By Bob Hicks
Down the street from my sister’s house, my home town is in the protracted process of acquiring a Folly.
Perhaps you’ve seen some on your travels to England: those little bursts of architectural whimsy sometimes found on the rolling estates of members of the minor nobility, cozy towering playhouses for the eccentrically and unaccountably [...]
By Bob Hicks
All right, times are tough all over. But who’d’a thunk Lizzie Borden would be getting the ax after all these years?
This morning’s Art Daily passes along a brief item from the Associated Press reporting that the 40 Whacks Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is going out of business after two years: high costs, low [...]
By Bob Hicks
From Art Daily, the first look at designs for the new Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles. The 120,000-square-foot museum will house the expansive modern collections of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, and in at least one way it aims to be friendly: It’ll be known as “The Broad,” something in the manner [...]
A lot of recent Oregonians know the name “Winningstad” mainly because of the Dolores Winningstad Theatre, the little red jewel box in the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. Those who’ve been around longer vividly remember Dolores’s husband, Norm, the high-flying tech pioneer and philanthropist who represented the sort of freewheeling Western spirit that seems [...]
By Bob Hicks
Scatter friends Karen and John got home a few weekends ago from Hells Canyon Mule Days in Enterprise, in the Wallowa Valley of far eastern Oregon, and it got us to thinking about the big wide stretches and the places in America where work is still manual and landbound and practical in a [...]
By Bob Hicks
Once again the fates have flung Mr. Scatter to the far reaches of Ecotopia, where yet another dismal drive through the 90-mile sprawl of the great Seattle megalopolis has underscored how little eco is left in this topia of ours. They paved Paradise and put up a freeway that’s a parking lot.
Well, sometimes [...]
By Bob Hicks
Mr. Scatter has been traveling the byways of America quite a lot of late, and by a quirk of fate he found himself in an open pavilion in Sun Valley, Idaho, on the eve of September 11, listening to Salman Rushdie talk about Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Sarah Palin, the [...]
By Bob Hicks
Over at Oregon Live, Friend of Scatter D.K. Row reports that Oregon’s two major gubernatorial candidates, Demo John Kitzhaber and the GOP’s Chris Dudley, have pretty much nothing to say about how they would or wouldn’t approach statewide funding and other support for the arts. Both ducked a request by the statewide lobbying [...]
By Bob Hicks
It’s pretty grim, according to Steve Law’s report, Historical Society may ask voters for tax levy, in The Portland Tribune, and Sarah Mirk’s followup, State History Museum Will Run Out of Cash in 2011, Pitches Tax To Stay Afloat, in The Mercury’s Blogtown.
Things are skeletal right now. Oregon Historical Society boss George Vogt [...]
In a town of gifted animators and graphic novelists and even the cartooning Simpsons daddy of ‘em all, Matt Groening, John Callahan has long held a special place: the edgiest of the edgy, the guy from way out there, the quadriplegic artist (we mention this because that fact is so important to the formation of [...]