When that thing formerly known as the sun reappeared on Sunday morning in my garden, it threw beautiful columns of foggy silver across trees and meadow.
Fairy slides we used to call them when the kids were little. Alas, current associations go to magical thinking of a different kind: the installment of a king, if not emperor, wishing for a return to neoclassical building styles emulating the architecture of Greece and Rome millennia ago with columns as tokens of power and order, linking the current regime to nasty ones before them.
It was, after all, Hitler and Mussolini, who appropriated the tradition and grandeur of neoclassicism to serve the Nazi image and reminded a fascistic Italy of the power of the Roman Empire. No surprise, then, that our dear leader is going for Dictator Chic.
But who will be his Albert Speer, the equivalent to Hitler’s main architect?
Speer was as nasty as they come, but able to escape a death sentence at the Nuremberg trials because it was not yet known when he was tried how deeply he had been involved in the Holocaust. After his prison sentence he was released in 1966 and lived a life writing successful books until the died in 1981. Here is historians Ulf Schmidt assessment.
“Speer was personally involved in the Holocaust, that his ministry provided the building materials for an extension of Auschwitz, that he made a substantial fortune with Aryanized property, denounced uncooperative competitors, initiated the construction of concentration camps, and supported the draconian measures used against forced and slave labourers in some of Germany’s most horrific underground production facilities. If only a part of this had been known during the International Military Tribunal in 1945, which preceded the trial against Karl Brandt and others, Speer would probably have been sentenced to death. The fact that most of it was unknown at the time gave Speer the possibility of creating his own carefully constructed, but also greatly biased, post-war narrative of himself and the regime, a convenient and plausible story, which scholars and journalists either took for granted or were unable to refute.”
And here is an incisive essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, on reading Speer’s Inside the Third Reich as a child in Africa, then re-reading it as an adult at Yale. “His rueful acknowledgment of his dedication to Hitler, and his philosophical puzzlement at his own complicity, seeks to cast a glaze of innocence over him.” Perhaps the kind of book a certain attorney general might write in the distant future?
Back to the white columns: it is not architecture per se that should be seen as the problem. As I learned here there were lots of good guys (relatively speaking) who used neoclassical styles in their capitals (Paris’ Pantheon, London’s National Gallery,) and lots of bad guys, who have used the most progressive architects and architecture to set monuments to themselves. These include monumental buildings in totalitarian states such as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, designed by progressives like Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. Jair Bolsonaro from Brazil is apparently hiring the Danish star architect Bjarke Ingels.
The problem is the political process that seeks to reverse the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture (with us for 60 years now,) which insisted that architects suggested the designs to the government, not vice versa.
Entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” the draft of the executive order argues that the founding fathers embraced the classical models of “democratic Athens” and “republican Rome” for the capital’s early buildings because the style symbolized the new nation’s “self-governing ideals.”
Here are the details and also the reactions of various parties involved, including the resignation of the General Service Administration’s Chief Architect and Director of the Design Excellence Program, David Insinga, and the response of the American Institute of Architects.
“The AIA strongly opposes uniform style mandates for federal architecture. Architecture should be designed for the specific communities that it serves, reflecting our rich nation’s diverse places, thought, culture and climates. Architects are committed to honoring our past as well as reflecting our future progress, protecting the freedom of thought and expression that are essential to democracy.”
I believe proscribing certain styles of architecture is a statement of power, and an imposition of values associated with the style. It is not just a brand, it signals an ideology. If it is historically associated with authoritarian regimes by someone with authoritarian tendencies, we should be alarmed. Restricting creative freedom is just one more step in line of the developments we have seen over the last few years. We should march in protest columns, not have neoclassical ones stare in our faces.
Bruckner’s 4th symphony (a beautiful piece) starts with a sunrise, but since he was appropriated by the Nazis we’ll skip him. Let’s listen to this instead: Carl Nielsen’s Helios overture. Fittingly composed during a journey to Greece…
TIMES ARE HARROWING for people trying to protect Indigenous ancestral land and prevent accidents from pipeline spillage that would poison and pollute the regions’ land and water. The movement is taking place on many fronts, several of them cultural and artistic, including an Oregon-produced documentary film,Necessity: Oil, Water, and Climate Resistance, that focuses on the work of climate activists on the front lines and movement lawyers involved in supporting that struggle. And last week a group of Native American leaders and community allies in Portland gathered at the Port of Vancouver to protest the dangers of the continued use and expansion of pipelines, and alert us to what is going on farther north.
The Wet’suwet’en people in northern British Columbia, trying to stop construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline (CGL,) were arrested by Canadian police and tactical teams in the dark of night by militarized police with night vision and automatic weapons, their camps destroyed and media hindered on filming and reporting the police action. The BC Supreme Court granted the company behind the Coastal GasLink project, TC Energy, an injunction to continue construction activities and issued an enforcement order for the RCMP to clear the area.
“TC Energy says it reached agreements with 20 elected First Nation bands along the pipeline’s route and has the necessary permits to build. It has hailed the Coastal GasLink project as a way to create jobs and bolster economic development. But Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, who under Indigenous law hold authority over approximately 22,000sq km of land, say they never gave Coastal GasLink their consent to move ahead with the project.”
Protests are an urgent summons during a time when the 2019 UN Climate Change Summit failed to deliver, and scientific predictions of how fast we are approaching a point of no return are growing more dire by the day. The summons try to reach those who deny the dangers (or the very existence) of the climate emergency, those who ignore it and those who are giving in to helpless passivity in the face of it.
Cathy Sampson-Kruse, a Umatilla Tribal ElderPaul Che oke ten Wagner of the Vancouver Island Saanich Tribe
Those who are determined to raise awareness about the crisis, call for change, at a minimum, of our behavior, or, more urgently, of our whole system of relating to nature and each other. They are forging alliances across a whole spectrum of organizations and participants, setting aside differences in ideology and strategic approaches, and join forces to rescue this planet in whatever fashion is still possible. By necessity.
