Category Archives: Environment

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, Food, General, Music, Theater

What wedding? — on Chekhov, string quartets, bridges, drums and locavores

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  • The royal whatzis
  • The Cherry Orchard at Artists Repertory Theatre
  • Noble Viola on Opus at Portland Center Stage
  • Brian Libby on the failed Columbia River Crossing
  • Portland Taiko tells a tale
  • James E. McWilliams on eating locally and globally

Portland Taiko. Photo: Rich Iwasaki/2009Portland Taiko. Rich Iwasaki/2009

By Bob Hicks

We’re given to understand some sort of white-tie wedding is taking place in the wee hours of Friday morning, and much of the world is agog. Art Scatter does not plan to cover it. With any luck — if the cat doesn’t come slapping at our cheek with her paw, demanding to be let outside — we’ll be snoozing.

And now, on with the news.

Chekhov the composer: On Wednesday night the Scatters took in The Cherry Orchard, playwright Richard Kramer’s world-premiere adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s final dramatic masterpiece, at Artists Rep. It struck us again that, like so many leading playwrights, Chekhov thought like a musician.

Like a string quartet: Linda Alper, Tim Blough (background), Michael Mendelson and Tobias Andersen in "The Cherry Orchard." Photo: Owen CareyThere isn’t much story to The Cherry Orchard, but there are themes, counter-themes, motifs. It’s chamber music, and the way we hear it can be startlingly different from production to production, depending not just on our own life experiences (interpreting Chekhov relies to an extreme on what the audience brings to it) but also on the emphases of interpretation on the stage: Do we concentrate on the cello tonight, or the bassoon? In truth, I suspect that even more so than ordinarily, every member of the audience sees a different play when watching Chekhov.

Kramer’s intermissionless adaptation, which I like quite a lot, sets out to rough up the Chekhov-as-wistful-yearning school of thought, and it succeeds. To extend the musical metaphor, it’s a bit like Bach rearranged by Bartok: depths and balances and gorgeous tones, but syncopated and spiked up.

Continue reading What wedding? — on Chekhov, string quartets, bridges, drums and locavores →

Bob Hicks, Books, Environment, General, Music

Bronc bustin’ the Code of the West

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Buffalo Bill circus poster, ca. 1899. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C./Wikimedia Commons

By Bob Hicks

So it’s happened. Oregon’s House of Representatives has officially endorsed the Code of the West, a business opportunity ridin’ hard out of the hills of Texas into the hearts of legislators from Cheyenne to Salem. A trademarked moral compass, as it were, ready-made for tryin’ times. Keep ‘er simple. Keep ‘er pure. And please buy the book.

Before the Code becomes part of Oregon law, the state Senate must also consider the bill. Bet on its passing. In tough times, this is quick and easy symbolism, roughly on the order of naming an official state lizard or proclaiming State Barleycorn Growers Appreciation Day. And basically as harmless, although the Code has whomped up a bit of consternation among people who point out that the settler ethic didn’t work out so well for, say, the native Americans who were here before the place was called the West. Or the Chinese and Japanese settlers who made the mistake of thinking they were free to carve out lives of their own on the frontier. Or the black families legislated brusquely elsewhere by Oregon’s strict exclusion laws.

Still. That was then and this is now. The cowboy code, if historically imperfect and a tad romanticized (and isn’t all history imperfect and much of it romanticized?) is not a perversely unreasonable document. It appeals to the virtues of good old-fashioned common sense. It’s also considerably shorter, easier to understand, and vastly more entertaining than the Oregon State Building Code. By comparison, the Code of the West is downright literature.

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Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Environment, General

Home on the range: separated at birth?

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Dead Eagle Trail, by Jane Hilton, front cover. Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam.

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 vastly different and more elemental way than the workaday practicalities of living an ordinary urban life.

Heart of a Shepherd, by Rosanne Parry, front cover. Random House.It was the thirtieth anniversary of Mule Days, and Mr. Scatter, who was on the spot for last year’s festivities, which he wrote about here and here, was sorry to miss the big blowout. Of course, with about 1,800 people (plus another 1,000 or so just up the road in Joseph) Enterprise is a giddy metropolis compared to the landscapes of two books we’ve been pondering lately — British photographer Jane Hilton‘s Dead Eagle Trail and Portland area novelist Rosanne Parry‘s Heart of a Shepherd. Both books take imaginative looks at territories where the high lonesome is not just a fact but also, often, a comfort of life. And don’t these two cowboys just look like they’re cut from the same cloth?

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Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

Maryhill stretches its legs for the future

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The extension blends landscape and building architecture to keep a low profile. C.S. Holmes for GBD Architects

By Bob Hicks

Today Mr. Scatter donned his reporter cap with the story Maryhill Conceives a Broader Canvas in The Oregonian. In case you missed the print version (which has lots of cool pictures, including one of Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the Maryhill Museum of Art in 1926, and another of original mansion owner Sam Hill sitting in the library with a bunch of medals slung around his neck), you can follow the link.

