Ah, 2008. The year when the fat got lean and the lean got leaner. The year when the big fat lie led to the big fat crash. The year when the faked memoir devolved from the merely mercenary and narcissistic to the unbearably sad and pitiable. The year, more cheerfully, when Obama won and the [...]
OK, the last day of 2008, as per one method of reckoning the revolutions of one satellite around its star. Mostly as we’ve thought about it, this year, we’ve been stunned into silence. The complexity is simply too great for Art Scatter’s feeble resources. For 2009 we’ve got one resolution and one resolution only: [...]
Cool things to read in other places:
– Laura Grimes, charter member of Friends of Art Scatter, has a delightful piece in the Sunday Oregonian’s books pages about reading Henry James’s The Ambassadors (or trying to read it) on the bus, and whether James was quite the sort of fellow you could sit down and have [...]
Art Scatter has taken an obsessive interest in watching the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art as it tiptoed along the crumbly edge of the abyss. After all, MOCA is an internationally important arbiter and collector of new art with big curatorial ambitions (at this point, some might say too big), and its effect [...]
Martha Ullman West reminded us below in the comment section that Harold Pinter wasn’t the only death of a prominent artist over the holidays. Eartha Kitt departed, too. I imagine her in a heaven populated by Wall Street plutocrats, seducing a healthy portion of their ill-gotten gains out of them, though how the plutocrats [...]
Harold Pinter had one of those deep, dark provocative minds, the scary kind, and he used it to create characters that resembled almost exactly the furtive and often malign creatures that burrow around inside our heads and heart, alternately bullying us and cringing in the corner. I’m thinking of early Pinter here, the Pinter [...]
Now Chriftmas comes, ’tis fit that we
Should feaft and fing, and merry be
Keep open Houfe, let Fiddlers play
A Fig for Cold, fing Care away
And may they who thereat repine
On brown Bread and on fmall Beer dine
(Virginia Almanack, 1766)
I have discovered, of late, a dangerous aisle at Powell’s City of Books. More accurately, I have [...]
Just a short item, because we saw this is on the Portland Art Museum’s website:
A memorial for Terry will be held on Sunday, January 4, 2009 and begin at 2 p.m. with a viewing of Wild Beauty. The memorial program is scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. in the Fields Ballroom in the Museum’s [...]
Today is Winter Solstice, and as my late father-in-law used to say, have you noticed the days are getting longer?
Well, no, not in the afterdaze of the snowstorm that’s punched the Pacific Northwest and reminded me, if briefly, of my stint living in Upstate New York, a long time ago. In those days I knew [...]
“Not much ever happened to him but weather.”
– Willa Cather, A Lost Lady
I think of love stories in winter weather. Perhaps it’s my own small town South Dakota youth calling, remembering my own 60s romance with the love of my life, cold winter nights parking at a turn-out on the gravel road out past the [...]