Art Scatter

Spook Country is the place of no fixed boundary, where official governments and their shadowy minions mingle, betraying friends and arming future enemies. The Dick Cheneys of the world assure us that what they do there is all for our own good and that we should sleep better at night for it, but we suspect that more than a little of what comes of it feathers their own beds. And more and more we...

Yes, July 3 is the date of Franz Kafka's birth in 1883. If he hadn't died of starvation brought on by tuberculosis in 1924, he would have been 125 years old today! I imagine the news report: "A doddering Franz Kafka celebrated his 125th birthday today surrounded by friends and the uncomfortable notion that he had unwittingly invented some of the more profound absurdities of the modern state."...

Here we go again: More trouble over a school play. Don't these people ever learn? I mean the principals and school boards who do the censoring and always seem to do it so clumsily, as if critical thinking were anathema to education and free speech were a legislative inconvenience to be swatted away on a whim — usually the whim of a frightened administrator or a few right-wing parents...

Earlier, we were musing about the alleged death of the sentence. We didn't understand it. Didn't we frequently, ourselves, muster a sentence or two? But then the Voice Inside Our Head replied, rhetorically, "You call that a sentence?" Our sentences weren't just NOT sentences; they actually killed The Sentence as they were constructed. We sometimes hate the Voice Inside Our Head. How...

So, yes, Scatter had a momentary, um, hiatus. Yeah, that's the ticket. Actually, we were up in Seattle, lots of us, and we took hundreds of slides! There we are with Gramps splashing in the pool. Uh, Gramps? Pull up the trunks. Yeesh! Anyway, the best thing about traveling, even just up I-5 a ways, is coming back and telling your dear friends all about it. Which would be you. Stop that...

Let's say you've just gotten back from a weekend in Seattle, taken for the sweetest of reasons (a wedding!), hurried back actually, because you'd waited until the last possible day to see the TJ Norris installation, Infinitus, at the New American Art Union. A long drive, after a couple of long days, which also included a visit to the Olympic Sculpture Park, and that was on your mind as you walked...

With the summer solstice having hit town at precisely 4:59 p.m. Friday — was that a sylph we saw cavorting in the woods? — it's a semi-beautiful weekend here in Portland, Oregon. All right, clouds are moving in. Yet we are undaunted. Some cool things are happening around and out of town involving Friends of Art Scatter (this is not an official organization, but we like the sound...