Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

The running-out of the bulls and bears

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The Kipton Art Bull Market Rocket/artdaily.org
The Kipton Art Bull Market Rocket/artdaily.org

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That rip-snorting bull? Old hat. Wall Street has a new symbol of wild optimism: a rocket blasting off merrily into space, presumably taking the Dow on a gravity-free ride into the heavens.

Artdaily.org reports that sculptors Mark and Diane Weisbeck have created a new, “21st century symbol for the Bull Market,” 13 feet tall and made of stainless steel.

Icarus, engraving, Hendrick Goltzius/Wikimedia CommonsNobody seems to remember anymore what the fabled bull and bear stand for, the story comments, and they got that right: If investors and manipulators hadn’t conveniently forgot that the bull periodically and inevitably transforms into a bear, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. Optimism is a lovely thing, but not when it doesn’t have its feet on the ground.

I’m going to miss the bull and bear. They had a sense of balance, of yin and yang. And they were rooted: They had a living, breathing physicality that offered the comforting illusion that the marketplace was based on some sort of reality. This rocket ship? I don’t feel the weight of gravity in the image. And I want a sense that what goes up will also come down.

So here’s an idea. If we’re going to have a new bull, OK. But the Weisbecks need to give us a new bear, too. Under the circumstances, I suggest a 13-foot-tall stainless steel Icarus.

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Remembering Merce in his element: the vast Northwest

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Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Nearly Ninety. Photo: Anna Finke/2009

Dance critic and historian Martha Ullman West has spent a lot of time thinking about Merce Cunningham, the great 20th century dancer and choreographer who rethought what dance means by  introducing chance as a primary element in the mix. Cunningham, who was born and raised 90 miles from Portland in the small town of Centralia, Wash., died July 26 at age 90. Martha considers, among other things, the effect that the Pacific Northwest had on Cunningham’s art.

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Merce Cunningham. Photo: Mark Seliger/2009 Merce Cunningham died the other day, in his sleep it is said, which means he was still hard at work at the age of 90. Artists do, you know, work in their sleep, as well as their waking hours. There is no rest for the psyche.

He died in New York on Sunday, July 26, at his home in Greenwich Village. In his obituary for the New York Times, Alastair Macaulay, who is working on a book on Cunningham, called him “always a creature of New York.”

That’s not untrue, at least from 1939 on, when Cunningham joined Martha Graham‘s company. But it’s only part of the story.

Merce, in fact, was one of ours. So was Robert Joffrey. So are Trisha Brown and Mark Morris, who, thank God, are still around. All are natives of the Pacific Northwest, specifically Washington State.

I believe that Merce’s use of space, his sense of infinite possibility, his connection to nature, his conviction that you can do anything that pleases you on stage as long as it works aesthetically, came from the ethos of this part of the world. You see those elements in the poetry of Gary Snyder, who like Merce and composer John Cage, Merce’s long-term partner in life and art, was influenced by Zen thinking. You see them, certainly, in the work of Trisha Brown.

And, to bring it home to Portland, you see it in the choreography and technique of Mary Oslund, who studied with Cunningham and several members of his company, including the late Viola Farber. Oslund remembers being at dinner with Merce when White Bird presented the company (which, God love them, they did twice, in 2001 and 2004). Merce talked with her about Farber, Mary says, in his “diminutive and humble way.”

“He gave us a lot of permission,” Susan Banyas told dance maker Gregg Bielemeier when she heard the news of Merce’s death.

Continue reading Remembering Merce in his element: the vast Northwest →

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Grace, Falling Like Rain: Rick Bartow, the original story

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Rick Bartow, True Dog. Courtesy FROELICK GALLERYReaders of Laura Grimes’ recent post “Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story” have noted that the link to the original story by Bob Hicks, which ran on Sunday, March 3, 2002 in The Oregonian, didn’t work. That was a link to the Multnomah County Library version; the story isn’t available on The Oregonian’s Web site, Oregon Live. So here it is, unfortunately without Stephanie Yao’s wonderful photographs that ran with the original.

