Books, General

Hemingway: Last Night in Havana

1 Comment

U.S. policy toward Cuba is depressing.

Fifty years ago there were high hopes in Cuba when Fidel Castro toppled the dictator Batista and ran out the American Mafia. But since then there has been a slow, steady descent into poverty and repression, the combined effect of the U.S. embargo and Castro’s ruthless system of concentration camps, forced-labor and re-education, supported by a network of secret police and informers. Recently, Castro was replaced by his brother Raul, and there was much speculation about “transition scenarios” and the usual saber-rattling from the administration about regime change, keeping hopes alive for the politically-active Cuban-American community that someday they’ll be able to reclaim the property Castro confiscated fifty years ago.

ernesthemingway.jpgBut there’s likely no going back in any sense. Consider the curious fate of Ernest Hemingway, always a revered local god in Cuba. His novels To Have and Have Not, The Old Man and the Sea, and Islands in the Stream reflect the sun-soaked, elemental, sometimes violent sense of adventure he found in pre-Castro Cuba. His estate on the edge of Havana, Finca Vigia, or “Look-out Farm,” where he lived for more than two decades, is now a state-run museum, housing thousands of books and dozens of paintings he collected, as well as many heads of animals he killed on safari.

Finca Vigia is the setting for Leonardo Padua Fuentes’ entertaining novel Adios Hemingway (Cannongate, 2005). As the story opens in the year 2000, ex-cop Mario Conde returns to duty to investigate the discovery of a skeleton and FBI badge that have washed up in the garden during a violent storm. It’s quickly established that the man was murdered some forty years before, during Hemingway’s last months in Cuba. Suspicion falls on the famous author because it was then that he abruptly left Cuba to resettle in Ketchum, Idaho, where he killed himself in 1961.
Continue reading Hemingway: Last Night in Havana →

Books, General

Surveillance: From Barbed Wire to the Invisible Prison

Leave a comment

Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets
To conceal.

Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”

1.jpg
Ubiquitous means being or existing everywhere at once. A novel word for a commonplace idea. We now accept the idea that surveillance is ubiquitous, even though we commonly, and romantically, associate it with the world of stealth and spying, as in popular novels and movies of the James Bond or Jason Bourne variety.

Its reach is much broader than that.

I posted on CIA, surveillance and paranoia the day before the revelation that “contract” employees at the State Department accessed the passport files of Barack Obama and other presidential candidates. “Contracting” of course means “outsourcing,” which means the likes of Blackwater and Halliburton and its subsidiaries, the client states of administration officials and lobbyists. The State Department claims it was simply innocent curiosity – before they’ve even investigated. And little chance we’ll see the results of the investigation soon. It is essentially the same claim made on behalf of the Patriot Act. Communication surveillance is directed at terrorists; honest Americans have nothing to fear. I don’t “fear” anything, but I have no illusions. If information is there to mine, the roving political operatives in either party will mine and exploit it for political purposes.

Surveillance is pervasive. I recently ran the 2008 Portland Shamrock Run and a few days later received an email with a photo of me captured mid-race (and laboring mightily) that I can purchase for a fee. I can’t reproduce the photo here without violating intellectual property laws (as if I’d want that hunkered huffer-puffer figured-forth in this space). I assume the photographer was able to identify me by the timing chip I wore on my ankle. I don’t recall that I gave race officials permission to use me commercially in this way, but I imagine it is there somewhere in the entry form fine print. This is likely as “innocent” as surveillance gets. Cameras are everywhere and we now have the capability if not the political will or federal funding to create virtual borders. It is not, finally, that we are being tracked. It is that we are now effectively captive to technology and the paranoid will to use it in order to maintain political order.
Continue reading Surveillance: From Barbed Wire to the Invisible Prison →

General

Friday recap: Week six

Leave a comment

From certain perspectives, it wasn’t a good week at Art Scatter. A knee replacement. A hacking flu. A wheezing bronchial apparatus. Not much fun in there. Still, on the edge of Spring Break — and who doesn’t STILL celebrate Spring Break, even decades past the classes we’re allegedly breaking from? — it was hard to get too down in the dumps, especially as the knee replacement went just fine from all important reports.

But: All conspired to make it hard to “keep up.” You see the quote marks, and you’ve read the signs. “Keep up with what?” Or: “What does ‘keep up’ mean, anyway?” But maybe most pertinently: “Who said anybody was keeping up with anything?” We like keeping up as well as the next blog, really we do, although most of the time it feels more like “catching up.” Which begs a set of similar questions.

