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Visual Arts: Books: Wine:
Plays,
Poetry & Late Night Creativity surges through town this weekend, when both LCC and Lord Leebrick offer new plays; the UO presents a groundbreaking work directed by a stellar former student, and Saturday bookends with high quality silliness early at Tsunami and late night at LLTC. The new play at LCC, Montana 1948, written and directed by Patrick Torelle, is based on a book of the same name written by Larry Watson. Montana 1948 is one of two books selected for LCC's Reading Together project. The project is part of a nationwide plan on college campuses to engage faculty, staff and students in activities and discussions centered around a chosen work. Two closely linked books were picked: Montana 1948, fiction, and Privilege, Power and Difference by Allan Johnson, nonfiction. Both explore the subject of diversity, the theme of LCC's Spring Conference. "The overriding purpose of the Reading Together project is to create community," says Ellen Cantor, LCC English instructor and Reading Together project coordinator. Throughout the year, multi-disciplinary activities — class discussions, dance, fine art, lectures, guest speakers, author visits, movies, student presentations and service projects — will center around each work. Montana 1948 is a tale of love and courage,
of power abused, and of the terrible choice Montana 1948 plays for two weekends only, beginning this Friday, Nov. 7 and continuing Nov. 8, 13, 14 and 15 at 8 pm and Sunday, Nov. 9 at 2 pm in the Blue Door Theatre, main campus. A discussion follows each performance. The play contains adult subject matter. $10/$8 sr./stu. 463-5202. Another adaptation launches Lord Leebrick's New Play Reading Series at 7:30 pm Sunday, Nov. 9, with a staged reading of Robert Urbinati's West Moon Street. The play is adapted from the short story "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" by Oscar Wilde. LLTC Artistic Director Craig Willis directs and describes West Moon Street as, "a predictably witty farce with echoes of the great Wildean repartee." The reading is free. Urbinati, in town to guest direct University Theatre's production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, is a New York-based writer and director who received his Ph.D. in theater arts from the UO in 1994. In a nutshell, Urbinati took off for New York and hit the big time. He is an associate artistic director of the Queen's Theatre in the Park and has two one-act plays successfully running in Omaha, Neb., where he directs on a regular basis. Urbinati also directed the off-Broadway production of Lost by Kirk Bromley and Jessica Grace Wing, as well as many other NY shows — simply too many to list here — and has received numerous awards.
Urbinati's version/vision of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest opens this weekend in Robinson Theatre. Adapted from Ken Kesey's novel, the epic is highly comic on the surface but delves into serious issues of control and the individual spirit. Urbinati has come up with his own distinctive interpretative take on the material, faithful to the adaptation, but incorporating more of Kesey's hallucinatory vision. The concept of "altered states of mind" will be reflected in the production's set, lights and sound design. Cuckoo's Nest was Kesey's (who was born and raised in Oregon and graduated from the UO) first novel, published in 1962. In 1959, Kesey underwent dramatic changes after volunteering for an experiment involving hallucinogenic drugs. He then took a job working the night shift at a mental ward and came to realize that the patients weren't mentally unstable but rather just more individualized than society was willing to accept. Parts of the novel were written while he was under the influence of LSD and peyote and many of the characters are inspired by the patients he met on his job. The play adaptation, by Dale Wasserman, was first presented on Broadway in 1963. It was then drastically revised and reappeared off-Broadway in 1971. The novel was also adapted to a very successful movie in 1975. Cuckoo's Nest opens Nov. 7 and continues Nov. 8, 13, 14, 15, 21 and 22 at 8 pm and Nov. 16 at 2 pm. The Nov. 16 performance benefits Shelter Care. Tickets are $12 /$9 sr., UO Faculty/Staff and non-UO students,/$7 for Youth (6-18) and $5 for UO students. Call 346-4363. A symposium on the writings of Ken Kesey runs Friday, Nov. 14 through Sunday, Nov. 16. More on that next week.
