The American system for producing food seems pretty broken at this point. In the October food and drink issue of NY Times Magazine, food writer Mark Bittman said that for people to eat well, live well and be healthy, for agriculture to be sustainable, for life in rural areas and even the way we live in cities to be sustainable, the food system has to change.   This summer, I drove out into the dry flat grasslands down five miles of bumpy dirt road in the High Desert of eastern Oregon to go to a party ranchers Doc and Connie Hatfield were having at their house for people interested in the ranching cooperative they founded, Country Natural Beef, that supplies Burgerville, New Seasons, Whole Foods, Higgins Restaurant and the Japanese restaurant company Kyotaru to name a few places. I talked with Doc and Connie and award-winning chef, Greg Higgins, on pioneering new ways of producing local, affordable, sustainable food that also is economically viable for the small producer.  The Hatfields’ story of how a cooperative of 100 Northwest ranchers has made it work since 1986 for themselves, for the land, and for the people eating their beef holds out hope for how food is made in this country.

Listen on the air this Sunday the 11th, 5PM, on KZME 107.1 FM.

Art can either instigate or reflect political movements, but once social change is accomplished, it’s hard to get the toothpaste back in the tube.  This Thursday the 10th at PNCA, New Yorker cartoonist Shannon Wheeler (author of Oil and Water on the oil spill in the Gulf), editorial cartoonist Matt Bors, author/activist Lidia Yuknavitch, novelist Monica Drake, God Is Disappointed in You author Mark Russell and a climate change expert sit down with Nora Robertson to dig into how art can lead to political action. Community discussion to follow the panel at 7:00, door at 6:30.

People often have mixed feelings about readings. Readings can be long and boring, Or they can be performances, parties, political rallies, scenes.  Portland, like a lot of other cities, has a long history of underground readings through many cultural moments, from Ken Kesey’s Poetry Happenings to today, when Portland is on the national tour circuit.  I sat down with 90′s slam host Reuben Nisenfeld, Smalldoggies‘ Matty Byloos and Carrie Seitzinger, Bad Blood’s Zachary Schomburg, Literary Mixtape’s Erik Bader, and Loggernaut’s Erin Ergenbright, Jesse Lichtenstein and Paul Toutonghi on Portland series then and now.  Check it out on 107.1FM in the Portland metro area, Sunday, October 9th, 5PM.

Listen to the KZME podcast here.

Neon Frontier, my new radio segment on KZME 107.1FM’s Artclectic show, debuted on September 11th with an interview with Sid Miller, Burnside Review editor and director of Portland’s newest writing/arts center, Crow Arts Manor.  Neon Frontier will explore how Portland’s cultural space has evolved through conversation with the artists and makers who have shaped it.  I sat down with Sid to talk about what it means to start a DIY instituition, kind of by pulling up your own bootstraps.

Take a listen to the KZME podcast here.

From Playboy to the Bible: Adapting Writing for Screen and Image

New Yorker cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, writer Mark Russell and filmmaker Andy Mingo sit down with writer Nora Robertson to discuss collaboration between writers and artists in visual mediums. Get a look at a sneak peek of Mingo’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s short story “Romance” that recently appeared in Playboy, images from Wheeler and Russell’s adaptation of the Bible, God Is Disappointed in You (Top Shelf in 2012), and Robertson’s poetry film with Jason Bahling, The Humble Egg. Wordstock, Oregon Convention Center, Sunday the 9th, 4PM, Oregon Cultural Trust Stage, presented by New Oregon Arts & Letters.

