Monthly Archives: April 2009

Books, General, Poetry, Vernon Peterson

Call me anthological

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“Anthologies of contemporary poetry, like new cars, run the risk of being obsolete within a couple years. My hope is that this one will have the lasting power of a Volkswagen at least.”
-A. Poulin, Jr., Contemporary American Poetry (1971)

9780520072275As anthologies go, the monstrous Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry (2009), edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson, is a Hummer pretending to be a hybrid. Combined with its sturdy predecessors, Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Volume One: From Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude (1996), and Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium (1998), edited by Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, with 2600 combined pages, they are a fully-loaded triple trailer.

A carrier we can use for the long haul, or a threat to others on the road? At the beginning of the new millennium, we have some time to sort it out. This is my shakedown run.

I love poetry anthologies, for reasons that can’t be duplicated with anthologies of fiction or essays. A lyric poem, after all, is itself a work of assemblage, each line a careful choice of image and word held in balance for a breath, framed in tension or in harmony with lines before and after, rounded swiftly to the close. The poetic line is a product of selection; the poem an anthology of lines. In a good anthology, we sense, in the swift space of a few poems, the range or depth of the poet, the clash or harmony of theme and emotion. In half an hour we explore the unique geography and weather of two, four or half a dozen poets, landscapes wild or domestic, an experience that can be over- or underwhelming depending on the curatorial skill of the anthologist.

No other anthology offers the same sense of immediacy or range. I very seldom read fragments or segments of novels in progress. I don’t even like isolated short stories; I need to read several at a go to feel connected to any one. So I wait for new collections by Alice Munro and T.C. Boyle, rather than read their stories singly in The New Yorker or Harper’s.

Anthologies have been the lifeblood of American poetry, the venerable Mississippi of American poetry, though poets and readers may not realize it fishing the thousands of miles of the hundreds of tributaries, pulling up sunfish and an occasional trout. Though the internet may have changed that somewhat, providing broad access to poetry and poets, there is nothing like the compact, well-thumbed anthology to provide the casual intimacy that precipitates the shock of recognition – a new poet! The discovery of good poetry is incidental to that kind of casual exploration.

Poetry also has fewer readers and wider diversity, and needs the cross-fertilization an anthology provides. I’m guessing wildly here, but if you ask 25 readers to name the top 25 fiction writers in America, I’d expect two-thirds of those named would be the same but in a different order. Ask 25 poetry readers to name the top 25 American poets and perhaps only half a dozen would be the same, and some lists might have no common names.

There are all kinds of anthologies. Some explore eternal themes such as love and anti-war. Some are gender or ethnic collections. Others are simply the 101 “best loved” poems of the last year, decade or century. Some are designed for college classroom use, providing surveys of canonical poets and representative poems, often winding a poet’s reputation tightly to a few poems before they’ve hit their stride. Some anthologies are school or movement oriented, both recognized and obscure: Futurists, Surrealists, Objectivists, Beats, confessional, or language poets. Most – and, interestingly, some of the best – are very polemical, arguing for a certain kind of poetry. Classrooms never do justice to this volatile aspect of contemporary poetry. I’m not sure how you can educate yourself in the broad landscape of American poetry, all its streams, other than through the anthologies of the day, serially “new” and “recent,” and then old and dusty and obscure in all their wild diversity.

I’m seldom more than a few feet from a poetry anthology (or a battered copy of Four Quartets, an anthology of sorts). How else to fill the time when you have a minute or two to spare, waiting for something or someone, and you crave intellectual nourishment, but a novel is too much and a Luna bar wrapper too little?
Continue reading Call me anthological →

Bob Hicks, Books, General

Sunday scatter: It was a dark and stormy night in the Rainy North Woods …

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Our friend Rose City Reader has a running feature on her lively lit blog she calls Opening Sentence of the Day, and it’s just that — a first sentence that, for some reason, catches her eye and ear and compels her to pass it along.

hotIt’s a great idea, and it’s hers, and no way am I going to steal it, because that would be so wrong. But just this once I’m going to borrow it, because after putting new shelves in the office I’ve been restocking some books that have been sitting in boxes in the basement, and that includes pretty much my entire collection of mysteries, which I’ve now been taking out selectively and re-reading with pleasure.

