“By and large, time moves with merciful slowness in the old-fashioned world of writing. … (T)he rhythms of readers are leisurely. They spread recommendations by word of mouth and ‘get around’ to titles and authors years after making a mental note of them. … A movie has a few weeks to find an audience, and [...]
By Bob Hicks
John Buchanan, the flamboyant former director of the Portland Art Museum, died on Friday, Dec. 30, 2011, after a struggle with cancer. He was 58.
Buchanan left the Portland museum in 2005 to become director of the much larger Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which encompasses the de Young Museum in Golden Gate [...]
By Bob Hicks
At OregonLive, Marty Hughley has just posted a terrific interview with Stepan Simek about Vaclav Havel, the philosopher-playwright who became the unlikely leader of the Czech revolution and his nation’s first post-Soviet president. Havel died on Sunday at age 75.
Simek, a native of Prague and chairman of the theater department at Lewis & [...]
By Bob Hicks
Someone called Singlet, responding online to the obituary in The Guardian for the novelist and children’s writer Russell Hoban, had this to say: “A few comments that Hoban’s other novels don’t come close to Riddley Walker make me think of what Joseph Heller reportedly said when asked, ‘Why have you never written anything [...]
By Bob Hicks
The fun thing about art is that it always seems to come with a story. Not that the stories are more important than the art — at least, not usually — but they do have a way of getting a potentially esoteric subject down to the nitty gritty.
Martha Ullman West, whose tale about [...]
By Bob Hicks
Titian did not live starving and penniless in an unheated artist’s garret. He was wealthy and famous in his own time — more Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst, at least as far as the fame game goes, than Vincent Van Gogh.
At least partly, that’s because he had a good press agent.
Mr. Scatter has [...]
By Bob Hicks
Good lord, it’s December. And it’s Thursday, the first Thursday of the month. And that means tonight is First Thursday in Puddletown, the city’s monthly art walk of mainline galleries. (There are other such monthly festivities, including First Friday on the East Side and Last Thursday in the Alberta District, but First Thursday [...]
©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver
By Bob Hicks
Mr. Scatter is just getting around to letting you know that he and Mrs. Scatter joined the opening-night throng on Friday for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s opera buffa The Marriage of Figaro, based on Pierre Beaumarchais‘ stage comedy of the same name, at Portland Opera. (It also happened [...]
By Bob Hicks
Over at Splattworks, playwright Steve Patterson delivers this nice farewell to America’s second-most-famous Rooney, after Mickey. Professional television curmudgeon Andy Rooney is dead at 92, and he kept on keeping on with his 60 Minutes moments almost to the end. Patterson, an old newshound himself, appreciates Rooney’s old-fashioned reporting skills, and signs off [...]
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 [...]