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NECESSITY: OIL, WATER, AND CLIMATE RESISTANCE is a locally produced documentary film, directed by Jan Haaken and co-directed by Samantha Praus, that focuses on the work of climate activists on the front lines and movement lawyers involved in supporting that struggle.
Here is a trailer of the feature length film, that describes what is at stake for the health of our waters and the populations that depend on them.
https://vimeo.com/297226350
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THE FILM INCLUDES conversations with lawyers who are central in protecting those who protect the waters. The conversations make it clear what is involved with organizing the movement and defending those who are accused of crimes around protest actions or to be made an example by the legal system to alert those who are contemplating joining the protest movement. One of the defenses under consideration is the Necessity defense, which states that when all legal and political means are exhausted it might be necessary to engage in non-violent illegal action to prevent irreversible harm.
One of the lawyers is Tara Houska, whose incisive opinion piece, My Culture is not Super Bowl Entertainment, was published on Super Bowl weekend in the New York Times. It called out the lasting damage done to Native Americans with the exploitation and degrading of their culture, particularly during the Super Bowl. The continuing use of mascots, and the nostalgic racism transmitted with stereotypes of the fallen noble savages is dehumanizing, and it hurts every new generation of Native American children, never mind their parents who have to live in a world with systemic suppression of opportunities to right the historical wrongs.
Tara Houska, Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe
People like Houska, an Ojibwe from Couchiching First Nation, are changing that. As a tribal attorney, the Campaigns Director of Honor the Earth, co-founder of Not Your Mascots, a non-profit committed to eradicating Native stereotyping, and founder of the Giniw Collective, she pushes back, fights hard and smart, and is central to building alliances with those who can and want to be supportive. Here is Houska in a TED talk on the Standing Rock resistance movement.
One of her statements during the interview struck me as particularly important. Roughly paraphrased, as best as I remember: as allies, non-Native Americans have to learn to listen and respect that there is knowledge and wisdom regarding goals and strategies to combat environmental destruction and other consequences of climate change. As survivors of genocide, indigenous people all over the world have accumulated strength and insights that should not be superseded by Whites rushing in and thinking they know the next best tactic to achieve shared goals. Leadership in coalitions needs to be assigned to those whose very existence is threatened by potential environmental disasters.
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IN THE INTENSIFYING conflict between industry and climate protesters, SLAPP suits abound. These are Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) that are intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition. These are in some ways only place holders, until state legislatures get their ducks in a row to pass laws that make anti-pipeline and other protest activities a crime. Since 2017 18 states have put forward legislation criminalizing protest, constitutional rights be d-mned. West Virginia, as just one example, has hearings today, February 10, on industry-drafted legislation (HB 4615) that would make peaceful civil disobedience against gas pipelines and other fossil fuel projects a felony.
Luckily there are experienced people one can turn to for issues concerning civil rights. One of them is Lauren Regan, a founding member and executive director of the the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC) based in Eugene, OR, which supports “movements that seek to dismantle the political and economic structures at the root of social inequality and environmental destruction. We provide litigation, education, legal and strategic resources to strengthen and embolden their success.”
As a trial lawyer she handles state and federal criminal defense, SLAPP defense, grand jury resistance, and federal civil rights litigation against police and government agencies for violating the rights of activists and organizations – 3000 cases across the last 15 years together with her staff attorneys.
Lauren Regan, Executive Director at the Civil Liberties Defense Center
Here she is in a podcast where she talks about surveillance of social movements. (It starts out with very loud music, be warned, but then goes to normal decibels…)
The topic of alliances, in all their strength and challenges, came up in our conversations here as well. You cannot swoop in and take over what are the existential fights of certain groups. To achieve trust, furthermore, and create a blueprint for constructive collaboration, you need to connect and build relationships before crisis hits. That means extensive and longitudinal involvement between and learning from allies, so that a structure is established that carries everyone through when the need arises.
Given the potential increase in actions around climate resistance movements, this is something to be acknowledged.
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NECESSITY: OIL, WATER, AND CLIMATE RESISTANCE, depicting the efforts and challenges of the resistance movement, was selected by the Doc Society NYC for their Inaugural Climate Story Lab as a film about climate resistance that could make a difference. The non-profit organization, with their mission “dedicated to the impact of art and the art of impact,” supports the production of documentary films and helps to connect them to global audiences.
Their partnering with the NECESSITY project makes it feasible to produce a film series featuring different regions where Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies confront the fossil fuel industry. The documentary series will educate about the front lines of climate resistance, including lessons that climate activists are learning about legal tactics and various rights and risks associated with the calls in the movement for acts of civil disobedience. Bearing witness – one possible contribution to climate activism in joint efforts to protect the planet.
“What do I want? Why do I want it? And how do I get it?” – Stacey Abrams, in a TED talk shortly after she lost in the 2018 midterm elections.
AS SHOULD BE OBVIOUS by now, I rarely review exhibitions that I don’t like. The world doesn’t need more negativity and I don’t need the emotional aggravation. It is therefore with some trepidation when I accept invitations to review something I have not yet had a chance to see. I will only do so if I am deeply committed to an institution and usually trust their choices, as is the case with the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE.)
Felicia after the Black Prom, Vidalia, Georgia, 2009. Photographed by Gillian Laub.
No need to fret: OJMCHE’s newest exhibition, Southern Rites, is one of their strongest yet, a moving and thought-provoking tour de force about race relations and racism in contemporary America. Organized by the International Center for Photography and judiciously curated by Maya Benton, the exhibition of photographs by Gillian Laub is visual activism at its best: perceptive, engaged, critical photography of human beings in a context that defines them. Did I mention beautiful? Beautiful!
