General

Scatter’s got the genius fellowship blues, or not

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Art Scatter doesn’t have much to say about this year’s MacArthur genius grants, half-a-million bucks, no strings, no waiting. We usually get a bit queasy when they are announced, not because we ourselves are expecting the phone call (even Art Scatter isn’t THAT delusional) but because we fear that someone we know will be on the list, someone we can’t abide. So we are happy this year. We don’t know a soul. (We just saw The Big Lebowski again and have determined that we don’t use “abide” nearly enough, as in “The Dude abides.”)

Truth be told, I always LIKE the list, mostly people I’ve never heard of doing things that sound amazing if not impossible, a sort of scatter in its own right. This year seems heavy on the neuroscience. I have great respect for neuroscientists. I have no idea how one spends her day, of course. Peering into people’s ears with one of those ear-examiner things with a little light, except it’s a laser and they are picking up electrical activity in one lobe or another? That’s a bit like what I imagine. Or on darker days, slicing fresh brain into ultra thin slices. I started to add, “the size my mother wants her cake sliced at birthday parties.” Sorry. I’ll spare you my astro-physicist fantasies.

I did recognize a few of the fellows (that’s what we’ll be called when we are chosen: MacArthur Fellows), especially the ones in the arts. Jennifer Tipton is an amazing lighting designer — techies rule! I saw saxophonist Miguel Zenon at a two Portland Jazz Festivals (don’t get me started: bring it back!). Is he “creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st Century” as the MacArthur people suggest? Probably not, but he can really play and his combo of Latin, African and Caribbean influences IS really interesting and listenable. We’ve already written so much about Alex Ross, the New Yorker music critic who wrote “The Rest Is Noise,” that he probably thinks we are stalking him. No complaint there. I haven’t read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun about life in Nigeria after the civil war with Biafra, but the award makes me want to. And I don’t know Tara Donovan, who takes ordinary objects such as paper clips and straws and makes various sensuous shapes out of them. The photographs I’ve seen are pretty cool.

I think my favorite winner is John Ochsendorf, a structural engineer at MIT who uses the “wisdom” of ancient builders to solve contemporary engineering problems. He’s studied rope suspension bridges designed by the Incans, Romanesque church vaults and buttresses and he and his students designed England’s Pines Calyx dome, pictured above, “a robust, energy-efficient structure built from local resources using a tile vaulting system patented in the 19th century by Spanish architect Rafael Guastavino,” according to the MacArthur notes. My google-snooping suggests that this is exactly right. I think it’s important to our sense of history that we understand just how smart, just how adaptive those who came before us have been. So, well done MacArthur peeps, well done. (This is NOT sucking up!)

Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

The Halprin fountain dance, one week later

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I thought I was done with the Halprin fountain “event” or “happening” or “dance” — I still can’t quite name it — that ended the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland last Sunday (that would be Sept. 14). But I keep getting flashbacks of the performance, replaying little bits in my mind, thinking about some of the music I heard. You know what that’s like: Something more than random neurons firing.

I’ve had a couple of aids in this. The first is visual. Art Scatter received a very nice email from writer Brett Campbell, who was also very taken with the Halprin happening and said he was working on an essay of his own. When he completes it, we will link to it. This is right down his alley: He’s working on Lou Harrison book and Harrison was in the middle of the San Francisco milieu of Lawrence and Ana Halprin. But as a memory igniter, Brett’s wife, photographer CaroleZoom, was actually more important, because she sent us some images of the event. Quite beautiful ones, which explain the adulatory comments I heard about the first piece of the performance choreographed by Tere Mathern — which I was unable to see (I was late, it was too crowded). So, I’ve posted those here.

And there was the thread to the original post… Randy Gragg, one of the key organizers, responded a couple of times. Carolyn Altman, who was a Portland dancer/choreographer/writer, wrote in from Georgia, where she now lives, with memories of the fountains. Dance writer Martha Ullman West got things going and left us wanting more of her eye on the dances themselves.

