Category Archives: Film

John Maynard Keynes gets “Network”-ed

Faye Dunaway in Network So last night, after the Super Bowl, I was channel-surfing. I’m not proud of it, but there you have it. Sometimes I think that’s the way the universe is trying to talk to me: If I happen upon the “Dog Whisperer,” I might conclude that I’m not calm and assertive enough (or maybe not submissive enough? Sometimes I get mixed messages). If “Ask This Old House” is working on someone’s water heater, then I immediately suspect that mine needs some lovin’.

Anyway, as I was surfing, I fell in with Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s great 1976 satire about television and society, just before the Howard Beale speech, the “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” speech. I knew it was coming and I waited for it, because to this day, it’s the single most subversive thing I’ve ever heard in a mainstream Hollywood movie. (Maybe you have others? We could make a contest of it in the comments.) And this time, it was a swift blow to the solar plexus.
Continue reading John Maynard Keynes gets “Network”-ed

From Lar to PAW: a Monday link and scatter

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.

Jean-Paul Belmondo: Tough guys finish first

Hillary Clinton got a quick stamp of approval from the Senate, President Obama rolled up his sleeves and got to work, Caroline Kennedy withdrew from the New York senatorial race, LeBron James steamrolled the Trail Blazers, the Pacific Northwest College of Art agreed in principle to take over the ailing Museum of Contemporary Craft and Portland Mayor Sam Adams fought an uphill battle for his political life.

But for my money the best read in the Thursday papers was Elaine Sciolino’s report in the New York Times on the French movie god Jean-Paul Belmondo and the release of his latest film, Un Homme et Son Chien (A Man and His Dog), based on Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 neorealist classic Umberto D.

Belmondo, he of the broken nose and the seductive grin and the street-tough physique, is 75 now, and people don’t like to see their physical idols grow old: Think of the matronly-plump Elizabeth Taylor, all comfortable at last inside her expansive body, or the Botoxed-so-hard Sophia Loren, so tight in the face that her eyes seem stretched halfway around her temples.


But Belmondo committed a deeper sin.
Not only did he age, he also degenerated. He had a stroke in 2001 that left him speechless for six months, with a basically useless right side. He’s struggled back, and speaks now, with difficulty, and has regained some of the use of his body. But he is now plainly, as they say, disabled. And that’s how he plays his new role, as an aging, stoved-up, slowly disintegrating man. “It’s me,” he tells Sciolino, “without any special effects.”

The French press has not been amused. As Sciolino reports, Un Homme et Son Chien has been greeted with responses ranging from so-so embarrassment to downright outrage. “One can only be staggered by this portrayal of decrepitude ….,” the magazine Le Point moaned. Le Monde complained about “melodramatic overstatement” and “the effort visibly made by the actor in the dialogue.” Le Matin, swinging for the fences, pronounced the entire enterprise “absolutely despicable.” Even Belmondo’s onetime co-star Arielle Dombasle (Amazon, 2000) got into the act. “He is not cerebral,” she said. “People want to see their hero. To see him as an old man who loves his dog is ridiculous.”

All of this makes me want to see Un Homme et Son Chien very much. As anyone who’s ever read Norse mythology (or Greek, for that matter) knows, even gods die eventually. And it strikes me as monumentally courageous of Belmondo to own up to that profoundly simple fact and let us look in on the process. Maybe the movie’s lousy: I don’t know. But I can only admire a god who comes to even an uneasy peace with his mortality and quietly makes it part of his never-ending story.

*********************

Gods do die, of course, and we remember them in their prime.
For Cary Grant it’s The Philadelphia Story or North by Northwest, not Father Goose. I don’t know why thinking about Belmondo got me also thinking about Grant — their screen personas are very different — but it did. Maybe it’s because they were both stars in the old-fashioned sense: magnetic actors who played themselves, no matter what their role happened to be. We have wonderful actors on screen now, and several of them “better” than Belmondo or Grant, in that lose-yourself-in-the-role-and-create-something-new protean sense. But do they have the same impact?

Contemporary film has no Cary Grant. Hugh Grant may come the closest to Cary Grant the light comedian, but for all his comic skill, Hugh has no dark shadings. Harrison Ford approaches Cary Grant’s impact as a dramatic actor, but Ford hasn’t struck a funny note since the Star Wars movies, and even in those it was comic-book comedy. If you could somehow fuse Ford and Hugh Grant you’d get one genuine old-fashioned movie star.

Think about that the next time you watch Bringing Up Baby or Indiscreet. And think about what an extraordinary actor Cary Grant was.

Jon Raymond and the power of, gulp, discipline

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.
Continue reading Jon Raymond and the power of, gulp, discipline

Caroline, Jeb, Teddy and literary dynasties: Bully!

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!

