Scatter happy holidays edition: puzzling out the season
Here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we’re used to friends and associates grumping about Christmas and the holidays. “Bah,” they say. And again, “Humbug.” A seasonal deficit disorder afflicts our closest circles of civilization, and we’ve learned to grump along with the chorus, just to keep things running smoothly.
But the truth is, we sort of like the holiday season. Yesterday afternoon the Scatter Inner Circle brought home its Christmas tree and got the lights and some of the ornaments artfully arranged before settling in to watch Christmas in the Clouds, an affable, low-key romantic comedy about life at an American Indian-operated resort lodge, with terrific wintry scenery from the grounds of the Sundance Institute in Utah. Graham Greene plays a vegetarian chef who tries to scare all of his customers out of ordering meat, and M. Emmett Walsh plays a foul-tempered drunk who has a change of heart, and the DVD arrived from friends in New Mexico who sent it just because they’d enjoyed it and wanted to share it, and that’s kind of what the holidays are about, isn’t it?
Of course Mr. Scatter is way behind on shopping (and several things need to be sent, which requires the sort of logistical hoop-jumping that often ties Mr. Scatter’s brain, if not his stomach, into knots). And many dozen cookies remain to be baked: The Small Large Smelly Boy insists. Never mind. It’ll all get done. Holiday CDs are pretty much in continual loop here at AS world headquarters (we’ve been listening to 16th and 17th century carols from the Baltimore Consort) and some members of the inner brain trust have been doing serious damage to the national eggnog supply.
The picture of Santa Claus above is a detail from a jigsaw puzzle assembled over Thanksgiving weekend in Port Angeles, Washington, mainly by a junior member of the Scatter clan. The corporate brain trust discovered a shop in downtown P.A. that specializes in mostly used jigsaw puzzles — and actually assembles every puzzle before offering it for sale, to make sure no pieces are missing. It’s apparently an obsession. This particular puzzle comes from a little artisanal outfit in Kansas City called Hallmark. If our records show that you’ve been good, we’ll run a photo of the whole completed puzzle before the season ends.
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Among other things, December is a month of beautiful music, and in Portland there is far more of it than a person can hope to take in. We regret, for instance, missing the medieval caroling of the women’s ensemble In Mulieribus, Portland’s answer to the Anonymous 4, and London’s Tallis Scholars, who know how to put the pedal to the pedagogy and make it soar.
On Friday night the Scatter clan braved the threat of ice and trekked to the Aladdin Theatre for Holidays with the Trail Band. It was well worth it. We hadn’t seen the Trail Band in a few years, and it was worth making the reacquaintance. The Trail Band is the baby of Marv and Rindy Ross, who back in the 1980s had a shot of national success as leaders of the pop group Quarterflash, and earlier were the core of the terrific bar band Seafood Mama. Since starting the Trail Band 16 years ago to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail, they’ve been digging deeper and wider into the roots of popular music, and the result is a smart brand of musical eclecticism that is what it is and doesn’t really care what the tastemakers think.
The holiday show featured a great lineup including the highly talented guitarist Cal Scott (who’s also blowing a mean cornet these days); Phil and Gayle Neuman of the Oregon Renaissance Band, who bring the likes of pennywhistles and flageolets to the party; fine fiddler Skip Parente; the subtle and attentive drummer/percusussionist Dan Stueber; and Mick Doherty, who rescues the hammered dulcimer from the yellowing pages of history and revives it as an exciting contemporary instrument. Plus, guest shots from actor/comedian Scott Parker, who gives the nativity story a hilarious spin; flash guitarist Doug Fraser, the Rosses’ old Quarterflash sidekick, who rocks and roars through a funky little ditty called Mustang Santa; and the hugely talented Michele Mariana, whose warm, deeply measured Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas brought pulses in the house to a halt.
Try as we might, we just can’t grump about a show like that.
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On Saturday night Mr. Scatter and his younger lad went to Northwest Children’s Theater and School to see the company’s musical play Narnia, based on C.S. Lewis’s children’s fantasy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A small review ran in Monday morning’s Oregonian; here’s the link to my much longer online review on Oregon Live, in which I touch lightly on the phenomenon of Christian parable in 20th/21st century kids’ lit, from Tolkien to Lewis to L’Engle to Rowling.
How, you might wonder if you followed the link, did Robert Frost get into the mix of the longer essay? Credit goes to the book group with which I’m loosely associated, an erudite and genial collection of lawyers, writers, classical musicians and even an actor who gather once a month to eat, drink and do lit talk. One member happens to be a noted Morris dancer; a couple have been getting their jollies recently by writing dueling sonnets based on rousing biblical tales.
December in this group is poetry month, and this year’s reading choice was Frost. So the ice man was fresh in my mind when I sat down to write about Lewis’s ice queen, and I discovered that Frost fit the discussion neatly. Fire and ice, baby. You can’t get much more Narnian than that.