One of my rediscoveries is Gore Vidal’s three murder mysteries from the early 1950s featuring suave public-relations man Peter Sargeant (Vidal wrote them under the pen name Edgar Box) — Death in the Fifth Position, maybe the best backstage ballet murder mystery ever written; Death Before Bedtime, a maliciously funny evisceration of power, sex and corruption in the nation’s capital; and Death Likes It Hot, a mystery about — well, I can’t remember exactly, because I haven’t read it in a long time and I’ve just begun it again. But its first sentence is so delicious that I just have to take a cue from Rose City Reader and pass it along. (I can’t resist adding the second sentence, too, because it underscores the method of Vidal’s elegant wry comedy):

The death of Peaches Sandoe, the midget, at the hands, or rather feet, of a maddened elephant in the sideshow of the circus at Madison Square Garden was at first thought to be an accident, the sort of tragedy you’re bound to run into from time to time if you run a circus with both elephants and midgets in it. A few days later, though, there was talk of foul play.

Ah, the wonderful tastelessness of it all! Isn’t that what we long for in a comedy-of-manners murder mystery, even moreso than an alibi-proof plot?

And that got me thinking of my old friend and fellow ink-stained wretch Vince Kohler, who died too early, at age 53, several years ago, but not before creating his wonderfully seedy reprobate of an amateur sleuth, Eldon Larkin, an “overweight, oversexed reporter” on a daily newspaper in a mythical town on the southern Oregon coast. (Kohler, who when I knew him was a reporter for The Oregonian, where Berkeley escapee Eldon hoped a good scoop might someday land him a job, was once a reporter at the Coos Bay World.)

Continue reading Sunday scatter: It was a dark and stormy night in the Rainy North Woods … →

Bob Hicks, General, Language, Theater

Man who didn’t write Shakespeare doesn’t have birthday

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St. George slaying the dragon/Gustave Moreau/Wikimedia CommonsToday, as much of the world is eager to tell you, is William Shakespeare’s 445th birthday. The Bard of Avon, the Sultan of Stagecraft, the Titan of Tragedy, the Crown Prince of Comedy was born beneath a twinkling star on this day, April 23, in the Year of Our Lord 1564, whereupon he was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, and …

Oh, wait. Wrong myth.

It’s popular these days, as it has been for centuries in certain circles, to declare that the penny-pinching commoner WS couldn’t possibly have written all that stuff ascribed to him, and that the real genius behind the greatest achievements in the English language was Kit Marlowe, or Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, or a committee of sophisticates united in an elaborate literary conspiracy, or possibly Saint George, in an expansive mood after he’d polished off that pesky dragon.

Now Art Scatter discovers that not only did Shakespeare maybe not write Shakespeare, but maybe he wasn’t even born on the day we’ve all assumed he was. See this, from Anthony Holden, author of William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius:

So another myth must be dispelled at the outset. There is no evidence, alas, to support the popular belief that William Shakespeare was born – as fifty-two years later he was to die – on 23 April, the date celebrated in England since 1222 as the feast day of dragon-slaying St George. As the poet’s posthumous fame grew, securing a unique niche for his country in the cultural history of the world, it was a natural enough temptation for posterity to unite the birthday of England’s national poet with that of its patron saint. But the tradition is based on a false assumption, that Elizabethan baptisms invariably took place three days after the birth.

The instruction given to parents in the 1559 Prayer Book, published five years before Shakespeare’s birth, was to have the christening performed before the first Sunday or holy day following the birth ‘unless upon a great and reasonable cause declared to the curate and by him approved’. In 1564 the 23rd day of April happened to fall on a Sunday, four days after the feast day of St Alphege and two before that of St Mark – traditionally an unlucky day, so the curate’s permission to avoid it may well have been forthcoming. But the contemporary inscription on Shakespeare’s tomb in Holy Trinity – that same church where he was christened on 26 April by the vicar of the parish, John Bretchgirdle – reads that he died in his fifty-third year (‘obiit anno . . . aetatis 53‘). We know that he died on St George’s Day, 23 April, so this would seem to imply that he was born before it, however marginally. There are few more satisfactory resolutions of this problem than that of the poet Thomas de Quincey, who suggested that Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth Hall married on 22 April 1626 ‘in honour of her famous relation’ – choosing the sixty-second anniversary of his birth, in other words, rather than the tenth of his death.

