Except in this case it’s deliberately bad writing, short parody passages in emulation of the florid style of Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, PC, the 19th century British playwright, novelist and politician immortalized for his creation of the line “It was a dark and stormy night.”

The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, first perpetrated in 1982 by English professor Scott Rice of San Jose State University, is a veritable treasure chest of purple prose, a perverse celebration of overstatement and strangely linked ideas.

Find the 2009 winners here, and weep for joy.

This year’s grand prize winner is David McKenzie of Federal Way, Wash., for this dark and stormy sentence:

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the Ellie May, a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish: for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

Bulwer-Lytton was a man to be reckoned with. A quick cruise through the Web reveals that, while his style may be painfully out of fashion, he could turn a phrase. The great unwashed and pursuit of the almighty dollar are his, and in his 1839 play Richelieu he created the pen is mightier than the sword.

Take a look at that famous dark and stormy sentence in full, the opening of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

OK, the man didn’t know where to stop. But the thing about Bulwer-Lytton is that he knew how to stick a phrase in your mind so it stays. Madeleine l’Engle, Wikipedia reminds us, used “It was a dark and stormy night” to begin her wonderful, Newbery Medal-winning children’s adventure A Wrinkle in Time, which she wrote in 1962, a full 20 years before the Bulwer-Lytton Awards began. If it’s a good enough beginning for Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace as they whisk through space and time, it’s good enough for us.

Still, when it comes to a good parody, what’s fairness got to do with it? Thank you, Lord Bulwer-Lytton, for providing the fodder. Let us close this chapter of the Art Scatter annals with these words from the winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Vile Puns category, Greg Homer of Placerville, California:

“Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.”

Why not turn cadavers into posed objects for museum display, as  hugely popular shows such as Body Worlds do? They’re only mummified skin and bone. Any resemblance to any actual living human being who once inhabited this “plastinated” shape is purely on the surface, and inconsequential, anyway: It’s not as if the stiff is alive.

It’s all so rational. And, yes, there’s so much to legitimately poke fun at (Elmer Gantry and his heirs) or fear (suicide bombers stoked on righteousness). Faith, or its misconception, has made a mess of a lot.

And yet, much of the world simply doesn’t agree with modern rationalism and the intellectual assumption of superiority that so often accompanies it. And much of the world has a point. Do we keep getting into these foolish, messy wars partly because we find it hard to imagine that belief is important — that for some people, the sacred trumps self-interest? In snickering at the earnestness of evangelicals, does blue America simply mock something it hasn’t even tried to understand?

The question becomes fascinating when you extend it to indigenous cultures, where so often “sacred” and “secular” don’t really exist as opposite or even separate categories. It’s here, especially, where Western ideas of science and art run into troubles. Tenets that make perfect sense in the European tradition simply don’t apply. So we get a battle, for instance, over the remains of Kennewick Man.

In the museum world, repatriation is a hot, hot issue. It has to do with history, and the spoils of imperialism, and national pride, and the disputed rights of original ownership. Originating countries such as Greece, Italy and Egypt are firm in their demands that looted or casually sold artworks be returned (even if, sometimes, they simply land in the basements of already overstocked home-country museums). Art stolen by Nazis from Jewish collectors or sold on the cheap to finance escape from the Nazis is going off of museum walls and into the hands of the original collectors’ heirs. Now that Athens has a top-rate new museum at the Acropolis, repatriation advocates are arguing that the last remaining excuse for keeping the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum has crumbled away.

In the murky world of rightful ownership, repatriation isn’t always the clear-cut issue it seems at first glance. Issues of availability to a broad audience, of ability to display objects in a broader artistic context, and of the ability to keep objects in a safe environment and care for them adequately also are legitimate parts of the debate.

But what if the work in question isn’t even considered art in the eyes of its originating culture? That twists the argument in intriguing ways, and in one case this week, with a surprising result: The Seattle Art Museum has returned a sacred Aboriginal object to Australia — and SAM initiated the repatriation. Australia’s National Indigenous Times tells the story here, and Artdaily.org also reports.

