Category Archives: General

Cities, General, Laura Grimes, Music, Visual Art

London, Part 2: The political shuffle

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By Laura Grimes

A constant thrum of helicopters filled the air today. I know that sound, and when I hear it I look for it. It’s one thing when the helicopters are moving. It’s another thing when they’re hovering. It means something’s up.

The Pantsless Brother and I shared some van Eyck, Rembrandt and Turner together at the National Gallery and then he took off for Dublin to chase some Vermeer (seriously). After several hours he sent me a note asking what I did when he was gone and I replied that I had just posted this on Facebook:

Cool hanging outside 10 Downing Street today with protesters, tourists, black suits, reporters and police. It’s gotta be one of the weirdest political climates in British history since WWII — a hung parliament, mad party coalition negotiations that quickly flip-flopped, and a sudden change of tenants at the prime minister’s residence.

Here’s the biggest crowd I came upon:

democracy

I couldn’t get a closer shot with a better angle without risking being obnoxious or being in the middle of heavy vehicle traffic. (Now I wish I had done both.) However, just a little farther down the sidewalk I came upon a small group of people who were waiting patiently at an iron gate. It was the opening to Downing Street, otherwise known as where the British prime minister lives. This proved to be the more interesting spot, not that I saw much more than black cars with tinted windows and a security detail. The speeches came a few hours after I left. What was all the hubbub?

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Dance, Environment, General, Martha Ullman West, Theater

Goodbye to Lena, swan song for Gavin, the Brontes and kickin’ with Cedar Lake

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By Martha Ullman West

Art Scatter is always pleased as punch to accept an essay from its chief correspondent and occasional world traveler, Martha Ullman West. MUW has been a busy woman lately. Herewith we offer her personal recollections of the late, great Lena Horne; her thoughts on the swan song of dancer Gavin Larsen, retiring from Oregon Ballet Theatre (plus other thoughts about OBT); Cedar Lake Contemporary Dance; and a comic theatrical riff on the Bronte sisters. Whew: That covers some territory!

Cropped screenshot of Lena Horne from "Till the Clouds Roll By," 1946. Wikimedia Commons

First and second thoughts on a Monday morning —

I was going to start this post with some second thoughts about Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s recent Duets concert series and specifically last Sunday’s matinee performance, Gavin Larsen‘s last as a principal dancer.

But I logged on to my e-mail an hour or so before I began writing and found that a high school classmate had forwarded me the New York Times obituary for Lena Horne, so I’ll start with some extremely vivid memories of her that go back, oh dear God, 58 years.

Original poster from Lena Horne's 1941 movie "Stormy Weather." Wikimedia CommonsHer daughter, Gail Jones, was a year ahead of me at a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., called Oakwood. The glamorous Lena Horne was a loving, devoted mother, who always came to Parents Day — and so did my father, believe you me.

First memory: October of my freshman year, Lena in a red velvet suit, prowling (no other word for it) along the football field, definitely deflecting fatherly attention from the game as well as the nubile cheerleaders, although Dad claimed for years he heard a Quaker referee calling “Thee is out.”

Second memory: Two years later, a cold wintry day, I was running barefoot down the hall of my dormitory when that unmistakable voice called from Gail’s room, “Child, put your shoes on — it’s freezing in here.” I stopped dead in my tracks, turned around, and there she was; looking, needless to say, stunning. And stern. I put my shoes on.

Third memory: The American Masters PBS show twelve years ago in honor of her 80th birthday (and she looked about 50, I might add), which I imagine PBS will reprise and I urge all Scatterers to watch. Daughter Gail Jones’s history of the Horne Family is also well worth reading. As is the Times obituary. Lots of “Stormy Weather” in Lena’s life; damned if she did, damned if she didn’t, and did she ever overcome, with astonishing glamor and grace.

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There was plenty of grace of a different kind, and glamour best described as casual, as Oregon Ballet Theatre’s dancers filed past Larsen at the second intermission a week ago Sunday. Larsen was still in her Duo Concertant practice clothes costume, crowned with a ballerina’s tiara. The casual part applies to the jeans-clad dancers who each gave her a single rose and a kiss as they walked past her: It’s a tradition that began, I believe, at the Paris Opera Ballet.

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Cities, General, Laura Grimes

London: Flying high on the blog

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by Laura Grimes

JoJo and I say hello from London. Let’s surprise Mr. Scatter by filling him in this way about our travels, shall we?

Editor’s note before I begin: I have The Wimpy Camera and when it comes to camera equipment, even the wimpy kind, I am technically disabled. So my deep apologies in advance. (Some of these photos were taken with The Wimpier Camera, my Blackberry.)

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Postcard from London to Portland, London to Portland

When I picked up this postcard from SCRAP in Portland a few weeks back, my friend, Holly, said, “If you send me that from London, I’ll know where it came from.” Well, guess what?

