By Bob Hicks
What’s been cooking lately in the Scatter kitchen? Well, a lovely baked dressing made up mostly of mushrooms, celery, onions and leftover bread slices (Mrs. Scatter’s clean-out-the-fridge creation). And another batch of baklazhannia ikra, or “poor man’s caviar,” an addictive eggplant/tomato/onion/pepper relish that William Grimes discovered recently in one of those great old [...]
“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 [...]
This is the lead image in today’s ArtDaily report, fitting for a rainy and relaxing Christmas day. Hope is born, over and again, fragile yet real. Feliz navidad. Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” c. 1607-10, Oil on canvas, 143 x 115cm, National Gallery of Scotland.
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 Laura Grimes
Dear Mr. Scatter,
You do realize, right, that while you sped away to have a raucous dinner party at the assisted-living facility, you left me here to 1. make my own coffee. 2. fetch my own newspaper. 3. share my bed with more beasts than usual and 4. somehow end up with less bed [...]
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 [...]