Category Archives: Music

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Visual Art

Monday scatter: Ballet blues, theater dreams, Gypsy Rose Lee

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Update: After posting this I ran into Jon Ulsh, OBT’s executive director, who pointed out that OBT isn’t cutting all live music: There’ll be some, but not the full orchestra. That’s an important distinction. Even a pair of pianists can make a huge difference, as OBT’s recent premiere of Christopher Stowell’s version of The Rite of Spring showed so satisfyingly. Cutting the full orchestra, Ulsh said, saved $300,000. That still left $1.7 million to cut elsewhere. After explaining the cuts, he excused himself. “I’ve got to go raise some money,” he said.

OBT Nutcracker, 2007The news today isn’t good, and it isn’t unexpected: Oregon Ballet Theatre, faced with tumbling income because its ordinary donors don’t have the money to give anymore, is slashing its budget by 28 percent. That’s an overnight cut from $6.7 million to $4.8 million, as Grant Butler reports in The Oregonian.

These are the times we live in, and Scatter partner Barry Johnson talks about their effect on the city’s arts scene in his Portland Arts Watch column this morning on The Oregonian’s Web site, Oregon Live.

Oregon Ballet Theatre is very good: This rising company has been making a genuine mark nationally. But in today’s shell-shocked economy it’s not enough to be good. You also have to have a cushion. And that, OBT does not have. It has no endowment, and its always-thin budget is brittle to the point of breaking. Butler reports that the number of full-time dancers will drop from 28 to 25, which isn’t precipitous, although none of these dancers is exactly striking it rich, and three more high-quality artists will now be out of work.

As troubling from an artistic view is the sacrifice of live music for at least the next season. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big deal — maybe the world of contemporary dance has got you used to the idea of canned music — but they call it “canned” for a reason: It’s prepackaged, unchanging, from a dancer’s view metronomic, or at least predictable: It doesn’t have the edge that live musicians supply. Ballet thrives in the thrilling uncertainty of the moment, when conductor and musicians and dancers all respond to the others in real time and everyone’s attention is heightened. Great ballet requires live musicians. Now, the dozens of talented musicians who make up this orchestra are out of a job, too.

Live music, including full orchestration, has been one of the prime aspirations and foundations of Christopher Stowell’s vision for this company since he took over as artistic director. I’m sure he hasn’t changed that determination. But he’s had to put it on hold. Sometimes being able to establish a holding pattern is a triumph. At least for now, this is putting the brakes on a company that was going places. Now, it’s hunker down and survive.

*****

If a recession or a depression is something that we think ourselves into, maybe it’s something we think ourselves out of, too. For years it’s been obvious that both Oregon Ballet Theatre and Portland Opera need a better place to perform. Although both dip occasionally into the 900-seat Newmark Theatre, home base for both companies is the cavernous, 3,000-seat Keller Auditorium, a hall that puts performers and audiences alike at a disadvantage. It’s too big; it swallows sight and sound.

Over the past year I’ve talked a few times unofficially with the ballet’s Stowell and Portland Opera’s general dirctor, Christopher Mattaliano, about the possibilities of creating a new theater for the two companies to share — something actually designed for the art forms rather than as an all-purpose barn, which is essentially what Keller Auditorium is. Stowell and Mattaliano happen to get along very well, and for the long-term health of both companies, both men would love to see this happen.

A new hall would be as intimate as the economics of the business would allow it to be — somewhere between 1,400 and 2,400 seats, and if that seems like a wide range, it is: There’s plenty of room for honing this dream. It could also encourage other partnerships: the development of a full-time orchestra for the ballet and opera to share; combined marketing; even (and this last part is me speaking, not Stowell or Mattaliano) combined administrative and fund-raising services.

Is this a crazy time to be bringing this sort of thing up? Yes, and no. Obviously nobody’s going to start a bricks-and-mortar campaign now, with the economy circling into the sewer. Portland Center Stage is still roughly 9 million bucks short of paying off its move to the Armory, for crying out loud, and the meter seems stuck on that one.