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The Pantsless Brother (TPB) has been waylaid by an ash cloud. Regular Scatterers will remember his predicament with gas in his pants so being waylaid by an ash cloud should be considered par for the course for him. In the meantime, I’ll scatter while I wait late at night and try not to drink all the beer before he gets here.

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Before JoJo and I left Portland, his buddies in the hood wished him well:

JoJo's buddies from the hood

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After having endless trouble checking in online a day before departure I’m happy to report that once I was at the airport I was checked in, through security and had ordered coffee even before Mr. Scatter was back home. Considering we live only a hop, skip and barely 20 minutes from the airport … slick!

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Environment, General, Laura Grimes, Music, Theater

Epilogue: Scattering live from the opera

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By Laura Grimes

Portland Opera's The Barber of Seville

Mrs. Scatter’s final thoughts and look back — and a chance to add what she missed before:

Forget coherence. Forget cohesion. Stutter and start is the only way to blog live about the opera. People talk and joke and all that is part of the cheerful scene, but forget trying to put two words together that make sense on the computer screen.

To read our meandering live blogs about the opera:

Mr. Scatter’s.

Mrs. Scatter’s.

Though it’s nice to make sense, frankly it’s icing on the cake when it happens because the whole point really is that it’s brilliant marketing on the part of the opera. It costs them a little staff time to arrange (but what’s a few e-mails), some flier bills describing the blogs and the people  (which call us “prominent local bloggers” — elbow elbow), a bag of nuts (Mr. Scatter calls them salty), and a few glasses of wine (blog lubricant). So, really, for peanuts they get a buzz going in different directions among different people. Brilliant. You put on a show and you want people to see it. That’s just smart business.

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General, Laura Grimes, Music, Theater

Friday night live: Mrs. Scatter gets a curl

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By Laura Grimes

Mrs. Scatter is considerably fond of facial hair, and Mr. Scatter’s beard in particular, so she’s concerned what type of shave he has in mind. Let’s hope it’s the farcical kind because we’re blogging in tandem tonight about The Barber of Seville. That’s right, folks …

Live from Portland Opera, it’s Scattering Night!

We’ll be updating our posts as the night goes on, so check back, scroll down and see what’s new!

LIVE FROM ART SCATTER WORLD HEADQUARTERS, 5:35 P.M. FRIDAY, MAY 7, 2010 –

Two hours until Curtain Time: This is a test photo from The Wimpy Camera:

Mr. Scatter in his home office

In the meantime, I’ve been boning up:

  • This is the second barber show in two nights for the Scatter Family. On Thursday night, they ventured to see Sweeney Todd at Grant High School.
  • The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini premiered in 1816 … the same year  Jane Austen’s Emma was published.
  • Jennifer Rivera, who plays Rosina, has a kick-in-the-pants blog, and the videos are not to be missed.
  • Bob Kingston, who gives the pre-performance talks at Portland Opera, shared this podcast from LA Opera.
  • The blog at Portland Opera by Operaman, otherwise known as Stephen Llewellyn, is personable and insightful about opera in general.
  • And, thanks to Operaman, that’s where I found my most useful resource, though stink if I can get it to embed:

Warner Bros. presents \”Barber of Seville\”

LIVE FROM KELLER AUDITORIUM, 6:49 P.M. FRIDAY, MAY 7, 2010 –

The wine has arrived, the personal nuts, the pretzels, the cookies …

Continue reading Friday night live: Mrs. Scatter gets a curl →

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Friday night live: Mr. Scatter gets a shave

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By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter is all lathered up in the lobby of Keller Auditorium, and Mrs. Scatter is at his side, underneath one of those big-bubble hairdrying doohickies. Each of us is posting live on opening night of Portland Opera’s “The Barber of Seville.” We’ll be updating our respective posts as time allows, so if you read them early, check back: There’ll be more.

"The Barber of Seville." Photo: Cory Weaver/Portland Opera

LIVE FROM ART SCATTER WORLD HEADQUARTERS, 5 P.M. FRIDAY, 2.5 HOURS BEFORE CURTAIN, MAY 7, 2010 —

Famous barbers in history:

— Sal “The Barber” Maglie, star pitcher for the Giants, Indians and Dodgers in the 1940s and ’50s, so nicknamed for his eagerness to brush back hitters with high inside fastballs in the vicinity of the jaw and neck. In baseball parlance, he gave ’em a close shave with a little chin music.

— Benjamin Barker, a skilled bladesman from Fleet Street in London, who, after being frightfully wronged by a corrupt judge, took to a life of crime as the infamous “demon barber” Sweeney Todd, casually slitting his customers’ throats so his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, could grind ’em up and pop ’em into meat pies.

