Category Archives: Bob Hicks

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland 2: pride, prejudice, ruin, respect

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Mama Nadi's approach gets her girls' attention (from left, Chinasa Ogbuagu, Dawn-Lyen Gardner, Victoria Ward). Photo by Jenny Graham.

By Bob Hicks

Art Scatter, despite its name, is mostly about pulling things together. We examine the daunting scatter of incident that is contemporary culture — this endlessly broad turmoil of emotions, beliefs and events — and gather them together, looking for patterns, similarities, fragments of coalescence. Out of chaos, we seek structure and story. We do this for you, our readers, but also for ourselves, because story, we’ve come to believe, is how we make sense of the subterranean roil of chaos that is life.

Maybe that’s why the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has become an annual touchstone in our lives. Mr. Scatter first came to this company, many years ago, as a professional observer. He’s stuck with it, gradually becoming friend, admirer, devil’s advocate, occasional scold, and in his own small way, participant — as are all who feed the festival with their time, money and attention. Whatever its faults, the festival believes in story, and in the essential wrestling with chaos that story represents: the quest to wrest comprehension from the incomprehensible.

Ah, but how to make sense of a glorious day of theatergoing that begins with the iron filigree of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and concludes with the hellfire and brimstone of Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s corrosive drama of Congolese warfare and rape? How, that is, besides the minor comparisons of stagecraft, plot, style and technique (all of which, in both productions, are admirable)? These are two peas that at first, second and even third glance do not appear to come from the same pod.

Your Honor, we call to the witness stand Aretha Franklin and Rodney Dangerfield.

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Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland the first: night the twelfth

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Viola in disguise (Brooke Parks) discovers an affection for Orsino (Kenajuan Bentley), as Feste (Michael Elich, center), Curio (Fune Tautala Jr., back left) and Valentine (Jorge Paniagua) look on. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

By Bob Hicks

Ah, the adventures of the road. The brain trust at Art Scatter World Headquarters has packed up and squeezed itself temporarily into the Scattermobile, partaking of adventures large and small. We’ve ingested the oyster and the clam, descended into Devil’s Churn, gazed upon the gathered elk, spied osprey and eagle and hawk, felt the chilling spray of Hellgate Canyon as it soaked the curl from our hair. We’ve dined in the company of Jack London’s ghost at the Wolf Creek Inn. We’ve discovered disturbingly misplaced apostrophes on public signs, dangling hopefully like unacknowledged offspring at the reading of a rich man’s will.

Now we’re in Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where we’re settling in long enough to take in the nine plays still in repertory, having missed the already departed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Well. It’s a marathon that’s become a tradition of shared argumentation and pleasure. Mr. Scatter, Mrs. Scatter, the Learned Sister and the Large Smelly Boys experience it all, each from his or her own vantage, each with the advantages and handicaps of his or her own delights and prejudices. Late August is high season, and a good time to be doing this: The shows have hit their groove and become pretty much all that they can be.

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Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Long night’s journey into day

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Robyn Nevin, Luke Mullins, Todd Van Voris and William Hurt in "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Photo: Brett Boardman

By Bob Hicks

It was a long, long night, and by daylight its shadows were still playing tricks.

Saturday night’s opening of the eagerly anticipated Long Day’s Journey Into Night was more than a social event, although it was that. The Newmark Theatre was packed to its two-balcony gills. A post-show spread of food and drink sprawled out over two levels of lobby. The chatter was more clamorous than at a free-for-brawl with Alvin and the Chipmunks, and first-nighters arrived resplendent in a liberal smattering of dress-up Hawaiian shirts (Mr. Scatter’s attire), leopard-skin party dresses, silk jackets and loose-neck ties, even though the temperature was in the high 90s — or, by Puddletown standards, dangerously close to the hubs of Hell.

It was also one of those moments of coalescence when a particular piece of art mattered, whether individual people happened to “like” it or not. One way or another, people were thinking, and arguing, about it — some of them, I imagine, into the wee hours of the morning, when they may or may not have been wearing off a Tyrone-size hangover.

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Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Journalism, Visual Art

The state of support for history in Oregon

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Tom Fehrer, skulls, from "In the Navel of the Moon" at Camerwork Gallery, Portland.

By Bob Hicks

It’s pretty grim, according to Steve Law’s report, Historical Society may ask voters for tax levy, in The Portland Tribune, and Sarah Mirk’s followup, State History Museum Will Run Out of Cash in 2011, Pitches Tax To Stay Afloat, in The Mercury’s Blogtown.