You can’t see the object in the photo above, because the object isn’t meant to be seen by a general audience. SAM has had it in its collection since 1970, but it’s never put it on display. It’s being called a “secret/sacred object” that would be used by an Aboriginal man in religious ceremonies. And that means that, although from a Western viewpoint it might be an interesting anthropological and aesthetic object, from an Aboriginal viewpoint it’s off-limits to anyone but its owner/user.

In other words: It’s something sacred. And SAM — especially Pamela McClusky, the museum’s curator of African and Oceanic art — decided that that meant it doesn’t belong in an American museum. It belongs back where it began.

Regina Hackett, the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic who now writes on her Art Journal blog Another Bouncing Ball, has a good insider’s take:

“A student of Robert Farris Thompson’s, McClusky is not your ordinary art curator. Like Thompson, she embraces the meaning first peoples give the objects that they create. She is far more likely to see the central Australian Aboriginal object in question as elders see it, rather than in purely aesthetic terms.

“Once the object came to her attention, it was as good as gone.”

“It’s something that is not to be seen by men who have not been initiated, by women or by children, and it’s intended to be kept in a relatively sacred, secret place, usually a cave,” ABC Canberra quotes McClusky.

The network further quotes her:

“The museum has been displaying Australian Aboriginal art and a lot of Australians had been coming through and I would always say ‘do you want to come down to storage and see this material we have’ and they would say ‘not a stone, that shouldn’t be here.’”

Now, it’s not.

As Hackett reports, the object isn’t quite home yet, wherever “home” might be: “The National Museum of Australia will store the object temporarily while consultations proceed regarding its final repatriation.”

It’ll be fascinating to see where this object finally lands. Except that maybe it’s none of our business, and we just won’t find out. And maybe that’s alright.

Bad news for Portland’s arts scene: Keith Goodman, a contemporary dancer, choreographer and teacher, died today shortly after a performance, apparently of a heart attack. Marty Hughley has the story on Oregon Live.

Goodman was 54. He was known as a gentleman, a graceful spirit, a good friend. He was part of the core of the contemporary dance center Conduit, and had his own company, Dance Gatherer.

Keith was a beautiful man, and not just with the physical beauty of a fine dancer, although he certainly was that: a lean, lithe, graceful, athletic man. People will remember him, I think, for a different sort of beauty — a quiet, contained wholeness that shone on his face; a sweet openness to his smile; a feeling of generosity.

We are all a little lesser today. Keith will be missed.

Godspeed.

It was this part of his talent that made me mourn this sad man’s passing: The strength of my response to the news of his death surprised me, I must admit.

And so I’ve been reading the coverage in The Oregonian and looking for mention of the man’s incredible ability to move. Marty Hughley’s eloquent analysis told me much I did not know, as did that emerging dancer Peter Ames Carlin’s. But no nod to the way the man moved.

Then, to my delight, there was an account in this morning’s Oregonian of the French, frequently a class act, celebrating Jackson by moonwalking around the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris: I hope someone filmed it.

Just now, I turned online to the New York Times and read Alastair Macauley’s tribute to Jackson’s dancing talent — who knew that the British-born critic with his eagle eye for the subtleties of classical dance from Petipa to Cunningham would go to the trouble to watch a whole slew of YouTube snippets of Jackson dancing and write so perceptively about him?

For my part, I will always associate Jackson with dancing, and not just his: when my daughter was in the second grade at Glencoe Elementary School, her teacher drilled the kids in aerobic dance for exercise and they put on a fabulous performance to Beat It for the parents.

Outstanding was a boy who was quite horizontally challenged, but, man, could he move to Jackson’s beat.  Nearly as well as Jackson.

– Martha Ullman West

Mr. Scatter has been going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland since roughly the last Ice Age, when he was still fooling around in the cave with that nice new five-hole bone flute he’d got for his coming-of-age ceremony.

Mrs. Scatter hasn’t been taking the trek that long, but she’s a devotee (of the festival, not the flute). Their next generation, the astonishing Ms. Sarah, was practically weaned on the plays: She still sometimes speaks in Elizabethan cadence, just for the fun of it. And now the Large Smelly Boys demand their annual attendance, in not “Are we …?” but “When are we?” terms. This ends up costing quite a few clams.

