Hats Off To Bill: A Tribute To Bill Plympton

From a post about Bill Plympton on  Oregon Movies, A to Z:

All of Bill’s films may well be love stories. The stories are getting deeper, the love more mysterious and spiritual. It is as if Bill, having grown accustomed to sharing his innermost sexual fantasies in vivid, comic detail, has become so divested of inhibition that there is nothing to stop him from sharing his deepest worries, his sorrows, his pain and his soul.

Read the rest here: 

Dennis Nyback and I will be introducing  Adventures In Plymptoons,  a new documentary about Bill by  Alexia  Anastasio,  on May 26 at 7:00 PM at the Bagdad Theater in Portland.

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense. Ken Kesey

From my May 19, 2012 editorial in The Oregonian:

I grew up in Portland and returned home after spending 30 years away. What struck me most forcefully upon my return was how strongly Oregon wanted to believe it was a backwater. I saw Gus Van Sant films in Manhattan theaters, read about Chuck Palahniuk’s books in the Sunday Times, saw The Dandy Warhols’ club dates in the Village Voice.

I knew these artists came from my 3,000-mile-away home. I also knew that New Yorkers wanted to believe that everything clever or new or beautiful came from somewhere south of 14th Street.

I accepted this refusal to assign Oregon citizenship to successful artists as strange, but understandable. What I was not prepared for, when I returned home, was the discovery that Portlanders too, wanted to identify its artists as originating spiritually, if not actually, from somewhere south of 14th street. A programmer for a local film festival told me he could not identify the Oregon roots of a visiting director because it would turn off his audience. Portlanders wanted better than that. They wanted art created by people who did not grow up in Oregon.

Read the rest on OregonLive:

Crash Course On Oregon’s Three Warrior Poets: Joaquin Miller, C. E. S. Wood and John Reed

“I’m damned if I could tell the difference between a hexameter and a pentameter to save my scalp.” Joaquin Miller, c. 1871

Many surprises await the reader of “The Poet in the Desert”, for it is strong meat, the work of one of those rebel spirits who cannot free their souls without smashing most of the conventions. - New York Times, June 1915

Reed was no theoretician; he could not learn from books. His education came through his eyes, which were the eyes of a poet..—Granville Hicks, 1935

This year at the Northwest Poets Concord in Newport, Oregon, I will be giving a talk about frontier poet Joaquin Miller, soldier poet C. E. S. Wood, and the only American poet buried in the Kremlin, journalist John Reed.

The Envelope Please: Oregon Goes To The Oscars/ Feb. 26 @ OHS

On Sunday, February 26, at 2:00 PM, Oregon Movies, A to Z, aka Anne Richardson, talks Oscars at the Oregon Historical Society. 1200 SW Park Avenue in Portland.

This talk serves as a great crash course in Oregon film history.

Read the rest of this post at Oregon Movies, A to Z.

Oregon Cartoon Institute Public Meeting/Feb. 12 @ 5th Avenue Cinema

Oregon Cartoon Institute is holding its second public meeting on Sunday, Feb. 12, at 2:00 PM at 5th Avenue Cinema.

All friends and fans of Oregon Cartoon Institute are invited. If you think you might belong to this group, you do.

The agenda includes a brief introduction to the all volunteer Institute, and a discussion of what is up next. We’ll have announcements from the Mel Blanc Project and the Homer Davenport Project, some proposals to consider, and some hand outs to take home.

Reminder: last time the Institute met, Dennis Nyback supplied home made refreshments.

This year our featured attraction, besides Dennis’ brownies, is a rare screening of The Little Baker, a stop motion animation short by early Portland filmmaker Lewis Clark Cook (1909 – 1983). We will also screen a ten-minute profile of Cook, made for OPB in the early 1980’s by Portland artist Jim Blashfield.

For the rest of this post, which is from Oregon Movies, A to Z, go here:

Robert Johnston/Anne Richardson/David Horowitz/Bugs Bunny@PSU, Feb. 8, 2012

Tim DuRoche laid down the challenge. “Have you read Robert Johnston’s book?”  I hadn’t, but, after a summer of listening to the Mel Blanc Lectures, it was time.

Johnston’s book, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question Of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, takes the political temperature of Portland’s middle class during the city’s rapid growth at the turn of the century. Small business owners Frederick and Eva Blank were part of that population spurt, arriving from San Francisco in 1915 with their two sons, Henry and six year old Melvin Jerome.

In his award winning book, Johnston examines four civic leaders – Will Daly, Harry Lane,Lora C. Little and William U’Ren – who helped shape Portland’s political landscape during that period. Princeton University Press describes The Radical Middle Class this way:

By examining in particular the independent small business sector or petite bourgeoisie, using Progressive Era Portland Oregon as a case study, Robert Johnston shows that class still matters in America. But it matters only if the politics and culture of the leading player in affairs of class, the middle class, is dramatically reconceived

Johnston puts the concept of middle class under a microscope. What is the middle class, and how does it differ from the working class? Is there a line? Where do we draw it? Examining Portland’s voting records, precinct by precinct, Johnston found working class interests receiving unexpectedly wide support.  During this period, where one might expect to find the “middle class” small business owners identifying upwards with the interests of management, Johnston instead found the voting records indicating the opposite – the owners of small businesses identified downwards, and supported the unions.

What impact did this deep populist streak have on the young Portlander who would later become one of our country’s most skilled pop culture practitioners?

On Feb. 8, 2012, Robert Johnston will come to Portland to sit down with Anne Richardson, director of the Mel Blanc Project, for an onstage conversation to explore this question. We will be joined onstage by PSU professor David Horowitz, author of The People’s Voice: A Populist Cultural History Of Modern America.

Thank you to Thomas Luckett, chairman of PSU’s History department, and to John Rowe, of PSU’s Phi Alpha Theta, for partnering with the Mel Blanc Project to make this event possible. Thank you to Carl Abbott for overseeing the matchmaking.

The final Mel Blanc Lecture, an onstage conversation between Robert Johnston, Anne Richardson and David Horowitz, will take place on Feb. 8, 2012 at 7:00 PM.

Find us in Smith Center 333, at Portland State University.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Thank you, Tim DuRoche, for the kick in the pants!