Category Archives: Music

Bob Hicks, Cities, Dance, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Recession blues: IFCC shuts down

1 Comment

Actor Daniel Beaty in 2008's "Resurrection" at IFCC

Bad news often breaks on Friday afternoons, and today is no exception: The Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center is shutting its doors.

The Oregonian’s D.K. Row has the story on Oregon Live; expect him to explore it in greater depth soon.

Interstate Firehouse Cultural CenterThe city-run Portland Parks & Recreation, which owns the old firehouse and its grounds, announced that the non-profit IFCC’s board has voted to cease operations because of persistent deficits, in spite of decent attendance at events.

The center’s failure is a blow to Portland’s alternative and multicultural arts scenes. Over the years IFCC has had its ups and downs, but since it began in 1982 it’s been a welcoming space for emerging theater and dance companies, visual artists, musicians, and community events. Artists who often felt shut out of downtown spaces found a congenial home here, as did North and Northeast Portland residents who discovered the joys of having a vital art center close to home.

The shutdown takes effect May 1, but existing rental contracts through June 30 will be honored. That means, presumably, that upcoming shows by Rose City Vaudeville and Vagabond Opera, as well as IFCC’s share of Disjecta‘s Portland2010 biennial art exhibit, will go on as planned.

IFCC’s problems reflect the difficulties that the prolonged international economic crisis presents to cultural organizations, especially small and midsized ones. Put simply, everyone’s strapped for cash, and traditional sources are either tapped out or stretched thin. IFCC’s budget is built on just 20 percent earned income, the rest coming from foundation, corporate, individual and government grants. For everyone, those are getting tougher and tougher to nail down.

Read the parks department’s press release after the jump:

Continue reading Recession blues: IFCC shuts down →

Food, General, Laura Grimes, Music

The dirty little secret behind the dirty little secret martinis

1 Comment

Dirty little secret martini/Wikimedia CommonsI have a dirty little secret. It’s so dirty I don’t even add commas between adjectives.

It starts out innocently enough. I poke around the fridge and come across a jar with a few floaty thingies and a bunch of brine. And I realize the fridge is full of jars with a few floaty thingies and a bunch of brine. And then I determine to do something about it.

“Honey, are you thirsty?”

“Why?”

“We have too many floaty thingies.”

Mr. Scatter gives me that look through his eyebrows. He mildly shakes his head.

“We have a problem here!” I get a little defensive. I’m a bit sensitive about My Issue and I’m looking for some sympathy. Mr. Scatter knows I have a dreadful disability. Making fun of such an acute condition is not humane.

Continue reading The dirty little secret behind the dirty little secret martinis →

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, General, Journalism, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Art Scatter officially runs off at mouth

2 Comments

prolific-blogger-award

Here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we’re identifying proudly these days with the good townswomen of River City, Iowa, in The Music Man: “Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little, cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more.”

With emphasis on the “talk a lot.”

Thanks to the silver-tongued Mead Hunter of Blogorrhea and The Editing Room, who generously passed this honor along to us, we are now recipients of the coveted Prolific Blogger Award, a sort of Oscar for best supporting prattler. In other words: You can’t shut us up. Mrs. Scatter made passing reference to this blogospheric milestone in this post, in which she got all sentimental and teary-eyed over Mr. Mead’s enshrining of her with the honorific “retinue.”

But we blather.

Here’s what it’s all about. Adhering to the biblical code of sevens (like Joseph and his dream-interpretations), the Prolific Blogger Award moves in waves. Each recipient must in turn pay it forward to seven other bloggers who feed the beast regularly. They must also link to the original PBA post (we did that above; it’s on the blog Advance Booking) and, most confoundingly, hook up with the mysteriously named Mister Linky.

Our friend and benefactor Mr. Mead has noted the dismaying phenomenon of once-prolific bloggers who have fallen by the wayside, some no doubt waylaid by the strumpet sirens of Twitter, Buzz and Facebook; others perhaps realizing that there is Life on the Other Side. Yet we found many good and noble blogs worthy of this award. Without further ado ….

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN


Noble Viola. Charles Noble, assistant principal violist for the Oregon Symphony, subtitles his blog Life on the Working End of the Viola, and that’s the view he gives you: the world of art music from the inside. It’s smart, provocative, sometimes funny, and almost always illuminating. A good musician isn’t always a good writer. Noble is. Like Lenny Bernstein, he knows how to use words to get inside sounds.