Things are skeletal right now. Oregon Historical Society boss George Vogt says that Oregon ranks No. 50 in state support of its history museum. Not sure, but that sounds like dead last, unless they’re counting the likes of Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Washington, D.C. in the rankings.

The state of Oregon, strapped for funds like every other state, has basically thrown its hands up and surrendered. The Historical Society is so far down the list of its priorities, it’s probably looking up at the likes of funding for bicycle lanes on logging roads in the Tillamook Forest (where something called the Tillamook Burn once happened, but looks like that’s, well, history now).

Vogt says the society will run out of cash next year. His solution? A five-year, $10 million levy on the November ballot that would add about $10 a year to the property-tax bill on a $200,000 home. The catch? It’s not a statewide levy — it’s just for Multnomah County. One of the undertold stories of Oregon politics is that greater Portland and the Willamette Valley have been paying a big share of the bills for most of the rest of the state for decades (urban Oregonians pay much more into the state coffers than they get back in services, and the “extra” money helps underwrite rural and small-town Oregon) but you rarely see it spelled out as baldly as this. The payoff: Multnomah County residents would get free admission to the museum, which ordinarily costs $11 for adults.

Portlanders tend to believe in their cultural organizations, and in ordinary times this would probably stand a fair chance of passing. But these aren’t ordinary times, and I’m guessing this levy, if it hits the ballot, will face a steep uphill challenge.

Thoughts on this? Hit that comment button, please.

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The picture at top, by Seattle photographer Tom Feher, is just one of his many images of Oaxaca, Mexico, on view Aug. 21-Sept. 24 at Portland’s Camerawork Gallery. There’ll be an artist’s reception 1-4 p.m. on Saturday the 21st. Feher’s exhibit, In the Navel of the Moon, is all about history, and the ways that history persists into the present, subtly and sometimes not so subtly shaping what we think of as contemporary life.

Feher has been photographing life in Oaxaca for a dozen years, and lives there half of every year. Here are some of his thoughts on what’s become something of a life work:

Life, in all its aspects, is multilayered in Mexico generally, and especially so in Oaxaca. At its most superficial there is what the tourist sees: the color, the festivities, the unsettling chaos of the markets, streets and traffic. But it goes deeper than that. The countless churches built upon the remains of ancient temples; the religious services and celebrations, an admixture of the orthodox and the older native practices. City names, often a combination of the indigenous name with a post-conquest Saint’s name tacked on. Contemporary art frequently contains pre-Hispanic imagery. Even the food has its origin in the indigenous dishes that existed before the Spaniards came. It becomes evident that even as they live in an ever more contemporary world, there are people of today’s Mexico who still dream the dreams of the ancients and evidence it in their daily lives, as well as events that only thinly disguise their connection to rituals of pre-history.

Ah, but then again, history: Who needs it, anyway?

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Intriguingly, Northeast Portland’s 23 Sandy Gallery has a show coming up in September that seems to dovetail in interesting ways with Feher’s exhibit at Camerawork. Portland photographer Stewart Harvey‘s I Am What I Need To Be, on view Sept. 3-18, is subtitled A Photo Essay on the Odyssey of Identity in New Orleans. It’s about the nature of creativity in the Crescent City, which seems to have a lot to do not just with the whims and brainstorms of young creatives but more importantly with the ways that the past weaves into the present and the future. In other words: History lives.

Compared to Portland, which “shares much of the same liberal spirit,” Harvey says:

… the Crescent City seems more enamored by cultural movements than the rabid individuals who create them. I was charmed by the willingness of New Orleanians to not only give sanctuary to the expressive oddball, but to provide a platform for their development.

Like Oaxaca, New Orleans has a deep and long-running history with bones: See Harvey’s photograph below. Unlike Oregon, it seems to think that history has a place in the present and future.

Stewart Harvey photographs skeletal revelry in New Orleans, at 23 Sandy Gallery in September.

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PHOTOS, from top:

  • Tom Fehrer, skulls, from “In the Navel of the Moon” at Camerwork Gallery, Portland.
  • Stewart Harvey photographs skeletal revelry in New Orleans, at 23 Sandy Gallery in September.
Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General, Humor, Journalism, Language, Theater

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll darn near die

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What's holding things up? Jamey Hampton in "BloodyVox." Photo: Michael Shay, Polara Studios

By Bob Hicks

Actors have a parlor trick they like to pull out to amaze and amuse their non-thespian friends. I’m not sure if it has an accepted given name, but I sometimes call it the “laugh-cry game.” It’s simple, really: They cover their faces, start making an odd guttural sound, and challenge you to tell whether they’re laughing or crying. In terms of technique, both actions come out of the same place.