Paul Guinan, "Marvel on the Klondike," from "Boilerplate: History's Marvel," copyright 2009 by Paul Guinan.The gist is this: Maryhill, that unlikely yet undeniably charming citadel far out above the Columbia Gorge, has announced a $10 million expansion to its 1918 building, which is a beloved landmark in Gorge country and was built as a home for good-roads champion Hill, who never actually lived in it. The place has been bursting at the seams, and the expansion plans, by Portland’s GBD Architects, offer it necessary breathing space while keeping a low enough profile to give the beaux-arts style original mansion pride of place. Plans are to have the extension completed by March 2012.

Mr. Scatter’s trip out the Gorge (Maryhill is about 110 miles east of Portland, on the Washington side of the river) also gave him the chance to see Maryhill’s temporary exhibition Comics at the Crossroads: Art of the Graphic Novel, which he wrote about here for the Big O. It’s drawn mostly from Portland’s vibrant comics/graphic publication scene, and includes the very cool illustration of Paul Guinan’s Boilerman and a dancing bear shown above.

The museum has already raised $8 million of the $10 million it needs for its expansion, but not everything’s rosy.

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Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

‘It’s not about me, it’s about the region’

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Lee Kelly in his studio at Leland Iron Works, outside Oregon City. Michael J. Burns.

By Bob Hicks

The best way to see the art of Lee Kelly, if you’re not lucky enough to visit his studio and expansive sculpture garden near Oregon City, is to hop on the bus or your bike or just start hoofing it around Portland. The city and its suburbs are speckled with his large public pieces, which have gone a long way toward defining a Pacific Northwest vision of a place where the natural and the man-made can coexist in harmonic creative tension.

Lee Kelly, Arlie, 1978, steel, at Portland Art Museum. Museum Purchase: Helen Thurston Ayer Fund, © Lee KellyOf course, taking the grand tour can be a bit strenuous. So before you pull out your official Lee Kelly art-hop map (the Portland Art Museum has handily created one, in easy-fold form, which will guide you to 31 sculptures in the greater Portland area and down the Willamette Valley as far as Eugene) head on down to the museum to take in the crackerjack retrospective of Kelly’s work that opened Saturday and continues through January 9.

Since Kelly’s been an active artist for more than 50 years, that’s a lot of retro to inspect. (The museum has also published a lavish and fitting catalog to accompany and expand on the exhibition.) But it’s a fascinating time trip, reaching all the way back to the heady days of abstract expressionism. Curator Bruce Guenther defines those brash young painting days as the first of three key periods in Kelly’s career, followed by his busy years of making large metal public work and a latter, reflective period — in Guenther’s words, “the post-public Kelly,” during which he’s created “not monuments, but personal landscapes.”

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Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Environment, General

How about a bridge we can live ON?

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Drawing of London Bridge from a 1682 London map. Surveyed by: Morgan, William, d. 1690. Published: London, London Topographical Society, 1904. Wikimedia Commons

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 you need a car. And cars need roads. And roads, when they run up to little impediments like the mighty Columbia River, need bridges. And bridges, we hear, can cost a cool four billion bucks. And four billion bucks (plus interest), we understand, will be coming out of everyman’s collective wallet for a long, long time to come.

Interstate Bridge between Portland and Vancouver. Source: Cacophony/Wikimedia Commons.Up to now Mr. Scatter has stayed out of the fray over the Columbia River Crossing bridge, the proposed replacement for the aging Interstate-5 span between Portland and Vancouver, Wash. Should the bridge be an architectural icon, a splendid work of art? Should it be a utilitarian get-‘er-done, a cheap and (presumably) practical slab of concrete designed to move the traffic and not much else? Truth is, Mr. Scatter doesn’t really know, although he’s grouchily beginning to ask himself a more basic question: Do we really need to bother with the damned thing at all?

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Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Environment, General, Visual Art

Rushdie to judgment: Idaho journal

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First snow hits the blade of the Sawtooths north of Ketchum, Idaho, in September.


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 nonpolitical and political natures of art, the difficulties of free speech and the true perils of reactionary jihadism.

The unlikeliness, and yet the unabashed Americanness, of this event occurring in this place and at this time, nine years minus a few hours after the jihadist suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, was perhaps less ironic than celebratory. It was proof, in a way, that in a world wracked by violent religious and cultural insanity, good sense and mere goodness can survive.

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Bob Hicks, Environment, Food, General

A prune by any other name smells sweet

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By Bob Hicks

Mrs. Scatter shovels a tiny spoon beneath my nose.

“You need to taste this new mustard,” she commands.