Artist Talk at OJMCHE before the official opening of the exhibition
It is not the beauty that matters here, though. It is the package of three elements that make this not just an artful, but an important exhibition: a longitudinal project executed with skill and courage in the light of tremendous obstacles, for one. Secondly, a slew of smart curatorial decisions how to present that project, equally important for creating a narrative. And finally, the flexibility of a Jewish museum bent on going beyond the traditional role of keeper of memory, whether Holocaust-related or preserving the history of the local community.
Museum Director Judy Margles welcomes the artist.Bruce Guenther, frequent guest curator at OJMCHE, attends the opening
OJMCHE’s invitation to have difficult conversations about racism and relations between African Americans and Whites — at a time when this city is, again, in the midst of a murder trial for someone accused of hate crimes and where the weekend brings marches by the KKK and their allies in close vicinity of the museum — provides the very model of inclusivity that is a prerequisite for change. To hark back to Stacey Abram’s questions (and potential answers): if it is change that we want, and if it is justice that demands it, then to get there we are helped by the kind of art Gillian Laub creates and museums like OJMCHE that channel it.
Qu’an and Brooke, Mt. Vernon, Georgia, 2012. Photographed by Gillian Laub..
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“I am an invisible man…I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” –Ralph Ellison (1952)
GILLIAN LAUB IS A STORY TELLER. I cannot tell whether the New York-based photographer and film maker intuitively grasps the effectiveness of a human interest narrative, or if her projects are the results of intellectual decisions to employ a certain method – probably both, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Her work delivers a comprehensive view into the lives of other human beings, the way that they are shaped by their environments. Her interactions with her subjects elicit an openness and willingness to communicate that are rare for documentary photographers. The fact that she graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in comparative literature before studying photography at the International Center of Photography, clearly exerts an influence. At her best she makes the invisible visible.
Gillian Laub, photographer and film maker
The images that you encounter at the museum depict the African-American and White High School seniors of small towns in Montgomery County, Georgia. The towns had segregated Proms way into the 21st Century. Laub visited, on assignment for he NYT, after a high-schooler had sent a cry for help to Spin Magazine in the early 2000s. Not only was she escorted out of the White Prom, chased out of town, car tires slashed, but repeatedly so, across several years that she returned, even when the Prom was now officially integrated some time later.
Yearbook of Segregated Prom
The topic of Prom politics – and the eventual accumulation of Prom photographs – was soon superseded by a tragic death in the community: in 2011 one of the young men associated with all the teens she had been photographing, was murdered by the father of a girl who had invited Justin Patterson and friends to come at night to her house. He shot at several of them several times. Originally charged with seven offenses, among them murder and false imprisonment the man was offered a plea deal and spent a year in a State detention center and some years probation. The victim’s parents’ claim that the shooting was racially motivated, went unheard. In later interviews, once freed, the shooter showed no remorse. In addition to portraits of the involved people, the exhibition shows a tape of the 911 call that is hair raising in its lack of humanity.
Curator Maya Benton in front of a photograph of the shooter and audio tape of the 911 call
A detailed HBO documentary of the Patterson killing, filmed by Laub, can be seen at the museum every Wednesday at 2:00 pm and on demand on the weekend.
Documentation of the Town’s Coping
The third part of the show consists of a large number of B-roll footage, glimpses of workers in the onion fields of Georgia, the town, the churches, and, fascinatingly, the many church signs and billboards that display evangelical messages. Most of the churches are still segregated by choice. Yet you cannot tell by eyeballing which constituency posted the religious slogans. A shared appeal to fear of Divine punishment for your aberrations, however, does not translate into anything much else that’s shared, it seems.
Noted.
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MAYA BENTON, EDUCATED AT BROWN, Harvard University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, was faced with a tough choice for this exhibition. Many of the questions and subject matters raised by the extensive body of images and their implications had to be sifted through to cull a manageable display. More importantly, how do you tell a story that is not entirely your own? How do you document reality without appropriating someone else’s history? I have previously asked these questions here for other visual artists.
Maya Benton, Curator, Lecturer and Writer
In the current exhibition the decision was made – successfully – to let the subjects of the portraits speak for themselves, with transcriptions next to the images. It is then equally important to look at the photographs AND read the accompanying texts, particularly in instances where Laub had repeated contact with individual students across time, allowing us to be witness to changes in perspective caused by concurrent events. Believe me, it does not feel like the usual chore of digesting endless artist statements. These are living testimonials of voices that we rarely get to hear, and help to do both for us: to acknowledge stereotypes and perhaps to combat them.
A substantial amount of general information about the history and politics of segregation in our public school systems is displayed in additional showcases. Getting a refresher about the path from Plessy v, Ferguson to Brown v. Board of Education doesn’t hurt. What does hurt is reading the evidence of communal complicity in maintaining segregative practices even during the years of the Obama Administration: teachers’ comments on students’ essays bemoaning the divided Proms, classmates notes decrying calls for change as in the face of Southern tradition and so on. The displays are superbly assembled.
Note from classmate
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“One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.” –Theodor W. Adorno, (1959)
WHEN ADORNO WROTE in 1959 about the (refusal of) working through the past, he had fascism and in particular the guilty German people foremost in mind. OJMCHE is on target when the museum allows us to see how some of this can be translated to the memory culture of slavery and racism in this country as well, I believe. What is striking though, and that is what this exhibition certainly has made me think about, is how much those who used to enjoy the advantages of segregation and relative power in society, want return to the past, rather than forget it, never mind come to terms with it.
Public Shaming, Vidalia, Georgia, 2013. This Country. This Century. Photographed by Gillian Laub.
For large groups of Whites, power is perceived to be a birthright, and resentment surges when one sees one’s own displacement or descent as directly caused by the ascent of specific others – women who work, migrants who come into the country, African-Americans who take over the Prom. Unfortunately, these emotions are often stirred by easily manipulated beliefs rather than facts: if your job is gone, it is easier to blame the women who you see working all around you for displacing you, than questioning an economic system that relies on automation and outsourcing to continue to reap profits. If you believe that South American migrants will deprive you of your share of limited resources you don’t even look at the facts that show this to be untrue.
