By Laura Grimes
Many laws are writ about packing. Pack food. Pack water. Pack enough underwear so as not to run out. Many more laws take it in the shorts, laws that are never violated under any circumstance. Herewith are writ the laws that take it in the shorts:
By Laura Grimes
The Pantsless Brother was passing through town recently, but I was prepared this time. Gas or no gas, I found him some pants. Whatcha think?
A clever friend sent the photo to me, and she can’t remember where it came from. Gotta love those flames on top of the head. But is that … smoke coming from those ruffled BVDs?
The Pantsless Brother is now so concerned I’ll further inflame his reputation that he regularly will go on about some crazy tale and then say … “Don’t write about that.” or “I don’t want that showing up in your blog.” or “You don’t get to blog about that.”
Delores Pander “was made of stern stuff, but laughter and a zest for life itself were so much a part of her it’s hard to believe, or accept, that she’s gone,” Martha Ullman West wrote in this recent tribute.
Friends and admirers of Pander, who died June 24 at age 71, are invited to a memorial service on Wednesday, July 7. It will be at 7:30 p.m. at St. David of Wales Episcopal Church, 3422 SE Harrison St., Portland.
Pander, wife and partner of artist Henk Pander, also worked many years with authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Jean Auel, as well as with the old Portland Dance Theater.
Portland Opera didn’t exactly go to Hell and back to make its first commercial recording. Or maybe it did.
Can it really have been only last November that Philip Glass‘s opera Orphee, based on Jean Cocteau‘s celebrated 1949 film version of the myth about the man who lost his love by looking back at her as he guided her out of the Underworld, was the talk of Puddletown? When perhaps the world’s most famous living serious composer was in town, taking in rehearsals of the opera company’s revival of his 1993 musical drama?
Glass decided he liked the Portland cast so much that it should be recorded, leading to a double first: Portland Opera’s first-ever commercial recording, and the first full recording of Orphee, part of a Cocteau trilogy by Glass that also includes La Belle et la Bete and Les Enfants Terribles.
Now it’s here. Today, Portland Opera’s Julia Sheridan sent out word that the two-disc set, released on the Glass-centric Orange Mountain Music label, has hit the shelves. You can buy it online at the opera company’s Web site, or at its box office south of OMSI, and soon, we imagine, at all the usual places.
Portland Opera’s version of Orphee, in a production that originated at Glimmerglass Opera in Upstate New York, was terrific, and fellow Scatterers may recall that we covered it like a Methodist missionary desperately throwing wet blankets over the sunbathers at a nude beach. Here is the outcome of our group interview with Glass, which came before Mr. Scatter blogged live from the Keller Auditorium on opening night: the results of that act of impertinent bravado are here, here, here, and here. A little later, Mr. Scatter offered empirical evidence of why his fellow blogger Storm Large was besieged by autograph hounds and he was not.
Time to slip that CD into your stereo and raise a Glass in a toast. Just don’t look over your shoulder.
It’s not just rock around the clock in Puddletown: It’s dance around the calendar. Autumn, winter, spring and even summer, you just can’t keep this town’s dancing feet down. Art Scatter senior correspondent Martha Ullman West has done her best to keep up with the action, and reports here on some of what’s been kickin’ in town lately.
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By Martha Ullman West
Portland is having a dance boom, even though those who swim in Terpsichore’s wake are having a hell of a time staying afloat.
Used to be things were winding down by the time you reached the summer solstice, and there definitely was a time when addicts like me found it impossible to get any kind of movement fix once the Rose Festival was over. Not this year — I actually had to make choices, not having managed the art of being in two or three places at once. So to several emerging choreographers as well as some much more established ones, I apologize for not making it to their performances and herewith offer some thoughts on those I did see.
I’ll start with Carol Triffle’s new musical Backs Like That, which I saw on June 18th. It’s the latest in her series of quirky commentaries on what Balzac called the human comedy, with more than a little irony implied, and as usual with an Imago piece, it is greatly involved with movement.
By Laura Grimes
Several vignettes about kids and books have been pin-balling about my head for months, but two things this week got the mojo going: a goofy T-shirt and a fake mustache.
You only get one this time, though. I’m intent on cleaning up the hell holes around the house and the other night I came across a small bright purple T-shirt. Size 7. It was covered with colorful buttons, shiny Mardi Gras coins, pipe cleaners and assorted gunk from the craft bin. All this was attached with miles of masking tape.
By Bob Hicks
SAN FRANCISCO — Two clichés come to mind today: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “Familiarity breeds contempt.”
I wouldn’t call my attitude toward Impressionist painting contempt, exactly. Far from it: This is great stuff, and you’d have to be a fool not to recognize that, even if, as in my case, your attention has been elsewhere of late.
I confess to having had a touch of fatigue, a sense of been-there-seen-that, a feeling that yesterday’s artistic revolution had become today’s wallpaper, the essence of nice. (Another cliché pops into my head: “guilt by association.” I gradually came to undervalue the real thing, I think, on the evidence of innumerable encounters with contemporary paintings in which a sort of generic, Impressionist-lite fuzzing of the image attempts to obscure the artists’ inability to be compelling or precise.)
Thank you, Musee d’Orsay and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, for shaking me out of that nonsense. Birth of Impressionism, the show of masterworks from the Paris museum on display through Sept. 6 at the Fine Arts Museums’ de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, reinvigorates the Impressionistic moment by putting it in the context of its own time and the art world that existed when it knocked on the door and was found unsuitable company for dinner with the establishment.
