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Bob Hicks, Cities

Guvs duck art; pick a peck o’ PICA

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By Bob Hicks

Over at Oregon Live, Friend of Scatter D.K. Row reports that Oregon’s two major gubernatorial candidates, Demo John Kitzhaber and the GOP’s Chris Dudley, have pretty much nothing to say about how they would or wouldn’t approach statewide funding and other support for the arts. Both ducked a request by the statewide lobbying group Cultural Advocacy Coalition to talk it out in a town hall meeting before the election. And both ducked the chance to comment to D.K. for his story.

Timberline Lodge: the last word in Oregon cultural funding? Photo: Kelvin Kay/Wikimedia CommonsNo surprise here. With the state budget circling the toilet bowl and getting ready for the big flush, neither candidate is likely to come out promising anything to anyone about arts and culture. Remember last year, when the Democrat-dominated legislature raided the state’s supposedly sacrosanct Cultural Trust fund in an attempt to pay the bills.

Portland city commish Nick Fish, who’s also a board member of the Cultural Trust, called the candidates’ no-talk “a missed opportunity.” But even some arts leaders expressed sympathy for a pair of guys caught between a rock and a hard place. “When I think of the immense economic problems the next governor has to solve, my stomach hurts,” Chris Coleman told Row. “The notion of even advancing a cultural agenda would be hard right now. So I understand. If I was running for governor, it’d be hard for me to find time for the arts.” Coleman is artistic director of Portland Center Stage. He also happens to be board president of the Creative Advocacy Network, Portland’s coalition of arts boosters in the political ring.

Whoever wins the governor’s race, don’t be expecting a neo-WPA, folks. The feds are pretty much out of this picture, FDR’s kicked the bucket, and we already got our Timberline Lodge. Arts and culture will be looking at a lot of pay-as-you-go. Oops. That’s sort of what the Cultural Trust was before the big raid, wasn’t it?

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The trouble with TBA, the annual late summer/early fall festival thrown by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, is that it always hits town in late summer/early fall.

A lot of people set their annual calendars around this thing. Here at Art Scatter, it always sneaks up on us, and, too often, slips right past us. We tend to be traveling a lot this time of year, and preparing young heathens for schooling, and tending to such crucial matters as putting up the annual supplies of pickles and chutney.

All of which is to say that (like the guv guys on arts funding) we have pretty much nothing to say about TBA this year. Fortunately, several other keen observers do. Here are a few places to look for news and comment:

Arts Dispatch. Barry Johnson sees and extrapolates.

Urban Honking. PICA’s own site invites such luminaries as Mead Hunter of Blogorrhea to do the Monday morning quarterbacking.

Oregon Live. Expect steady updates from The Oregonian’s cultural squad.

Culturephile. Anne Adams and Claudia La Rocco have been pickin’ em and writin’ em for Portland Monthly’s blog.

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PHOTO: Timberline Lodge: the last word in Oregon cultural funding? Kelvin Kay/Wikimedia Commons

Bob Hicks, Cities, General

Legislature takes its ax, gives state culture 40 whacks

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It’s over. As Oregonian political writer Harry Esteve reports here on Oregon Live, the Oregon House has just passed its down-to-the-skeleton emergency budget by a vote 0f 37-22. The vastly pared budget, identical to the version passed Tuesday by the Senate, includes the expected raiding of $1.8 million in direct donation — not tax payments — to the Oregon Cultural Trust. Gov. Ted Kulongoski is expected to sign the new budget early next week.

So that’s that — for now. And if nothing else, it diverts some of the spotlight from State Senator Margaret Carter, who’s lucky that people in Oregon are mostly pretty polite, or her performance on Tuesday might have gone viral by now.

Cicero Denounces Catiline: Fresco by Cesare Maccari/Wikimedia CommonsLike her fellow Oregon state legislators, Carter — chief of the Senate’s budget committee — is stuck in a politicians’ nightmare. The economic catastrophe has forced her and her colleagues to make deep budgetary cuts guaranteed to prompt howls of anguish and cries for their heads. Nobody knows exactly where this thing’s going, but the best guess is that before cuts the state budget hole is $855 million right now and will be $3 billion for the 2009-11 cycle. That’s a lot of enchiladas. Legislators face the distressing challenge of dealing with a situation that has no good solutions: Whatever they do, on some level it’s going to be wrong.

