Category Archives: General

General

Scatter fourth and multiply

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Art Scatter has an acquaintance with the Declaration of Independence, and the first part of that great second paragraph, Scatter can recite (with a little prompting):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

On the other hand, we feel distant from these founding principles, and not just in time and place. This is the kind of government we signed on for — derived from the consent of the governed — and yet everywhere we look, we, the people, are thwarted. As all political science students know, we measure a democracy by the distance between two points: the will of the people and the policy of the government. The closer, the more democratic. And so on this celebration of American independence, of American democracy, we find our government in need of repair, profound repair: because that distance is so great; because so many powerful forces are determined to keep it that way; because it all seems so irreparable.

Government of the people. I spent the morning in Ashland, Oregon, watching that city’s Fourth of July parade, and if you know Ashland at all, you know it was, well, idiosyncratic. Would the Naked Lady of Ashland show up and if so, would she be wearing a bikini as she said she would, for propriety’s sake, or would she be skating, um, free? I count it a triumph of the Pursuit of Happiness that she was indeed skating free (though not in the official parade) and that though she was skating fast, it wasn’t because she was being chased by the Civil Authority. The city’s hula society paraded and so did its belly dancers, its gymnastic and circus academies, its veterans and its peace activists, various small bands and one large one assembled on three large flatbed trucks. The ACLU marched with some members dressed in orange prison suits with Abu Ghraib sacks over their heads. I could go on.

And then as the last drummer passed by, the street was filled with the unofficial part of the parade, the citizens of Ashland themselves, transformed from onlookers to participants, strolling down the street on a cool morning, enjoying the freedom of walking what has become a very busy street over the years. You know already where I’m going with this — onlooker AND participant, the perfect metaphor for a representative democracy. We watch and we join in. It’s crowded, it’s painful, and sometimes you think no intelligent consensus can possibly come from all of these people walking down this street — except there we all are, walking on that street, freely and with good intent. It’s enough by itself to make you want to fire a rocket in the air.

Books, General, Vernon Peterson

Summer reading: William Gibson’s “Spook Country”

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spook countrySpook Country is the place of no fixed boundary, where official governments and their shadowy minions mingle, betraying friends and arming future enemies. The Dick Cheneys of the world assure us that what they do there is all for our own good and that we should sleep better at night for it, but we suspect that more than a little of what comes of it feathers their own beds. And more and more we know they really don’t have a clue.

In the age of post-9/11 neo-surveillance, counter-terrorism is the new terrorism, and every cultural production, be it furniture, appliance, weapon, art work, act of Congress or staged event such as political rally or act of terror, is authentic only if it is inauthentic; if, in other words, it is, as William Gibson suggests, “a very elaborate artifact, mass-produced by artisans of one culture in vague imitation of what had once been the culture of another.”

And what is the most primitive human artifact still in use? The container: bag, box, pocket, backpack, diplomatic pouch, car bomb, micro-chip, cargo container.

You may not know what it is, or what it contains, but in Gibson’s latest novel, Spook Country, now in paperback (Berkley Trade, $15.00), Bobby Chombo can tell you where in our undifferentiated global grid it is right this minute. Chombo is geek squad gone over the edge. His GPS grid-induced paranoia leads him to divide his warehouse into squares and he never sleeps twice in the same spot. Trained in militarily valuable applications of Global Positioning, he now freelances for conceptual artists like Alberto Corrales, for whom he triangulates complicated bits of computer-simulated reality on location. Slip on a custom helmet and you see a life-like hologram of River Phoenix dead on the street or pale F. Scott Fitzgerald dying in a bar. Corrales’ latest piece involves Charlie Manson and Sharon Tate.

But Chombo also works for an unnamed old man, seasoned, avuncular, who may be a rogue CIA operative, and who appears to bear the scars of betrayal from as far back as the Bay of Pigs. The old man has Chombo tracking a cargo container bound for North America.

