Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Bing bong bang: Here comes the weekend

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It’s almost here, and whatcha gonna do? Weekend planning’s SO much more complicated than it used to be, partly because in Portland there are so many more choices than there used to be. So here are a few of many, many possible suggestions:

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Portland Taiko. Copyright Rich Iwasaki/2008PORTLAND TAIKO’S “A TO Z”: That’s not A to Z, the negociant-style Oregon wine blenders. It’s A to Z, Ann to Zack. Portland Taiko‘s first big concert of the year will be a drum-banging stroll down memory lane with Ann Ishimuru and Zack Semke, back for a reunion gig with the company they founded 15 years ago. The repertory for these two shows, at 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday in the Fir Acres Theatre at Lewis & Clark College, will be drawn from the troupe’s first decade. Big drums, sweet violin, a rousing, joyful noise. Come join the fun.

Bias alert: I’m a member of Portland Taiko’s board. Then again, if I didn’t really like what this company does, I wouldn’t be on its board.

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Aurora Chorus“WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY”: But in Portland, rowdy women make very good music. In two shows Saturday, 4 and 8 p.m. at St. Mary’s Academy Theater, the 100-plus-voice Aurora Chorus will raise the roof with a program celebrating “women in history who boldly colored outside the lines and didn’t care what was written into their permanent records.” Among those ceiling-busters are locals including Portland police chief Rosie Sizer, artist Lillian Pitt, and Gennie Nelson, founder of Sisters of the Road.

The Aurora Chorus is led by Joan Szymko, who’s been misbehaving her own historical path in Portland and Seattle for many years, creating a rambunctiously engaged musical career that’s also seen her lead the Seattle Women’s Ensemble and the women’s chamber ensemble Viriditas, and act as musical director for the irreverent acrobatic and aerial theater artists of Do Jump! Extremely Physical Theatre. Through a quarter-century or so Szymko has also been a serious and talented choral composer (she has more than 50 octavos in publication), and this spring the American Choral Directors Association chose her as composer for next year’s Raymond W. Brock Commission, a task that’s gone in the past to the likes of Daniel Pinkham, Gian Carlo Menotti, Gwyneth Walker and David Conte. Excellent, if possibly ill-behaved, company.

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TRIPLE-THREAT TICKETS: You’ve got your Third Angle. You’ve got your Third Rail Rep. And you’ve got your Three Sisters. Somewhere in there lies an exceedingly un-square root. Let’s take ’em one at a time:

Third Angle New Music Ensemble with Jennifer Higdon: As I type I’m listening to a recording that Third Angle artistic director Ron Blessinger gave me of Philadelphia composer and double Grammy winner Jennifer Higdon‘s Celestial Hymns and Zaka, and I’m liking it a WHOLE lot.

higdon_pcard_webIt’s jangly, insouciant, nervous, brash yet somehow introspective music. It’s thoroughly American. And it’s accessible, which in this case means not dumbed down but smart and extroverted — speaking, like Gershwin and Copland and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and many others, in a voice that would actually like to be heard by an intelligent general audience. Makes me think of Bartok crossed with Charles Lloyd, maybe because of the clarinet and flute.

What’s more, from everything I’ve heard and read, Higdon’s a delightful person, exactly the sort of public ambassador that contemporary classical music (I know; that sounds like an oxymoron. Can you think of a better way to say it?) needs. This concert, with Higdon on hand and Third Angle playing music by her and some of her talented former composition students, is at 7:30 p.m. Friday in The Old Church. Should be a barn-burner.

Fabuloso at Third Rail Rep: I caught this last Saturday on its opening weekend, and it’s an odd little duck of a play, with just the right quack to put its appeal over. John Kolvenbach‘s closely cropped comedy is about two couples — one staid and settled; the other impossibly improvisational — who somehow wind up sharing a one-bedroom apartment. It’s about growing up but not giving in, and maybe even about deciding to have children, and in spite of its extremities it’s a sweet domestic little waterfowl when you get down to it.

Fine performances by Third Rail regulars Stephanie Gaslin, Philip Cuomo and Valerie Stevens, and a true bell-ringer of exuberantly controlled excess by Tim True. Tim gets the juicy parts, but there’s not a touch of self-indulgence in what he does: The show would fall flat if he didn’t stay in tune with the other three instead of winging off into the wilderness on his own. Once again from Third Rail and director Slayden Scott Yarbrough, a model of ensemble theater. Things start almost itchy-slow, but that’s part of the geography of the play, which soon enough goes bang-bang-bang. It’s worth catching, and you have through May 31 to do it.

