Category Archives: Environment

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Environment, General

Happy 150th, Oregon — sorry about the history

1 Comment

logo_2

The state of Oregon turned 150 on Valentine’s Day, and it looks like the honeymoon’s over.

A friend sent along a copy of this message from  the Oregon Historical Society, an organization that’s been dealing with tough financial times for several years. (It was once funded largely by the state, but those days are long gone.) For most people, the society’s research library is being shut down.

A lot of Oregonians will never notice, of course. But for writers, researchers, historians, people searching their family roots, this is a blow. Here’s an excerpt from a message sent to insiders. Read it and weep.

Conversation: Closure of OHS Research Library
Subject: Closure of OHS Research Library

Dear friends and colleagues,

It is with great sadness that I write to share the news with you that, due to severe budget reductions, the Oregon Historical Society will be closing its Research Library beginning this Saturday, February 28th. The collections will no longer be open to the public, and all library positions will be eliminated beginning March 13th. A few positions will remain to handle orders for photo and film reproduction. It is not known at this time if or when the library will re-open and at what capacity.

As many of you know, the OHS Research Library has the largest collection of archival documents relating to the history of Oregon, including its nationally-renowed photograph collection containing over 2.5 million historical photographs, more than 32,000 books, 25,000 maps, 12,000 linear feet of manuscripts, 3,000 serials titles, 16,000 reels of newspaper microfilm, 8.5 million feet of film and videotape, and 10,000 oral history tapes. I feel this not only as a very personal loss but as a great loss to all Oregonians.

If you have questions or concerns about the OHS Research Library closure, I strongly recommend that you contact our Executive Director, George Vogt, at george.vogt@ohs.org or 503-306-5203. Please continue to check our website at http://www.ohs.org for any future news about the status of the library. …



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

Tom Coburn and his wilderness of ideas

20 Comments


UPDATE, 1:55 p.m. Friday, Feb. 6: MISCHIEF WINS, “SMALL POTATOES” LOSE: I didn’t think he could do it, but he did. Today the U.S. Senate, by a ridiculous 73-24 vote, passed Sen. Tom Coburn’s amendment to the economic stimulus bill to bar anything with even the faintest whiff of culture from getting any stimulus money. Here’s the requisite passage from Congressional Quarterly:

“Lawmakers also voted 73-24 to adopt a Tom Coburn , R-Okla., amendment to place tighter restrictions facilities that can be built with money from the bill. The Coburn amendment would bar spending on casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses, swimming pools, stadiums, community parks, museums, theaters, art centers, and highway beautification projects.

“That’s broader than prohibition in the House-passed bill, which applied only to casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses and swimming pools.”


The vote is astonishing, and preposterous, and I can only guess that the amendment was passed with so little thought or debate simply because the Senate is in a pedal-to-the-metal rush to get this thing off the assembly line and onto the streets. Coburn may be a fool, but he’s a canny fool — he knows how the system works, and he knows how and when to manipulate it. This ugly bit of mischief could still disappear from the final bill, of course, but now it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of ruckus-raising. It’s officially time to get mad, get on the horn, bug your congressional delegation and get something done about this.

Timberline Lodge, funded by the WPA/Wikimedia Commons

News flashes from all sorts of fronts today about the latest Molotov cocktail from Sen. Tom Coburn, the Republican from Oklahoma known for his quixotic attempts to deliver America from the clutches of common sense. It was Coburn, Oregonians might recall, whose threat of filibuster scuttled last year’s otherwise certain passage of the Lewis & Clark Mount Hood Wilderness Act. That act finally passed the Senate last month, as part of a broader wilderness bill, on a 73-21 vote — over Coburn’s objections.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OklahomaThis time out Coburn’s tackling the omnibus economic bailout plan — surely a target for some tough critical thinking: How many Dutch boys with their fingers in the dike does it take to keep the thing from bursting, anyway? Unfortunately, it’s not just Coburn’s finger that’s all wet. His Amendment No. 175 to the economic stimulus bill is tough, and it’s critical. But it’s utterly lacking in thinking.

Here’s how Coburn proposes to guard your pocketbook:

“None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, arts center, or highway beautification project, including renovation, remodeling, construction, salaries, furniture, zero-gravity chairs, big screen televisions, beautification, rotating pastel lights, and dry heat saunas.”


