Barry Johnson, Books, Film, General, Television

John Maynard Keynes gets “Network”-ed

1 Comment

Faye Dunaway in Network So last night, after the Super Bowl, I was channel-surfing. I’m not proud of it, but there you have it. Sometimes I think that’s the way the universe is trying to talk to me: If I happen upon the “Dog Whisperer,” I might conclude that I’m not calm and assertive enough (or maybe not submissive enough? Sometimes I get mixed messages). If “Ask This Old House” is working on someone’s water heater, then I immediately suspect that mine needs some lovin’.

Anyway, as I was surfing, I fell in with Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s great 1976 satire about television and society, just before the Howard Beale speech, the “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” speech. I knew it was coming and I waited for it, because to this day, it’s the single most subversive thing I’ve ever heard in a mainstream Hollywood movie. (Maybe you have others? We could make a contest of it in the comments.) And this time, it was a swift blow to the solar plexus.
Continue reading John Maynard Keynes gets “Network”-ed →

Books, General, Vernon Peterson

Zen and the art of Michael Dibdin (why I’m a serial reader)

5 Comments

dibdin “I’m a stranger here myself.”

Odd this should be the last thing I hear from Aurelio Zen. I’ve just read Zen’s parting shot in Dead Lagoon, the Michael Dibdin mystery novel I’ve saved unread for several months. Didbin wrote eleven novels featuring Zen, the solitary, dark-hearted Italian police inspector. The first, Ratking, was published in 1988, when Zen is almost fifty and nearly washed-up as an investigator, and the last, End Games, was published in 2007, a few months after Dibdin’s death. Born in England in 1947, Dibdin taught in Italy for several years before beginning the Zen series. He died in Seattle in March 2007, having lived there many years with his wife, Katherine Beck, also a mystery novelist.

I became intrigued with Didbin after reading his short non-Zen novel, Thanksgiving, a disturbing, creepy Sam Shepard-like American tale set in the Nevada desert. The first Zen book I read was And Then You Die (2002), which picks up the inspector’s story as he recovers from an assassination attempt. I quickly moved through the somewhat grisly Medusa (2003), about caves and fascism; Back to Bologna (2005), a sly tale of soccer, bungled murder and an off-kilter semiotics professor out to get a popular TV cook; and finally End Games (2007), published posthumously, a strange, comically cynical end-of-world tale about the attempt to make a Mel Gibson-inspired movie about the Book of Revelations.
Continue reading Zen and the art of Michael Dibdin (why I’m a serial reader) →

Bob Hicks, General, Language

Apostrophe’s and groundhog’s: on promiscuous punctuation

8 Comments

Courtesy of Jeffrey Beall, Flickr Creative Commons
As the great lexicographer Bob Dylan might have asked, “Where have all the apostrophes gone?”

In Birmingham, England, it turns out, they’ve been long time passing: According to an Associated Press report via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, city bureaucrats have been dropping the little floating comma from Birmingham’s street signs since the 1950s. So it’s no longer “St. Paul’s Square”; it’s “St. Pauls Square.” And, as some critics are sniffing, it’s no longer the Queen’s English, it’s the Queens English (which sounds, if you think about it, like the argot of a particular borough of New York City).

Here at Art Scatter we like to think of punctuation as little road signs along the great linguistic superhighway, helpful warnings that a curve is coming in the road and you need to slow down, or a thought has run its course and you need to stop. Pay attention to the road signs and the meaning comes clear, not to mention the rhythm that is playing in the author’s head, and which presumably she or he would love to plant in your own intellectual pulse.

The presence or absence or substitution of a punctuation mark can alter meaning. “What do you mean?” is most likely a simple interrogative: “Can you please explain yourself a little more clearly, so I can understand what you’re saying?”

“What do you mean!” is more likely a challenge, even an exclamation of outrage: “You can’t be serious! I reject with every fiber of my being the very principle on which you build your argument, and I am shocked that a purportedly civilized human being could hold such an errant point of view!”

