Three areas of general interest:

1. TBA is up and running. This presents our difficulty in a nutshell. Just today there’s a site-specific work by Sojourn at
South Waterfront and performances by Reggie Watts, Leesaar the Company, Antony and the Johnsons, Neal Medlyn, Ice Rod and Khris Soden. Among others! Our cup runneth over. Often, we try to find out about what we missed by consulting Grant Butler and his gang of TBA bloggers.

2. First Thursday was last night/First Friday is tonight. Henk Pander, Sean Healey, Rene Rickabaugh, Hildur Bjarnadottir, Stewart Harvey, Ethan Jackson, Christine Bourdette, Michael Knutson… Seriously, this is impossible. And we haven’t caught up with Volume, the group show curated by Jeff Jahn yet, either.

3. Theater gets going with Blackbird at Artists Repertory Theatre. Artistic director Allen Nause gets to play another of the creepy roles he inhabits so well in David Harrower’s drama. Marty Hughley gives the show a nice preview in A&E.

We won’t see everything that attracts us, not by a longshot, but we will attempt to report back on what we do stumble upon. Unless, of course, it all gets to be TOO MUCH!

Back to Project Runway, though. Which is different for me because I have absolutely no desire to design clothing and there’s no calm submission involved. In fact, chortling at the fashions in the New York Times has always been something I shared with my wife, a way to bond. Who thinks up these get-ups, I’ve often wondered. Thanks to Project Runway, I now know, and not only that, I get to see them work in the most stressful situations — and frankly, after last night’s episode, it looks as though the stress is starting to win.

So is Portland’s own Leanne Marshall! Leanne (aka Leanimal) has won two consecutive episodes (or “challenges”). We LOVE her. For a while, she looked like the least likely to succeed, so fragile personally and so quirky of spirit and design. But Leanne has untapped reservoirs of spunk, and to go with her coolness under pressure, she’s developed a cool designing style that has won over the judges, who included Diane von Furstenberg last night. By cool, I simply mean sleekness of silhouette, luxurious fabrics, impeccable craftswomanship and coherent design ideas (see! I’m learning my terms!). Quirks lurk but they don’t take over — they add charm and visual interest. There are some other excellent designers, too, and I wouldn’t be crushed if, for example, Korto won. She has great ideas and sticks by her guns (a yellow highlight on a black and white print last night, which Tim Gunn, who acts as a sort of designer handler for emcee Heidi Klum, had serious reservations about during the process, but which Korto insisted on using). We love you too Korto!

I can’t wait to get to work to talk last night’s episode over with Kristi Turnquist, who is a devout follower of the show and posts on Oregonlive.com about it after every episode.

A William Weir story in the Chicago Tribune today starts with an account of the difficulty composer Kenneth Fuchs has broadcasting his music out into the world — and Fuchs is well-known as far as contemporary composers operating in a “classical” context go. He then suggests that the answer for Fuchs may be to get his music out of the “classical confines.” I disagree with him that the death of classical music stores is a good thing, but his suggestion that the blurring of genre lines that separate classical from other kinds of music does sound right. He then cites a few new-music organizations such as Bang on a Can and the Wordless Music series as examples of moves in the right direction, as well as cellist Matt Haimovitz, who couldn’t be more popular among the country’s few remaining classical music critics because he is so involved in both genre destruction and operating outside traditional classical music confines.

This leads us, inevitably to the Portland Cello Project, which went to the top of Amazon’s classical music chart this weekend per the group’s website. Congrats! I’ve listened to Cello Project’s CD a lot the past couple of months, and it is a movement in genre-blurring all by itself, a mix of hip-hop, folk, indie, old classical and new classical, by turns witty and moving. The PCP invited several other excellent local musicians to play on the record, so if you’ve been lagging behind the local music scene a little bit, the CD helps catch you up.

