Category Archives: General

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Banned in Sherwood, sold out in Portland

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The good news is, I couldn’t get in to Brunish  Hall Sunday afternoon to see “Higher Ground” — it was sold out. Maybe you read about it here, on the front page of Monday’s Oregonian, in another of reporter Maya Blackmun’s continuing series on the off-again, on-again production of a play about middle-school bullying that Sherwood Middle School Principal Anna Pittioni deemed too hot for her tots to handle.

It would have been nice to see this sort-of happy ending, with all the cheers for the hard work of the student performers and tekkies and their drama teacher, Jennie Brown, who wrote the script that Principal Pittioni considered too mature for some of the school’s students to deal with. (The kids in the show argued that the script actually watered down everyday reality in the halls of the Sherwood school, a typical sort of place in a typical sort of town, and, you could further argue, a reality that the typical young teen enrolled in the school is already all too familiar with.) But if I’d gotten in, someone else would have been left out (lots of us were turned away at the door), and isn’t that what every producer wants: a sold-out show?

So everybody won, and everything turned out great, right?

Well, no — and it’s important to remember that.

Continue reading Banned in Sherwood, sold out in Portland →

General

The Echo Maker: Powers of Attraction

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Writing is the act of accepting the huge shortfall
between the story in the mind and what hits the page.

– Richard Powers

richard powers photo Richard Powers did not disappoint the small but very attentive group at his reading March 6. We accept on faith, I suppose, his claim that there is a shortfall between what is in his mind and what shows on his page, but we’ll never detect it, because what he writes is such a seamless weaving of disparate threads, as in the story he read that night. Called “Modulation,” and written special for his reading tour, it interweaves the stories of four people in places as various as Iraq, Sydney, Germany and an “I” state campus in the dead of winter. Different temperaments, different relations to music, but each trying to detect a secret harmony, a ghost tune they strain to hear in the global jangle of music, samplings and crossover genres, bootlegs and illegal downloads. Music – “the art that leaves nothing,” except the desire to read “Modulations” when it is published this spring in Conjunctions 50, a special anniversary collection of stories and poems by 50 writers.

Powers explored the theme later in response to a question about the fate of music, or any other “intimate art” such as reading, “in an age of technological ubiquity,” as he phrased it. He’s not worried. Every age, he believes, has produced a music “surprising for its moment.” Being grounded in our “now” is second nature in his novels.
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General

Sunday recap: week four

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Do not be alarmed: below is a non-fiction comics super-post, which collects all four parts of last week’s series. It differs from the originals in some parts, but for those hardy souls who followed along, it is not necessary to read the edited version. Newcomers be warned: It’s long.

This is a good opportunity to mention a couple of the sites that have included Art Scatter in their deliberations. We were honored that Furious Nads, the One True b!X’s website, linked to us. If you don’t know the site, it is in the Scatter mode, too, mixing politics and culture in unlikely and furious combinations. We also have to give a nod to Portland playwright Steve Patterson and his Splattworks blog. Theater has been in the news lately, and Steve has helped us participate in the conversation. And DK Row at Oregon Live (not to mention The Oregonian) helped get us going in the beginning. Cheers, DK!

What’s coming up this week? Hard to say, but Vernon has been typing away feverishly on a Richard Powers post, and he may have something to say about a particular jigsaw puzzle artist showing at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Frank Rich and Stephen Sondheim are going to be in town on Tuesday and the usually heavy March flow of events is there for the fishing.

Books, General

Thompson, Delisle, Sacco and comics non-fiction

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panelsoba.jpgThat’s Joe Sacco, to the right, looking out of the window in a restaurant in the old part of Sarajevo. As usual he is passive — listening to the stories that other people tell him, observing life around him and presumably taking notes, though in this frame, he doesn’t seem to have a notebook with him. He looks a lot like a — journalist. Oh. There’s no drawing pad, either. And that’s what usually separates him from other journalists: He is recording conversations,
observations, scenes AND he’s drawing them.

By this particular moment in War’s End: Profiles From Bosnia 1995-96 (2005, Drawn and Quarterly Books), Sacco has drawn and interviewed his subject, Soba, a lot. He’s also drawn the streets of Sarajevo, the insides of clubs and restaurants and apartments. He’s proven to be sympathetic to Soba’s account of his combat against the Serb nationalists attempting to defeat the Bosnian independence movement — he’s listened, he’s drawn, he’s located himself in the narrative. And something wonderful has happened: We’ve gotten to know Soba.
Continue reading Thompson, Delisle, Sacco and comics non-fiction →

Books, General, Poetry

Robert Creeley: “Selected Poems, 1945-2005”

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creeley.jpg The rhyme is after
all the repeated
insistence.
— Robert Creeley, “For W.C.W.”

