Art Scatter

Right now, as my fingers stumble across the keyboard, the top story at the ArtJournal site is from the Telegraph in the UK, specifically a video of short interviews with prominent Brit writers who confess their sins: The classic books they haven’t read. Go ahead, click the link! It’s only 3 minutes or so, and really, it’s worth it, because it will make you feel better about some secret reading omission of your own.

The Bible, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Shakespeare, Catch-22, Ulysses, On the Origin of Species … The big books spool out, unread. As I watch the guilty rat on themselves, my favorite is playwright Michael Frayn, who suggests that he hasn’t read ANYTHING and is “in a state of perpetual embarrassment.” Which is exactly how I feel. Not that I haven’t read anything (and frankly, come on, the erudite Mr. Frayn has read a lot), but even if I’ve read it recently, important details have begun to leak out of my brainpan immediately. Was that book really great, or does it simply leave the impression of being really great…? More than regretting books not read, I regret books not remembered.

But OK. I’ll play. The book I’m most embarrassed that I haven’t read. Hmmm. Suddenly there are so many to choose from! Let’s see: Crime and Punishment. It is so big, it is so important, it is so daunting, and I know almost as much about it as books I’ve actually read and forgotten! But still… Hey, that feels better. Your confession below?

Although the Los Angeles Times hasn’t made a formal announcement, four former editors of its esteemed book review section have protested the paper’s decision to eliminate it and move book reviews to the paper’s Calendar section. Their letter to the newspaper reads in part:

Angelenos in growing number are already choosing to cancel their subscriptions to the Sunday Times. The elimination of the Book Review, a philistine blunder that insults the cultural ambition of the city and the region, will only accelerate this process and further wound the long-term fiscal health of the newspaper.

I don’t live in LA nor am I a regular reader of the LA Times, so I’m in no position to judge how important to the LA basin’s literary culture its book section has been. But I suspect it’s considerable, at the very least as an important link in the book business chain and in championing the writers of the region. I know the Tribune Company, which owns the paper, is in a severe cost-cutting mode across its many papers — spend a week glancing at Romenesko’s newspaper news and gossip blog on Poynteronline if you want to find out the gory details in Baltimore, Chicago and various other newspaper points in the Tribune domain. No doubt the book section doesn’t attract lots of ads, though I suspect its readership numbers are substantial. But it does speak to seriousness of purpose: How intellectually rigorous the newspaper is.
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The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, Jeff Whitty’s festive romp through a field of razor blades, brings to mind a couple of things. The first is the flap over the now infamous New Yorker magazine Obama cover illustration, the one that takes the various racial and incendiary whispers about the presidential candidate and his wife and gives them visual form. It’s clearly satirical, and clearly potent: It hits with merciless accuracy at precisely the points of fear and loathing that the dirtier fighters among Obama’s opponents are eager to exploit.

Yet, here’s the funny part: Obama’s camp itself, the presumed beneficiary of this political counterthrust, has found it necessary to protest vigorously against the images, even though the candidate undoubtedly understands their satirical point. Funnier yet: Obama’s opponent for the presidency, John McCain, has also found it necessary to protest, even though he surely understands the difference between satire and actuality. (Do the candidates truly believe that Swift wished to eat children?)

Now that they are presidential candidates, Obama and McCain find themselves the main characters in a pre-scripted drama. They are the guardians and servants of the nation’s images, and it becomes more important for them to respond to the illusion of reality than to reality itself. The script says, Americans don’t talk about such things. So the candidates, no matter “left” or “right,” must protest: To do less would be to place themselves outside the devoutly desired center of the let’s-pretend debate. And so they become the not-Obama and the not-McCain, fictional characters in a ritualized national drama that they can’t escape.

The second thing that Whitty’s comedy, playing in the Angus Bowmer Theater of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, brings to mind: Jasper Fforde’s sly comic novels (The Well of Lost Plots and several others) about Thursday Next, a human investigator of crimes and misdemeanors among the vast pages of fiction. In Fforde’s universe, fictional characters have an actuality of their own, even though they operate under severe constraints: They find it difficult, for instance, to speak without employing quotation marks and a liberal sprinkling of explanatory “he saids” and “she saids.”

