Category Archives: Bob Hicks

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Hot and sweaty at Conduit Dance: Don’t think, just feel

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Here’s what I think. I think we think too much.

Sometimes.

About art.

Linda Austin. Photo: Daniel AddyAbout visual art, definitely. We’ve created a mumbo-jumbo priesthood of commentary and pretend the intellectual abstraction is more important than the physical experience of the art itself. Which it is, but only sometimes. And far less often than the priesthood likes to think.

Also about dance, which on the face of it is about as physical and sensual as an art form can be: One’s body is one’s art. That doesn’t mean dance isn’t driven by ideas, from folk styles to ballet and modern and the most contemporary expression. Yet in no other art form is it so literally true that an artist creates a body of work.

On Friday night Portland was happily busting the spine of an unPortland-like heat wave, but the word hadn’t drifted up to the fourth floor of downtown’s Pythian Building, where giant fans were whooshing to keep the sticky air circulating at Conduit Dance. Conduit’s in a bit of a pickle financially right now, and so it’s putting on a series of benefit performances this weekend and next, and Friday was opening night.

A hot and sticky affair, as it turned out: For a change, the audience got a feel for what it’s like to be out on the floorboards, sweating under the lights. Because so much of the audience was made up of dance people, anyway, it just helped to create a here-we-are-together mood. And because the wet heat had the mildly giddy effect of a low-grade fever, it encouraged dispensing with analysis and just experiencing the thing. As Paul McCartney put it, Let it be.

For years I’ve watched Linda Austin, a smart and funny woman who’s established herself as one of the city’s leading contemporary performers, and for years I just haven’t quite got what she’s up to. Linda’s out there, and I’ve spent a bit of time trying to figure out where “there” is and exactly why she’s taking us to it. In that suss-out-the-puzzle sense her Friday night performance, a solo study for her work-in-progress Bandage a Knife, was pretty familiar in its unfamiliarity: Who besides Linda knows what that chanting and waving of lights was all about?

Continue reading Hot and sweaty at Conduit Dance: Don’t think, just feel →

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Music

Boll weevil blues: Singing the heat wave away

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What makes your head so red?
Tell me, what makes your head so red?
I been workin’ so long in the hot hot sun,
it’s a wonder that I ain’t dead.

My father used to sing that sometimes, sleeves rolled up, shirt open at the collar, head tilted back for the high notes. Just a snatch of a song, I always figured, part of something bigger, but that was the part he sang. So do I, now, when it sounds in my head, a short burst that makes me think of high heat and hard work in fields that I have rarely known.

Hot enough for ya?Today, in the throes of an infernal Pacific Northwest heat wave that has the thermometer rattling up toward 107, that red-baked head is on my mind again. Kind of blue, kind of hot, an oddly triumphal moan, mixed of resignation and endurance and somehow coming out on the sweet side of things: I ain‘t dead.

I come from a singing family. (And a whistling family, too, for that matter.)

My father tended toward old country-style things, like “Goodnight, Irene”:

“Sometimes I live in the country,
sometimes I live in town.
Sometimes I take a great notion
to jump into the river and drown.”

Or “Froggy Went a-Courtin'”:

“Without my uncle Rat’s consent,
I wouldn’t marry the president!”

On rare occasions he’d pull out his old battered guitar and strum. More often he’d just start to sing.

My mother had a pretty, Jo Stafford sort of voice, and her songs were more from the pop charts, often with a ’40s derivation, definitely pre-rock ‘n’ roll:

“Shrimp boats a-comin’, there’ll be dancin’ tonight!”
“It was fiesta down in Mexico, and so I stopped a while to see the show …”
“Your Daddy’s rich, and your Mama’s good-lookin’ …”


My father is 93 now, and my mother is 89, and they don’t sing much anymore: The old vocal cords just aren’t what they used to be. But for most of my life I remember singing as an utterly casual yet plainly important part of their lives. They had seven kids and not a lot of money and precious little time to themselves, but singing they could do. Singing was a pleasure, and to most of their children they passed it along. To me they even passed along a certain taste. I’m much more likely to start singing “Hey, good lookin’, whatcha got cookin’?” or “If I’m gonna marry it’s the butcher boy for me!” or even a rollicking old church tune than anything by the Beatles, much less Madonna or Cheryl Crow or Smashing Pumpkins.