Those emotions mobilize: You see yourself attacked as a class, no longer as a failing individual, and that unites you with the many who share your view. Rather than apportioning blame to yourself as not being competitive, you can blame a shared out-group enemy – making for these dangerous movements that are now sprouting across the US, movements that are willing to consider even violence to defend what they believe is ripped from them.
Scientific studies have shown this to be true nowhere more so than in the American South. In their book Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics Avidit Acharya, a political scientist at Stanford, Matt Blackwell, a professor of government at Harvard and Maya Sen, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, link current conservative attitudes towards gun rights, death penalty and racial resentment in parts of the South directly to a slave holding history.
In a nutshell: Southern Cotton and tobacco industries thrived on chattel slavery, since those crops were extremely labor intense. After the Civil War, those regions’ economic survival depended on finding ways to continue to exploit Black labor. Anti-Black laws and practices, from Jim Crow to the undermining of education and participation in the political sphere, served that purpose. But there is another important mechanism at work, called behavioral path dependenceby the authors: Generation after generation passes down and reinforces beliefs about racial inequality and the need to impede progress of those deemed inferior. Children learn from their parents and teach their own children, all the while being backed up by local institutions that echoe the value judgments and create spaces for segregation. After slavery was abolished and with it Ante Bellum Laws, the subjugation of Blacks now relies increasingly on cultural mechanisms.
“…things like racialized rhetoric from the top down can have really, really damaging and long-term impacts. So things like talking about people in dehumanizing language, institutionalizing policies that treat people as less than human. Those things can really create attitudes that then persist for a long time.
.. to be able to kind of preserve the same structure, economic structure that we had with slavery it required a lot more kind of local vigilance to kind of enact these policies. So you had a kind of creation of a culture, a maintenance of a culture that required things like extrajudicial violence, it required basically training and indoctrinating young children into thinking about the world in certain ways.“
Shelby on her grandmother’s car. Mount Vernon, Georgia, 2008
And this culture is incredibly resistant to change, proceeding at a glacial pace. In other words, federal interventions, like the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act (or what’s left of it) can address behavioral discrimination, but they do nothing with regard to attitudes. Children who are indoctrinated from an early age will carry their parents’ attitudes to the next generation.
For change to happen, we must pursue the one public cultural mechanism at our own disposal: education. This is whatSouthern Ritesdoes on so many levels and so successfully.
Gillian Laub, artist, Maya Benton, curator.
In the true tradition of concerned photography, the early documentary approach to describing the injustice of the world, it educates through imagery, through text, through augmenting materials. It does so effectively because it taps into something beyond our thoughts. Show me one person who is not going to leave that exhibition emotionally riled, to varying degrees. It elicits empathy, pure and simple, an opening to relating in new ways. I just hope every high schooler in town has a chance to visit!
Southern Rites
From the International Center of Photography Photographs by Gillian Laub
Let’s just look at the BRIGHT side. That’s what the views suggest – there are so many spots lit up. That was true for the landscape as photographed 2 days ago, which had this weird partial lighting when the sun peeked through the clouds.
But it is also present in what is on offer this week in the cultural landscape – I will post longer essays in days to come on two of the three things I urge you to visit, and photographs for the third. Each one in its own right is a testament to resilience, finding joy in hard places, fashioning the world with new perspectives and refusing to give in. In other words, they help us look at the bright side.
For now I recommend, highly, a visit to OJMCHE to see their new exhibitionSouthern Rites. The expressive photographs of Gillian Laub, thoughtfully and confidently curated by Maya Benton and The Center for International Photography, introduce us to a new generation of young Black people living in the American South, their losses, challenges and perseverance. The exhibition also offers welcome education on some of the legal issues involved with inter-racial relations.
February 5, 2020 – May 24, 2020 724 NW Davis Street Portland OR 97209 Opening on First Thursday.
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Also of interest, starting First Thursday as well, is an exhibition at Gallery 114 that will communicate joy. Ebullience, initiated by Gallery 114 member Joanne Krug and her husband, displays both 2D and 3D art created by artists living with intellectual or developmental disability. The artists have found a place to be creative at the Portland Art and Learning Studio, part of Albertina Kerr, under the caring and smartly involved directorship of Chandra Glaeseman. I can’t wait to report in detail on the work that is done there, and the art that will be on display at 114.
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The third recommendation regards two 50 minute-long performances this weekend of How to Have Fun in A Civil War, created and performed by Ifrah Mansour (Somalia/U.S.). Offered by Boom Arts in conjunction with the 30th Annual Cascade Festival of African Film, the multimedia performance event will make your heart softer.
Mansour revisits her childhood memories during the 1991 Somali civil war to confront violent history with humor, and provide a voice for the global refugee stories of children. How to Have Fun in a Civil War, is a one-act multimedia play, which explores war from an idyllic viewpoint of a seven-year-old Somali refugee girl. The play weaves puppetry, poetry, videos and multiple oral stories taken from community interviews to tell a captivating story about resilience while pushing the audience to engage in a healing process that is still raw for survivors of the war.
Here is a more detailed review. And here is a video of her explaining her project.
February 8th at 1:00pm & 9th at 5:00pm – PCC Cascade, Moriarity Hall Theatre, on the corner of N. Killingsworth and Albina ( enter on Albina)
For the last bit of this week, a bit of PR for one of the projects I am involved in as set photographer: OUR BODIES OUR DOCTORS. I’ve written about it before here. And here is an overview article on the multi-pronged legal and political assaults on our rights. Don’t let them be swept away by floods resembling the current state of the Willamette river….