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GRACE, FALLING LIKE RAIN

“One thing I hold true is that we’re made up as much of what we’ve lost as of what we’ve gained,” Rick Bartow says, smudging out a streak of pastel crayon with the palm of his hand. “And what is erasing but a metaphor for that?”

A winter rain is snapping against the roof and windows of the Oregon artist’s main studio in South Beach, across the Yaquina Bay bridge from downtown Newport. The little building groans in the wind, which bellows and shrieks and cradles the place, rocking it in a rhythm that is fierce and exhilarating and lulling and somehow timeless. Inside is a cocoon.

Moving quickly and efficiently, Bartow tapes three large sheets of paper side by side by side on the wall. “I’ve tried working on a single sheet,” he says, “and it’s really difficult for me. I have scattered energy, sort of like when I’m talking. I jump all over the place.” He puts a few rough pencil marks on each sheet. Lines, dots, straight, curved. Taking a stick of charcoal in his hand, he flattens his palm and smears a streak of gray against the first sheet. “Just to make damn sure I’m not pussyfooting around,” he says. “I have to do something decisive.” Then he slaps handprints on the other two sheets and smears them around.

He’s just eliminated the Big Empty.

Art has begun.

Continue reading Grace, Falling Like Rain: Rick Bartow, the original story →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Hot and sweaty at Conduit Dance: Don’t think, just feel

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Here’s what I think. I think we think too much.

Sometimes.

About art.

Linda Austin. Photo: Daniel AddyAbout visual art, definitely. We’ve created a mumbo-jumbo priesthood of commentary and pretend the intellectual abstraction is more important than the physical experience of the art itself. Which it is, but only sometimes. And far less often than the priesthood likes to think.

Also about dance, which on the face of it is about as physical and sensual as an art form can be: One’s body is one’s art. That doesn’t mean dance isn’t driven by ideas, from folk styles to ballet and modern and the most contemporary expression. Yet in no other art form is it so literally true that an artist creates a body of work.

On Friday night Portland was happily busting the spine of an unPortland-like heat wave, but the word hadn’t drifted up to the fourth floor of downtown’s Pythian Building, where giant fans were whooshing to keep the sticky air circulating at Conduit Dance. Conduit’s in a bit of a pickle financially right now, and so it’s putting on a series of benefit performances this weekend and next, and Friday was opening night.

A hot and sticky affair, as it turned out: For a change, the audience got a feel for what it’s like to be out on the floorboards, sweating under the lights. Because so much of the audience was made up of dance people, anyway, it just helped to create a here-we-are-together mood. And because the wet heat had the mildly giddy effect of a low-grade fever, it encouraged dispensing with analysis and just experiencing the thing. As Paul McCartney put it, Let it be.

For years I’ve watched Linda Austin, a smart and funny woman who’s established herself as one of the city’s leading contemporary performers, and for years I just haven’t quite got what she’s up to. Linda’s out there, and I’ve spent a bit of time trying to figure out where “there” is and exactly why she’s taking us to it. In that suss-out-the-puzzle sense her Friday night performance, a solo study for her work-in-progress Bandage a Knife, was pretty familiar in its unfamiliarity: Who besides Linda knows what that chanting and waving of lights was all about?

Continue reading Hot and sweaty at Conduit Dance: Don’t think, just feel →

General, Journalism, Laura Grimes, Music, Visual Art

Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story

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Rick Bartow: Crow's Delusion (He Who Must Be Obeyed). Courtesy Froelick Gallery

By LAURA GRIMES

Today my current first husband and I can legally drink. We’ve been married 21 years.

We can’t legally drink and celebrate together because I’m spending our special day with my mom. But it’s not the special days that make a marriage special. It’s the everyday little things. Like laughing and teasing. Like coffee together in the morning.

The first Christmas we spent together, my current first husband gave me a coffee maker. Sweet? I was pissed. But I gotta admit, that coffee maker was our loyal morning friend for 20 years, part of many a happy moment. Good memories are made of many a happy moment. Good marriages, too.

There’s one moment, though, that I will always hold dear.