Three Sisters at Artists Rep: In one corner, Anton Chekhov, subtle and masterful progenitor of contemporary drama. In the other corner, Tracy Letts, brash Steppenwolf rabble-rouser and Tony- and Pulitzer-winning author of August: Osage County.

How does Letts handle Chekhov in this world-premiere translation? “This Three Sisters starts as a drama about quiet desolation, then takes the quiet behind the barn and shoots it,” Aaron Mesh writes in Willamette Week.

Not sure what that means, but it sure makes me want to see the show and find out. It keeps brawling through June 14 at Artists Rep.

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THE HUNCHBACK OF MANTUA: Better known as Rigoletto, Giuseppe Verdi‘s operatic potboiler from 1851 that’s fabled for the nefarious duke’s lilting La Donna e Mobile, which everyone knows and comparatively few realize comes from Rigoletto. (Nor do most people know it’s one of the most flippantly sexist pop tunes ever written, but then, that’s the duke: What a guy. If you’re sensitive, it’s best not to understand Italian — or to read the supertitles.)

Portland Opera‘s current production, which ends with performances Thursday and Saturday evenings at Keller Auditorium, is straightforward and traditional and, despite a problem here and there, a welcome affirmation of what a gorgeous score Verdi wrote. Good, solid drama, too: The three hours muscle their way through with no flabbiness. In theater and opera, if you’ve got a hump or a limp or a big nose you tend not to get happy endings. Think Quasimodo, Rigoletto, Cyrano, Richard III. Well, there is Tiny Tim. But he can’t sing, and Rigoletto can. Huge difference.

I caught last Friday’s opening night performance and fell in love, once again, with the score. David Stabler’s positive-with-reservations review in The Oregonian seemed spot-on.  Two more chances to soak in that glorious sound.

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Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General, Visual Art

Calatrava in Manhattan: It’s a jungle out there

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Conception for World Trade Center transportation hub

Everything old is new again. Or everything new is old again.

Or (and this is much more satisfying to type) DINOSAURS ARE ON THE LOOSE IN NEW YORK CITY!!!

Thanks to Art Knowledge News for this story about architecture superstar Santiago Calatrava‘s design for the new transportation hub at Manhattan’s World Trade Center site. (And when, if ever, will Portland start thinking about this sort of architectural landmark?) An exhibition on this and other Calatrava projects will be at New York’s Queen Sofia Spanish Institute through Aug. 31.

I love the look of this building, which seems, well, Jurassic. You might even say, stegosauran, although Calatrava prefers to think of it as suggesting a bird being released from a child’s hand. Well, we know about birds’ prehistoric line of descent. Which prompted me to poke around Google until I found this image, of a stegosaurus model at the Bartow Jurassic Park in Poland. Maybe this guy’s the Model T to Calatrava’s Ferrari. But the family resemblance is unmistakable:

Stegosaurus, Baltow Jurassic Park, Poland/Wikimedia Commons

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Dance in Portland: The kids are alright

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Portland Ballet Academy, Concerto in F/BLAINE COVERT

Dance passes from generation to generation: style, technique, muscle memory, handed down from experienced dancers to those just learning the art and craft. In Portland, no one’s observed this process more carefully than Art Scatter’s friend and associate Martha Ullman West, a distinguished national dance critic who has recently been keeping her eye on the spring spate of performances showing off the skills of young dancers at several of the city’s dance schools. Here is her report:

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By MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

“Twas in the merry month of May, when green buds they were showing,” begins that lovely folk song Barbara Allen, referring to the kind of verdant spring we are finally enjoying in Portland.

But green buds showing also applies to young dancers — the students who show what they can do in school performances designed to showcase their talents and their training — and I’ve been a happy member of the audience at three of them in the last couple of weeks.

