On this very day two years ago — on February 8, 2008 — a fine strapping lad was loosed upon the world, and immediately started yawping. Yes, its name was Art Scatter, and it was born right here in river city: in Puddletown, Oregon, brave bubble of liberality, Do It Yourself center of the universe, fearless exposer of itself to art, curious keeper of the weird.

Call us sentimental, but we’ve been thinking a lot about our friend Art, this thing we call a blog. For one thing, why is it still here?

A lot of blogs burn bright for a while and then flame out. Many are simply places to vent steam, or casual public diaries, or vanity projects. Well, almost all, including this one, are the latter at least to a certain degree. After all, nobody’s making any money out of this thing.

Art Scatter has changed a lot over its two years. It was the brainchild of Barry Johnson, my friend and longtime arts section compatriot at The Oregonian, who was looking for a way to explore new approaches to journalism outside of the print world. Barry brought me and his friend Vernon Peterson, a lawyer and talented literary critic, into the project, which was planned to be not too taxing on anyone because there would be three people to fill the virtual space.

Life moved on, and both Barry and Vernon departed for other projects. That left me wondering what to do with the thing, and wondering, sometimes, whether I was letting it eat up far too much of my time. In a very real sense my wife, Laura Grimes, saved the blog when she began to post her own witty and moving observations, eventually under the nom de plume of Mrs. Scatter. How could I not keep Art Scatter going? I was fascinated by how Mrs. Scatter’s adventures were going to turn out. Besides, she injected a bracing shot of humor into the blog, the humor that I have known and loved for more than twenty years.

Martha Ullman West, the noted dance critic who had written a couple of pieces for us, began to contribute more, and that added to the conversation. But I realized that if the thing was going to keep going, it was going to be largely up to me.

So. Why was I doing this?

• First, writing’s a habit. I do it reflexively, if not always reflectively. Just can’t seem to help myself.
• Second, it’s fun.
• Third, it allows me scope to write about a lot of things in a lot of ways that were rarely possible during my years in daily journalism.
• Fourth, it keeps me connected to my community and allows me to have a voice in a few things that go on in this little corner of the world. Good lord, I’ve made friends through this thing!
• Fifth, it helps me discover my post-newspaper writing voice. I can feel that voice waking up inside me, gradually realizing that it’s no longer bound by the newspaper straitjacket unless it chooses to be. I can hear it trying out new things, even whooping it up now and again. Good for you, voice. Let ‘er rip.

Slowly, mostly accidentally, the blog has developed its own personality. The characters of Mr. and Mrs. Scatter just sort of announced themselves. The Large Smelly Boys pushed their way into the mix. OED, the Older Educated Daughter, made brief visits. We talked about word games and secret societies and oysters on the half-shell. The League of Tough-Guy Arts Observers had its brief day in the sunshine and then wandered off to sleep in a cave: perhaps it’ll wake up and elbow back into the action again. We found we were able to be serious, and flip, and amused, and reflective, and serious and amused again, and somehow get away with it. We began to take a very broad view of just what the word “culture” means.

I’m sure Art Scatter will continue to evolve. It’s already changed in surprising and often delightful ways. It’s opened doors. I know people will drop in and out. Mrs. Scatter’s day job has been busy lately, and I’ve been missing her brilliant reports. (I’m sure you have, too.) Can’t wait for them to return.

And I’ve become convinced of one thing: The blog has to work with my writing career, not against it. I love the freedom and scope that Art Scatter gives me, and I love that it lets me try things out with a regular and forgiving readership. But I also need to make a living, and I do that by writing. This is not a hobby. It’s what I do. So if Art Scatter is my professional exploratory laboratory (and also the locus of a great deal of my pro bono work) I want it to look professional.

Which brings us to Modern, the new design theme that we’ve adopted, yes, today. And which wraps up this semi-impromptu State of the Blog address. Thank you, my fellow Scatterers. Good night, and God bless.

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Illustrations, from top:

• Not Mr. Scatter delivering his State of the Blog address. Edward W. Clay’s lithograph celebrates President Andrew Jackson’s destruction of the Second Bank of the United States with his “Removal Notice” (removal of federal deposits). Well done, Andy! Wikimedia Commons.
  
• Not Baby Art Scatter. Father Time and Baby New Year from Frolic & Fun, 1897. Wikimedia Commons.

