Category Archives: General

General

Hand2Mouth Theatre does the scatter

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At lofty Scatter Tower, high above the din of the city, we occasionally receive missives about what’s going on down below. Otherwise known as press releases. We appreciate these, but because we don’t do a regular “calendar” sort of thing, we don’t often post them. But the email from Erin of Hand2Mouth Theatre appealed to our scatter sensibility. Erin wrote:

We have a show opening next week called Project X: You are Here that is somewhere between a performance and an installation. Thus we are calling it a performance installation. We are hoping to get some crossover press into the visual arts world as this show definitely has appeal beyond the theatre/theatre-lovers community.

We interpreted this to mean: We’ve got something going on this weekend and next that is really hard to explain and we’re looking for some open-minded people to come and check it out! From the press material itself I gathered that the performance/installation involves the collecting of materials (stories, observations, “myths”) from the audience. I know those who arrive under the Art Scatter banner will have GREAT stories, not to mention a few bizarre myths. And it’s happening at Gavin Shettler’s new project, Milepost 5, an artists’ community.

The deets: Project X will be at Milepost 5, 900 NE 81st Ave., Portland, on Thursday, August 14: 7-10pm; Fridays, August 15 & 22: 7-10pm; Saturdays, August 16 & 23: 2-5pm & 7-10pm; Sundays, August 17 & 24: 2-5pm. Tickets: $6 or 2 for $10. Info: 503-235-5284 or mail@hand2mouththeatre.org.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Warhol at Maryhill: Putting on a good face

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High above the windy hollow of the Columbia River Gorge, Sitting Bull and Geronimo and Gen. George Armstrong Custer seem right at home.

And Andy Warhol? Surprisingly, him, too.

Warhol, the epitome of a certain sort of New York sophistication — a self-created phenomenon of the 20th century, pointing the way to the 21st — is the focus of a new show in the upper galleries of the Maryhill Museum of Art, “Andy Warhol and Other Famous Faces,” assembled from the contemporary print collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation.

The exhibit, with images mostly by Warhol plus a sprinkling of supporting pieces by the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Red Grooms, Chuck Close, Jasper Johns and Jeff Koons, proves once again what has become a mass-culture commonplace: In a world of celebrity-soaked informational sameness, we are all from Manhattan, all from Iowa, all from the sparse deserts of the West. Red state or blue, right wing or left, Elvis and Marilyn and Campbell’s Tomato Soup have brought us together and made us alike — or at least, given us the same pop-cultural preoccupations.

Maryhill, one of the unlikeliest of American art museums, sits in a concrete castle on a high bluff on the Washington side of the Columbia River, about 100 miles east of Portland and well on the way to desert country: It’s practice territory for the Middle of Nowhere. The fortress was built as his residence by the visionary road engineer and agricultural utopian Sam Hill. (His Stonehenge replica, a World Wat I memorial, is nearby, and the next time you head for Vancouver, British Columbia, you should stop on the border at Peace Arch Park to take in another of his monuments, the International Peace Arch, which sits with one foot in Blaine, Washington, and the other in Surrey on the Canadian side. Both monuments are as clean-lined and populist as any of Warhol’s works, and a good deal more interactive.)

Hill’s mansion was transformed into a museum by three of his high-powered women friends, including Marie, Queen of Romania, who was related to the royal houses of both England and Russia. As a result its collections are heavy in memorabilia of the good queen’s life (including some furniture she designed), plus objects related to another benefactress, the great dancer Loie Fuller; a goodly amount of Rodin; a good sampling of Native American art; many fine Russian Orthodox icons; quirky attractions such as the French high-fashion stage scenes of Theatre de la Mode (even Jean Cocteau took part in this immediately post-World War II artistic attempt to give French haute couture a sorely needed economic kick-start); and an amusing, sometimes amazing sampling of international chess sets.

But the museum’s permanent fine-art holdings are largely romantic landscape, plus Victorian and American realist paintings. As a result, it relies largely on temporary shows for things a little closer to modern times.

Continue reading Warhol at Maryhill: Putting on a good face →

Barry Johnson, General, Music, Visual Art

Those tasty Tuesday hotlinks, well-scattered

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While you continue to hone your answers for the “movies that move me” confessional below — more! we want more! (it’s kinda getting a little Bruno Bettelheim-y in there) — we have some refreshing links from home and abroad.