What’s in the container? Perhaps it’s smuggled arms, or a weapon of mass destruction, or human cargo, or a huge chunk of small bills the U.S. shipped to Iraq and then lost. Or perhaps it’s simply an al-Qaida dry run to test Homeland Security. Or perhaps container and cargo are another virtual creation, an element of the “consensual hallucination,” as Gibson calls the internet.
Continue reading Summer reading: William Gibson’s “Spook Country” →

Barry Johnson, Books, General

Happy birthday, Franz Kafka!

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Yes, July 3 is the date of Franz Kafka’s birth in 1883. If he hadn’t died of starvation brought on by tuberculosis in 1924, he would have been 125 years old today! I imagine the news report: “A doddering Franz Kafka celebrated his 125th birthday today surrounded by friends and the uncomfortable notion that he had unwittingly invented some of the more profound absurdities of the modern state.”

Did Kafka actually prove that the worst and darkest ideas operating in the deepest recesses of the human dreamscape will eventually manifest themselves as government/business policy? I think maybe he did, though it took a while for us to get it. He got the very heart of our paranoia — the ways in which we don’t trust ourselves. It’s a little strange to toast such a thing, but there you go.

To one of the Titans of the Art Scatter pantheon, happy birthday!

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

A “Laramie” lawsuit: Footing the bill for censorship

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Here we go again: More trouble over a school play. Don’t these people ever learn? I mean the principals and school boards who do the censoring and always seem to do it so clumsily, as if critical thinking were anathema to education and free speech were a legislative inconvenience to be swatted away on a whim — usually the whim of a frightened administrator or a few right-wing parents determined to make everyone else line up with their rigid view of the world. Where do they think they are, Guantanamo Bay?

The play in question this time around, almost predictably, is The Laramie Project, Moises Kaufman’s moving and mostly even-handed exploration of how the brutal murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in 1998 affected the people in his town of Laramie, Wyoming. This one’s just too much for the great 16th century thinkers who seem to be running, and running roughshod over, our public schools. Controversy? Perish all thought.

As Melissa Navas reported this morning in The Oregonian, Portland actor and onetime teacher Wade Willis has sued the Beaverton School District for $125,000, claiming he was “harassed, intimidated and humiliated” for his attempt during the 2005-06 school year to bring The Laramie Project to the stage at Southridge High School, where he had been a music, drama and language arts teacher. Shattered by the experience, Willis quit a job that he presumably loved.

His lawyer argued, Navas reports, that “a wrongful discharge lawsuit can be filed when an employer ‘maintained specific working conditions so intolerable’ that a person would resign.” Navas also reports that Kaufman had given permission to take out the play’s profanities to make it appropriate for a school audience, and she points out that although the play is about a hate crime against a gay man, it’s not about sex.

I don’t know Wade Willis, but I’ve seen him many times on stage, and he’s always struck me as an actor who approaches his job in a totally professional manner. (Right now he’s on stage in Broadway Rose Theatre Company‘s critically hailed production of the musical Les Miserables.) The loss to the students who no longer get to learn from him is of course impossible to measure, but I imagine it is significant: Here is a man who understands music and theater from the inside out, deeply respects his craft, is exceptionally good at it, and was willing to pass that knowledge along. Further, he wasn’t afraid to confront his students with topics that demand critical thinking — and what greater skill can a school hope to impart to the children in its care?
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Barry Johnson, Environment, General, Language, Music

If we sacrifice the semicolon, will the sentence live on?

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Earlier, we were musing about the alleged death of the sentence. We didn’t understand it. Didn’t we frequently, ourselves, muster a sentence or two? But then the Voice Inside Our Head replied, rhetorically, “You call that a sentence?” Our sentences weren’t just NOT sentences; they actually killed The Sentence as they were constructed. We sometimes hate the Voice Inside Our Head. How could we not?