Maybe it’s simply a matter of what’s in a name. “Classical music” just doesn’t work very well for me. No thanks, I want to say. On the other hand, Mozart’s Quintet in C Major or the Mahler Nine? Huzzah! Right now, I’m listening to one of the concerts in the Worldless Music Festival, via their website (the link’s above). Is it “classical”? Not completely — Chopin and Scriabin, yes, but also French composer Colleen’s eerie music and the indie band Beirut. But it is surprising, complex, engaging to ear and mind and heart. The jump from one form to another isn’t jarring, not in these days of the iPod shuffle. And that perhaps is one of Weir’s points in the Tribune today: Part of our brain wants desperately to categorize things; the other part happily disregards those categories in practice.

As Mighty Toy points out, the editorial got lost not only by running on a Saturday but also because it was buried beneath the flurry of news about vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin (pre-grandma version) — and wasn’t that an artfully worded baby announcement, by the way.

The editorial’s gist is this: Even though most Portlanders could care less about the symphony and opera and ballet, these things are important to our economy and our sense of civic pride. The city’s most prominent performance space, downtown’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, is in need of big fixes — at least $10 million, maybe a lot more — partly because its acoustics are subpar, and it’s used 60 percent of the time by the Oregon Symphony, a group for which acoustics are exceedingly important.

So far so good. But then the editorial gets down to what really seems to excite its author: the possibility of reviving the idea of some sort of bridge between the Schnitz and the theater building that houses the Newmark and Dolores Winningstad theaters right across Main Street. It’s an idea that was part of the original 1982 blueprints for the Portland Center for the Performing Arts but was scrapped for financial reasons. And it would include permanently blocking off Main between Broadway and Park Avenue to create a plaza that would connect the two buildings.

“In the offing now,” the editorialist writes, “is an opportunity to finally connect the two buildings, to animate their too-often-dormant lobbies, to cleverly create downtown’s long-sought ‘gateway’ to its cultural district.”

OK, first a little history. When the performing arts center was being planned in the early 1980s, it was all to be built on land donated by Evans Products adjacent to Keller Auditorium, which was then known as Civic Auditorium. That plan would have created a Portland version of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts — an arts cluster near downtown but not quite at its center. And except for the old Civic, all the halls would be built new, so the acoustics and seating would be up-to-date and you wouldn’t run into any of the surprises and compromises that go along with historical renovation. (The Schnitz at the time was known as the Paramount, and was a shabby onetime vaudeville and movie house that was being used for rock ‘n’ roll concerts.)

But downtown business and political interests pushed through a swap so the new center would be housed instead along a stretch of Broadway that had become run-down, creating an economic spur to help the center of the city out of its recession doldrums. The Paramount, with all of its problems, became the key player in the switch, and the city took over the block across from Main to build its two smaller theater spaces. Economically, the plan worked like a dream (for the business district, at least: the arts center itself, and the companies that used it, still suffer because the center’s financial structure covered only the costs of construction, with no regard for maintenance or operation).

Flash forward to 2008 and the latest push to create a “gateway” to the cultural district, which also includes the Oregon Historical Society and the Portland Art Museum along the South Park Blocks. And forget for the moment the nasty realities about actually funding any sort of project, because that’s a subject far too complex for this post. As the Oregonian editorial stresses, it would require plenty of individual, corporate and foundation support in addition to tax money.

Yes, the interior of the Schnitz needs some sprucing-up, and if that concentrates on some cost-effective improvements to the acoustics, I’m all for it: Especially under the baton of music director Carlos Kalmar, clarity of technique has become a calling-card for the Oregon Symphony, and that goal of acute sonic precision begs for the best acoustics possible.

But what is possible in the Schnitz? How good can the old girl be made to sound? Before the city starts throwing money willynilly at the thing, it needs to have a pretty sound sense that the acoustic improvements will actually work — not an easy task in an old, retrofitted building. When Seattle redid its opera house a few seasons back, it basically tore the thing down to its shell and started from scratch. Is Portland willing to spend that kind of money? Even in the unlikely circumstance that it is, is the Schnitz shell capable of that sort of radical redesign? The Keller would seem a more viable candidate for extreme surgery.