***

My current first husband wrote a post recently and described a certain look in my eyes. Damn, but he beat me to it. Because little did he know that I have been working on a certain story that has just such a look, albeit a tad bit different and a shade bit farther … and on a certain somebody else. Actually, I’ve been tooling this story around in my head for many years. But a recent event swept through my brain like a tornado in Kansas and collected all the disparate thoughts, lifted them up, swirled them around and plunked them down again.

***

I met Rick Bartow a few weeks ago, and now I understand.

I understand a story I first started hearing years ago.

Rick Bartow. Courtesy Froelick GalleryIt was early 2002. Mr. Scatter and I and the large smelly boys – who were not so large and not so smelly back then – were driving several hours north to visit family. To visit my mom, in fact. The not-so-large not-so-smelly boys must have been blessedly quiet in the backseat for a long stretch of road. We’ll just chalk that up to divinity and not ask why.

Mr. Scatter had recently visited Rick at his home and studio in Newport, Ore., for research to write a story. He had been typing away on it for a few days. But he was at loose ends. I could tell. Because he was talking about it incessantly, as much to figure out a throughway for the story as he was just plum excited.

He was trying to get his arms around a giant octopus and he hadn’t quite figured out how to land it.

***

After meeting Rick and seeing him perform, now I know why. Rick and two of his musician buddies did a show with Portland Taiko on July 2. Mr. Scatter is on the board of Portland Taiko, so even though I was looking forward to finally hearing Rick, I figured it would be an evening of smiling and shaking hands. I fretted about taking the right handbag.

It had been a blistering hot day and the event was taking place on the roof of the DeSoto Building in the Pearl, above Froelick Gallery. Frying came to mind. But by evening, the temperature had cooled to balmy, a slight breeze had kicked in and the sky was an uncanny even blue, deepening darker as the night wore on and lending a crisper backdrop for a half moon that lifted and slowly shifted through the show. It was magic.

Rick was even better. He was immediately open and generous, a magnetic guy who took a blues song and elevatored it down to deep dark basements faster than you can push a button. His songs were earthy and mystical and wrapped in rich, complex storytelling. He didn’t hold back.

What a gift. He talked of his past substance abuse, Vietnam, friends who have died, the beginnings of songs, the ends of songs. He wasn’t afraid of ugly. And he wasn’t afraid of sweet.

His stories unspooled for anyone lucky enough to have a seat. Friends. Strangers. He opened up for everyone. It was the gift he gave.

Afterward, Mr. Scatter and I chatted with him. I asked if he ever played at the Blues Festival, which was happening at the same time at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. He said no, he just can’t take the crowds. His nerves get to him.

I understand that, too. He seemingly wears all of his nerves on the outside. He takes in everything, absorbs it, feels it, and gives it back. For someone to perform like that, he must be perceptive to the slightest vibrations. And when you’re that sensitive, when all your pores are open to everything that comes in, crowds can be overwhelming. It’s too much all at once. There’s a lot of good in there, but the bad comes with it.

I want to say that Rick is a big man, but that doesn’t sound right. He’s a big spirit. At once gentle and rough.

Continue reading Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story →

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Music

Boll weevil blues: Singing the heat wave away

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What makes your head so red?
Tell me, what makes your head so red?
I been workin’ so long in the hot hot sun,
it’s a wonder that I ain’t dead.

My father used to sing that sometimes, sleeves rolled up, shirt open at the collar, head tilted back for the high notes. Just a snatch of a song, I always figured, part of something bigger, but that was the part he sang. So do I, now, when it sounds in my head, a short burst that makes me think of high heat and hard work in fields that I have rarely known.

Hot enough for ya?Today, in the throes of an infernal Pacific Northwest heat wave that has the thermometer rattling up toward 107, that red-baked head is on my mind again. Kind of blue, kind of hot, an oddly triumphal moan, mixed of resignation and endurance and somehow coming out on the sweet side of things: I ain‘t dead.

I come from a singing family. (And a whistling family, too, for that matter.)

