Mack McFarland is documenting his experience as an artist and viewer in TBA:06, the time-based arts festival put together by PICA. Mack is a PNCA alumnus and current staffer, and his joint project with artist Dennis Nyback entitled “The Portland That Was” is showing in various locations during the festival week. Email Mack your thoughts at .

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Sep 22, 2006

As I come down from a rush of do do do, see see see, there is a feeling of empty inside. I have tried to take time off to reflect, to catch my breath, to give my feet a break, to spend time with my cat and wife, but it is not easy to do. The need to fill one’s day with activities is addicting.

Finally yesterday I had some time, just sitting, read the newspaper, went for a long walk with Leigh, my wife, sat on the couch and watched a Hollywood movie; all of this done without the nagging feeling that there is some much more productive way to spend this time. I could empty out the brain a bit and get ready for the new. And there must be a new. I think our lives here in The Land of Art, is all about the new. We march forward with our new ideas and plans, looking ahead to see where next to show, or what new grant or project space to apply for. Being a chronic procrastinator is deadly in this field. Though being totally self absorbed in your work or even The Land of Art, can also lead to unpleasant destinations.

I have no formula to give, or a “the key for me is” to say. I can only say that new ideas are needed very much in our world, in all areas of our world. And as artist we should live how ever best to foster and share those ideas to everyone, not only The Land of Art.

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Sep 20, 2006

We hosted an event as part of The Portland That Was… yet technically separated from PICA’s TBA event, solely for legal reasons, called ALL NIGHT LONG FILM CARAVAN. Here is how the event was described.

All Night Long is a free, outdoor film show in which the audience travels from site to site to see eight short films in eight related historic sites in downtown Portland.

Artist Mack McFarland and film archivist Dennis Nyback will lead the caravan, which will go from the South Park Blocks to The Pearl. Audience members traveling on foot, by bike, or on skateboard will see a line up of films which includes classic Hollywood animation featuring the voice of Portlander Mel Blanc, an educational film which features Mayor Terry Shrunk and City Commissioner Neil Goldschmidt being dressed down by Portlanders upset by development in Goose Hollow, a 1940 Republican Party campaign film encouraging voters to choose the Wilkie/McNary ticket, and more. All presented in glorious 16mm on film, not video!

All of the projection equipment, generator, and films will be transported by bicycle, facilitated by SHIFT www.shift2bikes.org

We did this without any permits (which is why we could not bill it as a PICA event) and were asked to leave from only one place, “Portland’s living room” Pioneer Courthouse Square. Here Dennis was showing a film from the 1940’s of George Olsen, a popular bandleader who was discovered at the Portland Hotel, now Pioneer Courthouse Square. We were on the sidewalk outside of the square, seven minutes into the 12 minutes of film when one bicycle policeman came up and asked us to leave. Some members of Shift and other attendants tried to plead with the cop, but to no avail.

All and all the event worked better than we could have hoped. We ended up going to nine locations in four hours. Beginning at 8pm outside of Lincoln Hall on PSU’s campus we watched a Woody Woodpecker cartoon featuring the voice of Portlander Mel Blanc and ending outside of the Low Brow Lounge where we watched NW beer commercials.

Look for the next ALL NIGHT LONG FILM CARAVAN

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Sep 18, 2006

Well the TBA festival has ended and we have all survived. In the days to come I will give a report on our All Night Caravan, but for today I want to rave about NATURE THEATER OF OKLAHOMA and their work Poetics: a ballet brut.

The last few TBA Festivals I’ve attended there is always one that sticks out as THE ONE that carries me to the next years festival. From TBA 05 it was Lone Twin Sledgehammer Songs: A Bother in Twenty-One Dramas. This year without doubt it is Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Surpassing even Laurie Anderson, whom I really enjoyed, and was very excited to see, NTOK’s piece just kept giving and giving.