— Samuel Barber, American composer of works including Knoxville: Summer of 1915. In photographs he appears graciously clean-shaven.

— Figaro, the clever schemer of Seville, whose comic adventures among the rich and dissolute are celebrated in two of our greatest operas, Rossini’s 1816 The Barber of Seville and Mozart’s 1786 The Marriage of Figaro. A little confusingly, Marriage is a sequel to Barber, even though it premiered 30 years earlier. The mixup straightens out once you realize that both operas were based on even earlier plays by Pierre Beaumarchais.

It’s The Barber of Seville that brings us to the lobby of the Keller Auditorium tonight, where Portland Opera has invited us to blog on our impressions of the opening night performance of its new production.

Who are we?

— Mrs. Scatter, aka Laura Grimes, co-conspirator of this very blog, who is entering her own version of the evening’s events in another post right here at Art Scatter. I’ll be fascinated to read it once I’ve finished my own. Can this marriage be shaved?

— Brandi Parisi, morning host at All Classical Radio 89.9FM, and no doubt intimately familiar with the territory. She’ll be posting on All Classical’s Facebook page.

— Mike Russell, writer, cartoonist and proprietor of the brilliant CulturePulp, who’ll be creating a cartoon report on his evening at the opera.

— Mr. Scatter, aka me, Bob Hicks.

TO BE CONTINUED …

Continue reading Friday night live: Mr. Scatter gets a shave →

Bob Hicks, Environment, General

Caveman sex: a little Neanderthal on the side?

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By Bob Hicks

Artist's rendering of a Neanderthal clan, about 60,000 years ago. National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The family tree just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Or the roots get more and more tangled.

This morning’s most intriguing news was the revelation that, yes indeed, Neanderthals seem to be among our ancestors. At least, a team of biologists doing DNA analysis of Neanderthal bones has determined tentatively that between 1 and 4 percent of non-African contemporary humans’ genome derives from that brawny, slope-headed side of the family. Once upon a time most scientists pretty much figured there’d been intermingling. Then they decided there hadn’t been. Now, it seems, caveman sex was pretty liberal, after all.

Several versions of this story are floating around. We like Nicholas Wade’s report in the New York Times, because it’s complete for a general audience and comes with the necessary cautions that more research needs to be done and not all scientists agree that the evidence leads to the conclusion. Even in matters sexual, peer review is important.

Here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we have a longstanding interest in the prehistoric links between culture and biology. We’ve talked about them in relationship to natural selection in the Pleistocene era and celebrated the discovery of Ardi, our 4.4 million-year-old beauty of a cousin. Something’s been making the world go ’round for a long, long time.

We also note with gleeful irony that today’s announcement comes as bad news for the rear-guard intellects of the Aryan Nations: Because this interbreeding hanky panky took place in the Middle East, after humans had migrated there from Africa but before the wanderers had split off into their European and Asian arms, the shared genetic material isn’t found south of the Mediterranean. In other words: If there’s such a thing as a “pure” race, it’s in Africa. Ha!

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Illustration: National Aeronautics and Space Administration artist’s rendition of a family of Neanderthals about 60,000 years ago. The extinct animals of the Pleistocene epoch pictured are the Woolly Mammoth, the Bush Antlered Deer, and the Sabre Toothed Cat. Pleistocene animals in this image that still exist are the Eurasian Horse, the Oryx, the Banded Lemming and the Musk Ox. Some of the plant life of the Pleistocene epoch consisted of grasses (which did not exist until this time), ferns, trees, sedges and shrubs.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Snark escapes; Scatters chase barber

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By Bob Hicks

Henry Holiday, Plate 9 from "The Hunting of the Snark"; "Fit the Seventh: The Banker's Fate." Wikimedia Commons

The Snark eluded Mr. Scatter. No matter. It was a sporting chase, and no doubt will be continued at the rising of another moon. Some of you may recall our earlier mention of Mr. Scatter’s recent benighted journey into the hinterlands on this odd quest.

Fortunately he has returned to the safe haven of Puddletown just in time to prepare for his next adventure: On Friday he and Mrs. Scatter will be blogging live from Keller Auditorium on opening night of Portland Opera‘s The Barber of Seville. Think of this dynamic duo as the Ferrante & Teicher of the journalistic keyboards, or the Nick and Nora Charles of musical sleuthing.

Daniel Belcher as Figaro and Jennifer Rivera as Rosina. Photo: Portland Opera/Cory WeaverThis four-hand feat, by the way, will come just before Mrs. Scatter’s departure on her own quest, this one to far London town on the trail of Tates ancient and modern, the Victoria and Albert, perhaps a groundling ticket to the Globe, and persistent rumors of dining opportunities beyond steak and kidney pie. It’s a reward well-earned over the past ninemonth; wish her godspeed. She’ll be in the convivial company of her brother the Philosopher King, master baker of bivalves.

