Category Archives: Books

Barry Johnson, Books, General, Visual Art

Arts management ideas from Focke and Weinstein

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Dennis Cunningham's Willamette White Sturgeon. He was a Mississippi Mud artist. OK, this one’s a little long, but it tries to get at some important issues of how we organize ourselves, operate in the world, through the lens of two “artist managers,” Seattle’s Anne Focke and the late Joel Weinstein.

I was rummaging around the Matthew Stadler-edited The Back Room: An Anthology, and after I’d found what I was looking for (and it really wasn’t), I flipped to Anne Focke’s essay “A Pragmatic Response to Real Circumstances”. Which turned out to be what I should have been looking for all along — the tao of managing an arts organization artfully.
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Bob Hicks, Books

Rabbit, rest: John Updike, 1932-2009

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10924397RABBIT’S AT REST.

At least, we can wish so for John Updike, the creator of the vivid American everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who through several novels fell from the heights of high school basketball stardom into the cultural maelstrom of the 1960s and ’70s, tried the straight and narrow, made a fool of himself over women, became desperate, became rich, became old, and always, always, kept searching for … for what? For whatever it is we search for in this nervous, impatient nation of ours.

Today, at the early age of 76, Updike died from lung cancer in a Massachusetts hospice near his home. A novelist, short-story writer, essayist and poet of prodigious output whose work was praised for its grace and humor and panned for all sorts of reasons, up to and including the purported clumsiness of his sex scenes (just last November Britain’s Literary Review magazine awarded him the Bad Sex in Fiction lifetime achievement award), Updike seemed an unlikely subject for the occasional exasperation and pettiness that his work attracted. Maybe it was because he and many of his characters were unapologetically middle class in their underpinnings — too high an aspiration for some of his critics, too low an aspiration for others. Mark Feeney, writing in today’s Boston Globe, quotes Updike: “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.”

To me, there was honor in that so-American attempt to create myth from the everyday and supposedly mundane, as he did in his Rabbit novels and in such writings as his early novel The Centaur. Stylistically the two writers had almost nothing in common, but it’s apt to note that, in the theatrical world, Arthur Miller did the same thing. And wasn’t Walt Whitman, when he sang the possibilities of the men and women of this adolescent country, thinking of the same sort of people who would come to find themselves caught in the webs that Updike strove to understand?

For all of Rabbit’s importance, and for all the fuss his Witches of Eastwick and other novels sometimes kicked up, I have an abiding affection for another Updike character: Henry Bech, the irascible, august fictional novelist who eventually ascends from the mess of his everyday existence to become a winner of the Nobel Prize. Bech is the central character in what may be the funniest scene ever written about writer’s block — when he sits on a Caribbean beach, drinks and nubile companionship and fat publisher’s fee at hand, with no task but to autograph a huge pile of one of his novels, and finally becomes so paralyzed that his pen freezes in midair: He’s forgot his name.

We’ll not forget the names of Bech, and Rabbit, and John Updike. Rest well, gentlemen. You deserve it.

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Film, General, Language, Music, Theater, Visual Art

From Lar to PAW: a Monday link and scatter

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Lar Lubovich Dance Company. Photo: ROSEThings have been busy here at Scatter Central the last few days; so busy that we haven’t had a chance to post since we left poor Jean-Paul Belmondo in the clutches of all
those nasty French critics. Never mind, Jean-Paul. As far as we’re concerned here on our far side of the puddle, you’ll always throw a mean left hook.

So, time for a little update.

Lar Lubovitch, a genuine. living and working part of American dance history, shows up Wednesday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, and the White Bird dance series reports it still has good tickets available. The Lubovitch company hasn’t toured in 10 years, and it’s been a good deal longer than that since it’s been in Portland, so this is a good opportunity. The program looks intriguing, and all of the dances are relatively recent: last year’s Jangle, Four Hungarian Dances, set to Bela Bartok’s Rhapsodies #1 and #2 for Violin and Piano; 2000’s Men’s Stories, A Concerto in Ruins, with audio collage and original score by Scott Marshall; and 2007’s Dvorak Serenade, set to Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade in E Major. Plus, Lubovitch will be on hand for a question and answer session after the show.