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Sure, Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa is a brilliant conception, one of the touchstones of 20th century thought. But when it comes to literary cockroaches, my heart belongs to Archy. A free-verse poet, an ink-stained wretch, a nervous moralist of the demimonde, an insect in love with a slatternly cat, Archy first saw the light of print in a 1916 column by New York Sun journalist Don Marquis, who stuck by the little fellow and his feline companion, Mehitabel, through hundreds of columns and a few book collections until Marquis’ death in 1937.

If The Metamorphosis is a comic nightmare vision of the dehumanizing essence of modern culture, Archy and Mehitabel is a sadly knowing comic ode to optimism, and as such, a much more American tale. Life on Shinbone Alley, the little fetid corner of New York where Archy and his pals hang out, has a mythic quality, and the myth that comes to mind is Sisyphus: always reaching for the top, always falling back into the same old muck, always dusting off and starting the journey again. For Mehitabel the sensualist, hope is just another alley cat away. For Archy the world-wise, despair and joy are almost the same thing, and like a Beckett character but with a good deal more joie de vivre, he can’t go on, yet on he goes.

Archy, as Marquis tells the tale, just showed up one night in the Sun newsroom and, choosing Marquis’ typewriter because the columnist seemed “a little less human” to him than most humans (a race with which he held little truck), proceeded to relate the stories of Shinbone Alley. To do this required a good deal of physical pain. Archy climbed onto the keyboard and flung himself headfirst onto the keys in order to type out his first-hand reports of life on the dangerous but always fascinating streets. He wrote everything in lower-case because he couldn’t hit both a letter key and the shift key at the same time. At least he didn’t have to worry about an editor, and that alone endeared him to the corps of semi-anonymous reporters who flung their own heads against the immutable forces of the newsroom in order to record straight the tragedies and comedies and everyday occurences of the strange boisterous brute that was the big city.

What brings Archy back to mind is a visit to the Oregon Cabaret Theatre in Ashland, a spiffy space carved out of a onetime Baptist Church building just a couple of blocks away from the grounds of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The cabaret’s current show is a revival of Archy and Mehitabel, a lightly jazzy, hipsterish 1950s musical adaptation of Marquis’ columns. A sly fusion of the strain of sardonic optimism that flavored the United States of both the 1920s and the 1950s (decades in which a lively underworld put the lie to the official order of standardized moralism), Archy and Mehitabel provides a pleasantly raffish break from the shows at the Shakespeare festival and also fits neatly with them: After all, like the classics that the festival embraces, the enduring qualities of Marquis’ cockroach and cat are built upon a masterful scaffolding of words, words, words. (The festival and the cabaret have always enjoyed a sort of cross-fertilization of talent. In Archy and Mehitabel, stalwart festival actor Michael J. Hume is the highly effective taped voice of Don Marquis, setting the stage with brief interludes of narration.)

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In 1938, when Richard Rodgers, Larry Hart, George Abbott and George Balanchine brought The Boys From Syracuse to Broadway, no one had ever before made a successful musical from a Shakespeare play. And Boys, a free and breezy adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, was successful. Its jazzy score landed several songs — Falling in Love With Love, He and She, This Can’t Be Love, Sing for Your Supper – in the Great American Songbook, to be picked up and played around with by interpreters as diverse as Mel Torme, Oscar Peterson and Sonny Rollins.

But while Boys paved the way for such later hits as West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate, and helped inspire many more musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, including Arne Zaslove’s popular Twelfth Night with Gershwin tunes for the old Bathhouse Theatre in Seattle in the 1980s, it hasn’t had a lot of revivals. New York’s Encore series of staged musicals produced and recorded a top-flight version in 1997, but a 2002 Broadway revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company was by most accounts (I didn’t see it) badly botched.

Too bad. I’ve listened to the music a fair amount, but I’ve seen a production of The Boys From Syracuse only once, years ago at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, and it’s left me longing to see it again ever since (like another Rodgers & Hart show, 1940’s Pal Joey, which also has a terrific score and is rarely revived).