Rose City Reader. You’d think RCR would already own the franchising rights to the Prolific Blogger Award. A busy lawyer by day, she’s a compulsive reader, list-maker and blogger by night (or maybe early morning). Her reading is catholic, roaming from classics to contemporary lit to arcane food-and-drink books to history, politics, and the occasional P.G. Wodehouse caper. And she writes about her literary adventures with wit and savvy independence.

Portland Through My Lens. Having completed (with occasional additions) the terrific Fifty Two Pieces, in which she and a friend spent a year writing about art and artists connected to the Portland Art Museum, LaValle Linn has picked up her camera and embarked on this visual adventure, recording life and images around and about Portland’s streetcar line. Following it is like taking your morning coffee in a different little hangout every day.

Portland Architecture. If you build it, they will argue. Brian Libby’s ambitious blog serves the dual purpose of keeping up with the city’s maze of architectural news and providing a platform for architects and planners and citizen-advocates to vent on issues as broad-ranging as neighborhood design and the fates of Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Quarter.

Powell’s Books Blog. We aren’t sure who actually puts this together, but Portland’s iconic bookstore runs an excellent blog. It’s wide-ranging, with lots of topics and lots of guest bloggers, often writers with fresh books on the market. Sure, it’s a commercial blog, but it pops with good writing and stimulating ideas. You can never keep up with what’s going on in the publishing biz, but this is a good start.

Splattworks. Playwright Steve Patterson’s blog begins with matters theatrical but often veers sharply into other obsessions, from photography to guitars to the inanities of the political world (on which he can be witheringly caustic). Smart, funny, passionate; a blog of admirable exasperations.

Eva Lake. A lively checking-point for gallery hoppers. The artist and journalist Eva Lake, whose Art Focus program on KBOO-FM features often fascinating interviews with Portland artists and curators, tracks what’s happening on the city’s art scene.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

The meaning (or not) of Tick Tack Type

Leave a comment

tick-cropped

What’s it all about, Alfie?

After a Friday evening of loosely organized chance in the company of Third Angle New Music Ensemble (the program included Terry Riley‘s endlessly mutable In C; California composer Mark Applebaum‘s similarly open-ended exploration of alternative musical “reading,” The Metaphysics of Notation; and Portland composer David Schiff‘s exhilaratingly jazz-charged Mountains/ Rivers, which takes inspiration from In C) we’re feeling a bit unmoored.

Since we’re in free-float anyway, this seems like a good time to check in on Imago.

One of the terrific side benefits when Jerry Mouawad develops a new show is that he thinks long and hard about what he’s doing, and then he writes about it online. Anyone who wants to take a peek can get an inside look into one of Portland’s most fertile creative minds. Mouawad, Imago’s co-founder with Carol Triffle, spills his thoughts on the company blog. The spilling isn’t always easy, because, ever aware of the virtues of theatrical suspense, Mouawad really wants to hold onto the beans.

“I assume this blog is vague since I am not divulging any of the action,” he writes about his new show, Tick Tack Type. “I apologize for this, but I am doing this for your sake (that is if you plan to see the work.) By discussing the action I am robbing you of the experience of it. What I see in an action may not be what you see. I can say this about Tick Tack Type: in many ways it’s about “seeing” or “not seeing.”
Continue reading The meaning (or not) of Tick Tack Type →

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

39 steps to a new and better Mr. Scatter

4 Comments

Leif Norby on the lam in "Alfred Hitchcock's 'The 39 Steps'" at Portland Center Stage. Photo: OWEN CAREY

It’s been a busy few days around Scattertown.

First, on Thursday night, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter took a break from the gala festivities of Science Night at Irvington Elementary School to scoot up the hill to Talisman Gallery on Alberta, where their friend Cibyl Shinju Kavan was having an opening of new assemblages. Scrolls, bamboo, feathers and rocks figure into the work, which is quite pleasing.