We have new evidence that the sentence is not dead! It’s simple, really. If we aren’t completely sure that the semicolon has passed away, tossed into the rubbage bin with a wink, then surely the sentence has received a premature burial. The French started in back in April, though maybe the whole thing was a joke, oui? John Henley writing in the Guardian exhausted the topic, we would have thought. Every clever thing that has ever been said about the semicolon was in his article. And as a good journalist must, he left the question open: Dear, reader, it is for you to decide. But then Slate’s Paul Collins got in on the fun and proved that Henley had left some things unsaid. His point was simply that the semicolon is either always misused or always dying; we’re not sure which.

We have struggled to have an opinion on the semicolon, and a real opinion, not just a wisecrack. We find that we use them just to give our pinky a bit exercise from time to time. See? We’re just not capable of it. And did you notice the short sentence there? We aren’t just irreverent about semicolon usage; we frequently employ short sentences, even “non-sentences,” instead of erecting handsome, well-made sentences, with their interlocking pieces secured by the semicolon.
We could go on: Something makes us think that if we continue to talk about semicolons, somehow we aren’t killing the sentence.

General, Visual Art

Friday Scatter: Back to business

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So, yes, Scatter had a momentary, um, hiatus. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Actually, we were up in Seattle, lots of us, and we took hundreds of slides! There we are with Gramps splashing in the pool. Uh, Gramps? Pull up the trunks. Yeesh!

Anyway, the best thing about traveling, even just up I-5 a ways, is coming back and telling your dear friends all about it. Which would be you. Stop that cringing once and for all! This is going to be quick…

Northwest African American Museum: Part of a reconverted school in Seattle, this museum is small — and almost perfect in its way. Its first show features the art of Jacob Lawrence (who moved to Seattle in 1970) and James W. Washington Jr., a neat pairing, both deeply interested in the African American history and daily life. But for me the real revelation was the permanent exhibit, most of which is a big timeline of African American history in the Northwest. Dense with information and photographs, it does an excellent job of conveying basic knowledge — the faces of early black settlers, the churches they built, what their lives were like. But then it brings us back to the present with video interviews with present African American residents of Seattle, Portland and Yakima, who talk about what it’s like to live here now. It’s great stuff. I would say Portland should have a museum like it, but this one has taken since 1981 to build (it opened in March), so maybe it’s best to concentrate on this excellent beginning.

Wing Luke Asian Museum: The new building of this museum is also excellent — a conversion by architect Rick Sundberg of an old tenement into a light, airy museum that still reminds us of the tenement it used to be. But the Wing Luke could take its cue from the African American museum on coming up with a clear historical timeline of Asian American history in the Northwest, although it should work well as a community meeting place. Another Seattle artist, sculptor George Tsutakawa, is featured here, though perhaps not given enough space. The best idea? Moving the shelves and counters from a Chinese store that opened in 1910, the Yick Fung Company, and re-installing them stocked with goods in the new building.

Olympic Sculpture Park: OK, you already know about this, right? Sculpture by the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Louise Nevelson, Mark di Suvero, Anthony Caro, Alexander Caro, etc., in a new park overlooking Puget Sound and staring straight at the Olympic Mountains? Some of the moments are beautiful: In a clearing of white Aspens nests a large black Tony Smith rectangle that creates its own clearing inside the clearing, an arena inside an arena. But maybe it’s best as an “urban renewal” project. The park straddles and spans a major arterial and a railroad track, reframes and reconditions them, and then gives us a great view across the Sound. A bit of urban design genius by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi.

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

TJ Norris: signs and no-signs

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Let’s say you’ve just gotten back from a weekend in Seattle, taken for the sweetest of reasons (a wedding!), hurried back actually, because you’d waited until the last possible day to see the TJ Norris installation, Infinitus, at the New American Art Union. A long drive, after a couple of long days, which also included a visit to the Olympic Sculpture Park, and that was on your mind as you walked across I-84 from Northeast Portland to the gallery. Because that’s how we often arrive at our art experiences. After long drives. After long days. With other stuff, even other art, on our minds.

