Cousin Rick, a far-flung Scatter-friend, writes from Paris. Writes! On writing paper, with hand-formed, fully-formed letters and elegant sentences. Like tooled leather, it seems to me.
Cousin Rick works for a large international “software solutions” firm, recently merged with a larger firm. “With a merger of this size,” Rick tells us, “it can take months [...]
So much for bipartisanship. All of a sudden it feels like we’re back in the bad old days of the 1980s and ’90s “culture wars,” when the right-wing juggernaut raised fears of chocolate-coated performance artists to push its narrow view of American culture and its broad view of the body politic as a happy economic [...]
“This score is my bible,” David Schiff, the Portland composer of the chamber opera Gimpel the Fool and a lot of other good music, said with a big smile.
It was Friday night, and I’d run into Schiff as I was leaving the opening performance of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw at Portland Opera. [...]
You are just a thought that someone
Somewhere somehow feels you should be here
Arthur Lee, “A House Is Not A Motel”
“We change what we remember, then it changes us, and so on, until we both fade together, our memories and ourselves. Something like that.” This is Salman Rushdie on the way our lives intertwine with [...]
As reported earlier on Art Scatter and elsewhere, the U.S. Senate pulled a nasty Friday surprise by voting 73-24 in favor of an amendment to the national economic stimulus package that would ban any spending on a wide variety of arts and cultural projects — anything that would give federal reaction to the economic [...]
UPDATE: The discussion at Portland Arts Watch on this post is getting robust as well. You might want to have a look.
I just posted a version of this at Portland Arts Watch, and I’m thinking that I’ll extend it to these precincts as well, because I really do want to hear opinions about this [...]
UPDATE, 1:55 p.m. Friday, Feb. 6: MISCHIEF WINS, “SMALL POTATOES” LOSE: I didn’t think he could do it, but he did. Today the U.S. Senate, by a ridiculous 73-24 vote, passed Sen. Tom Coburn’s amendment to the economic stimulus bill to bar anything with even the faintest whiff of culture from getting any stimulus [...]
So last night, after the Super Bowl, I was channel-surfing. I’m not proud of it, but there you have it. Sometimes I think that’s the way the universe is trying to talk to me: If I happen upon the “Dog Whisperer,” I might conclude that I’m not calm and assertive enough (or maybe not submissive [...]
“I’m a stranger here myself.”
Odd this should be the last thing I hear from Aurelio Zen. I’ve just read Zen’s parting shot in Dead Lagoon, the Michael Dibdin mystery novel I’ve saved unread for several months. Didbin wrote eleven novels featuring Zen, the solitary, dark-hearted Italian police inspector. The first, Ratking, was published [...]
As the great lexicographer Bob Dylan might have asked, “Where have all the apostrophes gone?”
In Birmingham, England, it turns out, they’ve been long time passing: According to an Associated Press report via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, city bureaucrats have been dropping the little floating comma from Birmingham’s street signs since the 1950s. So it’s no longer [...]