We asked for your advice, and a lot of you gave it. Thanks to Scatter friends and followers Charles Deemer, LaValle Linn, Charles Noble, Brett Campbell, Cynthia Kirk, Mighty Toy Cannon and others for chipping in with preferences and ideas. Each of the three candidates had its fans, and each had its detractors. I appreciate the energy that all of you put into this. And I appreciate that more than one of you noted that design isn’t why you visit Art Scatter, anyway: You come for the writing and the ideas. Special thanks to LaValle for her warning that Web designs can devour your time and sanity in the middle of the night if you let yourself get too deeply drawn into them: Perish that thought!

Still, we want the writing and ideas to be displayed well. The decision wasn’t easy. At least one of you listed the eventual choice as his least favorite.

And the winner is …. Modern, designed by Ulf Pettersson, the design you’re looking at now.

It’s a clean, well-spaced, elegant design, a very professional-looking presentation, and that’s important. Its headlines are understated but big enough to stand out, and they look good running either one or two lines. Its serif type style moves serenely among bold, italic and roman type, making its point at each stop without leaping for your jugular. The type’s a little small in its pull quotes, but they still look good. The design handles splendidly such small but crucial matters as spacing and creating ample windows for inset illustrations: Nothing’s haphazard about it.

Is it too understated? We’ll see. If it turns out to be, we’ll switch again. Charles Noble touts the advantages of the premium design he chose for his blog Noble Viola, and it’s true that paying a little more can add a great deal more flexibility. I like the way that Charles’s blog can highlight several posts at once, for instance, and the way it can add “extras” such as promotional highlights and recent comments and still look crisp and inviting.

I’ve spent a lot of time inside these three designs, checking them out not just for looks but also for flexibility. When we began this journey I was drawn to the jazzy, stop-the-presses look of Copyblogger. (Mighty Toy Cannon points out its nice retro feel and homage to “legacy media,” meaning newspapers, the world from which both Mr. and Mrs. Scatter emerged). But although I liked its side panel perhaps the best of the lot, it had internal difficulties that made it hard to choose, including, but not limited to, poor spacing for its illustration windows, allowing type to bump right into the pictures.

In general I prefer serif types to sans serif types, although a good sans serif beats a bad serif. Veryplaintext 3.0 has my favorite typeface of any candidate, a distinctive and gorgeously assertive face. But it doesn’t like italic very much (what you see isn’t always what you get), and I consider italic type an integral tool in my presentational box. The real deal-buster, though, was its ragged, center-adjusted side panel, which to my eye (and LaValle’s, too!) looks haphazard and uncontained and, well, unprofessional. Too bad.

So that brings us back to Modern, which has an elegant look and seems the best compromise. Unfortunately, Mrs. Scatter hates it, and I understand her reasons. The blog title is small and pushed far to the right, and that bothers her. I’d prefer its type a little bigger, but its placement doesn’t bother me. She hates all gray boxes – that’s one of the reasons we defected from Artsemerging, which has a prominent gray screen – and Modern’s side panel is shaded gray. Plus, the panel’s wide, eating up a lot of space that could go instead to the relatively narrow main column. Like Mrs. Scatter, I’d like the side panel to include links to recent posts and possibly recent comments, and in general to be more flexible. Perhaps I can play around with it a bit and get some of those things to happen.

I deeply, sincerely hope this design grows on Mrs. Scatter – believe me, I deeply and sincerely hope this! – and I hope the design doesn’t prove to be too sedate. I’m convinced that it’s a stylish, visually pleasing design. Time will tell if it’s right for Art Scatter. For now, at least, it’s won the day.

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 Children” at Lincoln Center Theater, and he casually asked my dad how long it took him to write the play. My father, even more casually, answered that it took him all of ten days. At that point, my friend looked like he might throw up all over the table and I might start crying, so my father took pity on us and added, “But I had been thinking about it for a very long time.”

Well, of course.

Stories take time — a lifetime, sometimes — and the actual setting down of them can be  simply the culmination of a very long process, the plucking of the fruit from a tree that took years to mature and finally produce. It’s a little like the oft-told story of the “overnight success” that took twenty years to achieve.

But in Foote’s case (he died last March, 10 days shy of his 93rd birthday) it’s not just a matter of long experience bringing forth a story. It’s a matter of long experience in learning how flexible the theater can be, too. The Carpetbagger’s Children, for all its apparent traditionalism, breaks all sorts of rules about the stage — and it breaks them exceptionally because it’s learned the exceptions to the rules.