My father tended toward old country-style things, like “Goodnight, Irene”:

“Sometimes I live in the country,
sometimes I live in town.
Sometimes I take a great notion
to jump into the river and drown.”

Or “Froggy Went a-Courtin'”:

“Without my uncle Rat’s consent,
I wouldn’t marry the president!”

On rare occasions he’d pull out his old battered guitar and strum. More often he’d just start to sing.

My mother had a pretty, Jo Stafford sort of voice, and her songs were more from the pop charts, often with a ’40s derivation, definitely pre-rock ‘n’ roll:

“Shrimp boats a-comin’, there’ll be dancin’ tonight!”
“It was fiesta down in Mexico, and so I stopped a while to see the show …”
“Your Daddy’s rich, and your Mama’s good-lookin’ …”


My father is 93 now, and my mother is 89, and they don’t sing much anymore: The old vocal cords just aren’t what they used to be. But for most of my life I remember singing as an utterly casual yet plainly important part of their lives. They had seven kids and not a lot of money and precious little time to themselves, but singing they could do. Singing was a pleasure, and to most of their children they passed it along. To me they even passed along a certain taste. I’m much more likely to start singing “Hey, good lookin’, whatcha got cookin’?” or “If I’m gonna marry it’s the butcher boy for me!” or even a rollicking old church tune than anything by the Beatles, much less Madonna or Cheryl Crow or Smashing Pumpkins.

Our town was surrounded by dairy and berry and bean farms and it rained a lot and in winter we got silver frosts with icicles hanging like troll-knives from the eaves. Summers were short and warm and grew things that got us out in the fields, rustling through strawberry bushes to earn clothes money for the coming school year. The music in the fields tended toward the tin beat of transistor radios and pop-40 tunes: “Call my baby lollipop, tell you why, his kiss is sweeter than an apple pie …”

People made their own music. That’s always been and always will be, despite the corporate push to turn us all into spectators for carefully controlled musical spectacles. (Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the masses; apparently he never saw MTV.) People made music at church. They made music on the porch or in the back yard. Kids gathered on sidewalks and chanted their proto-raps: “Made ya look, ya dirty crook, ya stole your mother’s pocketbook!” “Miss Suzy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell, Miss Suzy went to Heaven, the steamboat went to Hello operator, please give me number nine  …”

Continue reading Boll weevil blues: Singing the heat wave away →

Environment, General, Laura Grimes

Scorching temperature: The long and the shorts of it

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Desperate times call for desperate measures.Here in the Art Scatter sauna we wouldn’t stoop to wearing a muu muu, but we have fantasized about it.

Are we the only ones to pitch all decorum in this stifling heat? One of the large smelly boys* walks around in boxer shorts and the cat sleeps on the dining table.

I know. Gross. But I don’t have the heart to discourage it. The cat knows where to find the best air flow.

But back to the boxer shorts. They remind me of the mom who once told me that they have a rule in their house.

“If the blinds are up then everyone has to wear at least underwear.”

(pause)

“And that goes for everyone.”

— Laura Grimes

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*Identity has been blurred to protect the guilty.

Bob Hicks, Environment, General

Temporarily incapacitated: Please go away

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Old Sol, with spots. NASA/Wikimedia Commons

The temperature on the surface of old Sol, often referred to as “the sun,” is 5,510 degrees Celsius.

The temperature in Portland, Oregon, United States of America, western and northern hemispheres, planet Earth, is 105 degrees Fahrenheit.

Close enough.

Art Scatter gives up.

If something eventually gives, we will emerge from the basement.

Until then, we are OUT OF ORDER.

Our apologies.

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Television, Theater

Farewell, frontiersman: Dallas McKennon, 1919-2009

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One day in 1978 a shadow fell over my desk at the old Oregon Journal in downtown Portland. I looked up and there stood a giant of a mountain man, beard down to his chest, big grin peeking though from the bramble of hair, hand outstretched in greeting.

Dallas McKennonJoe Meek, maybe. Jedediah Smith. Liver-Eating Johnson. Jim Bridger.

