Category Archives: General

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Thursday scatter: church blues, high spirits, NW Biennial

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So, what does a possible breakup of the Episcopal Church in the United States have to do with the price of tickets in Portland? Nothing, maybe. Then again, maybe something, after all.

At first blush this morning’s news in the New York Times that a small group of conservative bishops has declared itself divorced from the American branch of the church (though not from global Anglicanism) doesn’t seem to have much to do with the world of art. The dispute seems to be mostly over American Episcopalians’ welcoming of gay and lesbian parishioners, and conservatives’ continuing disgruntlement over the ordination five years ago of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire. The temptation is to scratch your head over how, in a supposedly sophisticated spiritual communion in the year 2008, homosexuality can still be a bitterly divisive issue, to declare that 20 years from now the children of the breakaway churchmen and churchwomen will be similarly scratching their heads trying to figure out what in the world their parents were thinking, and move on. Their church, their problem: Every great social movement has its backwater of protest.

But. If this really goes through, almost inevitably there will be lawsuits over which faction owns church property when a local church breaks away from the larger group. And because churches enjoy tax-exempt status, the possibility of spillover to the nonprofit world isn’t out of the question. When this fight hits the courts the question of why churches aren’t taxed will be raised in a lot of quarters. And although we all complain about the lack of public support for the arts, the fact remains that our local and national governments do provide nonprofit arts groups (which in a city like Portland means just about all of them) with the very big financial advantage that nonprofit status entails — a public underwriting, in the fine print of the ledger books, of the arts and other community-based endeavors. Don’t expect, in our current atmosphere of bailouts, defaults, rising unemployment and scary recession, that this form of public spending won’t be challenged, too. Especially amid the rising libertarian movement, which looks suspiciously on any and all hands it thinks might be dipping into its pocket.

With the recession already coming down heavily on arts groups — for instance, Oregon Ballet Theatre has dropped live music from the majority of this month’s performances of The Nutcracker, a major step backward for a company that’s been making a name for itself nationally — an added hit in the tax and underwriting pocket could be devastating. And don’t think it can’t happen. A few years ago a judge on the Oregon Coast decided that the tax breaks to a small community theater in Lincoln City weren’t legal. If he’d prevailed (he didn’t) the entire structure of arts support in Oregon would have been jeopardized. So, onward, cultural soldiers. Don’t take anything for granted. Keep in touch with those city council members and state legislators. And keep making your case.

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On a bubblier note, a friend points out that Prohibition ended 75 years ago Friday — on Dec. 5, 1933 — and we’ll drink to that. The 18th Amendment, which ironically put a lot of the roar into the Roaring Twenties, had gone into effect on June 16, 1920, and had the effect mainly of manufacturing a lot of criminals out of previously law-abiding folks. It also led to a thriving moonshine industry, the possible naming of the great Li’l Abner character Moonbeam McSwine (and the comic strip’s house tipple, Kickapoo Joy Juice), and those eventual twin pillars of American pop culture, the movie and song versions of Thunder Road.

So, celebrate — quietly, moderately, enjoyably — tomorrow night. We’re putting a bottle of Saint-Hillaire 2004 Blanquette de Limoux brut in the Art Scatter refrigerator right now.

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It’s no secret that the old Oregon Biennial was about as high on Bruce Guenther’s list of priorities as his shoelaces: Asked once what he’d like to do with the Biennial, the Portland Art Museum‘s chief curator grinned and said, “Kill it off.”

Eventually, he did.

But if the state of Oregon doesn’t have a broad-overview showcase of the visual arts any more, or even the more narrowly focused showcase that the Biennial became before it quivered and died, the Pacific Northwest does. Today the Tacoma Art Museum announced the featured artists for its ninth annual Northwest Biennial, and followers of the Portland art scene will recognize a lot of the talent.

Michael Brophy (that’s his highway scene above), Linda Hutchins, Victor Maldonado, Stephanie Robison and Susan Seubert all made the cut of 24 (from 543 entries), as did Tannaz Farsi and Chang-Ae Song of Eugene. All of the others are from Washington state, mostly Seattle: Rick Araluce, Gala Bent, Jack Daws, Eric Elliott, Sarah Hood, Denzil Hurley, Robert Jones, Michael Kenna, Doug Keyes, Isaac Layman, Zhi Lin, Micki Lippe, Margie Livingston, Deborah Moore, Susan Robb, Ross Sawyers, Scott Trimble. No one from Idaho or Montana was chosen.