Our town was surrounded by dairy and berry and bean farms and it rained a lot and in winter we got silver frosts with icicles hanging like troll-knives from the eaves. Summers were short and warm and grew things that got us out in the fields, rustling through strawberry bushes to earn clothes money for the coming school year. The music in the fields tended toward the tin beat of transistor radios and pop-40 tunes: “Call my baby lollipop, tell you why, his kiss is sweeter than an apple pie …”

People made their own music. That’s always been and always will be, despite the corporate push to turn us all into spectators for carefully controlled musical spectacles. (Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the masses; apparently he never saw MTV.) People made music at church. They made music on the porch or in the back yard. Kids gathered on sidewalks and chanted their proto-raps: “Made ya look, ya dirty crook, ya stole your mother’s pocketbook!” “Miss Suzy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell, Miss Suzy went to Heaven, the steamboat went to Hello operator, please give me number nine  …”

Continue reading Boll weevil blues: Singing the heat wave away →

Bob Hicks, Environment, General

Temporarily incapacitated: Please go away

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Old Sol, with spots. NASA/Wikimedia Commons

The temperature on the surface of old Sol, often referred to as “the sun,” is 5,510 degrees Celsius.

The temperature in Portland, Oregon, United States of America, western and northern hemispheres, planet Earth, is 105 degrees Fahrenheit.

Close enough.

Art Scatter gives up.

If something eventually gives, we will emerge from the basement.

Until then, we are OUT OF ORDER.

Our apologies.

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Television, Theater

Farewell, frontiersman: Dallas McKennon, 1919-2009

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One day in 1978 a shadow fell over my desk at the old Oregon Journal in downtown Portland. I looked up and there stood a giant of a mountain man, beard down to his chest, big grin peeking though from the bramble of hair, hand outstretched in greeting.

Dallas McKennonJoe Meek, maybe. Jedediah Smith. Liver-Eating Johnson. Jim Bridger.

Or, as it turned out, Cincinnatus, the frontier storekeeper on Fess Parker’s old Daniel Boone television series from the 1960s.

Dallas McKennon, the actor who played Cincinnatus, reveled in the rugged-outdoorsman role that was his bread and butter through several seasons of Daniel Boone and occasional shots on the likes of Gunsmoke, Laramie, The Rifleman, The Virginian, Wagon Train, and the Don Knotts spoof-Western movie Hot Lead and Cold Feet.

It fit him well. He was born in 1919 in the eastern Oregon town of La Grande, and although he became one of those familiar Hollywood faces (and even more familiar Hollywood voices) he loved that frontier image. I never saw him clean-shaven and surely wouldn’t have recognized him if I had. He was big and booming and glad-spirited, a happy salesman of himself.

I don’t remember what his particular purpose was on that day in 1978, other than to make himself known to the new kid handling entertainment news at the paper. My mind was filled with Big Stuff — the French New Wave, new German cinema, Important Literaure — and I wasn’t sure where to fit in a full-throttle show biz throwback to the American-frontier myth.

But McKennon was gregarious and patient and genially insistent — I’m here, he never quite said; you need to deal with me — and when he had a project going, he’d drop by for a few minutes and a fresh photo. He knew how the business worked: I’d make sure a line landed somewhere in the paper.

I really should have paid more attention. McKennon died July 14, five days shy of his 90th birthday, and if Oregon didn’t pay much notice to the passing of a native son, other parts of the world did. Here’s a fine obituary by Claire Noland from the Los Angeles Times.

