RACC Board of Directors

Governance by boards of directors are a fairly obsolete and useless form of management. They hinder more than help. Two remaining purposes – to raise money, and to lead by example.

Regional Arts and Culture Council – Board of Directors. What’s missing? Who are these people? Who are these leaders-by-example? I count only 2 of 22 who are artists, and, I think, neither depend on the arts for their meals. And what do they represent in common besides RACC? Wealth, privilege and power.

RACC Officers

Mary Edmeades, Chair – Operations VP for Albina Community Bank

Ernie Bloch, Vice-Chair – retired director of the PacifiCorp Foundation (qualifying distributions FY 05/06 $2,171,117)

Claudia Burnett, Treasurer – She is COO of the Oregon Historical Society. Her father, C. Howard Burnett, was president of the OHS board from 1981 to 1983.

Jim Neill, Secretary – Davis Wright Tremaine

Eloise Damrosch, Ex Officio – RACC Executive Director

RACC Directors

Gwyneth Gamble Booth – long resume

• Founding chair of The Dougy Center

• Chair of the PGE Foundation (qualifying distributions for FY 03/04 $897,141)

• Former Board member of PGE

• Former Board member of the Portland Art Museum

• Longtime producer / host of KOAP-TV’s Front Street Weekly

Peter Cookson – Dean of the Lewis & Clark Graduate School

Mark Edlen – Gerdling Elden, property development

Leslie Garcia – OHSU Center for Diversity and Multicultural Affairs

Pam Gibson – Ms. Scott Gibson, and an artist

Stacey Graham – VP of marketing for First Independent Bank

Larry Harvey – Pac/West Communications

Larry Lewis – Accounting professor at the University of Portland

Mary Maletis – Columbia Distributing and Maletis Beverage

Josie Mendoza – Ms. Hugh Mackworth of SmartForest Ventures

Carole Morse – President of PGE Foundation (qualifying distributions for FY 03/04 $897,141)

Tad Savinar – Artist

Deborah Saweuyer-Parks is founder and Chief Executive Officer of Homestead Capital (and long ago worked on LIEAP!)

Carol Smith is with Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education. She is Chief of Staff for Portland schools Superintendent Vicki Phillips (and likely successor).

Jayne Stamm – Ms. Doug Stamm, CEO of the Meyer Memorial Trust (qualifying distributions, $30,533,405 in FY 05/06)

Craig Thompson – General Manager of Hotel Monaco

Julie Vigeland – former Chair of the Junior League, Portland Civic Theatre, Portland Center Stage, and manager of their recent Capital Campaign. Ms. Ted Vigeland

 

Independence day

Portland, 1915.

 

Portland’s Waterfront Blues Festival

I recently heard Portland’s Waterfront Blues Festival is the second largest blues festival in the nation, I imagine just after the Chicago Blues Fest.

What’s most important is it the primary fund raiser for the Oregon Food Bank!

Over the past 20 years just about every blues star has played one of the stages – the late John Lee Hooker in 1987 (saw him), the late Jimmy Rogers, Otis Rush, the late Son Seals, Koko Taylor, Pinetop Perkins (saw him), Ike Turner, Buddy Guy – and just last year both Irma Thomas and Marva Wright. This year – the list is too long to recite. See the Waterfront Blues Festival website.

Bring sunscreen, bring water, bring cans of food and your checkbook to write a nice donation check for the Food Bank. And if you can’t make it listen to live coverage of the festival on KBOO.

 

Remembering Tom McCall in Bronze

With an editorial this morning, The Oregonian joined a chorus for a suitable statue to remember Oregon Governor Tom McCall.

McCall’s work and Capitol painting by Henk Pander were written about on this blog on June 5.

It’s a nice idea, McCall is a deserving, and for Oregon, a larger-than-life character. The proposed statue by Troutdale sculptor Rip Caswell, well regarded for large local animals, such as eagles and elk, but less so for human subjects.

I hope art advocates such as McCall’s widow Audrey, Norma Paulus and Jack McGowan have better luck than the last memorial the Oregonian editors championed.

In 2005 and 2006 Doug Bates and Rick Attig wrote a handful of sentimental and scornful opinions about the cremated remains of over 3000 patient at the Oregon State Hospital.

