Category Archives: General

Barry Johnson, Books, General

Would Hobbes approve of the Dow Jones bounce?

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As Art Scatter stoops to post, it’s a Monday night and all the major markets were up substantially, around 10 percent during the day, making up a big chunk of the beating they took last week. Actually, I hate to anthropomorphize the “markets” like that. Took a beating? I don’t think so. They are just numbers. We know how illusory they can be, right? Real and illusory at the same time. Neat trick. Do we think that the “fundamentals” have been fixed so everything is all right now? Pour a few hundred million into some banks, take an equity stake in them, and it’s all good? Art Scatter doesn’t know its economics but … all we can do is shrug.

So, last night we were seeking solace in philosophy, the refuge of scoundrels. Often we turn to Rousseau — we don’t even really count him as a philosopher. “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains!” But we were in a darker mood. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” was more like it. That’s Tennyson, but he pointed the way to the philosopher we wanted. Thomas Hobbes: “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Pretty close to “red in tooth” if you ask me.
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Bob Hicks, Environment, Food, General

Farewell to Papa Pinot: An Oregon legend dies

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I remember David Lett a lot of ways, and not nearly as many as I wish I did: Here was a man, I always felt, I’d really like to know well. I didn’t. Although I’ve drunk a fair amount of his wine (again, not nearly as much as I’d like to have) we didn’t move in the same circles. Our paths crossed infrequently, and mostly anonymously — that is, I knew who he was, but he didn’t know who I was.

This morning’s Oregonian arrives with the news that Lett, founder of the pioneering Eyrie Vineyards, died late Thursday at his Dundee home. He was 69. The Associated Press filed this report, and gave the cause of death as heart failure.

Lett had passed the winemaking duties at Eyrie Vineyards to his son Jason three years ago, but it’s always been David’s spirit that’s defined the place. And what a place: a true slice of Oregon grit, a pioneering venture with a global impact, a place that knew what it wanted to do and stuck to its guns. Lett and Eyrie produced Oregon’s first commercial pinot noir in 1970, and to this day, despite the winery’s international acclaim, it’s still a little, musky-smelling, no-nonsense small-manufacturing joint in an old turkey-slaughtering plant across the railroad tracks in the McMinnville flats — in short, a glorious place to visit. No shimmering hillside chateau for David Lett: For him, it was all about the wine.

Lett had at least a couple of public images, and I suspect both had their measure of the truth. One was Papa Pinot, the genial elder statesman of the Oregon wine industry, a twinkling, silver-streaked Santa Claus of a man. The other was David Lett the irascible iconoclast, the fierce defender of making wines his way, which was, he believed, in the true traditional French manner. This David Lett believed in subtle, elegant, understated, long-lived wines that revealed their secrets in a whisper and were meant to blossom in companionship with food, not to stand out in a long line of gut-busters in a marathon tasting. He had little patience for younger winemakers who built high-alcohol fruit bombs and priced them through the roof, and he was outspoken about it, which didn’t endear him in some circles. I suspect he was proud of that. At heart he was a farmer and a chemist and a small manufacturer and an artist, and although he could be smooth, these are also identities that encourage a certain bluntness.

Continue reading Farewell to Papa Pinot: An Oregon legend dies →

General

Art Scatter considers worst-case scenarios

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Look, Art Scatter is not an economics advice site. We only know what we read, and frankly, that’s pretty dismal these days. Where should you put your money? What money!?!?!?! We do think that there’s a moral dimension to all of this, though, beyond the obvious, and maybe a suggestion that the way we at Art Scatter have thought about the world, even the way we have conducted ourselves, hasn’t been quite “right”, hasn’t acknowledged certain “realities” that may turn out to be the realities we should have been paying attention to. We are so easily distracted in the monkey tree.

Worst-case scenarios. How bad are your worst-case scenarios? This isn’t a competition. You don’t get extra points for having a bleaker worst-case scenario in your mind than your neighbor does in hers. Your worst-case scenario is a fantasy, after all. Or maybe a nightmare. It’s hard to manage a worst-case scenario once it’s planted in your head. Maybe you should just play with it — stretch it, take it in some strange directions, try to get to know it a little better so you can test it with what you can actually see and touch and taste. Right now, I’m picturing myself in a long line of refugees walking eastward on the other side of the Cascades. (I’m wishing right now that I had a better backpack.) Where are we walking? I have no idea. I have this image in my head from various newsreels/documentaries/movies I’ve seen over the years. I’ve never really imagined myself IN the line before.

I don’t think I can prepare for my worst-case scenario. Maybe no one does, if only because we aren’t actually living it. Maybe we just keep pushing our worst case back as actual conditions worsen and we realize there’s room for yet more deterioration. But that doesn’t mean I can’t act at all. And figuring out what to do, maybe that’s the ultimate reductive act: So very little really matters. And yet I do so very little of it.