See — it was Saint George!

shakespeareAll right, so I’m jumping to conclusions based on the thinnest of evidence. Which is pretty much, we here at Art Scatter tend to believe, exactly what the anti-Stratfordians have been doing all these years. The most rational response to this whole dust-up, we tend to believe, is that the guy whose name is on the cover actually wrote the stuff inside. But we also tend to think that, unless you own stock in downtown Stratford-Upon-Avon, which has a huge vested interest in the local boy actually being who he said he was, it doesn’t make a lot of difference. The play’s the thing. And the plays aren’t going away. (As a side note, Art Scatter would like to declare that we approve mightily of the historical existence of a character named Vicar Bretchgirdle. Did the good vicar know Sir Toby Belch?)

It’s good to point out that although Holden doubts April 23 is Shakespeare’s birthday, he doesn’t doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems. And it’s good to note that inventing birthdays is a time-honored tradition. Jesus was almost certainly born sometime in spring, not on December 25, a date adopted to co-opt all those pagan solstice celebrations. And the great jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong didn’t really know when he was born, so he settled on July 4, 1900, because … well, because in America, July 4 is a pretty special day.


So never mind all the kerfuffle, Bill. Here at Art Scatter we still believe in you. As Rosemary Clooney used to sing, a very merry unbirthday to you!

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General, Theater

Tuesday scatter: On Nixon, women in power, tutus and veils, alternate histories and Charlie Brown

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Mia Leimkuhler in Kudelka's Hush. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERT

On Saturday morning I picked up my newspaper and saw on the front page a photo of President Obama, smiling easily and looking down at, but not down on, Hugo Chavez. The American president is shaking hands with the Venezuelan president, a man who ordinarily makes great political hay from being seen and heard as a bellicose opponent of the United States and its political leaders. Chavez, too, has the sort of smile that seems genuine and not faked for the cameras (although who can say for sure in either case — these are politicians), and a semicircle of unnamed onlookers at the Western Hemisphere summit meeting in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, seems equally charmed.

Bill Christ as Nixon in Nixon/Frost. Photo: OWEN CAREYYes, charmed. And I thought, this is policymaking outside the channels of policy. Here, in Obama, is a man utterly at ease inside his own skin. That’s why people respond to him. Because he’s comfortable with himself.

My eye lingered on this photograph because the night before I’d seen Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon at Portland Center Stage, and if there ever was a leader who was uncomfortable inside his own skin, it was Richard Nixon. Actor Bill Christ, in Rose Riordan’s smooth and entertaining production, makes this as clear as can be. He offers a Nixon who is inordinately intelligent and funny in the driest possible way, but who’s so clumsy he gives even himself the heebie-jeebies. He’s not smooth, he’s not sexy, he can’t do small talk. If he were a language he’d be German, not French. Nixon was actually savvier even than JFK about the power of the television camera but he couldn’t take advantage of it because he didn’t have the goods: He could only mitigate the camera’s effect by understanding how it works. Nixon knew that in the charm game he would always be an outsider looking in, and he resented it deeply. It fed his combativeness, his sense of the Other, of us versus them, of his bitterness of the East Coast elite’s patronizing of him, of being the guy who knew all the strategies and did all the dirty work but was barely allowed in the game.

I was young when Nixon bulldozed back into power in 1968 with his “secret plan to end the war,” and I despised him with all the moral certainty that only the young can summon. It was an extension of my detestation for Lyndon Johnson: How could these men be such liars and murderers? Over the years I’ve come to think of both instead as tragic figures. Here were leaders who could have been great — indeed, who were great in certain ways — but who were destroyed by their own hubris. Over time I might change my mind about this, too, but I now think of Nixon and Johnson as tragic in a way that George W. Bush can never be, because Bush lacked the capacity for greatness: His limitations made him instead something on the order of an oversized and disastrously effective school bully.