Black Mountain College, nestled in the mountains of eastern North Carolina, was small but thrived on its own terms for the 30 years it existed from the mid-1930s to mid-1950s. And thrives, perhaps, in memory because of the storied avant garde careers of teachers and students who took a turn there: Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller and Paul Goodman, as well as a cluster of poets that included Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley (1926-2005). Creeley’s Selected Poems, 1945-2005 (University of California Press), edited by Benjamin Friedlander, has just been published, a microcosm of 60 years and some 60 volumes of work.

Creeley was inspired by jazz and abstract art and in fact collaborated with musicians, photographers and artists on various projects, a legacy of the communal atmosphere at Black Mountain. Creeley and other Black Mountain stalwarts were part of the “New American” poets anthologized by Donald Allen, but while they were associated with the Beats, they had their own clear path, a more reserved, austere form of verse that was innovative and experimental nonetheless.

One of my favorite Creeley poems is not included in Selected Poems, perhaps because it seems to be a shade romantic and sentimental. Here it is, “The Woman”:

I called her across the room,
could see that what she stood on
held her up, and now she came
as if she moved in time.

In time to what she moved,
her hands, her hair, her eyes, all things
by which I took her to be there
did come along.

It was not right or wrong
but signally despair, to be about
to speak to her
as if her substance shouted.

I read this poem in 1966 in a collection called For Love (1962),” and copied it out in my literary treasures notebook for Mrs. Wheeler’s senior English class. This was a different kind of love poem. No lips like cherries, cheeks like roses, hair like fine-spun gold – the verbal cornucopia that turned woman into an Acrimbaldo portrait. This was a real flesh and blood woman who stood across the room, held up, as it were, but not on a pedestal. The line break “what she stood on / held her up” still floors me. A simple, elegant poem, it tickles the mind and stirs the blood.
Continue reading Robert Creeley: “Selected Poems, 1945-2005” →

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

For Sherwood kids, the show goes on — downtown

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This from Maya Blackmun at The Oregonian, who’s been covering the flap over a play about bullying at Sherwood Middle School. In brief: The show’s going on, but not in Sherwood, where the school principal ordered a last-minute postponement of “Higher Ground” and said parts of the script would have to be rewritten after parents of three kids involved in the show (out of almost 50) complained about the content. The kids voted to cancel the show, which was supposed to have opened Feb. 22, instead of changing it. Art Scatter wrote about the issue on Feb. 27.

Now you can see it, the way they and their director intend it: The Portland Center for the Performing Arts has donated the center’s Brunish Hall for one performance, at 2 p.m. this Sunday, March 9. It’s free, but donations are being accepted at the door (dig into your pockets) and the kids are also collecting nonperishable food for the Loaves and Fishes lunchtime program at Sherwood Senior Center, where they’ve been rehearsing. As the rock anthem goes: The kids are alright.

— Bob Hicks

Books, General

Part four — Joe Sacco’s extreme journalism (extremely good)

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For the intro to this series click here. Do the same for Part two and Partthree.

cover War’s End, by Joe Sacco
Both Craig Thompson (even in the looser diary format of Carnet de Voyage) and Guy Delisle follow comic book conventions. In Thompson’s work they show up in the idealized women, for example, the relative inexpressiveness of the faces and in the representation of himself as a Woody Allen kind of character usually underdrawn compared to the rest of the characters. Delisle’s Pyongyang reads even more like a comic — lots of frames per page, action (what there is!) moving along linearly, and his own self-depiction is VERY cartoony: none of the other characters is so unnaturalistic.

Sacco lives in a different world — War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995-96 wants to demolish the acceptable boundaries of comics, the affect of most Sacco books. The subject matter is grimmer. The drawings act as though they want to spill off the page. Words can fill huge chunks of space. (There are moments in Carnet that resemble Sacco’s work: Thompson has cited Sacco as an influence.) I like the subversion and the obsession with getting it right: We interpret it immediately as “seriousness of purpose,” and I accept it as a reasonable account of what happened, especially the events that Sacco witnessed directly.

Continue reading Part four — Joe Sacco’s extreme journalism (extremely good) →

Books, General

Part three — Guy Delisle: How empty is it?

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For Part Two on Craig Thompson, click here. The introduction is here.
Pyongyang detail
Like Carnet de Voyage, though less explicitly, Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea is a journal of a trip. In this case it’s Guy Delisle’s business trip to North Korea. Delisle, a French Canadian, worked for a French animation company, which farmed out big chunks of the actual animation to North Korea (Delisle says that Eastern European studios also get lots of this sort of work). Basically, the North Koreans take their cue from the the “key” drawings in a movement sequence and fill in the drawings between them. Delisle supervised their work.