Art. Art points us to places we can’t talk about, where the idea of “this matters” is somehow forged and spit out into the universe. Among other things. I like to think of art as a description of things as they are, even interior things, a description that is more or less useful to me. I imagine a photograph of an expensive condo tower, maybe like one in the paper today. Today, it’s ironic. A suggestion of “things I don’t need”. Two year ago, it might have described something else: the dense, successful city of the future. Although that description might have been intended ironically, too. Things we don’t need: “Cities of the future.” (Maybe we need a city that works today and works better tomorrow. And maybe it includes condo towers; in fact I rather suspect it does.)

Art won’t tell you what to do with your assets, the shreds of your remaining assets, or the big fat zero that describes your “net worth”. It might make you reconsider what net worth means, though. So does a financial crisis, apparently. How is art like a financial crisis? They both give you an appreciation for what’s real.

This is Friday. Art Scatter has no idea what Monday will bring. (You knew that, of course.) Art Scatter can only promise that it will try to have a little more insight into what its business really is.

Environment, General, Visual Art

Turning up the “Volume” on planning in Portland

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Art Scatter regular Tim DuRoche, a man of wide-ranging interests, has allowed us to post this account of Portland’s “Summer of Planning”, which is rapidly becoming a “Fall of Planning”. We’re especially happy to have his report of Portland planning chief Arun Jain’s talk on the last day of the “Volume” art exhibition, organized by Portlandart proprietor Jeff Jahn, in some ways the clearest expression of the uneasy relationship between art and urban planning. Tim writes about planning, urban design topics for Portland Spaces’ Burnside Blog.

By Tim DuRoche

With all the hubbub about cities and planning in arts circles—Sojourn Theatre’s Built, the Lawrence Halprin Fountain-centric City Dance, visual arts group shows Volume and the Thomas Sieverts-inspired Suddenly for starters, you kind of have to wonder—is urban planning the new black?

Or in the context of the lo-fi, local artscape, is an embrace of placemaking and the language of planning yet another double-coded, wink-wink social-practice gambit from the legions of folks making art that’s rife with sewing circle/swap meet simplicity?

The marquee-prominence of planning in cocktail-conversation Portland thrives because of civic engagement, while on the viz art end, Portland’s social-practice artists bank on a street-level participation that’s one part community charrette, part tea party, part cracker-barrel confession, and many parts Tom Sawyer whitewashing.

So what happens when an architect-planner meets a young-and-restless art posse head on?
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Bob Hicks, General, Journalism, Language

Newspapers: Leaner, meaner, livelier or else

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I have been devoted to newspapers since — oh, since I was 6 or 7 and getting caught up in the ongoing adventures of Gasoline Alley and Our Boarding House and Little Orphan Annie and other daily heirs to The Yellow Kid.

My print addiction built with my childhood passion for baseball and the after-game quotations of heroes such as Ted Williams, whose fondest phrase, as passed along by sportswriters and dutifully cleaned up by copy editors, was “blankety-blank” — as in, “That blankety-blank umpire couldn’t call a blankety-blank pitch in a blankety-blank grade school game!”

Those were the days.

And these are these days, when the daily newspaper is teetering on the brink of (choose one or more):

— Irrelevance.

— Extinction.

— Rebirth.

Not a lot of people are betting on that third option. By the time I bailed out of the full-time journalism racket almost a year ago, after nearly 40 years of writing and editing for other people’s publications, we in the working press had pretty much taken to referring to ourselves (or at least, our institutions) as the Titanic, muttering with grim humor about rearranging the deck chairs.

And we did so in pretty much a vast silence, as onetime readers and never-bothereds ignored our flailings in droves — at the same time our advertisers were scuttling toward the greener pastures of Craigslist and television and direct mail and, if we were lucky, those preprinted inserts that arrive on your sidewalk with the morning news but don’t pay the newspaper what an old-fashioned ad on the page pays.

Long before Wall Street’s spectacular tumble, newspapers started taking it on the chin. Massive layoffs and buyouts, from the Washington Post to the New York Times (100 lopped from the newsroom) to the Los Angeles Times to The Oregonian, where I was one of nearly 30 members — all with decades of experience — of the Buyout Class of 2007. Now The Oregonian is in the process of another huge voluntary buyout, cutting 50 people from the newsroom and lots more in other departments. In Portland and across the country, it’s a journalistic brain drain of astonishing proportions.