Of course there was no way Laurie Anderson could of lived up to to my 12 years of longing to see her. Well, perhaps if she would put me, her, Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Lou Reed in a time machine to 1985, ending up at some six screen extravaganza with….

Yeah, on the other hand I was not even going to attend NTOK. I, like many, have to make decision on what will and wont be seen. One of the first things I do with the massive TBA catalog is go through and look at all the pictures and pick a few things out based on their image. Sure, for you this may sound silly, but for me it makes sense. What I am going to see is a visual experience and I would hope that the image in the catalog would lend a clue into what will be going on in some manner. Like Vivarium Studio’s The Itching of the Wings, that guy in the feather suit had me the first time I saw that image. In contrast NTOK’s image of a shirtless man spot lit on stage did not grab me, i simply turned the page. Now of course later I go back and read what the shows are about, but for that first look through, it is all about the photograph.

That said, NATURE THEATER OF OKLAHOMA was an inspiring piece of theater which contained plenty of the key ingredient to a good show, surprise.

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Sep 16, 2006

We had our last official TBA screening on Thursday night. That afternoon we decided to make a venue change due to the rain. Despite the rain and the move from the Eastbank Esplanade to The Works under the Hawthorn Bridge the crowd was enthusiastic and attentive. However, because of our use of The Works space, and not wanting to cut into the time of Ten Tiny Dances, which was really great!, we had to cut out two of the films we were planning to show.

One of those films, It Can Be Done (1937), is one of my favorites from our project. It was made by Portland General Electric to promote the electrification of farms. Even before I learned anything about this film I was fascinated by it. It opens with a nicely exacted double exposer montage which gracefully depicts the early rising farmer and the large amount of work which gets done before lunch. A good opening to a film can carry it a long way. When I think back to some of my favorite films and videos, be they short or feature length, they almost all have a very powerful opening sequence. (Alphaville, Scorpio Rising, Performance, Pi, Being John Malkovich…) And once we showed the film to PGE retirees and they told us that most of the cast and crew were real farmers and PGE employees; the film took on a new meaning and context. I began to wonder about the farmers and their convictions on this issue of electrification, and it reminded me that there was a time when electrification was debated.

Another good bit of information we heard from the PGE retirees was that PGE once had a plan to rig a pulley system from Oregon City to downtown Portlandas a way to carry the energy from power plant to user. I Love imagining that.

Here is The Portland That Was…’s last ha-raw. Not part of TBA.
http://portlandwas.com/caravan.html

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Sep 14, 2006

First thing we did yesterday was to rent a new generator, one that could perform for more than 3 people, and not get stage fright. This was simple, a phone call, a pick up, $27, piece of cake.

Again Jean Margaret, Daniel and Xena meet us at 5:30 to begin the load in and set up. The 15 ft truss is not all that heavy, however the four 30lb sandbags that hold the steel base down are. As is the generator, the projector, the speaker, etc. We have a wheeled cart, thank the inventor of the wheel, for from where we park the trucks, to where the films were shown last night was about 125 yards. Despite the trek we had the whole set up done by 7:00 pm. We then sat, chatted and hoped it would not rain. Which it didn’t, in fact the sky cleared up, producing a wonderful sunset. This amphitheater on Tom McCall Park is a really nice place to have free public events. There is all the natural beauty of the river, mixed with the architecture of the city. Toss in crowds of people passing by and you have the kind of place that can draw, not only the crowd you have invited, but also many who just happen upon the event.

The only thing better than it not raining, was the fact we did not need the new generator. Two newer looking light posts had two outlets each on them! This made the night much quieter. If there are any engineers out there, I would love for you to develop low cost, quite generators. That would be great. You can do it after lunch, while riding high on your success to finding a new clean, Green, energy source.

The crowd was good, as were the films, which were from the 30’s and 40’s and had to do with radio of that era. Stars who became so from radio fame like Bing Crosby, Cab Calloway, and Kate Smith were featured. Lets all sing, “Radio killed the literary stars.”

