My younger Large Smelly Boy plans birthday parties with the frightening precision of an engineer. Felix Unger? Meet Martha Stewart.
He begins months in advance, poring over magazines and listing all the activities he wants to do and all the recipes he wants to make. He redoes his lists. He designs his invitations. He insists it [...]
Art Scatter is on the road, but some things you can appreciate long-distance. Such as Scatter friend Charles Deemer’s new micro-movie Deconstructing Sally, which the Portland playwright/novelist/essayist/teacher finished a few days ago, shooting it on a Flip minicam and spicing it up with a terrific soundtrack of mostly ’60s songs.
It’s 30 minutes long, and you [...]
Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart in “The Shop Around the Corner”: heart-to-heart, but not eye-to-eye. MGM, 1940/Wikimedia Commons
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In a world of reality television and cheesy stadium-pop music, finding good, intelligent escapist entertainment is a lot harder than it ought to be. The idea is to tickle your brain, not insult it, and tickling takes a [...]
One day in 1978 a shadow fell over my desk at the old Oregon Journal in downtown Portland. I looked up and there stood a giant of a mountain man, beard down to his chest, big grin peeking though from the bramble of hair, hand outstretched in greeting.
Joe Meek, maybe. Jedediah Smith. Liver-Eating Johnson. Jim [...]
When I was not quite 19 and in fall term of my sophomore year in college I returned home for Thanksgiving dinner, bringing a housemate with me. I’d been growing a beard since beginning of term, two months before.
At dinner (and beforehand, while bustling over the Brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes in the kitchen) my [...]
Eighty-seven degrees, the creaky old thermometer hit this afternoon, and although the nervous native Northwesterner lurking inside me can’t help fretting about an imminent neo-Dust Bowl and amateur revivals of 110 in the Shade (can you imagine a stranger named Starbuck riding in to save the hinterlands from thirst?), the better part of me is [...]
On Friday night, the Portland experimental music group Fear No Music performed a selection of short pieces that went with a selection of short films and video. We were there.
Even for those of us without much technical training (which would include this department of Art Scatter), a literature of sorts exists to talk about music [...]
Friend of Art Scatter Martha Ullman West got back to Portland from a lengthy stretch in Kansas City, where she’s been researching a book on ballet legend Todd Bolender, just in time to take in one of the Rose City’s busiest dance weeks in quite a while. Here’s her report — and thanks, Martha, for [...]
What with arts politics and scratchy throat and other everyday interruptions I’ve avoided actually writing about any art since talking about Portland Opera’s The Turn of the Screw and the finale of the Fertile Ground new-plays festival a couple of weeks ago.
But I don’t want Artists Repertory Theatre’s brilliant version of The Seafarer and Opera [...]
So last night, after the Super Bowl, I was channel-surfing. I’m not proud of it, but there you have it. Sometimes I think that’s the way the universe is trying to talk to me: If I happen upon the “Dog Whisperer,” I might conclude that I’m not calm and assertive enough (or maybe not submissive [...]