This is a memory play, and it’s told by three actresses, and “told” is the correct word: They take turns delivering long, carefully wrought soliloquies, speeches that overlap in theme and content (told by each sister from a slightly different point of view) but never overlapping in delivery. There is no dialogue, no pretension of ordinary conversational speech patterns, no give and take, except in the incidental clashes in the way the stories are told.

How could something so “undramatic” be so gripping? Because Foote knew story, and he knew the surprising elasticity of the theater, and he trusted that good performers would know how to bring life into the words that he put down. Remember, this is the guy who wrote the screenplays for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies. Not ordinary tales. But that’s the beauty of the things.

I once commented in exasperation that watching a Horton Foote play was like watching paint dry. I don’t think I ever actually wrote those words for print, which is a good thing. I don’t even remember what particular incident inspired them. It must have been, I can only hope, a particularly ham-fisted production of one of his plays. Because although nothing much “happens” in a Foote play, at least in the sense of slam-bang Hollywood action, worlds turn, as they do in Chekhov.

The director of Profile’s production, Jon Kretzu, has a longtime affinity for Chekhov, and it shows in the way these three able actresses turn softly (and sometimes harshly) on a dime. If the journeys they take are largely internal, they have external effects. This is the story, in a way, of a Southern empire crumbling, more quietly than the crumbling empire of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which opens in revival later this month at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival) but crumbling nonetheless. And that’s a fascinating, troubling, sometimes even exciting thing to see.

Briefly: A young Union soldier, fighting against the Confederates in Texas during the Civil War, likes what he sees and comes back, after the war, as a reconstructionist. Through shrewd business dealings and the aid of the triumphant Republican apparatus, he amasses a fortune in money and land, which he considers his offsprings’ duty to hold together. It’s up to sisters Cornelia (Jane Fellows), Grace Anne (Jacklyn Maddux) and Sissie (Val Landrum) to achieve that as the decades roll on.

Well, they can’t. Surprised? But the effort shapes each, and several other characters alluded to, in intense and often warping ways. That’s the way of the world. And without going into more detail, the plain old brutal way of the world is what the play’s about.

With Tim Stapleton’s simple but familiarly domestic in-the-round setting and DeeDee Remington’s spot-on costumes, it’s a handsome production. The three stars settle with warm fury into their characters. Nothing much “happens” except life and death themselves.  And paint does not dry.

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PICTURED: Val Landrum (left), Jane Fellows (center) and Jacklyn Maddux: the carpetbagger’s daughters. Photo: Jamie Bosworth

All very manly. But Mr. Scatter would like to offer you as an alternative pastime a chance to read his review of The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet that is printed in the O! section of today’s Sunday Oregonian.

The new novel, by Portland writer Myrlin A. Hermes, is a smart and witty reimagining of some of the great literary mysteries of our time. (The mysterious events take place in Elizabethan times, but it’s our time that gets all hot and bothered about them.)

To wit:

• Who was this William Shakespeare?
• Who was this Dark Lady of the Sonnets?
• Who was this Melancholy Dane?
• How did Mr. Shakespeare become Mr. Shakespeare?

Drolleries abound, along with intellectual, historical and emotional insights. It is not giving away too much to reveal that in this fictional universe Hamlet is as gay as a caballero going to Rio de Janeiro, and maybe Shakespeare is, too. No Super Bowl rings for them. But they find their compensations.

Enjoy the game. Whichever one you prefer.

VERYPLAINTEXT 3.0 SCREENSHOTS:

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… AND COPYBLOGGER SCREENSHOTS:

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Regulars Brett and Charles have both asked for such a thing, and it’s not just a reasonable request, it’s a no-brainer. Unfortunately Mr. Scatter’s brain just says no when he tries to figure out how to make it happen.

The best he can manage is a fuzzy screen photo of each candidate taken with his inadequate Blackberry phone, in the hopes that the pictures will help jog your memories back to what you saw in the last couple of days.

What you see, from the top, is:

Copyblogger, the jazziest of the candidates, with red headlines and a tabloidy staccato feel.

Veryplaintext 3.0, with a crisp, beautifully design serif type and an old-newspaper feel.

Artemerging, the theme Art Scatter has had since its birth but is getting ready to shed.

And, you’re reading this in Modern, the third candidate and today’s theme.

Mr. Scatter sincerely hopes this helps. And he promises not only to make a decision soon, but to explain how and why.

