Tag Archives: George Taylor

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

‘Good Citizen’: when it did happen here

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A Japanese American unfurled this banner the day after the Pearl Harbor attack. Dorothea Lange photographed it in March 1942, just prior to the man's internment. Wikimedia Commons.Japanese American storefront, 1942. Dorothea Lange

By Bob Hicks

In 1935 Sinclair Lewis published his novel It Can’t Happen Here, about the Hitler-style takeover of the United States by a power-grabbing populist president. The book’s title was satiric. Lewis meant that it very much could happen here, and if we didn’t pay attention, it just might.

On February 19, 1942, scant weeks after the Japanese aerial attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the rounding-up and “relocation” of Japanese American citizens, mostly from the Western states, into internment camps for the duration of World War II. More than 140,000 people, all of them uprooted from their ordinary lives, ended up in the camps.

Minoru Yasui, the real-life hero of "Good Citizen."On March 28, 1942, little more than a month after the roundup had been set into motion, a young Japanese American man named Minoru Yasui — he’d been born on October 19, 1916, in Hood River, and earned his law degree from the University of Oregon in 1939 — walked into a police station in Portland and dared the officers to arrest him for breaking curfew. They obliged. Yasui landed in jail and eventually in a relocation camp. Yasui wanted to test the constitutionality of the internment law, and his case finally went to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that his arrest and incarceration were legal. Yet he kept fighting, during and after the war. He was a Good Citizen.

On Monday, March 28 — 69 years to the day after Yasui’s arrest — Artists Repertory Theatre will present a staged reading of Good Citizen, Portland writer George Taylor‘s play about Yasui’s good fight. The play, which is still getting a few revisions, is a finalist for the 2011 Oregon Book Awards. It’ll be performed at 7:30 p.m. on the theater’s Morrison Stage; tickets at the door only, suggested donation $8.

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Bob Hicks, Books, General

Oregon Book Awards, K.B. Dixon’s latest

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By Bob Hicks

Word started making the rounds last night about the list of finalists for this year’s Oregon Book Awards. Jeff Baker has the complete list in this morning’s Oregonian, along with the lowdown on how to vote for the special readers’ choice award. The ceremony will be April 25 at the Gerding Theater at the Armory, Portland Center Stage’s home space.

Congratulations to all the nominees in the seven categories — fiction, poetry, general nonfiction, creative nonfiction, children’s lit, young-adult lit, and theater. And a special nod to a few Friends of Scatter — George Taylor for his play Good Citizen; Marc Acito for his collaboration with C.S. Whitcomb on the stage comedy Holidazed; K.B. Dixon for his novel A Painter’s Life.

Cover image from "The Ingram Interview" by K.B. DixonAll of this is an honor, and the awards ceremony is bound to be a lot of fun. But as writers tend to do, most of these people have already moved on to new projects. Acito is shifting his attention to New York and a new life in the world of Broadway musicals. Taylor’s had another play, The Strange Case of the Miser at Christmas, on stage for a first reading. And Dixon has just released his newest novel, The Ingram Interview, through Inkwater Press.

Ken Dixon, whom I first got to know when we were both working at The Oregonian, is a drily funny and well-read fellow. When I was filling in at the visual arts desk for a while I had him write some reviews, and was taken with his well-informed and independent pieces. He wasn’t contrarian. He just knew his own mind. Only shortly before I left the paper, at the end of 2007, did I learn he was also a novelist.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Theater

Friends of Scatter show their chops

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By Bob Hicks

The thing about so many Scatterers is that they don’t just observe, they also participate. Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead would be so pleased.

Heidi Stoeckley Nogoy in Martha Graham's Cave of the Heart. Photo: John DeaneTonight we head to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, where the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company trods a Portland stage for the first time since 2004. One way to think about modernism: The Great Graham was born in 1894, which would make this modernist avatar 116 years old if she were still alive and kicking, and very much of an antique. How do you keep modernism modern when it’s got so old?

One way is to keep the dancers themselves fresh and vigorous. Another, presumably, is to build on the legacy, and that’s where Friend of Scatter Josie Moseley comes in. We’ll be holding down the “observer” part of the bargain. Josie will handle the participating. Moseley, the Portland choreographer whose credits include work directly or indirectly with Jose Limon, Alwin Nikolais, Anna Sokolow and Mark Morris (among others), set a new solo on the Graham company’s Samuel Pott this fall, and it’ll be premiered tonight. Her piece is one of three new dances commissioned as responses to Graham’s seminal 1930 solo Lamentation. (The other two are by Larry Keigwin and Bulereyaung Pagarlave.) Moseley’s variation, Inherit, is set to music by jazz saxophonist and composer Joshua Redman.

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Wednesday night it’s to Northeast Portland’s Blackbird Wine Shop & Atomic Cheese to see Scatter friend Charles Deemer‘s debut screening of his latest online movie, The Farewell Wake. Deemer’s made two versions of the film — a shorter, more tightly edited director’s cut and a longer version, which includes some scenes and performers who’ll end up on the short version’s cutting room floor. The Blackbird screening is the long version, and it’s a special showing for all the people who took part.

That includes Mr. Scatter, in a very brief cameo as a guy named Art Scatter, and Scatter chief correspondent Martha Ullman West in a meatier supporting role. Will Mr. Scatter survive the final cut? He’s on pings and noodles. Martha, he knows, is a survivor. Here’s what we wrote about Deemer’s last video film, Deconstructing Sally. (And here’s what we wrote about his Oregon-classic play Christmas at the Juniper Tavern.)