Our Wheezer is headed for DC. The Man With the Bionic Knee is headed home. The Hacker will continue his profound examination of the idea of hacking. Another week turns. Our paranoia sharpens. The duct tape territorial debates are just beginning. A box of graphic novels arrived. The dogs are barking.

See. Maybe we’re keeping up after all.

Urgent note: Those of you who take your Art Scatter from 9 p.m. Fridays to 9 a.m. Saturdays are going to be disappointed tonight. Our delightful internet host is going dark for 12 hours to make things better in the network. We take this as the truth by faith alone.

General

Ord. 374: Commissioner Leonard and the Audacity of Nope!

Leave a comment

Commissioner Randy Leonard missed the March 19 City Council vote on City Ordinance 374, the measure he sponsored to prohibit the use of duct-tape or other markers on public property as a means of reserving space to view parades. Though he missed the vote, I imagine the Commissioner, aboard the bicycle carrier PSS Tom McCall, declaring “mission accomplished.”

I don’t like parades. I attended the Rose Parade once, in 1980, wearing a mask to protect against Mt. St. Helens ash. But I worked for thirty years in an office overlooking MLK, Jr. Blvd., and each year watched as folks blocked out space on the sidewalk with tape, chalk or string, and perhaps a lawn chair or two, reserving each his own personal observation deck for the Rose Parade. This would begin a week or more before the parade, and on the last day or two some people, the less trusting, would take turns occupying their spot, negotiating neighborly boundaries, all for the sake of a parade. I admit that the junk-art collagist in me also liked walking the streets the next several weeks, observing how remnant markers faded and melted away, especially the duct-tape, which as it disintegrates turns into a delicate web before disappearing altogether.

At first I assumed the law authorized this ad hoc reservation system. When I realized that this was just neighborly folk law in action, I was amazed, and still am, that for the most part people respected each other’s taped dominion. I always highlighted the practice for visitors, a charming sign of Portlanders’ mutual respect and good will. “Something there is that does not love a wall,” as Robert Frost said, and that something was your everyday Portlander, satisfied to have a marked venue with a view.

I’ve heard the plaint: “What makes folks think they can save a prime view of the parade simply by laying down a strip of duct-tape?” What indeed! For no reason other than it’s the custom of the country.

No longer.

I’m reminded of the “Sut Lovingood Yarns” by George Washington Harris, in particular a story called “Bart Davis’s Dance.” Bart hires a band, his wife Peg fixes a bunch of food, and they invite the Kentucky countryside to the dance. A preacher shows up. Welcomed good-naturedly by Bart, the preacher says, “Yu is hosspitabil,” to which Bart wonders if he should take exception, asking Sut, “I b’leve I’se been ‘sulted in my own hous’; didn’t that durn’d preachin mersheen call me a hoss?” Sut is always “sloshin’ about” at such affairs, and loves to stir the pot. “Sartinly,” Sut tells Bart, “pitabil is a sorter Latin tail stuck tu hit so yu moutn’t onderstand; hit means pitiful hoss in Inglish, an’ ef I wer yu, I’d see that his stumack wer spiled fur Peg’s fried chicken an’ biskit.” Violence and hilarity ensue.

See, I think a Rose Festival visitor observed the ceremony of the tape, was as amazed as I was, and happened to mention to Commissioner Leonard that she thought it very hospitable on the part of Portlanders to allow such a practice.

The Commissioner was not going to take that sitting down, as I’m sure he’s entitled to do, in a parade seat reserved for dignitaries, in a prime parade viewing area set aside for such purpose. And I suspect it rankles that an activity like this, not sanctioned by Authority, should actually work, more or less, certainly more than, say, the water billing system (yes, I know, different commissioner), but less than – well, I can’t think of a thing at the moment. More’s the pity, hoss.

Books, General

CIA, Harold L. Humes and Harry Mathews

1 Comment

He didn’t tell me much about CIA’s modus operandi that I hadn’t heard already, but I did learn about the generally accepted laws of intelligence organizations. The basic rule is that if something can go wrong, it will. Applied to information from the field as it was read in supervisory offices, this means: “When something can be misinterpreted, it will be.”