For complex scheduling reasons that by this point have skipped my mind, the Scatter family travelers won’t be getting to Ashland until the beginning of September this year, which means that we’re relying a lot on hearsay and the word of friends — one of whom, Marty Hughley, actually covers the festival  professionally for The Oregonian. Here’s his latest, pretty glowing report.  We check in on the Web site Ashland Link. And people come back and tell us what they thought.

Two clear-eyed friends — veteran journalist Paul Duchene, who spent a lot of years in the arts wars and is now executive editor of Keith Martin’ Sports Car Market magazine, and writer Sherry Lamoreaux, co-author of the Algonquin Round Table play Vitriol and Violets — just came back from the festival, and they’re still glowing with the pleasure of having seen the world-premiere production of Bill Cain’s Equivocation, a play about Shakespeare (or Shag) and what happens when truth and the Official Version don’t align. Here’s what they have to say:

Paul Duchene:

In case you can wangle a way, I saw the best play at Ashland I have seen there in 25 years. It’s a world premiere and it will go to Broadway and the West End for sure. It’s already headed to LA’s Geffen Theater first.

The play is Equivocation and it’s a classic case of how to write a current thriller by setting it in past times.

The plot is that Shakespeare is hired by James I’s government to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot (Guy Fawkes etc al) and how disaster was narrowly averted by the King’s security services.

But as Shakespeare looks into it, he’s not sure any plot ever existed and suspects that people were tortured into confessing something that didn’t happen, as a means to keep the Catholics in line. And the question arises about how to ask hard questions in dangerous times and how not to answer them, because his probing is putting him and his company in danger. Equivocation was the Jesuit way of not answering a question without exactly lying. “Look through the question to see what they’re really asking and see if you can answer that honestly…”

Playwright Bill Cain got the idea when he was in the Tower of London looking at a rack and a government sign above it that said “Nobody was ever tortured on this rack for their religious beliefs..”

And Cain thought of all the names of prisoners scratched in the dungeons below, along with last messages for their wives and families.

It’s brilliant stuff. He was flying back to the States and he thought: I have to go back and research this and write it in London. And he got off the plane in New York and booked a flight back.

Best of all, it’s not a work in progress, it’s sorted.

Sherry Lamoreaux:

We got to see Equivocation … what a play.

It’s linear and easy to follow but many of the scenes progress like tapestries shaken from folded sleep (my, how earnest of me).  All the stories dovetail and work.  All the layers — (politics then and now), families, death, truth/lies, the Shakespearean canon and the inside workings of theatre in general — are balanced among themselves, and between poignancy and humor. The playwright is working from deep knowledge and complete mastery.  An absolutely sure touch. Brilliant material, brilliantly directed and performed, set off by a set so clean and simple that when a noose comes on, it commands the stage. Perfect lighting.

Maybe the best thing I’ve ever seen at Ashland … and it is not a work-in-progress, it’s fully baked.  (I’d tighten the ending by four lines, but that’s just me.)

I’ve seen nothing that indicates it was commissioned for OSF, but the play speaks to the setting and the festival as well, and the season uses it like a jewel in a crown, setting other plays referred to in it on its skirts.

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Paul and Sherry also brought back good reports on Helena de Crespo’s performance in Shirley Valentine at Oregon Stage Works in Ashland. De Crespo, the globe-trotting, Portland-based actor, stars in Willy Russell’s one-woman play through July 13. A lot of people still remember her Portland performance a few seasons back in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads.

In Portland recently, people ponied up $120,000 in a single week to save the annual summer Washington Park music festival. They tossed in more than $850,000 to keep Oregon Ballet Theatre from folding.

In the middle of the worst recession/depression since the 1930s, people are somehow helping to pay for things they believe in, and they just keep going to shows. Maybe they’re looking for bargains. But they’re looking, and they’re going.

It’s an ingrained human need, as John Noble Wilford suggests in this morning’s New York Times. Wilford, the Times’ fine science writer, reports on the discovery of a five-hole bone flute in a cave in what’s now southwestern Germany. It’s a sophisticated instrument, apparently with harmonic possibilities not too far removed from a modern flute’s. And it’s at least 35,000 years old — maybe 40,000. It was discovered, Noble reports, “a few feet away from the carved figure of a busty, nude woman, also around 35,000 years old.” As the researchers keep digging I’m hoping they’ll discover the remains of an ancient flagon and complete the Ice Age trifecta: wine, women and song.