Speaking of the Keller, it’s also important, while thinking about short-term improvements, to keep in sight the city’s long-term artistic needs. The Schnitz isn’t the only problematic performance space under the arts center’s control. The 3,000-seat barn that is Keller Auditorium is also inadequate to the long-term needs of its two prime local tenants, Portland Opera and Oregon Ballet Theatre. (It’s OK for the road-show musicals that would love to use it more frequently: It may be a disaster artistically, but it pencils out great financially for the touring shows.)

So, looking ahead to, say, the year 2018, the city needs an opera and ballet house of between 1,800 and 2,400 seats, designed to have excellent acoustics and sightlines — and that means a hall built fresh, not another retrofit. Such a shared space would also make it possible for the opera and ballet companies to share an orchestra (already, a lot of musicians play for both groups), a marketing strategy, and possibly even administrative and management functions.

What, then, of the symphony orchestra, which ideally would also have its own new performance space? (Again, the example of Seattle and its symphony’s Benaroya Hall suggests the possibilities.) As The Oregonian’s editorialist points out, the symphony is carrying a $6 million deficit, and paying $400,000 a year to service it, and that means it’s given up the dream of a new space and is willing to make a go of it in the Schnitz.

Well, OK, that sounds prudent. But is it? Or is spending $10 million or $20 million or $30 million to try to make the Schnitz work a little better simply gobbling up what ought to be the down payment on a new $150 million or $200 million home that would allow the orchestra to grow artistically? How long should the city defer that dream before deciding it’s a pipe dream? Some very tough financial figuring is going to have to be done here, along with a hard-headed analysis of what’s possible in the Schnitz. If the long-term goal of a new symphony hall seems realizable, money spent in the meantime to spruce up the Schnitz should be kept to a minimum. If analysis shows that a new home isn’t in the cards, then any re-do of the Schnitz should be considered organically, as a major attempt to make it work, not as piecemeal fixes.

One radical thought: Once the ballet and opera have a new home, completely redo the Keller for the symphony, and spend a modest amount reconfiguring the Schnitz for Broadway tours (problematic because of bad wing space, but conceivable), White Bird’s dance series and other uses.

So, at last, to the idea of a bridge and plaza between the Schnitz and the new-theater building.

I have to ask, why? I can’t imagine a literal bridge that would work aesthetically to tie these two dissimilar buildings together (although a brilliant architect might persuade me otherwise). More important, why do the buildings need to be tied together? As public spaces, each works admirably on its own. The lobbies of both are popular milling-around spaces, and if you’re attending, say, an Oregon Children’s Theatre show at the Newmark you don’t also have to be wandering over to the lobby space for the symphony performance. The spaces don’t need each other, at least not beyond the proximity they already share. And to truly create a fusion of the two buildings, even if it were possible, would be very expensive — and not cost-effective, considering that what needs fixing is in the performance hall itself, not in the lobby. Remember this: It’s not a real-estate deal. Real estate helps it happen, but real estate isn’t the goal. If it weren’t for the real-estate deal of 1982, we wouldn’t be talking about the fixes of 2008.

As for the plaza, I’m more amenable, but only if it can be done well for a modest amount of money. Again, what’s more important — a gathering spot, or the veracity of the performance space? Already the city routinely shuts down Main Street between Broadway and Park whenever the arts center has something going on there, creating a workable temporary plaza. What’s wrong with that arrangement, which costs basically nothing? Yes, a permanent plaza would allow for all sorts of free, open-air events, perhaps even turning the site into a more arts-oriented version of the popular Pioneer Courthouse Square. But, let’s face it: It rains in Portland. The outdoor celebration season is short. And in the context of these formal performance spaces, whatever goes on in the plaza is the side show, not the circus.

Let me suggest, though, that the Cultural District does sorely need a bridge — not between its two performance halls but between the grossly separated buildings of the Portland Art Museum, on the other side of Park Avenue. Separated by a lonely and inadequate plaza with a small, ingrown sculpture garden that practically shrinks from the street, this is a space that cries for a bold statement — not simply for the sake of making a bold statement, but because this architecturally bifurcated museum desperately needs to be reintegrated.