White Bird has some deals on tickets, including 30-buck Level 3 seats, in addition to its usual student/senior rush tickets two hours before the 7:30 curtain. Details here.

mandy_greer_dare_alla_luce_05Over at his alternate-universe home, Portland Arts Watch (or PAW, as we like to call it), Scatter impresario Barry Johnson has been following the proposed merger between two Portland art stalwarts: the financially struggling Museum of Contemporary Craft and the recently vigorous Pacific Northwest College of Art. Good idea? Bad idea? Necessary idea? In his Monday column in The Oregonian and on Oregon Live, Barry comes down with a case of cautious optimism. Read it here.

And speaking of synchronicity (we were, weren’t we?) my review of the craft museum’s two newest exhibits, by installation artist Mandy Greer and textile artist Darrel Morris, will run on Friday, Jan. 30, in The Oregonian’s A&E section and on Oregon Live. Look for it then.

Did we say alternate-universe homes? We’re embarrassed to reveal that only recently have we discovered the second virtual home of one of our best online friends, the ubiquitous and perspicacious Mighty Toy Cannon of the invaluable Portland arts and culture site Culture Shock. Seems MTC also maintains a fascinating, if less regular, music site called, appropriately, Mighty Toy Cannon. From Nick Lowe and Richard Fontaine to Ruth Brown and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, MTC takes a welcome and refreshing curatorial approach to the wonders of the YouTube musical world. Give it a look, and a listen.

Henry James, by John Singer Sargent, 1913Meanwhile, who’d have guessed that the path to understanding Henry James runs through William Shakespeare’s most infamous stage direction? (That’s “exuent, pursued by a bear,” from The Winter’s Tale, by the way.) The grapevine that slithers through our mutual abode tells us that Part Five of Laura Grimes’ running riff on all things Jamesean, coming Sunday, Feb. 1, in The Oregonian’s books pages and on Oregon Live, is going to be a doozy, complete with Shakespearean bear. In yesterday’s Part Four, Grimes — Friend and Supporter of Art Scatter First Class — gets caught up in a neighborhood book group and unveils a Henry James contest, complete with a prize. Read it here.

Portland’s stages have been simply aburst with fresh new work, thanks to the citywide Fertile Ground festival of new plays. At The Oregonian, Scatter friend Marty Hughley kept up with some of the most recent action in Monday’s paper: Read it here.

Scatter’s been hitting the festival, too. We’ve already run our report on Apollo and Vitriol and Violets. And my review of Northwest Children’s Theater and School‘s new jazz version of Alice in Wonderland also ran in Monday’s Oregonian; read it here.

reGeneration: 50 photographers of Tomorrow, a traveling exhibit that’s just landed in the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, is a chilly but pretty darned fascinating look at 50 young photographers worldwide whose work, the shows’s curators believe, will still be vital and important in the year 2025. My review ran in brief in Monday’s Oregonian; for the much more complete version, see it on Oregon Live here.

Finally, we’ve been amused and bemused by the misadventures of operatic tenor Jon Villars, who walked off the stage during a dress rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, reportedly because he didn’t like the conductor’s tempo. Here at Art Scatter, we confess to skipping out on a show early a time or two over the years, too. But not when we were part of the cast.

Barry Johnson, Books, Film, General

Jon Raymond and the power of, gulp, discipline

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Michelle Williams as Wendy with dog LucyArt Scatter has been late to the Jon Raymond celebration, which started last month when copies of his short story collection Livability started popping up and reviews started to hit various book sections. The film Wendy and Lucy, based on one of those stories, had already hit the festival circuit, winning some major prizes, and then it opened here. Raymond lives here, his stories roam around here, and the film was shot in Portland in 2007, so somehow it feels as though we have a stake in these various enterprises. Which turns out to be a good thing.

What I admire most about 1) Raymond’s short story Train Choir, 2) the film Wendy and Lucy that Kelly Reichardt has directed based on that story, and 3) Michelle Williams’ utterly central performance as Wendy in the movie, is their discipline. All three have some other pleasures, but I love how they hew so close to the line that they’ve cut for themselves. No rambles. No posturing. No baroque curlicues or cupids hovering pudgily above the stage. No windy psychological explanations or philosophical expressions of “meaning”. They are clean and bare and simply present. We observe and supply our own wind, our own meaning, our own set of explanations, maybe, but we don’t really even need to do that. They have a completeness in and of themselves.
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Bob Hicks, Books, General, Language

King, Obama, TR and Taft: thoughts about America

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Today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’m thinking not just about the great civil rights leader but also about the state of the nation — where we’ve been, where we are, where we might be going. That leads me to reflections on a couple of former presidents, and also on the challenges facing our newest president, Barack Hussein Obama, who will be sworn into office tomorrow. And I’m thinking of what advice Dr. King, who never held a public office but was one of our greatest leaders ever, might have for Mr. Obama, who takes office at a time of multiple perils and instability.