Let the celebrity conduct Maybe this is “only on the BBC” but a new reality show is hoping to bridge the gap between classical music and pop culture by enlisting some UK celebrities, most notably drum’n’bass inventor Goldie. The key moment in the Scotsman’s story: “A giant, shaven-headed fellow with an imperious demeanour, he is dressed in a yellow T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers. Gold teeth glint from his mouth. Yet the moment he launches into conducting, I – and the entire orchestra – are spellbound.” And now I’m thinking who I’d reallywant to see conduct the Oregon Symphony…

Kindle, the new iPod? Wired speculates on the fate of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, which apparently is starting to gain traction in the universe. I’ve briefly pondered its fate before on Scatter, and Wired is rather dismissive. But still…

Art in The Oregonian Because of my professional affiliations and all, I don’t usually do this, but I gladly send you off to four recent visual arts stories by my comrades: Bob Hicks takes on Andy Warhol at the Maryhill Museum, D.K. Row on Portland sculptor/icon Lee Kelly, and Inara Verzemnieks on the 100th Monkey Studio’s mischief art show and on Caldera’s Hello Neighbor street art project.

And now, without further interruption, descend one post and tell us about your movie past!

Books, Food, General, Theater

Weekend Scatter: blasts from the past

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A recent (completely fictional) email to Art Scatter began: “Sweet Mother of the Muses, can’t you get over the Shakespeare festival already?” Art Scatter was gob-smacked. Over the Shakespeare festival? Who would want to get over the Shakespeare festival? We are just beginning to sharpen our dull thoughts on the subject. We might even go back this fall! When it isn’t so hot and crowded! So, we aren’t promising anything. But we can already feel our collective attention wandering.

According to the advanced metrics generated by the advanced spyware technology affixed to this site, which, by the way, never really add up, we know that more of you are joining us here than ever before. We now may have enough for a couple of tables of bridge! But from those same metrics (don’t you just love how “metrics” gets thrown around willy-nilly these days? When all we need is “numbers”?), though, we have determined that we need to re-sell a few posts that were washed out to sea in the flood of confessions about what books you haven’t read and the thousands of words we have devoted to the Shakespeare festival.

So, hot links to our OWN POSTS!

Peter Nadas We couldn’t be more excited about this Hungarian writer, some of whose work has just been issued in crisp new Picador editions. Maybe all I have to say to this crowd is “Hamlet, people,” because Nadas on theater is such a delight, but there’s even more than theater in Nadas, who is headed for Nobel Valhalla no doubt.

Thoreau and Bellow We don’t often lump Mr. Thoreau out on the pond with Mr. Bellow in hurlyburly Chicago. But you take the dramatics of Mr. Thoreau and the pastoral moments of Mr. Bellow and they sort of meet in the middle.

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

OK, that is neither Thoreau nor Bellow, but it IS Marlowe — and we love Marlow, too!

Tolstoy and the price of rice Look, we city folk, for reasons unascertainable but perhaps linked to our constant exposure to pastoral literature as youths, are fascinated with the country, specifically with farming. We know in our bones that something is wrong with our current practices and maybe we even subvert them a little by buying local or husbanding a plot of our own. We aren’t the first to think along these lines, though, not by a longshot.

So, those should keep you busy, yes? While we devise new ways to describe the Oregon Shakespeare Festival or create a forum that might squeeze yet more personal confessions out of you? Cool… By the way: If you want to comment on those posts (and by all means!), you might double back to this post and leave them here…

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Why I quit my job: A teacher tells all

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There are plenty of reasons to quit a job, even in a lousy economy like this one.

You just came into a healthy inheritance.

You married a millionaire.

You’re going back to school so you can get something that pays better than slinging coffee drinks.

Or, you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take it any more.

That’s the one that finally made sense to Jennie Brown, a teacher at Sherwood Middle School in Portland’s southern suburbs, whose passion and specialty was teaching drama. Brown, you may recall, was the author and director of Higher Ground, a play about bullying at school, which she wrote based on extensive conversations with the kids in the show. It talked about bullying for all sorts of reasons: because kids are overweight, or don’t wear the “right” clothes, or they’re the “wrong” race, or maybe they’re gay, or … you get the picture.

At the last minute, parents of three kids (out of 52 involved) protested to Principal Anna Pittioni, who called the show off. That was in February. The kids themselves voted not to water down the script so they could take the stage in a censored version (some of them claimed the show already diluted the harsh realities of life in their blackboard jungle), and the Portland Center for the Performing Arts invited them to present the play as it was written in downtown Portland, where it was received enthusiastically.

But for Brown, it was the beginning of the end. Her relationship with Pittioni crumbled. She was investigated by the school board (at one point her school-issued computer was seized and her email messages scrutinized). She felt marked. And last week, with nothing else concrete on the horizon, she quit a job she had loved.

