Bitten by the Fuckdog
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Cole, a playwright, lawyer, former CIA employee, and cofounder of CoHo Productions, a not-for-profit Portland theater company, had an itch to go back east and wondered if there might be a job for him out there that wouldn’t require election. “My friends in Oregon and I started talking about the NEA,” he says. “After the disillusioning experience with the congressional race, I didn’t want to embark on a fool’s errand, but they didn’t think it would be an issue.” After all, Cole says, both art and the Republican Party are supposed to be about personal liberty.
It looked like he was in luck: there was an opening for a deputy chairman for grants and awards–the number-three job in the agency, responsible for the day-to-day operation of the roughly $60 million grant program. Cole thought this would be dandy and believed his experience in art, business, and law made him eminently qualified. In the spring of 2003 he applied for the job and says Oregon senator Gordon Smith pushed for him. That May he went to Washington for interviews with NEA head Dana Gioia and the White House personnel office. Soon afterward he got an e-mail from Ann Guthrie Hingston, director of the NEA’s office of congressional and White House liaison, telling him he was Gioia’s choice for the $131,000-a-year job, subject to White House approval, and on June 9 he got a congratulatory call from her announcing that the position was his. “I was ecstatic,” Cole says. “This was my dream job, the culmination of 20 years of hard work in the arts and Republican politics.” In Chicago at the time for his brother’s wedding, he dived right in, celebrating the appointment with his parents and making an offer on a house in the D.C. area.
After a flurry of publicity earlier in the week, a crowd of only about a half dozen gathered at Louis Sullivan’s stock exchange arch behind the Art Institute last Saturday to hear the Richard Nickel Transaction Ensemble perform the first part of a protest concert. Ensemble leader Steven Tod says the group had been trying for a year to get permission to play a requiem for their namesake in the re-created stock exchange trading room inside the museum, without success. (Nickel, who dedicated his life to photographing and preserving Sullivan’s buildings, died in 1972 when the floor of the trading room at the stock exchange building he’d attempted to save caved in on him.) So the ensemble was playing under the arch, where it had to compete with a sax wafting over from Monroe Street and the unrelenting rush of the adjacent triple fountain. The group had planned an improvised work to be played on bottles, but the sound of breath hitting liquid in five partially filled containers was barely audible.
SOS: The production of Flanagan’s Wake that was scheduled to open September 11 at the Royal George is itself a candidate for a wake. Mia Fiorella, the show’s booking agent, says it’s been abandoned by its producer, Vicki Quade, and is looking for a new home. “We had a director, and the show was cast,” Fiorella says–but in August Quade advised her that they’d have to delay. When Fiorella pressed for an opening date, Quade replied that she was too busy to focus on it.