Continue reading Tuesday scatter: On Nixon, women in power, tutus and veils, alternate histories and Charlie Brown →

Books, General, Vernon Peterson

Scattered thoughts reading turning 61

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haystacks1989

“I am ruminating,” said Mr. Pickwick, “on the strange mutability of human affairs.”
– Charles Dickens

Death is secondary to the reality of absence engrained in me as a child, I’ve come to believe. To the child seeing out (yes, seeing, not looking), when you are gone (or not visible) you do not exist. Simple as that. After a certain age (at what age I can’t say, although if I’d tuned to this notion earlier, observing our first grandchild the past several months, I could have established it almost to the day) the child loves peek-a-boo only because absence and return are as quick and as certain as the game is over before the sharp intake of breath registers as deep fear or dread.

And what is absence but recognition of the Other in a different key? Other begins as differentiation from self – mother, family and friends, as the child’s remembered world expands. Eventually, Other is everything other than this: this moment, this place, this Other we call our own body (although, okay, mind/body is convention too). We stand outside all nature as Other, which becomes God, or, outside God (the concept of creator), the endless cosmos/universe, logical or chaotic or chaotically-logical, depending.

To think that reading a book titled The Other, conjoined with the turn to my 62d year, would release distillations running in all directions: personal, political, existential. (As I write this Time magazine’s headline is “The Decline and Fall of Christian America,” while that of Newsweek reads “Vanishing Act: How Climate Change is Causing a New Age of Extinction.” Our own little corner of this moment in infinity divided between judgmental gods and selection of a different sort.)

To sense that the space between the “this now and that then” of thought, is where love takes root, and where we find the related extensions of tolerance, acceptance, or ties to family, community, family of man. We love because the Other leaves; we are bound to others already in memory because they will have left. Permutations of this theme abound in Gabriel Josipovici’s intriguing novel Goldberg: Variations. In it an 18th century scholar parses John Donne’s poem “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day,” which is about love as the opposite of un-being and extinction. Love of Lucy called the poet into being and her death leaves him “re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.” In another passage in the novel the scholar describes marriage as a dance – not two become one, but two in accord, “well-being in reciprocity,” recognition of space between one and the other, “the mutual respect of the one for the other, and into the physical pleasure of each in its own being, which is that of the other.” Love is thus absence in place.

The scholar’s wife addresses him in her diary while he is distant on business: absent. “I have grown used to your presence in the house and it is hard to be alone.” Or, again: “I do not really grieve at your absence. I merely miss your presence.” And then she makes a remarkable observation about her private writing in the diary:

I had never thought of any of this till I sat down half and hour ago filled with the need to write about you. That is what writing is like. The sheet of paper before one and the pen in one’s hand seem to allow those things to emerge which one knew but didn’t know one knew. It may not be very interesting or very profound, but it brings relief. Like hugging you. But why is it not sufficient to sit in my chair and imagine myself hugging you? After all, when I write here in my notebook you are no more present than if I closed my eyes and thought of you. Indeed, less so perhaps, since if I close my eyes I can see you, whereas when I write I certainly do not. But then when I hug you I do not see you, I feel you. And that is what seems to happen with writing. But why should that be so? To feel you, you have to be present and close to me, and now you are neither. Yet I am sure this is the truth, that when I close my eyes I see you but when I write I feel you.”

“How can one touch that which is absent?” Her answer is writing; that is, the thing written: the book, is other than the Other, the Other in yet another key! But is it not also a bridge to the Other; a thread of something that in fact binds us to the Other?

Writing and reading, the book and the Other. And writing and reading is why we are here, at this moment, in this place, in the first place, isn’t it?
Continue reading Scattered thoughts reading turning 61 →

Barry Johnson, Film, Music

Fear no description: a little loose music talk

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The Large Hadron Collider On Friday night, the Portland experimental music group Fear No Music performed a selection of short pieces that went with a selection of short films and video. We were there.

Even for those of us without much technical training (which would include this department of Art Scatter), a literature of sorts exists to talk about music in non-technical terms. Histories, biographies, reviews, learned opinion expressed in lay terms, received opinion that belittles as it’s grudgingly given, even sharp new opinion that cuts things open from new angles — an apparatus of sorts exists if you want to access it.