Cibyl Shinju Kavan at Talisman GalleryThen, at midday Friday, the Scatter duo showed up at the Gerding Theater in the Armory to see dancer Linda Austin and her cohort J.P. Jenkins tear up the joint with a fascinating visual, musical and movement response to Mark Applebaum‘s elegant series of notational panels, The Metaphysics of Notation, which has been ringing the mezzanine railings above the Gerding lobby for the past month. Every Friday at noon someone has been interpreting this extremely open-ended score, and this was the final exploration. California composer Applebaum will be one of the featured artists this Friday at the Hollywood Theatre in the latest concert by Third Angle New Music Ensemble, the band of contemporary-music upstarts for whom Mrs. Scatter toils ceaselessly.

Austin and Jenkins began by racing around the mezzanine and literally playing the hollow-steel guard rail, which was quite fun. They moved from pre-plotted base to pre-plotted base, always coming up with surprises, as the small crowd followed like Hamelin rats mesmerized by a piper’s tune. Mr. Scatter enjoyed the red fuzzy bargain-store microphone and the Sneezing Chorus and especially the shower of discarded clothing items floating down from the mezzanine into the path of the startled flower-delivery guy in the lobby below. Mr. Scatter took no photos, partly because the little camera doohickey on his cellular telephone is pretty much useless for anything more complicated than an extreme closeup snapshot of an extremely still object, and partly because he was just having too much fun to bother. But Lisa Radon of ultra was more disciplined and took some fine shots which you can ogle on her site.

On Friday evening it was back to the Gerding for opening night of Portland Center Stage‘s comedy Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The 39 Steps,’ which takes the 1935 movie thriller and blows it to preposterous proportions.

Continue reading 39 steps to a new and better Mr. Scatter →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Music

Dick Bogle, jazz fan deluxe, dies at 79

2 Comments

UPDATE: Stuart Tomlinson and Kimberly A.C. Wilson have this good obituary on the Metro cover of this morning’s Oregonian. Good pictures at the link, too.

Dick Bogle's jazz blog home page

Dick Bogle was a Portland cop, and a television newscaster, and a newspaper reporter, and a city councilman, and he distinguished himself in all four fields, partly by being a pioneer African American locally in each.

But I like to think of him as one of Portland’s most devoted jazz aficionados, a man who loved the music, had strong opinions about it, and spread the good word about it whenever and however he could. He took wonderful black-and-white photographs of jazz greats and local luminaries in the clubs. He was Oregon correspondent for Downbeat. And he reviewed new releases on his own jazz blog.

Bogle died this morning at age 79. Willamette Week’s Hank Stern has the story here, complete with excerpts from a short profile WW published in 2007. Bogle’s wife, the singer Nola Bogle, said the cause of death was congestive heart failure.

Dick Bogle was one of those people of whom you can honestly say, this city is a better place because he lived here. I didn’t really know him, although I talked with him a few times. But I’ll miss knowing he’s around. I wish I knew where to find some of those jazz photos, so I could show you how he saw his city.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Singing for Haiti: a Portland benefit

1 Comment

Seems like every time something cataclysmic happens, artists show up to help out. Like a lot of other people they know they can’t do much, but they also know they can do something. And often, because this is what they do best, they put on a show.

A painting by Leslie Ann Butler will be used as cover art for the benefit CD "Portland Sings for Haiti."Especially when you’re talking about the local artists who are the heart and soul of any city’s arts scene, that often means that people who barely have two dimes to rub together are among the ones who jump in and get something done. They raise awareness (pardon Mr. Scatter for employing that overused phrase) and they raise money. I’m not sure why performing artists and restaurant people so often take the lead on this sort of thing, but maybe it’s because both work in businesses where they become acutely aware that nothing gets done right unless everyone works together.

The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley has announced one such benefit project, a benefit CD called Portland Sings for Haiti. Marty’s story is interesting, especially in relating how actor Patty Price-Yates got the thing rolling from her own sickbed, so click on the link. The CD, which features cuts by such leading lights as Storm Large, Susannah Mars, Julianne Johnson and Isaac Lamb, will be available Feb. 22, and you can pre-order at cd baby. The money will go to Mercy Corps for its efforts to help Haiti dig out from the rubble of its massive earthquakes.