So, yes, right now a lot of artists have their hands out. And what’s amazing to me is that so many people are pausing among their own economic problems and doing what they can. Another example: The Portland Ballet, the “other” classically oriented dance company in town, has collected $15,000 from a public drive specifically so it can have live music for its annual performance of the holiday-season ballet La Boutique Fantasque. I don’t know if this is exactly what Barry Johnson meant in his recent Portland Arts Watch post about democratizing the arts, but it’s sure active and participatory.

So just for fun, let’s make the argument that art is as much of a human need as food — or, if that’s too rash, that the urge to make art is as ingrained in the human psyche as the necessity to eat is imprinted on  the human body. Sure, you can survive without art. But the artistic impulse is there, I’ll suggest, in your heartbeat. Everyone’s got rhythm.

And that link between food and art brings me to Sojourn Theatre and its upcoming benefit, A Very American Breakfast, which is happening 7:30-9 in the morning on Wednesday, July 1, at Disjecta, that big inviting space for all sorts of things in the percolating old Kenton neighborhood of North Portland. (Disjecta is having its own first-anniversary party for its Kenton home from 8 to 11 Saturday, June 27; no cover, cash bar.)

Sojourn is a Portland-based company that tours the country, developing and performing community-based plays that usually coalesce around specific themes. For the last year, among a myriad of other activities, it’s been working on a new piece called On the Table that looks at food, and how it’s grown and distributed, and the choices we make about it, and the impact it has on various communities. A lot of field reporting (in this case, literally) goes into a typical Sojourn show, and that takes time and resources. Company director Michael Rohd figures the project has another year to go: “The show will happen Summer 2010 simultaneously in PDX and a small town 50 miles from PDX, and explores the urban/rural conversation in Oregon, culminating with a bus trip for both audiences and a final act at an in-between site,” he says.

The benefit breakfast costs $50 (you can make a reservation here, or if that’s too much or too little or you’re going to be out of town, make a donation) and will feature food from Phresh Organic Catering. Disjecta is at 8371 N. Interstae Ave., Portland.

Sojourn doesn’t make a habit of putting its hand out, but there comes a time and place. Here’s part of what Rohd had to say when he spread the word:

“So, we are busy.
And we don’t have a building.
And we are engaged in the most ambitious project of our nearly ten years together.

And, its going to be tough.
This moment right now is tough.
But we believe — go big, or go home.”

In the meantime, breakfast in the shadow of Kenton’s giant Paul Bunyan statue sounds good.

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Another way to look at food and art and cities and rural life: Froelick Gallery’s exhibit Town & Country: Oregon at 150, which continues through July 11 at the gallery, 714 N.W. Davis St, just off Broadway. This juried group show takes a look at Oregon through its urban/rural geographical divide, which sometimes is a connection as well. That’s Eric Bowman’s 2007 painting “Oregon Farm” above.

Who knows? Maybe someone’s sitting behind the barn, playing a five-hole bone flute. And maybe that’s just all right.

“In my opinion a museum cannot and should not be showing only art by dead people.”

Lee Musgrave was sitting in his little ground-floor office at the Maryhill Museum of Art, away from the sweeping view just outside of the Columbia River Gorge and the eastern face of Mt. Hood. He’d just told me that after 14 years as the museum’s only curator he was getting ready to retire — he leaves at the end of July — and he was in a relaxed, expansive mood.

Of course, I’d just driven the 110 miles east from Portland to see a bunch of paintings by dead people: the museum’s show Hudson River School Sojourn, which is on view through July 8.

But then, I was also curious to see the newest incarnation on the museum grounds of Musgrave’s annual outdoor-sculpture invitational, Maryhill’s lively contemporary response to its historic collection of Rodin sculptures in the indoor galleries. And if this quirky, oddly intoxicating little museum hadn’t begun to pay much more serious attention to the contemporary world in the past couple of decades, I might have just left it dozing away in the desert and never gone visiting at all.