Dallas (or Dal, as his old movie and TV credits often had it) was living in the Washington coastal town of Raymond, along Willapa Bay, when he died, but he’d spent many years in Cannon Beach on the Oregon Coast. It was there that he began to put together his own live-theater musical productions with titles such as Johnny Appleseed, Kaintuck and Wagons Ho. In the early 1950s he’d had a pioneering kids’ TV show in Los Angeles, and once he’d settled back in Oregon he’d sometimes show up on the old Ramblin’ Rod morning show in Portland.

He was never forgotten in Hollywood. Partly that was because of the old TV shows, but it was also for his prominence as a gifted voice actor. He worked for Walt Disney and Walter Lantz. He was the voice of Buzz Buzzard on Woody Woodpecker. He was Gumby, he worked on Mr. Magoo, he voiced part of the cartoon scene in Mary Poppins and did voice work on other Disney animated films such as A Hundred and One Dalmatians and Sleeping Beauty. He was the voice of Archie Andrews, the freckle-faced prototypical comic teen-ager, on TV. He even had a bit part in the Elvis Presley movie Clambake; according to a poster at www.cartoonbrew.com, during film breaks he and Elvis passed the time together doing dog barks.

That’s a life. Or part of one. Other things of note: He had eight kids. He married Betty Warner in Portland in 1942, and they stayed married: She survives him.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1, in the Cannon beach Community Presbyterian Church.

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Dance, Environment, General, Music

Monday links: Romancing the Rose Quarter

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TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLET GAME: Remember the flap over Memorial Coliseum? Tear it down? Fix it up? Turn it into the doorway to a suburban-style, cookie-cutter entertainment and shopping complex? Build a minor-league baseball park in its place, with a concession stand serving grilled architects on a bun?

Portland Memorial ColiseumNiel DePonte has another idea, and you can read about it on this morning’s Oregonian editorial page, under the headline Imagine the Rose Quarter Performing Arts District. I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth at City Hall now. Or is that the sound of stonewalling?

But DePonte — Grammy-nominated percussionist for the Oregon Symphony, music director and conductor for Oregon Ballet Theatre, president and founder of MetroArts, Inc., which is helping to find and train the next generations of artists — has some good ideas. And right now the Coliseum in specific and the Rose Quarter in general need some good ideas. Give it a read. And if you like the idea, or parts of it, pass it along.

FAREWELL TO FRANK: This morning’s New York Times has a good appreciation of Frank McCourt, the New York Irish character and sweet writer who died Sunday at age 78. In 1996 McCourt published Angela’s Ashes, his harrowing yet tender memoir of Ireland and America and poverty and drink and survival, and it became a phenomenon, staying near the top of the best-seller lists for two years.

A lot of bad writing’s been committed in the name of memoir. Let’s take time, then, to celebrate a man who did it right — who told the tale more for his readers than himself, and told it with an innate understanding of what storytelling means.

MTC TURNS 100: … and we’d be not just remiss but downright dumb to not point out Mighty Toy Cannon‘s perky celebration of his first century of blogging at Culture Shock. He’s mighty frisky for an old guy. Some writers have got in trouble for misrepresenting the past. MTC niftily sidesteps that problem by brazenly misrepresenting the future. Or is he dead right? Check back in 2109, when our great-grandkids might be comparing him to Nostradamus. Congratulations, old-timer.

Bob Hicks, Books, Food, General, Music

Why I like coffee shops on a Sunday morning

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First, on a day like today, there’s the walk. Just four breezy blocks beneath a cat-stretch sun and here’s our neighborhood coffee shop — Caffe Destino, where Ralph the Owner has been known to laugh and accuse Mrs. Scatter and me, as we’ve sat facing each other tapping away on dueling laptops, of playing Battleship.

John Dodge at Caffe DestinoNo computer screens today, though. On most Sunday mornings Destino offers a bonus: Guitarist John Dodge sits on a stool in the corner by the kids’ toys, small amp propped on a chair beside him, and gives the French blend and bagels a musical setting. It’s melodic, and just the right decibel, and a bit Robert Browning-ish in its simple elegance: All’s right with the world.

Destino sits on the corner of Northeast Fremont and 14th in Portland and has big towering windows that let the sun stream in, but today the place is sleepy: The weather’s so good that most people are out and about, not inside anywhere.