Or, as it turned out, Cincinnatus, the frontier storekeeper on Fess Parker’s old Daniel Boone television series from the 1960s.

Dallas McKennon, the actor who played Cincinnatus, reveled in the rugged-outdoorsman role that was his bread and butter through several seasons of Daniel Boone and occasional shots on the likes of Gunsmoke, Laramie, The Rifleman, The Virginian, Wagon Train, and the Don Knotts spoof-Western movie Hot Lead and Cold Feet.

It fit him well. He was born in 1919 in the eastern Oregon town of La Grande, and although he became one of those familiar Hollywood faces (and even more familiar Hollywood voices) he loved that frontier image. I never saw him clean-shaven and surely wouldn’t have recognized him if I had. He was big and booming and glad-spirited, a happy salesman of himself.

I don’t remember what his particular purpose was on that day in 1978, other than to make himself known to the new kid handling entertainment news at the paper. My mind was filled with Big Stuff — the French New Wave, new German cinema, Important Literaure — and I wasn’t sure where to fit in a full-throttle show biz throwback to the American-frontier myth.

But McKennon was gregarious and patient and genially insistent — I’m here, he never quite said; you need to deal with me — and when he had a project going, he’d drop by for a few minutes and a fresh photo. He knew how the business worked: I’d make sure a line landed somewhere in the paper.

I really should have paid more attention. McKennon died July 14, five days shy of his 90th birthday, and if Oregon didn’t pay much notice to the passing of a native son, other parts of the world did. Here’s a fine obituary by Claire Noland from the Los Angeles Times.

Dallas (or Dal, as his old movie and TV credits often had it) was living in the Washington coastal town of Raymond, along Willapa Bay, when he died, but he’d spent many years in Cannon Beach on the Oregon Coast. It was there that he began to put together his own live-theater musical productions with titles such as Johnny Appleseed, Kaintuck and Wagons Ho. In the early 1950s he’d had a pioneering kids’ TV show in Los Angeles, and once he’d settled back in Oregon he’d sometimes show up on the old Ramblin’ Rod morning show in Portland.

He was never forgotten in Hollywood. Partly that was because of the old TV shows, but it was also for his prominence as a gifted voice actor. He worked for Walt Disney and Walter Lantz. He was the voice of Buzz Buzzard on Woody Woodpecker. He was Gumby, he worked on Mr. Magoo, he voiced part of the cartoon scene in Mary Poppins and did voice work on other Disney animated films such as A Hundred and One Dalmatians and Sleeping Beauty. He was the voice of Archie Andrews, the freckle-faced prototypical comic teen-ager, on TV. He even had a bit part in the Elvis Presley movie Clambake; according to a poster at www.cartoonbrew.com, during film breaks he and Elvis passed the time together doing dog barks.

That’s a life. Or part of one. Other things of note: He had eight kids. He married Betty Warner in Portland in 1942, and they stayed married: She survives him.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1, in the Cannon beach Community Presbyterian Church.

General, Language, Laura Grimes

The Write Brain Initiative: Wrong words stir up a storm

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Oklahoma! -- Photo: Wikimedia Commons/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

By LAURA GRIMES

The worst thing about Writer Brain is that it’s silent but deadly.

It wildly carries on in my head without anyone knowing it and then embarrassingly erupts at odd moments when I least expect it. The real problem? It’s not always quiet.

“I’m sorry,” I’ll murmur. But it’s too late. It’s out. And everyone heard it.

This happened to me at a very civilized dinner party of eight. This wasn’t during the unruly cocktail time when I could cough and hide in the folds of a curtain and hope the errant noise was covered by polite chatter and crunchy hors d’oeuvres. This happened while everyone was sitting thigh to elbow around the table and pleasantly eating salad and halibut.

I had been working for weeks on a gangly and lengthy poem that stretched well beyond the reaches of my imagination. It had started in a flash of brilliant clarity that was so pinpoint-exact that of course I could never find it again. Trying to describe it led me on an epic search from which I might never return. I wrote verse after sprawling verse.

Continue reading The Write Brain Initiative: Wrong words stir up a storm →

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