But I keep remembering that Portland voters approved construction of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts in the midst of the city’s last bad recession, in the early 1980s, when the city’s and state’s economies weren’t as diverse as they are now. Sometimes people think biggest when things look the worst. And I know that if you don’t have goals even in the toughest of times, you won’t get anywhere. Call this one a dream deferred — temporarily.

*****

Gypsy Rose Lee, 1956/Wikimedia CommonsOn a lighter note, a trip to North Portland for a puppet show got me thinking about the great ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee, she of the most celebrated stage mom in show business. (That would be Momma Rose, in the musical Gypsy.) You can see the results of my puppet adventures, as related in Monday’s Oregonian, here.

The puppet company Night Shade was performing at Disjecta, the warehouse-like arts space in the shadow of the Paul Bunyan statue that marks the rapidly reviving Kenton district (a revival sparked partly by the Interstate MAX light-rail line). The district does have its holdovers, which is part of its charm, and one of them is a strip club across from Disjecta called the Dancin’ Bare.

Here’s what the club’s reader board said:

Amature Night

Hot Girls Cold Beer

Well, Gypsy Rose Lee was a literary-minded stripper (note her firm familiarity with the keyboard in the photo) and I can’t imagine that in the heyday of burlesque she’d have put up with a misspelling as glaring as that, any more than she’d have put up with any amateurs horning in on her profession.

And when Gypsy Rose danced, she danced to live music.

*****

Quick links: I’ve also been hitting the galleries lately, and have a couple of reviews in this morning’s Oregonian. The print-edition reviews are briefs. You can find the longer versions online at Oregon Live:

— Photographer Paul Dahlquist’s 80th-birthday show at Gallery 114, and photos by Terry Toedtemeier from the 1970s, at Blue Sky. Review here.

— Glass art by Steve Klein and Michael Rogers at Bullseye Gallery. Review here.

Barry Johnson, Cities, General, Music, Theater

A light Scatter of arts+newspapers+urban matters

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Rough Rider WeeklySo, lots of things bubbling about with Scatter implications, of a Monday evening.

First, a tip from regular TdR, who posts at Portland Spaces’ Burnside Blog — and got to the whole gag reflex to the idea of a Rose Quarter “entertainment district” (mentioned below) WAY before Scatter did. I confess, all I can imagine is the most sanitized experience possible, which is the very antithesis of a good “entertainment district.” Thanks to MTC, we’ve also corrected our link to the Burnside Blog.

We’ve threatened to talk about media, and given the origin myth of Art Scatter, that frequently means “newspaper,” which back in the day transmitted “news” to a populace eager to be told what “news” was. Clearly those days are not these days. The financial pins of the whole newspaper business have been knocked hither and yon by various nefarious forces (as you’ve no doubt heard), and the most recent example of this in action was reported today at The Oregonian, where significant pay cuts and layoffs of part-time staff were announced, among other cost-cutting measures. My rules of engagement forbid me to talk about this in a substantive way, and even if I could, I don’t know exactly what it means except the obvious. The chatter about how to put Humpty Dumpty together again is ongoing on various journalism blogs, and soon we’ll do a little summary for our interested Scatter community.

Over at Portland Arts Watch, we’ve been posting furiously on events we’ve been hitting. Like Imago’s “APIS,” Jerry Mouawad’s fusion of bees and prison. OK, you kinda had to be there, though the “wordless opera,” as Mouawad calls it, reminded me of the connection between Imago’s kid shows (such as “Frogz”) and its adult shows. It also exposed the “tragic” nature of the Imago approach, even its comedies. At least, that’s what I thought I saw.

I also caught the end game of “24/7,” which organizers Bill Crane and Thomas Lauderdale created to mark “7 years of war” with “24 hours of music.” Actually, it’s less than seven years of war in Iraq, but more if you count Afghanistan, which may be the war that never ends. Don’t you hate when Orwell is right? Anyway, the mostly classical program was inspiring, by all accounts, and by the time I got there for Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Wieden+Kennedy’s atrium was jammed and the musicians were playing free and easy and beautifully.