Singer-actor Corey Brunish, a participant and one of the project’s organizers, reminds me that you can get a sneak peek (or an early ear) at the music starting at 7 tomorrow night, Thursday the 11th, at Wilf’s. Several of the CD’s musicians will be on hand for a cabaret-style show, and it’s a two-fer benefit. Proceeds from the $20 admission will benefit the musical-theater company Stumptown Stages. Plus, you can be one of the first people to buy the CD, and that money goes to Mercy Corps.

Sounds like a good night out.

*

ILLUSTRATION: This painting by Leslie Ann Butler is cover art for the benefit CD “Portland Sings for Haiti.”

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

This ‘Cosi’ is a farce. You got a problem with that?

1 Comment

Cosi fan Tutti. Photo: Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

Chatting with a friend in the lobby of Keller Auditorium during halftime of Portland Opera’s Cosi fan tutte on Friday night, Mr. Scatter became aware of a controversy he hadn’t realized existed.

“Audiences tend to love this production,” my friend, an exceptionally knowledgeable follower of the opera world, sighed. “And critics tend to hate it.”

Up to this point I’d been having a rather jolly time myself, although I knew the production, which originated in 2003 at Santa Fe Opera and emphasizes brisk farcical shtick, wasn’t strictly traditional. So I stuck his comment in the back of my mind, returned to my seat for the second act, and continued to have a jolly time along with the rest of the audience, right up to the curtain call.

And this morning I did a little researching. It’s true. A lot of critics (though by no means all) have found this Cosi distressingly populist. “A gag-filled, vulgar romp,” J.A. Van Sant wrote in Opera Today, reviewing Santa Fe’s 2007 revival. That might sound like a good ad quote, but he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Since Van Sant seems to speak for a lot of other critics, let’s give him a little more room to explain himself:

Politely put, (stage director James) Robinson’s Cosi was a gag-filled, vulgar romp. Such is not Mozart’s Cosi, an elegant, ironic comedy – not an ambiguous study of human nature requiring Regietheatre treatment, as is the present day style with this piece. To make Cosi into slapstick comedy combined with faux psychological exploration of the characters is to miss the point.

Essentially a bittersweet comedy of character types, set to some of Mozart’s most exhilarating and beautiful music, Cosi indeed has dark edges that serve to heighten amusement over the foibles of human nature.

You shouldn’t overdo the darkness, Van Sant continued, but you shouldn’t sacrifice the elegance to showy gimmicks, either.

A couple of other points emerged from other critics.

  • First, the not-too-reluctantly philandering sisters in this play (the story is by Lorenzo da Ponte, who also wrote the librettos for Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni) and their gentleman-and-an-officer lovers have traditionally been played by older singers, suggesting that these erotic foibles are less the result of sheer youthful exuberance and more of something innate in human nature.
  • Second, the play is very much about social convention at a level of society in which adherence to social convention is extremely important. These characters, if they’re going to sin, would do so cautiously, with a sense of decorum, not with casual friskiness. To give Cosi the sheen of 1950s naughtiness that this production does is historically misleading and saps some of the intellectual vigor from an opera that has a far subtler soul.

Objections noted. And on this one, I’m going to side with the audience.

Continue reading This ‘Cosi’ is a farce. You got a problem with that? →

Bob Hicks, Food, General, Music

Why Oregon beats Pennsylvania this time of year

1 Comment

Punxsatawney Phil says bundle up. www.groundhog.org

This chilling report just in (OK, actually it was in early this morning, but Mr. Scatter was busy) from the Official Website of the Punxsatawney Groundhog Club: Looks like Phil’s laid a six-week egg. Temperature in downtown Punxsatawney at 5:06 p.m. Pacific time: 31 degrees. Not too bad for Pennsylvania this time of year, actually.

Long, long ago Mr. Scatter lived within a groundhog’s toss of Punxsatawney — all right, it was 260 miles, but cold is cold — on the banks of the beautiful Chenango River. He stored quart bottles of locally brewed soda pop on his back porch. One morning he discovered twelve neat popsicles sticking up from a dozen bottlenecks, each crowned with a neat crimped cap. That’s what Phil’s talkin’ about.

Here at Scatter World Headquarters we haven’t watched Groundhog Day this season, but Mr. Scatter maintains the foolish fiction that given as many do-overs as Bill Murray got, he could play a mean piano, too.