“A quiet morning,” Dodge comments, smiling. And then he begins to play Goin’ Home, one of the loveliest melodies in the American songbook. And I think about how this beautiful song, which many people believe is an African American spiritual, is actually the theme from the second movement of Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, his Symphony From the New World, which he wrote in 1893, during his four-year stay in the United States. The great Czech composer was fascinated with what he heard of Native American and African American music, and predicted that a new American serious music would be built on the foundation of black music. In a way, he was right: It’s called jazz.

So a Czech composer embedded a song on an American theme into a European-style symphony, and it became one of America’s foremost “folk” tunes, because the nature of American culture, like the English language, is to borrow and adapt from everywhere. Czech, Chinese, West African, Brazilian, Russian, Afghani: Once it arrives here, it’s all part of the mix.

People wander in, often with children, who are a regular part of the Destino blend. A sudden squall at the counter declares an emergency: A young lady has spied a cinnamon roll and it’s become her heart’s desire. Except her dad’s said no. Eventually, reluctantly, she settles on a grilled cheese.

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Bob Hicks, General, Theater

In German or English, learning the language of the stage

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From left: executive director Nurella Doumitt, artistic director Beth Harper, office and financial manager Georgia Cacy.

“Do it in German,” Beth Harper said.

Harper, the guiding light of Portland Actors Conservatory, was talking with Simona Constantin, who after two years at the conservatory was trying to figure out what she should do for this week’s graduation showcase Wednesday through Saturday nights.

Constantin, whose English is way better than your German probably is, was worried that her English skills were too rough. And, as much as she loves Portland, she was getting ready to return home to Berlin at the end of summer, where she’ll try to break in to the professional theater scene.

So, do it in German.

She will. Constantin, one of nine grads who’ll perform monologues in this week’s program, will perform one piece in English (Christina Mulchauy’s Sex in a Cold Climate) and one in German: Die Heirat, or The Marriage, by Nicolai Gogol. And if that doesn’t prove that acting’s an international language, nothing will: a German actress from an American school performing a Russian play in a German translation for an American audience.

Simone Constantin: In the language of the stage.“The goal is, after two years, to turn out actors who are ready to go out and act in the professional world,” Harper said a couple of weeks ago at a small media gathering to showcase the showcase and the conservatory itself.

And if your professional world is going to be in Berlin, … well, there you go. Beth Harper is a very practical dreamer, and her advice to Constantin was vintage Harper: Think big, go for it, but figure out how to get there.

It’s been a long road for Portland Actors Conservatory, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and I’m happy to say I was there when it was on the ground floor.

Which it wasn’t. It was a walkup in the Hollywood District, in a couple of rooms that had been a dentist’s office, and its ribbon-cutting was jammed with prominent theater folk of the time: I remember talking with Isabella Chappell and Bill Dobson from the old Portland Civic Theatre. Later, when it was still called The Training Ground, the conservatory moved to another walkup in Old Town with a cramped little theater whimsically called the Loft in Space. Finally it landed at the Firehouse Theatre, a city-owned former firehouse just above downtown on a hill to the west of Portland State University, and there it remains, busting at the seams. (There are remodeling plans to make the place play bigger.)

In the early years of my accidental career as a theater critic, Beth was one of the people who helped me realize that theater is the stuff that happens in the spaces between the actors: the energy, the connections, the passing of the ball on the fast break. She was a very fine actress, and a very good director, the kind who never let herself show but brought the best out of the script and the performers. She studied those scripts, broke them down, then put ’em back together again. And she talked a lot about the need for craft to let the art come out.

So it wasn’t a huge surprise when she became a teacher and a businesswoman. And an idea of making this thing a true school was always part of the dream. Last year the conservatory gained full accreditation from the National Association of Schools of Theatre, a major step but far from the end of Harper’s grand plan.

Now, for a select group (as many as 20 students the first year, down to 12 max the second) the conservatory offers its two-year, full-time professional program. It continues its studio program for ongoing studies — a necessity in a discipline like theater — a summer youth program and a season of plays performed by students and guest actors.