And realizing that I missed Martha’s eye made me understand how inadequate the description of things in the original post was/is. If I could do it over, I would try to tell you how the dancers moved, more than simply saying it was “old-style” modern dance, carving space, attending to changes in topography and water flow, operating at scales tiny and grand, how they rolled and buckled and ran, the qualities in the momentary tableaux, the muscle groups engaged and relaxed, the dancers and the way their dance personalities emerged. The music would be harder for me — help us, Brett! — fleeting, sporadic, in search of original impulses to propel it, guide it, original impulses to communicate to us.
Continue reading The Halprin fountain dance, one week later →

Bob Hicks, General

Scatter, the new generation: On the right-brain revolution

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The thing about pep rallies is, sometimes there really is something to cheer about. So it was Thursday night inside the Dolores Winningstad Theatre in downtown Portland, where a group no longer called Arts Partners gathered much of the local arts mob for a rebranding celebration — from now on, thanks to the Portland firm North, Arts Partners is The Right Brain Initiative.

What’s that mean?

For one thing, you’re going to have to finally get that right brain/left brain thing straight in your mind: left brain analytical, right brain intuitive. You can color-code it if that helps.

More importantly, it means that after many years of America’s public schools being pushed further and further into a “back to the basics” position that all too often amounts to deadening drudgery, creative thinking is pushing back. And considering the economic, cultural and environmental challenges of the 21st century, it’s pushing back just in time.

The RBI, which has been spearheaded by the Regional Arts & Cultural Council but has had lots of vital input from many other organizations and individuals (including some local government grants), has set itself a noble if daunting task — to incorporate arts programs “into the education of every K-8 student in the Portland metropolitan region’s school districts.” And the goal has a good kick-start. Beginning this winter, 20 schools will give the idea a test drive — two in the Gresham-Barlow district, six in North Clackamas, four in Hillsboro and eight in the Portland district. Programs will be put in place by Young Audiences of Oregon and Southwest Washington, which has many years’ experience bringing arts events into public schools.

Some good old-fashioned left-brain questions remain to be asked, and a lot of tough left-brain work needs to be done to bring this thing on-line. The point, after all, isn’t to kick analytical thinking out of the schools and substitute it with daydreams, but to teach kids how to fuse their thinking and use their whole brains: analysis and imagination working together. How do we learn? What is the purpose of learning? How do we engage our students in the excitement of discovery? How do we teach them to survive and thrive in a 21st century that demands adaptability and suppleness of thought?

Continue reading Scatter, the new generation: On the right-brain revolution →

Barry Johnson, General

More about money and art: Lehman Brothers, Seattle Art Museum, Oregon Symphony and Brad Cloepfil

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So we will continue our meditation on the connection between art and money. Which really, we hate to do — the connection makes things messy in so many ways, and when we are thinking about the connection we aren’t thinking about the art. But we are thinking about the conditions that make art possible, for better or worse, so we will persevere, at least through a series of related links.

First, of all, Bloomberg’s Lindsay Pollack notes that bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers has something on the order of 3,500 contemporary art works in its collection and wonders what will happen to it now. There must not be an accessible list of the art, because Pollack’s own list is rather sketchy — though it includes work by Louise Nevelson and Jasper Johns, not to mention Damian Hirst. But the article does give us a sense of the long history of the Lehman name in art circles — there is a Robert Lehman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, after all, named after the grandson of the founder of the bank.

Closer to home, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Regina Hackett notes the VERY close connection between the Seattle Art Museum and Washington Mutual, the huge savings and loan which is both under great financial pressure and looking for a buyer as we type this. The two share a building in downtown Seattle in a complex arrangement that the museum used to finance the extension, designed by Portland’s own Brad Cloepfil. The museum says it has its bases covered, no matter what happens to WaMu, but Hackett has found some folks who aren’t so sure.

Closer still, Art Scatter friend David Stabler, at The Oregonian, found out that the Oregon Symphony hasn’t detected any deterioration in the financial commitments of its patrons. This could be a “Planet Arts” phenomena (see post below), but it is encouraging, nonetheless. And he found the silver lining in all of this:

How many times have we heard that the arts should be run more like businesses? Well, Brian Dickie, General Director of Chicago Opera Theatre in Chicago (the small company, not Lyric Opera), hopes he never hears that again, “given what CEOs with MBAs from the major business schools have managed to do to some of the country’s largest financial institutions.”