Visitors often simply don’t know where to enter — they often go to the big door in the North Wing, which used to be the main entrance to the old Masonic Temple that the museum annexed. The North Wing galleries are connected to the original building (and its more integrated add-on) only by a confusing underground walkway, and a lot of visitors never make the connection: They miss the North Wing galleries entirely, in the process missing some of the museum’s most provocative work. Taken as a whole — and it’s important to do that — these spaces just don’t work. Yes, please, a bridge — a bold, practical, uniting, aesthetically thrilling bridge. Bring it on.

Of course, the museum also owns the parking-lot block immediately north of the North Wing. But we’ll wait a few years to talk about that.

Such as Josh White, who is playing on the stereo (we reveal our age by using such an antiquated term), who has just finished singing and playing “Strange Fruit” (if you think Biilie Holiday’s astonishing version is the whole story, give this one a listen) and has moved on through his hilarious, haunting “One Meat Ball” and is now into his definitive “St. Louis Blues” and — hold it — a killer “Careless Love.”

And Art Scatter’s wife’s amazing ability with a dirty martini.

And the hot peppers of Hatch, New Mexico, where his 92-year-old father lived for two years in the 1920s, and one of which has entered a soup still simmering on the Art Scatter stove, and which (the town, not the pepper) this corner of Art Scatter did not visit on a recent eight-day trip to Santa Fe and environs, which experiences this corner of Art Scatter will discuss shortly. (A shout-out to Southwest Airlines, perhaps the last of the decent air carriers.)

And now Josh White is singing “Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin’ Bed,” and this corner of Art Scatter could almost die happy.

But not before recommending a few things.

Such as Alistair MacAulay’s excellent revisit to the 1948 Michael Powell/Emeric Pessenburger movie The Red Shoes, which Friend of Art Scatter First Class Martha Ullman West has recently promoted as one of the greatest movies of all time. If you’ve done what we often do on holiday weekends and let your newspaper sit untouched, do pick up your Sunday New York Times.

You’ll also find in your Sunday Times a wonderful story by J.D. Biersdorfer about a late 18th century art scam that pulled in the American painter Benjamin West and eventually other leading painters with its promise of revealing the secrets of the great Venetian ancients. It was, of course, a hoax, of P.T. Barnum proportions. A ruefully delightful tale.

Finally, check out Friend of Art Scatter D.K. Row’s challenge to the Portland art scene in the Sunday Oregonian, a piece bemoaning the city’s lack of a contemporary art center to goose the city’s art scene and push it into the national mainstream. We couldn’t agree more. The city that thinks it’s cool has a long way to go, and it’s lucky it has a few people like Row to speak the truth to its press-ageantry-lulled sense of self-satisfaction.

Happy Labor Day!

The visual “play” outside that window all week is why we come, every bit as much as entering those scenes ourselves, nudging long strands of kelp and other sea “trash” left at high tide or feeling that chilly north Pacific nipping at our ankles and, watch out, knees and thighs. Everyone who comes here is affected about the same way, yes? Sky, surf, land in perpetual rearrangement, sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic, three elastic elements readjusting to each other. You don’t have to watch every second, that’s not necessary — but every short while you look up and locate the difference, how the pattern has changed.

I’m not sure what this has to do with Titian, or specifically the two Titians that the 7th Duke of Sutherland (only seven?) is hoping to sell to “balance his portfolio.” These are great paintings, no doubt, and the Duke is willing to sell them to the UK’s National Gallery for one-third the price they would likely bring at auction, which is estimated to be 300 million pounds. And the scrambling for money and the gnashing of teeth over the public interest in keeping the paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland, where they have lived since 1945, has been intense and reminiscent of Philadelphia’s citywide debate over the future of Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic, which was headed to Arkansas until $68 million was raised to keep it where it was.

The bidding at auction for these paintings would be intense, I’m sure, if they ever hit the block. The Getty Museum would love them and has lots of resources, Las Vegas beckons, but my bet would be on the petro-dollars accumulating in the Middle East. At this point, though, if not before, the Titians cease to be paintings and become trophies, a set of particularly impressive antlers on the wall that remind the viewer more of the hunt that anything else.