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 this point I’d been having a rather jolly time myself, although I knew the production, which originated in 2003 at Santa Fe Opera and emphasizes brisk farcical shtick, wasn’t strictly traditional. So I stuck his comment in the back of my mind, returned to my seat for the second act, and continued to have a jolly time along with the rest of the audience, right up to the curtain call.

And this morning I did a little researching. It’s true. A lot of critics (though by no means all) have found this Cosi distressingly populist. “A gag-filled, vulgar romp,” J.A. Van Sant wrote in Opera Today, reviewing Santa Fe’s 2007 revival. That might sound like a good ad quote, but he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Since Van Sant seems to speak for a lot of other critics, let’s give him a little more room to explain himself:

Politely put, (stage director James) Robinson’s Così was a gag-filled, vulgar romp. Such is not Mozart’s Così, an elegant, ironic comedy – not an ambiguous study of human nature requiring Regietheatre treatment, as is the present day style with this piece. To make Così into slapstick comedy combined with faux psychological exploration of the characters is to miss the point.

Essentially a bittersweet comedy of character types, set to some of Mozart’s most exhilarating and beautiful music, Così indeed has dark edges that serve to heighten amusement over the foibles of human nature.

You shouldn’t overdo the darkness, Van Sant continued, but you shouldn’t sacrifice the elegance to showy gimmicks, either.

A couple of other points emerged from other critics.

• First, the not-too-reluctantly philandering sisters in this play (the story is by Lorenzo da Ponte, who also wrote the librettos for Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni) and their gentleman-and-an-officer lovers have traditionally been played by older singers, suggesting that these erotic foibles are less the result of sheer youthful exuberance and more of something innate in human nature.
• Second, the play is very much about social convention at a level of society in which adherence to social convention is extremely important. These characters, if they’re going to sin, would do so cautiously, with a sense of decorum, not with casual friskiness. To give Cosi the sheen of 1950s naughtiness that this production does is historically misleading and saps some of the intellectual vigor from an opera that has a far subtler soul.

Objections noted. And on this one, I’m going to side with the audience.

I’ve seen a huge number of concept productions that horse around with the times and settings and sometimes even the underlying intentions of the original shows. It’s common in the theater world, so much so that it’s inspired a hoary but apt joke: “Did you hear about the radical concept for the new Hamlet? They’re doing it Elizabethan style.”

The true question isn’t, “Is it authentic?” but, “Does it work?” That is, does the concept fit metaphorically with the essentials of the original? Is it carried out consistently, without laboring to make its connections or dropping them halfway through? Does the concept have a purpose other than simply being different?

And, oh, yes: Does the audience like it? That last is a tricky one. Audiences like all sorts of things that are aesthetically half-baked, but artists who ignore their point of view make a grave mistake: No piece of theater is complete without an audience in the house. Indeed, if it’s not for an audience, it’s not theater.

To me, this Cosi is organic. David C. Woolard’s costumes, which veer from late ’50s girl-group chiffon to Shriner convention madcap, mesh beautifully with Allen Moyer’s curlicued folding box of a set, which cracks open magnificently at the top of the second act. And stage director Elise Sandell, working from Robinson’s original ideas, carries out the same sort of concise overstatement, a swift and busy flow of controlled exaggeration that plays in counterpoint to, but not against the grain of, Mozart’s extraordinary music — which, after all, is the core of the opera.

This is the language of farce. And a lot of the objections to this production, I think, are essentially objections to farce itself, which seems to many people somehow a lesser form of art, unworthy of playing in conjunction with Mozart’s sounds. I happen to think farce fits this story well, but then, I also happen to think that good farce is a great and serious business, a way to slice to the heart of human nature and analyze it shrewdly without getting all heavy and morose  about it. Farce’s serious-but-frivolous nature seems an excellent complement to this beautiful music, and I had no trouble either integrating the farce and the music or understanding that the two are complementary but not the same.

About that music, and its performers. The six key figures in this Cosi are true actor-singers, and their easy engagement in the extreme physical actorly demands of what is already a strenuous opera to perform was delightful. The orchestra, under George Manahan’s baton, was both sprightly and nuanced. The balance of voices was good. And the almost mystically seamless flow of Mozart’s music, from harmony to aria to harmony again, was the eye- and ear-opening wonder that it has never ceased to be since the opera’s debut in Vienna in 1790. If I had to choose one standout from this uniformly lovely cast, it would be soprano Lauren Skuce, partly because her Fiordiligi carries the emotional weight of the opera with her brilliant second-act aria of vexation and moral indecision. Farce can have weight, too. Good farce always does.