All of this involves sentences. You know, the atom of writing. But sometimes the music itself is sub-atomic. In fact, one of the threads of the past century — our immediate history, musical or otherwise — involves something we could call the sub-atomic. And sometimes our sentences don’t seem up to the chore of describing these minute and evanescent phenomena, especially a series of them.

So, right, we are preparing to use our sentences to talk about Fear No Music’s latest combine — recently created experimental visuals (video/film/etc.) and some musical experiments of the past century (and most of them on the more recent end of the time-line, though a Webern string quartet on the program was composed exactly 100 years ago). The program was called “Parallaxis: music and moving pictures,” and it was assembled (or curated) by Fear No Music and Leo and Anna Daedalus of Helsinqi media studio.
Continue reading Fear no description: a little loose music talk →

Cities, General, Vernon Peterson

Bad Day at Black Rock: The far post

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200px-bad_day_at_black_rockStop me if you’ve heard this one before. There are two plots, it is said: Someone Goes On A Trip and Stranger Comes To Town. That’s one plot, actually, with two points of view. Stranger must go on trip from some other town in order to come to ours.

Why then so many stories? Subplot and denouement.

For example, Kid comes to town and wants to play ball. Say Kid is poor and lives on the flats (the poor kid is always from the flats). When Kid shows up on the field, he’s picked on and stuffed in the trash can. Or, Kid shows up on the field with immense talent, becomes a hero, and gets a scholarship to State.

Or, say, Kid is rich, and when he comes down off the hill (the rich kid always lives on the hill), he brings a shiny new ball and a couple extra pairs of shin guards, to share. Many options here. Say Kid’s dad builds town a Carnegie library and moves on to next town (Kid leaves ball with team).

Or, Kid says, “We play by my rules or I take my ball and go home.”

Or, Kid says, “Give me your lunch money and I’ll let you clean up and mow Mr. Wilson’s vacant lot for a new pitch, and I’ll let you paint the fence. And, if you promise me your kid’s lunch money 20 years from now, I’ll give you free tickets on promo night.”

Moral of story: Some kids teach their parents about Stranger Danger. Some don’t.

Bob Hicks, Cities, General

The city and the Rose Quarter: First, do no harm

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Le Malade Imaginaire, Honore Daumier

“Government should practice the same principle as doctors,” President Obama said the other day. “First, do no harm.”

He was responding to critics who say he’s been too timid on the banks, shying away from the get-tough part of the takeover business. Going too far, Obama argued, could make things worse instead of better.

Whatever you think of Obama’s tactics in this particular case, “First, do no harm” isn’t a bad principle for government, even — and maybe especially — when government decides it’s time to be bold. Be bold, yes. But also be sure. Before you do something radical, make sure it’s actually going to make things better rather than worse. That isn’t a conservative or a liberal stance. It’s just a sensible one.

It’s a principle that Portland Mayor Sam Adams seems to be ignoring in his rush to tear down Memorial Coliseum — one of the city’s best-designed buildings — and replace it with a $55 million minor-league baseball park as part of a complicated package to free PGE Park for exclusive use by a new major-league soccer team, push through a government-funded $200 million convention center hotel, and synergize with a Portland Trail Blazers plan to transform the Rose Quarter into an entertainment district that would seem to be more at home along a suburban shopping thoroughfare than in a vital corner of the central city.

Whoa, Nellie. What’s that choking sound? It’s the gurglings of architects, preservationists, planners, veterans groups, North/Northeast Portland residents and economic analysts reacting to having something shoved down their throats. In a word, ouch.

Fellow Scatterer Barry Johnson, in a post headed Demolishing Memorial Coliseum — a bad idea inside a bad plan, has an excellent analysis on his Oregonian/Oregon Live blog, Portland Arts Watch; read it here. Oregonian reporter Mark Larabee filed a good report on gathering opposition to the Rose Quarter steamroller here; and The Oregonian’s Ryan Frank reports here on Adams’ effort to push for the 600-room convention center hotel, a plan that so far is opposed by Multnomah County exec Ted Wheeler, whose support is necessary if the thing is going to get built. In addition, architecture and design writer Brian Libby has been weighing in frequently (and critically) at his Web site Portland Architecture, and Tim DuRoche has this sharply worded argument on his blog for Portland Spaces magazine.

