Bob Hicks, Books, Food, General

Merry Chriftmas, one and all: Feaft like lords and ladies

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Now Chriftmas comes, ’tis fit that we
Should feaft and fing, and merry be
Keep open Houfe, let Fiddlers play
A Fig for Cold, fing Care away
And may they who thereat repine
On brown Bread and on fmall Beer dine

(Virginia Almanack, 1766)


I have discovered, of late, a dangerous aisle at Powell’s City of Books. More accurately, I have discovered the center of an aisle, in the cookbook section, beyond the volumes by celebrity chefs (where, among the Paula Deens and Mario Batalis and the occasional Peg Bracken I Hate To Cook Book you can sometimes find an old copy of one of Vincent and Mary Price’s grand collections of old American recipes or recollections of their adventures in great world restaurants) and before you hit the Great Big Collections of Foolishly Complex Recipes From Famous Magazines.

Here, in the middle, is a small row of shelves labeled collectors books (aren’t all books in a bookstore for collectors?) and on the shelves sit a continuously rotating selection of scruffy old volumes. Some are from the beginning of the last century and most are of little consequence but every now and again the shelves yield a true find for anyone interested, as I am, in the history of foodways and its interconnection wth the daily life of the past. It was here I found, not long go, the daftly entertaining 1938 Cheddar Gorge: A Book of English Cheeses, edited capriciously by Sir John Squire and peppered with delicious illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard.

More to the seasonal point, here is where I found The Williamsburg Art of Cookery, or, Accomplifh’d Gentlewoman’s Companion: Being a Collection of upwards of Five Hundred of the moft Ancient & Approv’d Recipes in Virginia Cookery, a 1966 reprinting of a book originally copyrighted in 1938, which was itself a collection with commentary of receipts and reminiscences from the 1600s to the mid-1800s. This is where I found the quote from the Virginia Almanack at the top of this post. And it’s where I found this report, filed by “Monfieur Durand, a Frenchman journeying through Virginia in the Chriftmas holiday Seafon in 1686″:

We were now approaching the Chriftmas Festival. Milor Parker was, as I have faid, a Roman Catholic … He wifhed now to pafs Chriftmas Day in Maryland, and as we were only five or fix Leagues diftant and had no Defire to leave him, it was agreed that all fhould go to fpend the Night with Colonel Fitzhugh, whofe Houfe is on the Shore of the great River Potomac …

Mr. Wormeley is fo beloved and efteemed in thefe Parts that all Gentlemen of Confideration of the Countryfide we traverfed came to meet him, and, as they rode with us, it refulted that by the Time we reached Col. Fitzhugh’s we made up a Troop of 20 Horfe. The Colonel’s Accomodations were, however, fo ample that this Company gave him no Trouble at all; we were all fupplied with Beds, though we had, indeed, to double up. Col. Fitzhugh fhowed us the largeft Hofpitality. He had Store of good Wine and other Things to drink, and a Frolic enfued. He called in three Fiddlers, a Clown, a tight rope Dancer and an acrobatic Tumbler, and gave us all the Divertifement one could wifh. It was very cold but no one thought of going near the Fire becaufe they never put lefs than the Trunk of a Tree upon it and fo the entire Room was kept warm.


As your guests plow through the Great Blizzard of Aught Eight to get to your holiday table, may your fiddlers and clown and dancer and tumbler also arrive safely and happily. Even if it takes them 20 Horfe to get there.

General

Terry Toedtemeier memorial service time and date

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Just a short item, because we saw this is on the Portland Art Museum’s website:

A memorial for Terry will be held on Sunday, January 4, 2009 and begin at 2 p.m. with a viewing of Wild Beauty. The memorial program is scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. in the Fields Ballroom in the Museum’s Mark Building. The program will include remarks by friends and family and a slide show of Terry’s work.

Bob Hicks, Food, General, Visual Art

Merry solstice, pagans, scientists and true believers

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Today is Winter Solstice, and as my late father-in-law used to say, have you noticed the days are getting longer?

Well, no, not in the afterdaze of the snowstorm that’s punched the Pacific Northwest and reminded me, if briefly, of my stint living in Upstate New York, a long time ago. In those days I knew how to drive in the snow — even a pathetic yellow Ford Pinto that would start only after I opened the hood and stuck a stick inside the solenoid so the fuel could get going and do its job. This required a procedure involving a return to the driver’s seat to turn the key, then another trip outside to take the stick out of the solenoid and slam the hood down, making sure I’d set the dodgy emergency brake in the meantime. It was a neat trick in winter weather that might be 15 degrees above or 15 below, but when you’re in your 20s you’re capable of miraculous things.