The paintings, the viewers who casually or intently scan them, the marketplace. Let’s see: the paintings are the sky, the viewers are the sea, the marketplace is the land? It doesn’t work. I can’t make the parts congruent with the view outside my window. Not even close. This isn’t to denigrate the paintings: Diana and Actaeon is fabulous and we wonder, does Actaeon know what’s coming? The punishment that awaits him for viewing the goddess? The trespass he has committed? Or is he, alive in the world, simply bamboozled by the view he has stumbled upon? I like that: Alive in the world one minute, turned into a stag the next, and then slaughtered by one’s own dogs.

Well, I like the “alive in the world” bit at least, because that’s what the painting reminds me of. So I suppose would the antlers and definitely the view outside the window at the beach. I, the observer now and the actor later, am alive in the world. And when I encounter the goddess, my negotiation will go better.

Benjamin’s Angel of History, based on an interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, stands breathless, back turned to the future, watching as the wreckage of the past piles up at his feet. Benjamin was chief forager in this cultural dustheap. I’ve spent the past week browsing an intriguing book, Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (Verso), drawn from the salvage of Benjamin’s odd collections and catalogs: notes, photos, picture postcards, toys, news articles and lists—endless lists, including, charmingly, the first words and phrases spoken by his son Stefan. Loads of it is reproduced (paper yellowed, cracked, water-stained, but without the archival dust that would have me wheezing and choking in a minute).

A short note titled “Excavation and Memory” contains this bit of Scatter lore:

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

These are images, treasures in a collector’s gallery. But it is not mindless scattering (and conjoining). There’s the time, place and circumstance of good historical research. We must mark “the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up.” The investigative report on authentic memory documents the strata of origination, “but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.”

Fragments, shards, shored against ruin, but tagged, referenced and carbon-dated.

(Compare the origin of Art Scatter.)

*Image: ”Angelus Novus”, Paul Klee (1920).

Much of the time, even for the broadminded, variant spelling is the same as incorrect spelling. It’s no big deal, if you whiff on “accommodate” — though I’m about to argue the other side of this in a moment — because there’s no punishment, just a little hiccup in a reader’s mind as she encounters the misspelling, restores the missing “m” (the most frequent error) and moves on. She’ll never trust your spelling of a tricky word again, but that’s not a major consequence. We’re on the Internet for crying out loud! And she understands that. Don’t worry, she doesn’t trust us either…

The keyword here is “variant.” I bring it up because an article by Frank Furedi on the website Spiked (which we found via ArtsJournal, of course). Furedi suggests that a movement exists to “forgive” common spelling errors in British universities (such as truely) by treating them simply as variant spellings. No harm, no foul; we knew what the student meant.

Furedi argues that while some pragmatic grounds may exist for this pardon, it sends entirely the wrong signal to students:

“My principal objection to ‘variant spelling’ is that it reinforces the pernicious idea that children and young people today cannot be expected to meet the difficult challenge of learning how to use language correctly.”

And you know where this is headed, right? The insistence by some dogmatic educators that the “truth” like spelling is relative, or variant. Here you go:

In essence, variant spelling is a true companion to the idea of variant truths. Contemporary cultural life has become estranged from the idea of Truth with a capital T.

This is the most tiresome argument ever, and it makes me want to spell argument “arguement” just in protest. How are those Big T truths working out for you, Mr. Furedi? I’m sure all your misspellings are simply typos, right? And the punishment for those academics who think that there’s something provisional about all their conclusions? How about eternity in the National Spelling Bee?

Back to accommodate, or accomodate, if you prefer the most frequent variant. It’s Latin, originally, accommodare, and the translation that several online Latin to English dictionaries suggest is to adapt. Which is nice and Darwinian. Peel it back a little more, and there’s commodus — convenience, suitability, comfort, advantage — and commodius (roomy, spacious). Also commode, which gets us into problems with Big T truth, because it’s either a cabinet, a toilet or a cupboard containing a washbowl (via the Free Dictionary). All of these can help build our understanding of accommodate, take our sentence in a suitable direction, give it amplitude, room to grow and adapt to current conditions. For me, within accommodate it is entirely possible that ample lurks. I spell it “correctly” to suggest that possibility, though it is also possible to “barely accommodate,” as we know.

