Art Scatter

Thomas Nast/1871

By Bob Hicks

The national political season is getting good and nasty these days, and we here at Art Scatter World Headquarters are pretty pumped about it: blood sports do that to us.

We’re especially excited about the literary possibilities. In  recent days we’ve added some astute veteran political observers to our stable of correspondents, all of whom know their way around a well-turned phrase. First came Eugene Field, with his commentary on the viciousness of the infighting during the South Carolina primary campaign: “The truth about the cat and pup is this: they ate each other up!” Then we succeeded in persuading the Scottish poet William Miller, famed for breaking the Wee Willie Winkie scandal, to comment on Newt’s unusual nighttime frolics (”upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown”).

Now we’re extremely proud to be able to bring you the commentary of the legendary George Washington Plunkitt, whose plainspoken eloquence on the subject of practical politics captivated the nation in the best-selling Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. Plunkitt made a fortune in the political game, boasting, among other things, “of his record in filling four public offices in one year and drawing salaries from three of them at the same time.”

Following is his first dispatch to Art Scatter. Don’t ask us what we had to guarantee Mr. Plunkitt to get him to write for us. You don’t want to know.

Plunkitt on the uproar over Newt and Fannie Mae:

“Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I’ve made a big fortune out of the game, and I’m gettin’ richer every day, but I’ve not gone in for dishonest graft – blackmailin’ gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc. – and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.

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By Bob Hicks

I’ve just put up this post at Oregon Arts Watch about two extraordinary feats of endurance: Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton’s star-crossed quest in 1914-17 to trek 1,800 miles across the Antarctic continent, and Lawrence Howard’s captivating three-hour solo telling of the tale at Portland Story Theater. Give it a read, and the next time you think of grumbling about a little Portland rain, think of Shackleton and his men. Still a few tickets available, I’m told, for Howard’s Friday-night performance Jan. 27.

Photo: Lifeboat James Caird launches from Elephant Island, April 24, 1916. Probably by expedition photographer Frank Hurley. Wikimedia Commons

By Bob Hicks

Seeing it as our duty to help sort out this most perplexing of civic seasons, we here at Art Scatter World Headquarters have hired our first political correspondent. He’s a veteran newspaperman named Eugene Field, and we’re proud to add him to our mix.

Here is Mr. Field’s first dispatch, filed from the late 19th century on the morning after Newt Gingrich’s tooth-ripping victory over Mitt Romney in Saturday’s South Carolina GOP primary election. Well done, Mr. Field! We look forward to your continuing reports:

THE DUEL

By Bob Hicks

Something’s Got a Hold on Me. Etta James, that incredible American voice, died today from cancer at age 73, and although she urged us to “Don’t Cry Baby,” a few collective tears are going to tumble down.

Etta touched on blues and country and rhythm & blues and soul – pretty much most of the traditional popular song forms – and distinguished herself in all of them. She lived hard, on purpose, and sometimes fell over the edge, then scrambled back and added a little more of the scrape and grit she’d landed in to her already astonishing sound. “My mother always wanted me to be a jazz singer, but I always wanted to be raunchy,” she wrote in her memoir.

She was a walking, talking myth: She thought her daddy might have been the pool hustler Minnesota Fats, though she didn’t know for sure, and apparently, neither did he. She seemed to sing from some vital contradiction in the American spirit: how could a voice be at once so smudged and raw and pure? Johnny Otis, who died on Tuesday at age 90, discovered her, but no one could hold on to her. Dementia caught up with her in her final years. It couldn’t hold on, either. Today, Etta’s free.

At Last.

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Photo: Louis Ramirez, 2000, Flickr/Wikimedia Commons; Etta in San Jose.

By Bob Hicks

Over at Oregon Arts Watch I’ve posted Ready, aim, fire: on Portland stages, a shot in the dark. It’s an account of my weekend adventures viewing the premieres of Joseph Fisher’s (I Am Still) the Duchess of Malfi at Artists Rep and Jason Wells’s The North Plan at Portland Center Stage, plus Allison Moore’s Collapse at Third Rail Rep. Guns were blazin’. Regimes were toppled. A sex addict helped save the day. I even managed to introduce the Victorian poet and critic John Addington Symonds into the mix. Well, why not?