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Sep 13, 2006

Win some, Loose some.

Last night was the 1st of our free outdoor screenings, “Vaudeville Deluxe,” under the Steel bridge, in Tom McCall Park. Jean Margaret, our technical director who works for PICA, and two very fabulous volunteers: Xena and Daniel (all in photo, though their faces remain secret) met us at 5:30pm to begin the set up. We projected onto a 12 ft screen Dennis Nyback had hanging around his studio. To deal with the wind, a truss was erected and secured with sandbags and rope. Then masonite was clamped to the main supports to help keep the screen still. The screen looked great, the river to the right and behind, the monstrous Steel bridge. The ambient sounds of the MAX, boats, passer byes, bikes, and the generator to power it all, added to the experience.

It was the generator that stole the show away from these vaudevillian performers of yesterdays. We knew the the generator was loud, but for the first film of Gus Visser singing with a duck (1927) one could barley hear. Dennis and I then made some adjustments with the placement of speaker and power source, and by the time Chaz Chase began his act of eating lit cigarettes and matches (1936) one could really hear the sizzle of the burn, as the drone of the generator fell away. But alas the generator would fail us.

40 minutes into the films the generator would begin to spit and sput and, not wanting to perform. It seems this was the largest crowd it had worked for and it got cold feet. This is the only explanation we have at this time, for not long ago in our test run, this little machine put out power like a coal fired power plant in its heyday, circa 1902. So it is sad to say that the stage lights were dimmed all too early again on these vaudevillian greats. The generator stole the show.

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Sep 12, 2006

Last night I set out to see more wonderful TBA things.

1st was Deborah Hay Room performed by Linda Austin and Tahni Holt. http://www.pica.org/tba/tba06/detail.aspx?eventid=35

This minimalist dance piece points out how powerful the body in motion can be. Austin and Holt’s gestures (both in movement and sound) combined with the eloquently executed lighting by Jeff Forbes had the packed house entranced, laughing, and at a few points startled. This piece had my mind thinking of watching kids at the beach (from the free actions mixed in wonderment and also Holt’s costume), David Lynch films (from the mood of some movements punctuated by the light, or lack of and also Austin’s use of the sounds her costume made while she moved in it), Lars von Trier film (Idioterne 1998), and I could also not escape the image of Findhorn, Scotland where my wife and I visited last summer. Findhorn is where Austin and Holt, with other choreographers and performers, spent 11 days under the tutelage of Hay. The feeling of this coastal town came to us from the “singing” done during the show. Even at its most indecipherable (like many a cab diver in Scotland) the style of the voice took us back to green, green fields, friendly folks, and good, dark beer. The show was so compelling to one man that at the point in the performance when Holt is singing how she wishes she was where we (the audience) are, that he sang back (very well I might add) that he wished he was where she was. She smiled and went on. This work should not be skipped in the madness of seeing it all.

Last night I was also fortune it enough to catch a couple of films from the Oregon Department of Kick Ass at The Works. The evenings films were all chosen by Vanessa Renwick. I was only able to see the last three films, of which Renwick’s Hope and Prey is still with me. With the three screen projection the video is powerful, then add the live droning score from Daniel Menche and you’ll have the nightmares I did last night. Stark, bare, black and white video shot in snow cover fields and forest showing elk and wolves hunting and living their lives. And birds, flocks and flocks of crows, and a wonderful appearance of a bald eagle. This was a TBA one off, but check out www.odoka.org for another chance to see it.

And as I said here is the WE who made our TBA project happen.