Groundhog/Wikimedia CommonsMore poetically (and less argumentatively), the use of punctuation is a handy writers’ tool in the construction of mood and suggestion: “He’s driving fast fast fast” is simply faster to a reader’s eye than “He’s driving fast, fast, fast” — and if the blur of speed is what you’re trying to get across, using commas is like driving in the Indianapolis 500 with your emergency brake on.

Here in The Great Republick That Our Forefathers Built (or is it Forefather’s?) we seem to welcome all those apostrophes banished from Birmingham: As the photo at the top of this post illustrates, we like to throw them into words willy-nilly, like candy confetti on top of a cupcake. For an amusing exploration of the subject, see The Care and Feeding of Apostrophes.

Nor is the comma the only mistress of Americans’ punctuational promiscuity. Over at Blogorrhea, the courtly Mr. Mead Hunter has introduced us to the perverse pleasures of The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, a photographic compilation of signage screwups that are, as the MasterCard commercials say, priceless. And Art Scatter itself confesses to a fondness for the colon that verges on the indiscreet: Like a politician with a wayward passion for that little taste of danger, we let ourselves be seen in public with the slatternly Ms. Colon on our arm far too frequently.

What to do, then, when, punctuationally speaking, we’re not sure what to do? Americans are a practical people (as a nation we are Rome, not Greece; engineers, not artists) and the obvious answer is: avoidance. Just don’t let it be an issue. Around Portland, that means eliminating the historical struggle between Sauvie’s Island and Sauvies Island by settling, at least officially, on Sauvie Island. Nationally, let it be noted that tomorrow morning, when Punxsatawney Phil pokes his head out of his burrow and sniffs around for signs of spring, he will not be marking Groundhog’s Day or Groundhogs Day. It’ll be a singular event: Groundhog Day. And if he casts his shadow just right, maybe we can avoid misplaced apostrophes for six more weeks.

Note: Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Beall, Flickr Creative Commons

Barry Johnson, General

Scatter reaches out to Portland Arts Watch

Leave a comment

Lar Lubovitch's Jangle by Chris Roesing of White BirdArt Scatter is looking over at Portland Arts Watch and saying, hey man, what about me. Over there, I’ve been posting madly the past couple of days, and of course I’m going to tell you all about it, right now!

I’ve had a couple of posts on the PNCA-Museum of Contemporary Craft merger. The first was a column for The Oregonian, arguing that Portland’s thriving design community was at the heart of it; the second, a further cogitation, having chatted with craft artist/printmaker/you name it Frank Boyden, a longtime member of the Contemporary Crafts Community. Then, I had a few observations about the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company visit on Wednesday; people love their classical modern dance. And last night I went to hear Nobel economist Paul Krugman (though I could just as easily gone to Cornell West, and I’m in a cognitively dissonant state over my choice even as I type). He had some direly smart things to say.

So, if any of those strike your fancy, please link up. Portland Arts Watch needs your minds working on these topics!

I will say that a lot of my thinking these days has been guided by the post on Anne Focke’s essay, right below this one, and it will turn up in my Monday column for The Oregonian, which is about the instability of “purist” arts institutions in our hybrid world. Well, it’s sort of about that, anyway, and suggests that new models, such as Classical Revolution PDX and Portland Cello Project, might be in the offing. It also has an interview with double-bass genius Edgar Meyer!

Meyer was pretty distracted for our conversation. He’d played like an angel the night before with the symphony, but he had something else on his mind when we sat down, namely a recording session with his old friend Bela Fleck, who has done for the banjo much of what Meyer had done for the bass, and Zakir Hussain, the tablas giant. Well, that’s newspaper talk. Is he actually a giant? Probably not. And Meyer’s not the most loquacious fellow to begin with, at least not with miserable minions of the press. But it was still great to talk to him, because what he did say was entirely pertinent. Succinct but pertinent, with traces of his Tennessee accent.