And my obsession with the PNCA-Museum of Contemporary Craft merger continued in a column in The Oregonian today. Bauhaus came up. Honestly.

Portland has a Major League Soccer team. We just had to type that one more time.

Books, General, Music, Vernon Peterson

Being in song: to be born again just in time

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“I’m mumbling mumbling
And I can’t remember the last thing that ran
straight through my head”

Van Morrison, “Ballerina”

flyerEvery Monday, new music lightens our dreary drive to Eugene and back. New releases come Tuesday so there’s a week’s delay and anticipation that figures into the mix, too. Yesterday it was “Sweet Thing,” the fourth song on Van Morrison’s new Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl, before he was clearly mumbling – clearly mumbling, words as sounds tumbling and rolling out of his chest and throat — and we knew it was going to be a great drive. Astral Weeks (1968) has tracked this Scatter’s nearly forty year marriage and yesterday as the music washed over us, in scat-time to occasional shower, we were driving South Dakota back roads, not down I-5 and back. We didn’t even get to Keith Jarrett’s new Yesterday, which will now be next Monday or later.

Recorded last November, all the Astral Weeks songs are here, in different order and with some improvisations: Astral Weeks Beside You Sweet Thing Cyprus Avenue The Way Young Lovers Do Madam George Ballerina Slim Slower Slider – play them in your head — plus “Listen to the Lion” from Saint Dominic’s Preview (we listen to that every July 4) and “Common One,” one of those mystic church-Swendenborgian things we put up with to have the rest of Morrison.

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So when we got back to Portland I opened Austrian novelist Peter Handke’s My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, to read the part about the singer, Morrison in disguise. Morrison sang one of Handke’s lyrics on The Philosopher’s Stone and one of the photos of Morrison on his Back on Top (another great album with those chilling, barely registered, barely mistimed backing vocals by Brian Kennedy) is on the jacket of My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay. (Connectedness is all.) But long story short, “Being in song was the original condition for him,” says the narrator of the singer. Being in song. And: “It seemed to the singer as if something in him was beginning to heal, something which, although he had sung about it again and again, he had not even wanted to have healed.”

It’s that perpetual “beginning to heal” we listen for in Morrison, and if someday his voice sounds healed I don’t know what we’ll do.

My wife, this morning, mumbling “To be born again . . .”

Barry Johnson, Books, Cities, Dance, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Please Coraline, save the economy!

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The Warhol EconomyAfter the dust settles, the tsunami recedes or the cookie crumbles, depending on your metaphor of choice for our present economic condition, who will be left standing? More specifically, what regions of the country can expect to rebound quickly and which ones are headed for even deeper trouble?

That’s the provocative topic of Richard Florida’s Atlantic Monthly essay this month, which is the starting point for my column in this Monday’s newspaper. It’s long (Florida’s article, not my column!). And it contains some predictions of doom for certain cities and states that must give them pause. For the record, he expects the Pacific Northwest, from Vancouver, B.C., to Eugene, to do just fine — he jumped on our bandwagon in his book “The Rise of the Creative Class” way back in 2002, after all. He doesn’t think the same for Phoenix, Cleveland and Detroit.

Early in that article, Florida mentions Elizabeth Currid’s book, “The Warhol Economy,” as he explains why he thinks New York City, even though the hit it has taken from the collapse of the financial sector is massive, will continue to thrive. Currid, who teaches at USC, did a “case study” of the creative class in New York, specifically the music, fashion and art scenes, and found that these interwoven “industries” were 1) far more important to the city’s economic health than commonly understood, and 2) when linked to the national media outlets and the rest of the city’s creative economy of designers, theater, and the other arts, were absolutely crucial to the city’s identity as an international center.
Continue reading Please Coraline, save the economy! →

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Late scatter: All hail the Devil and Rudolph Valentino

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Tobias Andersen, Bill Geisslinger, Todd Van Voris, The Seafarer

What with arts politics and scratchy throat and other everyday interruptions I’ve avoided actually writing about any art since talking about Portland Opera’s The Turn of the Screw and the finale of the Fertile Ground new-plays festival a couple of weeks ago.

