Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Tony! Toni! Tone! (and Drammy, too)

5 Comments

By Bob Hicks

Well, it’s celebration season again — and not just because the Puddletown rains are threatening to finally go away (although they’ll surely come another day).

workingdrammy_003No, we’re talking about theater awards season. The Tony Awards, Broadway’s commerce-driven annual extravaganza, are Sunday night. And on Monday night at the Crystal Ballroom, Portland’s far more laid-back and generally convivial version, the Drammy Awards, celebrates the past year’s best on stage. As the R&B hitmakers Tony! Tony! Tone! so memorably put it:

It feels good, yeah

It feels good

Ooohh it feels good

It sure feels good to me.

Maybe not so good to un-nominated shows and the non-winners in the Tony races, where a win or a loss can make or break a show and a well-placed victory can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars, both in the continuing Broadway run and the eventual national tours. Patrick Healy has a good handicapping in Friday morning’s New York Times; read it here. One guess: In the best-musical category, there’ll be a Most Happy Fela! Yes, the ceremony will be on TV. As they say, check your local listings.

Unlike the Tonys, the Drammys don’t announce any finalists: You show up for the party and wait for the winners — often a handful in each category — to be announced. Because almost all of the shows under consideration have already closed, the commercial pressure’s off and it’s more of a celebratory group hug. A couple of years ago Mr. Scatter was awarded a Drammy basically because he’d hung around a long time (like Peter Sellers, he was honored for Being There) and it felt like … well, check those triple-Tony lyrics above.

This is a good party, and it’s free, if you don’t count the drinks. Shmoozing starts at 6 and the ceremony at 7; the suave and funny Michael O’Connell will be master of ceremonies. The Crystal Ballroom is at 1332 West Burnside Street, just a jog away from the Best Big Bookstore in the Known Universe. See you there.

General, Journalism, Laura Grimes

It’s raining on our parade — bring it on

4 Comments

Sweepstakes Float, Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade, 1971

By Laura Grimes

You’re stuck with me. Sorry about that, but it can’t be helped. Mr. Scatter had a wee bit of oral surgery and he’s either high or sleeping. Either condition would produce an interesting blog post, but it ain’t happening.

Like that wasn’t enough, the Small Large Smelly Boy came home from school smelling like squid. Something about biology. He was especially happy to report that he got to pop the eyeballs.

Continue reading It’s raining on our parade — bring it on →

Bob Hicks, General, Poetry

Listen up, Oregon: Your poet laureate is on the air

2 Comments

By Bob Hicks

Some Scatterers may remember this story, from way back in February, when Oregon was searching for a new poet laureate to replace Lawson Fusao Inada, who had filled two terms and was departing gracefully.

clip_image003Mr. Scatter suggested in The Oregonian that, historically speaking, the best qualifications might include a good beard (or at least a good shock of hair) and a cool-sounding name, like Colley Cibber or Seamus Heaney or Blind Harry or, well, Lawson Fusao Inada.

Once again ignoring Mr. Scatter’s unsolicited advice, Gov. Ted Kulongoski instead appointed Portland poet Paulann Petersen, who does not have a beard but does at least have an alliterative name.

Paulann Petersen, Oregon's new poet laureatePetersen seems like an excellent choice, actually. A good poet laureate is, in a sense, an ambassador of the word, and Petersen stressed that point to the committee that recommended her. “Poetry is not the domain of just a few, nor the realm of the elite,” she said. “Poetry is as natural and accessible as heartbeat and breath.” In April, Jeff Baker introduced her well in the pages of The Oregonian, and a few days later the O’s editorial board even chipped in with this nicely considered look at the laureate’s role and how Petersen might approach it.

This afternoon the Oregon Cultural Trust sent notice that Petersen will be the guest Tuesday morning on OPB Radio‘s Think Out Loud public affairs show, with host David Miller. Considering that poetry began as a spoken art form, this seems good and appropriate: We can all gather and listen around the virtual campfire. The show will be broadcast live 9-10 a.m., and rebroadcast 9-10 p.m. The shows are downloadable on the OPB Web site, too.

And that, fellow Scatterers, is the word.