It’s fitting that the art of acting is so often depicted with drawings of the tragic and comic masks, because the comic and tragic are so often barely a whisker’s width separated from each other. Tragedy gets the respect. Comedy gets the love, if often reluctantly. But really, the balance is a lot closer. Remember, Chekhov insisted his mournful plays were comedies.

Robyn Nevin and William Hurt in "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Photo: Brett BoardmanI think of this because the big deal in Puddletown this weekend is Saturday night’s opening of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill‘s imperial American classic, at Artists Repertory Theatre. This production has Serious written all over it. A co-production with Australia’s Sydney Theatre Company, it stars occasional Oregonian William Hurt as the destructive Tyrone family patriarch, and it drew sparkling reviews in its recently closed Sydney run. I look forward to it not just because it arrives with stellar recommendations but also because O’Neill was in a very real sense the father of American theater, our first true genius. That he was such a morose son of a bitch was the luck of the draw. France got Moliere, the satiric comedian. England got Shakespeare, the astonishing Everyman. We got Old Bleak House, and few writers have ever done bleak better: O’Neill paints loss in despairingly seductive strokes of love.

Good laughs are nothing to sniff at.

Continue reading You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll darn near die →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater

‘Astral Weeks’ onstage: just think radio

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By Bob Hicks

A few nights ago, as I watched the premiere of Find Me Beside You, Jessica Wallenfels’ “rock story ballet” stage adaptation of Van Morrison‘s 1968 concept album Astral Weeks, three things crossed my mind.

The first was the tradition of the minimally staged Broadway musical — in essence, concert versions of full-blown theater pieces — that has been popularized in the Encores! series at New York City Center and emulated across the country, including productions by the Portland company Staged!

Dave Cole and Elizabeth Klinger in Jessica Wallenfels' "Find Me Beside You," produced by Many Hats Collaboration, Portland. Photo: Zachary RouseThe second was Working Girl, the 1988 romantic movie comedy starring Melanie Griffith as a working-class sharpie who, as a gopher for conniving big-biz baddie Sigourney Weaver, figures out how to make a stalled television megadeal work: let a little air out of the tires and reap big profits in radio instead.

The third was Winterreise, Franz Schubert‘s 1827 song cycle based on poems by Wilhelm Muller.

Ben Waterhouse has reviewed Find Me Beside You here for Willamette Week, and Catherine Thomas here for The Oregonian; both were in general impressed, with reservations. I tend to see a little less diamond and a little more rough, but I agree that what’s good here is promising. And I have a modest suggestion: let a little air out of the tires. Find Me Beside You tries to do too much on too many platforms, and its high ambitions make it a sprawling muddle instead of the focused gem it might be.

Continue reading ‘Astral Weeks’ onstage: just think radio →

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Music, Visual Art

We will, we will rock you (Victorian style)

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By Bob Hicks

At a certain age, cranking up Queen on the stereo is an inalienable right. But who knew “stereo” meant “stereoscopic,” as in those cool old double-image photos that you look at through a viewfinder?

Brian May performing in Warsaw, 1998/Wikimedia CommonsJesse Kornbluth, editor of Head Butler, has the lowdown via The Huffington Post. Brian May, legendary (and now 63-year-old) guitarist for the British rockers, has developed a passion for stereoscopic photographs, which created 3D effects long before Avatar (and, for those who remember that lethal pair of scissors striking out, before Hitchcock’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder). Specifically, May fell hard for the images that a pioneer of the form, T.R. Williams, created in the 1850s in his home village of Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire.

A Village Lost and FoundAs Kornbluth explains it:

What Williams had done, May realized, was to freeze a small village in a magical moment — instead of reading about it in a novel by Thomas Hardy, you could almost literally visit it. That is, with the help of a viewer, you could feel yourself in the scene. And what a scene: a rural idyll, five minutes before the train comes to town, and mass literacy, and industrialization.

Now May and photography expert Elena Vidal have come out with a slipcovered book called A Village Lost and Found, an annotated version of Williams’ village series. It arrives with a foldup stereo viewer that May devised, so you can get as near as possible to the full effect.

