Category Archives: Bob Hicks

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Missing the ballet: Looks like it was a barn burner

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danceunited_finalbows

I’ve been out of town but eagerly scanning for news on Dance United, Friday night’s gala benefit to help Oregon Ballet Theatre dig out of its financial hole. According to these front-line reports from Culture Jock at Culture Shock and Barry Johnson at Portland Arts Watch, it was boffo — an absolute night to remember.

And, they report, it was announced at the gala that OBT’s emergency fund drive had hit $690,000 of its $750,000 goal, which makes it highly likely that it will have hit the goal and, if all goes well, more by its June 30 deadline. That’s excellent news — and everyone needs to understand that this is just the beginning, the even-ing of the keel so the tough, unending work can begin of raising enough money on a consistent basis to provide the economic stability and means for growth that this excellent artistic organization needs and deserves. There’ll be lots more news out of OBT in the months to come.

I know that dance writer Martha Ullman West, a charter Friend of Art Scatter, will have extensive coverage of the Dance United gala in Monday’s editions of The Oregonian. Look for it then in print and online at Oregon Live.

In the meantime, Friday night was spectacular, as Blaine Truitt Covert’s photo above, from the grand finale curtain call (that’s OBT artistic director Christopher Stowell in the center with the dancers) attests. Those are some happy faces!

Congratulations to all. Thanks to all the big-time companies from across North America that sent dancers to perform. And many happier days to come.

Bob Hicks, Books, Environment, General

Going native on the Oregon Coast: a hair-raising tale

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Tonight is the gala Dance United in Portland, the all-star benefit to help get financially ailing Oregon Ballet Theatre out of its fiscal sinkhole, and under any other circumstances I would be there with bells, cheering the dancers on.

13733bBut on Wednesday the large smelly boys were paroled from a nine-month sentence in the Portland public school system, and Mrs. Scatter and I had a longstanding deal to whisk them to the Oregon coast to the four-way-split shared getaway we’ve been holding in our own tenuous economic grasp for close to 20 years. And on that subject, just one question: What sort of fool would pay actual money for a share of a piece of property in the shadow of a place called Cape Foulweather?

So here I sit, staring at the oddly quiescent cape (the sun is out, sort of), with a copy of Vince Kohler‘s Eldon Larkin mystery Rising Dog at hand, thinking about this shaggy stretch of oceanfront I’ve come to love. Not that I get out here very often. Regular readers may recall this post about Vince, a kind of forgotten hero of Oregon literature, and his shambling news-hound hero, Eldon, as introduced in the first Larkin mystery, Rainy North Woods.

Rising Dog (the title comes from the curious case of a mutt that’s been run down by a 14-wheeler on busy U.S. 101 and then seems to have risen from the dead) came in 1992, and like the late and lamented Mr. Kohler’s other mysteries, it really ought to be better-known.

Eldon’s stretch of the Oregon Coast, though mythical (there is no actual Nekaemas County), runs south of these parts, nearer Coos Bay territory, where life is less touristy and more hardscrabble, although Newport this week seems in desperate want of those recently disappearing city spenders. Wall Street has not been kind to small towns that rely on the whims of visitors.

Still, I feel I must pass on this description of life in the mythical Port Jerome on a rare day when the rains have ceased and the sun has come a-wandering in:

“The sun had drawn the town’s population from hiding. That was the worst thing about good weather. In the streets were women fifty to eighty pounds overweight, squeezed into blue jeans or blue or white knit polyester slacks. There were stringy, hard-faced men in grubby denims and crushed, grimy baseball caps. There were potbellied salesmen with long sideburns and lined, pouchy faces, and adolescents reveling unaware in their brief season of physical beauty before declining into the sleazy hardness of their elders.”

As I sit here I am wearing a pair of aged, faded jeans, gone stringy at the cuffs and with a hole in the pocket that encourages a trickle-down theory of fugitive pens and pennies. I have on a faded purple T-shirt, a little spongy at the collar, and a gray sweatshirt that is unaccountably my favorite piece of upper-body wear. My “Mo’s West” baseball cap, bearing the emblem of a favored chowder shack, is flung casually close to hand. I make no claims or excuses for the lazy paunch floating beneath my belt. My socks are semi-clean, and my hair has taken on that wild dry look of straw that’s been electrocuted in a summer storm. It does no good to brush or comb it. It’s gone native, and it ain’t comin’ back, not as long as I’m within spitting distance of the ocean. In certain ways, once a small-town boy, always a small-town boy.