My first stop was an open dress rehearsal at Portland Ballet Academy, out on Capitol Highway, on April 30. The school, founded in 2001 by Nancy Davis and Jim Lane, both former dancers who trained at the School of American Ballet and elsewhere, provides professional training for ballet dancers, and some of their former students are now performing with such companies as Pacific Northwest Ballet and Houston Ballet. Like everything else, PBA has been hit by the recession, but few people are more creatively resourceful than dancers in hard times, and they converted their main studio into a perfectly respectable black box theater to showcase their students as professionally as possible.

I am invariably impressed by how well trained PBA’s male students are, and this year was no exception. In a Cliff Notes version of Act I of Don Quixote, adapted by faculty member Jason Davis, the enthusiasm of all the dancers was infectious and the dancing of Henry Cotton and Skye Stouber, both headed this year to the School of American Ballet’s summer program on full scholarship, was exuberant and correct. Generally speaking I would rather watch Dick Cheney sneer than have to sit through this swaybacked, spavined war horse again in any version, yet I enjoyed this performance mightily because — and here’s the test for very young dancers — the performers were having a blast.

Continue reading Dance in Portland: The kids are alright →

Bob Hicks, General, Language

Happy birthday to an American literary original

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Yogi Berra/Googie Man/Wikimedia CommonsToday is Yogi Berra’s 84th birthday, and it’s a good question whether baseball fans or lovers of language are lighting the most candles in celebration. If you’re both, line up for a slice of the cake.

Yogi was, of course, one of baseball’s greatest. Some people who know a lot more about the game than I do say he was the best defensive catcher ever, with cat-quick feet and a shrewd intelligence that belied his public image as a lovable knucklehead and linguistic heir to Mrs. Malaprop, the syntax-mangling heroine of Richard Sheridan‘s 1775 stage comedy The Rivals. In truth, despite that image as a free-wheeling zany Berra’s always been a pretty careful man, highly selective in his decision-making: In 7,555 lifetime big-league at-bats, he struck out only 414 times. A few modern sluggers can whiff that often in two seasons.

It’s a fair question how much of the Yogi myth is actually based on fact and how much was simply laid at his feet by sportswriters and other denizens of the cultural deep. As Yogi is reported to have declared, “I never said most of the things I said.”

Still, some of the things he either did or didn’t say are humdingers. And like Shakespeare, they can be adapted to the times. “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore,” Berra supposedly groused. And, once asked what he’d do if he found a million dollars, he displayed a keen grasp of the theory behind governmental bailouts of train-wreck private companies. “I’d find the fellow who lost it,” Yogi said, “and, if he was poor, I’d return it.”

A lot of Yogi’s real and supposed sayings have a sly twist that goes beyond mere flub-a-dubbing to a canny second level of meaning. And like jazz, that other great expression of the American spirit, it revels in the delight of the unexpected, the little rhythmic jump that reinvents. Here, culled from www.brainyquote.com and www.rinkworks.com, is a selection of Yogi-isms. Mrs. Grundy wouldn’t approve. I trust you will:

“Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.”

“It was impossible to get a conversation going. Everybody was talking too much.”

“The towels were so thick there I could barely close my suitcase.”

“I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.”

“Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”

“Even Napoleon had his Watergate.”

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”

“So I’m ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face.”

“You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.”

“You can observe a lot by just watching.”

“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General

Rose Quarter/Coliseum: Is K.C. the sunshine gang?

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Broadway & 42nd Street, New York, 1880/Wikimedia CommonsA quick followup on our last post about Memorial Coliseum and how it fits or doesn’t fit into plans for a revamped Rose Quarter. In this morning’s Oregonian, Ted Sickinger files this fascinating report from Kansas City and its  Power & Light District, a glitzy entertainment district developed by the Cordish Co., which also wants to redevelop Portland’s Rose Quarter in partnership with the city and the Trail Blazers. It’s a good, balanced read that talks clearly about money, about the differences between Portland and Kansas City (Kansas City’s downtown was pretty much wiped out and any fix looked good), and about the audience for the new K.C. entertainment zone — pretty much suburbanites and out-of-towners.

Question: Is the city’s goal to set aside a chunk of prime real estate as a lure for out-of-town spenders, like Vancouver, B.C.’s Gastown or New York’s recently sanitized Times Square? Is that good policy? How will it help or harm already existing businesses and nearby neighborhoods in Portland? Will any Portland businesses be part of the deal? Sickinger points out that several of the Kansas City development’s prime tenants are owned by a subsidiary of Cordish — a cozy arrangement that suggests this will be a dropped-from-the-sky project, not an organically grown development.