The picks were made by Tacoma museum curator Rock Hushka and Alison de Lima Greene, contemporary curator for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. You can zip up the freeway and see the show between Jan. 31 and May 25.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Remembrance of things past: Art that pays its respects

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One of my most vivid memories from a visit to St. Petersburg, Russia, almost a decade ago is of walking into a ramshackle room in a tumbling old palace and seeing, as if they were ghosts, long-smocked artisans painstakingly copying old masterworks: eerily antique-looking men and women making giant decorative objects based on the art of the past.

St. Petersburg is and always has been something of a museum city, hermetically sealed in its own royalist aesthetic. Even in the late 1990s, as the new thuggery of the ascendant Russian opportunist class was evident everywhere, the urge to re-create the glories of the past was also busily hammering away around every corner. By rebuilding with obsessive accuracy so much that the Germans had destroyed in the Siege of Leningrad, Petersburgers weren’t just taking their central city back to the glories of the days before World War II. They were replicating the age of the czars.

Is this art, or mummification? My guess is, yes and yes. It is what it is, for better and for worse, and in St. Petersburg, which like few other big European cities has resisted the hard edge of modernism (although it does have its share of Soviet Brutalist architecture) there was an abundance of each.

The urge to retreat into the verities of the past is strong, especially when you’re not sure about the present or the future. The past in one sense is a popular commodity, with eager buyers looking for a patina of instant heritage and sellers willing to feed their nostalgic fantasies. So the art world has a furtive underground market in fakes (read Robertson Davies‘ sly and very good novel What’s Bred in the Bone for some sharp insights into the mind of a brilliant forger), and the American and English antique-furniture markets are in an uproar right now over purportedly fraudulent high-end pieces cobbled together (with exceptional skill, it must be admitted) from old pieces of semi-junk.

An obsession with the past can also rise from uncertainty over our ability to make contemporary decisions. In its early years the only art in the collection of the Portland Art Museum was cast reproductions of ancient Greek and Roman statuary: Citizens of the pioneer city were invited into a sacred space to see knockoff versions of the foundations of Western art and accomplishment, as if the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, for instance, let alone the crude vigor of the American frontier, had simply never existed.

Yet it’s equally true that to ignore the past is to fundamentally misunderstand the present. What we are is built on everything that’s come before, and one of the objects of art is to explore that past in light of the present. That’s the great gift of a good museum. And it’s what makes Homage: Re-enactments, Copies and Tributes, which continues through Dec. 7 in The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, such an intriguing experience.

Curator Terri Hopkins built Homage around Sherrie Wolf‘s giant re-creation of Gustave Courbet‘s 1855 painting The Painter’s Studio: Allegory of Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life. It’s crucial that Courbet’s painting isn’t just any old Courbet. It’s a painting about painting, a lively and affecting treatise in oil on the nature and context of making art. And Hopkins has done with it the sort of thing good curators do: She’s surrounded it with other pieces that approach the same general question from different angles. To Wolf’s audacious act of reinvention she added a liberal smattering of photographer Christopher Rauschenberg‘s passionate pursuit of Eugene Atget‘s Paris, plus a pair of largely academic projects that, while they don’t add much to the visual pleasures of the exhibition, nimbly frame it and give it context.

Continue reading Remembrance of things past: Art that pays its respects →

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

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

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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.

General

Scatter sez: Have yourself a Happy Thanksgiving!

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Well, of course, dear Art Scatter readers! What? You thought we were too cynical to observe Thanksgiving? Oh, sure, subjecting an entire continent to a near-death experience might be an odd thing to celebrate, but that’s where our optimism comes in. Spoil a continent and then you really have something important to do. Unspoil it. Which isn’t the same as restore it, because that would be impossible. The encounter between the industrializing West and the flora and fauna and native peoples of America was just too filthy and lethal. Combine that with a little thing called slavery and, frankly, we’ll never pay off the karmic debt — we’ll come back as cockroaches forever… unless.

I’ve always loved “unless”. What follows “unless” is always very interesting, even though frequently it’s a letdown. Either it’s obvious to the point of banality (this is the sort Art Scatter generally favors) or it’s impossibly huge and/or vague (“unless we get it together”). The implication is that the utterer of the sentence possesses a profound understanding of the equations that govern the universe. Oddly, sometimes we do. Scratch that: Miraculously, sometimes we do. Unless.