Harry Mathews, My Life in CIA

We don’t keep secrets these days. We don’t want to be told things that should be kept secret. We don’t joke (especially in airports); we don’t pretend. We don’t pretend to know secrets. Secret agents among us pretend to be something they’re not. Secret agents often pretend to be what they think secret agents should be. And we assume we’re stalked, watched over, listened to by agents so invisible they don’t need to pretend to be secret. We don’t know what combination of places frequented, things read or words used on a cell or the internet will trigger the profile that becomes the secret we do not know we keep. So, what if we happen to be paranoid?

doc_humes_1968-fullinit_.jpgCheck out Rachael Donadio’s essay on Harold L. Humes in the New York Times Book Review, February 24, 2008. In the early 1950s Humes founded The Paris Review with Peter Matthiessen and others and wrote two highly-praised novels, The Underground City (1958), about post-World War II spies in Paris, and Men Die (1959), a story about African-American soldiers on a U.S. munitions base in the Caribbean. Called “Doc” by friends, Humes was a cultural touchstone in New York in the ‘50s and ’60s. He even managed Norman Mailer’s run for mayor in 1961. But he became increasingly paranoid. He believed the CIA was out to get him. It turns out, in fact, that his friend Matthiessen did work for the CIA, using The Paris Review as cover. Humes’ last years were defined by mental illness and odd behavior and he never wrote another novel. He died in 1992.

Humes’ daughter, Immy Humes, has made a documentary film about his life, and his books have been reissued by Random House. I haven’t read them, though I’m planning to do so. But I have another reason for bringing him up. Reading Donadio’s essay I thought of a superb book I did read a couple years ago, Harry Mathews’ My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, $13.95).
Continue reading CIA, Harold L. Humes and Harry Mathews →

Books, General

Looking for something that works

Leave a comment

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.
— Epictetus

images-3.jpgA week ago, I sat in on a lecture by Roger Martin, dean at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The talk, sponsored by the Portland branding/design firm Ziba Design, was in the open atrium/auditorium at the Wieden+Kennedy headquarters in the Pearl District. There were W+K and Ziba people in the audience, but lots of other people, too. I noticed the head of a Portland arts organization, for example, and a couple of members of a prominent local law firm.

The epigraph above comes from the beginning of Chapter Six of Martin’s book, The Opposable Mind, which was on sale in the atrium and doing a brisk business with the crowd, it seemed, though perhaps less brisk than the table of pastries. It’s a nice quote, and above all a practical quote. Which describes Martin’s book, too, because it describes a practical approach to problem-solving.

And that’s what I found so interesting. We have reached a point of such bureaucratic stasis in our national life (both business and government and everything in between), of such stalemate in our way of thinking about problems, that what be commonplaces to followers of good old-fashioned John Dewey pragmatism, are taken now as new developments, creative breakthroughs. Martin’s idea is that our most successful leaders are able to look at competing ideas, take the best elements from them and come up with a newer, better idea.
Continue reading Looking for something that works →

General, Visual Art

Al Souza: The Puzzler’s Dilemma

2 Comments

I’m just trying to do this jig-saw puzzle
Before it rains anymore
– M. Jagger / K. Richards “Jigsaw Puzzle”

souza_italian_dressing_e.jpg
Ours is a family of re-puzzlers. Last holiday our sons, both in their mid-twenties, spent two days working through our old puzzles, beginning with the extra large-piece “Masters of the Universe,” a “battle royal” featuring He-Man and two dozen other trademarked Mattel heroes of the day (circa 1983). From there they moved to “G.I. Joe Battles Cobra Command,” four puzzles that, when completed, can be interlocked to form a large mural depicting all-out war on land and sea and in the air. These boys have always been deliberate, methodical re-puzzlers. As youngsters they would build them, tear them down and build again. As adults they are also deliberate about seeming disengaged; they are handling memories, after all, not puzzle pieces.

My wife and I joined them on the adult puzzles, some we’ve had since the late 1960s, when we were first married and a bottle of wine and a good puzzle were an evening’s entertainment: “Fisherman’s Wharf,” in Monterey, California, the way it looked when we lived there; “Five-Clawed Dragon,” a detail from an embroidered Chinese Imperial robe; and “St. George and the Dragon,” a photograph of a statuette owned by a Bavarian duke who lived during the time of Shakespeare.

Oh, we’ve had other, one-time puzzles, more than I’d want to count, but these are the ones we’ve kept and re-puzzled time and again. Life is like a jigsaw puzzle, I’ve thought. Not like a box of chocolates. The puzzle worked over and completed, and then un-puzzled and tossed back into its box, is the seven ages of man – the first youthful stammering returning to reclaim incoherence from the modest settled principles an adult pieces together once, maybe twice, in a life.

So I was curious to see Al Souza’s sculptural jigsaw puzzle collages showing at Elizabeth Leach Gallery this month. He uses commercial puzzles gathered from thrift stores and on E-bay, and some that acquaintances around the country find and assemble for him. He layers and juxtaposes parts of the puzzles in large scale works such as “Italian Dressing” (72” X 72”, above), creating an explosion of slick images and bright colors that are the hallmark of commercial puzzles. Animals, clocks, landscapes, famous paintings and buildings, loopy holiday ribbon candy, toys and sports memorabilia – jumbled together in odd, surprising ways.
Continue reading Al Souza: The Puzzler’s Dilemma →

General

Friday recap: Week five

Leave a comment

Sherwood in flames!