But I don’t want Artists Repertory Theatre‘s brilliant version of The Seafarer and Opera Theater Oregon‘s campy but gorgeous Camille/La Traviata to get any farther in the rear view mirror without picking up my virtual pen. Both shows have ended their runs, which turns this into something more of an afterglow than what’s sometimes known in the biz as a “money review.”

Still, darned near everything in The Seafarer was pretty much right on the money, beginning with Irishman Conor McPherson‘s multiply layered script and extending to Allen Nause’s precise yet lively direction of one of the best ensemble casts you’re likely to see in a long while.

McPherson broke on the scene in 1999 with The Weir, when he was still in his late 20s, and although he’s become a leading voice in contemporary theater he’s something of a classicist: The Seafarer, which was first produced in 2006, is an old-fashioned play in a lot of good ways. It revels in language (the way McPherson lobs curses is much funnier and, dare I say, humanitarian than the way Mamet usually does). It’s a “well-made play,” a form that’s fallen out of fashion but has historical staying power. It plays with checks and balances and dramatic weight, encouraging you to shift your view now and again about who the “central” character in this cosmic-showdown drama really is. It’s — hold your breath here — entertaining, a basic value that all too often gets lost in the name of cultural relevance and Art.

Continue reading Late scatter: All hail the Devil and Rudolph Valentino →

Barry Johnson, Music

Scatter has a birthday!

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Christine Sehnaoui This phalanx of Art Scatter has been totally missing for a while. Quite a while. Which means we’ve been posting our fool heads off at Portland Arts Watch, trying to get that vessel seaworthy.

We just posted today on a visit by Christine Sehnaoui, a Lebanese-born, Europe-based exponent of experimental music. It’s improvised music, so maybe it also qualifies as free jazz. It IS listed as a Portland Jazz Festival event. Anyway, the post has a sort of Art Scatter feel to it, so I’m hoping maybe you’ll venture forth. Penguins are involved. So is Ursula K. Le Guin (but only because of the penguins). Also, there’s a little participatory journalism: At one point I was afraid that the audience would register the squeaking of my rather noisy chair as part of the performance. I’m considering the formation of the Squeaky Chair Quartet as a result of this experience. I’m looking for someone who’s good on recliner.

Yes, the Portland Jazz Festival. Which is just about where we came in one year ago. Weirdly enough, Art Scatter has passed the magical one-year barrier. That post I did on Ornette Coleman? One year ago. I started to say it seems like only yesterday, but in fact it feels more like a decade! At my age, that’s a good thing. We’re trying to s-t-r-e-t-c-h those days out.

Anyway, we thank you for joining us this past year. Frankly, if not for you, we wouldn’t be doing this. We’d be boring Scatter Wives completely silly instead! I/We have no idea what this next year will bring in Scatter Land, because we/I have no idea which way the worm will turn. But speaking entirely for myself, this space we share with you has amused me no end. And I mean amusement in the best possible way. Thanks!

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Portland onstage: of ghosts and vampires

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The Turn of the Screw/Portland Opera“This score is my bible,” David Schiff, the Portland composer of the chamber opera Gimpel the Fool and a lot of other good music, said with a big smile.

It was Friday night, and I’d run into Schiff as I was leaving the opening performance of Benjamin Britten‘s The Turn of the Screw at Portland Opera. Schiff loves Britten for several reasons, but in this case he was thinking of Britten as a shining example of how to orchestrate an opera for only a dozen instruments and have it sound full and brilliant and just right. He didn’t use the word “busy” about Britten’s score, but he talked about its muscularity, the way Britten used his limited number of instruments to maximum effect, stretching their sound and matching the dramatic texture of Myfanwy Piper‘s libretto, which is based on Henry James‘s mystifyingly open-ended ghost novella.