That historical grounding had been absent from my thinking for a while. It reminded me of why the Impressionist movement was groundbreaking, and reawakened my fondness for works whose value should have been self-evident. (A followup exhibition from the d’Orsay, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, opens Sept. 25 and runs through Jan. 18, 2011.)
Graceful, intelligent and hard-working, Delores Pander generally stayed behind the scenes of Portland’s arts world, where she had a habit of making sure the scenes were working precisely the way they ought to. Born on Aug. 16, 1938, she died of cancer on Thursday, June 24, 2010. For many years she was the wife and partner of the Dutch-born Portland painter Henk Pander, one of our best and most important artists, whose work has fused the long tradition of Dutch art with the frontier edge of the Pacific Northwest and a keen outsider’s feeling for the American psyche. Art Scatter senior correspondent Martha Ullman West, a longtime friend of Delores, offers this personal tribute.
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By Martha Ullman West
Delores Pander died early Thursday morning after a long, hard, painful battle with cancer. Her accomplishments were many, her passion for knowledge profound, the reach of her love and loyalty and friendship broad and deep.
Henk Pander’s extraordinary portrait above of his beautiful wife, made in December of last year, says it all: she is surrounded by images representing the things that were most important to her — a ceramic made by her granddaughter Mary-Alice; the house she shared with Henk and Mary-Alice and several dogs for a number of years; a pile of books; and in her hand a book by Ursula Le Guin, another artist whom she helped with the practical details of work. Her favorite color was the deep, dark red that saturates the painting, and the lighter red shoes she’s wearing are emblematic of her love of pretty clothes.
Delores was years away from becoming an artist’s wife when I first met her in the fall of 1973 at David Nero and Associates, where I was an incompetent technical writer and she was the highly competent secretary for an educational research project to study Follow Through, a shortlived offshoot of Head Start. With her dark hair and sparkling eyes, her clear intelligence, her love of laughter, and the incredible speed, organization and efficiency with which she ran the office and kept our motley crew in line, she reminded me at once of my mother, who put all those attributes, including the dark-haired beauty, to work in the caring and feeding of my artist father.
Delores’s refusal to put up with any guff from those of us who were above her in the pecking order also reminded me of my mother. I’m ashamed to say I was a bit uppity with her at some point, and for Christmas she gave me an engagement calendar inscribed “to the writer from the typer-writer.”
Mr. Scatter hasn’t been writing a lot lately, at least not for print. Lots of notes, lots of transcriptions, lots of interviews and looking at stuff and thinking about it, but not so much for instant gratification — Mr. Scatter’s or his readers’.
In case you missed it, he did have this piece in last Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, a reflection on that not-so-polite (and extremely loosely organized) form of art known variously as folk, outsider, naive, primitive, self-taught, you name it.
A recent trip to the Bay Area has got him to thinking about artists like The Hairy Who (from Chicago, but they had a big influence on the Bay Area Figurative Art scene) and Robert Arneson, and of course the splendidly loony master cartoonist R. Crumb, whose surprising take on the Book of Genesis is at the Portland Art Museum right now, and fun and funk, and the disappearing distance between high and low art, “taught” and “outsider” art. That’s what the A&E piece is about, in the context of Portland’s variously beloved and maligned Alberta Arts District scene. ‘Nuff said. Read it for yourself.
While he was in Baghdad by the Bay, Mr. Scatter stayed in Japantown, where the view out his window was the pagoda at right. Best thing about the very good hotel where he stayed, thanks to an excellent online deal: the long deep Japanese soaking tub, which he filled with hot water nightly to wash away the stress of those up-and-down hills. He tried not to think about the ungodly amount of water he was using. Sometimes, a person splurges.
San Francisco is a great place to eat, maybe right up there in the United States with New Orleans and New York, and Mr. Scatter had a bite or two. About a third of the city’s population is Asian, and it follows that eating in Asian spots can be a good bet, even little ones that don’t get much press. That was the deal with a little Korean diner he found one night: good bubbling stew with soft tofu and little oysters. But the side dishes, or banchan, were knockout: nine little bowls of kimchi and other various fermented sprouts, cucumbers, radishes and the like, including a dish of dried anchovies that had been partially reconstituted with oil, giving them a sharp funky taste and a chewy, almost woody texture. Outstanding. San Francisco treat or not, Rice-A-Roni didn’t stand a chance.
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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:
— Tabor Porter, carved devil figure, courtesy Guardino Gallery.
— The view from Mr. Scatter’s window: the pagoda in San Francisco’s Japantown. Wikimedia Commons.
By Bob Hicks
SAN FRANCISCO — The cabbie’s whipping around the corners like a Tim Lincecum curveball, as wild and abandoned as the wind whistling down the bay. We’re heading back toward town from an art studio near the south waterfront, and the driver’s rapping out opinions like a batter playing pepper in spring training. Mr. Scatter checks his lap a little nervously: Yes, his seat belt’s on.
Chicago lays claim to the nickname The Windy City, and it earns it, although Buffalo and Rochester could put in likely claims, too. And San Francisco certainly fits the profile, as anyone who’s ever sat through a ballgame at Candlestick Park can attest. As the cab nears AT&T Park, the compact and nostalgic home of the San Francisco Giants, the chatter turns to sports.
“The Giants,” the cabbie says. “The Giants, they mean something to this town. I mean, that’s history, man. That’s glue.”