Vince meant that description of coastal folk ruefully, but with a certain affection. Eldon’s no Adonis himself. I saw the Adonises, six of them, yesterday, in their black rubber bodysuits, drifting out from the beach by Otter Rock on their surf boards. I’m guessing none of them was a logger or a commercial fisherman or one of those incredible samurai-skilled women who so swiftly gut and clean the salmon and halibut coming in from the tourist fishing-excursion boats to the docks on the Newport waterfront.

One more thing I can’t resist passing along: Vince’s not-so-standard legal disclaimer from the beginning of the book:

Rising Dog is a work of fiction. The novel’s characters inhabit a stretch of the southern Oregon coast that is entirely a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to people, places, or institutions in the real world is an enormous and shocking coincidence. In particular, the Sons of Eiden Hall and its denizens are not intended to represent any actual Scandinavian group.

Skoal to all that.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Scatter hits the ballet, and revels in the next generation

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Pianist Carol Rich and Olga Krochick, The Concert. BLAINE TRUITT COVERT

Loyal readers know that Art Scatter is fiercely in favor of protecting Oregon Ballet Theatre from the financial wolves that are nipping at its heels, eager to drag it down and devour it for a mid-recession munch. I’ve made the case that this is Portland’s finest theatrical troupe, a company on the rise nationally, and that to lose it would be a devastating blow to the city. I remain confident, cautiously, that Portlanders will pull together like a hardy band of foresters and help carry the wobbly sojourner out of the economic woods to safety, where it can get its feet back under itself and figure out a prudent path into the future.

So on Saturday afternoon I went with more than usual anticipation to see OBT’s season-ending program of Christopher Wheeldon’s Rush and three dances by that Broadway-driven balletic dramatist, Jerome Robbins. Martha Ullman West, a frequent contributor to Art Scatter, reviews the program perceptively for The Oregonian and, I’m hoping, might post more thoughts later here. Scatter cohort Barry Johnson was there, too, writing on his Portland Arts Watch blog; and The Oregonian’s Grant Butler had a good update in Sunday’s Oregonian on this Friday’s coming benefit blowout. I won’t repeat what they had to say, but give ’em a read!

I went to the Saturday matinee partly because I knew some of the major roles would be performed by the “second stringers” — the alternate casts that don’t do opening night. I like to do this because it’s a terrific way to get a sense of the depth of a company. Yes, several principal dancers and soloists perform in the matinees — Gavin Larsen was superb in Rush, for instance, and Artur Sultanov was an electrically restrained faun in Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun — but the matinees also give you a chance to see who’s developing in the corps.

Let me tell you who: Grace Shibley, one of the company’s youngest dancers, who paired beautifully with Sultanov in Afternoon of a Faun and simply ran away with the role that company star Alison Roper danced on opening night in Robbins’ witty, gorgeously performed lark The Concert. Shibley is graceful and funny and superbly trained (she came through OBT’s school, which under Damara Bennett’s leadership does wonderful work) and she has personality. The future, if economic troubles don’t bring it tumbling down, is big for her. As for the rest of Saturday’s dancers: Any number of companies across the country would be thrilled to have a starting lineup as good as these “reserves.”

And that got me to thinking about something that I want for this company and this city: I want the joy of succession. Other cities and companies — San Francisco and its San Francisco Ballet, Seattle and its Pacific Northwest Ballet, New York and its New York City Ballet — have the honor and pleasure of seeing their great dancers come to the end of their careers and leave on high notes, secure in the knowledge that capable, fresh young dancers are ready to fill their shoes. It’s how traditions are created; how they’re refreshed and reinvigorated for the future. That tradition is taking root here.

Roper and Sultanov and Larsen and Anne Mueller and Yuka Iino and other OBT stars won’t be dancing forever. Dancers are like professional athletes: They have their time, and then a time comes to hang it up. The Grace Shibleys are always in the wings, ready to learn, ready to take their place in the spotlight, ready to pass the torch on to someone new when their time comes.