On this Important Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Cinema 21 Hosts a Special Screening of OUR BODIES OUR DOCTORS Winner “Best Documentary Feature” 2019 Portland International Film Festival The event includes WE ARE FORBIDDEN, a short film directed by Cheryl Strayed and Brian Lindstrom.
On this anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Cinema 21 hosts a special screening of OUR BODIES OUR DOCTORS, Winner of “Best Documentary Feature” at the 2019 Portland International Film Festival as well as Best of SIFF and the “Lena Sharpe Persistence of Vision Award” at the 2019 Seattle International Film Festival. This feature length film has been described as “bold and brave” and “nothing short of revolutionary” in the depth of its portrayals of the work of abortion providers.
OUR BODIES OUR DOCTORS features Portland providers, often unsung heroes, and the creative work of feminist clinics in the Pacific Northwest.
“When I took on this documentary project, I was struck by how little people knew—even those that are pro-choice—about what’s actually involved in abortion care. What I found in making OUR BODIES OUR DOCTORS was a quiet rebellion in the field of medicine led by a new generation of progressive physicians fighting religious control over healthcare. The providers in the film take up difficult questions: How do they deal with the emotional and political aspects of abortion? What makes second term abortions medically and emotionally challenging, for the providers themselves and for their women patients? These are areas where pro-choice films have previously not ventured. But the providers featured in this film—and many of their patients–are bold and brave enough to take us there.” – Jan Haaken, Director
Screening with WE ARE FORBIDDEN, a 10-minute film directed by Brian Lindstrom and Cheryl Strayed.
In parts of Nepal, menstruating girls and women are considered impure. They are banished from their homes or sequestered to a room; forbidden from eating most foods and not allowed to attend school, visit a temple or even look at male family members. In this moving short film, nine Nepalese girls share their menstruation stories. The film derives its power from allowing the girls to speak for themselves, demonstrating their courage, strength and inspiring desire for change.
Providers featured in the film will join Director Jan Haaken and Producer David Cress for a Q&A session after the screening. Co-directors Brian Lindstrom and Cheryl Strayed will be present at the event.
“While a handful of forthrightly pro-choice documentaries have successfully conveyed the enhanced urgency of the issue in the 2010s – few films have managed to offer a truly novel perspective that goes beyond red-alert despair about the state of the world… OUR BODIES OUR DOCTORSis a smart, affecting documentary… Shining a light on the abortion issue from a vital yet neglected angle.”
–Cinema St Louis
“This film feels nothing short of revolutionary. The experiences of abortion providers have for too long been left out of the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate, and presenting these doctors with honesty and compassion will have a profound impact on the discourse around abortion in this country.”
“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” ― Arundhati RoyThe Cost of Living (1999)
If it weren’t for that pesky number at the end of the quote, dating it some 20 years back, you might as well imagine that Arundathi Roy crafted that paragraph with an eye on the exhibition currently on display at the Oregon Historical Society, DREAMs Deferred.
Roy frequently writes about the fate of minorities, refugees or displaced people on the Indian subcontinent. The focus of the DREAMs Deferred exhibit is somewhat closer to home, asking what happens to those who came to our country from Mexico or Latin America as young children of undocumented parents. The collaborative work on display shows a combination of six portraits and short-form narrative accounts of young undocumented immigrants, joined by photographic documentation of some treasured objects that were chosen by them be taken on the hazardous journey. The thrust is indeed: Watch! Try and understand! Never look away! These are your neighbors. These are people who just like the rest of us seek love, overcome obstacles and indescribable challenges, pursue a simple life and do not confuse the things that matter with those that should be ignored.
Portraits of DREAMERS combined with narrative and object description
The dream, the aspiration, is to live while you’re alive – something not guaranteed in the places that were left behind, with often existential threat forcing parents to bring their children to an unknown country that then was not known for its hospitality if you were non-white and poor, and is even less so today. DREAMERS, as these young people are known, existed in a legal limbo until the Obama administration in 2012 announced the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) policy, which brought a pause to potential deportation if you qualified. You had to be younger than 16 upon arrival to the US, lived here (endless documentation needed) for at least five years, be between 15 and 30 year old and either in school, or graduated, or a veteran of the Army or the Coast Guard, and have no convictions for felonies, significant misdemeanors (DUI included) or multiple misdemeanors. (Here is a small window into the insane bureaucracy involved for (re)application.)
Yessica Perrez Barrios, portrait by Sankar Raman
Approximately 700.000 people were protected by DACA until the Trump administration decided to rescind the policy in 2017. Their fate rests now with the US Supreme Court, with cases to be decided this June. Add to that the fate of 250.000 offspring of those Dreamers, who are US citizen because they were born here, but would be separated from their parents if deportation ensued. The Supreme Court cases also reach potentially beyond those young people now involved and living in limbo – there is the distinct possibility that any future President will be denied the right to implement progressive immigration reform through executive action. (Legal details can be found here.)
Opening of the exhibit. Sankar Raman, left, with guests.
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The small, beautifully curated exhibition provides an intimate window into the lives, thoughts and emotions of six very different undocumented people from Mexico and South American countries, made possible with support from the Zidell Family Foundation. The concept was developed by The Immigrant Story (TIS,) a local non-profit organization which is playing an important and increasingly visible role in capturing our attention about the plight of those in our community who do not have the legal protections the rest of us enjoy. “The right to have rights,” to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase from “The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), is, after all, restricted to citizens, and according to the United Nations, there are a record 65.6 million people who have been forcibly displaced; 22.5 million are considered refugees; ten million people currently stateless, all deprived of basic rights you and I take for granted.
Folks at TIS, guided, pushed, prodded and supported, if my intuition is correct, by founder and Board president Sankar Raman, understand the persuasive power of narrative relative to the value of statistics. If you aim for empathy and inclusion, as their mission statement implicates, storytelling is essential. Trained as a physicist, Raman holds a Ph.D. in Engineering and retired from the High Tech industry some years back, with an arsenal of skills when it comes to the technical challenges of organizing multi-pronged, group-based work. He arrived in the US from India in the beginning of the 1980s, just as I arrived from Germany. Given our similarity in age and comparable levels of education, I could not but wonder, while in conversation with this passionate man, how the difference in the color of our skin affected the process of immigration and integration.