Just another day in the Nanny Dearest environs of the public schools, you might think. And indeed, a similar case sprang up a few months later, when Portland actor Wade Willis sued the Beaverton School District for $125,000 because, he said, administrators at Southpark High School had “harrassed, intimidated and humiliated” him to such an extent that he was forced to resign.

Continue reading Why I quit my job: A teacher tells all →

Barry Johnson, Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Ashland times 2: A Q&A about the festival’s new direction

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It’s been around since 1935, when, legend has it, a young college prof named Angus Bowmer persuaded the town fathers of Ashland, Oregon, to let him produce two performances of “Twelfth Night” and one of “The Merchant of Venice” on an old Chautauqua stage for the town’s Fourth of July celebrations. They gave him $400 and one stipulation: He’d also have to stage some boxing matches to cover the expected deficit from the Shakespearean shows. The boxing matches lost money. The Shakespeare did boffo business and covered the prize-ring losses. And with that, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was off and running.

A lot’s changed in the intervening 73 years. The festival is by most measures the biggest regional theater company in the United States, producing 11 plays annually — usually four or five of them by Shakespeare — in a season that runs from late February through October, and which uses three theaters: the 1,200-seat, open-air Elizabethan Stage (actually an outdoor Elizabethan-style stage attached to Greek-style amphitheater seating with a wraparound porch like a vintage 1930 baseball park’s); the exquisitely adaptable, 600-seat Angus Bowmer Theatre; and the sophisticated black box known as the New Theatre, which averages about 300 seats. To these shows the festival sells more than 400,000 tickets every season, making Ashland a particularly upscale sort of tourist town, with an Elizabethan purse, sweet Victorian buildings and, underneath both, the practical bones of a modern Western working town.

As the festival goes, in many ways, so goes Ashland: The commercial success of the two are intricately linked. Both have benefited from the festival’s astonishing stability. After Bowmer, it’s had just four artistic directors: Jerry Turner, Henry Woronicz, Libby Appel and, beginning this season, Bill Rauch.
Continue reading Ashland times 2: A Q&A about the festival’s new direction →

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

The Denver Art Museum deflects a hot summer day

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The Daniel Libeskind-designed addition to the Denver Art Museum, which opened in 2006, doesn’t count as “new” anymore. It seems to have settled into its home near the State Capitol building, dug in, maybe, because it reminds me of an armadillo, bronze-plated and glowing in the sun. It has that peculiar snout, though, a sharp geometric foray into space and toward the original Denver Art Museum building over a busy Denver street. But otherwise it seem perfectly suited to the hot summer day in Colorado on which I visited it – its blocky facets deflecting the heat, its low aerodynamic profile slicing through the hot wind, its situation in the plaza that Libeskind created for it roomy enough to allow its heat to radiate and disperse without warming its neighbors.

So, yes, I approved of the new building from a sculptural point of view — it also reminded me (and my wife — thanks Megan!) of a Stealth bomber. And I like the metaphor: art stealthily and lethally undermining a crude, car-choked American metropolis. But I had two questions in mind for the new DAM: 1) Would the aggressive architecture detract from the art inside, impose itself too much, and 2) how would it “fit” into downtown Denver as an urban design proposition. One visit and a little Googling isn’t going to answer those, but that’s not going to stop me from taking a stab at them… oh no.
Continue reading The Denver Art Museum deflects a hot summer day →

Books, General, Language, Vernon Peterson

Jenny Diski fights sleep, wins

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“Reality cannot stand too much wakefulness.”

America could use a Jenny Diski.

Joan Didion, Annie Dillard and Janet Malcolm exercise a comparable ruthlessness, waged against received opinion on subjects of comparable range, but they are not as unrelentingly unreserved as Diski. America cannot abide too much wakefulness, which is why I resist sleep. And Diski, post-empire British to the core, is one of the things that keep me up nights.

Check her “Diary” column in the latest London Review of Books, (31 July 2008), one of the select items the Review posts online. “If you set aside the incomparable cruelty and stupidity of human beings, surely our most persistent and irrational activity is to sleep,” she begins. In the next paragraph she turns to “the second most absurd thing we do: wake up.” In the space of a page and a half she describes the several levels of wakefulness through which we descend in and out of sleep—for descend out of it we do, she convinces us, in an endless spiral, with occasional freefall.

In Diski’s hands, such a tale is magic. There’s humor: “As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep.” And she can tap the nostalgia for those “delicious,” slightly anxious moments we never outgrow: her earliest memory of “sensual pleasure,” lying in bed, “the bedtime story told, lights out (not the hall, leave the door open, no, more than that),” perfectly comfortable, “falling slowly into sleep.”