And audience members will smile, and cheer, and say, “Isn’t that girl marvelous!” and “Remember when …?” and “Doesn’t he remind you of …”

And the show will go on, always changing, always reinventing itself, always the same.

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And now, on to tonight’s Drammy Awards at the Crystal Ballroom. What fun: Should I pull out my tux?

Bob Hicks, Books, Environment, General

On the bookshelf: Ignazio Silone’s ‘Bread and Wine’

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One of the advantages in this Day of the Download to maintaining actual bookshelves is that you browse through them now and again, looking for things you’ve read before that you might want to read again. I’m a proponent of re-reading, and I’ve come to trust my sense of when it’s time to pick up a book and give it another shot.

Bread and WineSo one day last week I picked up my old copy of Ignazio Silone‘s Bread and Wine, a classic Italian novel that is celebrated for its anti-fascist and anti-communist leanings (Silone is often abbreviated as the Italian George Orwell) but which is at least as much, it seems to me, a reflection on the nature of the church and the chasm between organized religion and true morality.

That this reflection comes from a writer who has been accused by historians of spying for the fascists in the 1920s is something I can’t explain, except to suggest that the most potent condemnations of specific wrongs sometimes come from those who are tempted most mightily by them. And if, indeed, Silone was a police informant as a young man, it lends a deeper resonance to Bread and Wine, a story that includes a key character who has informed on his communist cellmates and later come to terms with his motives and actions, bravely enduring a Christlike death. Silone is extraordinarily understanding and insightful about this character, whose path to saintliness echoes the imperfections and weaknesses of Jesus in Nikos Kazantzakis‘s novel The Last Temptation of Christ, except that the Greek writer’s man/god, while tempted to the point of torment, doesn’t give in.

Silone wrote this novel in exile in 1935, when Mussolini and his crowd were riding high and had just gone a-venturing in Abyssinia, prowling for the spoils of victory. He rewrote the book in 1955, seeking to make it sparer and cleaner, and the version I have was published in 1986, which is I imagine when I first read it. That was my second go-round. I’d also read the novel in college, in the late 1960s, for the same class in which I read The God That Failed, the 1949 book of essays by Silone, Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, Andre Gide, Louis Fischer and Stephen Spender about how they became disenchanted with communism. Surely it means something that I’ve read Silone’s book at about age 20, and about 38, and now at 61, and each time it’s felt like a fine wrestle with literature that matters.

Continue reading On the bookshelf: Ignazio Silone’s ‘Bread and Wine’ →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Theater, Visual Art

Drammy, Drammy, who’s got the Drammy?

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Thenkewveddymuch. I couldnadunnit without all the little people.

workingdrammy_003Oops. Wrong award ceremony.

Monday night (a night after the Tonys and a very long distance, psychically, from the glamfest called the Oscars) Portland theater folk will gather for the 30th Drammy Awards, the annual celebration of the best and brightest of the local theater season. It’s a good party, a good show, and generally a lot of fun.

Here’s the official scoop:

WHAT: 30th Anniversary Drammy Awards
WHERE: Crystal Ballroom
1332 W. Burnside St.
Portland, OR
WHEN: Monday, June 8
6:00 PM Social hour and slide presentation
7:00 PM Awards presentation
COST: FREE ADMISSION, no-host bar and pizza
DRESS: Theatrical, elegant, innovative. Costumes are encouraged.

Costumes? I generally show up cleverly disguised as an aging L.L. Bean type who doesn’t own an iron. One year I wore my tuxedo and achieved the improbable: I turned a bunch of Portland actors speechless. It’s almost worth doing again.

These were wild and woolly occasions in their early days, with lots of drinking and shouting and the occasional Marlon Brando refusal to appear (Sacheen Littlefeather, where are you now?). I may not be remembering this exactly right — surely I didn’t imagine it — but one year a director of a certain show, miffed over a slight I can’t remember, refused to go up and receive several awards his show had won until the best-director category came up and his own name was announced. Suddenly he had a change of heart. Another year I got in a post-ceremony tiff with the master of ceremonies, who had engaged in an egregious-because-untrue running rant against my employer of the time. I blush to recall.