So, first: to Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, the man who succeeded TR as president in 1908 and whose bid for a second term Roosevelt scuttled in his own failed third-party campaign in 1912, awarding the presidency to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. We don’t usually think of Taft as one of our more nimble presidential thinkers, but he did have his moments, as Candice Millard passes along in her fine book The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, which we discussed earlier here. Here’s what Taft had to say about the man who first put him into the White House and later kicked him out:

“The truth is, he believes in war and wishes to be a Napoleon and to die in the battle field. He has the spirit of the old berserkers.”

Roosevelt was a great man, but we’ve had enough of that. You can’t say George W. Bush has the spirit of a berserker — this is not a man who wants to go onto a battlefield and join in the carnage himself — but he has acted with an impetuous relish for war when patience and diplomacy would have served the entire world far better. Obama, we have the feeling, is not a rash man. Yet, as all presidents are, he will always be pushed by those advising quick and violent action.

So it’s good — not just today, but all days — to listen to Dr. King. Here are a few of his thoughts, for Barack Obama and for all of us:

“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.”

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Food, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

We’re No. 1 with a dart! (pass it along)

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Actually, it’s a multiply shared No. 1, a sort of pay-it-forward No. 1, a chain-letter pat on the back that feels nice and warm and fuzzy.

From somewhere out of the blue (OK, it was from our cyberspace friend Rose City Reader, the literary omnivore who in the real world hangs out just a few blocks away) comes to Art Scatter the Premios Dardo Award.

It’s not the Nobel, it’s not an Oscar or even a Pulitzer. But neither is it a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme. No money changes hands (isn’t that just life in the blogosphere, though?). The Premios Dardo robs no one of their dignity or life savings. It’s simply a way of saying, we like what you do, and we’d like you to tell us whose work you admire on the Web. Fair enough. A lot of wheezing takes place on the Net, and one good way to get to the fresh air is to listen to recommendations from people you trust.

We haven’t been able to track down where the Premios Dardo Awards began or who’s behind them, but it really doesn’t matter. By this point it’s a crazy quilt stretched loosely across the globe, and we’re happy to add our few stitches to the pattern. (As near as our feeble translating abilities can figure out, by the way, “Premios Dardo” means roughly “Top Dart.”)

Here are the rules:

1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person that has granted the award and his or her blog link.

2) Pass the award to another 15 blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.

3) Remember to contact each of them to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

So, here goes. Here’s our pick of 15, listed in that boring-but-still-useful old alphabetical order. If you haven’t already, give ’em a look. You might find some new friends:

Bunny With an Art Blog

Charles Noble’s Daily Observations

Culture Shock

Dave Allen’s Pampelmoose

Dramma per Musica

Little Red Bike Cafe

Mark Russell’s CulturePulp

Mead Hunter’s Blogorrhea

Port

Portland Architecture

Portland Spaces/Burnside Blog

Reading Copy Book Blog

Splattworks

Third Angle Music Blog

TJ Norris

Bob Hicks, Books, Environment, Film, General, Theater

Caroline, Jeb, Teddy and literary dynasties: Bully!

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So Caroline Kennedy, holder of a fabled name, wants to take over the Senate seat of Hillary Rodham Clinton, holder of another fabled name — but not if Andrew Cuomo, son of a prickly politico also named Cuomo, has anything to say about it. And Jeb Bush, holder of a recently soiled name, has decided that this isn’t the greatest time to join the Senate from the great state of Florida, even if his dad, the founder of America’s most recent presidential dynasty, says Jeb would be a boffo president someday.

Why should anyone be surprised that politics is a family business? We’re used to it in the arts.

Theater and the movies positively wallow in it, from the Booths to the Royal Family itself, the Barrymores (I have a soft spot for the 2007 movie Music and Lyrics, with Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant, a piece of cinematic fluff that seems to me to catch a lot of the spirit of the old screwball comedies) to all those hard-to-sort out Baldwins and Arquettes and Sheens.

