Good news for travelers to that sprawling town on Puget Sound. Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company isn’t going out of business, after all: It’s relocating in the spring from Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill. Melissa Allison has the story in the Seattle Times.
At 20,000 square [...]
A quarter-century after a literary landmark in Oregon, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Let’s see. Urban/rural split, with a vengeance. A recession in the city, which means a depression in the small towns and countryside. Newcomers wide-eyed with enthusiasm over their new home; old-timers narrow-eyed [...]
“How could they say ‘partial’ nudity?” Gentleman No. 1 asked wryly. “They were totally naked.”
Gentlewoman No. 1 nodded in agreement. “Doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“Well,” Gentleman No. 2 replied, “they [...]
E-mail to colleague first thing: “I won’t be at the office this morning. I’m getting new toilets.”
And just in time. The hard-to-lift boxes had to get out of the Large Smelly Boymobile before Dungeons & Dragons Dad [...]
Less than a week after I left my decades-long job on May 1, I found myself in hell-and-gone suburbs shopping for the perfect soap dispensers. And pillows. And those fluffy egg-crate-looking things that are supposed to make beds gooshier.
I knew this was weird. I [...]
Mrs. Scatter only reports in short e-mail bursts these days. Her long-winded farcical spiels have been reduced to quick knock-off observations. This morning she prepared to leave for the office …
She coiffed her hair in a perfect rumple, slipped [...]
Mr. Scatter has been inside more theaters over the years than Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and he is sometimes haunted by what he sees — not the plays so much as the spaces themselves.
Actors are a hardy lot. Give [...]
Today the Scatter Family Land Schooner sets sail for the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula, where the winds whip westerly and the mountain peaks glisten like gold. (Actually the winds tend to blow [...]
Art Scatter’s cup runneth over. Well, it’s not our cup, actually; it belongs to the [Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza [...]
“What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it, Brick? Didn’t you notice the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity [...]
Things have changed in Bellingham, Washington, since I was a kid. Thanks to artdaily.org for this report on Saturday’s grand opening of the Lightcatcher, the showpiece of an $18.3 million addition and refurbishment to [...]
Remember the old days, when Cadillac-sized opera singers planted their feet among the scenery and belted beautiful music with no thought to the dramatic possibilities of the opera? Art Scatter’s senior correspondent Martha Ullman West does, and she shudders at the memory. What’s more, she sees the old style’s residual [...]
Mr. Scatter had coffee today with Deborah Elliott (actually, she had tea, something in a purply-roseish hue) and she reminded him that the 16th annual Sitka Art Invitational Exhibit and Sale is coming up this weekend.
I shouldn’t have let it slip my mind. This annual bash in Miller Hall at [...]
All right, I know. It’s way past time to get off this Portland Opera kick: Puddletown’s got a lot more fish to fry.
BUT …
How can I not mention Christopher Mattaliano and his big splash (or rather, his show’s big splash) in the front-page centerpiece of [...]
Above: Sue Perry Olson, dentalium cap, Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw, 2002. Inset: Chooktoot’s doctor regalia, Klamath, ca. 1900. Photos: Frank Miller
On Portland’s South Park Blocks the big [...]
It’s called, I think, charisma. The dress doesn’t hurt, either. One of the pleasures of being part of Friday night’s blogathon at the opening of Portland Opera’s [...]
10:10 p.m., this joint is emptying out.
I think they want to kick us out.
A couple of things first:
In the film that Glass adapted, Cocteau was revitalizing the “fairy tale,” which even in the 1940s and 1950s had been relegated [...]
9:53 p.m.: After the show, after the applause, after the standing ovation.
“I actually liked it a lot,” Mrs. Scatter said. “I found it surprisingly moving.”
Yes, it is. This is an opera that’s hardly been produced since its debut in 1993, and [...]
Photo: French poster for Jean Cocteau’s film “Orphee,” the inspiration for Philip Glass’s opera. Wikimedia Commons
8:38 p.m., Intermission: No smoke yet, but lots of mirrors.
One of the coolest things about this opera is [...]
6:14 p.m. Friday, Nov. 6, Keller Auditorium, in the lobby: One hour and 16 minutes to showtime, the show being the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’s Orphee, by Portland Opera.
A crowd’s assembled outside the doors, early birds waiting [...]
As the old joke goes, tonight’s the night!
Art Scatter regulars might have noted that it’s been Philip Glass Week in Portland, and tonight at Keller Auditorium his 1993 opera Orphee opens in its West [...]
“I’ve never been very interested in film,” Philip Glass said one morning this week at a long table set up in a rehearsal hall in the Portland Opera studios. “I don’t go to movies a lot.”
An odd confession from Glass, the [...]
… into the next great adventure of his life.
Barry, who had the idea of Art Scatter in the first place and was the doctor on duty who slapped it on the bottom in the delivery room and sent it off squawking into the world, has told his many friends and [...]
Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s esteemed global correspondent for the terpsichorean arts, files this report from last night’s action in the balletic trenches of Mississippi — that is, North Mississippi Street in Portland. Sounds like a good place to move your feet tonight or tomorrow:
Last night [...]
Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the still unfinished Maryhill Museum in 1926.
Eventually the world seems to show up on the doorstep of the Maryhill Museum of Art.
Which is a [...]
ABOVE: “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Nicolas Poussin, 1650-51. Musee de Louvre, Paris. INSET: Philip Glass, composer of “Orphee.” Wikimedia Commons.
DON’T LOOK BACK. Bob Dylan gave that sage advice, possibly after considering the experiences of Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt [...]