Things are more tame these days, if no less fun. The people who hate the idea of awards ceremonies have learned to just stay home. The people who show up seem genuinely excited about the event, which doesn’t mean there isn’t sometimes grumbling about the outcomes of the votes. (And a shout-out to the committee members, who see an unconscionable amount of theater in order to cast their votes.)

Last year’s ceremony is a bit of a haze to me — a happy haze — because I was given a lifetime achievement award, which made me feel somewhere between an unlikely cultural icon and dead. Fortunately life goes on, and I don’t seem to be either. But sometimes I look at my little plaque, which sits atop a bookshelf in my bedroom, and smile.

To all those who wish for a similar rush on Monday night, break a leg.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Putting the art in the scatter: Escher, Ainu, PNCA, beads

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It’s a big weekend in Portland art. Not only are most of the city’s commercial galleries showing new stuff after their First Thursday and First Friday openings, but the Portland Art Museum also has a couple of big openings on Saturday, and another opens Saturday in the pavilion of the Japanese Garden. The Scatter brain trust will be busy making the rounds.

In the meantime, here’s our (just invented) Friday Scatter Rotogravure:

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PNCA at 100, at the Portland Art Museum: The museum kicks off this centennial celebration of the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which for most of its lifetime was connected to the museum and was known as the Museum Art School. Now it’s on its own and bursting with ambition. This show goes back to the beginning with works by the likes of Anna B. Crocker and Harry Wentz, and includes Northwest icons such as Louis Bunce, Michele Russo, Lucinda Parker, George Johanson, Paul Missal and Jay Backstrand, all of whom have had close connections to the art school. Pictured here is Parker’s 1980 acrylic on canvas Feast of Stephen, a museum purchase from the Helen Thurston Ayer Fund.

This show, curated by Bruce Guenther, hangs around until Sept. 13.
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M.C. Escher, Encounter, 1944. Collection Dr. & Mrs. Robery W. LearyM.C. ESCHER at the Portland Art Museum: Truly an artist for the Age of Engineering — a draftsman for the dreamers, a dreamer for the draftsmen. On Saturday the museum opens Virtual Worlds: M.C. Escher and Paradox, and somehow that’s got us us humming a tune from The Pirates of Penzance:

A paradox?
A parodox,
A most ingenious paradox!
We’ve quips and quibbles heard in flocks,
But none to beat this paradox!

The Escher Equation continues through Sept. 13 at the museum. Pictured is Escher’s 1944 lithograph Encounter, from the collection of Dr. and Mrs. Robert W. Leary.

This show, curated by Annette Dixon, hangs around until Sept. 13, too.

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Ainu group, 1902 or 1904/Wikimedia Commons

PARALLEL WORLDS at the Japanese Garden: Subtitled Art of the Ainu of Hokkaido and Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, this appealing-looking show brings together traditional ceremonial robes and other woven pieces by northern Japan’s Ainu ethnic group and the more familiar work of Tlingit and other artists from Alaska and British Columbia.

The Ainu story is intriguing: It’s a native nation from Japan’s northern islands, with a little spillover to main land Siberia, that has struggled to maintain its own identity: Only recently has Japan reversed a decades-long policy of forced assimilation.

The photo above isn’t from the exhibit. It was taken in 1902 or 1904, and was printed in the book Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People. It’s from Wikmedia Commons.

The exhibit, curated by Diane Durston, is in the Garden Pavilion through June 28.

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Columbia Plateau beaded bag, ca. 1900-20. Coll. Arlene and Harold SchnitzerGIFTS OF HONOR at the Portland Art Museum: This very good show has been up since the end of last August in the museum’s Marge Riley Education Gallery, which straddles the museum’s two buildings, but it ends June 30, and you should try to catch it before it disappears.

Assembled from the collection of Arlene and Harold Schnitzer and subtitled Beaded Bags From the Columbia River Plateau, it’s a terrific sampling of 35 bags, ranging in age from about 1900 to about 1960. The one shown here is circa 1900-1920, and is made of glass beads, hide, wool, cotton cloth and cotton string.

The quality and variety of work in this show, which is curated by Anna Strankman, is immensely pleasing.