From God Is Disappointed in You:

Stadler was a writer-in-residence in the summer of 2005 for Michael Hebb and Naomi Pomeroy’s Ripe restaurant group when he started the Backroom conversation series.  Stadler managed the Backroom collaboratively with Coolley Gallery curator/director Stephanie Snyder and musician Curtis Knapp.   Adapted from the communal seating and fixed menu of Ripe’s popular family supper, the Backroom brought together such artists as Gore Vidal, Stephen Malkmus, Calvin Johnson, Mary Gaitskill, Tom Spanbauer, and many more on such topics as art and friendship, or the way writing can shape a city.   The menu itself was shaped from each evening’s discussion by meeting with the chefs in advance, and a letterpress chapbook by Pinball Publishing of related content by the artists was given out. I went to one of the early ones in the back of the Gotham Tavern and remember how the way we talked so openly with people we’d never met over gorgeous food seemed to spill over into the way we talked with the panelists after the initial presentation.  It felt more like a small college seminar.  “A lot of the impulse is how do you get the audience to heckle or do something?  Or cheer?” Stadler told me.  “I no longer blind myself to the difference between [the intimate setting of Backroom] and a group of 2000.  I know that when you’re sitting in a big audience, your agency is unknown to the person in front.”

Backroom has now become a non-profit project of Portland’s Charitable Partnership Fund and continues in a variety of spaces, not always hosted by Stadler or Snyder.  An interesting aspect of Backroom is that they make their website, paypal and mailing available to anyone who would like to host an evening.  So far six people have taken them up on it, including Randy Gragg interviewing Chinese architect Yung Ho Chang.  Stadler told me “what we made very quickly became a tool used by a whole community of people.”

In 2009, Marc Moscato founded the Portland version of the Dill Pickle Club, which has organized several public conversations on topics like Northwest music, the legacy of the WPA, and the importance of preserving oral history.  “With the disappearance of public forums…we have lost an important facet of our culture: face-to-face conversation and airing one’s ideas before a general public,” Moscato wrote in his monograph on the original Dill Pickle Club in 1920’s Chicago.  “The makeshift, participatory nature of yesteryear’s public forums also bears many resemblances to today’s movement of DIY, decentralized art spaces.”  The Dill Pickle’s events often involve a field trip.  However, the Northwest Passage music evening I went to was at the Waypost café and brought together Vanessa Renwick with Cool Nutz and Calvin Johnson.  Renwick screened House of Sound, her homage to the North Portland record store that was a center for the African-American community.  Renwick’s film was intense and evoked a sense of forgotten history that reminded me of her film about the Lovejoy columns.  Cool Nutz talked about coming up in hiphop in Portland, which provided a nice context to Renwick’s film and also contrasted with Johnson’s story of coming up in indie rock.  The evening ended with Johnson playing a song for us and dancing.  This immediately got a bunch of phones out recording this, probably to put online.

For discussions of art and place, Portland Monthly’s Bright Lights, Big City series at Jimmy Mak’s has brought talent like Dan Wieden in conversation with editor and host Randy Gragg.  Performance Works Northwest’s 2010 Artist Dinner series has sat down with performers like Linda K. Johnson, Lisa Radon, Kristan Kennedy, and Plazm editors Josh Berger and Tiffany Lee Brown over a meal cooked by the hosts, Linda Austin and Tahni Holt.  Book festival Wordstock featured several conversation events this year on topics like the future of reading and the difficulty of humor writing, and why we should write short fiction. For discussions of civic issues, Oregon Humanities has been hosting Think & Drink, a happy hour series at rontom’s, and the Conversation Project, which brings public dialogue to rural towns around Oregon.

The advantage of public forums is that they enable human interaction in our local physical space around art, ideas and politics in a way that invites the audience to get involved, to heckle.  At the Dill Pickle Club’s Northwest Passage evening, Voodoo Doughnut owner Tres Shannon was calling out questions for Renwick from the back of the room during her lecture, and it seemed entirely in the spirit of the evening.