To get your Saturday evening off to a rollicking start, be at Tsunami Books at 5 pm for Joe Cronin and John Dooley's "Two Micks Short of a Pint — Poetry, Tall Tales, Fibs." The two Irish-American poets, both National Slam Poetry vets, will read from their humorous works. Expect a lively performance. It's free.
After your 8 pm performance at UO, LCC, ACE, LLTC (don't forget about Live Matinee, which we told you about last week); or wherever else you might be, don't go home and go to sleep; nope, stay up for Late Night at Lord Leebrick. Yes, late night is back, and even though sometimes the skits/acts have really sucked in the past, it's always been fun, at least if you're a theater geek, and so cheap — this one is "pay what you will" — all you really have to lose is a little sleep. And who needs that? But there's good reason to believe this particular incarnation will be worthwhile. Conceived by performance artist Mario Tucci, the late night series is planned for the second Saturday of every month starting at 11:30 pm, and will feature a different host each month, as well as a variety of musical, dance and other performance acts. This Saturday boasts Lord Leebrick and Impact! Arts co-founder Randy Lord back in the space as the host, which is just simply cool for those who follow theater. Total performer Allison Rickenbaugh tap dances to Frank Zappa's "The Black Page #1," a drum kit solo. Amy Impellizzeri, and Stuart "Lips" Philips perform Contact Improvisation. Writer, dancer, and TApROoT founder David Koteen tells the story, "The Killing of Small Fishes;" Heidi Beierle performs a monologue and Mario Tucci explores the world of dreams. The music is provided by jazz bassist Rob Kohler.
Tickle
Your Fancy What culture doesn't have a tradition of masks? All over the world masks are associated with religious rituals, carnival, theater, opera and dance. From Switzerland to India, people hang masks on their doors to ward off the evil eye. Whether lofty or low, spiritual or earthy, serious or playful, the fascination masks exert has deep, primitive roots in our psychology. The mask-bearer has permission to be another, and through masks another world is allowed to enter our own.
Whatever their function, masks also possess an aesthetic dimension, and the latter is primary at Karin Clarke's current Mask Invitational exhibit, for which the gallery invited 11 local artists to create masks. The result is a playful array of masks bearing the stamps of widely different imaginations. Ceramics: Faye Nakamura's exquisitely carved and painted ceramic masks include two large-format, full-head masks, one inspired by Japan, the other by Egypt, and five smaller eye-masks. All are decorated with incised motifs (flowers, dancers, women's faces), delicately carved flowers, seashells, or snakes. Colors are soft and luminous. Paper: Paper, in skillful hands such as Bonnie Bartell's, can acquire surprising sculptural properties, as in her all-white Mask of Methuselah. Though quite varied in form, Bartell's masks are highly playful, often inspired by a punning imagination. Maskerade Ball uses a softball with a bright pink-and-gold eye-mask on. Framed Mask for Invisible Man consists of an empty rectangular frame decorated in fluorescent pink. Her Three Masketeers is a triple mask created out of a long narrow panel of colored paper. Mark Clarke's From the Toy Box, a three-headed mask, also demonstrates the versatility of the paper-and-cardboard medium. The central part represents a toy soldier's head wearing a bright red cap, one side of its face painted green, the other dark red and purple. To the right emerges a boy's reddish gold profile, whose expression evoked for me the folk hero and prankster Till Owlglass. To the left springs a bird's torso, painted gold over black. These toys are from an attic's trunk, far in aesthetics and sensibility from today's manufactured toys, but I suspect they would speak instantly to the imagination of any contemporary child.