Well, not quite. But “Higher Ground,” the bully play by a middle school teacher in Sherwood,is managing to ignite passions. Coercion on the playground and coercion by a bureaucracy are a lot alike, as Bob points out below, and maybe we are dreaming if we think the adults should know better. It’s a little bit sick, a little bit sad, and a whole lot aggravating. But the show does go on! And that’s brilliant.

We might stop to talk a little about Eliot Spitzer if there was one iota of the story that hadn’t been been chewed over by multiple mouths. There’s an unfortunate image for you… But $80,000? We will say “The Wire” ended spectacularly, and when you hear members of the Fourth Estate complain about the way David Simon depicted the Baltimore Sun, they protest too much. Good stuff, and close enough to “real” to be recognizable, at least from here.

Taking a little darshan with Stephen Sondheim was a good antidote to an unruly week. Anything that makes you want to see lots more theater, that has to be a good thing, right? Apparently, a certain principal in Sherwood disagrees.

What’s next? I have no idea. We have entered deep improv mode here at Art Scatter. But something big is about to happen. I can just feel it.

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

A heavy hand comes down in Sherwood

2 Comments

Good God, will this not cease?

While I was twiddling my thumbs Wednesday in a jury-duty pool, The Oregonian’s Maya Blackmun was breaking the story on the latest development in the Sherwood school censorship case: The school district is investigating Jennie Brown, the Sherwood Middle School drama teacher who wrote the play “Higher Ground,” which in a last-minute decision was kept off the stage by school principal Anna Pittioni.

Ironically, the play is about bullying and how to respond to it.

A few onlookers had said earlier in this running farce that the school was going after Brown and trying to get her fired. I thought that was a little melodramatic. Now it looks as if they were right.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s an old tactic, and I’ve seen it many times: the stacked deck of official procedure forcing out the card that doesn’t fit. It’s always done in private, of course, for the “protection” of the person being investigated, even if that person declares he or she has nothing to hide. In the meantime, the charge and the innuendo do a nice smear job, sometimes irreparably damaging the target’s reputation. The first time I saw it done was in the late 1960s, when a college prof I knew who was a leader in the anti-Vietnam War movement was forced out of his job. It was such a shock to his system that he became a journalist.

Continue reading A heavy hand comes down in Sherwood →

Music

Sondheim speaks, we gladly listen

Leave a comment

51cy5ayyqql_aa240_.jpgThe Stephen Sondheim-Frank Rich question and answer session, staged by Literary Arts at the Schnitz Tuesday, was about as delightful as it possibly could have been. Rich was a terrific interrogator: smart, prepared, completely aware that his role was to spark Sondheim into memorable bits of reflection, story-telling, even emotion. He succeeded brilliantly at all three, succeeded to such an extent that the nearly full house (which would be 2700 or so) sang “Happy Birthday” to Sondheim at the end, in anticipation of his birthday on March 22 (when he turns 78, by my count). Sondheim had won us over completely, as though we needed winning over to begin with.

What did they talk about? Musical theater, of course, from Sondheim’s particular, insider perspective. So there were anecdotes about Oscar Hammerstein II (Sondheim’s mentor and father-figure) and a couple of great Cole Porter anecdotes (more about these a little lower), recollections of putting West Side Story together, Gypsy, Company, Sunday in the Park With George and of course Sweeney Todd, which led to observations about the difference between film and theater (film is more propulsive; theater allows more imagination from the audience), and much more. Marty Hughley gives an account of it all on Oregonlive. With actual quotes!

Many of the anecdotes were familiar ones, especially to those who’ve read Meryle Secrest’s biography of Sondheim. But what a difference hearing the stories from Sondheim’s lips. So, he describes walking over to play his songs for Cole Porter in Williamstown, Mass., (where he went to Williams College) and we can feel the trepidation he must have felt, the awkwardness, the Porter-esque parody he played and his relief that Porter not only enjoyed it but helped him make the ending even better. Sondheim helped us understand the meaning of the encounter for a young artist, the joy it gave him, the inspiration. All of which is missing from Secrest’s book, which deals with the incident quickly. Ditto, the last time Sondheim played for Porter, when he was seriously ill, both legs amputated, and managed to elicit a gasp of recognition from the dying man, a smart turn and unlikely rhyme. And this is in microcosm the power of theater itself — to attach feeling and meaning to words that might slip by unattended by either.
Continue reading Sondheim speaks, we gladly listen →

a Portland-centric arts and culture blog