Photo credit: Craig Sietsma

“Narrative and pictures are the core of the artistic project these days,” Art Spiegelman told moderator Joe Sacco in front of a hushed crowd at PNCA recently. Part of PNCA’s Focus Week, the evening was held in the long concrete hall of the Swigert Commons, and was packed from the floor to the balconies with students and representatives of the Portland arts community. Sacco, himself the author of American Book Award-winning graphic novel Palestine, was understated and collegial—the format was one of my favorites, a renowned artist having a conversation with another well-known artist. Spiegelman, casual and slouched in his chair, said this experimentation with words and pictures “is what became the graphic novel.” In fact, Spiegelman is often described as the father of the modern comic novel. To which Spiegelman said in a Literary Arts talk the next night, “If so, I want a paternity test.”

But the truth is, Spiegelman has influenced Watchmen author Alan Moore, Chris Ware, and a host of others in the generation of comic artists that followed his own. One of Spiegelman’s core ideas, visible throughout his groundbreaking comic memoir of his parent’s experiences in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, Maus, and his surrealist collection Breakdowns, has been that comics can pull apart words and pictures to reorder time in ways that are similar to what contemporary art has done. “Comics work the way our brains work. We think in icons,” Spiegelman told Sacco. Events can be re-sequenced, memories juxtaposed, and perception made more difficult in order, like art theorist Victor Shklovsky described, to make the reader’s experience of reality new again. Pulling up an image of an early 70’s panel as an example, Spiegelman called this reordering “the grammar of comics.” He has often stretched this to conceptual levels, an experimental sensibility he blames on early exposure to Mad Magazine.

Photo credit: Matthew Miller

“I was oddly imprinted very early like a baby duck with Mad. It was like tree, rock, Mad,” Spiegelman said. “Once I realized that comics were made by people, I wanted to be one of them.” As the child of immigrants, Mad served as a fractured guidebook to American culture and values. “I was nurtured by Mad Magazine, basically.” In addition to Mad, his father bought him vintage comics because they were a bargain, not knowing comics had been censored starting in 1954 for violence and sexual imagery. “Comics were giving us important toxins,” Spiegelman said at Literary Arts the next night, “Horror comics were a way of post-Holocaust Jews to deal with that horror.” His awareness of using comics as a vehicle for cultural commentary had begun.

Spiegelman’s father did not share his son’s enthusiasm for his choice of profession and wanted him to be a dentist. “In Auschwitz, even doctors were dentists,” Spiegelman, in his gravelly Brooklyn voice, said his dad told him. “If you’re a dentist, you can draw cartoons at night, but if you’re a cartoonist, no one will see the dentist at night.” Sacco’s parents, also immigrants, wanted Sacco to join the family business, and thought even studying journalism was a stretch from a practical perspective. “You have more of a chance of becoming an NFL quarterback than being a cartoonist who makes a living,” Sacco said, a little wryness in his voice. “If there’s something else you can do,” Spiegelman agreed, “you should consider doing it.”

After college, Spiegelman’s early and only 9-5 job was at Top Bubblegum designing Wacky Packs—work Sacco described to us, while slides of the Garbage Pail Kids and “Nooseweek” came up onscreen, as “low art.” This seemed like a compliment, especially considering high art and low art have been a theme in Spiegelman’s work, partly because he has taken what was once considered a low form of culture and made it do the work of high art. Spiegelman outlined for us the hierarchy of cartooning, which he said runs, from top to bottom: painter, illustrator, strip artist or gag cartoonist, and comics books, which were considered junky and just above tattoo artists. Sacco asked Spiegelman whether his work at Top represented him as an artist or was merely a response to the market. “My explosive rage with a smile on my face,” Spiegelman answered. “It represented me at the time.”

Photo credit: Matthew Miller

It was through connections made at Top that Spiegelman met R. Crumb in 1966 and was influenced by him to move into more underground comics. “Get in touch with your inner psychopath was the basic idea,” Spiegelman said, gesturing with both hands. “Very unsettling stuff,” Sacco said. The late 1960s were a cultural moment interested in pushing the boundaries of the acceptable, and underground “comix” were the opposite of the safe, censored comics of the ’50s.