And over at Culture Shock, Mighty Toy Cannon gives this blistering analysis of the Coliseum situation, connecting a lot of dots that needed to be connected. It’s highly recommended reading.

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Journalism

Memorial Coliseum: The empire strikes back

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portlandmemorialcolWell, damn those architects’ pointy little heads. What right do they have to protest the demolition of a historically important building when a billionaire’s profits are on the line?

Astonishingly, that seems to be the subtext of this morning’s banner story in The Oregonian, under the reductionist headline, Save the coliseum, but for what? Unlike the paper’s previous reporting on the issue of razing or saving Memorial Coliseum, which has been solid, this piece feels like it belongs on the op-ed page. Even then, it’s poorly thought out — mainly, in its thrust, a repetition of the Portland Trail Blazer/City of Portland talking points and a flicking-away of the several legitimate counterproposals that have been made for use of the building. Now that Mayor Sam Adams has given the Coliseum at least a temporary reprieve, this morning’s story reads like the first strike in a counter-campaign to get it torn down, after all. That’s a legitimate goal for an opinion-page story, even though I happen to think it’s the wrong choice. But why am I reading it on the front page, in the guise of a news story?

I won’t get into the arguments in favor of preserving the Coliseum, which have been made well and often in several places (among them Portland Arts Watch, Burnside Blog, Portland Architecture and Culture Shock), except to say this: For all of Portland’s vaunted reputation as a well-planned city, it’s hardly overloaded with buildings of real architectural distinction, and that makes the potential loss of any excellent work of architecture a matter for deep public concern. I’m not an architect, and the International Style is hardly my favorite — indeed, I have a lot of issues with it — but you save what you have, and in the case of Memorial Coliseum, what Portland has is an elegant, almost startlingly pure expression of the International ethos. We’re not talking about an abandoned Home Depot here, in spite of City Commissioner Randy Leonard’s unfortunate stab at architecture criticism.

After establishing the impracticality of the architectural trade in general (why, you’d almost think they were college professors!), The Oregonian’s story gets down to business: The Coliseum is a money-loser. An accompanying bar chart reveals that, yes, for the past three years it’s lost money, mainly because the city’s spent close to $2 million in that time period on needed upkeep (the bill’s been $3.2 million since 2000). And it could cost another $13 million or more to make up for years of neglect and get the place in really good shape again.

Fair enough, although the chart also reveals that in the three immediately preceding years the Coliseum stacked up profits of $243,000, $338,000 and $275,000 — even though the Blazers, who have the sole right to manage and book the building even though it’s city-owned, haven’t had a lot of incentive to push the Coliseum to the detriment of their own Rose Garden a quick jog away.

Continue reading Memorial Coliseum: The empire strikes back →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General

Memorial Coliseum saved. Now what?

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Conceptual drawing for Lents baseball stadium, 1760. Wikimedia CommonsThis morning’s Oregonian headlined the news that Mayor Sam Adams and his partners-in-sports have backtracked and won’t take the wrecking ball to Memorial Coliseum, after all.

Hooray for that. But the story’s far from over.

Mark Larabee’s report says that aspiring mogul Merritt Paulson will shift his proposed minor-league baseball stadium back to the Lents neighborhood of Southeast Portland instead of trying to squeeze it into the Rose Quarter site controlled by full-fledged mogul Paul Allen, whose Trail Blazers organization wants to redevelop the whole shooting match for a highly questionable, theme-park-ish entertainment district. Fellow scatterer Barry Johnson, over at his alternate-universe blog on OregonLive.com, raises several pertinent red flags. Read his column — it’s important.

Questions:

1. Why build a 9,000-seat minor-league baseball park at all? Lents might want it, and maybe it’ll be good for a neighborhood that could use a few good things, and certainly it’ll provide some decent (if short-term) construction jobs. But is it necessary? PGE Park, which is now slated to become a soccer-only stadium for Paulson’s new major-league soccer franchise, is still a great place to see a baseball game. We’re told the soccer league insists that member teams provide soccer-only stadiums, but let’s face it: “Major” league or not, we’re not talking baseball or football or the NBA or even big-league hockey here. Why not call the league’s bluff? After all, we’re all paying for this thing. It’s in the public’s best interest to (a) insist on the best deal possible, and (b) decide whether it wants to make a deal at all. Sam doesn’t get to decide that all by himself.