Thanksgiving. I always pictured uncomfortable early 17th century people, wearing strange hats and numbed by five hours or so of sermonizing, sitting down to a really smoky meal. Maybe the Native Peoples were there, too. Maybe they even ate corn and turkeys together. I hope so. They expressed their gratitude to God as they understood the concept. So did Lincoln when he re-started the Thanksgiving tradition in 1863 during the Civil War — but after Gettysburg, when it was becoming apparent that the armies of the Union would eventually prevail.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

Consistent with the Divine purposes. A tautology lurks in there somewhere. What are the divine purposes? Wait and see.

Divine purposes operate on a different ground than “unless”, which is an expression of cause and effect. Lincoln believed in cause and effect, and he understood his limitations sufficiently to doubt his ability to understand them. And when we doubt sufficiently our ability to get a good cause and effect chain going, then we hope for the best, we pray to the heavens (I like Lincoln’s use of the plural), we take a leap. But first we prepare ourselves. How do we prepare? First, by establishing our humility (for those perversenesses and disobediences) and thus our worthiness for a good outcome, perhaps. Then? Maybe a nice lunch. Unless. Unless we observe the rituals, the forms, the virtues of the Good, we will never get what we want. We may not even get it then.

Unless. Unless I get started on these turkeys, they’re never going to get done in time for dinner. On the other hand, without a bit of heavenly intercession, the breast meat is going to be too dry or the thigh meat is going to be not quite cooked. And if the gods are particularly prankish, both! As long as my mother doesn’t burn the pie, though, it’s all good.

And you, dear reader? No unlesses. Have a great day, however you choose to deal with it. We’ll worry about the unspoiling tomorrow.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Theater

Clive Barnes: It won’t be the same without you

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Too late we get around to noting the passing of Clive Barnes, the urbane, entertaining and zestful dance and theater critic who died Nov. 19, at age 81, from liver cancer.

Barnes, who arrived from England to become dance critic at the New York Times in 1965 (he added theater to his duties two years later) was truly a working critic: He was still filing reviews to the New York Post two weeks before he died.

A friend in New York who knows I rarely see the Post passes along this warm and truly lovely tribute from his friend and Post colleague Michael Riedel; may we all deserve such a sendoff when our own time comes. Deborah Jowitt’s memory of Barnes in the Village Voice is worth reading, too.

Riedel says Barnes was deeply influenced in his early days by the mercurial and brilliant British critic Kenneth Tynan, and that explains a lot: the passion, the omnivorian taste, the wordplay, the ability to follow his own opinions wherever they might lead him, the sense of fun. It was Barnes who, in a review for the Times of a production of “As You Like It” whose cast included Meat Loaf, famously referred to the rock star on second reference as “Mr. Loaf.”

For nine years, as lead critic in both dance and theater for the Times, Barnes held the country’s most powerful critic’s chair in two disciplines. In 1977, when the Times ordered him to choose one or the other, he instead bolted from the Pillar to the Post, accepting the tabloid’s offer to let him keep writing about both. And there he stayed, no longer in the Times spotlight but free to do what he wanted.

I met Barnes only once, and so briefly that it hardly counts. It was a dance concert in New York, on a night when the New York critics were out in force, a coalescence that can have deadly effect. At intermission the mass of critics rushed to the lobby and began lobbying one another, feeling each other out for their opinions, trying out lines on each other for possible use in their reviews later that night. Barnes stood, not aloof, but apart from the crowd, infinitely genial, greeting when greeted, but not taking part in the tribal ritual. He was, as Riedel notes, “ever a gentleman”: pleased, briefly and apparently genuinely, to meet a writer from the hinterlands. Professionally, the show was inside his mind. You got the feeling that he simply didn’t care what anyone else thought. He would end up writing what he thought (as it turned out he liked the program, while recognizing it was no barn-burner) and that was that.

And isn’t that the way it ought to be?

Bob Hicks, Food, General

Late Monday Scatter: Sex and the single turkey

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So here it is, Thanksgiving week, and here this corner of Art Scatter sits, tied to the care of two adolescent and near-adolescent boys who’ve been ruthlessly cast out by the public education system on the flimsy excuse that teachers are entitled to a holiday. Ha.