The remains symbolize the ruin Oregon’s mental health system has incurred – largely since the Board of Control, developed by Tom McCall, ceased to provide on-sight oversight of the hospital.

Few remember McCall visited the hospital monthly, and talked with patients, staff and family members in a regularly scheduled public meeting. No other Oregon governor has taken personal interest in the hospital – and the lack of an advocate has ruined the institution.

Attig and Bates insisted the remains should be vacated from the funky closet in an abandoned building and a respectful memorial should be built. Though community members offered to PAY for this memorial – State Senator Peter Courtney nixed the generous offer and used the remains as leverage to source over $300 million for a new state hospital.

And though Bates and Attig won a 2006 Pulitzer for their effort, another year has passed with no memorial.

Remembering Tom McCall – Oregonian
Sculpture to honor governor’s legacy – Statesman Journal
Oregon State Hospital Patient Memorial – more than you want to know
Ashes Saved from ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ Hospital – ABC News

 

Blitzen Trapper – Devil’s a Go-Go

Video for Blitzen Trapper’s song Devil’s a-Go-Go off their album Wild Mountain Nation. Frickin cool.

Listen – Wild Mountain Nation (mp3) really good.
MySpace – Blitzen Trapper
Review – Pitchfork
Review – Mercury

Oh yeah they play tonight at Holocene.

They are the Holy Model Rounders reincarnate (whereas Wilco is the Dead) with the clangy bangy foot-stomping camaraderie bonhomie. The blogs are uniformly hot on these guys.

Consider the list of active Portland bands – The Thermals, The Decemberists, Menomena, The Gossip, Stars of Track and Field, Quasi, The Shins, The Blow, The Minders, Viva Voce, The Shaky Hands – and more. Right now is definitely the best music scene in the city’s history.

 

Wednesday Poem – Chris Chester

About 25 years ago Chris Chester and I were figuring out how to be poets as a way to remain human, both and often together. We met in bars and coffee shops, read our scribblings to each other, were mutually disgusted, played chess or debated the concerns of finer poets.

Chris was fascinated with words and word jugglers, how tone could change mood; Chris took Camus’ truly serious philosophical problem to heart, and together we listened and laughed to how “It’s Hell to be Poor,” and prodded the shy and forlorn to vet their souls at the open mike.

Chris died of cancer on April 17. He was 54. He was the author of Providence of a Sparrow: Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds which won the 2003 Oregon Book Award for nonfiction.

A Bum Proposal – by Chris Chester

With bodies and minds exquisitely garbled,
you slump in your leavings and fermented clothes
to dream of an Eden
of dumpsters with club cars.

Missing teeth, legs
and bits of your ears,
you are slack-jawed,
bashed-in-the-head,
bleeding from the scalp,
non-vertical even while standing.
You were the drunken rabble,
the groundlings, the inadvertent sinkers
of wooden ships;
O, receivers of knife wounds,
you are local color.

So, I think you should be paid,
applauded in your work
for the skills you bring
to the pageant of dying.
+++

Picture and poem from Chrischester.org, a great memorial website by Chris’ nephew Marc Mowery.

The Sorrow and the Sparrow: The Life and Death of Chris Chester – by Inara Verzemnieks, from May 21, The Oregonian. About the nicest obit I have ever read.

Life with Feathered Tenants – Oregon writer’s memoir engages – Eugene Weekly, 2002

From the University of Utah Press

Providence of a Sparrow – from Powell’s

Chris Chester RIP – from Stoney Moss

 

McCormick & Baxter Creosoting Company Superfund Site

A piece of prime real estate destroyed by toxic waste lies at the Willamette River’s edge below the University of Portland bluff and just North of Swan Island. For about 40 years, starting in the late 1940s, McCormick & Baxter used creosote, a coal-tar derivative; pentachlorophenol; and arsenic on the site to pressure-treat railroad ties and telephone poles. The chemicals are toxic and cause cancer in humans.

You can access this area via several public roads off N Willamette. There are areas which are open to the public, and areas where rust on trampled fencing shows perhaps several years of easy access. And there are areas where both signage and common sense say NO. We saw rabbits, heron, ducks, mice, crows, grackels, raccoon droppings, snakes, squirrels, a hawk, feral cats, teenagers and a deer.