Sankar Raman, President of the Board at THE IMMIGRANT STORY, photographer.
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By the time you leave the exhibition you have become if not familiar, then somewhat connected to those who shared their thoughts, joys and fears. Partly that has to do with the quality of the portraits, photographed by Raman. Larger-than-life faces all with eyes directed straight at the viewer express a range of emotions across subjects. Whistfulness alternates with exuberance, pensiveness with caution. There is a naturalness to them, even though they are obviously staged, that speaks to both the skill of the photographer and, more importantly, to the trust established between artist and subject. There is a poise that reveals these young people know that what they are doing is important. Telling their stories cannot be an easy thing even for the more gregarious among them. The use of a color palette focused on optimism rather than foreboding also draws you in. Strong work.
Ivan Hernandez, portrait by Sankar Raman
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“Strong work” is probably the weakest of the descriptors used in evaluation of photographer Jim Lommasson’s output. He is something of a role model if not a hero to many local and national photographic artists both for the quality of his workmanship and the choice of subject matters. A demonstrably humble man, he likely grimaces at such a label, but that is how the community sees him. As does the jurying set who decides to award grants and prizes, including the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize (2004) a coveted recognition from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Jim Lommasson, photographer.
Lommasson does not shy away from difficult topics, or political discourse transmuted into emotionally charged images and text. The artist somehow manages to communicate the raw essence of his subjects, their suffering and their triumphant survival no matter where he directs his lens. From American boxing rings, to the postwar existence of wounded veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to documentation of mementos of generations of Holocaust and genocide survivors in his most recent project: What we carried: Fragments from the Cradle of Civilization, the work invites us to think about our shared humanity. Us and hundreds of thousands of viewers nationally, given that his work has been displayed at numerous museums, including the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, which alone has half a million visitors come through on an annual basis.
Judge Torres’ passport. One of the objects carried to the US.
Invite is perhaps the wrong term. Lommasson forces us to engage with the images, objects – in the DREAMs Deferred display as well – that were selected by those who had to leave home, not just because of their poignancy, captured without any sentimentality in the photographs. We are forced to engage because of the platform given to the voices of those who carried these objects into the unknown: the images provide the surface on which the explanatory narratives unfurl, in the handwriting of the refugees.
What they carried and what it meant to them.
I forget where I picked this up, but the artist from the very start of his career as a photographer was motivated by a child’s question on viewing (bland) images: “So what?” Not for a moment does his documentary work afford this sentiment. No “So what?” possible in the presence of the anguish, grit and will towards survival in his depictions. Lommasson’s desire to show that at the core we are all one, in our vulnerability, in our hopes, in our rights to have rights, finds the perfect expression in his art. In this focus he reminds me of Anjum, the central character in Arundathi Roy’s newest novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, who lives in a deserted Muslim graveyard just outside New Delhi. She is able to make borders disappear between men and women, animals and humans, life and death. As the author herself (approximately) put it in her PEN America Arthur Miller Freedom to Write lecture last May – we turn to people like these when seeking shelter from the tyranny of hard borders in an increasingly hardening world.
Sankar Raman and Jim Lommasson, collaborating on this exhibit.
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How would it feel, if you were ripped out of your teenage universe at age 15, mourning the loss of the all-important cohort, forced to study in a foreign language and live in a foreign country, constantly worried about your ability to put down some roots? What would it take to have great academic success while fearing you will be denied access to college? And now, less than a decade after your arrival, you own a flourishing practice as a family therapist, helping, among others, Spanish speaking clients to deal with the existential strain of displacement, or the hardship of living with uncertainty? Liliana Luna, who I met at the exhibit opening, can tell you all about it.
Liliana Luna, one of the people portrayed in this exhibition.
How would one cope if being sent back to a country that you last saw as a toddler? Having to leave a close-knit community of co-workers in case of deportation, evidenced by many of the OMSI staff who came to the exhibit opening to celebrate their colleague? Miguel Rodriguez is out of the woods in this regard, having been granted legal status.
Miguel Rodriguez, one of the participants, in front of Judge Torres’ portrait.
Given his work in the community through his non-profit engagement at Through a Latinx Lens, he would be able to tell you, however, countless stories of those out there living in constant fear of what the future holds. Dreams deferred, indeed.
It is upon all of us to make sure they do not shrivel, fester, or explode.
DREAMs Deferred: January 10 – April 12, 2020
Oregon Historical Society 1200 SW Park Ave Portland, Oregon 97205
There will also be a Live event at Lincoln Recital Hall, Portland State University 1620 SW Park Avenue, Portland OR 97201.
Saturday, April 11, 2020. 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
DREAMs Deferred Live kicks off at 7 p.m. with a culturally specific musical performance from this region. Afterward, from 8:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., six different storytellers from Mexico and Central America will share unique stories about the arduous and frequently dangerous journeys that brought them across the border to the United States.
Happy New Year to one and all. And what should it be, dear reader, the first weekly topic of 2020? What is the appropriate choice for a year looming in front of us like an iceberg, with the distinct options of either collision or rapid melting, not sure which one would be worse?
Should it be art? Politics? Literature? Nature? A snippet of them all, in combination? I’ll see what I can do.
What I can easily do is recommend a writer, Barry Lopez, who does it to perfection, creating that amalgam of politics and nature in his most recent book Horizon. Others agree: It’s a beautiful, sorrowful autobiographical epic that feels like a final reckoning of sorts: with the difficulty of living a moral life today, with our estrangement from nature, and with the spectacular mess we’ve made of things. There’s not an iota of righteousness or judgment, but instead, abundant reminders of human possibility in desperate times. (You can find the whole conversation between John O’Connor, a journalism professor at BU and Lopez here.)