Note that. No money for museums, theaters, arts centers, aquariums, zoos, highway beautification, apparently any sort of beautification at all. I’m not really sure what a rotating pastel light is, but none of that, either. Fortunately I don’t golf. But I do like a good sauna now and again.

It’s easy to laugh this off as just another crackpot amendment that’s going nowhere — except that Coburn has a history of making this sort of thing stick, at least temporarily. I doubt it’ll work this time, because with the Democratic gains in the Senate from the last election he’s lost his biggest tool, which was his ability to forestall a 60 percent Senate vote to halt filibuster. His power has always been the power to make mischief, not the power to actually create anything.

Still, it’s a very good idea to call your senators (the Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121) or zip off an email to them. If you live in Oregon, that means Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley. If you live in Washington, it means Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray. If you live in another state, check here for contacts. The danger isn’t that anywhere near a majority of senators agree with Coburn. The danger is that, in their eagerness to get some sort of broad-stroke stimulus package passed as quickly as possible, a majority will be willing to horse-trade away this “small potatoes” stuff. In D.C., that’s how mischief’s made.

It seems silly to even have to bring it up, but here goes: Museums and theaters and aquariums are part of the economy, too. And they’re a potentially multiple-payoff part of the economy. They don’t just create jobs for themselves, they feed tourism, hospitality, construction (which means such things as logging and mining and steelmaking). Increasingly, in our information-driven society, the arts play a big role in driving entire regional economies: People move to cities specifically for their arts scenes. That’s certainly true of Portland. Oh: And all that “beautification”? It creates good, lasting things. The picture at the top of this post is of Timberline Lodge. It’s on Mt. Hood, and it was built during the Great Depression as a project of the federal government’s Works Progress Administration.

The WPA was good to the arts, and in return the arts were good to America. From murals in small-town post offices to architectural treasures like Timberline Lodge to theater and dance and music projects to photographic documentation of the Depression to the wonderful, sadly unfinished, collection of writings about American foodways, our previous mass economic stimulus package had the good sense to recognize that an “economy” is only a financial blueprint of a whole society.

Am I nervous about the economic stimulus plan? You bet. But I’m a lot more nervous about the Tom Coburns of the world than I am about helping a museum keep from falling into the abyss of economic failure. Keeping our shared culture alive, I’m confident, is a very good idea.

Barry Johnson, Environment, Food, General

Anthro-fantasy: Leaping about the Kamass patch

Leave a comment

When we left you, the snass was upon us and the cole snass was a very recent memory. Both rain and snow encourage indoor pursuits — basketmaking, for example, among the tribes of the lower Columbia, including the Multnomah, who lived where I sit and type now. Without having gathered the appropriate reeds for basketmaking, I was left to my own devices, Internet devices, and I ran across two stories with Oregon connections: specifically, they were both based on research by archaeologists with Northwest roots. Both of them led me to the beginning of human habitation on the Columbia River, which is still a space that we can occupy imaginatively, because the details are so sketchy.

For grounding, I turned to Melissa Darby, an expert in these matters. She was part of suddenly, an ongoing meditation about the ideas of Thomas Sieverts, which we visited below, and as organizer Matthew Stadler suggests in the post immediately preceding, taking part in their ongoing discussion is a good idea. But I’m afraid I have to take responsibility for the conclusions to which I’ve leaped here. (After the jump: Killer comets! Cake! Idle anthropological speculation! Recipes! More!)
Continue reading Anthro-fantasy: Leaping about the Kamass patch →

Barry Johnson, Environment, General, Language

Scatter dodges the snass, just this once

7 Comments

The snass arrived last night, though here at the sprawling Art Scatter compound on the Northeast Plateau, at least, nothing like a “major weather event” occurred, which is surprising after all of the “flood of floods” warnings bleating from the television the past few days.

“Snass” is the Chinook Jargon (or Chinuk Wawa) word for rain — it rhymes with moss. It is the only word for rain I was able to find in George Gibbs’ famous 1863 dictionary of the trading language, which was used by many tribes of the Pacific Northwest, especially along the Columbia, as well as French and then British trappers and traders. I would have guessed that native peoples employed at least 111 words for the varieties of precipitation that come our way here, from mist to lashing downpour, and the languages of various individual tribes may well have such words. But not Chinuk Wawa, and frankly, I like its economy. Snass. Most of the time here, we know it means light rain turning to drizzle from sometime in November to sometime in May, with periods when it is merely overcast. Snow, by the way, is called “cole snass”, a little English sneaking in there.