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This is, of course, only a taste of what’s out there to be seen in the city’s galleries and museums. And we haven’t even mentioned its theaters and concert halls. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, for instance, Oregon Ballet Theatre performs its season-ending show of Jerome Robbins and Christopher Wheeldon at Keller Auditorium. Go forth, fellow Scatterers, and multiply across the face of the city.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Time to pay it forward to Oregon Ballet Theatre

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2007 Nutcracker. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERTYou’ve read here and elsewhere about the deep financial hole Oregon Ballet Theatre has stumbled into. Scatter partner Barry Johnson broke the news in The Oregonian last week that the company needs $750,000, fast, to keep from going under. The problem isn’t getting customers in the seats — OBT’s concerts are extremely popular — but a precipitous 50 percent drop in individual contributions.

The arguments have been made. I believe the loss of this company would be devastating for Portland, even for people who have no interest in ballet. Now’s the time to help.

First: If you can, write a check or use your credit card to make a contribution. I’m doing that. Here‘s where to do it.

Second: Buy tickets to the season finale concert of ballets by Jerome Robbins and Christopher Wheeldon, June 5-7 at Portland’s Keller Auditorium. Here‘s where to do it. Or call the ballet at 503-227-0977.

Third: Buy tickets for Dance United, the benefit performance June 12 at the Keller that will bring together dancers from major companies across North America, including New York City Ballet, Boston Ballet, Houston Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, San Francisco Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, Washington Ballet, Trey McIntyre Project, Ballet West, BodyVox, White Bird/Minh Tran & Company, Oslund+Co., Linda Austin Dance, and OBT. Program details are here. It’s an astonishing show of solidarity, and an astonishing array of talent. Here‘s where to do it.

Fourth: OBT is organizing an online auction to help raise money. Maybe you have something to donate, or maybe you’re in the market to buy. Here‘s where to get details.

Barry Johnson has been following the situation more closely than anyone else in the press. For more insights, see this and this from his Portland Arts Watch blog and column for The Oregonian.

All together, now. Let’s get this thing done.

Bob Hicks, Cities, Food, General, Journalism, Theater, Visual Art

Sunday links: Art garden and a wild and crazy quote

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A quick Sunday scatter of good stuff in other places:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Summer," 1573, Louvre/Paris. Wikimedia Commons*************************

FEED THE BODY, FEED THE MIND: Under the headline Philbrook Museum of Art Trades Tulips for Tomatoes, artdaily.org reports that Tulsa’s Philbrook — the museum that Brian Ferriso left to become executive director of the Portland Art Museum — is replacing its 3,600-square-foot south formal garden with a vegetable garden and will give the veggies to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma to help Oklahomans get through the economic crisis. Now, there’s a conceptual art project we can get behind. Bravo. Too often when times get tough, culture and shelter (and schools, for that matter) get tossed into an either/or funding game, turning natural allies into competing animals at a shrinking watering hole. As this project reveals, it doesn’t have to be that way.

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STEVE MARTIN UNLEASHED: The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley has a good report in Sunday’s O! section on how things turned out when students from the local high school finally got to put on their production of Steve Martin‘s stage comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile. They performed it at Eastern Oregon University instead of at the high school because the school board, after receiving parental complaints about the play’s purported immorality, called the thing off.

Martin then stepped in and paid for the production himself, and in a letter to the local paper he came up with this gem, which Hughley quotes:

“I have heard that some in your community have characterized the play as ‘people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.’ With apologies to William Shakespeare, this is like calling Hamlet a play about a castle.”

Yes, Xenophobia, there is an Oregon. But the good news to take from Marty’s story is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

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IN SWITZERLAND, A SWING TO THE RIGHT: A few art insiders complained when Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times’ chief art critic, decamped to Europe for a year instead of paying attention to what was happening on the art scene stateside. Not me. I’ve enjoyed his Abroad reports. They’ve helped an already top-notch critic broaden his knowledge even further, and they’ve given readers a lot of good stories they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

One of the best is last week’s report from Zurich, In Quiet Switzerland, Outspoken Rapper Takes on the Far Right, about an Estonian-born Swiss rapper stage-named Stress who’s stirred up some welcome controversy by tackling directly in his lyrics chemicals tycoon Christoph Blocher, powerful head of the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party, who is one scary dude. Like Hitler and Stalin before him, Blocher uses his own sanitized vision of cultural purity in the arts to push his ideal of the perfect, and perfectly xenophobic, homeland. Kimmelman writes:

Mr. Blocher used his own collection of works by 19th-century painters like Albert Anker and Ferdinand Hodler in shows he organized to illustrate what he has said represent wholesome Swiss ideals: women in the home, farmers milking cows, a nation historically separated from outsiders by more than just mountains.