All we can say is, sweet!

And finally, speaking of Brad Cloepfil, he’s at the heart of the beast in New York City, where his redesign of 2 Columbus Circle is unveiling. Another Scatter friend, Inara Verzemnieks, is there and she’s been posting about it on OregonLive and had a front page story about it in today’s Oregonian. For us the key quote came at the end (consider this a spoiler alert):

One of the criticisms that has been leveled at Cloepfil’s building is that it is not bold enough, not enough of a break with the past. But this blurring of past and present seemed to be what Cloepfil wanted. He seemed to like playing with the tension between what you thought you remembered — is that the lollipop building? — and what you now see. That it was possible for the two to occupy the same space.

“The ambiguity of memory,” he said. “Isn’t that sometimes the nature of cities?”

We’d much rather end with the ambiguity of memory than the ambiguity of money.

Barry Johnson

Will the arts follow Lehman Bros. into the tank?

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When the economy gets bad, Recession bad, the common understanding is that the arts suffer even worse. And the Wall Street, sub-prime loan crash looks like it may kick the rest of the economy into R-word land, once and for all. So, arts groups are headed for the hills, where they will attempt to hunker down and hold out to the last mime, right? Well, no, not according to David Segal and Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post, who surveyed arts groups in New York, mostly, but also Washington to see what the mood was.

Segal and Trescott, perhaps expecting to find panic, ran into a pocket of relative calm. Maybe it’s that corporate giving to the arts is so low in the U.S. — the article says 3 percent of all contributed income — or maybe it’s just blind optimism, but the executive directors refused to buckle. The key quote came at the end:

It’s an article of faith among theater honchos that when the going gets depressing, the depressed go to the theater.

My own theory is that Planet Arts, as the article colorfully calls it, is used to operating near the edge all the time and has confidence in its coping skills. The garden out back. The chickens. The Dumpster diving. Or maybe, as the article suggests, it simply takes a while for economic problems to reach the far-flung planet. Portland isn’t Wall Street, and we have missed much of the direct sub-prime misery that has afflicted California and Florida. But we are not in a bubble here, and the indirect effects are now hitting us (checked your stock portfolio lately? Art Scatter refuses to investigate the one share of Bear Stearns our granny left us).

So, what happens here on our little piece of Planet Arts? I’m not sure. I’ve heard rumblings of majors in trouble for some time now. How resilient will they be if we are facing a one- or two-year Recession? And if the majors ramp up their requests for money from individuals and foundations, will the mid-sized and smaller groups start to feel the pain, too? That’s an honest question… I know lots of Scatter readers work for or are near to arts groups in town. What do you think? What have you heard? Where are we headed? Use the comments section OR if you need more anonymity than that, email us at artscatterpdx@gmail.com.

Barry Johnson, Books

Farewell to David Foster Wallace

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I have been brooding about the suicide of David Foster Wallace since hearing about it last weekend. I thought of him as a sort of “family friend,” primarily because my son Nathan, one of his biggest fans, and my wife once had dinner with him (and a table full of other people). When I heard that he and Nathan spent a large chunk of time talking about movies, I couldn’t have been more pleased — and proud that my son could keep up with him. I don’t think I could have.

I think of Art Scatter as a sort of argument in favor of breadth. But it’s the shadow of the shadow of the argument made by DFW himself, whose supple brain could wrap itself around thorny mathematical ideas (his book on infinity is a wonder) and cruise ships with equal facility. I started to type “felicity,” so that, too.

Unlike a real “family friend” might have, I have no interpretation of the specifics of his death that makes a bit of sense. It just makes me profoundly sad. I heard about the death of William Gaddis right before taking a cruise of my own, found my way almost unconsciously to a bookstore and picked up a Gaddis book I hadn’t read, A Frolic of His Own, which weirdly proved to be an excellent commentary on the trip, not as direct as DFW’s own but equally keen to the absurdity. Now, I’m feeling called to do the same for David Foster Wallace as he joins the company of Gaddis. It’s the best I can do.