The weekend: “We scattered til our head hurt”

Mercy, mercy, did we scatter this weekend! We scattered til our head hurt, we scattered til Michael Chabon uttered the last sentences of his lecture Sunday night, we scattered back in time as we watched Mary Oslund’s Bete Perdue, we even scattered at the now-only-newish Bond flick Quantum of Solace. The latter was hard. How many words were actually in that script, anyway? 500 or so? If that? Dear reader, we scattered anyway. We were scattering fools.

The return of Bete Perdue: I went to opening night of the re-dance of Mary Oslund’s spring show. I’m in favor of re-dances, by the way. For those who haven’t seen the choreography, which let’s face it, is 99.999 percent of the metro area, it’s a chance to come in from the cold. Those of us who have seen it get another look — and memory being what it is (a miracle, sure, but so totally unreliable), we need it.

I posted on Bete Perdue before, so I’ll just add a few thoughts: 1) I thought Oslund had changed it some, eliminating some longer solos, replacing them with more group dancing. The eagle-eyed Martha Ullman West said it was longer by 10 minutes, but I didn’t clock it. 2) Friday night it might have been danced more crisply. My operant theory: Go to the last night of a local dance performance, and you will miss opening night jitters/mishaps and second night emotional troughs. 3) I noticed the Obo Addy-Katie Griesar music more than I had before, and I mean that in a good way. I understood it as an organizing principle of the dance, and enjoyed its subtlety and rhythms (Obo!). 4) Individual dancers didn’t respond directly to those rhythms, but the dance as a whole did. Oslund moved our eyes around the stage more or less quickly by the rhythm of her animation of groupings of dancers. A very sophisticated effect. 5) The two amuse-bouche that opened the program were captivating — funny, quick, then deeply felt. Made me want a meal of small plates. Here’s the Catherine Thomas review on OregonLive.
Continue reading The weekend: “We scattered til our head hurt”

Thursday scatter: of foxes and hen houses, etc.

An egg crisis is ravaging the hen house.

They’re disappearing.

And the foxes are shocked, shocked.

While the hens bemoan the loss of their little ones — several survivors have been running around crying that the sky is falling — the foxes have gathered the whole barnyard to declare that Something Must Be Done. Trust them: We Must Act Now.

The head fox has declared that the true victims are the foxes themselves, who have been cruelly deprived of their stockpile of eggs. To avert catastrophe, the foxes’ hoards must be replenished: The hens must lay 700 billion new eggs, right now. The farmer, blinking owlishly, agrees. One wise old fox, who yearns to live in the farm house, has declared that he will Suspend All Other Activities while he Helps Find a Solution. That solution will be found by foxes, and foxes alone. And the solution is that the Hens Will Provide.

Meanwhile, no omelettes this morning. And for music lovers, the rooster doesn’t much feel like crowing, either. Where’s Aesop when we need him? Where’s George Orwell?

********************************************

NEW GUY AT THE GUGGENHEIM: Those who can curate, curate. Those who can curate well, lead museums. At least, that’s the mini-trend among major museums in New York.

Following the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s appointment earlier this month of European tapestry curator Thomas P. Campbell to replace the venerated Philippe de Montebello as director, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has named Richard Armstrong, director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, as the Guggenheim‘s next director.

Like Campbell, Armstrong rose in the ranks on the strength of his curatorial qualities, not his showmanship: His specialty is contemporary art, a good fit for the Goog. And the ever-busy Carol Vogel, in her report for the New York Times, suggests that after years of expansion in Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and (coming in 2013) Abu Dhabi, Armstrong and the Guggenheim are ready to shift their focus back to New York. Another good report comes from The Art Newspaper.

Is it possible that sober financial times are bringing more prudential museum leaders? De Montebello, of course, has combined prudence, measured daring and a brilliant commitment to the art for more than 30 years at the Met, following the mercurial reign of supershowman Thomas Hoving. At the Guggenheim, Armstrong will follow high-rolling Thomas Krens. And when the Portland Art Museum‘s Hoving-like director John Buchanan headed south to take over the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the museum board replaced him with Brian Ferriso and charged Ferriso to quiet the waters and keep things on an even keel.

The question is, will an even keel fill the cruise ship with customers? Is generating excitement gauche, or is it part of what a museum is about? To what extent does a museum exist for insiders, and to what extent does it have a duty to appeal to the general public?

These are uneasy times, and leading a major — or modest — museum is no easy task. To Armstrong, Campbell, Ferriso and their compatriots, then: Good luck, be wise, balance well, take risks, and don’t forget the public.