Read it, and marvel how this brief essay–a miniature novel–slips in such short space from human cruelty and stupidity to Raquel Welch saving our beleaguered world!

If you enjoy reading and re-reading this piece, click Jenny Diski’s blog for more.

Diski is a novelist, but I’ve only read her non-fiction. I’d like to report that she grasped Portland’s unique essence in her American travelogue, Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions, but, alas, her night journey from Spokane to Portland, on the Empire Builder, the train she had boarded in Chicago, is recalled only for the fact that it was a non-smoking leg, except for a brief stop in Pasco, where she stood on the platform and inhaled “the best part of two cigarettes.”

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

Monday links: a Scatter round-up

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We stopped measuring our heads in the mirror long enough to do a little online investigating. (One of our number spent the day with his head pressed against his full-length mirror attempting to disprove the contentions of Major Scientists that the image his eyes were seeing in the mirror was half the size of his real head. Scatter can be so easily amused. Unfortunately, he was trying to prove this with an Outside Observer — sorry, Lynn — when it’s the subject’s perception of himself that’s at stake.)

Here’s what we found:

Over at Power Slice, art history student Luke Fidler’s blog about “art, culture and contemporary living,” we found a keen eye and lots of excellent links. And we noted a shared interest in the painter Carl Morris. We’ll be back.

Via Power Slice, we were led to Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes on ArtsJournal, specifically his post on a Richard Diebenkorn show in the making. We agree with Mr. Green! An Ocean Park series exhbition would be wonderful. We only hope that the Portland Art Museum gets a piece of the action. Diebenkorn was born in Portland (OK, we can’t get too excited; he left when he was 2), but more importantly to us, his oscillations between abstraction and figurative art were similar to those going on among Portland artists during the Fifties and Sixties (I’m thinking of George Johanson and Carl Morris, specifically, but lots of our artists worked through an AE phase, so powerful was the movement). The interaction between San Francisco and Portland artists during that time — and I understand there was a lot — would be an excellent subject for an excellent exhibition.

We went back to Culture Shock, where we found a stirring defense of the Rights of Children to access to the arts. Art Scatter regulars will know that we couldn’t agree more. In fact, we believe that society should be organized around this right. A place that encourages its kids to create is going to be a great place to live.

Culture Shock linked us to Mead Hunter’s blog, MrMead’s Pupu Platter, which featured a post about headaches, specifically weekend migraines of the most debilitating sort. If you have a remedy, I’m sure Pupu Platter would entertain it. We also noted that MrMead was in the process of, um, redefining his blog and mentioned Art Scatter, which we found flattering, but that almost caused us to slip into an orgy of self-analysis ourselves. Or maybe that was the whole mirror thing.

The week beckons!

General

Books for those who don’t read too much into them

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The display windows of Anthropologie at 11th and Couch in the Pearl are filled with reading matter —that is, books considered as matter. Books that have been cut in half or thirds, very raggedly, with a band or crosscut saw, the pieces folded back against the spine and stapled or screwed together with bold black screws, and hung in the window displays in heavy swirling ribbons of pulp.

Fascinating.

The hangings look like the stylized curves and coils of waves and flecks of foam in Japanese prints, but I suspect they are meant to suggest the rough delicacy of lace, currently featured in a line of women’s clothing—lace that has been “coaxed into modern silhouettes.” (Check out “Enlightened Lace” under “Points of View.”)

These are old, mostly yellowed or browned paperbacks ready to be pulped in any event (one fragment is stamped “Discard from Dickey Prairie School”). I recognize a few titles: On Writing Well, Diet for a Small Planet, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, something by Peter Maas. Fragments send one spinning ironic metaphors: “Otherwise there can be big problems up high.”

Or, one can find—well, found poems:

Recipe for Black Bean Soup

Family Together
Modern Home
In waking insects
John Powell breaks his way
“These same Babysteps are what we all have to
selves to take . so many times in our quest to get”
Edit > Preferences > Default

I have no love for old books. The dust triggers my asthma. Looking through the windows at this odd display, I feel my lungs trickle and tighten. I remember the lace doilies that my grandmother laid across the arms of chairs and sofas, and that my mother hand-washed and ironed and folded and saved. And I remember, too, the blue-veined hands of the old ladies who pawed through this stuff when we sold it all at auction after my parents died.

A shudder of nausea on this smart, bright corner in the Pearl.

(Photos by Lynn Peterson.)