And here we are, 35 years later, in another season of miraculous things — or coincidental occurrences, or events fully within the statistical model of probability, depending on how you view these things. Last night at 11:38 my mother-in-law arrived at Portland’s Union Station on an Amtrak run from Seattle that had been scheduled to arrive at 5:50 but was slowed down by little inconveniences that included a derailed freight train and several frozen couplings that had to be unfrozen so her train could pass. No, I don’t know how they do that. Somewhere along the line, when it became apparent that the train was going to be several hours late, the Amtrak people offered their passenger-hostages a movie to while away the wait — if they paid four bucks. Some people will regard the train’s eventual safe arrival as a miracle. All people will agree that Amtrak’s version of hospitality under duress falls well within the statistical model of probability.

Today, on the solstice, all is well. We might not make it out of the house (or beyond the lure of snowballs in the yard, although both cats have ventured trepidatiously out of doors, and I’ve just been reminded that the neighbor across the street is throwing an open house later this afternoon, with lots of food and drink). But the larder is full, and a log’s on the fire — it’s made of compressed coffee grounds, which I’ve persuaded myself come from organically grown, fair-trade, visions-of-a-better-life beans. Tuaca and bourbon and cider and eggnog are available, and the resident 11-year-old, master of decorative gift-wrapping, has been busily bundling presents not destined for his own stash and then arranging them beneath the Christmas tree, which seems glowingly unaware of its dual role in Christian and pagan symbolism.

One of those presents, which my wife discovered a few days ago, is a Wiccan cookbook filled with delightful old woodcut prints and recipes that may or may not actually be useful: In a case like this, the recipes aren’t really the point. This one will be opened by a devotee of the culturally alternative and pleasingly esoteric. We like thinking about the old ways, even if we also think that electricity and modern medicine are pretty nifty things.

There will be no Wicker Man in our household this season. Our traditions are more Christian and, in my daughter’s case, Jewish. But these things get smudged and crossed and fused. We are all, inside our heads and traditions and belief systems, something like Frankensteinian monsters, stitched together from who knows what? — and that’s really not such a bad or alarming thing.

This morning I cruised through Art Knowledge News, a site I like to check out every couple of days, and discovered a pair of intriguing exhibitions arriving soon in England that illustrate, coincidentally, the hybrid quality of contemporary life. The first, to be shown starting in February at Yale and then moving to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, celebrates the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth by showing the effect of his revolutionary recalibration of natural causation on the world of art. The second, opening in April at the Tate Britain, is a restaging of William Blake’s only solo art show, in 1809, with all of its mystic, angelic, otherworldly vision of something vastly beyond the commonplace.

Somehow, historically and culturally, I find myself able to embrace both.

I suppose that’s a miracle.

Books, General, Vernon Peterson

Winter’s tales: Halldor Laxness on love and ice – and fire

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“Not much ever happened to him but weather.”
— Willa Cather, A Lost Lady

I think of love stories in winter weather. Perhaps it’s my own small town South Dakota youth calling, remembering my own 60s romance with the love of my life, cold winter nights parking at a turn-out on the gravel road out past the airfield, burning gas, fogging the windows — all manner of heat, and dreaming a life not far different from the one we’ve had. So I can relish without regret cold love stories that are tragic, like William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance, which begins with a winter sleigh ride, or a poignant tale like Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, with its blue shadows of the winter season and its intimations of the longer blue shadows of human behavior. Even thinking of it brings one of those who-can-tell-what-is-in-a-human-heart shivers.

But here is a cold-storage love story, one that pushes beyond what’s between a woman and a man, beyond the temperament of a season, striking at the ice or fire dilemma of creation itself.

“Where does creation end and destruction begin?” Here’s the preacher’s answer, in the form of a parable about a horse swept over a waterfall:

“He was washed ashore, alive, onto the rocks below. The beast stood there motionless, hanging his head, for more than twenty-four hours below this awful cascade of water that had swept him down. Perhaps he was trying to remember what life was called. Or he was wondering why the world had been created. He showed no signs of ever wanting to graze again. In the end, however, he heaved himself onto the riverbank and started to nibble.”