And, oh yes: Father Christmas puts in an appearance in Lewis’s tale. He’s very welcome, thank you.
December 14th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Discovering “Fire and Ice” was one of those life-altering moments for me. I always hoped I might someday capture in words those competing feelings of awe and dismay and the sense that my world had shifted rather more than I liked, but my poetical (or fictional) talents don’t seem to be up to the task. Maybe that’s why I’ve turned to criticism. When I’m tenured and the uni newsblog interviews me to fill some space on the internet, I’ll tell them that my illustrious career is all due to being dumbfounded by
Robert Frost.
December 15th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Frost is out of fashion these days, but it was good to make his reacquaintance. He’s the antithesis of an academic poet; his poems are usually complete in themselves, without a lot of reference to other literature but a lot to the physical and metaphysical worlds. His directness makes him a true people’s poet, almost in the tradition of the old balladeers, and most of his readers never notice the intense skill with which he constructs those seemingly casual observances.
Here’s another Frost poem, this one with some allusions, and a surprising tone, and certainly seasonal significance. It doesn’t have the astonishing density and impact of “Fire and Ice,” but then, few poems do. It’s from his 1928 collection “West-Running Brook,” and it seems to come from a dark night of the soul. Somehow it makes me think about Afghanistan:
THE PEACEFUL SHEPHERD
If heaven were to do again,
And on the pasture bars
I leaned to line the figures in
Between the dotted stars
I should be tempted to forget,
I fear, the Crown of Rule,
The Scales of Trade, the Cross of Faith,
As hardly worth renewal.
For these have governed in our lives,
And see how men have warred.
The Cross, the Crown, the Scales may all
As well have been the Sword.
December 15th, 2009 at 10:41 am
For AS’s highest paid columnist, this particular yuletide has been, so far, a well-rewarded search for complexity in what has become simplistic cliche–I refer of course to the Nutcracker, which for years I have viewed as a seasonal penance for choosing the lucrative profession of dance critic. But my colleague Christopher Caines, writing as a guest columnist for the blog Seeing Things on Artsjournal.com, whose examination of two versions of the Nutcracker I read after I saw Oregon Ballet Theatre’s rendition of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, further opened my eyes to some aspects of the piece that I found myself thinking about during the opening performance–namely just how complex the ballet is, because of the degree to which it is an expression of Balanchine’s religious faith as well as an homage to his Maryinsky training and the 19th century imperial tradition, some of its solo variations, Dewdrop for example, which Yuka Iino made into a miracle of speed and clarity and musicality on opening day, tailored to 20th and 21st century American dancers. (Iino is Japanese, but she’s got the Balanchine style down pat.) This is a roundabout way of coming back to Robert Frost–because his poetry rhymes and the poems are often, like post-modern dance come to think of it, about ordinary people doing ordinary things–the road not taken, for example–he has indeed gone out of fashion, a pity, because he’s really writing about some very complex things, see The Peaceful Shepherd above.
Mr. Scatter didn’t mention Christmas cards, in which I can take great pleasure if they’re pretty and take me down memory (not candy cane) lane–I received one yesterday of birds, flipped it over to see who had created it and damned if it wasn’t by Adolph Dehn, an American painter of my father’s generation who was one of the witnesses at my parents’ wedding in 1934.
Merry Christmas everyone, enjoy it!
December 16th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
When I first came across Fire and Ice s a high school junior, it was the most perfect little package of words I could imagine. I think I was a little obsessed with it for a while, even setting it to music, I’m a little embarrassed to admit.
Pet Peeve Alert: Skip the rest to preserve your holiday buzz.
Doug Fraser would have to be the Rosses’ (not the Ross’s) sidekick: Ross because that’s their name, es because there’s two of them, ‘ because it’s a possessive, and no trailing “s” because the possessor ends with an “s.”
Sorry. It’s like a disease. I’ve learned to live with it, like most of my family members.
Happy Holidays! Does that help?
December 17th, 2009 at 12:16 am
David, “most perfect little package” really gets at the genius of “Fire and Ice.” It’s so densely packed — not a wasted word, and every word carries extreme weight.
On the Rosses’ as opposed to the Ross’s: Of course, you’re absolutely correct. As a former copy editor, Mr. Scatter is abashed.
I’m going to fix this untoward error in the post. (And, yes, “Happy Holidays!” does help — thanks.)
December 18th, 2009 at 12:15 am
“FORMER copy editor”…you mean there’s a cure?
Hallelujah! I’m treatable!
December 18th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Maybe I should have said, “former PROFESSIONAL copy editor.” In other words, I actually got PAID to be picky! Later I became a mere professional writer and thus became picked upon (much of the time, for good reason).
It would have been hard to stay a copy editor. I split infinitives, end sentences with prepositions, and sometimes begin sentences with the word “And” or “But.” I consider none of those practices sinful.