Lopez has excelled at both fiction and non-fiction writing that concerns the interface between nature and the more domesticated world, with his two early non-fiction works probably known best, Of Wolves and Men (1978) and Arctic Dreams (1986)—the latter a winner of the National Book Award. His writing is valuable for both the explanations he offers as to how we got to where we are, but also for the suggestions, both practical and political, of how we might handle what is in front of us – (which is why I was thinking of him when facing the calendar page with its fresh round numbers…)
I have been using the week between the years, my time “off,” for extended walks in the woods, all around Portland, in contrast to Lopez’ extensive travels to the less explored corners of the earth, but I think the conclusions are the same, no matter where you are: to connect to nature you need to stop controlling it, you need to stop talking and start to listen, start shifting the focus of your attention. This is one of the reasons why I photograph such a variety of things on my walks – not “just” the birds, but the trees, the plants, the vistas, the rivers, with widely distributed attention.
Found this garbage receptacle with sticker at the entrance to Forst Park on Firelane 1
Connecting to nature, to understand what is at stake as well as what can heal, is one of the greatest demands of our time. We might think we are far enough away from the fiery catastrophes unfolding in Australia, or the traumatic floods engulfing Indonesia, but the planet is connected. What we do matters, even in minute ways.
And no, this is not Cassandra Heuer speaking, this is a determined, energized and hopeful citizen of 2020, looking forward to summoning all in solidarity with the goal of protecting what needs protecting. If you don’t have the time to tackle the 500+ pages, here is a lovely comprehensive review of Horizon ending with these words:
Horizon is long, challenging and symphonic. Its patterns only disclose themselves over the course of a full, slow reading. Rhythms rise and surge across 500 pages; recursions and echoes start to weave. This is a book to which one must learn to listen. If one does, then – to borrow phrases from Lopez – “it arrives as a cantus, tying the faraway place to the thing living deep inside us”. He has given us a grave, sorrowful, beautiful book, 35 years in the writing but still speaking to the present moment: “No one can now miss the alarm in the air.”
And talking about something symphonic, here is Dvorak to guide us to a new year, making a new world.
Lopez lives along the McKenzie river in Oregon’s Mt. Hood State Forest. Photographs are from that forest photographed during bygone trips.
And this is me in my rain pants in the new year:” Stay intrepid!” is my resolution.
Today I offer some insights brazenly stolen from a list found in The Nation, a useful reminder that there are points of hope.
Optimistic we can keep the ball rolling
Good stuff that happened this year:
Legal Victories for the Activists Fighting for Families on the Border
Continued Progressive Investment in the Work of Stacey Abrams
The Supreme Court Saves the Census
Optimistic we’ll find the right role models
Louisiana Reelects a Democratic Governor
Democrats Take Control in Virginia
We Finally Get Closer to Passing the Equal Rights Amendment
The 1619 Project (a wide-ranging editorial package including essays, images, and reported stories, and a radical challenge to the idea that “slavery was a long time ago”; it firmly roots the United States’ societal problems and inequalities in its treatment of black people. )
Optimistic we’ll stand our ground
The Continuation of the Demographic Revolution
Pelosi Retakes the Speaker’s Gavel
Trump Is Impeached
Optimistic we can look beyond ourselves
To read details about these hopeful signals, go here.
Optimistic we’ll see beyond black&white
Or just read or listen to Amanda Gorman, who was chosen the National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017. I’m optimistic: the kids will save us. (And in honor of her being from L.A., today’s photographs were taken there, at The Broad, with an eye on optimism…)
Optimistic we can preserve Little Red Riding Hoods’s resistance
— An original poem written for the inaugural reading of Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith at the Library of Congress.
There’s a poem in this place— in the footfalls in the halls in the quiet beat of the seats. It is here, at the curtain of day, where America writes a lyric you must whisper to say.
There’s a poem in this place— in the heavy grace, the lined face of this noble building, collections burned and reborn twice.
There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square where protest chants tear through the air like sheets of rain, where love of the many swallows hatred of the few.
There’s a poem in Charlottesville where tiki torches string a ring of flame tight round the wrist of night where men so white they gleam blue— seem like statues where men heap that long wax burning ever higher where Heather Heyer blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.
There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago— a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil, strutting upward and aglow.
There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas where streets swell into a nexus of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown, where courage is now so common that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.
There’s a poem in Los Angeles yawning wide as the Pacific tide where a single mother swelters in a windowless classroom, teaching black and brown students in Watts to spell out their thoughts so her daughter might write this poem for you.
There’s a lyric in California where thousands of students march for blocks, undocumented and unafraid; where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community. She knows hope is like a stubborn ship gripping a dock, a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer or knock down a dream.
How could this not be her city su nación our country our America, our American lyric to write— a poem by the people, the poor, the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew, the native, the immigrant, the black, the brown, the blind, the brave, the undocumented and undeterred, the woman, the man, the nonbinary, the white, the trans, the ally to all of the above and more?
Tyrants fear the poet. Now that we know it we can’t blow it. We owe it to show it not slow it although it hurts to sew it when the world skirts below it.
Hope— we must bestow it like a wick in the poet so it can grow, lit, bringing with it stories to rewrite— the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated a history written that need not be repeated a nation composed but not yet completed.
There’s a poem in this place— a poem in America a poet in every American who rewrites this nation, who tells a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time— a poet in every American who sees that our poem penned doesn’t mean our poem’s end.
There’s a place where this poem dwells— it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell where we write an American lyric we are just beginning to tell.
Optimistic we can stretch our sense of proportion beyond the electoral college….
Enjoy someone else’s perpetual optimism… I’m signing off for a week’s break. See you in January after I’ve restocked the archives!
Optimistic I’ll catch footage in some unexpected places…
“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.”
