Tag Archives: Rose City Reader

Art Scatter officially runs off at mouth

prolific-blogger-award

Here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we’re identifying proudly these days with the good townswomen of River City, Iowa, in The Music Man: “Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little, cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more.”

With emphasis on the “talk a lot.”

Thanks to the silver-tongued Mead Hunter of Blogorrhea and The Editing Room, who generously passed this honor along to us, we are now recipients of the coveted Prolific Blogger Award, a sort of Oscar for best supporting prattler. In other words: You can’t shut us up. Mrs. Scatter made passing reference to this blogospheric milestone in this post, in which she got all sentimental and teary-eyed over Mr. Mead’s enshrining of her with the honorific “retinue.”

But we blather.

Here’s what it’s all about. Adhering to the biblical code of sevens (like Joseph and his dream-interpretations), the Prolific Blogger Award moves in waves. Each recipient must in turn pay it forward to seven other bloggers who feed the beast regularly. They must also link to the original PBA post (we did that above; it’s on the blog Advance Booking) and, most confoundingly, hook up with the mysteriously named Mister Linky.

Our friend and benefactor Mr. Mead has noted the dismaying phenomenon of once-prolific bloggers who have fallen by the wayside, some no doubt waylaid by the strumpet sirens of Twitter, Buzz and Facebook; others perhaps realizing that there is Life on the Other Side. Yet we found many good and noble blogs worthy of this award. Without further ado ….

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN


Noble Viola
. Charles Noble, assistant principal violist for the Oregon Symphony, subtitles his blog Life on the Working End of the Viola, and that’s the view he gives you: the world of art music from the inside. It’s smart, provocative, sometimes funny, and almost always illuminating. A good musician isn’t always a good writer. Noble is. Like Lenny Bernstein, he knows how to use words to get inside sounds.

Rose City Reader. You’d think RCR would already own the franchising rights to the Prolific Blogger Award. A busy lawyer by day, she’s a compulsive reader, list-maker and blogger by night (or maybe early morning). Her reading is catholic, roaming from classics to contemporary lit to arcane food-and-drink books to history, politics, and the occasional P.G. Wodehouse caper. And she writes about her literary adventures with wit and savvy independence.

Portland Through My Lens. Having completed (with occasional additions) the terrific Fifty Two Pieces, in which she and a friend spent a year writing about art and artists connected to the Portland Art Museum, LaValle Linn has picked up her camera and embarked on this visual adventure, recording life and images around and about Portland’s streetcar line. Following it is like taking your morning coffee in a different little hangout every day.

Portland Architecture. If you build it, they will argue. Brian Libby’s ambitious blog serves the dual purpose of keeping up with the city’s maze of architectural news and providing a platform for architects and planners and citizen-advocates to vent on issues as broad-ranging as neighborhood design and the fates of Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Quarter.

Powell’s Books Blog. We aren’t sure who actually puts this together, but Portland’s iconic bookstore runs an excellent blog. It’s wide-ranging, with lots of topics and lots of guest bloggers, often writers with fresh books on the market. Sure, it’s a commercial blog, but it pops with good writing and stimulating ideas. You can never keep up with what’s going on in the publishing biz, but this is a good start.

Splattworks. Playwright Steve Patterson’s blog begins with matters theatrical but often veers sharply into other obsessions, from photography to guitars to the inanities of the political world (on which he can be witheringly caustic). Smart, funny, passionate; a blog of admirable exasperations.

Eva Lake. A lively checking-point for gallery hoppers. The artist and journalist Eva Lake, whose Art Focus program on KBOO-FM features often fascinating interviews with Portland artists and curators, tracks what’s happening on the city’s art scene.

While We Are Filling the Ice Bucket, The Large Smelly Boys Take Over the World (Act 1)

Martini makin's. Wikimedia Commons

Here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we’re madly preparing for a Gathering of the Blogbreaths by stocking up on two essential ingredients:

Gin

and

Vermouth.

Rose City Reader is out of the running, celebrating her dad’s 70th birthday and entertaining The Bavarians. Mead Hunter of Blogorrhea fame is busy being all important at the Willamette Writers Conference.

We boldly (BOLDLY!) admit we’ve been caught with our pants down in full frontal nudity.