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s new outdoor production of The Comedy of Errors isn’t The Boys From Syracuse. But it is a free musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy (which was itself an adaptation of a Plautus comedy from ancient Rome), and it has its considerable charms.

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I walked into the open-air circle of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Elizabethan Stage last night a disgruntled man, and three hours later walked out, finally, with what I’d come to Ashland looking for: the emotional, intellectual and aesthetic transformation that fine theater can achieve. Thank goodness for Our Town.

The trip’s been fine: that glorious drive south of Eugene, where the climate changes and the road becomes a curving slice through the mountains. (Why is Rice Hill at the bottom of the hill and the Rice Valley exit at the top?) An overnight stop, with two good meals, at the Wolf Creek Inn, where Jack London stayed in a tiny room for a few weeks in 1911 and wrote a story called The End of the Story. (I’m going to have to look it up: I’ve never read it.)

A quick stop at the nearby gold-mining ghost town of Golden, where volunteers are working to stabilize the remaining wood-frame buildings (the church has new glass in the windows) of a little boom town that was always different: Built by preaching miners, it had two congregations and no saloons. Two or three genuine markers lie in the little cemetery, but most of the headstones are fakes, set there many years ago for filming of an episode of Gunsmoke: So the not-so-wild West reinvents itself. And bless the volunteers, who have split new rails for the fence along the little road and are slowly reclaiming the natural state of the gouged-out mined areas below the town. May they outfox the woodpecker who was tap-tap-tapping away at the old church spire.

But in Ashland, aesthetically, it hadn’t been a good beginning. On Saturday afternoon, indoors at the Angus Bowmer Theatre, a gauche and vulgar version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play that deserves far, far better. Dream is a wonder of the Western World, one of the most nearly perfect plays ever devised, and I’ve often thought it close to foolproof. Turns out it’s not. It can be defeated by a director and designers determined to overwhelm the magic of its language with insipid pop-cultural winks, incessant visual distractions, head-scratching hand gestures that appear to be choreographed but have no apparent link to the emotional lives of the characters or the plotting demands of the story, and a general busy-ness that makes it almost impossible for the actors to settle into the quiet glowing heart of the story. It was the Roman circus, not the magical wood. My congratulations to Ray Porter, who managed a fine low-comedy focus as Bottom, and Kevin Kenerly, who kept his dignity intact as Oberon while all around him were being engulfed in foolishness.

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Art Scatter has declared its keen interest in Cave Doings in the past. What attracts us? Maybe it’s just that we see ourselves. Not ourselves specifically, of course, not with our sense of direction, not rooting around in the back of a cave where carbon dioxide levels are high enough to induce hallucinations and strange blind fish look up at us from cold, mineral drenched water, perhaps attracted by the pungent aroma of our dingy torches. Do fish smell? I mean with their own olfactory devices? I digress.

Those cave people, homo sapiens, were us, at least in terms of the intelligence they brought to bear on their environments. I haven’t ever seen any studies that suggest the human brain has evolved dramatically during the past 50,000 years or so. If you have, please let me know, because that would be interesting, too. So, their brains were operating in the world like ours, except without the same sort of technology, which has “evolved” over time. What we can piece together of their creativity in the face of the universe can’t help but be interesting in a deep way.

So we are preambling toward something — Judith Thurman’s story on cave art in The New Yorker. Thurman’s story examines a couple of recent books on cave painting, tests their propositions with experts studying the caves on the ground and then eyeballs those paintings itself (or rather herself). In her lead-in she cites the famous Picasso observation about the Lascaux paintings, reported by his guide: “They’ve discovered everything.” The list of painting “advances” includes perspective, Pointillism and stenciling, various colors and brushes and as Thurman points out, the “very concept of an image.” What I like about the article was the sense of amazement that Thurman conveys at just how perceptive the cave painters were — both about the caves themselves and the surfaces they offered for image-making AND the animals they created on the walls. But the primary point is to describe the dispute among cave historians, which basically comes down to this: To what extent is it possible to interpret accurately the “meaning” of the paintings.
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Before all of the thoughts generated by the pdXPLORE panel discussion on Tuesday exit my brainpan altogether and my notes go stale, I wanted to get something in a post, even if it’s not completely organized. The five panelists — Carol Mayer-Reed, Rudy Barton, Michael McCulloch, architect William Tripp and Richard Potestio — have each produced elements for an exhibit at PNCA that makes a few stabs at how we can think about Portland’s future in a creative way. I haven’t spent a lot of time with the exhibits, but they didn’t seem integrated into a whole “concept,” at least not to me, so perhaps a more haphazard report makes some sense. So we’ll just jump directly into the highlights.

