Archive for June, 2008

If we sacrifice the semicolon, will the sentence live on?

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

Earlier, we were musing about the alleged death of the sentence. We didn’t understand it. Didn’t we frequently, ourselves, muster a sentence or two? But then the Voice Inside Our Head replied, rhetorically, “You call that a sentence?” Our sentences weren’t just NOT sentences; they actually killed The Sentence as they were constructed. [...]

Friday Scatter: Back to business

Friday, June 27th, 2008

So, yes, Scatter had a momentary, um, hiatus. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Actually, we were up in Seattle, lots of us, and we took hundreds of slides! There we are with Gramps splashing in the pool. Uh, Gramps? Pull up the trunks. Yeesh!
Anyway, the best thing about traveling, even just up I-5 a ways, [...]

TJ Norris: signs and no-signs

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Let’s say you’ve just gotten back from a weekend in Seattle, taken for the sweetest of reasons (a wedding!), hurried back actually, because you’d waited until the last possible day to see the TJ Norris installation, Infinitus, at the New American Art Union. A long drive, after a couple of long days, which also [...]

Scatter friends go out on the town

Friday, June 20th, 2008

With the summer solstice having hit town at precisely 4:59 p.m. Friday — was that a sylph we saw cavorting in the woods? — it’s a semi-beautiful weekend here in Portland, Oregon.
All right, clouds are moving in. Yet we are undaunted. Some cool things are happening around and out of town involving Friends of [...]

Feeding the masses: What would Tolstoy do?

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Reading William J. Broad’s fascinating report in the Science section of Tuesday’s New York Times about a possible breakthrough in world rice production got me thinking about Leo Tolstoy’s masterful War and Peace, which I’ve been enjoying, in small gulps of 20 to 40 pages a sitting, in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s lively 2007 [...]

Well and truly sentenced

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

The question before us today is the question before us every day: Is the sentence dying? It was posed by James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who then answered it in the affirmative. And that set Washington Post writer Linton Weeks on an imaginative reporter’s journey to test his conclusion. It’s a clever little [...]

Hey, wait a minute Mr. Postman

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

Mister postman look and see/You got a letter in your bag for me
Yes, Art Scatter DOES get mail. Most excellent mail, thank you very much. For example, Scott Wayne Indiana sent us a key. Well, not exactly a key (”this is not a key”), but an image of a key. You can see at the [...]

A planning thrill ride with Fregonese, Koolhaas, Krier

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

According to the number crunchers at Metro (Portland’s regional government, for those keeping track outside Oregon), metropolitan Portland, which includes five counties in Oregon and two across the Columbia River in Washington, will reach a population of 3.85 million by the year 2060. The population now is roughly 2.1 million. And if the area continues [...]

Bob Hicks on Drammy night

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

NOTE: This was in the comment section to the post below, but I’ve moved it up. It’s Bob’s account of Monday night when he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Drammy committee, which dispenses awards to the local theater community.
Ah, Barry. Thank you sincerely for tooting my horn, although that headline’s a bit over [...]

Hail, Bob Hicks!

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Monday night at the annual Drammy Awards, Art Scatter’s own Bob Hicks received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Drammy committee and, by extension, the Portland theater community. And for once, we’re not going to make jokes about it because we really do think it brings honor both to Bob and to the theater community [...]

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