Still, that hasn’t stopped us from reading. And curiously, what we’ve been reading about — in family newspapers, no less — is S-E-X. Or, as some quarters would have it, something to be thankful about.

First, to the Willamette Valley town of Silverton, a pretty little village that’s the gateway to the fantastic glories of Silver Falls State Park and also happens to have a mayor who’s a very public cross-dresser. Silverton seems to be just OK with that, and more power to the town. Personally we never get farther than the L.L. Bean catalog when it comes to dressing up, but we always appreciate a little black dress and some scarlet high heels on someone else. Even if it’s the mayor, and his name is Stu.

The Oregonian’s Kimberly A.C. Wilson reports on Oregon Live about what happened when a group of ultra-conservative church folk from Topeka showed up in town to denounce the mayor’s evil-doings. Silvertonians pretty much told them to shut up and go home. Seems they weren’t in Kansas any more — at least not the truculent and loony Kansas of the Westboro Baptist Church, which makes a habit of sending moral storm troopers out into the Gomorrah that is the rest of America. As for the rest of us, we’ve come a long way, baby. And that includes Silverton.

Meanwhile, down in Grapevine, Texas, the Rev. Ed Young of the evangelical Fellowship Church is preaching the gospel of love. And by love, we mean love — the scattering, as it were, of the good seed.

Rev. Young and his congregation of 20,000 (and growing bigger every day) have embarked on a quest he calls Seven Days of Sex: All the church’s husbands and wives are challenged to have sex every day (with each other, of course) in order to strengthen their marriages and ward off the temptation of extramarital affairs. Word is, according to Gretel C. Kovach in the New York Times, things have been going swimmingly, or maybe glowingly. It’s a great way to build up your congregation, and actually, Rev. Young makes a terrific theological case for his position on the subject. In Portland he’d be called a Young Creative. Which is our excuse for mentioning him on our esteemed cultural blog.

Moving on from sex to death and Thanksgiving dinner, the Web’s atwitter with the “news” of Gov. Sarah Palin’s “pardoning” of a turkey slated for slaughter (a pretty darned common seasonal photo op for politicians across the land) and subsequent three-minute on-camera chat while other turkeys were methodically meeting their maker in the background. The Huffington Post huffed. Wizbang responded with the neocon view. The nonsacrificial turkey didn’t have a clue its life had just been spared. And here in the Art Scatter kitchen, we’re looking forward to that savory vegetarian mushroom bread pudding we’re going to whip together in a couple of days.

As they say in spin-land, happy holidays. And keep America weird.

Barry Johnson, Books, Dance, Film, General

The weekend: “We scattered til our head hurt”

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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” →

Barry Johnson, Books, Food, General, Visual Art

Joel Weinstein and the public realm

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The public realm. At the memorial service for Joel Weinstein, who honored us by choosing to be buried in Lone Fir Cemetery, after spending the past 14 years in warmer places surrounded by Latin American art, which both he and his partner, Cheryl, love, the public realm (as articulated by Paul Goldberger in the post below) occurred to me, specifically as it related to Joel.

Because Joel was a one-man public-realm band. He generated culture for the the public realm and he transmitted culture within the public realm. He created and connected and consumed, and though he never talked about it to me in these terms exactly, I think he took some degree of responsibility for the public realm, our public realm, at the same time that he took pleasure from it. His magazine, Mississippi Mud, was his most tangible contribution, maybe, but he intersected with the city, its artists, writers, barristas and pastry chefs in lots of other ways, too.

At the ceremony, one of his close friends (far closer than I) remarked that Portland hadn’t been the same since he left in 1994. Which is true, I suppose, though I read him to mean that his own life was poorer for want of Joel, that losing Joel and his delightful community of connections, reduced him in a clear and definite way. And I found myself thinking and then saying that Joel had been with us when we needed him most, during that dismal of Portland decades, the Eighties, when the economy was grim, many of our talented friends left and news of all sorts was brutal. That’s when his one-man band, his crusade to save us from our cynicism and our ennui, tooted its way through our streets, a parade that could celebrate even those awful times. Hey, if the coffee and company and cookies were good, how bad could life really be? And if we could write and make art and maybe gossip a little on the side? How much closer to paradise could we expect to be?

The Eighties left, a new generation arrived (much of it from other places), and a renaissance of all the things Joel loved began. And he wasn’t here to enjoy it. But for him that wasn’t such a big deal — he was enjoying himself just as much somewhere else as he would have here, more so actually because he was enjoying it with Cheryl. And he left us a model for living in the public realm, for treasuring it, for enjoying it.

