I tried to keep up with Ornette Coleman’s onstage conversation Friday with jazz writer/historian Howard Mandel, one of the many Portland Jazz Festival activities this week.
It wasn’t easy. Was what he was saying at any given time actually making sense? Was there a thread to his interview, a philosophy embedded somehow? Was he [...]
The thing I miss about most opera is raffishness.
You know, that music-hall, theatrical-underbelly, up-from-the-depths, cut-loose, anything-but-grand collaboration with the audience: the sly wink.
Wagner’s a mighty guy, but he’s no winker. Puccini’s plenty theatrical, but he wouldn’t wink if a butterfly fluttered past his eyeball. OK, Mozart winked. A lot. And I suppose you could call [...]
So, Allen Ginsberg comes to Portland in 1956 with his friend Gary Snyder and they spend a couple of days at Reed College. He’s 29 and just about as full of desire as a human can be. He wants to touch the firmament and he wants to savor the most exotic pleasures of the flesh, [...]
The first week of Art Scatter is littered below us! There were takes on great Oregon painter James Lavadour, “The Dancer” exhibition at the Portland Art Museum, the discovery at Reed College of the earliest known tape of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl,” a defense of sorts of Herbie Hancock’s River, some observations about Portland [...]
By BOB HICKS
Maybe you spotted it, near the end of a generally mild-mannered editorial urging people to help pay down the debt at Portland Center Stage’s Gerding Theater at the Armory, in the Saturday, Feb. 9, Oregonian: a throwaway insult guaranteed to boil blood.
“Portland has long been recognized,” the editorialist [...]
I’m listening to River: The Joni Letters, Herbie Hancock’s interpretation of Joni Mitchell songs that won the Album of the Year Grammy on Sunday. This was a surprise, if only because this little album had sold so few copies (50,000 according to Soundscan) and was facing the twin Goliaths of this year’s Grammy [...]
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,/angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night… “
Man. Once you start quoting “Howl” it’s hard to break it off. [...]
This report from my wife, Laura, who was walking in the South Park Blocks near the Portland Art Museum this morning, Tuesday, Feb. 12:
An elderly gentleman is standing beside that stern, sorrowful, loving statue of Abraham Lincoln. A bouquet of flowers is resting by the pedestal.
“Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday,” the gentleman says.
“Did you put [...]
“What does not change / is the will to change,” as the poet Charles Olson said, meaning that, wherever we look, change is fundamental, continuous, and irrevocable. We know this but often forget it in broad prospect as we round our own daily planet.
James Lavadour’s recent paintings are landscapes of such change. Now on view [...]
By BOB HICKS
In Paris they were called abonnes.
In Moscow and St. Petersburg they were balletomanes.
Lincoln Kirstein, the impresario who founded New York City Ballet with George Balanchine, rolled his eyes and referred to them waspishly as “balletptomaines.”
One way or another, they are nuts: nuts for the ballet, for the dancers, for the social swirl, the [...]