*

Instead of breaking off popsicles, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter donned their short-sleeve Hawaiian shirts last night and ambled over to Kaul Auditorium to catch the Kronos Quartet‘s three-encore show, presented by Friends of Chamber Music. A wonderful concert, which our friend David Stabler wrote about compellingly here for The Oregonian.

With music by a young Serbian woman (Alexandra Vrebalov, born 1970), a youngish Polish woman (Hanna Kulenty, born 1961) and an elder statesman of new music (Terry Riley, born 1935), plus fresh arrangements of a couple of moving traditional songs, the concert gave hope to the proposition that, nearly a decade into the 21st century, the music world is at last moving beyond the 19th.

Mr. Scatter has long thought of Kronos as invaluable curators of music from around the globe, bringing to our attention a wealth of sound we might otherwise miss. Last night’s concert underscored that. But we were hearteningly reminded as well that these are also superb musicians who have developed an uncanny ensemble sound. Someday we can tell our doting Scatter grandchildren that we were there when the great Kronos was more than just a recorded memory.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Journalism, Music

Link of the day: ‘You are not a gadget’

1 Comment

This morning’s most fascinating read in Scatterville was Michiko Kakutani’s review in the New York Times of You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, the new book by Silicon Valley insider Jaron Lanier.

you_are_not_a_gadgetlargeLanier, one of the people who brought you virtual reality, has been worrying the past few years about something he calls “digital Maoism,” the sort of edge-polishing collectivism driving Wikipedia and the Google search engine. Lanier argues some interesting things:

  • Basic software engineering decisions shape how we use and think about the Internet, so it’s good to get them right.
  • Free is not necessarily a very good price: It can kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
  • Anonymity undermines the Web, and probably the culture at large.

Kakutani expounds:

“(A)nonymity has helped enable the dark side of human nature. Nasty, anonymous attacks on individuals and institutions have flourished, and what Mr. Lanier calls a ‘culture of sadism’ has gone mainstream. In some countries anonymity and mob behavior have resulted in actual witch hunts. ‘In 2007,’ Mr. Lanier reports, ‘a series of Scarlet Letter postings in China incited online throngs to hunt down accused adulterers. In 2008, the focus shifted to Tibet sympathizers.’ “

Lanier and Kakutani and probably all of you reading this know a lot more about these issues than Mr. Scatter does. The proprietor does not Tweet, does not have a Facebook account, and, let’s face it, basically publishes dead tree-style ramblings in cyberspace (for free). What Mr. Scatter does not understand about computer engineering and even the possibilities of his woefully underutilized “smart” phone is pretty much everything.

Yet parts of this argument make sense — the dangers inherent in the loss of authorship, for instance, in an online world in which the going price for any and all information is free. Or the triumph of marketing over value in a world where worth is measured in number of hits (although marketing has had a huge impact on intellectual and popular success since long before the Internet). Certainly in the sobering spectacle of new media eating up old media and spitting it out, even though new media relies for most of its content on the production of old media, which it is killing off. How much sense does that make?

The collectivism that Lanier sees in the cyberworld is reflected in our broader cultural and political lives, as well. Surely this sort of mob mentality contributed to our squishy, nobody-likes-it response to the global economic disaster: Good and possibly superior ideas from isolated corners were steamrollered in the rush to create something that the majority, or a majority of prominent stakeholders, could reluctantly agree on. Ditto for health care reform. Then again, is any of this new?

For a counterbalancing view on Lanier’s book, take a look at Michael Agger’s review in Canada’s National Post. Agger isn’t drinking the Kool-Aid, at least not more than a few sips:

Lanier has good instincts: We need to be wary of joining in the wisdom of the crowds, of embracing the growing orthodoxy that making cultural products free will benefit the actual producers of those cultural products. But his critique is ultimately just a brand of snobbery. Lanier is a romantic snob.

That’s the nut. But Agger’s overview is much more nuanced, and worth a look.

***************

teddyGoodbye, Teddy Pendergrass: The great, smooth soul singer from Philadelphia died Wednesday night. He was 59 and had been treated for colon cancer. Paralyzed in a 1982 car accident, he never stopped bringing what Jon Pareles, in his obituary for the Times, called his “gospel dynamic to bedroom vows.”

He was a great popular singer, and he’s going to be missed in a lot of ways. How many children owe their existence to Teddy Pendergrass’s voice spinning on the turntable in the background?