I noted a lot of young faces in Friday night’s crowd, and I’m guessing that performance created more than one opera fan for life. My bet: They liked the farce, and loved the music.

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CAPTIONS, from top:

• From the left in Portland Opera’s “Cosi fan Tutte”: Robert Orth (Don Alfonso), Keith Phares (Guglielmo), Angela Niederloh (Dorabella), Lauren Skuce (Fiordiligi), Ryan MacPherson (Ferrando) and Christine Brandes (Despina). Photo: Portland Opera/Cory Weaver.
• Allen Moyer’s cracked-open set for “Cosi,” from a recent Denver production with the same sets and cosumes as Portland’s but a different cast. The set, created for Santa Fe opera, will be broken down and recycled after the Portland production — a shame, but Santa Fe is finished with it and doesn’t have a good place to store it. Photo: Matthew Staver/Opera Colorado.

Does this typeface go with our headline style? Should we go Friday casual, sober-suited, country corduroy or maybe uptown funk? Do we want to look reliable, or available, or maybe flirtatious but with strict limits?

Today we’re feeling sleek. And no wonder, after trying on the last of three costumes we’ve been contemplating, a Web presentation theme called Modern. Yesterday we showed you the jazzier Copyblogger, and Thursday we kicked off with the simple but typographically elegant Veryplaintext 3.0.

One of these three designs will replace the format we’ve been using since Art Scatter was a newborn in February 2008, Artsemerging. Why? Because we feel like a change. But we want to make sure it’s the right change.

So, here you have it. Three new suits. Each with strengths, each with weaknesses. Let us know which one appeals to you and why — and if one of them really grosses you out, let us know that. too. After all, we just make this stuff up. You’re the ones who read it.

Hit that comment button and let us know what you think.

For one thing, that’s just a terrific title, even better than the review’s zinger of a headline (based on a quoted poem set in a grocery store), The Free Verse Is in Aisle 3.

Mostly, though, we’re happy that Mr. Hoagland has a new collection on (or in) the market, and that Mr. Garner has so cheerfully brought it to our attention.

The review draws comparisons in Hoagland’s poems to Randall Jarrell, Frank O’Hara, Marianne Moore. And we love the way that Garner fixes not just Hoagland’s poetry but an entire school in the firmament, in the process defining both what Mr. Hoagland is as a poet and what he is not:

“On a superficial level Mr. Hoagland’s poems — he writes in an alert, caffeinated, lightly accented free verse — resemble those of many writers in what one is tempted to call the Amiable School of American Poets, a group for which Billy Collins serves as both prom king and starting point guard. But Mr. Hoagland’s verse is consistently, and crucially, bloodied by a sense of menace and by straight talk.”

That makes Hoagland, in the Scatter Book of Literary Comparison, akin to the great John Updike, poet (in prose and verse) of suburban middle class unsettling awareness. Something growls, softly, beneath the placid surface. Think of that as you read these excerpts, from a poem set at a wine-tasting, that Garner quotes from Hoagland’s 2003 collection What Narcissism Means to Me:

But where is the Cabernet of rent checks and asthma medication?
Where is the Burgundy of orthopedic shoes?
Where is the Chablis of skinned knees and jelly sandwiches?
with the aftertaste of cruel Little League coaches?
and the undertone of rusty stationwagon? …

When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.
But when a man is hurt, he makes himself an expert.
Then he stands there with a glass in his hand staring into nothing
as if he was forming an opinion.

A facelift, if you will. A little cosmetic plastic surgery to bring the fresh bloom of youth back to our chubby literary cheeks.

After an online lifetime of presenting ourselves in the guise of the Artsemerging Web design, we’re ready to move on, and we’re considering three candidates. Yesterday we slipped inside the skin of Veryplaintext 3.0. We like its serif type design a lot. Today we’re trying on something a little racier, the zippy Copyblogger design, which has (brace yourselves) red headlines and a slightly tabular, hot-off-the-presses feel. Tomorrow we’ll give you a shot at the sleek Modern design.

Help us, O Brave & Loyal Scatterers. Show us the path. Take a look at these three possibilities and tell us what you like and dislike about them. We’re committed to shedding our wrinkly old skin. But which new skin should we slip into? And does our insurance plan cover this procedure?