What’s this? New mustard? Mrs. Scatter’s been making the same mustard for so long it’s plastered on our sensory memories like the one tattoo you don’t regret. It’s Old Faithful, the house standard, the creme de condiments. If you can’t trust the house mustard, what can you trust?

Is this a prune? Naming goes plum loco.So trying out a new recipe seems slightly slatternly: are we cheating? But the weather’s changing. Restlessness is in the air. And there’s the little matter of those three mostly full bottles of regrettably bland wine that need to be used up.

I hesitate, then dutifully down the little spoonful of coarse new mustard, which has a sweet-and-sour, unknitted, wait-and-see tang.

“It needs to age,” I say.

Mrs. Scatter nods. She knows that. This is only a test.

Fall and food go together in the Scatter household — perhaps you’ve seen Mrs. Scatter’s posts on pickles and chutney and such — and matters of the stomach have been popping up all day.

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Dance, Environment, General, Martha Ullman West, Theater

Goodbye to Lena, swan song for Gavin, the Brontes and kickin’ with Cedar Lake

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By Martha Ullman West

Art Scatter is always pleased as punch to accept an essay from its chief correspondent and occasional world traveler, Martha Ullman West. MUW has been a busy woman lately. Herewith we offer her personal recollections of the late, great Lena Horne; her thoughts on the swan song of dancer Gavin Larsen, retiring from Oregon Ballet Theatre (plus other thoughts about OBT); Cedar Lake Contemporary Dance; and a comic theatrical riff on the Bronte sisters. Whew: That covers some territory!

Cropped screenshot of Lena Horne from "Till the Clouds Roll By," 1946. Wikimedia Commons

First and second thoughts on a Monday morning —

I was going to start this post with some second thoughts about Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s recent Duets concert series and specifically last Sunday’s matinee performance, Gavin Larsen‘s last as a principal dancer.

But I logged on to my e-mail an hour or so before I began writing and found that a high school classmate had forwarded me the New York Times obituary for Lena Horne, so I’ll start with some extremely vivid memories of her that go back, oh dear God, 58 years.

Original poster from Lena Horne's 1941 movie "Stormy Weather." Wikimedia CommonsHer daughter, Gail Jones, was a year ahead of me at a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., called Oakwood. The glamorous Lena Horne was a loving, devoted mother, who always came to Parents Day — and so did my father, believe you me.

First memory: October of my freshman year, Lena in a red velvet suit, prowling (no other word for it) along the football field, definitely deflecting fatherly attention from the game as well as the nubile cheerleaders, although Dad claimed for years he heard a Quaker referee calling “Thee is out.”

Second memory: Two years later, a cold wintry day, I was running barefoot down the hall of my dormitory when that unmistakable voice called from Gail’s room, “Child, put your shoes on — it’s freezing in here.” I stopped dead in my tracks, turned around, and there she was; looking, needless to say, stunning. And stern. I put my shoes on.

Third memory: The American Masters PBS show twelve years ago in honor of her 80th birthday (and she looked about 50, I might add), which I imagine PBS will reprise and I urge all Scatterers to watch. Daughter Gail Jones’s history of the Horne Family is also well worth reading. As is the Times obituary. Lots of “Stormy Weather” in Lena’s life; damned if she did, damned if she didn’t, and did she ever overcome, with astonishing glamor and grace.

*

There was plenty of grace of a different kind, and glamour best described as casual, as Oregon Ballet Theatre’s dancers filed past Larsen at the second intermission a week ago Sunday. Larsen was still in her Duo Concertant practice clothes costume, crowned with a ballerina’s tiara. The casual part applies to the jeans-clad dancers who each gave her a single rose and a kiss as they walked past her: It’s a tradition that began, I believe, at the Paris Opera Ballet.

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Environment, General, Laura Grimes, Music, Theater

Epilogue: Scattering live from the opera

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By Laura Grimes

Portland Opera's The Barber of Seville

Mrs. Scatter’s final thoughts and look back — and a chance to add what she missed before:

Forget coherence. Forget cohesion. Stutter and start is the only way to blog live about the opera. People talk and joke and all that is part of the cheerful scene, but forget trying to put two words together that make sense on the computer screen.

To read our meandering live blogs about the opera:

Mr. Scatter’s.

Mrs. Scatter’s.

Though it’s nice to make sense, frankly it’s icing on the cake when it happens because the whole point really is that it’s brilliant marketing on the part of the opera. It costs them a little staff time to arrange (but what’s a few e-mails), some flier bills describing the blogs and the people  (which call us “prominent local bloggers” — elbow elbow), a bag of nuts (Mr. Scatter calls them salty), and a few glasses of wine (blog lubricant). So, really, for peanuts they get a buzz going in different directions among different people. Brilliant. You put on a show and you want people to see it. That’s just smart business.

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