2. Why should the Blazers decide what the best use of Memorial Coliseum will be? Yes, I know the city cut Allen and his companies a sweetheart deal on management of the Coliseum and the rest of the district, which is part of the reason the Coliseum’s become run-down: The Blazers don’t have a lot of incentive to let it compete seriously with their own Rose Garden. Time for the city to rethink this thing and stand up for itself. The Coliseum needs to be reimagined as an attractor for the entire city, not just a money-maker for the Allen organizations. I still very much like the idea of a first-class participatory sports and recreation center. That would draw thousands of people into the Rose Quarter, year-round.

3. Why are Randy Leonard’s heels dug in? The famously assertive city commissioner, who has been Adams’ sidekick through this thing, says that with the Rose Quarter off the table for the baseball stadium, he won’t consider any option other than Lents for the new ballpark. “It’s either Lents or I’m off the deal entirely,” Larabee quotes him. Wait a minute: What about leaving the Triple-A Beavers at PGE Park, where they could easily be scheduled around the new big-league soccer team and would — hello — help keep the stadium from sitting idle most of the year? Our city council isn’t prepared to even consider that? This is the cheapest option. It might also be the best.

4. What about big-league baseball? We’re talking $55 million for a 9,000-seat minor-league baseball park when (a) most Portlanders simply don’t care about minor-league baseball, and (b) there’s an even chance that in the next five to ten years the city could lure an actual big-league franchise? Then what? How much more will the city pay for a big-league stadium? Where will the stadium be? And what will happen with the little Lents park? Maybe we should just sit out this whole Triple-A deal and work on the real thing.

5. Can someone please explain how the Hooters at the city’s northern gateway is an improvement on the old Waddle’s restaurant it replaced? At least Waddle’s had a decent corned-beef hash. This may seem like a digression, but it’s not, really, because it echoes the main trouble with the Blazers’ proposed entertainment district: It substitutes tired, watered-down (if also pumped-up) cookie-cutter ideas about culture for the local, truly individual, real deal. To borrow a line from Nancy Reagan, maybe it’s time to Just Say No.

General, Journalism

The future of content (or why we should stop listening to consultants and start reading cyberpunk)

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Benjamin Franklin and printing press. Charles Mills/1914/Wikimedia Commons

By TRISHA PANCIO

All across the country people are clamoring for artists (and the writers who cover them) to create new models that will be financially viable in this new economy. The answers so far have reminded me of a running joke we have in the performing arts.

It goes like this:

When you ask a new person (a board member, an intern) to brainstorm ideas for how to sell more tickets, the first words out of their mouth will inevitably be, “Why don’t we put up posters in coffee shops?”

If you ask a theater director the same question, you’ll hear “Hey! Why don’t we perform a segment of the show at the mall/Rotary Club/local High School/local Rock Club?”

The Marketing Director’s tactic of choice? “Let’s lower the price!”

And recently, in media circles, there has been a lot of talk about how to save the press by moving it online. The most common suggestion: “I know! Let’s do a newspaper subscription. Only, like, ONLINE.”

Why do these suggestions crop up, again and again? They recur because they arise out of the core temperament of the people making the suggestion. An artist loves nothing more than to put on a show – so of course their first idea for promotion will be “let’s put on a show.” A marketing director is fulfilled by the sight of a full house – no matter what price is paid for the seat. And a publisher likes to curate the content you see (for a fee) – we each push for the model we understand, the one that fulfills the desires that drew us into the business in the first place.

But these models are failing, all around us. And our solutions (more pop music at the symphony! Boozy cheap theater nights for young/gay/nerdy people! Subscription based websites!) are sourced from the past, variations on our last ten great ideas. They’re based on great research, but they are failing to improve the crumbling bottom lines of our institutions.
Continue reading The future of content (or why we should stop listening to consultants and start reading cyberpunk) →

Bob Hicks, Books, General

O mystery divine: when Wall Street was our friend

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51wzmdon2ylToday I plucked Emma Lathen‘s Death Shall Overcome from my recently reconstituted bookshelves. It was published in 1966, and it’s one of a series of mysteries featuring the improbable but highly likable and, in the clinches, deeply honorable amateur sleuth John Putnam Thatcher, who in his day job is senior vice president of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, a staid and sober Wall Street institution that would never, or at least not in 1966, find itself in the untoward position of requiring a financial bailout from these reluctantly wallet-emptying United States of America. The Sloan Guaranty found ways to act justly and properly and still pile up princely profits, which perhaps is a tipoff that this is a work of fiction.