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General, Theater

Monday links: Polaris, Heald, Dixon

2 Comments

By Bob Hicks

On Saturday night, tucked between a Friday night chocolate truffle-making soiree and a groaningly good Sunday night dim sum dinner (the Scatters bought places at both convivial tables last month at the estimable Portland Taiko‘s annual benefit banquet) Mr. Scatter trekked to the studios of Polaris Dance Theatre for another benefit fund-raising event.

Polaris Dance Theatre's "Simple Pleasures" All Access dance programThis time he was working, covering the event for The Oregonian, and it turned out to be remarkable — well worth twisting and ducking twelve blocks through the crowds and police blockades for the Rose Festival’s Starlight Parade. Mr. Scatter does not know if Ivory floats, but pretty much everything else in downtown Portland was either riding a float or watching from the sidewalk as the floats floated by.

The benefit was to support Polaris’s All Access program, which teaches dance to all sorts of people who wouldn’t ordinarily think of dancing: think wheelchairs, paralysis, Down’s Syndrome. A lot of those students performed during the party, and it was eye-opening. Keep an eye out for the extraordinary Wobbly Dance. Read about it here in Oregon Live.

*

DON’T MISS Marty Hughley’s terrific profile of actor Anthony Heald in Sunday’s Oregonian.

Shylock (Anthony Heald) listens in the court. Photo by Jenny Graham.Heald, the Broadway and Hollywood vet who gave it up to move to Ashland and join the acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, tells what prompted him to make the leap into relative obscurity, and why he’s happy as a clam about it. Heald is getting ready to open as Shylock in the festival’s new production of The Merchant of Venice. Interesting side note Marty dug up: Heald is the first Jewish actor ever to play the role on the festival stage.

*

AND DO CATCH local beer baron and Scatter friend John Foyston’s review of K.B. Dixon’s slim novel A Painter’s Life, also from the Sunday O.

K.B. Dixon's "A Painters Life," Inkwater PressBetween epic motorcycle trips and learned sessions with master brewers, Foyston’s been known to paint up a modest storm of his own. And Ken Dixon, who in the great long-ago wrote an occasional witty and perceptive art review for Mr. Scatter at a Large and Important Daily Publication, is a writer with a singular miniaturist approach to the puzzle of the written word. His books are wry and elegant, carefully measured for precise effect, and they maintain a sly satiric distance. At a time when the art world sometimes seems nearly strangled in a tangle of theory and jargon, even the name of Dixon’s artist-hero seems perfectly chosen: Christopher Freeze.

*

ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

— All Access performers from Polaris Dance Theatre’s “Simple Pleasures” program.

— Anthony Heald as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.” Photo: Jenny Graham/Oregon Shakespeare Festival/2010

— K.B. Dixon’s “A Painters Life,” Inkwater Press

General, Laura Grimes, Visual Art

When it comes to art, I got balls

8 Comments

By Laura Grimes

Mr. Scatter: What’s a dirty dog ball doing in the dishwasher?

Mrs. Scatter: Um … getting clean.

Mr. Scatter: We don’t have a dog.

Mrs. Scatter: That’s why it needs to get clean.

*

Points if you can find the clean dog ball.

OK, I confess. I completely took poetic license with that dialogue. In other words, it didn’t happen. Which is exactly what makes it highly unusual.

When Mr. Scatter sees a dirty dog ball in the dishwasher he doesn’t even bother to ask anymore. He just packs more cups and saucers around it, and closes the dishwasher again. He’s used to finding tile pieces and doll legs in the silverware caddy. He knows better than to toss a perfectly good broken plate when it’s sitting on the counter.

This is what you call marriage security. I have to stay married to this man because I could never find someone else who would put up with dirty dog balls in the dishwasher.

Continue reading When it comes to art, I got balls →

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

A circle of women: Eva Lake’s collages

1 Comment

By Bob Hicks

Eva Lake collage, Natalie Wood

William Tell and Robin Hood were fair hands at them. In war, they can be crucial to battle strategies. But in the art world, it was Kenneth Noland who took targets off the practice range and put ’em on the map.

“Yes, I love him. I love him. I’ve always loved him,” Portland artist Eva Lake says of Noland, whose famous target paintings made him an icon of mid-twentieth century New York art. “And I love Josef Albers. I love something inside of something inside of something.”