I’d been thinking about the opera’s orchestration because the topic came up in the pre-performance talk by Bob Kingston, who also writes the interesting blog dramma per musica. That got me to listening particularly closely to the orchestra, which was conducted with admirable precision by Christopher Larkin, and to noticing how well Britten combined tautness and lushness to bring out the strange, screw-tightening tensions of James’s tale.

Continue reading Portland onstage: of ghosts and vampires →

Books, General, Music, Vernon Peterson

Love, Forever Changes and The Ground Beneath Her Feet

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You are just a thought that someone
Somewhere somehow feels you should be here

Arthur Lee, “A House Is Not A Motel”

love“We change what we remember, then it changes us, and so on, until we both fade together, our memories and ourselves. Something like that.” This is Salman Rushdie on the way our lives intertwine with the history of rock ‘n’ roll. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999 ) is a novel about Ormus and Vina, Indians raised in Bombay, who become the first couple of international rock. Propelled by Ormus’ words and melodies and Vina’s voice, they blaze across the rock firmament as VTO (“Vertical Take Off”), their lives mirroring the rise and fall of many sacred monsters of rock the last half century.

200px-love_-_forever_changesI thought about Rushdie’s novel watching the documentary film Love Story, about the legendary L.A. band Love and their 1967 album “Forever Changes,” the best single album I’ve ever heard, and one of the most enduring albums of what folks still call the “the psychedelic era,” an odd term that reflects the cover art but not the bold lyrics, crystal clear vocals and resonant orchestral sound, acoustic guitars supplemented by symphonic strings and horns. The album is especially loved and respected in England, and British producers Chris Hall and Mike Kelly have made a quiet, fairly typical but informative rock history film, with vintage footage and interviews with Arthur Lee, the dark genius of the group, as well as Bryan MacLean and Johnny Nichols, who all played a critical roll in forming the band’s charismatic image as an early racially-mixed rock group. Recorded by folk the label Elektra, Love was not promoted very effectively in rock venues. They also refused to tour much outside L.A. Not burnt-out cases, really. They just faded out, disappeared. So the album “Forever Changes” has survived and thrived by word-of-mouth, although several years ago Rolling Stone placed it # 40 on the list of 500 greatest albums. My sons ride me for thinking it #1, but there you have it. “Forever Changes” is lodged there as firmly as Venus in my rock firmament.

If you haven’t heard it, it is never too late.
Continue reading Love, Forever Changes and The Ground Beneath Her Feet →

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Dance, Environment, Food, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Tom Coburn and his wilderness of ideas

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UPDATE, 1:55 p.m. Friday, Feb. 6: MISCHIEF WINS, “SMALL POTATOES” LOSE: I didn’t think he could do it, but he did. Today the U.S. Senate, by a ridiculous 73-24 vote, passed Sen. Tom Coburn’s amendment to the economic stimulus bill to bar anything with even the faintest whiff of culture from getting any stimulus money. Here’s the requisite passage from Congressional Quarterly:

“Lawmakers also voted 73-24 to adopt a Tom Coburn , R-Okla., amendment to place tighter restrictions facilities that can be built with money from the bill. The Coburn amendment would bar spending on casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses, swimming pools, stadiums, community parks, museums, theaters, art centers, and highway beautification projects.

“That’s broader than prohibition in the House-passed bill, which applied only to casinos, aquariums, zoos, golf courses and swimming pools.”


The vote is astonishing, and preposterous, and I can only guess that the amendment was passed with so little thought or debate simply because the Senate is in a pedal-to-the-metal rush to get this thing off the assembly line and onto the streets. Coburn may be a fool, but he’s a canny fool — he knows how the system works, and he knows how and when to manipulate it. This ugly bit of mischief could still disappear from the final bill, of course, but now it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of ruckus-raising. It’s officially time to get mad, get on the horn, bug your congressional delegation and get something done about this.