After I talked to Meyer, I made a point last weekend of seeing Third Angle’s minimalism show (I know. I posted on that at Portland Arts Watch, too), the Superman Orchestra (which involved Mattie Kaiser and some Classical Revolution musicians) and then some Cello Project folks at Doug Fir with choirs, Irish folk provocateurs, folkies, etc., all culminating in “Carmina burana.” Mercy! I wrote about that stuff over there, too. All of which made me think that this whole musical “purism” argument wasn’t just losing — it had already lost. The world has changed, and you can stay in your bunker with your tricked out sound system and the perfect acoustical set-up and listen ONLY to Bach or hard bop or Janis Joplin, but you’re missing out on a lot of interesting music. I’m imagining those Japanese soldiers, left on remote islands, who hid in the jungle and then stumbled into some village in the 1960s and were amazed to find out that the was over — and, by the way, they lost. Bummer. I know that Art Scatter readers are profoundly post-modern, though!

So, yeah, busy. And did something happen with Sam Adams? Honestly, we’re not going to get into THAT here. Maybe Bob will turn his analytical high-beams on the situation at some point, but I’m waiting for the passion to settle and a few thoughts to bubble up. Because really, the issues involved ARE interesting and it’s one of those rare opportunities to get a fix on where the collective mind is, for example, on our sexual norms. (I’ve already heard two perfectly reasonable people say that kissing is, or at least can be, sex. I didn’t know that — I was a lot busier in high school than I thought!)

Barry Johnson, Books, General, Visual Art

Arts management ideas from Focke and Weinstein

4 Comments

Dennis Cunningham's Willamette White Sturgeon. He was a Mississippi Mud artist. OK, this one’s a little long, but it tries to get at some important issues of how we organize ourselves, operate in the world, through the lens of two “artist managers,” Seattle’s Anne Focke and the late Joel Weinstein.

I was rummaging around the Matthew Stadler-edited The Back Room: An Anthology, and after I’d found what I was looking for (and it really wasn’t), I flipped to Anne Focke’s essay “A Pragmatic Response to Real Circumstances”. Which turned out to be what I should have been looking for all along — the tao of managing an arts organization artfully.
Continue reading Arts management ideas from Focke and Weinstein →

Bob Hicks, Books

Rabbit, rest: John Updike, 1932-2009

3 Comments

10924397RABBIT’S AT REST.

At least, we can wish so for John Updike, the creator of the vivid American everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who through several novels fell from the heights of high school basketball stardom into the cultural maelstrom of the 1960s and ’70s, tried the straight and narrow, made a fool of himself over women, became desperate, became rich, became old, and always, always, kept searching for … for what? For whatever it is we search for in this nervous, impatient nation of ours.

Today, at the early age of 76, Updike died from lung cancer in a Massachusetts hospice near his home. A novelist, short-story writer, essayist and poet of prodigious output whose work was praised for its grace and humor and panned for all sorts of reasons, up to and including the purported clumsiness of his sex scenes (just last November Britain’s Literary Review magazine awarded him the Bad Sex in Fiction lifetime achievement award), Updike seemed an unlikely subject for the occasional exasperation and pettiness that his work attracted. Maybe it was because he and many of his characters were unapologetically middle class in their underpinnings — too high an aspiration for some of his critics, too low an aspiration for others. Mark Feeney, writing in today’s Boston Globe, quotes Updike: “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.”

To me, there was honor in that so-American attempt to create myth from the everyday and supposedly mundane, as he did in his Rabbit novels and in such writings as his early novel The Centaur. Stylistically the two writers had almost nothing in common, but it’s apt to note that, in the theatrical world, Arthur Miller did the same thing. And wasn’t Walt Whitman, when he sang the possibilities of the men and women of this adolescent country, thinking of the same sort of people who would come to find themselves caught in the webs that Updike strove to understand?

