Kino Lorber, Inc.
By Bob Hicks
If you’re going to fall into a painting, choose carefully. Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie might be exciting, but after a while you’d start to feel like a mouse in a maze. Edvard Munch’s The Scream? You don’t want to go there. One of Henri Rousseau’s Edenic wild beasty scenes would [...]
Margot Voorheis Thompson/Sitka Invitational
By Bob Hicks
Tonight is First Thursday, Portland’s monthly gallery art walk. (We also have First Friday, Last Thursday and a few other gatherings, but this remains the big one.) Of course you don’t have to see the new exhibits tonight — most of them will be up all month — but if [...]
By Bob Hicks
Mr. Scatter is getting old.
At least, judging by his junk mail, the world seems to think so.
Rest homes (or “active senior residences”), pharmaceutical companies, retirement financial planners, purveyors of musical nostalgia in the Pat Boone mold have got their hands, if not on Mr. Scatter’s obituary, then certainly on the records of his [...]
By Bob Hicks
So this is the way it gets.
Lying in bed awake
at 3:17 a.m.
my wife’s heavy breathing
the weight of the dog on my leg
I am visited by the ghosts
of past mistakes
and dance to a symphony
of regrets
I wouldn’t change a thing
This is who I am
counting my blessings
in the dark morning
That’s Portland writer Charles Deemer’s poem The [...]
By Bob Hicks
Keep Portland Pickled. Or maybe, in honor of a certain shape of preserved cucumber, Keep Portland Speared.
Imagine a city where something called the Portland Fermentation Festival is such a mind-boggling hit that you can’t get in the doors. It’s like reporting that the Iowa City Haggis Festival or the Twin Falls Ukelele and [...]
By Bob Hicks
A few days ago my friend Barry Johnson, the guy behind the infant but swiftly growing online magazine Oregon Arts Watch, asked me to sit down with him and talk about Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and actor William Hurt’s starring performance in it at Artists Repertory Theatre. I said sure, and Barry [...]
Blaine Truitt Covert/OBT
By Bob Hicks
Last weekend I went to two dances and a play. The dances were Petrouchka and No Man’s Land. The play was Carmen.
This was odd, because No Man’s Land, a sort-of-comic psychic tussle at Artists Repertory Theatre, is by the revered British playwright Harold Pinter, whose brand of rhythmically menacing theater has [...]
By Bob Hicks
Geishas, kabuki actors, mountain landscapes, samurai scenes.
Check, check, check, check.
But what about those spine-tingling scenes of natural disaster?
The Portland Art Museum’s collection of Japanese woodblock prints has long been a strong suit in its permanent collections, and the new exhibition The Artist’s Touch, the Craftsman’s Hand, which features about 230 prints from a [...]
25 candles for First Thursday
BodyVox leans horizontally
William Hurt and Harold Pinter duke it out
Wordstock throws a bookapalooza
Oregon Arts Watch puts on a show (times three)
A double feature at Oregon Ballet Theatre
Portland Open Studios’ peek behind the scenes
By Bob Hicks
Good lord, what a weekend. Used to be, a person who really tried could actually keep up [...]
By Bob Hicks
Over at Oregon Live, my friend Marty Hughley has been engaging in some unfair battle practices: He’s been using wit and logic against a slew of unarmed opponents.
The issue has been his story in The Oregonian about Portland Center Stage’s new black-cast production of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! and the alternately [...]