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Jake Street, Vin Shambry and Chris Murray in “(I Am Still) the Duchess of Malfi.” Photo: Owen Carey

Art Scatter chief correspondent Martha Ullman West sends along this note about the Portland memorial service for Mark Goldweber, the founding ballet master of Oregon Ballet Theatre, who died last month from lymphoma at age 53. Goldweber, who made and kept many friends here, moved on to ballet-master positions at the Joffrey Ballet and then Ballet West in Salt Lake City. Martha also wrote this moving memorial for Portland Arts Watch.

A  gathering at 2 p.m. Sunday, January 22, in the studios of Oregon Ballet Theatre (818 Southeast Sixth Avenue, Portland) will remember Mark Goldweber, who was company ballet master from 1988 until 1997, when he returned to the Joffrey Ballet, where he had been a dancer, to take up the same position.  Goldweber, who was ballet master for Salt Lake City’s Ballet West when he died on December 9, was a superb dancer as well as ballet master. He set high standards for OBT that are still in place today.

Performance video will be shown, not only of Goldweber dancing, but also of ballets on which he had a real influence: his love of Romanov history as well as 19th century classicism was an integral part of James Canfield’s Nutcracker, and it was he who lovingly staged the company’s first production of Giselle. Speakers will include, among others, Carol Shults, former OBT dancers Daniel Kirk and Katarina Svetlova Thompson; Josie Moseley, and yours truly.  Since space is limited, please RSVP to Carol Shults at carolshults@comcast.net

By Bob Hicks

In Down the rabbit hole: Melody Owen makes a book, which is new on Oregon Arts Watch, I tell the tale of … well, of Melody Owen making a book. Actually, it’s more about the publication party for the Portland artist’s new book, Looking Glass Book, at Publication Studio, in a tuckaway corner downtown. The book consists of collages inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books, and the whole thing makes for an interesting tale.

Also well worth checking out at Oregon Arts Watch is ‘My Flashlight Was Attacked by Bats’: Farewell to poet Marty Christensen, in which Leanne Grabel, Doug Spangle and Mark Sargent offer heartfelt, eloquent and only mildly profane tributes to the late poet, who died January 5. Farewell to another cantankerous player from the old and gritty Portland.

By Bob Hicks

What’s been cooking lately in the Scatter kitchen? Well, a lovely baked dressing made up mostly of mushrooms, celery, onions and leftover bread slices (Mrs. Scatter’s clean-out-the-fridge creation). And another batch of baklazhannia ikra, or “poor man’s caviar,” an addictive eggplant/tomato/onion/pepper relish that William Grimes discovered recently in one of those great old Time/Life Foods of the World cookbooks and kindly passed along as a recipe in the New York Times.

Things have been cooking outside of World Headquarters, too. I’ve recently signed on as a regular contributor to Oregon Arts Watch, the ambitious online cultural newsmagazine masterminded and edited by my friend and former colleague at The Oregonian, Barry Johnson. I’ve filed a couple of pieces there already:

• Portland’s dance renaissance and Eowyn Emerald’s pair of sold-out performances at BodyVox Dance Center.
• Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo and its intimations of the Occupy movement, at Profile Theatre.

A few other things that’ve been keeping me hopping, each of which should be coming out in story form sometime soon:

• An evening up a dark alley to The Publication Studio for the opening celebration for artist Melody Owen’s new book, which has something to do with mad hatters and rabbit holes.
• An afternoon at the Portland Opera studios, where I discovered general manager Christopher Mattaliano leaping up and down with a cutout version of a gingerbread witch as singers from Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel watched and nodded.
• A morning at Milagro Theatre, talking with Dañel Malán about the perils and pleasures of touring the country to perform bilingual plays in tucked-away spaces – and whether the world is really going to end with the Mayan calendar in 2012.