Timberline Lodge, funded by the WPA/Wikimedia Commons

News flashes from all sorts of fronts today about the latest Molotov cocktail from Sen. Tom Coburn, the Republican from Oklahoma known for his quixotic attempts to deliver America from the clutches of common sense. It was Coburn, Oregonians might recall, whose threat of filibuster scuttled last year’s otherwise certain passage of the Lewis & Clark Mount Hood Wilderness Act. That act finally passed the Senate last month, as part of a broader wilderness bill, on a 73-21 vote — over Coburn’s objections.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OklahomaThis time out Coburn’s tackling the omnibus economic bailout plan — surely a target for some tough critical thinking: How many Dutch boys with their fingers in the dike does it take to keep the thing from bursting, anyway? Unfortunately, it’s not just Coburn’s finger that’s all wet. His Amendment No. 175 to the economic stimulus bill is tough, and it’s critical. But it’s utterly lacking in thinking.

Here’s how Coburn proposes to guard your pocketbook:

“None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, arts center, or highway beautification project, including renovation, remodeling, construction, salaries, furniture, zero-gravity chairs, big screen televisions, beautification, rotating pastel lights, and dry heat saunas.”


Note that. No money for museums, theaters, arts centers, aquariums, zoos, highway beautification, apparently any sort of beautification at all. I’m not really sure what a rotating pastel light is, but none of that, either. Fortunately I don’t golf. But I do like a good sauna now and again.

It’s easy to laugh this off as just another crackpot amendment that’s going nowhere — except that Coburn has a history of making this sort of thing stick, at least temporarily. I doubt it’ll work this time, because with the Democratic gains in the Senate from the last election he’s lost his biggest tool, which was his ability to forestall a 60 percent Senate vote to halt filibuster. His power has always been the power to make mischief, not the power to actually create anything.

Still, it’s a very good idea to call your senators (the Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121) or zip off an email to them. If you live in Oregon, that means Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley. If you live in Washington, it means Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray. If you live in another state, check here for contacts. The danger isn’t that anywhere near a majority of senators agree with Coburn. The danger is that, in their eagerness to get some sort of broad-stroke stimulus package passed as quickly as possible, a majority will be willing to horse-trade away this “small potatoes” stuff. In D.C., that’s how mischief’s made.

It seems silly to even have to bring it up, but here goes: Museums and theaters and aquariums are part of the economy, too. And they’re a potentially multiple-payoff part of the economy. They don’t just create jobs for themselves, they feed tourism, hospitality, construction (which means such things as logging and mining and steelmaking). Increasingly, in our information-driven society, the arts play a big role in driving entire regional economies: People move to cities specifically for their arts scenes. That’s certainly true of Portland. Oh: And all that “beautification”? It creates good, lasting things. The picture at the top of this post is of Timberline Lodge. It’s on Mt. Hood, and it was built during the Great Depression as a project of the federal government’s Works Progress Administration.

The WPA was good to the arts, and in return the arts were good to America. From murals in small-town post offices to architectural treasures like Timberline Lodge to theater and dance and music projects to photographic documentation of the Depression to the wonderful, sadly unfinished, collection of writings about American foodways, our previous mass economic stimulus package had the good sense to recognize that an “economy” is only a financial blueprint of a whole society.

Am I nervous about the economic stimulus plan? You bet. But I’m a lot more nervous about the Tom Coburns of the world than I am about helping a museum keep from falling into the abyss of economic failure. Keeping our shared culture alive, I’m confident, is a very good idea.

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Film, General, Language, Music, Theater, Visual Art

From Lar to PAW: a Monday link and scatter

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Lar Lubovich Dance Company. Photo: ROSEThings have been busy here at Scatter Central the last few days; so busy that we haven’t had a chance to post since we left poor Jean-Paul Belmondo in the clutches of all
those nasty French critics. Never mind, Jean-Paul. As far as we’re concerned here on our far side of the puddle, you’ll always throw a mean left hook.