Kornbluth’s story is fascinating (read it here), and the Huffington posting also includes almost 20 minutes’ worth of video conversation with May and Vidal as they explain the project. It also links to a pretty cool vintage version of Queen’s We Will Rock You. Along the way, Kornbluth casually drops the information that in his post-rocking days May has also immersed himself in the world of astronomy, picked up a Ph.D. (his thesis is titled Interplanetary Dust, A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud) and co-written a popular-science book, Bang! The Complete History of the Universe.

Does all of this make May the King of post-rock ‘n’ roll?

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PHOTO: Brian May performing in Warsaw, 1998. Wikimedia Commons.

Bob Hicks, General, Journalism, Visual Art

Two good places to put your money

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Blanket Dance, 2005, 3' x 4', Arches black and white cover stock and Strathmore Red and gold and silver Japanese. (Availalbe through the Stonington Gallery, Seattle.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the world is overflowing with causes deserving of our support. It is a truth personally declared that Mr. Scatter, on occasion, will spotlight certain of these causes in the hope that his friends and readers will give them a second look.

Two such possibilities have presented themselves of late.

The first arrived with news, via Lillian Pitt, that the fine Northwest poet, visual artist and thinker Gail Tremblay needs as many helping hands as she can get. Tremblay, a prominent figure in contemporary Native American art circles and an artist who has been exceptionally generous with her own time and talent, has dealt for several years with a rare disease called lipedema.

Indian Princess in a White Dress, 2006, 9 x 7 x 7, 16 mm film, metallic braid. This work is currently including in the exhibit, Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit, curated by Rickie Solinger, and traveling throughout the United States until April 2012.The condition causes a great deal of pain and makes it difficult for her to handle basic daily tasks. Surgical procedures can help immensely, but her American insurance plan has denied coverage. Without insurance, treatment in the U.S. would cost $30,000 a week or more. She can get four weeks of treatment in Germany for between $12,000 and $19,000 plus travel expenses, and has been accepted for treatment to begin Oct. 5. She’s paid 4,000 Euros on account, but because she’s needed to pay caregivers for the past three years, her savings are wiped out.

Any sort of help, of course, is welcome. But this might be the ideal time to pick up a good piece of Gail Tremblay art. (The piece at top is one of her series of paper weavings inspired by traditional basketry, the basket in the inset photo is made of old film stock from Hollywood depictions of Indian life.) She’s set aside several notable pieces — ones that have traveled the country in various exhibitions — for sale to help pay for her surgery, including some from her fascinating series of film baskets. You can learn more about available pieces and prices here.

Tremblay, who lives in Olympia, Wash., and teaches at The Evergreen State College, is represented in Portland by Froelick Gallery.

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Opportunity No. 2 comes via Dmae Roberts, the Portland playwright and Peabody Award-winning radio producer, who hosts and produces the weekly arts show Stage and Studio at 11 a.m. Tuesdays on listener-sponsored radio KBOO 90.7 FM.

Mr. Scatter spent a couple of hours at Dmae’s studio/office the other day, taping comments for her upcoming “Oregon Treasures” segment on Artists Repertory Theatre‘s Allen Nause (it’ll air Aug. 17) and in the process talking about her hopes for Stage and Studio.

Dmae Roberts/Stage and StudioIn a nutshell, Roberts would like to turn Stage and Studio into an online hub and radio show covering arts in the Pacific Northwest. She’s made a good beginning, and has the chops and smarts to follow through. As print sources of arts news and comment become slimmer and slimmer, we need as many good alternative sources as we can get. You can read about her project here.

To get the project kick-started (it’s independent from KBOO), Roberts is trying to raise $6,000 in donations. She has until Aug. 26 to hit her target, and it’s all or nothing: If she doesn’t get the whole $6,000 in pledges, she won’t take any of it. You can make your pledge here. Think of it as consumer-funded media. And of course, anything you give is tax-deductible.

From the Web site Stage and Studio

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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

  • Gail Tremblay, “Blanket Dance,” 2005, 3′ x 4′, Arches black and white cover stock and Strathmore Red and gold and silver Japanese. Available through the Stonington Gallery, Seattle.
  • Gail Tremblay, “Indian Princess in a White Dress,” 2006, 9 x 7 x 7, 16 mm film, metallic braid. Included in the exhibit “Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit,” traveling throughout the United States until April 2012.
  • Dmae Roberts in the radio booth.
  • From Dmae Roberts’ “Stage and Studio” Web site.
Bob Hicks, General, Music, Television, Visual Art

Thursday links: Trash-art TV, unkind cuts

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By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter doesn’t watch much television (especially since the Mariners have taken a dive into baseball’s primordial ooze of futility: where are you now, Edgar and Buhner and Big Unit?), and he doesn’t really go in for the American Idol model of determining cultural “winners.”