You take the Norris video installation lying down, facing upward at two screens suspended from the ceiling, which show different portions of a 71 minute video loop. Actually, those inclined benches are pretty comfortable and they have pillow-like substance at the top where your head goes. You enter the gallery, get your bearings and take a bench. I was alone most of the time on Sunday, the two screens flickering above me. At first they both had automobile imagery going, one of highway traffic shot from above and the other of traffic shot from the side through the diamonds of a chain link fence. So, my pulse still elevated from the walk and the lanes of I-84 on my mind, I immediately began to think of cars, mostly about how boring they were and that this as much as their destructive effects on cities and the environment was good enough reason to seriously limit their use. Seriously. TJ Norris’s installation has nothing to do with that, at least I don’t think so, but “boring” is a good thing to remember, boring as in “mundane.” The installation itself isn’t boring, of course. I found the experience that it offered just the opposite, once my pulse rate slowed and I stopped thinking about cars.

I situated myself on a bench between the two screens, the better to watch both. That was difficult at first, my attention diverted, eyes darting one way then the other. What did I see? I think the most lasting impression is “movement.” Images in motion. Some of them were abstract — tiny lights flickering and fluttering or shapes morphing across the screen. Bubbling emulsions. These passages could last quite a while. The cars, yes, and other “real” objects or places. Long corridors that the camera wanders down. A disco ball. A convex outdoor mirror, the kind they use to help you see around corners sometimes. Shadows of strange objects. Escalator stairs in motion. Buildings and steel “structures.” A close-up of a plant that, as the camera pulls back, is revealed to be behind a barbed wire fence. And speaking of barbed wire, razor wire. Quite a bit of razor wire. This list could go on, but just imagine these things moving along at a good clip though often in long takes, so you can “watch” the motion.

Nothing happens.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, Environment, Film, General, Music, Visual Art

Scatter friends go out on the town

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With the summer solstice having hit town at precisely 4:59 p.m. Friday — was that a sylph we saw cavorting in the woods? — it’s a semi-beautiful weekend here in Portland, Oregon.

All right, clouds are moving in. Yet we are undaunted. Some cool things are happening around and out of town involving Friends of Art Scatter (this is not an official organization, but we like the sound of it, though not as much as we like the sound of “The Loyal Order of Moose”) and we would be remiss not to fill you in on the upcoming action. Some of these are this-weekend-only opportunities, so get on your dancing shoes, and don’t let the door hit you on your way out of the house.

Subversive operatics at Someday Lounge: We like Opera Theater Oregon. How much? Read our report on OTO’s winter production of “Carmen,” sung live to a screening of Cecil B. DeMille‘s 1915 silent-movie version of the Bizet opera. So we are happy to report that this seat-of-the-pants company, which dares to believe that opera ought to be fun (its motto is “Making Opera Safe for America”), is throwing a one-night wingding Saturday at Someday Lounge to show off its new season, raise a little money (there’ll be a silent auction) and generally blow the art form’s reputation for stuffiness all to hell.

“Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” will preview the three-show season of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s “The Medium” (paired with a 10-minute original called “The Head of Mata Hari”) in October, “Camille Traviata” (music from Verdi’s opera accompanying the 1921 silent-movie “Camille” with Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino) in February ’09, and “Das Rheingold” (a scrunching-together of the Wagnerian wallbanger with an episode of television’s “Baywatch”) in June ’09. All shows at the Someday Lounge, where you can drink to all that.

Bonus attraction Saturday night: OTO performs Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” with Classical Revolution PDX and Karaoke From Hell. Ouch, we think.

7 p.m. Saturday, Someday Lounge. $25, $40/couple, 10 bucks if you just show up for the after-party from 9 until the cows come home.