I don’t believe that you get what you need. But in Joel’s case, we DID get what we needed, whether we deserved it or not. I’m trying not to mythologize here. Joel wasn’t the Enlightened One. In fact, I liked that about him — his prejudices and moments of thoughtlessness, his sudden changes of emotional temperature, his heavy judgments. He was one of us, prey to the same (or similar) desires and shortcomings, and still maintained some momentum, some positive momentum, despite them. His irrepressibility was all the more noteworthy because he faced the same hurdles, of character, of the human condition, as the rest of us. So… Joel, thanks. Again.

General

Paul Goldberger’s cities of the future: lecture tonight

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So, we’ve been preparing for Paul Goldberger’s lecture tonight on the future of cities in the 21st century. It’s 6 pm tonight in the White Stag building, $25. Why spend that kind of money on an architecture critic whose Sky Line column you can read in the New Yorker? Well, mostly because a lecture is a totally different form — more elastic, if only because of the presence of the audience, one that allows for a bit more speculation because its opinions aren’t frozen forever in print (or a digital file).

Spending some time with Goldberger’s columns and other work (for Vanity Fair, say) is a comfortable experience. He’s smart and observant, of course (he did win a Pulitzer for his criticism in the New York Times before moving to the New Yorker), and he’s also careful and even-handed (perhaps a result of those long years in daily journalism). So, he can give a measured opinion about the heavy hand of New York’s master planner Robert Moses, without giving the impression that he’s fallen in with the Moses revisionists seeking to spin some of the truly awful things Moses did to New York (and even Portland — until we revolted the same way New York did). Moses did some good things ; some bad things. That was the tenor of his review of Brad Cloepfil’s 2 Columbus Circle building, too — he found a mixed bag, perhaps less than hoped for outside and more than hoped for inside.

The reason I plunked down for a ticket, though, is that I really liked his investigations of Beijing during the Olympics, and those columns give the topic of his lecture even more gravity. If the future is Beijing and Shanghai, what does that tell us? Because frankly, it chills me to the marrow. The massive towers of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, Singapore and China seem so futuristic somehow, but not in a good way. Dystopian. Like Blade Runner or Orwell. In a way, I see them as the ultimate triumph of Robert Moses, perhaps, or Le Corbusier, the next sterile, logical step. They seem such perfect machines for control of those within, for detection of the thought-crimes they commit. The smart building. The panopticon. The luxury prison.

And then what’s going on outside those “smart towers”, which generate their own energy, purify and condition their own air? Those arks designed to lodge the “lucky” as they sail into the future? Outside, it’s a killing field of crazy tropical infections brought about by the Warming, scarcity as populations explode and then crash, increasingly polluted, increasingly dangerous, increasingly uninhabitable. Thought crime inside the tower is punished simply by expulsion into the chaos outside.

Whew! It felt good to get that out of my system! And I’m hoping that Mr. Goldberger will be able to put my fears to rest. Twenty-five bucks would be a small price to pay…

General

A little scatter, light and local

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It’s Tuesday night, and we have lots of half-baked posts on our minds. Possibly quarter-baked. OK, totally raw. So, we hit the local channels on the Internet…

Art Scatter has been completely oblivious to the steampunk movement, just generally and specifically as it relates to costume design. And most especially as it relates to the Oregon Children’s Theatre production of James and the Giant Peach and designer Sarah Gahagan. Our thanks to Culture Shock for the entertaining education!

Keeping it tuned to theater, Steve Patterson gives us a taste of the play that won the Oregon Book Award for drama, Lost Wavelength over at his site, Splattworks. Let’s see the whole thing!

Brian Libby at Portland Architecture gave a good summary of the proposal to change the rules of engagement in the Skidmore National Historic District to allow taller buildings on five sites in the district. I went to the City Council meeting that his post advanced last week, and I’ll be following it, because both sides of the dispute make reasonable, articulate arguments. Look for more on this later — City Council takes it up again on Dec. 18. Brian’s site is a terrific way to follow Portland architecture developments.

One of our regular stops is the Portland Mercury’s Blogtown, which bubbles along with a combination of news and views from Portland’s creative underbelly. Or overbelly. Or whatever. We don’t have a particular link in mind — we just liked the combination today.