Writers, too. There are the Buckleys (I don’t care which way your politics lean; Christopher’s blog at The Daily Beast is one of the funniest things on the Web these days) and, as Rose City Reader reminds us, the Amises, and here in Oregon, William and Kim Stafford, and … you get the idea.

I’m reminded of all this familial overfamiliarity not just by the news but also by my current reading project, Candice Millard’s 2005 book The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, about Teddy’s near-fatal journey to the wilds of central South America in 1913 and ’14, after he’d lost his Bull Moose third-party bid for a third presidential term in 1912. (Another fellow named Roosevelt, of course, carried us through and past the Dust Bowl days.)

They don’t make presidents like Teddy anymore, which is a good and a bad thing. He was an imperialist meddler and a guy who longed to get into a good war; an impetuous can-do sort with all sorts of contradictions: One of our earliest and most important conservationists, he was also a voracious big-game trophy hunter. Teddy was an outsized personality, and John Alexander’s spot-on parody of him as a nut case charging up the stairs and burying stiffs in the basement in Arsenic and Old Lace brings tears of laughter to my eyes every time I see it.

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Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General

Scatter links: BodyVox, more fun with Hank, read U.S.A.!

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Friend of Art Scatter D.K. Row, the reporting machine of Portland’s art scene, has a good behind-the-scenes cover story in the O! section of the Sunday Oregonian about dance company BodyVox‘s bold move (especially considering the state of the economy these days) into its own space in Northwest Portland. Row doesn’t just get into the economics, he also touches on the sometimes bruised feelings and occasional jealousies on the dance scene: As Row points out, BodyVox has access to some deep pockets that other contemporary dance organizations can’t touch. Read Row’s story here. And revisit Art Scatter’s own report from last fall, when BodyVox first showed off its new digs.

Meanwhile, nobody seems to want to have a beer with Henry James, although a few people suggest a cup of tea, or maybe a sherry. The Oregonian’s Laura Grimes follows up on her delightful piece from last Sunday about trying to read The Ambassadors (see below) with a second report on her adventures with Hank — this time with a lot of sterling literary responses from readers. The online version here includes a lot more responses than the print version in this Sunday’s Oregonian books pages. (For some reason or other we feel compelled to reveal that Ms. Grimes is married to one-third of Art Scatter. We leave it to the mathematicians among you to figure out exactly what that means.)

Finally, a shout-out to Liesl Schillinger for her review in this week’s New York Times Book Review of Louise Erdrich’s new collection of short stories, The Red Convertible. Quite sensibly, Schilinger writes admiringly about Erdrich: That’s as it should be. But what caught our eye was her opening salvo, a vociferous defense of American lit in general against the cold Arctic glare of those sneering Swedes of the Nobel establishment (she takes her argument, of course, much further than this, in some interesting ways):

“Last fall, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the group that hands out the Nobel Prize in Literature, disparaged American letters, saying our fiction was ‘too isolated, too insular’ and ‘too sensitive to trends’ in our own ‘mass culture’ (in short, too American) to matter much in the wider world. But it’s the very Americanness of our literature — the hybrid nature of our national makeup, our mania for self-invention and reinvention — that captured the international imagination at a time when most readers could never visit the country they dreamed about. It still does today.

“Americanness needs no apology; it’s the strength of our letters.


Thanks, Liesl. We needed that. Young and crude and immature we may be, but we are also creative and energetic and — yes — idealistic, and we still believe that art can and should be a democratic expression. Your question near the end of your essay — “(I)s the capacity for the quiet use of leisure, something essential to reading, on the wane?” — is pertinent to the entire world, a place that interestingly includes Sweden and the United States alike.

We hereby appoint Ms. Schillinger an honorary Friend of Art Scatter. Sadly, this honor comes with no Nobel prize money attached.

Books, Cities, Environment, General, Language, Visual Art

Scatter links: A beer with Henry James, a bail-in for Detroit, why NOT sell off some art?

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Cool things to read in other places:

— Laura Grimes, charter member of Friends of Art Scatter, has a delightful piece in the Sunday Oregonian’s books pages about reading Henry James‘s The Ambassadors (or trying to read it) on the bus, and whether James was quite the sort of fellow you could sit down and have a beer with. Read it here.