Damon Eckhoff, web site

Damon Eckhoff is a web developer and artist who lives in Portland, Oregon. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Missouri, Columbia, as well as a B.F.A. in Painting from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. He is fascinated by computer-based technologies and how they continue to define new areas of space in regards to information, culture, and social interaction. His research has included web-application design, robotics, and human-computer interaction (HCI). Currently, he is exploring how disparate web-based technologies can be combined to create new ways of experiencing the web. www.damoneckhoff.com

Dennis Nyback, film archivist

Dennis Nyback is an independent film archivist who curates feature length programs from his personal collection of rare short films. Last year he showed films in New York, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, Austin, Houston, as well as in Leipzig, Cologne, Bern, Brussels, and other cities across Europe. Nyback has been a featured guest at many international film festivals including Trickfilm Festival in Stuttgart), Underdog Festival in Oslo, and the Pi-Fan Film Festival in Puchon. He has served on the jury at the KinoFilm Festival in Manchester and the Interfilm Festival in Berlin.

Dennis served as story consultant to the PBS documentary YOURS FOR A SONG: THE WOMEN OF TIN PAN ALLEY, and MTV drew both on his collection and on his expertise for their hour long special on the history of the music video. He has been asked to program on subjects as wide ranging as baseball (Houston Museum of Fine Arts), blues music (Film Museum in Antwerp, Belgium), industrial animation ( New England Animation Festival), Mormon films (Pioneer Theater in New York), suburbia (Jacob Burns Film Center in New York), vaudeville (The Tank in New York), and Lt. Theodore (Dr. Seuss) Geisel’s WWII army training films (Yerba Buena Center for the Performing Arts in San Francisco). www.dennisnybackfilms.com

Anne Richardson, producer/mastermind

Anne Richardson grew up in The Portland That Was, and still misses the Union Gospel Mission’s JESUS LIGHT OF THE WORLD sign which used to illuminate the intersection of Burnside and Broadway. She appeared in early Tim Smith/Matt Groening films during high school, studied film at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University ( MFA 1991), and banged around New York raising her daughter on the Upper West Side. She taught film history classes with Dennis Nyback at Portland State University and Northwest Film Center in 2001. Married in 2003, they continue to collaborate.

Anu Samarajiva, intern

From Columbus, Ohio by way of Columbo, Sri Lanka, Anu is a Reed College sophomore currently testing her educational options which include the interest in history and art that she was happy to explore with THE PORTLAND THAT WAS

and me.

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Sep 11, 2006

Having survived the final push to finish our project for the TBA:06 Festival, I looked forward to some time of decompression. That time has still yet to arrive.

What I, and indeed, we, have been so engaged with is The Portland That Was…. Though this project has been in the works for the past six months we still have a hard time describing it, a real challenge when your trying to gain an audience. Here is the latest attempt.

The Portland That Was…

portlandwas.com is a two part project combining New Media interactivity with traditional film projections.

With the technological advances and rising popularity of hand-held digital video players, The Portland That Was… seeks to make connections within the shifting Portland landscape and the mediated and often forgotten history of this City. To that end, short documentary style videos have been created utilize vintage films and interviews of Portland’s citizens. These videos were produced for viewing in a specific place in Portland. When visiting the portlandwas.com you will be invited to use these “mobile videos.” Upon downloading the videos to your portable player, you print out the map, walk out your door, and begin to explore Portland’s past and present.

The second part of The Portland That Was… involves the river that runs right through the City. The Willamette River has played a major role in Portland’s development. For that reason, river front sites have been chosen to host free outdoor screenings. The first of these on Sept. 12th under the West side of the Steel Bridge; Vaudeville Deluxe will be commemorating the plethora of vaudeville theaters that were in Portland, many of which are serving as movie houses today. On the 13th of Sept. at the SW Salmon St. amphitheater in Tom McCall Waterfront Park the program is “Radio Days.” Short films of the 30’s and 40’s set in radio stations. These films, like The Portland That Was… were made to combined two forms of media into one. Then on Sept. 14th is the The Portland That Was… screening. All of the films used in the mobile videos will be shown near the Eastbank Esplanade Fire Station which is at the west end of SE Madison St.

All free, all begin at dusk.

See what I mean? The explanation and nformation just never seem to end. In fact I will be back very soon with even more. For example, who is this “we?”

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