These days, I consider it a personal requirement to drive to Maryhill at least once a year, and I freely confess that although I find the museum an intriguing place — I can’t think of any institution anywhere else, even in the wild-and-woolly West that it so quintessentially represents, that’s quite like it — a lot of the allure is simply that it offers a great excuse to make one of the most drop-dead gorgeous drives in the United States. The improbable fortress that is Maryhill, perched high on a cliff in that stretch east of The Dalles where forest has given way to desert, is the end-of-the-road payoff to a journey that’s already been its own reward.

“In my time here,” said Musgrave, who on the day of my visit was in a genial summing-up mood, “I’ve done 59 contemporary shows and exhibited the work of 258 Northwest artists.”

Those figures might come as a surprise to people who tend to think of Maryhill in response to its historical collections, an assembly of oddments that make it seem a little like a far-west cubby-hole annex to the Smithsonian Institution, “America’s Attic.” There are the chess sets, the Russian icons, the Rodin plasters,  the old weapons, a good Native American collection, the road plans of visionary engineer and rural utopian Sam Hill, memorabilia of the turn-of-the-century dance sensation Loie Fuller, the Queen of Romania’s furniture, the peacocks strutting around the grounds (they scare away snakes), the nearby concrete replica of Stonehenge, the French high-fashion dioramas of Theatre de la Mode.

But as crucial as those things are to Maryhill’s identity (a prominent art historian told me the other day that the museum should concentrate on its “creation myth”), they’re not the whole story. Musgrave, a practicing contemporary painter who’s been showing his own work since the late 1960s in California, the Northwest, and even Australia and Japan, has nurtured relationships with contemporary-art collectors such as Portland’s Jordan Schnitzer. He’s worked directly with a lot of artists, and he’s nurtured at least a nascent sense that in this place, time can mingle. “My favorite thing to do is to take contemporary artists and combine them with things in the permanent collection,” he says.

The annual outdoor sculpture show is a good example of how Musgrave’s connections with contemporary artists have influenced what the museum does. On his first day on the job in 1995, he says, he told his new co-workers, “I can’t believe you’ve got 6,000 acres and no sculpture outside.” So he started the sculpture program.

Yes, 6,000 acres — you read that right. The museum’s Texas-ranch dimensions are part of what makes the place seem so downright oddball. And if the sprawl of the museum’s physical holdings presents its challenges — how many other museums have to worry about water tables and grazing rights? — it also helps make Maryhill the unique attraction that it is. The land is what remains of Sam Hill’s lost dream of an agricultural utopia (the museum building was his home and was transformed into a museum through the efforts of his improbable trio of woman friends, dancer Loie Fuller, Queen Marie of Romania, and San Francisco socialite Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of the sugar king).

The land has ample space for Hill’s curiously moving Stonehenge replica, a World War I memorial. (Hill also led the drive to build the International Peace Arch, which straddles the United States/Canadian border with one foot in Blaine, Washington and the other in Douglas, British Columbia.) Whole hills surrounding Maryhill are leased to ranchers. And the giant wind farms that have sprung up along the river, their towering white windmills marching in line like an army of barren trees, go across Maryhill land.

The windmills put money in the bank — maybe $100,000 a year, says executive director Colleen Schafroth, and perhaps eventually a lot more. And it’s a good thing, because it takes a lot to run this place. It wasn’t built as a museum, and it’s bursting at the seams: Thoughts of expansion are in the air. The museum’s seasonal, from mid-March through mid-November. It’s isolated. The staff is small, and a fair number of important tasks are handled by volunteers. Maryhill recently received a $2 million bequest from Mary Hoyt Stevenson, and half of that goes into the museum’s small endowment, which like almost everyone’s took a hit in the stock market collapse (but comparatively not as bad, says Schafroth: the museum went conservative with its investments sooner than a lot of organizations).

And although admissions are up so far this year, they were down the three years previous. In the boom years of the late 1990s the museum pulled about 80,000 visitors a year. After 9/11 that fell drastically, to the 45,000-50,000 range. Recession, war, high gas prices and possibly the development of other tourism and cultural attractions in the Gorge played into the drop, Schafroth says.

Still, what seems like competition now could be money in the bank in the future. As the urban influence expands to The Dalles nearby, and as the wine industry grows on both sides of the river, this end of the Gorge becomes more and more of a tourist destination.

