So here it is just hours before Labor Day (to be celebrated by much of America by a trip to the mall, where many people will be working for minimum wage or a skoosh over it) and this corner of Art Scatter is thinking about a few things.
Such as Josh White, who is playing on [...]
Nose pressed to the glass, we watch mist clouds roll wetly off the Pacific onto the beach and when we get to the point of exposing our own flesh to the elements — mostly water in various incarnations and sand — we remark that this feels like the memory of an amniotic bath, except that [...]
Walter Benjamin is the prophet of Scrounge Scatter. The German critic of things broken, Benjamin embodies the true spirit of Modernism. Susan Sontag quipped that his essays end just before they self-destruct. But not before I’m lulled to sleep, usually. He’s the philosopher in search of an interpreter who will synthesize his scattered observations. In [...]
I wouldn’t say that Art Scatter is totally obsessed with spelling. We don’t employ a battalion of copyeditors to check our posts, after all, and I’m sure that strange letters pop up in strange places in the words we type sometimes. And we prefer some spellings, like “copyeditors,” that some sticklers might consider incorrect. [...]
As we suggested earlier, some of Art Scatter is at the beach, and on the first nice day at the beach, what do we do? Why, we build a sandcastle, that’s what. Well, actually, we critique previously built sandcastles, do archaeological digs around sandcastle ruins and ponder the sandcastles we would build if were [...]
The miracle (or the curse, depending on your point of view) of the Internet tubes is that they extend to the Oregon coast, and so, it is possible to share one’s vacation slides with the universe almost in real time. Not only that, it is possible to post from there/here, too. One suspects that [...]
“There are more good dancers in the world right now than there have ever been,” Christopher Stowell told me soon after he arrived in Portland a few years ago to take over Oregon Ballet Theatre.
He wasn’t talking about great dancers — those streaks of lightning and passion who come along every now and then and [...]
Let’s just say we didn’t have enough audience polling of unsavory behavior going on right now. (Which actually we don’t!) We’d suggest joining MrMead at his Pupu Platter site and confess to the world what awful movies you love.
For me? The Vikings: Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis vie for the lovely hand [...]
(This is a reader-participation posting. You, too, can embarrass yourself thoroughly by fessing up to the words you’ve mispronounced, misconstrued or generally mistreated for most of your natural born days. Hit that comment button!)
Comes this, from the venerable Associated Press: Apparently the host city of the Michael Phelps Quadrennial Swimathon is Bay-JING, not Bay-ZHING.
Who knew?
Well, [...]
Should we allow movies to pulverize the soft images in our brains of the books we’ve read, poor defenseless images that they are? A Guardian blogger thinks it’s time to fight back, and Scatter rummages around for a few thoughts.
So, for the past few weeks we’ve talked about movies and we’ve talked about books, specifically [...]