Death Shall Overcome hinges on the impending appointment to a seat on the New York Stock Exchange of its first black member, a man of impeccably conservative fiduciary credentials and precisely the pigmentation to drive certain portions of The Club straight up the wall. Not John Putnam Thatcher, of course, who knows a good man — and a proper course of action — when he sees one.

Mystery monger Jim Huang considers Lathen’s skills as a sly and pointed observer of the social customs of the actual and would-be cultural elite to be Jane Austen-like. That may be taking things a little far, and yet three-fourths of the pleasure in reading these witty mysteries comes from Lathen’s wry observations of the peculiar culture that is her milieu. So, borrowing a page once again from Rose City Reader (I know, I said I’d do this only once — I lied) here’s the beginning of the book:

Above all, Wall Street is power. The talk is of stocks and bonds, of contracts and bills of lading, of gold certificates and wheat futures, but it is talk that sends fleets steaming to distant oceans, that determines the fate of new African governments, that closes mining camps in the Chibougamou. In the world’s great money market, power has forged massive canyons through which thousands of men and women daily hurry to work, hurry to lunch, hurry, hurry, hurry in the shadows of towers tall enough to defy the heavens. Depending upon your point of view, Wall Street is either awesomely impressive or appalling.

No one has ever called it beautiful.


If I thought the John Thatcher Putnams were in charge, I’d vote for “awesomely impressive.” Lacking that assurance … well, there’s always fiction. And Emma Lathen is really very good at it.

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General, Theater, Visual Art

Monday scatter: Rose Quarter blues, theatrical greens, soft-pallette Gauguin, fighting red ink

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thomas_paineOur partner-in-Scattering Barry Johnson (who does not look like the portrait here of Tom Paine, rabble-rousing author of the political tract Common Sense) advocates a little citywide common sense in the continuing flap over Portland’s Rose Quarter and Mayor Sam Adams’ push to tear down Memorial Coliseum to make room for a minor-league baseball park and a suburban-style “entertainment district” of aggressively anonymous chain outfits on the order of a Hard Rock Cafe.

Barry writes in his alternate-universe column in this morning’s Oregonian that we all need to think more clearly about common sense the way the thinkers of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment thought of it, as “an idea based on the best available evidence and therefore potentially persuasive to anyone.”

Barry’s pretty clear about the slapdash quality of the thinking on this rush-rush move. His summation of how we got into this municipal pickle has the blunt ring of truth:

The initial push to demolish Memorial Coliseum came from Mayor Sam Adams, who wanted 1) to make sure Portland got its Major League Soccer team, 2) which he could only do by building a new baseball stadium, 3) which would help him and the Blazers build their entertainment district if it landed in the Rose Quarter, 4) which, in turn, would serve his new convention hotel. Oh, and 5) he’d have to knock down Memorial Coliseum to do it.

Brian Libby, on his site Portland Architecture, also continues to hit hard and tellingly on why Adams’ plan is a bad idea (I’d argue that after Point 1 above none of it makes sense), and Libby’s helped rally the city’s architectural community to the cause. Keep checking him out, because he keeps adding new twists to the story.

I can only add, picking up on Barry’s theme of “common sense,” that we also think of the meaning of the commons — those areas that we hold in public trust, for the greater good of all of us. The division between what’s public and what’s private has long since been blurred: These days, big  projects increasingly come in the form of what’s called “public/private partnerships.” That’s why city and state governments pay hundreds of millions of dollars for big-league baseball and football stadiums, and it’s why, in Portland, the rehab of the old armory building into a home for Portland Center Stage came from a complex quiltwork of various governmental dollars. It’s not a bad thing: It gets things done. But it does muddy the sense of what’s public and what’s private and who benefits most. And it makes it that much more crucial for our political leaders to remember which side of the fence they’re on.

Continue reading Monday scatter: Rose Quarter blues, theatrical greens, soft-pallette Gauguin, fighting red ink →

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