That bodes well for Maryhill, a museum that draws a high percentage of visitors who rarely or never go to museums elsewhere. That may well have something to do with the place’s mystique, its “creation myth”: Both Musgrave and Schafroth mentioned that visitors say one thing they like about Maryhill is that they feel comfortable there. It’s not intimidating, like other museums and galleries.

“Not intimidating,” of course, can slip into “not challenging” or even “not very good.” And it will be partly the job of Musgrave’s successor, Steven Grafe, to keep the place on the “friendly and interesting” side of the line. Grafe arrives from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, where he was curator of the Native American collection.

For a single curator to handle the curious variety of collections at Maryhill requires the mind of a generalist, Musgrave says, and Schafroth says that Grafe is, indeed, a generalist. (One of the museum’s long-range goals surely must be to expand its curatorial staff.) But every generalist is specific in his or her own way, and the shift in curators almost certainly will mean a shift in priorities and emphases at the museum.

Grafe’s training and apparent interests are in Native American art, and that fits well not just with one of the museum’s best collections, but also with its location. This is the heart of Plateau culture territory. Tsagaglalal, “She Who Watches,” the iconic rock carving, is not far away — like Maryhill, on the Washington side of the river. Just downstream lies the dam-flooded ghost of Celilo Falls, until the mid-1950s the great fishing ground and gathering spot of the river nations. Grafe has a doctorate in art history from the University of New Mexico, but his roots are in the Northwest. He’s curated exhibitions at the Burke Museum in Seattle, the Washington State Museum of Anthropology, the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute in Pendleton, the Umatilla County Historical Society in Pendleton, the High Desert Museum in Bend. He knows the area, and he knows the cultural territory.

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading River Song, Craig Lesley’s terrific 1989 novel about contemporary Native Americans along the Columbia, and it reminds me, as do so many other things, of how crucial it is to understand that native culture isn’t just something in the past, it’s part of the present and the future: The cultures are alive and changing with the times.

The Pacific Northwest has a vibrant community of Native American artists working in both traditional and contemporary forms, and it makes sense that Maryhill, with its decent collection of historical material, could be a center for free exchange of Native American artistic energy, building on the past but extending it into the future. With the likes of the Portland Art Museum, the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, the High Desert, the Crow’s Shadow Institute in Pendleton, plus the Warm Springs, Tamastslikt, and other tribal cultural centers, Maryhill could be an important link in a growing chain of institutions sharing art and information about native culture. And that, in turn, could become a cultural trail leading visitors around the region.

In the meantime, there are all of those permanent collections that must be tended to, shifted around, arranged in different combinations, built upon, combined creatively with fresh materials on loan, so that they seem part of a fresh, contemporary, evolving cultural conversation. And there are the temporary exhibitions: Once the Hudson River School show closes, Ansel Adams: Masterworks, a touring show of 47 works by the popular nature photographer, takes its place July 18-Sept. 13; and The Good Life, a show from the museum’s permanent collection of 30 paintings, drawings and prints celebrating small pleasures, follows Sept. 26-Nov. 15.

And how about that Hudson River School show? It represents both the upside and downside of visiting Maryhill. Musgrave assembled this collection of 34 paintings from about 100 in the private collection of Dr. Michel Hersen and Mrs. Victoria Hersen. Some very good painters and paintings are represented, but there are also significant holes, including anything at all from several of the best, most transporting members of the movement: Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt (whose dreamily romanticized painting of Mt. Hood is a centerpiece of the Portland Art Museum’s American collection), movement founder Thomas Cole, George Inness, Thomas Chambers, George Caleb Bingham, William Holbrook Beard. That’s an issue facing not just Maryhill but also most small museums: It’s tough to get your hands on the really top-rate stuff.

Yet there are a lot of compensations at the level just below the top, and if this exhibit doesn’t give you much in the way of “wow” moments, it reveals some of the breadth and depth of the Hudson River School, a romantic American movement that continued for two generations from about 1825 to 1915. Spreading up the Hudson River Valley, into the nearby Catskills and Adirondacks and White Mountains, with excursions into Pennsylvania and the New England coast and a surprising number of forays into the American West, the movement straddled nostalgia for European pastoral scenes with a fascination for the American wilderness — which, in the case of these mostly New York painters, often meant Lake George in Upstate New York, as iconic a subject for them as Mt. Hood and Mt. Rainier were for painters in the Pacific Northwest. (And so it continued: Several of Georgia O’Keeffe’s most prized paintings from before her New Mexico days are of Lake George.)