This derelict minister, Pastor Jon, has himself fallen from grace in Halldor Laxness’ novel Under the Glacier. His parish church stands at the foot of the glacier, its broken windowpanes boarded over, its door nailed shut, and its pews and altar stolen and used for firewood during “the spring of the great snows” several years past. Pastor Jon is now more tinker and local repairman than preacher to his flock. And into this strange world –- the center of creation or the end of the world, depending on who is consulted –- steps the narrator, who calls himself “Embi,” short for Emissary of the Bishop of Iceland. This young prelate has been sent to make inquiries and gather facts regarding rumors of strange goings on at the glacier parish.
Continue reading Winter’s tales: Halldor Laxness on love and ice – and fire →

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General

Architecture notes: Doyle’s demise, Sam’s folly

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At the risk of making Art Scatter look like an architecture and planning blog (we’re deeply interested, but others cover the territory fare more systematically) a couple of things are sticking in our craw. Well, my craw, at any rate.

First, the Riverdale School District’s decision to tear down an A.E. Doyle-designed elementary school in Dunthorpe, a move that’s far from surprising but depressing and exasperating, nevertheless: You get the feeling that the board never took the preservation case seriously; it just bulled ahead and did what it wanted to do. Noblesse, you might say, without the oblige. We wrote about this a while back. Now, we can’t think of any response better than those from Scatter friends Tim DuRoche, on his Portland Spaces blog, and Brian Libby, on his Portland Architecture blog. Read ’em and weep. Or get angry. Or both. This 1920 school building isn’t major Doyle, but it’s a model of how to do a modest building the right way — and after all, aren’t most buildings in most places modest? If you get the modest buildings right, the major buildings will follow suit.


Second — and not wanting to pick on Mayor-elect Sam Adams, who has a lot of energy and a lot of ideas — but what in the pluperfect hell is with his insistence on building that white elephant of a convention center hotel? I thought Metro had finally stuck a silver spike in this 600-room monster’s heart, but no: Sam just won’t let it die the death it deserves. This truly seems to be a case where money interests are overruling common sense and good public policy, which really ought to go together.

Let’s be clear about a few things.

— First, the chances of this $227 million project ever paying for itself are about as good as Bill O’Reilly’s shot at acing out Hillary and becoming Obama’s secretary of state. And let’s not even get into how much that estimated $227 million would actually end up being.

Continue reading Architecture notes: Doyle’s demise, Sam’s folly →

Barry Johnson, Cities, General, Visual Art

A scatter: Museums, bridges, noses, money

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Some things just must be cleared up by the New Year, yes? Like what’s happening at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which threw up its hands last month and cried out for help as its financial position (or at least its endowment) withered away to next to nothing (well, $7 million or so).

The New York Times’ Edward Wyatt reports that the MoCA board will decide today whether it will merge with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or go it alone with “help” from Eli Broad, who has offered MoCA what amounts to a $15 million matching grant to rebuild its endowment and funding for five years of exhibitions (at $3 million per year).
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Barry Johnson, Cities, General

Gil Kelley and the height of the Skidmore district

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Many days, I find myself Max-ing along First Avenue, once we ramp down from the Steel Bridge, and I have come to enjoy it immensely. It’s the buildings. There’s nothing quite like them. Two or three stories, mostly, elegant and tastefully restored, they are an instant invitation to consider the very beginnings of Portland as a city, because First Avenue, and the rest of the 20 blocks north and south of Burnside as far as Third, was the heart of the city’s first downtown.

It’s now the heart of the Skidmore historic district (or the Old Town/Chinatown neighborhood — they have overlapping, though not quite congruent, boundaries), far from the center of town and far from the major development activity that has re-made the Pearl and is now remaking the West End. Thanks to certain accidental economic forces and planning “failures”, around one-third of the original wonderful cast-iron facade buildings in the Skidmore district have been preserved, enough for it to have earned recognition as a national historic preservation district.

These aren’t the only old buildings in Portland, not by a long shot, but they are the greatest collection of cast-iron architecture still standing in the country. More importantly, they are beautiful — I love the human scale, the almost whimsical details, even the brickwork. And the renovations that have kept them “alive” as buildings have shown them to be deserving of more centuries of life, meaning simply that they can adapt to new circumstances, new technologies, new generations of tenants.

So, that’s how I enter the territory of two recent columns in The Oregonian, one by Steve Duin in ardent opposition (along with the preservationist community) to raising the height limits for new buildings in the district from 75 to 130 feet on five specific sites at the district’s edge, and one by Anna Griffin (online it inexplicably suggests that Renee Mitchell is the author; it’s Griffin) about how Mayor-elect Sam Adams’ reorganized planning director Gil Kelley out of a job and what this might mean. The two are related, because Kelley is the one who proposed changing the height restrictions, pending approval from the national historic district people.
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General

Terry Toedtemeier: a new book, a memorial service

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UPDATE: Via the Port site, we pass along the news that KBOO’s Art Focus (90.7 FM) will hold a tribute to Terry Toedtemeier at 10:30 a.m. Thursday. Scheduled guests: Jane Beebe of PDX Contemporary (his dealer), John Laursen and curator Prudence Roberts, Terry’s wife.

