A couple of weekends ago, we drove down to Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore., from Portland to see a little show curated by TJ Norris, ‘.meta’, at the college art gallery, which is one medium-sized room. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. When I got back to Portland, I didn’t talk [...]
Mercy, mercy, did we scatter this weekend! We scattered til our head hurt, we scattered til Michael Chabon uttered the last sentences of his lecture Sunday night, we scattered back in time as we watched Mary Oslund’s Bete Perdue, we even scattered at the now-only-newish Bond flick Quantum of Solace. The latter was hard. [...]
The public realm. At the memorial service for Joel Weinstein, who honored us by choosing to be buried in Lone Fir Cemetery, after spending the past 14 years in warmer places surrounded by Latin American art, which both he and his partner, Cheryl, love, the public realm (as articulated by Paul Goldberger in the [...]
OK, the experiment in blending semi-officially begins. Last night, I went to hear Paul Goldberger talk about the challenges facing cities in the 21st century. I blogged about the lecture at length today on OregonLive. If you’re looking for a fairly close account of what Goldberger said, that’s the place to go.
Here’s [...]
Let’s say you’re in Portland and you don’t anything on for tonight, or maybe you have something on, but you’re dreading it. Or Saturday night. If you are in that circumstance, then Art Scatter suggests that you drop in on Kidd Pivot, at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. It’s that good.
Kidd Pivot is the [...]
Most Art Scatter readers know that I work at The Oregonian, right? Editing the writers of the arts staff (and a fine band they are!) insofar as they will let me? I haven’t talked about this much directly, mainly because I didn’t want Art Scatter to be a place where people came to [...]
Art Scatter hereby congratulates the winners (and the nominees, for that matter) of this year’s Oregon Book Awards, especially Steve Patterson, whom we track on his Splattworks blog, for winning the drama award for his “Lost Wavelengths.” If you think doing theater is hard in the provinces, writing theater is even less rewarding, and [...]
Third Angle New Music Ensemble gave the world its first listen to Portland composer Tomas Svoboda’s newest quartet, String Quartet no. 10, Opus 194. I’m not adept enough to enter it very deeply from that one encounter, but I liked its spirit and its invention. The program notes said that it is dedicated to [...]
Today’s newspaper contained the sad news that Joel Weinstein, the publishing genius behind one of the city’s late, great magazines, Mississippi Mud, had died of lung cancer in Puerto Rico. (I wrote the obituary.)
I was surprised to calculate that Joel left the city in 1994 — my memory of him is still so vivid. [...]
When I was much younger, I marveled at Election Day, this First Tuesday in November when Americans en masse, from sea to shining sea, returned to the polls to exercise the primary ritual of a democracy. The idea of it as a collective enterprise, the voting I mean, just made me happy somehow, even when [...]