It’s also a hallmark of Harper’s practical approach to theater that the conservatory offers a variety of approaches to the craft. Students learn movement, clown, Meisner Technique, Shakespeare, improv, text analysis. They learn design, and even theater management. Whatever works. Whatever technique gets you there. That’s the one to use.

Teachers include the likes of Michael Mendelson, Sarah Lucht, Philip Cuomo, Rose Riordan and Cynthia Fuhrman — names to be reckoned with around here. Grads include the likes of Maureen Porter, Rafael Untalan, Andrea Alton (Saturday Night Live), Brooke Blanchard (The West Wing), Mario Calcagno, Gilberto Martin del Campo, Zero Feeney and Nathan Gale.

What’s it all come down to?

“After two years,” the graduating Constantin says, “you are more of yourself than you were when you came here.”

Not a bad result.

—————————————————–

DETAILS on this week’s conservatory graduation showcase:

WHO: 2009 graduating class of Portland Actors Conservatory
WHAT: Graduation Showcase performance, An Evening of Monologues
WHEN: 7:30 pm Wednesday through Saturday, July 15-18
WHERE: Portland Actors Conservatory
1436 SW Montgomery Street
Portland, OR 97201
COST: $15
TICKETS: http://www.actorsconservatory.com
Call 503-274-1717 for the box office

Photos by Drew Foster

Bob Hicks, Environment, General

Where have all the otters gone, long time ago?

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Sea Otter in Morro Bay, California. Photo: Mike Baird/Wikimedia Commons

I’m sitting at the beach, where I’ve been the past week, and I’m thinking about time.

Cape Foulweather is out there, a spit in the ocean to the north, so shrouded in fog that I can’t see it at all. A little to the south, also invisible, lies Gull Rock. Hard by it is Otter Rock, a bony outcropping that hasn’t seen an actual otter in more than a century.

Up the road either way is a flimsy yet stubborn string of weathered motels, chowder joints, candy shops, taverns, groceries, kite shops and other human clingings to the edge of the continent. I’m partial to Mo’s, where you can get a decent beer and a decent chowder and a decent smile.

People scratch for a living here, and sometimes the scratches run deep. But on a beautiful day, when you’re pointing in the right direction and you aren’t looking at the scars, it can be one of the happiest places on earth.

And of course, the scars are there because we all want to come to this place and snatch a little happiness, and we all want to be comfortable while we’re at it. Yes, I burned precious liquefied dinosaur to get here.

I hear birds I can’t see. I breathe watery air. I sip black coffee. I feel almost at home.

When I’m down this way I like to visit Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, which has a pleasant walking path along the estuary of Yaquina Bay and where a lot of valuable research is done. In the visitors center, if you time things right, you can see the resident octopus chomping on crab at mealtime (kids love this show). In the little shop I found a fascinating-looking book of ship lore, from chanteys to wrecks to mutinies, that I didn’t buy because I already have a big stack of books waiting to be read. And the displays are always well-explained for general and young audiences: science made not easy, but accessible and interesting.

The Hatfield Center makes you think about geology, about the skeleton on which life attaches. To geology, the little things we think of as time are barely a blink. Yet in those blinks we can make a gawdamighty mess of things, often while we’re in the process of improving them. As one display panel says:

Most of nature does not run at the time that we measure in seconds or minutes or days. To understand these patterns we must understand time itself.


Impossible, of course. But we can take a stab at it. Under the circumstances, I’d say, we have to take a stab at it.
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Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Music

Big Ben turns 150: Where does the time go?

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Big Ben at dusk, 2004. Photo: Andrew Dunn/Wikimedia CommonsToday is the 150th anniversary of Big Ben’s first chime, and artdaily.org has a charming report on the celebration, which was highlighted with the playing of a new composition by Benjamin Till that involves ringing nearly 200 bells across central and east London. Some hadn’t been sounded in 60 years.