Portland is a river city. Well, yeah. But both Mayer-Reed and Barton pointed out that the city does a poor job of celebrating its rivers, reaching out to them, dipping its collective toes in them, especially the Willamette. I’ve been hearing this comment a lot lately, which makes me think that the idea of burying I-5 on the east bank of the Willamette may be back in play in a more serious way.

Portland isn’t as green as it thinks it is. Mayer-Reed pointed this out, based on her researches that compared the city to its near West Coast neighbors San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., but several of the panelists mentioned that Portlanders shouldn’t be smug about their density and sustainability initiatives because other places actually have had better results along these lines.
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We were in Ashland for our summer run at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: five plays in all this time, meaning we missed some good ones, Othello, Our Town, and Fences, most prominently. Our colleague Bob is heading down THIS weekend so perhaps will set up a little online back-and-forth when he gets back to talk about the individual shows we have in common and the festival in general.

What was I looking for? Well, the usual, I suppose. New descriptions of old plays, new descriptions of my reality, a little inspiration here and there, something dazzling, the OSF comfort food (reliably good acting and good production values). But something else, too. This is the first year in the reign of Bill Rauch as artistic director of the festival, and I was looking for changes. I wasn’t expecting MUCH. OSF is the aircraft carrier of American theater companies, the largest non-profit theater company in the country (at least it once was) with many decades (since 1935), even centuries one might say (enter Shakespeare), of tradition to uphold. But maybe, I thought, I’ll be able to detect a new hand at the tiller. When Henry Woronicz took over from Jerry Turner in 1991, some changes were immediately apparent, notably the company’s far wider recruitment and employment of minority actors, part of the “color blind” casting movement that has become common at regional theater companies (you know I think that’s a good thing, right?). On the other hand, Libby Appel continued many of the initiatives that Woronicz started when he left the festival abruptly in 1995 (yes, we know the gossip). Her interests emerged and colored the festival more slowly and less dramatically.

Cut to the chase. What do I think I detected? I will enumerate! But first the caveats: I saw five of 11 plays on schedule this year; veterans of the festival might say, “I’ve seen them do that before,” and may even by right (though I think my points will still stand on the matter of degree); memory is a tricky thing.
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“It is never entirely safe to laugh at the metaphysics of the man-in-the-street.”
— J.W. Dunne, An Experiment With Time

I’ve spent three weeks in a state of distraction. Ten minutes here and there, cracks in time, I browsed the summer fiction issue of The New Yorker (June 9 & 16, 2008). I found several scattered signs of our times.

1. Peter Schjeldahl on a Jeff Koons retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Koons is a “major artist,” one of those who can “X-ray the cultures that give rise to them,” Schjeldahl begins portentously. But the culture that gives this particular rise is one in which “intelligence is obsolete.” Koons’ iconic “product line” sculptures–the latest of which, a huge steel heart, looks “incredibly costly” and “as sweet as dime-store perfume”–are turned out in a factory employing some 90 assistants. (”Rabbit,” shown here, is a stainless-steel cast of an inflatable bunny.) The steel heart, chirps Schjeldahl, “apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking scads of money in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste.” And that major artist, X-ray vision-ness? “We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably amount to wanting a better time.”

2. Annie Proulx, “Tits-Up in a Ditch.” This is the sloppily-tricked-out, unreinforced Humvee underbelly of the want-of-a-better-time-to-live-through. A story about Dick Cheney’s Wyoming and Dick Cheney’s Iraq War, in which a young woman, Dakotah, begins her “descent into the dark, watery mud” of our time, when she discovers that the only words she has to describe her Iraq experience are the gnawed-end clichés of the grandfather she hates.

3. Ron Chast cartoon book: “How to Live on One Hour of Sleep Per Night.”
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