Painting and collage: Clarke's Mask depicts a young, gently enigmatic face, painted in rich but muted complementary tones of reddish and greenish browns. Below, collaged letters spell the word MASK. I found this discrete painting to have enduring power. Wood: In Sculpture on my Mind, Clarke assembled wood pieces of different sizes and shapes, stained almost black, to create a tall mask in a "primitive" vein with a different face in front and back. On one side, an abstract sculpture functions as a headdress that evokes abstracted birds in flight. For Mask Head and Head Mask, Jim Bartell used cedar boards cut out and carved into profiles. Nails, together with copper wire flattened and coiled, create beards, hair, and facial marks. Mixed media: Judith Sparks' pieces show remarkable diversity of means, moods and inspiration. Make a Wish is an intriguing assemblage of animal bones, the largest suggesting a human skull-mask. Strings of seed beads dangle from its chin, each with a wishbone as pendant, and dice peer out of its sockets. Meanwhile, in Scarey, Sparks makes clever use of a single photograph of President Bush printed in different sizes, grain texture and darkness to create a photo-montage in the shape of a flower bouquet, as well as a political spoof. In contrast, Beverly Soasey plays with minute variations on the mask-shape theme in a series of five masks painted sienna and red with black accents, and decorated with feathers, sticks and beads. Other media used include metal (Harold Hoy), glass (Annah James), wood appliqué (Barbara Kensler), hydrocal (Miriam Kley) and stoneware with found objects (Betsy Wolfson). After viewing this display, visitors may well be inspired to dream up a mask of their own in any medium they fancy. "Mask Invitational" is at Karin Clarke Gallery, Oct. 21-Nov. 15.
Geology IN SEARCH OF ANCIENT OREGON: A GEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY by Ellen Morris Bishop. Timber Press, 2003. Hardcover, $39.95 To keep the record straight, I did not read Ellen Morris Bishop's 289-page geological and natural history of ancient Oregon from cover to cover, although I would love to have the leisure to read, study and engage with this book. Looking at her excellent large-format camera photographs and reading select passages stirred memories of an inspiring geology class I took in the late 1960s, when ideas about continent-building were seductive theories. Now, plate tectonics, moving seafloors and colliding continents are accepted geological tools that explain how the land we now call Oregon was added to the continent from its earlier forms as ocean bottom, shallow water coral reefs, volcanic islands and warm seas. This lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed book pulled me in. I was hooked by her caption for the photo on pages 2-3: "Glacial erratic, once part of Mt. Hood's eastern rampart, eroded and transported by Pleistocene glaciers, now resting atop the extensive moraine of Eliot Glacier." Bishop's gift of straddling time in a few succinct phrases makes sense of complex geological processes. The oldest rocks in this part of the new world are Devonian limestone, about 400 million years old, found in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon and the Klamath Mountains of southwest Oregon, which became part of the continental landmass at different times. Blue Mountains' rocks were coral reefs and forested volcanic islands that now "crown the Wallowa, Elkhorn, Strawberry, Aldrich and Greenhorn ranges," Bishop writes. Oregon's Klamath Mountains, the Rogue River Canyon, Kalmiopsis Wilderness, Illinois River drainage and Mount Ashland were a volcanic archipelago much like Indonesia today. These islands and micro continents merged offshore and were added to the continent as a single, complex block. In Search of Ancient Oregon will not only help you master the lexicon of geologic terms such as "subduction zones," the place where the seafloor dives back into the Earth's mantle, but also lesser-used words like exotic terrane, mélange and erratics. Bishop brings these geologic features to life in pictures of the landscape you might encounter on a drive from Eugene to Burns, for example. Bishop selected photographs from more than 3,000 large-format images. Her text is lively, and the narrative builds logically. I like how Bishop describes her intention here: "The geologist's mission is to translate the mute stuff of stolid stones into a planetary biography." Her search for ancient Oregon is a trip well worth taking. Bishop presents a slide show and lecture at 7 pm on Nov. 10 at Tsunami Books. Jointly sponsored by Black Sun Books and Tsunami Books, take this unique opportunity to meet Bishop, see these magnificent photographs. Reception follows.