From what I understand, Terry Toedtemeier had two “dream” photography books he hoped to publish. The first, Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957, was just published by Oregon State University Press and the Northwest Photography Archive, and as we have said it’s magnificent. (More importantly, though, book buyers feel the same way — we stopped at Broadway Books today and Roberta told us that the book was selling very well.)

The second was a book of his own photographs. Maybe the striking images of the Oregon headlands he’d captured at minus tide from vantage points most of us never reach. But since his death last week, a broader retrospective seems to be more in order, and the photography archive, the non-profit that Terry founded with John Laursen, has decided to take it on. As their plans for the book become clearer, we’ll let you know.

They’ll need help, of course, and for those who want to pitch in, the archive is collecting money for the new book at its website. It’s a way both to honor Terry and support the organization and its mission — to preserve the region’s heritage of great photography. The site also reports that a memorial service honoring Terry will be held at the Portland Art Museum on Sunday, January 4. More details to come.

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Martha Ullman West on the Ghost of Nutcrackers Past

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Nobody knows her Marzipans from her Sugarplum Fairies as well as Martha Ullman West, the distinguished dance writer and charter member of Friends of Art Scatter. We here at Scatter Central are pleased as holiday punch — and with the right additives, that’s pretty darned pleased — to turn our space over to her for some insights into Oregon Ballet Theatre’s “The Nutcracker” and the long line of Nutcrackers leading up to it. Read on!

When George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker premiered at New York City Center in 1954, critic Edwin Denby reported that a “troubled New York poet sighed, “I could see it every day, it’s so deliciously boring.” I thought of that remark while viewing the same choreography, excellently danced, when Oregon Ballet Theatre opened its current run on Friday. I think the poet, not named by Denby, but possibly W.H. Auden, must have made his backhanded comment at intermission, following the first act party scene. I don’t know if he ever went back, but I have, again and again, in many versions, including a Nutcracker God-help-me on ice, and the boredom becomes less delicious each time.

So on Friday, my mind wandered a bit — well, more than a bit — during that family party, notwithstanding adorable children in their party clothes, naughty Fritz and dancing dolls, all of whom performed just as they should have, harking back to the ghosts of Nutcrackers past — specifically James Canfield’s at OBT and Todd Bolender’s, which is still being performed by Kansas City Ballet. Both Canfield and Bolender (who danced in Balanchine’s 1954 production) have enlivened the party considerably, the former with mechanical dolls that are somewhat reminiscent of Dorothy’s companions in the Wizard of Oz (and they accompany Marie on her journey, in Canfield’s case to the palace of the Czar) and the latter with hordes of small boys galloping around the staid gathering tooting toy trumpets, and less formal social dances than Balanchine’s.

Nevertheless, there are elements of Balanchine’s party that I love and look for, particularly the Grandfather dance, which begins in stately decorum and concludes with a lively little pas de deux by the Grandmother and Uncle Drosselmeier, here performed by apprentice Ashley Smith and principal dancer Artur Sultanov, who will be seen in later performances as the Sugar Plum Fairy’s Cavalier. Moreover, his Marie is performed by a little girl and not an adult dancer pretending to be one. Julia Rose Winett, who danced the role on Friday night, has a jump that makes you think she has springs in her slippers. She can act, too. You know she’s scared to death during the battle of the mice and toy soldiers, even though the Mouse King really doesn’t look very frightening.
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Barry Johnson, Cities, Environment, General

Critic face-off: Brad Cloepfil and the battle against kitsch

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The primary piece of writing on my reading list this weekend was Inara Verzemnieks’ profile of Brad Cloepfil, which was a hybrid of sorts, marrying facts about the architect and his buildings, but also offering an account of life on the ground inside those buildings and an approach to thinking about his work. It even gets, gulp, philosophical. I was a little too close to the process of this story to supply a full-fledged analysis of it, let alone a “judgment”, but it is the jumping off point for the rest of this post.

Lurking within Inara’s story is a debate between Ada Louise Huxtable and Nicolai Ouroussoff, and not just over Cloepfil’s renovation of the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle, either. About everything. I’ll start with Huxtable just because she’s just the best. She puts Ouroussoff on notice immediately in the lead of her review in the Wall St. Journal: “the reviews have set some kind of record for irresponsible over-the-top building-bashing,” she writes, and she must be referring to him, because no one was quite as vitriolic as he was (that I’ve found in print, anyway).
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