So it’s no wonder they get testy. And in announcing the state Democrats’ lockstep approach to the new budget, Carter got testy, indeed, as reported by David Steves in the Eugene Register-Guard:

“There are those who are whining all over the place about ‘you cut this and you cut that,’ ” she said, wiping away mock tears during a speech on the Senate floor. “The fact is that we had to cut. That’s why I call this the shared cut and shared responsibility model.”

A few places picked up on the mockery right off the bat, including fellow Scatterer Barry Johnson on his alternate-universe blog, Portland Arts Watch.

When I reported here Tuesday on the Senate’s budget bill I skipped Carter’s little performance of pique because I wanted to concentrate on the issues. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this IS one of the issues, and an important one.

Politics is a messy and often ugly process, but one good thing to remember is this: If you’re going to pick people’s pockets, at least apologize to them and treat them with a little respect. What you don’t give, you don’t get back.

Among the “whiners” for whom the senator shed mock tears: advocates for homeless people and schools; 911 emergency system workers; university officials. Greedy fat cats, all.

And, of course, artists and their supporters, who for some reason seem upset that the Senate grabbed $1.8 million they contributed voluntarily to the Oregon Cultural Trust on the state’s promise that the money would be used for cultural purposes only and would be strictly separated from the state general fund. We discussed the moral and legal implications here, although the legal ramifications are much murkier than they appear on the surface: As with George W. Bush, apparently, if the Oregon Legislature does it, it’s legal.

I don’t believe Margaret Carter is the callous person her comments on Tuesday made her appear. I do believe it’s easier to make tough decisions that have bad consequences if you can imply that the victims of your actions somehow deserve it. The whiners. The me-firsts. The selfish cultural types who think we owe them the world.

Continue reading Legislature takes its ax, gives state culture 40 whacks →

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The Portland Jazz Festival lives (after all)!

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We wanted a Sugar Daddy and we got one! The Portland Jazz Festival has been rescued from oblivion — heroes include Nick Fish, Sho Dozono and Alaska Airlines, among others — which we learned from Luciana Lopez’s story in The Oregonian this morning (we’ll link you up when the story is posted on OregonLive, UPDATE: and is now.), and I’m not sure why exactly I’m feeling so pleased about it. After all, festivals wax, festivals wane, festivals disappear altogether. Even jazz festivals in Portland. These days, the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival continues to roll along under the St. John’s Bridge, fueled mostly by our local players. And the Mt. Hood Jazz Festival, which itself went into eclipse for a while, is back and seems to be growing again, returning this past summer to Mt. Hood Community College, where it once dominated the summer festival scene. Of course, either you know this or jazz festivals don’t interest you, so I’m not sure why I feel called to speak of it. Maybe just as a sort of accounting.

But the Portland Jazz Festival has had major aspirations (some would call them pretensions, I suppose), specifically to bring top-of-the-line international musicians to the city. And I appreciate the impulse. Plus, it comes in February. In February, we’re needing all the inspiration we can get, any good reason to get out of the house, fellow fans of the improvisatory art to consort with. In February we’ll pay almost any price for a lively brain, and the jazz festival has encouraged our synapses to snap their fingers and bop along. The city should fund the whole thing just for the overall improvement in the mental health of the citizenry. Call it jazz therapy.

So, I’m excited about the 2009 festival, which will celebrate Blue Note Records, more excited than I should be, I suppose. After all, there are lots of clubs in town now that feature jazz, and we have lots of terrific musicians, legends even. You could assemble a little mini-festival every week of the year. And really, there’s nothing quite like following the development of a fine jazz mind over time, something that’s possible only with a local jazz mind. Still. I like the concentration of talent. I like watching recordings come to life. I like the idea that for a little while, all jazz ears are cocked toward Portland. I like to feel as though I’m playing with the Big Boys and the Big Boys (and Girls) are playing for me. So yeah, I’m happy about it, and if I could order tickets right now, I suppose I would.

Thanks to Mighty Toy Cannon, one of the forces behind Culture Shock, for a heads up on this, too. MTC may well have had Portland blog priority on the “scoop,” though I first learned about it from Luciana.