Loie Fuller in the Columbia Gorge: Maryhill Museum of Art, our favorite concrete castle on a cliff with a backside view of Mt. Hood within easy driving distance of Portland (see our report on its affiliated Stonehenge replica) was established by visionary engineering entrepeneur Sam Hill as his home and the center of what he hoped would be an agricultural utopia. That failed, but three of his far-flung friends — Queen Marie of Romania, San Francisco dowager Alma de Bretteville Spreckels (wife of the sugar king) and Loie Fuller, the American girl who became an interpretive dance sensation in Paris — turned the place into one of America’s unlikeliest, and quirkiest, art museums.

On Saturday Maryhill is sponsoring a day-long series of events in celebration of Fuller’s life and art, to culminate in an evening performance in the nearby city of The Dalles by the New York company Jody Sperling and Time Lapse Dance, which will perform three dances inspired by Fuller. 7 p.m. Saturday at At the Dalles-Wahtonka High School Auditorium,
220 E. 10th Street, The Dalles; $7-$10.

Looks like a swell day trip, and if you need a break, some good wineries are nearby. The mammoth Maryhill Winery is just down the road from the museum; we’re also partial to the little, high-quality Syncline Cellars in nearby Lyle, Wash. (The poster shown here, part of the museum’s permanent collection, is by Alfred Choubrac, who with his brother Leon was one of Paris’ first poster designers in the 1880s, anticipating Toulouse-Lautrec. She’s probably doing Le Papillon, her butterfly dance.)

Glass at the Portland Japanese Garden: As many of you know, Portland is Glass City, U.S.A. this summer, with a major retrospective of the work of contemporary master Klaus Moje at the Portland Art Museum through Sept. 7, the annual international conference of the Glass Art Society this weekend, and glass work on view at about 40 galleries and other spots around town.

One of those “other” spots is the beautiful and soul-refreshing Portland Japanese Garden, where work by six Japanese or Japanese American glass artists is on view. The work of five (including onetime Moje students Yoko Yagi and Etsuko Nishi) are inside the Pavilion through June 30. But bigger-scale outdoor installations by one of our favorite artists, Jun Kaneko, remain on the grounds through July 31. “This Kaneko piece seems as if it has always been in the Garden,” Diane Durston says of the serene glass bridge in the photo above. We first got to know Durston, the garden’s curator of culture, art and education, when she was the director of education for the Portland Art Museum, and we trust her taste and enthusiasms.

The return of Chamber Music Northwest: One of Portland’s most congenial summer traditions returns Monday night for its 38th season, and we’re not afraid to say we’re looking forward to it. Sure, the crowd’s heads are largely streaked with silver, but these are geezers (and we count ourselves as part of that category) who know a good time when they see one. Great musicians playing great music under very Portland-friendly conditions: no leader onstage, just a small group of talented artists working on something together, and paying attention to the nuances that requires. Scatter pal David Stabler gives details in The Oregonian; we’re looking forward to festival vet Fred Sherry doing a little Wuorinen and Schoenberg’s first 12-tone quartet on July 12.

Through July 27; Reed College and Catlin Gabel School. (The photo is of cellist Sophie Shao and pianist Pei-Yao Wang in last summer’s “Schubertiade.”)

Bob Hicks, Books, Environment, Food, General

Feeding the masses: What would Tolstoy do?

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Reading William J. Broad’s fascinating report in the Science section of Tuesday’s New York Times about a possible breakthrough in world rice production got me thinking about Leo Tolstoy‘s masterful War and Peace, which I’ve been enjoying, in small gulps of 20 to 40 pages a sitting, in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s lively 2007 translation.

For all of the novel’s cinematic scope and dense cultural and moral observation (the closest thing to an American equivalent of this amazing piece of writing, which Tolstoy himself referred to as an “epic” rather than a novel, is Herman Melville‘s similarly discursive Moby-Dick), Tolstoy could draw a character and an intimate conversation like nobody’s business: Reading this translation, you feel like you’re in the room, observing with the invisible narrator himself, smiling or shuddering at facial expressions, nodding in agreement with Tolstoy’s acute descriptions.