What to do but pour a strong one with some of our favorite compatriots: Barry “Remember Him?” Johnson (Portland Arts Watch), Martha Ullman “Superb As Always” West (frequent Art Scatter correspondent and probably the most highly paid) and Mighty Toy “Can’t Say Enough” Cannon (nee Mamet, of Culture Shock).

In the spirit of No, We Don’t Have Jobs But Can They Be Saved Anyway? we’re planning a little cocktail party, a blog summit, a throw-an-extra-olive-in-the Dirty-Little-Secret-Martini scheme of things. We know we get but a few comments per post. We assume No One will read What the Heck We Write. And yet we labor on with blind ambition and happy thoughts. The upside? Because we know no one cares, we free ourselves of self-conscious restraints and party merrily.

Today we drink. Tomorrow we drive.

So we offer these car games that have a HIGH LSB* rating.

While we’re busy being irresponsible, we’ve given over the blog reigns to one of the Large Smelly Boys (not to be confused with the Soggy Bottom Boys).

CAR GAME, ACT 1:

When we’re not playing What’s That Smell?** in the car, we take letters (often ripped right from license plates) and make up words to go with ’em. Most recently, we’ve come up with words for … MTC:

Mighty Terrible Contractions
Mo’ Tasty Cornbits
Marmalade Tooth Candies
Meat Thermometer Canal
Merry Ticklish Cows
My Teeny Chickadee
My Tiny Cockatoo
Moon Truck Chocolates
Mistaken Twin Cousin
Masculine Teen Car
Massage Therapist Candles
Monster Toasty Crayons
Mr. Two Cheeks
Morbid Toe Cheese
Mighty Tasty Chipmunks

Which conveniently brings us to …

CAR GAME, ACT 2: Stay tuned for tomorrow.

What crazy words do you think MTC stands for?

— Laura Grimes and Large Large Smelly Boy

****************

*Large Smelly Boys

**Another game the LSBs like to play in the car is to take off their shoes and see how long it takes us to notice. The longest has been 5 seconds.

O mystery divine: when Wall Street was our friend

51wzmdon2ylToday I plucked Emma Lathen‘s Death Shall Overcome from my recently reconstituted bookshelves. It was published in 1966, and it’s one of a series of mysteries featuring the improbable but highly likable and, in the clinches, deeply honorable amateur sleuth John Putnam Thatcher, who in his day job is senior vice president of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, a staid and sober Wall Street institution that would never, or at least not in 1966, find itself in the untoward position of requiring a financial bailout from these reluctantly wallet-emptying United States of America. The Sloan Guaranty found ways to act justly and properly and still pile up princely profits, which perhaps is a tipoff that this is a work of fiction.

Death Shall Overcome hinges on the impending appointment to a seat on the New York Stock Exchange of its first black member, a man of impeccably conservative fiduciary credentials and precisely the pigmentation to drive certain portions of The Club straight up the wall. Not John Putnam Thatcher, of course, who knows a good man — and a proper course of action — when he sees one.

Mystery monger Jim Huang considers Lathen’s skills as a sly and pointed observer of the social customs of the actual and would-be cultural elite to be Jane Austen-like. That may be taking things a little far, and yet three-fourths of the pleasure in reading these witty mysteries comes from Lathen’s wry observations of the peculiar culture that is her milieu. So, borrowing a page once again from Rose City Reader (I know, I said I’d do this only once — I lied) here’s the beginning of the book:

Above all, Wall Street is power. The talk is of stocks and bonds, of contracts and bills of lading, of gold certificates and wheat futures, but it is talk that sends fleets steaming to distant oceans, that determines the fate of new African governments, that closes mining camps in the Chibougamou. In the world’s great money market, power has forged massive canyons through which thousands of men and women daily hurry to work, hurry to lunch, hurry, hurry, hurry in the shadows of towers tall enough to defy the heavens. Depending upon your point of view, Wall Street is either awesomely impressive or appalling.

No one has ever called it beautiful.


If I thought the John Thatcher Putnams were in charge,
I’d vote for “awesomely impressive.” Lacking that assurance … well, there’s always fiction. And Emma Lathen is really very good at it.