— Also in The Oregonian, on Monday’s op-ed page, is a bell-ringer by Tim Smith on how to “bail in” the reeling auto industry instead of bailing it out. Smith, a principal at SERA Architects in Portland and a Detroit native, suggests: “(L)et’s reorganize GM to replace it. Why not fund a conversion of General Motors from a purveyor of private transportation hardware to a planner, fabricator and supplier of a renewed, nationwide public transportation system?” An elegant, provacative piece, with some historical sting. Read it here.

— And, in case you missed it in the New York Times the day before Christmas, this intriguing piece via Art Journal about the brouhaha over deaccessioning art at museums to raise bucks, a move that’s recently put New York’s cash-strapped National Academy Museum in hot-to-boiling water. Is it an idea whose time has come? Maybe so, maybe no. Author Jori Finkel talks with, among others, former Portland Art Museum director Dan Monroe, now at the Peabody Essex Museum in Masachusetts. Read it here.

Bob Hicks, Books, Food, General

Merry Chriftmas, one and all: Feaft like lords and ladies

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Now Chriftmas comes, ’tis fit that we
Should feaft and fing, and merry be
Keep open Houfe, let Fiddlers play
A Fig for Cold, fing Care away
And may they who thereat repine
On brown Bread and on fmall Beer dine

(Virginia Almanack, 1766)


I have discovered, of late, a dangerous aisle at Powell’s City of Books. More accurately, I have discovered the center of an aisle, in the cookbook section, beyond the volumes by celebrity chefs (where, among the Paula Deens and Mario Batalis and the occasional Peg Bracken I Hate To Cook Book you can sometimes find an old copy of one of Vincent and Mary Price’s grand collections of old American recipes or recollections of their adventures in great world restaurants) and before you hit the Great Big Collections of Foolishly Complex Recipes From Famous Magazines.

Here, in the middle, is a small row of shelves labeled collectors books (aren’t all books in a bookstore for collectors?) and on the shelves sit a continuously rotating selection of scruffy old volumes. Some are from the beginning of the last century and most are of little consequence but every now and again the shelves yield a true find for anyone interested, as I am, in the history of foodways and its interconnection wth the daily life of the past. It was here I found, not long go, the daftly entertaining 1938 Cheddar Gorge: A Book of English Cheeses, edited capriciously by Sir John Squire and peppered with delicious illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard.

More to the seasonal point, here is where I found The Williamsburg Art of Cookery, or, Accomplifh’d Gentlewoman’s Companion: Being a Collection of upwards of Five Hundred of the moft Ancient & Approv’d Recipes in Virginia Cookery, a 1966 reprinting of a book originally copyrighted in 1938, which was itself a collection with commentary of receipts and reminiscences from the 1600s to the mid-1800s. This is where I found the quote from the Virginia Almanack at the top of this post. And it’s where I found this report, filed by “Monfieur Durand, a Frenchman journeying through Virginia in the Chriftmas holiday Seafon in 1686″:

We were now approaching the Chriftmas Festival. Milor Parker was, as I have faid, a Roman Catholic … He wifhed now to pafs Chriftmas Day in Maryland, and as we were only five or fix Leagues diftant and had no Defire to leave him, it was agreed that all fhould go to fpend the Night with Colonel Fitzhugh, whofe Houfe is on the Shore of the great River Potomac …

Mr. Wormeley is fo beloved and efteemed in thefe Parts that all Gentlemen of Confideration of the Countryfide we traverfed came to meet him, and, as they rode with us, it refulted that by the Time we reached Col. Fitzhugh’s we made up a Troop of 20 Horfe. The Colonel’s Accomodations were, however, fo ample that this Company gave him no Trouble at all; we were all fupplied with Beds, though we had, indeed, to double up. Col. Fitzhugh fhowed us the largeft Hofpitality. He had Store of good Wine and other Things to drink, and a Frolic enfued. He called in three Fiddlers, a Clown, a tight rope Dancer and an acrobatic Tumbler, and gave us all the Divertifement one could wifh. It was very cold but no one thought of going near the Fire becaufe they never put lefs than the Trunk of a Tree upon it and fo the entire Room was kept warm.


As your guests plow through the Great Blizzard of Aught Eight to get to your holiday table, may your fiddlers and clown and dancer and tumbler also arrive safely and happily. Even if it takes them 20 Horfe to get there.