Who invented Chinuk Wawa? That’s a major debate in the circles that debate things linguistic involving Native Americans. One side argues that the French started it to communicate with Northwest tribes, which explains all the French words that Gibbs recorded, word like lamonti for mountain or lapeep for pipe. But sometimes this isn’t conclusive. The jargon word for fowl is lapool, which is certainly French enough, but then the Siwash word for grouse is also lapool, according to Gibbs.

My own suspicion, and these days the majority opinion, is that a lingua franca (that wasn’t franca) united the tribes, who were big traders before the French arrived. That language was elastic enough to bend and merge with the language of the new European arrivals — each side used the words of the other. It was a living language that changed with times, until the tribes were routed by force of arms, disease and the sheer number of Euro/Americans flooding the countryside. And maybe it still is — the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde have an ongoing Chinuk Wawa language program.

The people of the Lower Columbia have been on my mind lately, especially the people who lived right here, where the Willamette meets the Columbia, the Multnomah tribe. Like many of the other tribes we gather under the name Chinook, the Multnomah have been something of an anomaly for anthropologists and archaeologists trying to create a nice, clean developmental account of human history on the continent. We’ll get to that in our next post.

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

Caroline, Jeb, Teddy and literary dynasties: Bully!

3 Comments

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.

Continue reading Caroline, Jeb, Teddy and literary dynasties: Bully! →

Bob Hicks, Environment, Food, General

Lighten up, lad: Diamond Jim, we hardly knew ye

9 Comments

Ah, 2008. The year when the fat got lean and the lean got leaner. The year when the big fat lie led to the big fat crash. The year when the faked memoir devolved from the merely mercenary and narcissistic to the unbearably sad and pitiable. The year, more cheerfully, when Obama won and the Yankees lost.

Oh, well. We’ll always have our heroes to look up to.

Oops. Turns out, Diamond Jim Brady was a fraud. Or maybe just a garden-variety (make that stockyard-variety) glutton. Or maybe it wasn’t him so much as his image-mongers, who seem to have larded the truth like it was a prize-winning pie crust at the county fair. David Kamp, in a mortally funny piece of debunkery in this morning’s New York Times, has pricked Diamond Jim’s balloon, reducing his reputation like so much Slim-Fast: Turns out Brady was the bloated beginning of a reputational Ponzi scheme that leaves us tail-enders holding a severely depleted bag.

Granted, Brady’s an odd sort of hero in the first place — not a role model so much as a bigger-than-life phenomenon, a sort of Zeus (or maybe Dionysus) of the foodie set. Anything you could eat, he could eat bigger. And did, so the stories go, four or five times a day, in all-out cram-athons, often in the company of his gustatory inamorata Lillian Russell, the even more fabled songbird of the Gilded Age, whose appetites seemingly rivaled Catherine the Great’s.
Continue reading Lighten up, lad: Diamond Jim, we hardly knew ye →

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?

7 Comments

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, Cities, Environment, General

Architecture notes: Doyle’s demise, Sam’s folly

8 Comments

At the risk of making Art Scatter look like an architecture and planning blog (we’re deeply interested, but others cover the territory fare more systematically) a couple of things are sticking in our craw. Well, my craw, at any rate.

First, the Riverdale School District’s decision to tear down an A.E. Doyle-designed elementary school in Dunthorpe, a move that’s far from surprising but depressing and exasperating, nevertheless: You get the feeling that the board never took the preservation case seriously; it just bulled ahead and did what it wanted to do. Noblesse, you might say, without the oblige. We wrote about this a while back. Now, we can’t think of any response better than those from Scatter friends Tim DuRoche, on his Portland Spaces blog, and Brian Libby, on his Portland Architecture blog. Read ’em and weep. Or get angry. Or both. This 1920 school building isn’t major Doyle, but it’s a model of how to do a modest building the right way — and after all, aren’t most buildings in most places modest? If you get the modest buildings right, the major buildings will follow suit.


Second — and not wanting to pick on Mayor-elect Sam Adams, who has a lot of energy and a lot of ideas — but what in the pluperfect hell is with his insistence on building that white elephant of a convention center hotel? I thought Metro had finally stuck a silver spike in this 600-room monster’s heart, but no: Sam just won’t let it die the death it deserves. This truly seems to be a case where money interests are overruling common sense and good public policy, which really ought to go together.

