Tag Archives: Portland Arts Watch

Legislature takes its ax, gives state culture 40 whacks

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

From Lar to PAW: a Monday link and scatter

Lar Lubovich Dance Company. Photo: ROSEThings have been busy here at Scatter Central the last few days; so busy that we haven’t had a chance to post since we left poor Jean-Paul Belmondo in the clutches of all
those nasty French critics
.
Never mind, Jean-Paul. As far as we’re concerned here on our far side of the puddle, you’ll always throw a mean left hook.

So, time for a little update.

Lar Lubovitch, a genuine. living and working part of American dance history, shows up Wednesday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, and the White Bird dance series reports it still has good tickets available. The Lubovitch company hasn’t toured in 10 years, and it’s been a good deal longer than that since it’s been in Portland, so this is a good opportunity. The program looks intriguing, and all of the dances are relatively recent: last year’s Jangle, Four Hungarian Dances, set to Bela Bartok’s Rhapsodies #1 and #2 for Violin and Piano; 2000’s Men’s Stories, A Concerto in Ruins, with audio collage and original score by Scott Marshall; and 2007’s Dvorak Serenade, set to Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade in E Major. Plus, Lubovitch will be on hand for a question and answer session after the show.

White Bird has some deals on tickets, including 30-buck Level 3 seats, in addition to its usual student/senior rush tickets two hours before the 7:30 curtain. Details here.

mandy_greer_dare_alla_luce_05Over at his alternate-universe home, Portland Arts Watch (or PAW, as we like to call it), Scatter impresario Barry Johnson has been following the proposed merger between two Portland art stalwarts: the financially struggling Museum of Contemporary Craft and the recently vigorous Pacific Northwest College of Art. Good idea? Bad idea? Necessary idea? In his Monday column in The Oregonian and on Oregon Live, Barry comes down with a case of cautious optimism. Read it here.

And speaking of synchronicity (we were, weren’t we?) my review of the craft museum’s two newest exhibits, by installation artist Mandy Greer and textile artist Darrel Morris, will run on Friday, Jan. 30, in The Oregonian’s A&E section and on Oregon Live. Look for it then.

Did we say alternate-universe homes? We’re embarrassed to reveal that only recently have we discovered the second virtual home of one of our best online friends, the ubiquitous and perspicacious Mighty Toy Cannon of the invaluable Portland arts and culture site Culture Shock. Seems MTC also maintains a fascinating, if less regular, music site called, appropriately, Mighty Toy Cannon. From Nick Lowe and Richard Fontaine to Ruth Brown and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, MTC takes a welcome and refreshing curatorial approach to the wonders of the YouTube musical world. Give it a look, and a listen.

Henry James, by John Singer Sargent, 1913Meanwhile, who’d have guessed that the path to understanding Henry James runs through William Shakespeare’s most infamous stage direction? (That’s “exuent, pursued by a bear,” from The Winter’s Tale, by the way.) The grapevine that slithers through our mutual abode tells us that Part Five of Laura Grimes’ running riff on all things Jamesean, coming Sunday, Feb. 1, in The Oregonian’s books pages and on Oregon Live, is going to be a doozy, complete with Shakespearean bear. In yesterday’s Part Four, Grimes — Friend and Supporter of Art Scatter First Class — gets caught up in a neighborhood book group and unveils a Henry James contest, complete with a prize. Read it here.

Portland’s stages have been simply aburst with fresh new work, thanks to the citywide Fertile Ground festival of new plays. At The Oregonian, Scatter friend Marty Hughley kept up with some of the most recent action in Monday’s paper: Read it here.

Scatter’s been hitting the festival, too. We’ve already run our report on Apollo and Vitriol and Violets. And my review of Northwest Children’s Theater and School‘s new jazz version of Alice in Wonderland also ran in Monday’s Oregonian; read it here.

reGeneration: 50 photographers of Tomorrow
, a traveling exhibit that’s just landed in the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, is a chilly but pretty darned fascinating look at 50 young photographers worldwide whose work, the shows’s curators believe, will still be vital and important in the year 2025. My review ran in brief in Monday’s Oregonian; for the much more complete version, see it on Oregon Live here.

Finally, we’ve been amused and bemused by the misadventures of operatic tenor Jon Villars,
who walked off the stage during a dress rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, reportedly because he didn’t like the conductor’s tempo. Here at Art Scatter, we confess to skipping out on a show early a time or two over the years, too. But not when we were part of the cast.