'Beginning', magna on canvas painting by Kenneth Noland, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1958/Wikimedia CommonsLake has a new exhibit of collages on view at Augen Gallery‘s DeSoto space, and while they draw obviously on Noland, they’re also very much their own thing: not so concerned with Noland’s color-field theories, much more concerned with social meanings.

“I am the one doing this,” she says. “I am the one putting the woman in the target.”

Lots of women, and most of them famous: Lake is fascinated with the allure and effects of celebrity culture, particularly strong and beautiful women who have been vilified or victimized or pushed to extremes in one way or another. Natalie Wood. Tina Turner. Marilyn Monroe. Lana Turner. Carole Lombard. Liz Taylor. Jean Shrimpton. Naomi Campbell. Ann-Margret. Lindsay Lohan. Liza Minnelli. (“It’s not that I relate to Liza; I relate to Sally Bowles.”)

Continue reading A circle of women: Eva Lake’s collages →

General, Laura Grimes, Visual Art

Rain and more rain, sky and more sky

3 Comments

By Laura Grimes

It’s raining and the sky is pretty much a solid dull gray. Gray upon gray. Rain upon rain. End upon end. But the sky doesn’t have to be that dull.

The Pantsless Brother must have seen something different out his window. He sent me this note:

I’m looking out at the sky over the water as the evening fades and all I see is Turner.

Could he have been thinking of this painting?

"The Fighting Temeraire" by J.M.W. Turner, 1838, National Gallery London/Wikimedia Commons

The Fighting Temeraire by J.M.W. Turner, 1839
Oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

That brilliant expanse of sunset sky is saying goodbye to a famous warship that’s seen its last good fight and being carted off on its last voyage to be broken up. Broad, colorful strokes know their bigness and strikingly evoke a sense of loss. The canvas gives room to all that the sky has to say.

Continue reading Rain and more rain, sky and more sky →

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Visual Art

I didn’t know what time it was. Then I met Mingus

11 Comments

By Bob Hicks

Salvador Dali, "The Persistence of Memory," 1931

We live in an age of miracles so commonplace we rarely think to marvel at them. On a quiet cloudy afternoon Mr. Scatter is standing in his kitchen, balancing on a floor made of oak chopped down and milled and planed almost a century ago, but looking new because it’s protected from scuffs and stains by an invisible, magical plastic coating that freezes entropy in its steps. He is pulling dishes out of a robotic mechanical device called an automatic dishwasher, giving them a swipe or two with a colorfully printed cloth woven somewhere in modern industrial China — China! — and putting them into cupboards that except for their compressed-particle composition aren’t much different from the ones you might see in an 18th century English country house. Scant steps away is the little breakfast nook which, well-wired, is Mr. Scatter’s electronic portal to the virtual world (and what, Mr. Scatter wonders, might a virtual world actually be?).

Charles Mingus, playing in Lower Manhattan on the U.S. bicentennial, July 4, 1976. Source: Tom Marcello Webster, New York, USA/Wikimedia CommonsA few more steps into the dining room is the small stereo system on top of which is cradled a sophisticated, powerful little green computing and storage device called an iPod. Ignoring this more recent communications miracle, he’s fed the system a small bright disc that, powered up, fills the room with sounds that the great bassist and composer Charles Mingus, with an ensemble of other innovative musicians, made in 1959 for an album called Mingus Ah Um. Mr. Scatter relaxes as the burnished rigor of a former revolution curls sharply and gently around him — a revolution that, a half-century on, has become a living, cultured comfort. Exactly the same as it was then, and worlds different.

This is our world: Time melts. Salvador Dali is our prophet, and his 1931 melted-clock painting The Persistence of Memory is our holy image.

*

ILLUSTRATIONS:

— Salvador Dali, “The Persistence of Memory,” 1931. Wikimedia Commons

— Charles Mingus, playing in Lower Manhattan on the U.S. bicentennial, July 4, 1976. Source: Tom Marcello Webster, New York, USA/Wikimedia Commons

Food, General, Laura Grimes

Mr. and Mrs. Scatter go shopping

10 Comments

By Laura Grimes

One Stop Shopping Center Where Mr. and Mrs. Scatter Buy Hosiery

(Editors note: For the safety of our readers, Art Scatter insists on maintaining proper blog decorum. Translation: We don’t swear. Mr. and Mrs. Scatter at all times maintain proper blog decorum in their everyday lives, inside and outside the computer screen, in order to set prime examples for their tender Large Smelly Boys and for the general public.