Barry Johnson, General

Scatter links to various and Tuesday

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Some hot buttered links to get you thinking? The first one involves money. Big Money.

1. The James Patterson phenomena! How does Patterson keep five separate lines of books going every year and pile up $1.5 BILLION in sales per annum? Teamwork, baby, teamwork.

2. “The Bonesetter’s Daughter”: how revolutionary IS the new Stewart Wallace-Amy Tan opera? The NY Times’ Anthony Tommasini and the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman were consulting their superlatives dictionary.

3. The importance of the site: theater is the theater. Well, maybe. LA Times theater critic Charles McNulty argues against Peter Brook’s famous “open theater” formulation, suggesting that local conditions affect productions in important ways. The article takes a quick tour of LA’s theater spaces and their “meaning”.

Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

Sunday in the park with the Halprins (while Rome burned)

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So, while Wall Street Giants shuddered, pivoted and crashed to the ground, Art Scatter was amusing itself at “City Dance,” the celebration of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, specifically Lawrence’s Portland plazas and fountains, Anna’s dances and early ’60s San Francisco art music, which somehow affected both. I will type (or is it keyboard, technically?) as long as I can, until the shock wave takes us off line… oddly it seems appropriate to muse on subjects such as these during times of economic crisis.

We’ve already set up the fountains, and to a lesser extent the dances, in a post below. To summarize, L. Halprin was hired by Ira Keller and the PDC to provide some public spaces for Portland’s first major Urban Renewal project, the demolition of the South Auditorium district and its replacement by a Skidmore, Owings, Merrill office/residential park. Keller was so happy with these, that he later asked L. Halprin to finish off the set with a plaza/fountain in front of what was then Civic Auditorium. It’s now the Keller Auditorium and the fountain is now Keller Fountain, though old-timers will be excused for calling it the Forecourt Fountain.

Fast forward 40 years or so. The fountains and plazas, important icons in the history of urban landscape design, could use a little conservation work, and so architecture writer/magazine editor Randy Gragg, the Halprin Conservancy, Third Angle New Music Ensemble and four Portland choreographers (Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilks, Linda Austin and Linda K. Johnson) banded together to help raise our collective consciousness about the Halprins’ work by staging a moving concert through all four sites (Keller Fountain, Pettygrove Park, Lovejoy Fountain, Source Fountain).

So on Sunday afternoon, sunny and warm, several hundred Portlanders, unaware perhaps that financial Redwoods were crashing, assembled to watch the show on the last day of the Time-Based Art Festival. Maybe there were more than that, adding the two concerts together. The second concert was so packed that when I arrived right before it began, I couldn’t get close enough to see anything much at the first site, the Keller Fountain, but that’s not going to deter me from my posting. Because there were three more sites to visit.
Continue reading Sunday in the park with the Halprins (while Rome burned) →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Language, Music, Visual Art

Thursday scatter: cool nicknames, a new guy at the Met

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One of our favorite Portland writers, Fred Leeson, has a sweet cover story in the inPortland section of today’s Oregonian on Sweet Baby James Benton, the smooth-singing jazz guy who is one of the last links to the great old days of the city’s North Williams Avenue jazz scene.

That scene was pretty much wiped out, along with the thriving black neighborhood that nourished it, by the midcentury sweep of urban renewal that also obliterated the bustling working and ethnic neighborhoods of south downtown, which at least led to the terrific Lawrence Halprin fountains that will be celebrated this weekend.

But enough of the heavy stuff. What we’re thinking about now is cool nicknames (Benton was being called Sweet Baby James at least a decade before James Taylor wrote that unavoidable song).

Jazz and blues and pop music have ’em. Count Basie. Duke Ellington. King Oliver. (Do we detect a pattern here?) Big Mama Thornton. Wild Bill Haley. Doctor John.

Football has ’em. Crazy Legs Hirsch. Whizzer White (who whizzed all the way to the United States Supreme Court bench). Night Train Lane (who gets honorary musical billing, too: He was married to the great Dinah Washington).