However, Spiegelman did not quite find his groove. “I’m not proud of my Viper period,” he said. Not just the heavy crosshatching and big feet, but also the deliberate attempt to shock. He alarmed R. Crumb’s wife once with a strip where Viper cut off the head of a guy performing oral sex on him and had intercourse with the neck. Crumb’s wife refused to allow Spiegelman back in the house. This self-described trial and error seemed to me like the formative period usually seen in any significant artist’s development—he was just doing in the company of R. Crumb and other comic revolutionaries. Sacco said, leaning towards Spiegelman, “I went through a similar period where I was just vomiting out stuff.” Shortly after the Viper incident, Spiegelman made the first Maus strip. He said, “I realized I was better off making a comic about the horror in my own life than trying to evoke horror.”

Photo credit: Matthew Miller

The use of animals in Maus, which has always read to me like a horrifying Disney reference, did come in fact from a lecture given by a friend of Spiegelman’s, the filmmaker Ken Jacobs, on the similarities between blackface minstrels and anthropomorphic animals in Disney cartoons as a mirror of American racism. Spiegelman has written that he thought the Nazi’s metaphor of Jews as vermin could be used in a similar way, and an early three-page strip titled “Maus” portrayed the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. Another short strip, “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” depicted his mother’s suicide when he was a young man, further exploring confessional territory that would develop into the book-length Maus. Coming after Spiegelman’s early conceptual work, Maus benefits from some of his experiments with juxtaposition and characterization while breaking new ground in long-form comic storytelling. “After Breakdowns,” Spiegelman said to us, “I was looking for a more accessible way.”

Photo credit: Matthew Miller

The conceptual work in Breakdowns was partly a result of his friendship with Jacobs, who called Spiegelman a “slob snob” and convinced him to visit museums with him. “Just think of them as giant comics panels,” Spiegelman said Jacobs told him. Spiegelman began experimenting with musical structures that repeated phrases, or Cubist representations of faces and settings. Looking at “A Day at the Circuits” up on the screen behind him, Spiegelman pointed out how there is more than one way for the eye to travel across the page, and none of them were right to left as we usually read. One panel could encompass a lot of time, or only a minute. One page sometimes took him eight months to draw. “It was a comic for comics’ sake,” Spiegelman said, “not just for kids.”

Although Maus is a monument of long-form comic storytelling, it might be his embrace of what comics are when they aren’t just a storytelling device that is Spiegelman’s greatest accomplishment. “I was pulling words and pictures apart to make them do things they don’t do,” Spiegelman said. “So they weren’t just digested and thrown away.”

Originally appeared on Plazm online.

Tom Marioni, Café Society, Breens Café-Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco, 1979 (from left, Howard Fried, Mary Hellman, her dog, David Ireland, others unknown); photographer unknown; Courtesy Tom Marioni; © Tom Marioni

New arts space YU Contemporary is sure starting out with a bang. I’ve heard reams about the impact of the Portland Center for the Visual Arts on the 70′s art scene in Portland. YU’s opening exhibit is a retrospective of the PCVA’s collection and features a new installation by San Francisco-based artist Tom Marioni.

Marioni has been a seminal figure in Conceptual Art since the 1960s, encompassing sculpture, drawing, experimental music, and performance. Marioni first presented The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art in 1970 at the Oakland Museum, CA., and continued the action as a weekly event in various incarnations held at the Museum of Conceptual Art, SF—Marioni’s art space for conceptual installation and performance pieces. Since 1973, he has held weekly gatherings of friends each Wednesday night at the bar in his own studio. According to the artist, this piece “comes out of my art school days of drinking beer with my friends. For more than 30 years I have been hosting a salon and artists’ club in my studio and galleries as an interactive installation that is site- specific, audience- participation, social sculpture”.