Nao Bustamante, not shocking enough for TV. Shows like Idol and So You Think You Can Dance certainly reflect the effect of the marketplace on the art world — an effect that a lot of people like to pretend doesn’t exist but is in fact crucial. That doesn’t necessarily make it a positive, only an inescapable fact of life. Still, as we’ve all become excruciatingly aware, an unchecked marketplace can be an arena for disaster, and Mr. Scatter is not convinced that his musical listening habits, for instance, should be determined by a popular vote.

This is a long route to confessing that he hasn’t actually watched an episode of the Bravo network’s Work of Art, in which visual artists advance or fall by the wayside according to a Trump-like theory of failure and success. Fortunately Regina Hackett, from her perch at the provocative and insightful Another Bouncing Ball, has watched, and thought, and written.

Her post Reality TV: artists as female stereotypes is a good read, and typically for ABB, it rattles the cages of conventional wisdom. And Hackett can be funny. Musing on Work of Art‘s judges, whom she judges to be pretty lame, she wonders whether the show couldn’t be goosed up a bit if venerated critic Donald Kuspit joined the panel: “When being fed nonsense, I prefer it to be elegant nonsense, like Kuspit’s.”

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Hackett’s post here on Dave Hickey (she calls him “the great tap-dancing art critic of our time”) is also a refreshing read. Here’s Hickey on university life: “It took me a few years to realize you can’t talk to other English teachers about literature. You can talk to them about their pets, though. That’s why you want to learn all the names of the professors’ pets, so when you see them in the hall you can ask, ‘How’s Roscoe?’ and they will go on for half an hour, and you can nod along and think about whatever you want.”

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Meanwhile, Barry Johnson at Arts Dispatch and David Stabler at The Oregonian have been having an interesting conversation about whether it’s smart or dumb for arts groups to  slash budgets in tough times. Should you cut budgets and programming, because it’s prudent to balance your budget? Or does that simply make you look desperate? The ping-pong has been interesting, and so have the comments by a lot of smart onlookers.

I like the latest (so far) take on the fray, by Oregon Symphony violist Charles Noble at Noble Viola: “What you cut is almost as important as how much you cut. … For example, cutting all pops programming because ‘the audience is all dying anyway’ is catastrophic cutting, whereas searching for the audience that we most want to develop and then catering to them within the general pops genre is the better route, though possibly more expensive and time consuming. The difference is what you or I might do to our prized Japanese maple tree if we just randomly hack off stray limbs instead of hiring a skilled arborist to perform careful pruning to make the tree more healthy.”

In other words: Constantly reassess, in good times and bad. And spend smart.

This is a discussion that might actually have an impact. If you haven’t already, catch up on the conversation at these links and throw in your own two Euros’ worth.

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Illustration: Nao Bustamante’s performance piece wasn’t shocking enough for the judges on Bravo’s “Work of Art.”

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Visual Art

John Callahan, 1951-2010

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One of John Callahan's most famous panels.

In a town of gifted animators and graphic novelists and even the cartooning Simpsons daddy of ’em all, Matt Groening, John Callahan has long held a special place: the edgiest of the edgy, the guy from way out there, the quadriplegic artist (we mention this because that fact is so important to the formation of his black comic universe) who cut through all the politically correct crap and aimed with devastating acuity at the little lies and evasions of everyday life. His cartoons were crude and embarrassing and dug deep down into the fatuous mush of public and private politeness, down to where the demons live. For all that, people who knew him well say he was a sweet and lovely guy.

Cartoonist John CallahanJohn died on Friday, July 24, 2010, taking his familiar motorized wheelchair off of Portland’s streets and silencing his singular voice. He seemed to us a necessary antidote to Portland smugness (we ARE the center of the universe, are we not?), and his presence among us ironically added to our notion of self-worth: John Callahan is one of us! Rest in peace, John, if peace, finally, is what you wish for. Or keep fighting the metaphysical good fight.

Here is Callahan’s Web site.

Here is Tom D’Antoni’s report on Oregon Music News.

Here is a compilation of Callahan stories from Willamette Week, where his syndicated cartoons had their original publication for many years.

Addendum, Monday, July 26: Here is Jim Redden’s report from the Portland Tribune, which includes an appreciation by David Milholland, who published Callahan’s cartoons in the old Clinton St. Quarterly.

And you can post your own reminiscences and comments on a memorial Web site here.