I don’t want to turn this into a diatribe about public spending on sports. I happen to be a lifelong baseball nut, and although soccer isn’t my game, I know it has a big following here. A couple of points: Despite the argument that PGE Park is a bad space for Triple-A baseball, in fact it’s a terrific place to watch a ballgame, a little gem along the lines of Seattle’s old Sicks Stadium or even Boston’s Fenway Park. Sure, it usually has far more empty seats than filled ones — but that’s because baseball destroyed its minor-league system decades ago in terms of audience allegiance (how do you follow a team when the players shift week to week?). And this: Fifty-five million dollars for a 9,000-seat minor-league park? Does it get torn down in turn if and when the city lands a major-league franchise?

As for Memorial Coliseum, yes, it’s been allowed to get shabby. But that’s fixable. And a little imagination could turn it into a genuine attractor (and economic kick-starter) for the area. A few years ago, when he was The Oregonian’s architecture and planning writer, Portland Spaces editor Randy Gragg championed a plan that would turn the Coliseum into a first-rate community athletic center, with Olympic pool, indoor track facilities and other active-participant draws. I thought it was a great idea then, and I still do — something to attract people to the area all year long. I’m sure there are other good ideas much better than tearing the old girl down. Can we seriously consider them, please?

Most of us laugh wryly now and again at Portland’s penchant to talk anything and everything to death before taking action. But while it may have cost us here and there, that earnest inclusionary tendency is also an essential part of what makes the city work. We don’t mind haste when haste is necessary, but we want deliberate haste — haste that pauses long enough to make sure that the issues are clear and the stakeholders have been heard. Around here, rushing things unduly is a hell of a way to run a railroad — and right now, what’s going on at city hall feels exacly like a railroad job. Is there a doctor in the caboose?

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

Congratudolences, and other fables of the clear-cut economy

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Update: Photographer David Paul Bayles’ free lecture at 23 Sandy Gallery, discussed below, has been postponed a week. Originally set for this Saturday, April 18, it’s been rescheduled for 6 p.m. next Saturday, April 25, at the gallery, 623 N.E. 23rd Ave., Portland.

Falling Tree #3, copyright David Paul BaylesA person of my close acquaintance (all right, she’s my daughter) has been laid off from a job she detests — indeed, a job which for at least a couple of years she’s harbored elaborate fantasies of quitting in grand-tragedian style. They beat her to the punch. She outlasted many of her friends at this Dilbertian company, who, she says, have created a greeting for new members of the formerly-employed-by-idiots club.

“Congratudolences,” they say, and they mean both halves of the word.

A person of my even closer acquaintance (all right, she’s my wife) is leaving a job she loves, because as a part-time worker she’s in recurring jeopardy of being laid off, and the industry in which she works, while a noble one, seems sadly to be circling the drain of no return.

Tim-berrrrr!

The clear-cut just keeps getting closer, doesn’t it? If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and it smacks you upside the head, are you too dazed to feel it?

For our daughter, the timing isn’t too bad. In fact, it could scarcely be better. In the fall she’s off to seven years of grad school, maybe in Tucson, maybe in Austin, probably in Seattle, from which she’ll emerge with a Ph.D. in Gothic literature and perhaps a whole new set of occupational challenges.

For my wife, who departs her long-loved job with a modest yet under the circumstances generous severance agreement that will keep the wolf from the door for a year even if if she doesn’t find another source of income between now and then, this is what they call an opportunity. For reinvention, for redirection, for a fresh start, for the edge-of-the-seat thrill of making things up as she goes along. And she’s embracing it, almost cheerfully. More control of her schedule. A chance to freelance. Time at the beach. Is this what they mean by the “creative economy”? Among her many skills, which include organizational abilities that leave me fairly gasping for air, my mate is an excellent writer, with a rare and subversive wit. Perhaps that will make her fortune, as it has for us here at Art Scatter’s gilded world headquarters, where we’re envied by all as the Warren Buffetts of the blogosphere.

