Today Mr. Scatter is putting the finishing touches on a little talk he’ll be giving Tuesday evening before Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s performance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
His charge from White Bird, the dance presenting folks, is simple. Speak for 20 minutes, try to say something interesting about the performance coming up, don’t put [...]
Mr. and Mrs. Scatter headed for BodyVox, the Portland touring dance and performance company, the other night for the public debut of BodyVox-2, the next generation.
BodyVox is a veteran company, filled with performers who have long and deep experience in ballet companies and with such performance troupes as Pilobolus and Momix. They carry their performances [...]
One of Art Scatter’s favorite virtual destinations, artdaily.org, is full of all sorts of fun stuff today. For instance, researchers have determined that Tut, the boy king of ancient Egypt, likely died of malaria when he was 19, way back around 1324 B.C. The scientists came to this conclusion after undertaking genetic and radiological testing [...]
Mr. Scatter has been a writing fool lately, and not all of it for the virtual pages of this illustrious blog.
He has also composed essays that resulted in actual financial recompense, including a trio of pieces for that fine and noble stalwart of legacy media, The Oregonian.
This piece, about Oregon’s search for a new poet [...]
Ah, the red. Ah, the passion. Ah, the flowers.
Like love itself, Saint Valentine, as it turns out, is something of a mystery. Way back when, in ancient Rome, several martyred saints were named Valentine, or Valentinus. And whichever individual or composite of them emerged to eventually become the Saint Valentine seems always to have been [...]
Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day. This is an important occasion, and not one to be taken lightly — or, horror of horrors, forgotten — unless you enjoy being a thirty-five-year-old bachelor living in your parents’ basement and spending all your free time playing online Dungeons & Dragons.
Pancho Villa did not waste his time like that. [...]
My paternal grandmother’s name was Lizzie Lou Willingham. Not Elizabeth Louise. Lizzie Lou.
Lizzie Lou married Virgil Homer Hicks, a man whose naming signaled a certain familial aspiration. One of their offspring, my father, is named Irby Hicks. No middle name, and a first name that was a family surname. (Another of their children, my father’s [...]
Seems like every time something cataclysmic happens, artists show up to help out. Like a lot of other people they know they can’t do much, but they also know they can do something. And often, because this is what they do best, they put on a show.
Especially when you’re talking about the local artists who [...]
On this very day two years ago — on February 8, 2008 — a fine strapping lad was loosed upon the world, and immediately started yawping. Yes, its name was Art Scatter, and it was born right here in river city: in Puddletown, Oregon, brave bubble of liberality, Do It Yourself center of the universe, [...]
As you may have noticed, here at Art Scatter we’ve been stressing out lately about the way we look. We were feeling … frumpy. We wanted something fresh, something new, and came up with three possible visual themes to replace Artsemerging, the theme we’ve been using since the blog began two years ago.
We asked for [...]