Book Notes Nov. 6 - Dec. 11: Lauren Kessler (Cover Girl, HarperCollins, 2003) will speak on "Crossing the Line: From nonfiction to fiction and back again" at 6:30 - 9 pm on Nov. 6, Baker Downtown Center, $5 donation. …Poet Paul Dresman (The Silver Dazzle of the Sun: Selected Poems) reads at 7 pm on Nov. 6 at Tsunami Books. …Essayist Richard Rodriguez (The Browning of America) speaks at 4 pm on Nov. 6 in 305 Pharmacy Hall, OSU, Corvallis. …Al Sandine (Plundertown USA: Coos Bay Enters the Global Economy) at 7 pm on Nov. 6 at UO Bookstore. …Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun) speaks at noon on Nov. 7 at Portland State's Smith Memorial Student Union. (503.725.4949). …Suzanne Kingsbury (The Gospel According to Gracey) reads at 7 pm on Nov. 11 in Knight Library Browsing Room, UO campus. …Veneta attorney Dean Van Leuven (Life Without Anger: Your Guide to Peaceful Living) speaks at 7 pm on Nov. 13 in UO Bookstore. …Literary Arts' Oregon Book Awards Ceremony is at 7:30 pm on Nov. 13 at the Scottish Rite Center, Portland (503.227.2583) Award for lifetime achievement goes to playwright, poet George Hitchcock (Harrisburg). Poetry nominees: Jane Bailey, Casey Kwang, Robert McDowell, Rita Ott Ramstad, Clemens Starck. Novel: Cai Emmons (Eugene), April Henry, Jane Kirkpatrick, Alan Siporin (Eugene), Lono Waiwaiole. Short Fiction: Tracy Daugherty, Douglas Rennie, Lidia Yuknavitch. General Nonfiction: Rick Harmon, Barbara S. Mahoney, Kim Stafford. Creative Nonfiction: Carol Ann Bassett (Eugene). Chris Chester, Gabrielle Glaser, Floyd Skloot, Kim Stafford. Children's Literature: Eric Kimmel, Petra Mathers, Valerie Rapp, Nicole Rubel, Cynthia Rylant. Young Adult Literature: Brian A. Connolly, Heather Vogel Frederick, Kezi Matthews, Elizabeth Rusch, Graham Salisbury. …Clem Starck (China Basin) reads at 7 pm on Nov. 15 at Newport Recreation Center and at noon on Dec. 4 at OSU Bookstore, Corvallis. …Wayne Harrison and Michael Spring read 7-9 pm on Nov. 18 at Eugene Public Library. …Historian and author David Peterson del Mar (Oregon's Promise) reads at 7 pm on Nov. 20 at UO Bookstore. …Kate Moses (Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath) reads at 7:30 pm on Nov. 20 at Powell's SE Hawthorne bookstore. …Novelist Edmund White (Fanny) reads at 7:30 pm on Nov. 21 at Powell's Beaverton store. …Barry Lopez introduces readers from Best Essays Northwest, including Kim Stafford, John Daniel and Bobbie Willis, at 7 pm on Nov. 25 in Knight Library Browsing Room, UO campus. …Memoirist, novelist Tobias Wolff (Old School; Knopf, 2003) speaks at 7:30 pm on Dec. 2 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall (503.227.2583). …Writer, Jungian analyst James Hollis (On This Journey We Call Life) speaks at 7 pm on Dec. 4 at the Knight Law Center. …Floyd Skloot (In the Shadow of Memory) speaks at 7 pm on Dec. 4 at the Knight Library Browsing Room. …4th annual Authors and Artists Fair, 7-10 pm on Dec. 6 at the Eugene Public Library
Huddle
Up For a guy who spends most of his waking hours staring into the savage, steaming underbelly of contemporary life — that is, the world of food and wine — I'm usually fairly upbeat. But, as my lovely Kat points out, every year around this time I go into this deep muddled state, swinging wildly between manic elation and desperate blue funk. These wicked gyrations of mood are not caused by drugs or by reading the daily news, though a steady dose of neocon lies does tend to exaggerate the problem, at least to deepening the "slough of despond." But, really, I'm pretty much hardened to the antics of lying politicians and thieving corporations; expecting the worst from them, I'm rarely surprised or disappointed, though I can't escape or prevent the pain I feel when thousands of good people have to suffer for the arrogance and greed of a few self-important oligarchs. What really races my roller coaster is the simple everyday pace of Time itself. While I try to savor every moment of this meager existence, all the moments, in all their increments, fly through my grasp like wishes on a high wind. Take Thursday: I race home from LCC in the waning afternoon sun, lovely golden low-slanting light, deepening blue