Baseball has ’em. Three Finger Brown. Big Poison Waner. Little Poison Waner. Stan the Man Musial. Moose Skowron. Catfish Hunter. Blue Moon Odom. Nuke Laloosh. (We don’t count sportswriter inventions such as the execrable “Splendid Splinter” for Ted Williams, or even “The Bambino” for George Herman Ruth: “Babe” was quite enough.)

We confess to a longstanding if not deeply felt regret for our own un-nicknamedness. A few people in our youth called us Hopalong: Although it’s true we once created a whole Hopalong Cassidy comic book with a fresh storyline by carefully cutting apart several old Hoppy comics and rearranging the panels in a way that fit our desires, the monicker was tied more directly to our unorthodox running style, which included a couple of hops and a jump. And a few people, knowing both our middle name and our family roots in the rural South, refer to us as “Bobby Wayne.” But those aren’t real nicknames. They don’t stick.

So, the big question: How about you? Got a favorite nickname for a public or semi-public figure? (Arianna Huffington, it seems, has annointed Sarah Palin with “The Trojan Moose,” but we have a feeling the honoree should actually be willing to accept the honor.) Something you were tagged as a kid that has sadly (or not so sadly) drifted away? A name you’d really like to be known by, if only someone else would get the ball rolling? Hit that comment button. All of Art Scatter really, really wants to know.

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THE CHANGING OF THE GUARDS:

Big news at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which some of us consider one of the coolest spots on Earth. Thomas P. Campbell, a late horse in the running, has been selected to replace the venerable Philippe de Montebello as director and chief executive. Campbell is 46 and widely respected by those who know him; his specialty is European tapestries. Montebello is 72 and has run the Met, extremely well, for 31 years; he retires next year. With Campbell, the Met went in-house and chose someone with impeccable professional credentials — no sure thing in the go-go museum world, where directors, like college presidents, are often chosen more for their ability to haul in the bucks than for their artistic or academic chops. Of course, Campbell’s going to have to raise tons of money, too. Good luck! Carol Vogel has the story in the New York Times. Plus, a compelling analysis from the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Alexei Ratmansky, artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, is leaving Moscow for New York to become artist in residence at American Ballet Theater: The internationalization of the ballet world continues apace. Again, The Times has the report.

And up the freeway in Seattle, Gerard Schwarz has announced he’ll retire as music director of the Seattle Symphony in 2011. He’s 61 now and will have been at the helm in Seattle for 26 years , guiding the orchestra, among other achievements, into its splendid home at Benaroya Hall. His leavetaking will not exactly be met with wailing and gnashing of teeth by a number of orchestra members, who have chafed under his autocratic leadership. But others at the symphony are stout defenders, and he’s put this orchestra on the map. A lot of potential replacements are going to consider this a plum job. Reports from the Seattle Times and the New York Times.

Barry Johnson, Dance, Environment, General

Deep Portland history: Lawrence Halprin and Ira Keller

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Monday night, Randy Gragg and Portland Spaces magazine staged another of its Bright Light City Discussions; this one featured historian Carl Abbott and was part of the Time-Based Art Festival. We took notes! More importantly we learned a lot about Lawrence Halprin and a provocative piece of Portland history. There was lots of information, some of which we may have gotten wrong. Don’t hesitate to correct our record!

Before the start of the Randy Gragg and Carl Abbott presentation on the history of the old South Auditorium district and the Lawrence Halprin fountains and plazas that replaced it, I happened to sit across from Robert Perron. This was lucky. Perron taught landscape design at UC Berkeley in the early ’60s when Halprin was there and knows a lot about him and his aesthetic impulses. And his knowledge of Portland is deep, possibly because he’s worked on so much of it, including the Salmon Street Fountain, Terry Schrunk Park and the First Presbyterian Church garden park. Because of that he understands the accidents, unintended consequences and budget shortfalls that affect the design of our cities and therefore our lives.

Shrunk was the mayor and Ira Keller was the chairman of the newly formed Portland Development Commission (PDC) when the decision was made in the late ’50s to bulldoze the aging neighborhood south of downtown and replace it with a utopian Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) residential and commercial district with impressive towers surrounded by green space. And in the green space, Keller decided, there should be a series of plazas and fountains designed by Halprin.
Continue reading Deep Portland history: Lawrence Halprin and Ira Keller →

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