********************************************

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SOMEDAY: Someday Lounge, that is. The Old Town Portland night spot and hub for interesting alternative arts has turned two and is celebrating with a bunch of events this weekend. The one that catches our eye is the premiere of Pig Roast and Tank of Fish, a documentary about Portland’s Chinatown (which is more or less where the Someday coexists) to be shown at 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 28. Here’s what the Lounge has to say:

Portlander Ivy Lin directed and produced Pig Roast & Tank of Fish. “I’ve always wondered why our Chinatown went from being the second largest in the U.S. to almost like a ghost town. It’s in the heart of downtown, with that beautiful gate and garden and nothing much else,” says Lin. “Earlier this year, 70 Asians showed up at a city council meeting to testify against the the siting of another homeless shelter on Block 25 in Chinatown. I was not even involved with the Chinese community then, but I was very moved and this event became the inspiration for this project.”

This documentary is the first-ever motion picture to acknowledge the history/legacy of Chinatown, Portland’s oldest neighborhood where the pioneers of many ethnic communities once called “home.” It includes some rarely seen footage of ongoing cultural/social activities behind closed doors…Chinatown is not dead!

See you there, Friends of Art Scatter.

Pre-Labor Day Scatter: Red shoes, hot peppers, art scams

So here it is just hours before Labor Day (to be celebrated by much of America by a trip to the mall, where many people will be working for minimum wage or a skoosh over it) and this corner of Art Scatter is thinking about a few things.

Such as Josh White, who is playing on the stereo (we reveal our age by using such an antiquated term), who has just finished singing and playing “Strange Fruit” (if you think Biilie Holiday‘s astonishing version is the whole story, give this one a listen) and has moved on through his hilarious, haunting “One Meat Ball” and is now into his definitive “St. Louis Blues” and — hold it — a killer “Careless Love.”

And Art Scatter’s wife’s amazing ability with a dirty martini.

And the hot peppers of Hatch, New Mexico, where his 92-year-old father lived for two years in the 1920s, and one of which has entered a soup still simmering on the Art Scatter stove, and which (the town, not the pepper) this corner of Art Scatter did not visit on a recent eight-day trip to Santa Fe and environs, which experiences this corner of Art Scatter will discuss shortly. (A shout-out to Southwest Airlines, perhaps the last of the decent air carriers.)

And now Josh White is singing “Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin’ Bed,” and this corner of Art Scatter could almost die happy.

But not before recommending a few things.

Such as Alistair MacAulay’s excellent revisit to the 1948 Michael Powell/Emeric Pessenburger movie The Red Shoes, which Friend of Art Scatter First Class Martha Ullman West has recently promoted as one of the greatest movies of all time. If you’ve done what we often do on holiday weekends and let your newspaper sit untouched, do pick up your Sunday New York Times.

You’ll also find in your Sunday Times a wonderful story by J.D. Biersdorfer about a late 18th century art scam that pulled in the American painter Benjamin West and eventually other leading painters with its promise of revealing the secrets of the great Venetian ancients. It was, of course, a hoax, of P.T. Barnum proportions. A ruefully delightful tale.

Finally, check out Friend of Art Scatter D.K. Row’s challenge to the Portland art scene in the Sunday Oregonian, a piece bemoaning the city’s lack of a contemporary art center to goose the city’s art scene and push it into the national mainstream. We couldn’t agree more. The city that thinks it’s cool has a long way to go, and it’s lucky it has a few people like Row to speak the truth to its press-ageantry-lulled sense of self-satisfaction.

Happy Labor Day!

Beach scatter: J. Austen, E. Jelinek, M. Mouse

The miracle (or the curse, depending on your point of view) of the Internet tubes is that they extend to the Oregon coast, and so, it is possible to share one’s vacation slides with the universe almost in real time. Not only that, it is possible to post from there/here, too. One suspects that it will be an excellent place from which to Scatter widely, if not consecutively, on such subjects as Jane Austen, Elfriede Jelinek and Mickey Mouse. So, having already 1) dipped nether digits into the briney Pacific, 2) ruminated on the pleasures the world offers while eating a smoked oyster from Karla’s Smokehouse (Karla is a genius of the delicate art of smoking), and 3) fought off the assaults of sand bugs attracted to smell of fresh meat from the city, we settle in to the broadcast booth to enter our code.
Continue reading Beach scatter: J. Austen, E. Jelinek, M. Mouse

Pupu Platter needs your help!

Let’s just say we didn’t have enough audience polling of unsavory behavior going on right now. (Which actually we don’t!) We’d suggest joining MrMead at his Pupu Platter site and confess to the world what awful movies you love.

For me? The Vikings: Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis vie for the lovely hand of Janet Leigh, but when I saw it, circa 1958 or ’59, I was more interested in how to storm a castle, the talons of the falcon and the long Viking horn. But before you go, tell us 1) what words you mispronounce and 2) the movies that moved you in the appropriate slots below!