But animation “experiences,” though informative (think about the whale rendering passages in Moby Dick, except shorter), don’t occupy many of the frames of Pyongyang. Instead, Delisle records the life he finds in North Korea. There is one very great difficulty to this: He must be accompanied everywhere he goes by a guide and translator. And he must stay in an almost empty hotel for foreigners, which is cut off from the rest of the city. So the book takes us on a series of excursions, some more impromptu than others, as Delisle attempts to get closer to the “real” Korea than the government wants him to get. If anyone has a complaint about loneliness, it’s Delisle, but he rarely mentions it. Instead, he works on his guides, trying to trick them into an admission of some kind or get them to take him somewhere off-limits. They seem pretty tolerant, even friendly in a distant sort of way, but they are NOT going to fall for Delisle’s tricks.
Continue reading Part three — Guy Delisle: How empty is it? →

General

Part two — Craig Thompson: O, the fame, the misery

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This is Part Two of a four-part series. The introduction is here.

As Carnet de Voyage begins on March 6, 2004, Craig Thompson is 28 and heading for Paris. Blankets has been published in the U.S. the previous year, to major acclaim, and his European publishers want him to do a promotional tour for a couple of months, signing books for fans, meeting other comics artists, attending some big continental comics fests. Most, if not all, paid for by the publishers and convention organizers. Sweet! To be young, gifted, single and comped on a European vacation. He even has a side trip scheduled for Morocco. The Carnet is his sketchbook diary of that trip, and we might expect it to be a celebration, maybe even a bacchanal!

189183060001mzzzzzzz.jpgExcept that maybe we’ve read Blankets, and we’re pretty sure that Craig is not going to be able to give himself over to that sort of thing. And in fact, Craig is unhappy for a lot of Carnet. He counts the ways: he’s homesick, he misses his ex-girlfriend profoundly, she’s quite ill, he’s lonely, everything reminds him of her, he’s lonely, his hand hurts from so much drawing. Did we mention he’s lonely? His internal struggles spill out into the frames and pages of his notebook, enveloping them in fog of gloom. Morocco, near the beginning of the trip, is especially difficult, primarily because he doesn’t know anyone, doesn’t understand the culture very well and plunges into the worst melancholy of the trip.

By the time he returns to Europe, things start to lighten up. Some. Everything is more familiar. He eats great food. The pages feature more drawings of attractive women. He has conversations with interesting people, including his comic artist heroes. He sees relatively happy families in action. But his drawing hand REALLY hurts, enough to seek treatment, and despite the numbers of slender, attractive European women around him, he misses his ex. The commercial part of the comics biz is difficult for him — the speaking, signing of books, conventions. And then he leaves, though by the end he’s getting to like it. Barcelona? Hard to argue.

Why is this relatively familiar story so engaging?

Continue reading Part two — Craig Thompson: O, the fame, the misery →

General, Visual Art

The capitalist and the art museum

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For the past month, I’ve been trying to make sense of the politics around the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, the new wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Since Eli Broad (whose fortune is $7 billion per Forbes magazine) told the New York Times’ Edward Wyatt that he intended to keep his art holdings (which are considerable) in his foundation rather than give them to the new wing he’d spent $50 million trail bossing to completion, the sparks have been flying in LA.

A lot of prominent art observers, notably Christopher Knight of the LA Times and Adrian Ellis of The Art Newspaper, saw Broad’s decision as an act of betrayal against LACMA, which had allowed itself to be “bought” by Broad and had then been dumped when he’d gotten what he wanted out of the museum.

At first my reaction was a lot like that of the NY Times editorial page, which argued that a lot depended upon how the foundation conducted itself — much of the work might find itself on the walls of LACMA after all. Over at PORT, Jeff Jahn said that it might actually be good for the Portland Art Museum, because our curators would likely have better luck dealing with Broad’s foundation than with LACMA. These are sensible positions.

But somehow, the matter didn’t feel right somehow. And in the March 20 New York Review of Books, Martin Filler (who frequently writes about architecture for NYRB) explains why (he cites both Knight and Ellis’ responses above). It has to do with the tyranny of Broad and the likelihood that he (and others like him) will run roughshod over the museum for their own purposes, Filler says, and his deft argument establishes a series of contrasts that are powerful: Broad v. public-spirited patron Anna Bing Arnold; Renzo Piano (architect of the new wing) v. Rem Koolhaus (whose design was discarded); Broad’s narrower collecting habits v. those of the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. And he embeds the argument against Broad within a convincing narrative of the troubled history of LACMA.

It’s hard to see much of a connection between Broad’s maneuverings in LA and what goes on in Portland. But what about the affect of Broad as a model of philanthropy? Are we inoculated against that? I don’t think so. Gifts nearly always come with strings; they don’t have to come with chains.