What brought a great American institution to such a pass? Over at Culture Shock, the sharply inquisitive blogger Mighty Toy Cannon has begun a fascinating conversation on newspapers and readership and the link between a critical press and a city’s cultural life. It’s a great discussion, right up Art Scatter’s alley, and I encourage you to join the fray. But the existence of broad and lively cultural coverage in the local press also depends on the health and stability of the press in general, and that’s a deeper discussion. So here goes. You’re going to read a lot of generalizations here, and a lot of tentative ideas. But it’s a start. Feel free to pitch in.

Continue reading Newspapers: Leaner, meaner, livelier or else →

Books, General, Vernon Peterson

Crimes of art

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Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks while we’re tryin’ to be so quiet?/We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it.
Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna

After what’s happened the last couple weeks, I wonder if we don’t need to take a deep breath, or hold our breath and count to 700 billion, for a start. No colorful displays of Wall Street or Main Street pyrotechnics. No illustrations. Black and white. Or black. Simply dark night and our eyes closed.

The argument whether 2000 or 2001 launched the new century ended on 9/11. That is the defining moment, we are told, in speech after speech, book after book, dividing our lives into “before” and “after.” Why this desire for a life-altering shift? The Wall Street bailout is characterized as a 9/11 rerun, the mortgage crisis as involving instruments of mass destruction. Too bad the president didn’t launch the bailout bid this last 9/11. It would have added a touch of, I don’t know, fearful symmetry to the last seven years.

Art is not immune from this crisis and re-boot mentality. Even literary criticism is burdened with its share of this cataclysmic dread and re-tread. An extreme example is the 2003 book, Crimes of Art + Terror, by Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe, professors at Duke University. I read it when it was published and thought at the time it was something worth a later revisit, a reality check, after hysteria became cliché. Now we need the hysteria before the morning cup of coffee.
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General

Scatter gives its dear readers a break

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Art Scatter could generate yet another lengthy post on the nature of an American city that looks a lot like Portland, with special attention paid to its remotest precincts. But the reptilian side of Art Scatter’s hard drive is twitching at the very thought of it. Art Scatter’s tongue just darted out to gather in more protein on the wing — thwiiiip! (Yuck, a moth…)

OK, so instead, we’ll search the horizon for tasty links:

Director Julie Taymor’s Broadway version of “Spider-Man” may cost something on the order of $40 million to produce, according to the New York Post. Scatter hopes that local designer and Taymor regular Michael Curry is getting his fair share. Aw, c’mon. We KNOW he is!

And speaking of Money and the Theatre, much of the rest of Broadway and the not-for-profit theater world of Manhattan is cowering in the corner because of the Wall St. meltdown down the block, at least per the New York Times. The Conventional Wisdom that in bad times people flock to the theater to forget their troubles is going to be tested.

Louise Bourgeois is not a brand, she’s a creator of some of the most provocative art work in the past century, almost all of which she’s lived through (she’s 98). How potent is she? Just read the very personal account of Guardian critic Will Gompertz on how the Bourgeois show at the Tate Modern gave him a good wrenching. That’s her spider above. Julie Taymor, take note!

Barry Johnson, Books, Environment, General

On the edge (of cities): past and present

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We’ve been MIA on Suddenly the set of exhibitions, lectures and events exploring the shape of our cities through the lens, primarily, of German urban designer/theorist/architect Thomas Sieverts. But we did make it to Sieverts’ lecture and a panel discussion Friday afternoon at the UO’s new architecture school branch in the White Stag building in Portland’s Old Town, a suitably central (or maybe, paradoxically central) spot to consider the remaking of suburbs, I suppose.

Matthew Stadler (a Scatter friend) did the introductions and moderated the panel, which was appropriate, because it was his reading of Sieverts’ book Cities Without Cities that suddenly changed his thinking about where the energy in cities really is these days and started this “movement” going. I think I’m getting ready to argue that Matthew’s was a creative misreading of Sieverts, though I’m waiting for one more event, another panel on Monday night, to confirm my first impressions, especially since I haven’t read the book(!).

Fairly early on in Sieverts’ lecture another friend of Scatter wondered about the intelligibility of his argument. But I think I understood the gist. The thought line he presented went something like this. 1) European cities are “splash” cities, meaning they no longer have compressed central cores. Instead, they sprawl a lot like American cities. In Sieverts’ powerpoint, charts and graphs showed just how “splashy” specific German cities had become. 2) The edges of this sprawl are chaotic and featureless. 3) German cities are shrinking in population, which makes it hard to change the edges through growth: It takes transformation. 4) Architects should address the problems of the edge, supplying aesthetic “meaning” and cultural coherence to them, even though planners tend to ignore them because they are so nondescript. 5) If these “edge cities” are going to compete in the global economy, they are going to have to attract “creatives” (Richard Florida’s young creatives, though Florida wasn’t mentioned), and that makes the transformation of these featureless suburbs, between spaces, crucial.
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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Art Scatter looks back on a dance with a kick

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I thought I’d said everything I was going to say about last week’s White Bird performance of Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet and the Shaolin Monks in this preview piece that ran in The Oregonian. But one friend who was impatient with the show asked me via email what I’d thought. And another friend said she couldn’t take time to post her own response, but if I posted something she’d respond in the comments.