So, time for a little update.

Lar Lubovitch, a genuine. living and working part of American dance history, shows up Wednesday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, and the White Bird dance series reports it still has good tickets available. The Lubovitch company hasn’t toured in 10 years, and it’s been a good deal longer than that since it’s been in Portland, so this is a good opportunity. The program looks intriguing, and all of the dances are relatively recent: last year’s Jangle, Four Hungarian Dances, set to Bela Bartok’s Rhapsodies #1 and #2 for Violin and Piano; 2000’s Men’s Stories, A Concerto in Ruins, with audio collage and original score by Scott Marshall; and 2007’s Dvorak Serenade, set to Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade in E Major. Plus, Lubovitch will be on hand for a question and answer session after the show.

White Bird has some deals on tickets, including 30-buck Level 3 seats, in addition to its usual student/senior rush tickets two hours before the 7:30 curtain. Details here.

mandy_greer_dare_alla_luce_05Over at his alternate-universe home, Portland Arts Watch (or PAW, as we like to call it), Scatter impresario Barry Johnson has been following the proposed merger between two Portland art stalwarts: the financially struggling Museum of Contemporary Craft and the recently vigorous Pacific Northwest College of Art. Good idea? Bad idea? Necessary idea? In his Monday column in The Oregonian and on Oregon Live, Barry comes down with a case of cautious optimism. Read it here.

And speaking of synchronicity (we were, weren’t we?) my review of the craft museum’s two newest exhibits, by installation artist Mandy Greer and textile artist Darrel Morris, will run on Friday, Jan. 30, in The Oregonian’s A&E section and on Oregon Live. Look for it then.

Did we say alternate-universe homes? We’re embarrassed to reveal that only recently have we discovered the second virtual home of one of our best online friends, the ubiquitous and perspicacious Mighty Toy Cannon of the invaluable Portland arts and culture site Culture Shock. Seems MTC also maintains a fascinating, if less regular, music site called, appropriately, Mighty Toy Cannon. From Nick Lowe and Richard Fontaine to Ruth Brown and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, MTC takes a welcome and refreshing curatorial approach to the wonders of the YouTube musical world. Give it a look, and a listen.

Henry James, by John Singer Sargent, 1913Meanwhile, who’d have guessed that the path to understanding Henry James runs through William Shakespeare’s most infamous stage direction? (That’s “exuent, pursued by a bear,” from The Winter’s Tale, by the way.) The grapevine that slithers through our mutual abode tells us that Part Five of Laura Grimes’ running riff on all things Jamesean, coming Sunday, Feb. 1, in The Oregonian’s books pages and on Oregon Live, is going to be a doozy, complete with Shakespearean bear. In yesterday’s Part Four, Grimes — Friend and Supporter of Art Scatter First Class — gets caught up in a neighborhood book group and unveils a Henry James contest, complete with a prize. Read it here.

Portland’s stages have been simply aburst with fresh new work, thanks to the citywide Fertile Ground festival of new plays. At The Oregonian, Scatter friend Marty Hughley kept up with some of the most recent action in Monday’s paper: Read it here.

Scatter’s been hitting the festival, too. We’ve already run our report on Apollo and Vitriol and Violets. And my review of Northwest Children’s Theater and School‘s new jazz version of Alice in Wonderland also ran in Monday’s Oregonian; read it here.

reGeneration: 50 photographers of Tomorrow, a traveling exhibit that’s just landed in the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, is a chilly but pretty darned fascinating look at 50 young photographers worldwide whose work, the shows’s curators believe, will still be vital and important in the year 2025. My review ran in brief in Monday’s Oregonian; for the much more complete version, see it on Oregon Live here.

Finally, we’ve been amused and bemused by the misadventures of operatic tenor Jon Villars, who walked off the stage during a dress rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, reportedly because he didn’t like the conductor’s tempo. Here at Art Scatter, we confess to skipping out on a show early a time or two over the years, too. But not when we were part of the cast.