Also, Mrs. Scatter searched the interwebs high and low for a proper photo and finally picked the one above from Wikimedia Commons and then looked at the caption. It’s from a Fred Meyer store in Portland, Oregon! Hullo! Cue the dialogue, puhleez!)

Mrs.: You park over here? I never park over here.

Mr.: Where do you park?

Mrs.: I park over by the sidewalk so I can safely walk into the store without getting run over.

Mr.: This area is closest to the entrance. (Points in a general direction.)

Mrs.: You go in that door? I never go in that door. You just like to park near the coffee shop, don’t you?

Mr.: I never go to the coffee shop.

Mrs.: We’re going to get run over.

Continue reading Mr. and Mrs. Scatter go shopping →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Visual Art

In tough times, SAM’s calculated gamble

4 Comments

By Bob Hicks

The "Art Ladder," the main staircase of the original Robert Venturi portion of the Seattle Art Museum. The visible statues are Chinese funerary statues: two rams and a civilian guardian. May 5, 2007. Photo by Joe Mabel/Wikimedia Commons

The Wall Street cowboys keep whoopin’ it up with other people’s money, the Dow dips and rises like a desperate trout on a line, the economists crunch numbers and announce happily that the recession’s over.

And in the real world, people brace for the worst. Jobs disappear. People take pay cuts and thank their lucky stars they didn’t get pink-slipped. Workers go on unpaid furloughs but keep the same old workloads. Basic benefits get deep-sixed. People simply drop out of the job market.

The state of Oregon trembles at the prospect of a half-billion-dollar shortage — a budget hole that will mean extraordinary cuts that are bound to include deep whacks in state cultural spending. This year’s crisis could make last year’s $1.8 million raid on the Oregon Cultural Trust seem like a mild practical joke. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Doors will shut.

Up north, they’re starting to swing already. In a bold and risky move, the Seattle Art Museum has announced that it will shut down most of its operations for two weeks early next year in a bid to cut costs enough to balance the budget. Janet I. Tu has the story in the Seattle Times. The cuts will also include a seven percent reduction in staffing and hefty salary cuts for top administrators.

“We are taking steps to remedy a tough situation,” said museum director Derrick Cartwright, who plans to take at least a fifteen percent salary cut. “I hope it will not impact the public.”

It will, of course. People will show up during those two weeks and the doors will be locked. Some people will be confused or disturbed or angry. Others will shrug their shoulders and possibly never show up again.

SAM and other major regional museums hold special roles in their communities. Even more than a symphony or opera or ballet or theater company, all of which routinely take breaks between performances, an art museum is looked on as a bulwark of reliability and stability. It’s expected to be open, except on Mondays. Only shutting down or curtailing a public library or a public school system — realities that more and more communities face — has a greater potential impact on a city’s sense of its cultural self.

On the other hand: When times are lean, what can you do but take extraordinary steps? SAM’s move is a calculated gamble. It’s more than budget-balancing, it’s shock therapy. Will potential donors see the move as tough, hard-headed pragmatism, or will they see an organization in trouble and tiptoe away? Obviously SAM is counting on the former: People will see an organization willing to make tough but necessary decisions and will want to put their money on the group that willingly faces reality. SAM could end up a “winner” in the increasingly difficult nonprofit funding race — but at what cost?

What do you think? Is this a smart move? How will it turn out? What can other cultural organizations learn from it, and is Seattle’s situation a harbinger of things to come in Portland? Let’s get the ideas rolling. Comments, please.

*

PHOTO: The “Art Ladder”, the main staircase of the original Robert Venturi portion of the Seattle Art Museum. The visible statues are Chinese funerary statues: two rams and a civilian guardian. May 5, 2007. Photo by Joe Mabel/Wikimedia Commons.

a Portland-centric arts and culture blog