It was July 11, 1859 when the big clock bell on the tower of the Palace of Westminster first rang. (Originally “Big Ben” referred to the bell, not the clock, but most people have come to think of Big Ben as the whole package — bell, clock, and tower.) It’s had a few outages since then, including wartime blackouts, fire and maintenance, but Ben has come to be the heartbeat and certainly, with its bell and Quarter Chimes, the sound of London.

And, my, but it’s English: Through thick and thin, come rain or shine, we will soldier on. (Or is that the U.S. Postal Service?) I love that the bulldog nation’s timepiece is also its signature sound, and that the anniversary has been made into a musical event.

Till based his new work on the macabre yet oddly beloved nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons, which fresh-scrubbed British lads and lassies have been chanting for ever so long. The lyrics refer in riddle form to the sounds of church bells across the city:

“Oranges and lemons” say the bells of St. Clement’s.
“You owe me five farthings” say the bells of St. Martin’s.
“When will you pay me?” say the bells of Old Bailey.
“When I grow rich” say the bells of Shoreditch.
“When will that be?” say the bells of Stepney.
“I do not know” say the great bells of Bow.
“Here comes a candle to light you to bed.
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
Chip-chop chip-chop — the last man’s dead.”

At which point, I suppose, there won’t always be an England anymore. At least, not an England with a head on its shoulders.

I’m not English (although some of my forebears were) but I think what I like most about Big Ben isn’t its storied British steadiness and precision but its imprecision. Compared to modern electronic and nuclear timepieces, Big Ben marks the time with the unsteady gate of a drunken folk dancer. The computer on which I’m typing would have a massive coronary if its internal clock were suddenly to coincide with Big Ben’s beat.

On the other hand, Ben is musical. His inconsistencies are his art. He reminds us that for most of life, close is not just good enough, it’s preferable. I come from a time and place where the answer to “What time is it?” was “quarter past three,” not “3:17.” So you were two minutes off. So what? Were you timing a missile launching? Ben has hands. Hands are human. To be human is to alter your gait, just a bit.

So ring those bells. Syncopate that sound. Music’s not a metronome. And life moves forward through its mistakes, not its consistencies, which can only wish they were as interesting as hobgoblins.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Language

The Bulwer-Lyttons: It’s STILL a dark and stormy night

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They’re back: the annual Bulwer-Lytton Awards, the cream of the crop of bad writing.
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, painted by Henry William Pickersgill. Wikimedia Commons

Except in this case it’s deliberately bad writing, short parody passages in emulation of the florid style of Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, PC, the 19th century British playwright, novelist and politician immortalized for his creation of the line “It was a dark and stormy night.”

The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, first perpetrated in 1982 by English professor Scott Rice of San Jose State University, is a veritable treasure chest of purple prose, a perverse celebration of overstatement and strangely linked ideas.

Find the 2009 winners here, and weep for joy.

This year’s grand prize winner is David McKenzie of Federal Way, Wash., for this dark and stormy sentence:

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the Ellie May, a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish: for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

Bulwer-Lytton was a man to be reckoned with. A quick cruise through the Web reveals that, while his style may be painfully out of fashion, he could turn a phrase. The great unwashed and pursuit of the almighty dollar are his, and in his 1839 play Richelieu he created the pen is mightier than the sword.

Take a look at that famous dark and stormy sentence in full, the opening of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

OK, the man didn’t know where to stop. But the thing about Bulwer-Lytton is that he knew how to stick a phrase in your mind so it stays. Madeleine l’Engle, Wikipedia reminds us, used “It was a dark and stormy night” to begin her wonderful, Newbery Medal-winning children’s adventure A Wrinkle in Time, which she wrote in 1962, a full 20 years before the Bulwer-Lytton Awards began. If it’s a good enough beginning for Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace as they whisk through space and time, it’s good enough for us.

Still, when it comes to a good parody, what’s fairness got to do with it? Thank you, Lord Bulwer-Lytton, for providing the fodder. Let us close this chapter of the Art Scatter annals with these words from the winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Vile Puns category, Greg Homer of Placerville, California:

Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.