skies, crimson and golden leaves clinging on maples and sweetgums. Run into house, toss bookbag at desk, grab vases, fill with warm water, snatch up clippers, dash into garden, clip furiously in purpling dusk, until vases glow with stems of dahlias — lemon yellow, babygirl pink, sunburst orange — plus zinnias, snapdragons, roses, petunias, the effusive glory of Oregon late-summer. Friday morning, wake to a garden gutted by a killer frost: zinnias zapped, roses ravaged, petunias punched out, dahlias dead as doormats. A whole season lost, another season leaped, winter has come. This is no petty pace creeping in day to day; feels more like a red rocket's glaring ride to oblivion. Gee, my wife is faithful, dog didn't die, truck's not broke, and still I got the blues? Then, a deep breath, tangy and sweet, and I feel lifted up, elated: The harvest is in, sweet bounty of food and wine. Despite the ravages of war, famine and pestilence, we'll find again reasons to huddle together against the spreading ice, gather with friends and family to pull corks and break bread, light candles, cherish children and dream of peace. Worst of times, best of times, wheels within wheels, we must embrace it all, and still give thanks. And for this Thanksgiving, let's pour some good wines. Festive feelings deserve festive wines. There's nothing like effervescence to kick the party up a notch, but please, please, do not pour that nasty six-buck-bubbleguck we find in most supermarkets. For just a few dollars more, you'll leap a chasm of quality and land on the banks of flavor and zest. And if you're on a buy-Oregon bent, don't forget that our homies make some superb bubbles, often at bargain prices. Look, for example, for Argyle Brut ($19), fine bubbles, light and lively. St. Innocent Brut ($18), from Salem country, is delicious and food-friendly. Our own good neighbors out Veneta way offer Secret House Northern Silk ($15) with round flavors, crisp and clean. Eugene's own, Discovery Brut ($13) is awfully good, especially at this price. Usually I'll admit only grudgingly to an occasional liking for the wines produced in that weird state south of us. (OK, California; there, I said it. We done?) Sure, they're probably nut-case neocon Republicans, but when it comes to sparkling wines, those guys can sometimes get it right. Affordable and surprisingly good is Korbel Extra Dry ($12), with just a touch of sweetness to give some weight. Of course, Schramsberg ($30) is fine and Roederer Estate ($20) is a perennial fav, but right now our tasters in the lab really like Chandon Blanc de Noirs ($18), blending pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay, yielding full flavors, really active bubbles. Soho Sandy said it: "This is what sparklers are supposed to taste like." Serving turkey for the holiday? Thinking of matching with a chardonnay? OK, whatever. But turkey matches up really well with gewurztraminer. Thomas Fogarty 2001 Monterey Gewurztraminer ($16) delivers zesty citrus/grapefruit flavors and pretty spice notes that will bring out the best in the bird and all the trimmings. Life is brief; take a chance. Something softer but sure to please would be Jezebel 2002 Willamette Valley Pinot Blanc ($14); comes on with aromas of autumnal fruits and white flowers, fills the mouth with flavors of ripe pears, sweet apples, lychee fruit, oh my. This seems to be another label bearing the flavor-loving touch of O'Reilly, and that's a nice message in any bottle. Think it ain't wine if it ain't red? Understood. If red you must with your feast, whether turkey or any other, you'd be nuts to miss Broadley 2002 Pinot Noir ($14). Almost never do I mention the same wine twice, but this is just too good for the money. Want bigger, badder? Find Alexander Valley Vineyards 2000 Merlot ($16), big, full-bodied, lush with dark fruit flavors of blackberry and cassis. One word: Gimmesum. OK, feeling a lot better now. Skies are pale gray but sun shining, leaves drifting, flock of kinglets pecking at the last of the sunflower heads. Time humbles us all, but it still feels right to lift our faces and our glasses and say our thanks for all we have.
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