For all of Rabbit’s importance, and for all the fuss his Witches of Eastwick and other novels sometimes kicked up, I have an abiding affection for another Updike character: Henry Bech, the irascible, august fictional novelist who eventually ascends from the mess of his everyday existence to become a winner of the Nobel Prize. Bech is the central character in what may be the funniest scene ever written about writer’s block — when he sits on a Caribbean beach, drinks and nubile companionship and fat publisher’s fee at hand, with no task but to autograph a huge pile of one of his novels, and finally becomes so paralyzed that his pen freezes in midair: He’s forgot his name.

We’ll not forget the names of Bech, and Rabbit, and John Updike. Rest well, gentlemen. You deserve it.

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

From Lar to PAW: a Monday link and scatter

1 Comment

Lar Lubovich Dance Company. Photo: ROSEThings have been busy here at Scatter Central the last few days; so busy that we haven’t had a chance to post since we left poor Jean-Paul Belmondo in the clutches of all
those nasty French critics. Never mind, Jean-Paul. As far as we’re concerned here on our far side of the puddle, you’ll always throw a mean left hook.

So, time for a little update.

Lar Lubovitch, a genuine. living and working part of American dance history, shows up Wednesday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, and the White Bird dance series reports it still has good tickets available. The Lubovitch company hasn’t toured in 10 years, and it’s been a good deal longer than that since it’s been in Portland, so this is a good opportunity. The program looks intriguing, and all of the dances are relatively recent: last year’s Jangle, Four Hungarian Dances, set to Bela Bartok’s Rhapsodies #1 and #2 for Violin and Piano; 2000’s Men’s Stories, A Concerto in Ruins, with audio collage and original score by Scott Marshall; and 2007’s Dvorak Serenade, set to Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade in E Major. Plus, Lubovitch will be on hand for a question and answer session after the show.

White Bird has some deals on tickets, including 30-buck Level 3 seats, in addition to its usual student/senior rush tickets two hours before the 7:30 curtain. Details here.

mandy_greer_dare_alla_luce_05Over at his alternate-universe home, Portland Arts Watch (or PAW, as we like to call it), Scatter impresario Barry Johnson has been following the proposed merger between two Portland art stalwarts: the financially struggling Museum of Contemporary Craft and the recently vigorous Pacific Northwest College of Art. Good idea? Bad idea? Necessary idea? In his Monday column in The Oregonian and on Oregon Live, Barry comes down with a case of cautious optimism. Read it here.

And speaking of synchronicity (we were, weren’t we?) my review of the craft museum’s two newest exhibits, by installation artist Mandy Greer and textile artist Darrel Morris, will run on Friday, Jan. 30, in The Oregonian’s A&E section and on Oregon Live. Look for it then.

Did we say alternate-universe homes? We’re embarrassed to reveal that only recently have we discovered the second virtual home of one of our best online friends, the ubiquitous and perspicacious Mighty Toy Cannon of the invaluable Portland arts and culture site Culture Shock. Seems MTC also maintains a fascinating, if less regular, music site called, appropriately, Mighty Toy Cannon. From Nick Lowe and Richard Fontaine to Ruth Brown and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, MTC takes a welcome and refreshing curatorial approach to the wonders of the YouTube musical world. Give it a look, and a listen.

Henry James, by John Singer Sargent, 1913Meanwhile, who’d have guessed that the path to understanding Henry James runs through William Shakespeare’s most infamous stage direction? (That’s “exuent, pursued by a bear,” from The Winter’s Tale, by the way.) The grapevine that slithers through our mutual abode tells us that Part Five of Laura Grimes’ running riff on all things Jamesean, coming Sunday, Feb. 1, in The Oregonian’s books pages and on Oregon Live, is going to be a doozy, complete with Shakespearean bear. In yesterday’s Part Four, Grimes — Friend and Supporter of Art Scatter First Class — gets caught up in a neighborhood book group and unveils a Henry James contest, complete with a prize. Read it here.

Portland’s stages have been simply aburst with fresh new work, thanks to the citywide Fertile Ground festival of new plays. At The Oregonian, Scatter friend Marty Hughley kept up with some of the most recent action in Monday’s paper: Read it here.