Steve Martin, the good people of Switzerland need you. Now.

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A CREATIVE WAKE-UP CALL IN PORTLAND?: Also in Sunday’s O! section of The Oregonian, visual arts critic D.K. Row files this intriguing report on how the flap over City Hall’s recent push to bulldoze Portland’s Memorial Coliseum has lit an activist fire under at least a slice of the city’s creative class. D.K. quotes architect/activist Stuart Emmons:

“We’ve just said, ‘Enough.’ We need to speak out for what we believe in and quit allowing politics to keep us from what’s right. This goes way beyond Memorial Coliseum.”

This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase “the art of politics.” Stay tuned. Let’s see where this thing heads.

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ON ART AND THE CRITICS: A recent Art Scatter post about Rocco Landesman’s appointment to run the National Endowment for the Arts sparked a heady and rambunctious round of comments that went off in all sorts of directions. I hope to get back to some of those issues, notably the meaning of “local” in the arts and the role of failure in creativity: Is it a necessary element of discovery, or a cult of self-absorption that ignore the needs and rights of the audience? Then there was this note from playwright, filmmaker, novelist and teacher Charles Deemer:

“At their best, critics are mediators between the artist and the society that doesn’t quite get it yet. At their worst, critics themselves don’t get it and go on to say it’s therefore not worth trying to figure out.”

Can’t argue with that. But if you’d like to, hit that comment button.

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Visual Art

Saturday heat-wave scatter: The farm is on fire!

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Mario Carreno, "Fire in the Farm," 1943. Photo: CHRISTIE'S

Eighty-seven degrees, the creaky old thermometer hit this afternoon, and although the nervous native Northwesterner lurking inside me can’t help fretting about an imminent neo-Dust Bowl and amateur revivals of 110 in the Shade (can you imagine a stranger named Starbuck riding in to save the hinterlands from thirst?), the better part of me is exulting in this nice dry heat and the brilliant sun that brings it. A walk with my 11-year-old son to the nearby neighborhood coffee shop confirms that it’s still possible to enjoy a hot cappuccino in a mini-heat wave (or, depending on your age, a cold chocolate milk), and I’m trying to discover the downside to that.

Longtime Portlanders are wondering how the weather can possibly be so glorious before the end of the Rose Festival: It is clearly written in the city constitution that the Grand Floral Parade must be marched in the midst of a monsoon. So how could this sunshine be? Global warming, I imagine, and although I suppose I feel a little guilty for not feeling guilty about that, I’d rather just enjoy the sun. I promise to worry later. When it rains.

Mrs. Scatter has conveniently scarpered to the coast for a weekend of sampling the vine and creating strange craft-ish items with some girlfriends, which means it’s bachelor days here with the Smelly Boys, 11 and 14 in their chronological persuasions. And that means pizza: cheese for them, “gourmet” veggie for me, and thank you, Papa Murphy, you friendly little corporate entity on the corner. Mine will be accompanied by the Chez Scatter house white, a Covey Run guwurtztraminer. I’ve just given the bottle a feel: It has a nice chill.

Next door this morning, a lawn-mower drone buzzed against the sky, and I cheerfully ignored it. Nor did I force the 14-year-old to unlock the garage and take out our grass-manicuring Luddite model, an antiquated push machine: Wouldn’t want him to actually break a sweat.

