The Organ, Portland’s greatest newsprint periodical since the Clinton Street Quarterly, has apparently published its last regular issue. (There’s a farewell editorial on page three, but a promo ad inside claims it will “be published on an irregular schedule” in 2005-2006.) In any event, editor Camela Raymond and staff have performed an admirable job these past two-plus years of covering the bi-state visual-arts scene, emphasizing the creative and the contemporary, and demanding that art be treated as a force for social progress. Raymond’s now taken a day job at the slick consumer-lifestyle mag Portland Monthly, so she can’t pour all her heart-n’-soul into The Organ for the time being.
The swan-song issue #13 (theme: “Resist”) includes several features of particular interest to Seattle readers:
- Raymond’s “Fragments from the Front” collects news clippings about the George Jackson Brigade, a sort of pre-WTO anti-corporate bombing and bank-robbing gang that operated in Seattle in the mid-’70s.
- Meagan Atiyeh’s “Artist in Residence” is an interview with Dutch-born painter Hank Pander, who’s got a career retrospective show at the Frye Art Museum until Jan. 16.
- Nadia Gregor’s “Signs and Wonders” is a lovely, haunting verbal travelogue along downtown Seattle’s abandoned storefronts (a topic I’ve also been quite interested in lately).
- And P-I arts writer Regina Hackett offers a review of local author Charles D’Ambrosio’s essay collection Orphans.
I’ll miss The Organ. I’d like to help make something new like it. Only this time, unlike the 2000-2003 print MISC, I don’t want to be the sole editor/publisher, and I don’t have any money to stick into it. Any ideas?
LOUSY NEWS OF THE DAY #2: Otis F. Odder aka Otis Fodder, Seattle’s own premier historian/collector/DJ of cool, strange, rate, and just plain odd recordings, is leaving town for the dreaded Frisco. (And yes, I call it “Frisco” deliberately, and the more you tell me not to, the more I’ll do it.)
LOUSY BUT EXPECTED NEWS OF THE DAY #3: “Snow Day” was pretty much over by 10 a.m., durn it.