Like the New England transcendentalists, these painters were concerned with man’s place in nature, and their theme carries through compellingly to Maryhill audiences, because that is also an enduring theme in the Pacific Northwest. In most of these paintings people are either absent or miniaturized, hovering in the shadows.

Charles Hunt’s Hunter in a Stormy Landscape, an Adirondacks scene, speaks to the mood of a lot of this work. He gives us not what we in the West think of as a wilderness, but a well-worn path, the hunter dwarfed by trees and a lowering sky. The hunter is in nature, perhaps apart from nature, but not above nature: He and his surroundings have arrived at that moment of stillness, that elusive pinpoint where, no matter what might happen next, everything aligns. For all the storm, there is a calm. A man is in his place in the world.

There are paintings to appreciate here from the likes of William M. Hart, Samuel Colman, George Henry Broughton, Robert William Hubbard, John Henry Hill, the serene and highly skilled Jasper Francis Cropsey, Asher Brown Durand (who founded the school, with Cole), David Johnson, and Julie Hart Beers, sister of Hudson River School painter William McDougal Hart (also in this show) and James McDougal Hart (not in the show). Thanks to this exhibit and its big William Coventry Wall scene from the Susquehanna Valley, I discovered a whole regional movement I’d never realized existed — the Scalp Level School, named for a small town in western Pennsylvania. And I discovered the bold, veering-toward-modern seashore paintings of Charles Henry Gifford of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Second rank, maybe, but good second rank.

Nothing here approaches the painterly mastery of Church, an artist who can quite simply take your breath away, even if you don’t ordinarily care much for landscapes. Yet in the end, I’m happy to have seen this show. And not just for the drive.

Our partner-in-scattering Martha Ullman West, taking a break from the balletic battles, scurried over to Performance Works Northwest over the weekend for a shot of contemporary-dance fresh air. Here’s her report:

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“I am wired for skepticism.  I cannot leave the questions alone.  They unravel everything.  My skepticism is like an old screen door. There is a metal smell and old dust that stings my nose. There is a tiny hole in the screen, which I can’t help but worry larger with my finger.”

– Sarah Hart

What that text had to do with the movement, the elegant, thoughtful, considered and highly physical dancing presented at Performance Works Northwest last weekend beats me, but Daniel Addy’s installation, consisting of a screen door with a moist green landscape projected behind it, and on the other side of the studio, a window with a watery view, framed The Portland Project handsomely.

The show began with TouchMonkey, in the persons of Carolyn Stuart and Patrick Gracewood, who are longtime practitioners of Contact Improvisation, a form based on trust and the ability to make on-the-spot kinetic connections. Stuart was wearing a black cloth over her eyes, which meant her responses to Gracewood were entirely by touch and contact.  Their duet, titled Special Alembics, (nice pun!) was performed to music played live by Eddy Deane, Alley Teach, and David Lyles of The Contact Lounge Band.

The performance was at once sensual and intellectual, and downright suspenseful. My God, what are they going to do next? I thought at one point, as they entwined and re-entwined their bodies on the floor, becoming at times a single body that appeared to have eight misplaced limbs. Nobody “wired for skepticism” can dance with a partner blindfolded, it seems to me, particularly one on whom she depends to shape the next step in the dance.

Tere Mathern, one of this city’s most cerebral choreographers, came next with Phase Phrase, performed by Hannah Downs, Sally Garrido-Spencer, Vanessa Vogel and Mathern herself. As they went along they embellished the propulsive phrase they performed and then stripped it down again, characteristically geometric and angular.  The four women to some degree played off one another, but this dance was pretty clearly planned ahead of time, with plenty of contact — one dancer touching another on the shoulder, causing that dancer to extend her arm in a straight line — but little improvisation. Tim DuRoche created a score that was minimalist to the Nth degree; I’ve liked his previous collaborations with Mathern and Mary Oslund, but this one I found exasperatingly repetitious.

