By Bob Hicks
Bless me, reader, for I have sinned.
For 40 years Moses wandered in the wilderness. And for roughly the same amount of time I have stumbled through the landmines of contemporary culture, wearing the sackcloth of the most extreme form of penitent journalist.
I have been a critic.
Well, apparently I have. That’s what everyone tells [...]
By Bob Hicks
It’s not often we call attention to a front-page newspaper story — after all, it’s right there on the front page; how could you miss it? — but today we’re doing just that. If you haven’t looked at it yet, please read Still Stuck in the Past, D.K. Row’s front-page story in today’s [...]
Hot licks and good times with Andy Stein, Padam Padam
Closing the books: Powell’s layoffs, Looking Glass R.I.P.
Patrick Page plucks praise from “Spider-Man” carnage
In the room with Egypt’s fierce cultural protector
Alexis Rockman and good news at the Smithsonian
By Bob Hicks
Hot licks and good times with Andy Stein, Padam Padam: My old friend and neighbor Jaime Leopold [...]
By Bob Hicks
Every reporter at one time or another has felt the heavy hand. The veiled or not so veiled threat. The “You know, I have lunch with your publisher every week, and he listens to me” routine. Sometimes it’s soft and condescending: “I know a smart guy like you is gonna help me out [...]
By Bob Hicks
Riches of the City: Portland Collects, the 237-work exhibition of art loaned by 83 of the city’s collectors from their private collections, opens Saturday at the Portland Art Museum, and I reviewed it in this morning’s Oregonian. You can read the review online here, but if you pick up a copy of the [...]
By Bob Hicks
In his time Mr. Scatter has done a lot of editing, sometimes with the lightest of fingers and sometimes with a bloodied ax.
He has ruthlessly rewritten. Many years ago he was put in charge of “fixing” a writer so bad that he recomposed, and even re-reported, every inch of every story she turned [...]
By Bob Hicks
About the time the icebergs started breaking off I realized that Out of the Deeps, John Wyndham’s 1953 speculative-fiction thriller, was heading into some pretty interesting territory. The suspicion had been rising for some time that this was no ordinary, dated genre toss-off. But when I picked it up I’d had no idea [...]
UPDATE: Prompted by reader comments on this story from the Corvallis Gazette-Times, Mr. Scatter checked the Web site of the Federal Elections Commission for expenditures by Jim Huffman, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate running against Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon. Huffman’s campaign has paid Third Century Solutions, the listed publishers of Economic Times of Oregon, [...]
By Bob Hicks
A while back, in this post, we groused about the shocking unprofessionalism of the team of bozos that had taken over management of The Tribune Company, publisher of such flailing giants as the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the Baltimore Sun.
We were responding to David Carr’s report in the New York [...]
By Bob Hicks
Mr. Scatter has never been able to talk Mrs. Scatter into chucking it all and building a little log cabin in the woods. And, truth to tell, he’s not all that good at the log-splitting thing. Plus, there’s the indoor-plumbing issue: In general, he’s in favor of it.
Still, he’s fascinated by the rustic [...]