Merry Christmas, one and all. The rotund gentleman above may not be singing, but neither is he hawking a Coke, and we’ll take that as a sufficient act of saintliness. Regular Scatterers may recall that the jigsaw puzzle pictured was begun and completed over the Thanksgiving weekend by the Large Smelly Boys. We showed a [...]
Three days before Christmas and a day past Winter Solstice, our lives are a crazy mixup of anticipation and loss. The longest night has given way to the rebirth of light. Summer’s a bare blip beyond the horizon, but we’ve turned the corner. Old Father Time is creaking toward New Year’s Eve, when that perky [...]
Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief international dance correspondent, took in “La Danse,” Frederick Wiseman’s documentary film about the legendary Paris Opera Ballet. How does it go wrong? Let her count the ways:
Last night I took a friend to Cinema 21 to see a benefit screening of La Danse, documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s take on [...]
Many months ago I showed up at a friend’s beach cabin and before I could walk even a few feet in the door she regaled me with a story about how when she arrived at the cabin the kitchen was perfectly pristine except for a piece of paper, conspicuously propped up. Excited, she picked it [...]
E-mail to colleague first thing: “I won’t be at the office this morning. I’m getting new toilets.”
And just in time. The hard-to-lift boxes had to get out of the Large Smelly Boymobile before Dungeons & Dragons Dad picked up six Large Smelly D&D Players.
Sound familiar?
The last story started there but veered to pants. And kilts.
Mr. [...]
Here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we’re used to friends and associates grumping about Christmas and the holidays. “Bah,” they say. And again, “Humbug.” A seasonal deficit disorder afflicts our closest circles of civilization, and we’ve learned to grump along with the chorus, just to keep things running smoothly.
But the truth is, we sort of [...]
An arts scene is a movable feast, a passing parade of people and ideas. Today’s Portland is vastly different from the big town of the 1950s to the 1980s, when the scene was small and sometimes rowdy but seemed somehow containable, as if you could experience all of it if you tried hard enough.
Impossible [...]
Good news for travelers to that sprawling town on Puget Sound. Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company isn’t going out of business, after all: It’s relocating in the spring from Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill. Melissa Allison has the story in the Seattle Times.
At 20,000 square feet, the new building (at 1521 10th Avenue above downtown) [...]
A quarter-century after a literary landmark in Oregon, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Let’s see. Urban/rural split, with a vengeance. A recession in the city, which means a depression in the small towns and countryside. Newcomers wide-eyed with enthusiasm over their new home; old-timers narrow-eyed with suspicion and mistrust. Jobs [...]
“How could they say ‘partial’ nudity?” Gentleman No. 1 asked wryly. “They were totally naked.”
Gentlewoman No. 1 nodded in agreement. “Doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“Well,” Gentleman No. 2 replied, “they were all the way naked, but not all of the time. So maybe it was ‘partial’ nudity in the sense that sometimes they had clothes [...]