Scatter’s been hitting the festival, too. We’ve already run our report on Apollo and Vitriol and Violets. And my review of Northwest Children’s Theater and School‘s new jazz version of Alice in Wonderland also ran in Monday’s Oregonian; read it here.

reGeneration: 50 photographers of Tomorrow, a traveling exhibit that’s just landed in the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, is a chilly but pretty darned fascinating look at 50 young photographers worldwide whose work, the shows’s curators believe, will still be vital and important in the year 2025. My review ran in brief in Monday’s Oregonian; for the much more complete version, see it on Oregon Live here.

Finally, we’ve been amused and bemused by the misadventures of operatic tenor Jon Villars, who walked off the stage during a dress rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, reportedly because he didn’t like the conductor’s tempo. Here at Art Scatter, we confess to skipping out on a show early a time or two over the years, too. But not when we were part of the cast.

Bob Hicks, Film, General

Jean-Paul Belmondo: Tough guys finish first

Leave a comment

Hillary Clinton got a quick stamp of approval from the Senate, President Obama rolled up his sleeves and got to work, Caroline Kennedy withdrew from the New York senatorial race, LeBron James steamrolled the Trail Blazers, the Pacific Northwest College of Art agreed in principle to take over the ailing Museum of Contemporary Craft and Portland Mayor Sam Adams fought an uphill battle for his political life.

But for my money the best read in the Thursday papers was Elaine Sciolino’s report in the New York Times on the French movie god Jean-Paul Belmondo and the release of his latest film, Un Homme et Son Chien (A Man and His Dog), based on Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 neorealist classic Umberto D.

Belmondo, he of the broken nose and the seductive grin and the street-tough physique, is 75 now, and people don’t like to see their physical idols grow old: Think of the matronly-plump Elizabeth Taylor, all comfortable at last inside her expansive body, or the Botoxed-so-hard Sophia Loren, so tight in the face that her eyes seem stretched halfway around her temples.


But Belmondo committed a deeper sin. Not only did he age, he also degenerated. He had a stroke in 2001 that left him speechless for six months, with a basically useless right side. He’s struggled back, and speaks now, with difficulty, and has regained some of the use of his body. But he is now plainly, as they say, disabled. And that’s how he plays his new role, as an aging, stoved-up, slowly disintegrating man. “It’s me,” he tells Sciolino, “without any special effects.”

The French press has not been amused. As Sciolino reports, Un Homme et Son Chien has been greeted with responses ranging from so-so embarrassment to downright outrage. “One can only be staggered by this portrayal of decrepitude ….,” the magazine Le Point moaned. Le Monde complained about “melodramatic overstatement” and “the effort visibly made by the actor in the dialogue.” Le Matin, swinging for the fences, pronounced the entire enterprise “absolutely despicable.” Even Belmondo’s onetime co-star Arielle Dombasle (Amazon, 2000) got into the act. “He is not cerebral,” she said. “People want to see their hero. To see him as an old man who loves his dog is ridiculous.”

All of this makes me want to see Un Homme et Son Chien very much. As anyone who’s ever read Norse mythology (or Greek, for that matter) knows, even gods die eventually. And it strikes me as monumentally courageous of Belmondo to own up to that profoundly simple fact and let us look in on the process. Maybe the movie’s lousy: I don’t know. But I can only admire a god who comes to even an uneasy peace with his mortality and quietly makes it part of his never-ending story.

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

Gods do die, of course, and we remember them in their prime. For Cary Grant it’s The Philadelphia Story or North by Northwest, not Father Goose. I don’t know why thinking about Belmondo got me also thinking about Grant — their screen personas are very different — but it did. Maybe it’s because they were both stars in the old-fashioned sense: magnetic actors who played themselves, no matter what their role happened to be. We have wonderful actors on screen now, and several of them “better” than Belmondo or Grant, in that lose-yourself-in-the-role-and-create-something-new protean sense. But do they have the same impact?

