Mr. Scatter has been a writing fool lately, and not all of it for the virtual pages of this illustrious blog.
He has also composed essays that resulted in actual financial recompense, including a trio of pieces for that fine and noble stalwart of legacy media, The Oregonian.
This piece, about Oregon’s search for a new poet laureate, analyzes the situation and reveals the two most important qualifications: a cool name and cool hair. In the old days it also helped if you could rhyme on a dime, but that is less important in our times of free and cut-rate verse. Mr. Scatter is given to understand that sometimes poems don’t rhyme at all!
Mr. Scatter is, in fact, in favor of this position and its title, and he admires Oregon’s retiring laureate, Lawson Fusao Inada, in whose hands the post has been not simply ceremonial but also active and engaged: He has taken poetry and learning to the far corners of the state, in situations ordinary and unusual, and persuasively held that language matters.
Today, by the way, is the final day to nominate someone to be Oregon’s next laureate. Find out how here.
This morning’s Oregonian features this story about the artist Joe Feddersen, whose most recent museum exhibition, Vital Signs, is at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem.
It’s a fine show, worth the trip. And speaking of trips, Mr. Scatter pauses for what might seem a brief diversion but in fact is not.
Mrs. Scatter ceaselessly admonishes Mr. Scatter that he should join a social network club called Facebook. Mr. PAW goes a step further, proclaiming loudly that Mr. Scatter must Tweet.
In fact, Mr. Scatter has trouble with the 200-odd emails that jam his computer daily, and does not fully understand his so-called “smart” telephone. So please drop in on this reconstruction of the interview portion of How Mr. Scatter Got That Story:
Continue reading Mr. Scatter shares the wealth
How did Valentine become linked with chubby cherubs and love arrows, let alone chocolate and Champagne?
How we got here is a puzzle, and yet, here we are, at the Valentine’s Day of modern times, with all of its traditions, temptations and demands. Not, all in all, a bad place to be, unless like a dope you forget all about it and schedule a poker game with the boys instead.
With apologies to the good pigs of Animal Farm, I bring this up because of this morning’s news — the latest bit in a decades-long accumulation, really — that former President Richard Nixon truly hated modern art, in whatever form he encountered it. How frustrating it must have been for him that he couldn’t stem its tide.
Our good friend Barry Johnson, the original Scatterer, who had the idea for this blog and brought it into being before parting amicably to pursue his own arts column and 
Impossible to even think about that now, which must mean Portland’s evolving into a city at last.
Another big player in those midcentury years, sculptor and printmaker Manuel Izquierdo, died in July. Notable (like so many of his contemporaries) as a teacher as well as an artist, he was also one of the artists who connected the Northwest’s sometimes insular scene to international ideas. He was born in Madrid, left Spain during the Civil War, and spent most of his adult life in Portland. But he brought a European spirit with him.
Hoving was a swashbuckler, a showman, a democratizer, maybe even something of a pirate. When he took over the great Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan in 1967, at the age of 35, he declared it moribund and set out to make it the most popular show in town.
The design firm says the Lightcatcher’s concept is “that of a museum turned inside out” to make the building as active on the outside as it will be on the inside.” For those who track such things, the Lightcatcher is also Washington state’s first museum building to earn a silver LEEDS environmental-efficiency designation.
It’s the big yearly benefit for the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, a hands-on arts retreat and workshop center on the Oregon coast, and it always has a generous cooperative feel. Plus, if you play your cards right, you can go home with a good deal on some good art.
The new online news and reviews service is an attempt to bring pretty much the whole Portland area music scene under one big umbrella, from classical to hip-hop to jazz and blues. Tom D’Antoni, a longtime music freelance writer and producer/reporter on OPB’s Oregon Art Beat, is editor-in-chief. Nancy Glass is publisher.
It’s the result of a 10-week workshop with older residents in care centers, listening to their stories and helping them set them down. The results are by turn comic, sentimental, regretful, nostalgic, and sometimes harrowing — the way life looks when you’ve traveled a long way down its path. A cast of good professional actors and musicians is interpreting the stories.
