Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, has been trotting the globe. She’s endured an evening of wretched belly-dancing on the Nile, chatted with a centenarian ballet dancer in Philadelphia, revisited the works of Jerome Robbins in New York, and returned home to Portland, where she found irritation with Random Dance and happiness with Oregon [...]
What’s it all about, Alfie?
After a Friday evening of loosely organized chance in the company of Third Angle New Music Ensemble (the program included Terry Riley’s endlessly mutable In C; California composer Mark Applebaum’s similarly open-ended exploration of alternative musical “reading,” The Metaphysics of Notation; and Portland composer David Schiff’s exhilaratingly jazz-charged Mountains/ Rivers, which [...]
It’s been a busy few days around Scattertown.
First, on Thursday night, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter took a break from the gala festivities of Science Night at Irvington Elementary School to scoot up the hill to Talisman Gallery on Alberta, where their friend Cibyl Shinju Kavan was having an opening of new assemblages. Scrolls, bamboo, [...]
Mr. Scatter has been a writing fool lately, and not all of it for the virtual pages of this illustrious blog.
He has also composed essays that resulted in actual financial recompense, including a trio of pieces for that fine and noble stalwart of legacy media, The Oregonian.
This piece, about Oregon’s search for a new poet [...]
Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day. This is an important occasion, and not one to be taken lightly — or, horror of horrors, forgotten — unless you enjoy being a thirty-five-year-old bachelor living in your parents’ basement and spending all your free time playing online Dungeons & Dragons.
Pancho Villa did not waste his time like that. [...]
Seems like every time something cataclysmic happens, artists show up to help out. Like a lot of other people they know they can’t do much, but they also know they can do something. And often, because this is what they do best, they put on a show.
Especially when you’re talking about the local artists who [...]
Here’s a story about the playwright Horton Foote, told by his daughter Daisy Foote and reprinted in the program for Profile Theatre’s new production of his play The Carpetbagger’s Children, which opened Saturday night:
A few years ago a playwright friend and I were having dinner with my father. My friend had just seen “The Carpetbagger’s [...]
Mr. Scatter understands an American football match of some importance is to take place this very afternoon. Squadrons from the midsized cities of Indianapolis, Indiana, and New Orleans, Louisiana will battle it out on a field called a gridiron to claim rights of municipal supremacy for the coming year.
All very manly. But Mr. Scatter would [...]
Chatting with a friend in the lobby of Keller Auditorium during halftime of Portland Opera’s Cosi fan tutte on Friday night, Mr. Scatter became aware of a controversy he hadn’t realized existed.
“Audiences tend to love this production,” my friend, an exceptionally knowledgeable follower of the opera world, sighed. “And critics tend to hate it.”
Up to [...]
Most of you know at least a little bit about Fertile Ground, Portland’s festival of new performance works, which has been playing on stages big and small around the city and continues to do so through Feb. 2. Marty Hughley and friends have covered a lot of the action, including Marty’s middle-of-the-action roundup, for The [...]