• An hour’s conversation on the phone with Hal Holbrook, octogenarian actor and uncanny channeler of the late, great Mark Twain, on topics ranging from politics to history to the unhappy state of print journalism and what it means to the future of democracy: “It’s a good paper. But as I remind people, it’s called the Wall. Street. Journal. Not The Journal. And it’s owned by that guy, Murdoch, who’s in all that trouble in England.”

Lots cooking, and more coming up. Last night I had an odd dream: I’d accepted an assignment from a glossy magazine to do a spread comparing two versions of barbecued pulled pork from famous Southern restaurants. This was a touchy situation for an ordinarily vegetarian/pescetarian writer, who was sorely tempted to do some serious taste-testing. In my dream I solved the problem by contacting the chefs of each restaurant and asking them to send me a towel soaked in their secret sauces. I then breathed in the aromas deeply, and began to type. If you should happen to stumble across this story somewhere in print, don’t believe a word it says.

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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

• Photo by Keith Weller/Wikimedia Commons
• Hal Holbrook in 2007. Photo: Luke Ford, lukeford.net/Wikimedia Commons

“By and large, time moves with merciful slowness in the old-fashioned world of writing. … (T)he rhythms of readers are leisurely. They spread recommendations by word of mouth and ‘get around’ to titles and authors years after making a mental note of them. … A movie has a few weeks to find an audience, and television flits by in an hour, but books physically endure, in public and private libraries, for generations.”

John Updike, The Writer in Winter
Collected in Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism, 2011

By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter contends that time is not an arrow: we all live in several pasts, several presents, even a few futures. At any moment, and in separate yet overlapping ways, we are old and young, conservative and radical, classical and modernist. We are ever-shifting texture, contradictions that forge ahead and loop back on ourselves. Crusty old children. Impetuous adults. Civilized wild creatures. Logical irrationalists. Mysteries, even to ourselves.

In that sense reading and writing may be the most human of the arts. They follow us, and sometimes lead us, into these bewilderments of emotion and thought – the places that may not make sense, but simply are. Books explain things, and smudge them up. They are private pleasures that draw us beyond ourselves. And they are time-travelers. They can be “new” to any given reader at any given time, sometimes even when that reader has experienced them before. O miracle divine!

This year, Updike’s notion of the “merciful slowness” of literature sets the table for my annual recap of my year’s readings. Considering the rivers of writing that flow into the great literary ocean in any given year, it’s a foolish quest. Yet I feel curiously compelled to undertake what amounts to a private reckoning in a public space. These books, all of which I read in 2011, engaged me. I believe in them, and like most readers in most times and places, I feel an urge to pass my enthusiasms on to someone else who might enjoy them just as much.

This is not a best-of-2011 listing. A few of the books were new last year. Several others have been kicking around for quite a while. In subject and style they sprawl all over the place, from classic animal fable to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to the wonders of the Louvre and the woes of Henry Miller and Anais Nin. That sort of leaping-about is the way life actually works for most of us, and it’s the way I like it. The discipline of writing opens up the world. And it isn’t simply, or even primarily, about what’s new, although a steady flow of fresh energy is necessary to its continuing health. How can we understand the new without some familiarity with the old? Why would we want to try?

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By Bob Hicks

John Buchanan, the flamboyant former director of the Portland Art Museum, died on Friday, Dec. 30, 2011, after a struggle with cancer. He was 58.

Buchanan left the Portland museum in 2005 to become director of the much larger Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which encompasses the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and the nearby Legion of Honor. He was director there from February 2006 until his death. Here is Kenneth Baker’s obituary for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, who was the Portland museum’s consulting curator of European art during Buchanan’s years here, said Saturday morning that it was apparent to his friends and his wife, Lucy Matthews Buchanan, that Buchanan’s days were short when he told Lucy before Christmas that he wouldn’t be returning to work.

For John, such a thing was unthinkable. He was a tireless worker, a man who was energized by the details and occasional high drama of the museum world, and who loved the art of the deal. Nothing stimulated him so much as creating and selling a vision about the world of art.

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