Sunday scatter: It was a dark and stormy night in the Rainy North Woods …

Our friend Rose City Reader has a running feature on her lively lit blog she calls Opening Sentence of the Day, and it’s just that — a first sentence that, for some reason, catches her eye and ear and compels her to pass it along.

hotIt’s a great idea, and it’s hers, and no way am I going to steal it, because that would be so wrong. But just this once I’m going to borrow it, because after putting new shelves in the office I’ve been restocking some books that have been sitting in boxes in the basement, and that includes pretty much my entire collection of mysteries, which I’ve now been taking out selectively and re-reading with pleasure.

One of my rediscoveries is Gore Vidal’s three murder mysteries from the early 1950s featuring suave public-relations man Peter Sargeant (Vidal wrote them under the pen name Edgar Box) — Death in the Fifth Position, maybe the best backstage ballet murder mystery ever written; Death Before Bedtime, a maliciously funny evisceration of power, sex and corruption in the nation’s capital; and Death Likes It Hot, a mystery about — well, I can’t remember exactly, because I haven’t read it in a long time and I’ve just begun it again. But its first sentence is so delicious that I just have to take a cue from Rose City Reader and pass it along. (I can’t resist adding the second sentence, too, because it underscores the method of Vidal’s elegant wry comedy):

The death of Peaches Sandoe, the midget, at the hands, or rather feet, of a maddened elephant in the sideshow of the circus at Madison Square Garden was at first thought to be an accident, the sort of tragedy you’re bound to run into from time to time if you run a circus with both elephants and midgets in it. A few days later, though, there was talk of foul play.

Ah, the wonderful tastelessness of it all! Isn’t that what we long for in a comedy-of-manners murder mystery, even moreso than an alibi-proof plot?

And that got me thinking of my old friend and fellow ink-stained wretch Vince Kohler, who died too early, at age 53, several years ago, but not before creating his wonderfully seedy reprobate of an amateur sleuth, Eldon Larkin, an “overweight, oversexed reporter” on a daily newspaper in a mythical town on the southern Oregon coast. (Kohler, who when I knew him was a reporter for The Oregonian, where Berkeley escapee Eldon hoped a good scoop might someday land him a job, was once a reporter at the Coos Bay World.)

Continue reading Sunday scatter: It was a dark and stormy night in the Rainy North Woods …

We’re No. 1 with a dart! (pass it along)

Actually, it’s a multiply shared No. 1, a sort of pay-it-forward No. 1, a chain-letter pat on the back that feels nice and warm and fuzzy.

From somewhere out of the blue (OK, it was from our cyberspace friend Rose City Reader, the literary omnivore who in the real world hangs out just a few blocks away) comes to Art Scatter the Premios Dardo Award.

It’s not the Nobel, it’s not an Oscar or even a Pulitzer. But neither is it a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme. No money changes hands (isn’t that just life in the blogosphere, though?). The Premios Dardo robs no one of their dignity or life savings. It’s simply a way of saying, we like what you do, and we’d like you to tell us whose work you admire on the Web. Fair enough. A lot of wheezing takes place on the Net, and one good way to get to the fresh air is to listen to recommendations from people you trust.

We haven’t been able to track down where the Premios Dardo Awards began or who’s behind them, but it really doesn’t matter. By this point it’s a crazy quilt stretched loosely across the globe, and we’re happy to add our few stitches to the pattern. (As near as our feeble translating abilities can figure out, by the way, “Premios Dardo” means roughly “Top Dart.”)

Here are the rules:

1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person that has granted the award and his or her blog link.

2) Pass the award to another 15 blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.

3) Remember to contact each of them to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

So, here goes. Here’s our pick of 15, listed in that boring-but-still-useful old alphabetical order. If you haven’t already, give ’em a look. You might find some new friends:

Bunny With an Art Blog

Charles Noble’s Daily Observations

Culture Shock

Dave Allen’s Pampelmoose

Dramma per Musica

Little Red Bike Cafe

Mark Russell’s CulturePulp

Mead Hunter’s Blogorrhea

Port

Portland Architecture

Portland Spaces/Burnside Blog

Reading Copy Book Blog

Splattworks

Third Angle Music Blog

TJ Norris