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Sidney Paget (1860-1908): "Sherlock Holmes," 1904. Wikimedia CommonsFinally, Scatter regular George Taylor has taken a break from his sauerkraut fermentation duties to spin out yet another play, and this one sounds like a corker. It combines England’s favorite miser and its favorite violin-sawing, cocaine-snorting gumshoe into a comic mystery called The Strange Case of the Miser at Christmas.

You can see a free reading of it on Monday evening, November 29, at Theater! Theatre! under the auspices of the invaluable Portland Theatre Works (read what we had to say about them here). Among the promising-looking cast are Tobias Anderson, Dave Bodin and Maureen Porter.

What’s it about? PTW’s Andrew Golla passes this along:

It’s Christmas Eve 1882. A miserly businessman named Scrooge calls at 221B Baker Street with a problem. A series of ghost-filled dreams has made him terrified to go to sleep. He fears the last dream, which is to take place this night, may signal his last night on earth. Surely the “world’s greatest detective” can discover what, or who, is behind the dreams. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have to use a controversial form of investigation to solve The Strange Case of the Miser at Christmas.

Your participation is humbly invited.

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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

  • Heidi Stoeckley Nogoy in Martha Graham’s “Cave of the Heart.” Photo: John Deane
  • Sidney Paget (1860-1908): “Sherlock Holmes,” 1904. Wikimedia Commons
Bob Hicks, General, Theater, Visual Art

Scatters revisited: Let’s play catch-up

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Art Students and Copyists in the Louvre Gallery (for Harper's Weekly), 1868, wood engraving, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Art Scatter is considering a new motto: All the news that fits, comes back to bite you again.

Maybe it’s not as elegant as the New York Times’s All the news that’s fit to print or as slobberingly juvenile as The Onion’s Tu Stultus Es (translation from the Latin: You Are Stupid). But we seem to be getting pingback, and we are not referring simply to those odd “comments” that pop up semi-regularly from online hucksters selling axle grease or whoopie cushions. (Mr. Scatter attempts to zap those into oblivion before our readers have a chance to see them, unless the links are unusually entertaining, such as the one that seemed to translate this post into some unknown language and back to English again, transposing “large smelly boys” into “vast sharp boys” and “Portland public schools” into “Portland open propagandize system.”) Stories don’t always end when the writer thinks they do. So consider this a chance to revisit some of our recent hits, with updates and amplifications:

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COPY CATS: In our recent musings on the value of museums (we had worked ourselves into something of a dither, a century late, over the idiocies of the Futurist Manifesto, which called for abolishing them) we tossed in this aside: “Why are our young artists not haunting the halls of the museums? Rarely – almost never – do you see someone set up with easel and paints in a Portland Art Museum gallery, copying the masters to learn their techniques, a sight that is common in European museums.”

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Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General, Theater

Tuesday scatter: On Nixon, women in power, tutus and veils, alternate histories and Charlie Brown

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Mia Leimkuhler in Kudelka's Hush. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERT

On Saturday morning I picked up my newspaper and saw on the front page a photo of President Obama, smiling easily and looking down at, but not down on, Hugo Chavez. The American president is shaking hands with the Venezuelan president, a man who ordinarily makes great political hay from being seen and heard as a bellicose opponent of the United States and its political leaders. Chavez, too, has the sort of smile that seems genuine and not faked for the cameras (although who can say for sure in either case — these are politicians), and a semicircle of unnamed onlookers at the Western Hemisphere summit meeting in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, seems equally charmed.

Bill Christ as Nixon in Nixon/Frost. Photo: OWEN CAREYYes, charmed. And I thought, this is policymaking outside the channels of policy. Here, in Obama, is a man utterly at ease inside his own skin. That’s why people respond to him. Because he’s comfortable with himself.

My eye lingered on this photograph because the night before I’d seen Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon at Portland Center Stage, and if there ever was a leader who was uncomfortable inside his own skin, it was Richard Nixon. Actor Bill Christ, in Rose Riordan’s smooth and entertaining production, makes this as clear as can be. He offers a Nixon who is inordinately intelligent and funny in the driest possible way, but who’s so clumsy he gives even himself the heebie-jeebies. He’s not smooth, he’s not sexy, he can’t do small talk. If he were a language he’d be German, not French. Nixon was actually savvier even than JFK about the power of the television camera but he couldn’t take advantage of it because he didn’t have the goods: He could only mitigate the camera’s effect by understanding how it works. Nixon knew that in the charm game he would always be an outsider looking in, and he resented it deeply. It fed his combativeness, his sense of the Other, of us versus them, of his bitterness of the East Coast elite’s patronizing of him, of being the guy who knew all the strategies and did all the dirty work but was barely allowed in the game.

I was young when Nixon bulldozed back into power in 1968 with his “secret plan to end the war,” and I despised him with all the moral certainty that only the young can summon. It was an extension of my detestation for Lyndon Johnson: How could these men be such liars and murderers? Over the years I’ve come to think of both instead as tragic figures. Here were leaders who could have been great — indeed, who were great in certain ways — but who were destroyed by their own hubris. Over time I might change my mind about this, too, but I now think of Nixon and Johnson as tragic in a way that George W. Bush can never be, because Bush lacked the capacity for greatness: His limitations made him instead something on the order of an oversized and disastrously effective school bully.

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