Sometimes dancing is just about dancing, despite the program note about Gregg Bielemeier’s Tracings that explains it is a duet working with the idea of distilling form, vessel and shadowing.  And what a pleasure to watch Taylor Alan Young, a recent arrival in Portland, incorporate Bielemeier’s relaxed-appearing movement style into his own body.  That kind of ease, that comfort in one’s own skin, is hard to come by, particularly the juxtaposition of small movements of head, neck, hands, against large, traveling ones.

What all three choreographers have in common isn’t Hart’s intriguing text, but rather the experience and wisdom to abstract from it a mood, or an atmosphere, or a dance that expands the horizons of the audience and at the same time provides a great deal of pleasure.

The Portland Project was skillfully curated by Anne Furfey, who produced it along with Linda Austin as part of Performance Works Northwest’s Alembic series.

Long before DIY became a Portland catch-phrase, Philemon Timothy Reid was quietly doing it himself. A self-taught artist, Reid spent a lifetime doing the things you need to do. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, he spent nine years in the service, went to night college, and worked many years for the Bonneville Power Administration. He settled in Vancouver. He raised a family.

And through it all he did the thing he loved to do, which was to paint and sculpt images of the African American musicians who played the blues and jazz. He often listened to Coltrane or Miles or Ella while he was making his own art.

“Phil” Reid died June 9 of pancreatic cancer, and while for many people who knew him that was a very personal loss, for me he was a missed journalistic opportunity. I never met him, and for a long time I meant to. I just didn’t get around to it.

There are a million stories out there, and every writer knows that for every one you manage to tell, a hundred get away. Phil Reid’s story was one of my many hundred untold tales.

As far as I know Reid wasn’t much aligned with any particular group of Portland artists. He wasn’t part of any art-school crowd. He wasn’t avant-garde. Technically, there wasn’t much novel in what he did: He adapted familiar Cubist techniques to his own subject matter, although he maintained more representational roots than Picasso, whom he cited as a major influence: I think that might have had to do with the African American tradition of storytelling and its superreality, although I don’t know for sure. He had a loyal, even enthusiastic following, but for the most part it didn’t seem to include the people who haunt museums and galleries.

Yet every time I saw his work it made me stop and think. And usually smile, because invariably there was a gusto, a joy, in the images he made. And I’d think, this is an interesting guy. I should look into this. His sense of men and women at work, immersed in the pleasures and tribulations of their trade, harked back to the social realists of the 1930s.

The exaggerations of his shapes — great guitars that swoop across the canvas, eating up half of the picture; strong chord-plucking fingers that seem like limbs on a mighty Sequoia tree — suggest the tall tale: John Henry; the nameless narrator of St. James Infirmary Blues.

And his colors! Every time I saw them I thought about the pleasure that so many black people take in dressing vibrantly, in reveling in the brightest of rainbows. Remember how, in the movie Watermelon Man, Godfrey Cambridge dressed brighter and sharper the more he became immersed in his black identity?

Unfortunately, anything I say about Philemon Reid is guesswork, the flawed and incomplete deductions of long-range, occasional observation. I’m sorry about that. This is a story, I suspect, worth much more than I can tell.

Considering that its goal was $750,000 by June 30, that’s remarkable. And it doesn’t need to stop here. Maybe OBT can smash $1 million by June 30, which would help considerably in balancing next year’s reduced budget. OBT says it needs to raise $1.5 million in donations to meet its slashed-back budget of $4.8 million, down from a projected $6.7 million before the economy collapsed.

To break it down: A little more than $500,000 came from 976 individual donations, or an average of about $512. And it didn’t come just from Portland:  Money came from 26 states, which indicates how highly this company is thought of nationally. Eight donors gave $190,000 of that, in chunks of $25,000 or $20,000, which means there were a lot of $25, $50, $100, $150, $250 gifts from ordinary dance-lovers who dug deep, and their willingness to help made a big difference. In addition, last weekend’s big gala concert pulled in about $330,000.

Now it’s time for the heavy hitters to step up to the plate — the six-figure and seven-figure people. It’s essential to the long-term health of this company that it gain the confidence and regular support of the deep-pocket crowd. That $1.5 million for the coming year? It breaks down to about $29,000 a week — and that’s for a bare-bones budget. To build the company back to the $7 million level, and restore its full orchestra, is going to take a lot more than that.

The task has just begun. In the meantime, congratulations to everyone.