Air-conditioning, of course, is evil, but it has its places, and one of them is in movie theaters. As the height of late-afternoon sizzle approached, we three brave males entered the arctic oasis of the Avalon Theatre on Southeast Belmont Street to catch Monsters vs. Aliens, the DreamWorks animated fantasy about, well, a battle supreme between monsters and aliens. May I say a word in appreciation of second-run movie houses? This entire escapade cost seven bucks. The movie was mildly amusing, as easy to ingest as a Sunday morning screwdriver, and it was well worth the minimal price of admission just to see a 50-foot-tall Reece Witherspoon as a space age Gulliver being taken down by an army of G.I. Lilliputians. Spotting the evil alien was easy: If the brainiac squid body wasn’t enough of a tip-off, the fact that he put sugar in his coffee clinched the deal. Yet I must protest: Why was the blob without a brain named Bob? A prediction: An army of angry Bobs will be the next to invade the Earth. Or at least, Hollywood. We’re mad as hell, and we won’t take it any more.

I imagine that sometime around mid-August I’ll start to feel like those poor wilted saps in the painting Fuego en el Batey (Fire in the Farm), above. Thanks to Art Knowledge News for tipping me off that Cuban artist Mario Carreno‘s 1943 painting sold earlier this week at Christie’s in New York for two million, one-hundred-eighty-eight-thousand and one-hundred dollars. Now, that’s a summer sizzler.

Many long moons ago, long before the Huxtables, when he was a young stand-up comic and recordings came on large long-playing vinyl discs, Bill Cosby did a routine about Seattle. As I recall it, whenever the sun came out the natives fell trembling to the ground and cried out lamentations to their god. Oh, forgive us! (or something like that), they shouted. What have we done wrong?

Sorry. Not buying it. Welcome, Sun King, to our humble abode.

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P.S.: Happy birthday (on Friday) to Laurel. And many happy returns.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

An emergency plea: Save Oregon Ballet Theatre!

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Mia Leimkuhler in Hush by James Kudelkae. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.The bad doo-doo has just hit the fan. Art Scatter’s Barry Johnson, on his alternate-universe blog Portland Arts Watch, has just reported that Oregon Ballet Theatre has its back against the wall. It needs $750,000, and it needs it fast — by June 30 — or it could fold up shop and simply disappear.

Make no mistake: That would be a catastrophe. No doubt the sneerers will be out in full force, snickering about how the marketplace has spoken and it just doesn’t care about twinkle-toed terpsichores trouncing around in tutus. I’m sorry, but Just. Shut. Up. Even if ballet leaves you cold, if you care about Portland and believe it has both the right and responsibility to be a full-fledged city, this is important stuff.

The fact is, we are in the middle of an economic disaster — I just learned this afternoon of yet another friend who’s lost her job — and it is taking down both people and organizations with no respect for their talents or worth. “The marketplace” has failed the nation. Right now, it’s a lousy measuring stick for anything.

Why is it essential that Portlanders keep Oregon Ballet Theatre alive? For a lot of reasons, one of which is that this is the city’s most gifted performing ensemble — or at least right up at the top, along with the Oregon Symphony, Portland Baroque Orchestra and Third Angle New Music Ensemble — and a beacon, in every show, for the heights that any group, artistic or not, should strive to achieve. It is our target, our model, our proclamation that we can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best.

Under artistic director Christopher Stowell OBT has achieved a solid historical grounding, a mastery of technique and an exciting artistic personality. The best part is, it’s still growing, and promises to achieve much more if only given the chance. No financial crisis should put a stop to that.

It’s simply unthinkable that dancers with such zest and style as Alison Roper, Artur Sultanov, Anne Mueller, Gavin Larsen, Yuka Iino, Kathi Martuza and Ronnie Underwood should suddenly find themselves out on the street, unemployed and unappreciated. All of them, and their fellow dancers, have created something special, and it is Portland’s duty to help them when they need help the most.

As Barry points out, the ballet world has taken notice. People in the know, know that this is a company on the rise, and a company of increasing national importance. So on June 12 — shortly after OBT’s season-ending program of works by Jerome Robbins and Christopher Wheeldon — dancers from the New York City Ballet, Boston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, the Trey McIntyre Project and elsewhere will be in town for a giant gala benefit performance that promises to be a true bell-ringer. Buy tickets to Robbins and Wheeldon. Buy tickets to the gala.

And if you’re able, write a check. OBT is too important to fail.