Contemporary film has no Cary Grant. Hugh Grant may come the closest to Cary Grant the light comedian, but for all his comic skill, Hugh has no dark shadings. Harrison Ford approaches Cary Grant’s impact as a dramatic actor, but Ford hasn’t struck a funny note since the Star Wars movies, and even in those it was comic-book comedy. If you could somehow fuse Ford and Hugh Grant you’d get one genuine old-fashioned movie star.

Think about that the next time you watch Bringing Up Baby or Indiscreet. And think about what an extraordinary actor Cary Grant was.

Barry Johnson, Books, Film, General

Jon Raymond and the power of, gulp, discipline

1 Comment

Michelle Williams as Wendy with dog LucyArt Scatter has been late to the Jon Raymond celebration, which started last month when copies of his short story collection Livability started popping up and reviews started to hit various book sections. The film Wendy and Lucy, based on one of those stories, had already hit the festival circuit, winning some major prizes, and then it opened here. Raymond lives here, his stories roam around here, and the film was shot in Portland in 2007, so somehow it feels as though we have a stake in these various enterprises. Which turns out to be a good thing.

What I admire most about 1) Raymond’s short story Train Choir, 2) the film Wendy and Lucy that Kelly Reichardt has directed based on that story, and 3) Michelle Williams’ utterly central performance as Wendy in the movie, is their discipline. All three have some other pleasures, but I love how they hew so close to the line that they’ve cut for themselves. No rambles. No posturing. No baroque curlicues or cupids hovering pudgily above the stage. No windy psychological explanations or philosophical expressions of “meaning”. They are clean and bare and simply present. We observe and supply our own wind, our own meaning, our own set of explanations, maybe, but we don’t really even need to do that. They have a completeness in and of themselves.
Continue reading Jon Raymond and the power of, gulp, discipline →

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

‘Apollo’ and ‘Vitriol’: New plays, old obsessions on stage

3 Comments

The big buzz this week on Portland’s art scene is Friday’s official kickoff of Fertile Ground, a citywide festival of new plays big, small and in between. The sheer ambition of this thing is impressive and endearing and a little scary: How ever will we manage to get to all this stuff?

Well, we won’t.

But we did get a head start over the weekend, taking in last Friday’s opening night of Nancy Keystone’s gigantic Apollo at Portland Center Stage and, on Saturday night, a preview performance of the new and improved Vitriol and Violets, this time with songs and lyrics by the astute and clever jazz composer and pianist Dave Frishberg.

In the theater world “new” plays almost always emerge out of a long process, and both of these have, well, a little history behind them, in a couple of senses. Keystone’s been playing with Apollo for eight years, and its first two acts have been produced before, in Los Angeles. Act Three, funded in part by Center Stage, now joins them for the first time in this new production, creating the complete play. V&V, the Algonquin Round Table play written by Shelly Lipkin, Louanne Moldovan and Sherry Lamoreaux, has also been around the block with a couple of previous work-in-progress productions. This one is the first with Frishberg’s witty songs, and it’s also undergone a lot of streamlining (a few characters have been banished to the wings) and some welcome shaping, making it feel more like a finished play — although the authors say they’re still making adjustments.

More to the point, both plays are about the American character, as measured through real historical characters and events, and both deal with the gap between the buoyant public perception and the tougher reality of the historic episodes they choose to portray.

Oddly, they go about their similar tasks from almost opposite directions.

Keystone’s Apollo is epic theater — “total theater,” this sort of thing is sometimes called — with a grandiosity that splashes wide, wide, wide and occasionally focuses down to the human particular. It comes at you in waves of choreographed sight and sound. And out of its cold sweep of history, a few vivid personalities eventually emerge.

Vitriol and Violets is far more traditional in its theatricality, reeling you in with the particular human comedy of outsize characters such as Alexander Woollcott and Dorothy Parker and letting the history tumble out almost unannounced. Having seduced you with laughter, it doesn’t announce its more serious attentions: It quietly lowers the boom.

Continue reading ‘Apollo’ and ‘Vitriol’: New plays, old obsessions on stage →

a Portland-centric arts and culture blog