25th. But we’ll also be cooking up those thick elk steaks, which wandered into our freezer via one of Mrs. Scatter’s fabled pickle swaps.

Randolph Caldecott, illustration of "The Christmas Dinner" from "The Sketch Book" by Washington Irving; 1876.Here at Chez Scatter, the arrival of Christmas always includes a good deal of flutter over food. How many people will we be this year? Who eats meat and who doesn’t? What recipes have we been longing to try? How traditional and how daring are we going to be?

A few things are non-negotiable: the good cheeses, the platters of pickles, the mounds of mashed potatoes, the cranberry-orange sauce with a dash of port. A dressing is essential: this year we’re leaning toward a mixed-mushroom and cornbread version.

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Bob Hicks, Food, General, Humor

When Cromwell canceled Christmas

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By Bob Hicks

It wasn’t just the theater that merry King Charles II restored when he reclaimed the British throne for royalty in 1661. He brought back Christmas, too.

Robert Walker, Portrait of Oliver Cromwell, ca. 1649. National Portrait Gallery, London/Wikimedia Commons.Many Scatterers undoubtedly know that when Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans took over power in England in 1645, not all that long after William Shakespeare’s heydey, they put a quick end to all that decadent theatrical nonsense (but apparently not, as the accompanying portrait of Cromwell reveals, to decadent ribbons and bows).

In 1644, Cromwell forced a bill through Parliament banning all Christmas celebrations, too: they were too popish, he proclaimed darkly, and besides, people shouldn’t be having that much fun. As Alan Rickman so brilliantly snarled as the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1991 movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: “And call off Christmas!”

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