Tom Marioni, Café Society, 2009, Marioni studio, San Francisco; photographer unknown; Courtesy Tom Marioni; ©Tom Marioni

On Saturday, July 30 from 4-7pm, YU Contemporary will present Tom Marioni’s The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art as the closing event for its first Preview Project and on the final day of its inaugural exhibition Selections from the PCVA Archive (on view 12-7pm). YU becomes the latest institution to present this work, following presentations by Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville, and UCLA’s Hammer Museum. The event marks the artist’s return to Portland nearly thirty-five years after having performed a piece titled Yellow Is The Color Of Intellect at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts (PCVA) in 1977.

Tom Marioni, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 2011, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; photograph by Joshua White; Courtesy Tom Marioni; © Joshua White

Like in other museum presentations of The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, Marioni will be in attendance and the empty beer bottles from private gatherings held at YU on three previous evenings will be displayed as part of the artist’s installation for the closing event. Marioni’s installation will include a bar, refrigerator, table and chairs, and the video, Golden Rectangle Beer. Accompanied by jazz music, the piece will be installed in YU’s garage, in what will be the future location of YU’s café following the repurposing of the Yale Union Laundry building.

Tickets are limited and available for advance purchase only at http://www.yucontemporary.org. Admission price is a sliding scale donation to YU at $5 and up. Guests must be 21 and older – valid ID must be presented at the door. Beer generously provided by Pacifico and Trumer Pils will be served by local artists bartending for the evening.

I always love how the Tin House summer workshop lets you hear Steve Almond talk about sex writing, or Aimee Bender talk about the plot-driven plot, all for $15. Burnside Review editor-in-chief Sid Miller is founding a new writing/arts center, Crow Arts Manor, that will make it highly accessible to work with some of the city’s finest artists such as cartoonist Jesse Reklaw, fiction writers Monica Drake and Lidia Yuknavitch, poets Emily Kendal Frey (pictured below with Miller) and Zach Schomburg and Mercury journalist Marjorie Skinner to name a few. Similar to LA writing center Beyond Baroque, Miller would like “ongoing arts education to be a right, not a privilege.”

The launch reading was held in E.A.T., the new restaurant and event space at Milepost 5 and included instructors Mary Szybist, B.T. Shaw, Schomburg and Frey, as well as a few past Burnside Review alumni. There was a tour afterwards in the Crow Arts Space itself, one of those cozy Milepost 5 studios with an office tucked behind a conference area with a big table presumably for workshopping . I immediately felt at home with the canning jars of quirky objects like dolls and plastic food, and the gallery of visual art along the white-washed walls.

The actual stage space of E.A.T., which is called The Chapel, reminds me of a Lutheran church with that Oregon-type coastal landscape framing the right side of the speaker’s head where there might have once been an altar. There was a sense of gathering which seemed fitting for the inauguration of an organization which will build the arts community within Portland and also came about through some collaboration. Miller had been looking for a space for about two years before Shaw, who is a Milepost 5 resident, put Miller in touch with director Gavin Shettner. Milepost 5 was at a point where they were looking to partner with an established Portland-based arts organization for the second phase of their development. The board of directors includes poet laureate Paulann Peterson and literary figure Kevin Sampsell. “Having run Burnside Review for seven years gave me some advantages. I’ve formed a ton of wonderful relationships with artists throughout Portland,” Miller commented, “It was fairly easy getting people on board with this project. It seems that most of Portland feels that Crow Arts Manor will fill a void.”

Programming will include classes, readings, gallery space and a library. Coming up in May and April: Jesse Reklaw’s Elements of Cartooning, and Emily Kendal Frey’s The Sequential Poem. Zach Schomburg’s The Narrative Prose-Poem class is already sold out, so act fast. Six week one-hour workshops will run only $95, and one-day workshops will be offered for $40. Class sizes are limited to 8. In June, also see a reading for the spring issue of Conjunctions and a screening by Found editor Davy Rothbart of My Heart is an Idiot, a documentary about love that spans two years and over a hundred cities.