So spelling accommodate correctly is a pragmatic decision, both because it connects the speller (namely, me) to the largest possible audience AND because of the power of suggestion — through the roots of the word, through its history of use in English — contained within the word. And that makes it a better description, insofar as letters “describe” words, because it’s potentially more useful. Most of the time, the surface is all that matters, and in those cases variants are almost never a problem, unless they are SO variant that the word fails to “read.”

OK, we’ve defended spelling, and we are feeling VERY Tory about it all, very 19th century. And so we quote from We Magazine’s Ten Futures by Stephen Downes (via Digg) just to shake off the cobwebs. The article gets very futuristic, predicting, for example, a peanut butter jar that tells you what jam is available in the fridge, a nomadic existence, hologram doubles, the withering away of the State and, naturally, cyborgs. Oh, and one last thing: the disappearance of written language. A wizard from Harry Potter might send a message by a talking owl, for example. Here goes:

When sentential utterances (words and sentences) are abandoned as a means of communication, it will become more natural to convey thoughts and information in multi-modal multi-sensory artifacts. We are beginning to see these even today with things like lolcats and YouTube videos. As our powers of expression (and the tools that helps us) become more sophisticated, we will create complex multi-faced forms of expression, the most advanced of which will (almost?) qualify as ‘life’ and will most certainly qualify as ‘art.’

Mr. Downes is imagining the densest possible representations of objects and actions — at least they are there if you need them — in a “multimedia iconology” that would store vast amounts of info (from personal preferences to the current market price to the story of Johnny Appleseed). “May I have an apple” is just the beginning of a long train of possibilities, sort of like Google, except vastly better tailored to the individuals involved. It’s exhausting to even think about, and presumably, much of the time, the simple request and a simple reply is all that’s necessary, sort of like clicking on the top item of a Google search response list.

Would a “multimedia iconology” accommodate accommodate? I suspect so, somehow. Would the seriously primitive information inside the spelling inhabit the icon, too. Perhaps. But for thousands of years, we have accommodated ourselves to sparse amounts of information. We have fingered it, used it, learned to embed it, passed it along. Now, we are faced with a glut of information and in the future, possibly, an organized glut of information, a multitude of truths, of contexts, of meanings that we artfully arrange to communicate what’s on our minds or hearts or bellies. In this universe, the spellings of words simply aren’t going to matter much.

That doesn’t mean we at Art Scatter are going to let our guard down and employ variants willynilly. Well, no more than usual, no more than the occasional willynilly which my spellcheck hopes to disallow, along with spellcheck itself. But someday we are hoping to send out beautiful peacocks that will communicate with you via a fabulous puppet show, and then we’ll be able to stop all this infernal typing.

The pyramid shape has its attractions, of course, and this one, the Ziggurat designed by Timelinks, an environmental design firm in Dubai, will one day be inhabited by one million people if the press materials are to be believed. One million. And it’s designed to be carbon neutral. I’m not sure about the scale, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be on the bottom rung of this particular pyramid. The challenge in sand? That pointy top, not to mention those cool reflective surfaces. I am pretty sure the sand version is mostly carbon neutral, though, at least when it’s in full operating order.

This building is not a proposal, it is under construction in Dubai and will become the tallest building in the world, at least until the next tallest building comes along. The lower 37 floors will be an Armani hotel, then apartments, then corporate offices, up to 160 floors. Unlike the pyramid, in this building, the Burj Dubai, I think I would prefer to be near the bottom. The construction boom in Dubai is so amazing that it won’t really be such an oddity when it’s done.

To sandcastle it, I have considered the dribble technique, which employs a sort of slurry of sand and water that you drizzle on a base. It looks pretty Gothic and can reach great heights without collapsing. Well, the illusion of great heights maybe. I think I do enjoy the views of the Pacific off the Oregon coast more than I would those of the Persian Gulf from the Burj Dubai. Why is it that I consider the proposed Ziggurat more “reasonable” than this tower? And don’t get me wrong: I think the pyramid thing is quite scary, just from a social “engineering” point of view. I am amazed at how BIG they are thinking in Dubai, though. Like China now, or the U.S. at the turn of the 20th Century, they are inventing cities out of whole cloth, except they are less like cities and more like machines. And that’s where the scary part comes in. We might note that press reports indicate that skilled carpenters on the site make less than $8 dollars a day while office space in the tower is fetching $4,000 per square foot.