Portland, neat and tidy environmentally friendly Portland, has several EPA Superfund sites in the city limits. They’re all fun to visit – but there’s more wildlife, and lost opportunity at the McCormick & Baxter Creosoting Company Superfund site.

“Is graffiti art?” is not an interesting question. The interesting question is, “If graffiti becomes art, will you recognize it?”

Yay! McCormick & Baxter is listed as one of the Worst Places In The World by Sprol.com.

I like the junk on top of junk on top of junk style. And from the look of the water, I suggest no one eat fish which swim downstream.

More about McCormick & Baxter at NOAA, EPA, University of Portland, and at Scorecard.org.

 

Frederic Littman – Mother and Child

Sculptor Frederic Littman (1907-1979) was professor at Portland State University for 30 years, and made Mother and Child in 1956. Littman also made Farewell to Orpheus which sits in a small fountain outside of PSU’s Smith Center in the South Park Blocks of Eurydice swept away and back down to the Underworld, and Seat of Wisdom which is pinned to the facade of the University of Portland library.

Mother and Child came from a bequest in 1949 by Florence Laberee, widow of George Laberee, a Portland homebuilder.

Briefly married to sculptor Marianne Gold Littman (1907-1999) Littman taught thousands of students, including longtime PNCA teacher Manuel Izquierdo.

In 1990 the statue was stolen by vandals (drat!) who sawed Mother at the ankles then dragged the 270 pound bronze down the hill. Cops found it in a house in NE Portland after an anonymous tip a few days later.

From the Oregonian – On Saturday, a man and a woman walked slowly by the black marble base of the statue, looking puzzled about its disappearance.

“I wonder who would do such a thing?” the woman remarked. “It was so pretty how it used to stand there. It’s almost as if we’ve all been robbed.”

The man shook his head and sighed.

“It doesn’t surprise me, the way things like crime have been going on in Portland.”

Learn all about the Council Crest Trolley at PDXhistory.com!

 

Sunday Poem – Charles Erskine Scott Wood

Sunrise

The lean coyote, prowler of the night,
Slips to his rocky fastnesses,
Jack-rabbits noiselessly shuttle among the sage-brush,
And from the castellated cliffs,
Rock-ravens launch their proud black sails upon the day.
The wild horses troop back to their pastures.

The poplar-trees watch beside the irrigation-ditches.
Orioles, whose nests sway in the cotton-wood trees by the ditch-side, begin to twitter.
All shy things, breathless, watch
The thin white skirts of dawn,
The dancer of the sky,
Who trips daintily down the mountain-side
Emptying her crystal chalice….
And a red-bird, dipped in sunrise, cracks from a poplar’s top
His exultant whip above a silver world.

Charles Erskine Scott Wood

 

Roadside Memorial for a Young Artist

Felipe Gonzalez, 22, died May 31 in a car crash at SE Clay and Grand in Southeast Portland. Winked out. According to police reports, his girlfriend Emma was driving. She’s been charged with manslaughter, reckless driving and driving under the influence.

His obituary is spread out on MySpace and taped to the fatal telephone pole. These photos are of the roadside memorial left by his friends and family.

Peace by Piece: Youth Take Action – is a 2001 documentary, made by Green Fire Productions and paid for by the Oregon Peace Institute. The film, shown to the Dalai Lama on his May 2001 visit to Portland, showed how “real” kids cope with conflict and personal violence.

Felipe met the Dalai Lama and was featured in the film, described by Inara Verzemnieks of the Oregonian this way,

“And there’s Felipe Gonzalez, a 16-year-old Lincoln High School student who dreams of a hip-hop career but thinks back to the days he roamed North Portland streets with a pack of friends, “assaulting people for no reason,” and to a friend who was shot and killed.

“I’m the ultimate cliche — ex-thug turned rapper,” says Felipe. He laughs, then turns serious. “I started rapping for all the wrong reasons. What I was writing about before was guns, basketball and corner stuff — ‘I got an AK- 47 in my pocket’ — dumb, ignorant things. It had no meaning. Basically, when I noticed people were actually listening, I thought I had to change so I didn’t make people more violent.””

Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms. – Roy Lichtenstein