Mr. Scatter anticipates an evening of answering doorbells and dispensing mass quantities of solidified high fructose corn syrup when the lights go down tonight. But there are other, possibly better, ways to celebrate Fright Night. A visual selection, not one of which has to do with overturning outhouses:
[...]
My younger Large Smelly Boy plans birthday parties with the frightening precision of an engineer. Felix Unger? Meet Martha Stewart.
He begins months in advance, poring over magazines and listing all the activities he wants to do and all the recipes he wants to [...]
Sartre’s “No Exit” on the tilt, at Imago Theatre. Photo: Jerry Mouawad
Who wrote that play?
I don’t mean, did the modestly talented actor Will Shakespeare really write all those great stageworks, or was he just a convenient [...]
Haiqiong Deng, zheng (but not Dungeons & Dragons) virtuoso.
While my brain has been on sizzle in other realms of the arts world, apparently a blog has been going on in my own house. The entire world can [...]
Art Scatter’s indefatigable chief dance correspondent Martha Ullman West, fresh from a sojourn in the Big Apple, hit the ground running on her return to Portland. In a week and a half she took in the [...]
For every now, there is a then. China, of course, has many thens, but two are on my mind right now: the then of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which might have outdone Stalin in its attempt to eradicate culture and [...]
A moment, please, to remember comedian Soupy Sales, who is with us no more, although the image of whipped cream cascading thickly from some passing celebrity’s pie-toss’d kisser remains vivid in our mind’s eye.
Sales, born Milton Supman on Jan. 8, 1926, in Franklinton, North Carolina, [...]
This morning I discovered that the venerable (blogospherically speaking) PDX Writer Daily has closed shop and many of its perpetrators have begun a magazine, Propeller.
A project of the Portland State University Writing Center, PDX Writer Daily had taken a long summer sabbatical that stretched into fall, [...]
UPDATE: The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley has posted a terrific, insightful review of of “August: Osage County” on Oregon Live. Give it a read.
There are many wonderful things about Steppenwolf Theatre’s touring production of Tracy Letts‘ August: [...]
UPDATE: Also read David Stabler’s feature on Stephen Marc Beaudoin’s adaptation of “The Beggar’s Opera” in Tuesday’s Oregonian. David digs a little more deeply into the social politics of the adaptation. See his story here on Oregon Live, or with bigger versions of Brian Lee’s rehearsal photos in The [...]
Above and below: “Chi,” by Wen Wei Wang, Northwest Dance Project, summer 2009. The Project dances downtown Friday and Saturday. Photos: Blaine Covert
It’s not all about Oregon Ballet Theatre.
Sure, the OBT story’s fascinating. Scrappy little company grows [...]
Joe Btfsplk, honorary grand marshal of Portland’s High Fashion Parade.
I was shocked — shocked! — this morning when I sat down to make my daily blog rounds and discovered Mighty Toy Cannon’s report at Culture Shock on Portland’s rankings in Travel + Leisure magazine’s latest assessment [...]
Once again Art Scatter is pleased to have the considerations of dance critic Martha Ullman West appear in our august corner of virtual space. Martha, who also reviews ballet for The Oregonian, is working on a biography of dancer and [...]
“Did you notice how the first lady soloist started dancing just with her hands?”
Intermission had just begun Saturday night at Oregon Ballet Theatre’s season-opening performance, which had so far consisted of the company premiere of George Balanchine’s green dream of a dance, Emeralds. Mrs. Scatter had [...]
A day before the season opener, the turmoil at Oregon Ballet Theatre has taken an unsurprising turn.
Jon Ulsh, the embattled executive director, is out. Artistic director Christopher Stowell picks up some of his role, and chief operating officer [...]
Portland loves process — a politician here can barely duck out for coffee without holding several public meetings first to thrash out which coffee shop she should hit in which geographically underserved corner of the city — and that extends to its arts scene.
[...]
ABOVE: “Days at the Cotton Candy #4,” copyright Maleonn, in China Design Now. INSET BELOW: “Graphic Design in China,” poster for the 1992 exhibition, copyright Chen Shaohua. Both photos courtesy Portland Art Museum.
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Quick notes on a Thursday evening:
CHINA DESIGN [...]
Above: Macbeth (Peter Macon) confronts a ghostly apparition in Ashland. Inset below: Diana (Emily Sophia Knapp) meets with Bertram (Danforth Comins). Photos: Jenny Graham/Oregon Shakespeare Festival/2009. [...]
Seriously. That’s how it all started.
I was minding my own business, blissfully enjoying the summer sunshine and occasionally writing goofy off-topic stuff for a blog that isn’t even mine.
Sure, I had plans. Big plans. I had planned to [...]
Today, after a matinee performance of All’s Well That Ends Well, the extended Scatter Family leaves Ashland and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for dinner, bed and breakfast at the old Wolf Creek Tavern north of Grants Pass before a Labor Day drive back [...]
Above: Truffaldino, the servant of two masters (Mark Bedard), takes a break from his dizzying existence. Inset below: The old tightwad Pantalone (David Kelly) is overjoyed at the prospect of receiving more gold. Photos: Jenny Graham/Oregon Shakespeare Festival/2009.
Every [...]
Above: Vilma Silva is soon-to-be-dumped Queen Katherine and Elijah Alexander is the charismatic king in “Henry VIII.” Photo: Jenny Graham/Oregon Shakespeare Festival/2009. Inset below: Portrait of [...]
Parnassus on Wheels, by Christopher Morley, 1917. Illustration by David Gorsline, 1955 edition, J.P. Lippincott Company.
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Mount Parnassus, as you’ll recall, is the home of the Muses, rising above Delphi in Greece. For that reason the word [...]