Now we are getting somewhere at last. It’s not just that the Burj Mubarak al-Kabir, the tall building that’s the centerpiece of Kuwait’s proposed new City of Silk, could be taller than Burj Dubai. Or that it’s part of a brand new city of 700,000. Oh no. It’s the moat. And even a bad sandcastle engineer can do a moat. What can I tell you about the City of Silk that you can’t read on Wikipedia. Frankly, absolutely nothing, except maybe that I’ve read that Kuwait intends to connect it to the other major cities of the Middle East by (presumably) high-speed rail — Baghdad, Riyadh, Damascus, Amman, Jerusalem.

Again, I like the gesture. You are sitting at the beginning of the 21st century on a massive pile of oil money, and you are thinking about the future, about how to be in the middle of a future that may not involve oil, and maybe you gamble BIG on the biggest infrastructure you can imagine, the technology that’s the most forward-leaning. And to us, sitting here in a prosaic little regional center on the Pacific, namely Portland, it looks amazingly futuristic and shiny and breath-taking in its audacity. Maybe we envy that. But then we apply our overlays — which are pragmatic, green, demand the participation of stakeholders, seek a human scale. And these cities and buildings in their brightest artists’ renderings seem monstrous, dystopian, at odds with the very creativity that made them possible in the first place. They look back, not forward, and like sandcastles built on the water’s edge, you can’t help but wonder what happens when the tide starts rolling in.

I don’t get the “relative simplicity” part. The behavior cues and patterns in Austen are WAY more complex than our own, which can often be reduced to the Dirty Harry aphorism: “Make my day.” Other Brit-TV classics debuting this fall include Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Little Dorrit. People, take my advice. Wait for the miniseries!

“Classical music is always acceptable to authority because it cannot overtly challenge power with subversive ideas or disturbing representations.” This quote comes near the beginning of Nicholas Spice’s review of Greed by Nobelist Elfriede Jelinek in the London Review of Books in the June 5 edition. The link won’t get you there — LRB restricts its content online, except for print subscribers, which I would be except that a Scatter friend drops me off four or five months-worth every four of five months. Consumer advice from Spice: The English translation of Jelinek’s book is not good. Which I took to mean: Wait for the miniseries!

Back to the quote. The context is that Jelinek, possibly the most radical and outsider of contemporary novelists, began her creative life as a classical musician at the urging (or insistence) of her domineering (”monstrous”) mother. Jelinek went to an important Vienna music conservatory to study organ and eventually had a nervous breakdown, from which she emerged a writer. Spice makes this make perfect sense — Austria “used” classical music as part of its efforts to cleanse itself after the Nazi year. I get that. But to me, classical music, some classical music anyway, is about the most radical form out there these days, and not just obviously “disturbing” modern composers such as Shostakovich, either. The Authority allows us to listen even to Mozart at its peril, because Mozart leads us to thought and thinking breeds dissidence. Let alone Mahler. Not to spoil Spice’s essay in any way because it couldn’t be more tasty.

“Who’s the leader of the club/that’s made for you and me?” We leave the Boomers among us with this bit of doggerel lodged in their heads. For those who aren’t Boomers, the answer to the singing question is “Mickey Mouse,” the venerable symbol of the Walt Disney Co. The LA Times’ Joseph Menn, however, has looked into the copyright on Mickey and found some reason to doubt Disney’s claims on Mickey’s earliest manifestation. He also reveals the corporate hardball Disney plays to “protect” itself and take from others. In general, I believe that restrictions on “intellectual property” tend to be too long and too limiting, that our copyrights and patents as they stand restrict creativity and inquiry and that the legal system being what it is, it allows the strong to run roughshod over the weak, no matter what the strength of the claims of the weak. We may be expanding that thought in the future. In the meantime, Menn’s story is enough to make you want to free the rat.

Over and out and off to the beach!