So forgive the lateness of it all, but here we go:

“What did you think of the show?” my friend Sharon wrote. “I thought it could have benefited from some major editing. King does some really creative collaborations, but I found that the monks were much more interesting than the dancers (and he’s got a company of truly beautiful dancers … they just weren’t given a lot to work with). I was hoping for more integration, more story — rather than the flat cultural juxtoposition we saw. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t like what I saw, I just wanted more and I wanted it more tightly woven.”

Another friend quoted her friend on the show, succinctly: “The trouble was, you couldn’t take your eyes off the monks.”

My own view is that something pretty interesting was going on here, and as much as I enjoyed it, I would have enjoyed it more if it had been a half-hour shorter: It was too much of a good thing. Every time I’ve seen LINES I’ve liked the work but felt it really needed to be cut.

I also agree there was no story in this piece, which is called “Long River, High Sky” — I don’t think King does stories. He sets up communities instead, so you get the possibility of stories coming out of it. But he’s not going to do it himself, the way that Balanchine or Tudor or Robbins or Ailey or Bill T. Jones would. I think of King as an explorer, interested in the borders between cultures. Especially in this sort of piece — like his “Moroccan Project” and his “People of the Forest,” a collaboration with a troupe of pygmy dancers and musicians from central Africa — his two cultures meet, mingle, try to find a way to mesh.

That’s what he’s interested in. How, given this meeting of cultures, will a new culture evolve? It’s dance as anthropology — not in the ordinarily conceived sense of “authentic” ethnic dance, but in that awkward, exciting, exploratory moment when two unknowns cross paths and begin to investigate each other. If, in “Long River, High Sky,” we find the kung-fu monks more compelling (and I also find a couple of King’s dancers magnetic on stage), perhaps it’s because we’re less familiar with what they do. And, yes, the monks’ aesthetic of combat is pretty cool stuff to watch.

Anyone else want to kick in on this discussion?

General

The Portland Jazz Festival lives (after all)!

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We wanted a Sugar Daddy and we got one! The Portland Jazz Festival has been rescued from oblivion — heroes include Nick Fish, Sho Dozono and Alaska Airlines, among others — which we learned from Luciana Lopez’s story in The Oregonian this morning (we’ll link you up when the story is posted on OregonLive, UPDATE: and is now.), and I’m not sure why exactly I’m feeling so pleased about it. After all, festivals wax, festivals wane, festivals disappear altogether. Even jazz festivals in Portland. These days, the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival continues to roll along under the St. John’s Bridge, fueled mostly by our local players. And the Mt. Hood Jazz Festival, which itself went into eclipse for a while, is back and seems to be growing again, returning this past summer to Mt. Hood Community College, where it once dominated the summer festival scene. Of course, either you know this or jazz festivals don’t interest you, so I’m not sure why I feel called to speak of it. Maybe just as a sort of accounting.

But the Portland Jazz Festival has had major aspirations (some would call them pretensions, I suppose), specifically to bring top-of-the-line international musicians to the city. And I appreciate the impulse. Plus, it comes in February. In February, we’re needing all the inspiration we can get, any good reason to get out of the house, fellow fans of the improvisatory art to consort with. In February we’ll pay almost any price for a lively brain, and the jazz festival has encouraged our synapses to snap their fingers and bop along. The city should fund the whole thing just for the overall improvement in the mental health of the citizenry. Call it jazz therapy.

So, I’m excited about the 2009 festival, which will celebrate Blue Note Records, more excited than I should be, I suppose. After all, there are lots of clubs in town now that feature jazz, and we have lots of terrific musicians, legends even. You could assemble a little mini-festival every week of the year. And really, there’s nothing quite like following the development of a fine jazz mind over time, something that’s possible only with a local jazz mind. Still. I like the concentration of talent. I like watching recordings come to life. I like the idea that for a little while, all jazz ears are cocked toward Portland. I like to feel as though I’m playing with the Big Boys and the Big Boys (and Girls) are playing for me. So yeah, I’m happy about it, and if I could order tickets right now, I suppose I would.

Thanks to Mighty Toy Cannon, one of the forces behind Culture Shock, for a heads up on this, too. MTC may well have had Portland blog priority on the “scoop,” though I first learned about it from Luciana.