Guess who? No, not that one. One of his predecessors, dangerously underestimated in these early words written by Dorothy Thompson, one of America’s most urgent, eloquent voices against Nazism. Her description of Hitler, as cited above, and her later flaming resistance against all things fascist led her to be thrown out of Germany in 1934, after having been one of the first successful female correspondents for the American media in Europe.
The woman was a marvel. Self-made, in many respects, suffragists, radio journalist, book author, political activist, she was a public speaker, on air for 15 nights and days straight after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. She became a source of facts and opinions for millions of American women who now had an alternative to what they were regaled with by their husband.
Her 1941 essay in Harpers, Who Goes Nazi?, is one of the most astute psychological assessments from a non-psychologist that I have read. Ever. She basically invents (or describes?) an upper-middle class dinner party with various and diverse guests (notably absent, alas, any person of color, which is probably historically an accurate scenario) and predicts for each person how likely they would join the Nazi movement if arriving on our shores. (It is no co-incidence that one of her three husbands, Nobel prize – winner Sinclair Lewis, wrote one of his famous novels, It can’t happen here, during their short marriage.)
If you took that essay and simply replaced the historically fixed term Nazi with a contemporary equivalent of immoral, unethical politician, you might have a perfect fit between the types of people she describes and those threatening an end to democracy who we are currently observing here and many European countries. Think impeachment and removal. Or the absence thereof, as the case may be….
December color!
Just as I worried in yesterday’s blog, I worry here: why don’t we learn from history? When it is all laid out for us in perfectly witty, insightful, premonitory writing?
“It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities. Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis. Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.”
One more remarkable item of courage and honesty associated with this path breaker: the woman who was on the cover of Time, declared together with Eleanor Roosevelt as undoubtedly the most influential women in the U.S., played by Kathrin Hepburn in Woman of the Year, and an early ardent supporter of Zionism, changed her views after visiting Palestine in 1945. Subsequently,
“She ran into difficulties, including accusations of anti-Semitism, which she strongly rebuffed, after being warned that hostility toward Israel was, in the American press world, “almost a definition of professional suicide”.[10][11] She eventually concluded that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war.[12]“
She was silenced indeed, as are so many contemporary journalists in this country, who follow suit. Here is a 4 minute trailer to a documentary about her, laying out what happened to her career and livelihood, with lectures canceled, newspaper assignments withdrawn and a general shunning initiated by those who could not tolerate any criticism at all of the state of Israel. And the official accusation was, of all things, being too soft on Germany…. something taken out of thin air, to persuade a public open to that villain schema at that time. Sounds familiar?
Photographs today are from my Oaks Bottom Tuesday walk taken last week.
Music is in honor of Beethoven’s birthday yesterday, a brilliant, pure, fear-acknowledging and fear-conquering piece that seems in line with Thompson’s character, the Streichquartett #14.
My thoughts have a tendency to wander through weird pathways – wouldn’t you know it, dear reader. Here is a map of yesterday morning’s procession, just for the fun of it.
A misty morning, moss brilliantly green…..
I started out to find a translation for the German word Moralpredigt: to sermonize from a moral high ground (there is NO dictionary translation…) because I intended to introduce the topic of gift giving in this consumers-on-steroids time of the year, with wagging fingers. (Never mind that I had broken my own vow not to buy anything in these December weeks before Hanukah and Christmas, because I found a perfect thing for the kids’ garden on Saturday.)
Literally translated, the German phrase says: first comes the guzzling, then the morals. Guzzling? Alternative words were given as feeding, gorging, devouring – all somewhat connected to the animal realm. Which is of course how some relate to the poor (who are so hungry that food comes before morals) – those animal who dare to steal the turnips from the masters’ fields….
Thoughts of turnips turned to thoughts of sugar beets turned to thoughts of molasses, since earlier that morning on my Sunday walk a friend had introduced me to the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. Ever heard of it? US Industrial Alcohol (USIA) had built shoddy tanks in 1915 to hold molasses used for manufacturing munitions and liquor. A tank fell apart, releasing all of its contents into the streets of Boston.
“More than two million gallons of thick liquid poured out like a tsunami wave, reaching speeds of up to 35 miles per hour. The molasses flooded streets, crushed buildings and trapped horses in an event that ultimately killed 21 people and injured 150 more. The smell of molasses lingered for decades. One hundred years later, analyses have pinpointed a handful of factors that combined to make the disaster so disastrous. Among them: flawed steel, safety oversights, fluctuating air temperatures and the principles of fluid dynamics.”
This, in turn, had me think about first comes the guzzling, then the morals bit in relation to the rich, rather than the poor. Let’s extract money first, safety comes later – if at all.
Which brought me to thoughts about the present state of affairs: with the sorry end of the climate conference in Madrid, we are once more reminded that we simply don’t learn from history, even if prevention, in this case, would protect literally humanity’s survival, rather than a single Boston neighborhood. As the Washington Post put it: U.N. climate talks end with hard feelings, few results and new doubts about global unity. Never mind that the existential real life consequences of this failure are not even mentioned in the headline…
Not learning from history, giving in to greed and courting disaster, then, were the bits that brought my thoughts back to where I started: the craziness of giving gifts just for the sake of – well, of what, indeed? We had the perfect analysis of the need to forgo consumption of goods that will loose their allure or their functionality, or both, in no time, already almost a decade ago. Gifts are bringing death and destruction to people and environments in developing countries: here is the link to the articleThe Gift of Death by George Monbiotwhich was supposed to be the heart of today’s post! It is bitingly funny and achingly sad.
Photographs are from yesterday’s walk in Tryon Creek, my Sunday morning routine.
An unusual capture of a pileated woodpecker and his turf in the mist from far away…
Music today is as far away from profit and greed as we can get. Field never got his recognition as the predecessor to Chopin’s development of nocturnes – and yet his pieces are as beautiful as they come.