Let’s be clear about a few things.

— First, the chances of this $227 million project ever paying for itself are about as good as Bill O’Reilly’s shot at acing out Hillary and becoming Obama’s secretary of state. And let’s not even get into how much that estimated $227 million would actually end up being.

Continue reading Architecture notes: Doyle’s demise, Sam’s folly →

Barry Johnson, Cities, Environment, General

Critic face-off: Brad Cloepfil and the battle against kitsch

11 Comments

The primary piece of writing on my reading list this weekend was Inara Verzemnieks’ profile of Brad Cloepfil, which was a hybrid of sorts, marrying facts about the architect and his buildings, but also offering an account of life on the ground inside those buildings and an approach to thinking about his work. It even gets, gulp, philosophical. I was a little too close to the process of this story to supply a full-fledged analysis of it, let alone a “judgment”, but it is the jumping off point for the rest of this post.

Lurking within Inara’s story is a debate between Ada Louise Huxtable and Nicolai Ouroussoff, and not just over Cloepfil’s renovation of the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle, either. About everything. I’ll start with Huxtable just because she’s just the best. She puts Ouroussoff on notice immediately in the lead of her review in the Wall St. Journal: “the reviews have set some kind of record for irresponsible over-the-top building-bashing,” she writes, and she must be referring to him, because no one was quite as vitriolic as he was (that I’ve found in print, anyway).
Continue reading Critic face-off: Brad Cloepfil and the battle against kitsch →

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Environment, General, Theater

A.E. Doyle and tearing down Portland’s past

7 Comments

Over at the valuable Portland Architecture blog, which helps keep the city’s designers and planners on their toes, Brian Libby has started a fascinating conversation that’s well worth checking out. It’s about the flap in little upscale Dunthorpe over its school board’s desire to tear down the 1920 Riverdale Grade School and replace it with something fresh and contemporary. Libby and a long string of commenters have created a stimulating conversation on just what historic preservation means — on why it’s important, how old buildings can be transformed for new purposes, when it might be OK to replace a good old building, what a historical presence in architecture means to a community. So far, the consensus seems to be: Keep the building, remodel it for modern needs, make it green, add on if necessary. Well, that’s the consensus on the Portland Architecture blog. It still doesn’t seem to be the consensus on the school board.

Beyond the general interest that Art Scatter has in architecture and planning, I find this conversation interesting because the school was designed by A.E. Doyle, Portland’s most significant architect of the early 20th century, and the subject of a good new historical biography by Philip Niles, Beauty of the City, which I happen to have reviewed for The Oregonian: You can read the review, due for print publication this Sunday, here, on Oregon Live. Central Library, the Benson Hotel (and the Benson Bubblers), the Meier & Frank department store (now Macy’s), the Reed College campus, Multnomah Falls Lodge — Doyle’s stamp is all around the city and its environs, and Niles’ book helps explain both how that came to be and why it’s a good thing.

So, save the Riverdale School? My gut says yes, even though I’ve never been inside it, and, frankly, I don’t know in what ways the school board thinks it inadequate. Maybe its members know something none of the rest of us do. But from its pictures it looks like a classic old building, with great light and a simple layout that would seem easy to reconfigure — and even add on to, if necessary. Yes, it might need seismic upgrading, but hundreds of buildings have gone through that: Drive through the little Oregon wine country town of Dundee, on the way to McMinnville, and you’ll see a school that’s been successfully and sensitively earthquake-proofed in the recent past.

I’m aware that a community is a dynamic thing and that preservation, wrongly applied, can be romantic mummification. I can understand the frustration that Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe must have felt over the weight of history pressing down on design in Europe, shackling it to the past. But that’s hardly the case in the United States, and especially not in a region as young and still raw-boned as the Pacific Northwest. We’re building all sorts of new stuff (far too much of it, unfortunately, in the sprawling subdivision cookie-cutter style of the rest of the nation) and we don’t have a lot of history to give away.

So weigh in on this thing. Check out Libby’s link at Portland Architecture: It’s a lively example of what can happen at the intersection of design, politics, money and community involvement. And give Niles’ book about Doyle a spin. For anyone interested in how cities grow (and this city in particular), it’s a good read.