But first things first. The Barber of Seville is Gioachino Rossini‘s 1816 comic masterpiece, based on an earlier comedy by Beaumarchais, who in turn seems to have been influenced by the satiric wit of Moliere. You know it, if for no other reason, from that stupendous Looney Tunes encounter between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. (You know another big Rossini operatic hit, William Tell, from the theme to The Lone Ranger.)

What happens, besides all that wonderful music? Here’s how Portland Opera describes the setup: “Let’s see if we can get this straight. The lovely, young Rosina is the ward of Dr. Bartolo, a comic old geezer who wants to marry her, but she’d rather marry Count Almaviva, who really wants to marry her too, but he can’t even see her because Bartolo’s always there, so what’s a guy to do?”

Bring in the barber, of course. Mr. Scatter notes with some reluctance that certain persons consider him to have robbed the marital cradle in his successful wooing of the young Mrs. Scatter. Mr. Scatter does not wish to be identified with Dr. Bartolo. Please do not jump to unwarranted conclusions.

Mr. and Mrs. Scatter will be joined Friday night by at least one other blogger, the immensely talented and amiable Mike Russell, lord and master of CulturePulp. He not only writes well, he draws well, and he’ll be — get this — cartoon blogging on the Barber. We could be outdone, if not undone.

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Illustrations, from top:

— Henry Holiday’s original illustration for Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” originally 1876, this edition 1931. This is from the nonsense poem’s “Fit the Seventh: The Banker’s Fate,” in which The Banker is attacked by a Bandersnatch, and goes insane. According to unverified reports, the Bandersnatch has been tentatively identified as one Ben Bernanke.

— This is not a portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Scatter, who remain curiously camera-shy. It is a picture of Daniel Belcher as Figaro and Jennifer Rivera as Rosina in “The Barber of Seville.” Photo: Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

General, Journalism, Language, Laura Grimes, Poetry

Journalism and poetry: Is a new romance in the air?

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By Laura Grimes
Today is the last day of National Poetry Month. Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of my last day at a large daily news organization. So it seems only fitting to reimagine a new, inspiring era of journalism … that incorporates poetry.

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For more than half my life I was a journalist. At least that’s the occupation I wrote on insurance applications and medical forms. But in the beginning it just seemed like one paycheck away from my real occupation: a big liberal arts question mark.

When I was fresh out of college and looking for work I vowed I would never work for a newspaper. I hated being pressed to finish term papers, why would I subject myself to deadlines every day? But I loved the whole messy process of publishing and had ever since I walked into Mrs. Wallis’ yearbook class my junior year of high school. The pull was still strong. After college, a quick accounting of publishing job options revealed:

  1. Literary magazines, tops on my list at the time, had no paycheck.
  2. Glossy magazines meant moving to New York.
  3. Book publishing ditto.
  4. Leaving the idea of working for a large daily newspaper really appealing.

So at a once-large publishing company in Portland, Oregon, my love affair with newspapering began, slowly at first, but eventually growing into a deep passion. The job taught me to work with speed and economy.

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Bob Hicks, General, Language, Theater

Singlehandedly: the art of storytelling

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“We did not believe in God,” Lawrence Howard recollects. “We believed in chicken soup and matzoh balls.”

As Mrs. Scatter has recently intimated, Mr. Scatter has embarked on a quest deep into the wilds of the exotic North American continent, hunting the elusive Snark. Today the Snark sleeps, and it is only sporting for Mr. Scatter to pause, too. Fortunately he’s discovered a forgotten hilltop with remarkably modern reception, so he’s decided to recount his recent adventure back in civilization, last Friday night at Hipbone Studio, at the opening of Portland Story Theater‘s Singlehandedly festival of solo shows.

Sharon Knorr meets her perfect partner. Photo: Lynne DuddyHoward is one of the founders of the story theater, and so it was fitting that his hour-long piece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Horowitz, kicked the festival off. Most everyone knows the mystical power of chicken soup, and most understand the pull of ritual and tradition in that thing we loosely call religion, so Howard’s audience, maybe 65 or 70 strong, rippled into laughter: the easy, familiar kind, the kind that says, “Yeah, we know what you mean.”

What transpired was a memory-tale, a tale of growing up Jewish, sort of, but not in a particularly devoted sense. His father changed the family name from Horowitz to Howard because in the 1940s and 50s he couldn’t even get a job interview with a Jewish name, and the family celebrated the holidays with a Christmas tree, although not in a window where it could be seen. Still, being Jewish was somehow important, not only in the way Howard viewed the world, but also in the way the world viewed him. Which was not always in the kindest or most pleasant way.

This bothered him: “I wanted people to hate me for myself, not just for my name.”

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