So let’s drop in, early in the going, on a conversation about the old roue Count Kirill Vladimirovich Bezukhov, who is on his deathbed and has no legitimate immediate heirs, although illegitimate ones are apparently scattered across Russia like seed from a flock of migrating birds. One of this prodigious offspring, the fine, fat, clumsy bear of a fellow Count Pyotr Kirillovich, or Pierre, looks to be on the ascent:

“Princess Anna Mikhailovna mixed into the conversation, clearly wishing to show her connections and her knowledge of all the circumstances of society.

” ‘The thing is,’ she said significantly and also in a half whisper. ‘Count Kiril Vladimirovich’s reputation is well-known … He’s lost count of his children, but this Pierre was his favorite.’

” ‘How good-looking the old man was,’ said the countess, ‘even last year! I’ve never seen a handsomer man.’

” ‘He’s quite changed now,’ said Anna Mikhailovna. ‘So, as I was about to say,’ she went on, ‘Prince Vassily is the direct heir to the whole fortune through his wife, but the father loved Pierre very much, concerned himself with his upbringing, and wrote to the sovereign … so that when he dies (he’s so poorly that they expect it at any moment, and Lorrain has come from Petersburg), no one knows who will get this enormous fortune, Pierre or Prince Vassily. Forty thousand souls, and millions of roubles. I know it very well, because Prince Vassily told me himself. And Kirill Vladimirovich is my uncle twice removed through my grandmother. And he’s Borya’s godfather,’ she added, as if ascribing no importance to this circumstance.”

Fine, witty writing. But what’s it got to do with the price of rice in China? Hold on. We’ll get there.

Forty thousand souls, the princess counts among the old man’s fortune. That means 40,000 serfs — in effect, slaves — whose lives and labor are in the power and patronage of a single man. Tolstoy finished writing War and Peace in 1868, seven years after the emancipation of Russia’s serfs; America’s Emancipation Proclamation was even fresher news. But the novel is set during the Napoleonic wars, from 1805 through 1812. And at the beginning of that period the world population was about 1 billion (up from a scant 1 million in 10,000 B.C.E.), or roughly one-seventh of today’s estimate of 6.7 billion. So with the same equivalent of the population, Count Bezukhov today would have directly controlled the destinies of 280,000 men, women and children — an astonishing figure, even in the contemporary world of runaway wealth and the new Russia of extreme fortunes got fast and furious. And how does a master feed 40,000, or 280,000, or 6.7 billion souls?
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Barry Johnson, General, Language

Well and truly sentenced

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The question before us today is the question before us every day: Is the sentence dying? It was posed by James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who then answered it in the affirmative. And that set Washington Post writer Linton Weeks on an imaginative reporter’s journey to test his conclusion. It’s a clever little trip. In typical reporter fashion he finds Important People to agree with Billington and Important People to disagree, and concludes with a trope newspapers seldom employ. He gives us a quote about the whole sentence problem that seems to agree with Billington, but he has taken it from an old Atlantic magazine (October 1937) and out of its context (that the loopy sentences of John Dos Passos and his kin were undermining the sentence with their complexity). Which just goes to show that language changes, and maybe that’s OK. Well played, Mr. Weeks.

The key paragraph of the story has this quote from Billington:

“We are moving toward the language used by computer programmers and air traffic controllers,” he says. “Language as a method of instruction, not a portal into critical thinking.”

He’s talking about texting, IM-ing, commenting on blogs and how these activities are seeping in the language as a whole. Sentences lurk beneath these crypticons, of course, but not good sentences, not beautiful sentences, not important sentences. The language of technology is replacing the language of… falconry. I made that last bit up, but my point is that technology always affects language, special languages do too, and for that matter so does the mode of communication. The old telegraph “language” was masterfully compressed (stop). So are classified ads (talk about a phrase that’s about to exit the language in a hurry). They save keystrokes, space and money. Modern texting is the same thing: an exploration of how little language it takes to make sense.
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