I think we’ll plant a garden this year. Tomatoes, herbs, lettuce, maybe a few cukes … does asparagus grow OK in a parking strip? Actually, in a weird way, this could be fun.

*******************

I like the intelligence and energy at 23 Sandy Gallery, an eastside Portland gallery I got to know when I wrote a story about its recent exhibit of on-demand fine photography books. The gallery emphasizes photography, hand-made books and graphic arts, all areas that are congenial to my own interests, and owner Laura Russell has a smart eye and an open mind.

This month the gallery is showing photos by David Paul Bayles of trees being felled — that’s his Falling Tree #3, which I shamelessly employed for metaphorical purposes, pictured above. And although I haven’t seen it yet, the show seems to suggest some insights into the world of tough economics as it’s been known in the Pacific Northwest for a long time. Here’s how the gallery’s Web site describes it:

From his early days as a logger in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to his present home on Dreaming Forest Farm outside Corvallis, David Paul Bayles has lived and worked from, with and in the trees. Of his many bodies of work focusing on trees, this group of 12 photographs features trees falling while being logged on one magical morning. Shot with an 8×10 view camera under demanding technical and physical conditions, these images capture the beauty of the forest and the grace and power of a tree in motion. It’s a haunting peek into a dangerous world that few ever experience — a world of rough men and “widow makers.”

Bayles, who considers himself a committed environmentalist (“In a forest I see communities of beings, creating and collaborating in the rich cycle of living and dying,” he says), speaks at the gallery at 5 p.m. April 18, and it could be well worth a visit.

The gallery is also featuring some hand-made, collage style books by Linda Welch that look bright enough to infuse a little happiness into a day dampened by the drizzle of the dismal science.

Bob Hicks, General, Music

Bang the drums loudly (Take 3)

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Photo: Rich Iwasaki, copyright 2003

People talk about how making a movie is mostly about standing around and waiting. But all performance arts have those quiet times — the quiets before the storms — and before a recording session it’s a busy quiet. You’re not just getting yourself ready, the way you routinely do before any performance. You’re making sure the instruments and recording apparati are just right, too.

One night not too long ago I drove out to the theater at Clackamas Community College near Oregon City, where the drumming ensemble Portland Taiko was in the last stages of recording its newest CD, and it made for one of the more intriguing hurry-up-and-waits I’ve sat through in quite a while. I was invited not as a working journalist but as a friend of the company: I’ve recently joined Portland Taiko’s board, marking the first time, after decades of observing arts organizations, that I’ve taken a hand at actually making decisions to help one do its work.

Recording sessions are funny things, and this one, for the CD Rhythms of Change: The Way Home, which will be released in August, is no exception. In order to get those precious moments of surging, melting sound, everything has to be prepared just so. Which generally means laying down an undergrowth of electrical wires, erecting a small forest of microphone booms, placing and re-placing baffles and makeshift mufflers (an old blanket might do the trick), arranging and rearranging the positions of players and instruments so that sometimes the people playing can neither see nor hear one another. The focus is up there, above the seats, behind those glass doors in the booth. That’s where everything has to balance and play right.

On this night the ensemble is getting ready to record  a piece called Slipping Through My Fingers, by artistic director Michelle Fujii, that features not only the array of drums that are central to taiko but also a violin, which alternately leads and counterbalances the sound. Except that most of the drummers can’t actually see the violinist, Keiko Araki, who is standing far stage left, hidden from view by a mini-wall of sound-directing barriers.

The drums range from a little bigger than trap size to the looming odaiko, a fatter-than-a-bass drum sitting on a gorgeous wooden stand. All of these hand-fashioned drums are beautiful, from their stretched skins to their burnished wooden finishes to their finely polished metal stays and tuners. But on this night, beauty — that is, visual beauty, which is of no consequence to a sound recording — doesn’t count. Most of the drums are wrapped inelegantly in white T-shirts to keep any metal parts from rattling. (You’d also better not cough, and your shoes had better not be squeaky.)

Continue reading Bang the drums loudly (Take 3) →