Today is the birthday of Grover Cleveland, the nation’s 22nd president from 1885 to 1889 and its 24th president from 1893 to 1897, who was born in 1837 in Caldwell, N.J.
Among all US presidents he scored high, if not highest, in integrity, honesty and independence. As a democrat he fought against corruption and protectionist trade policies. He is supposed to have said this:
“I would rather the man who presents something for my consideration subject me to a zephyr of truth and a gentle breeze of responsibility rather than blow me down with a curtain of hot wind.”
On my hike yesterday, out and up in the Eastern Gorge there were plenty of mild breezes. The hot air emanated somewhere else in Washington DC. But that was not the only contrast that came to mind.
Here I was, amidst indescribable beauty, strong enough to tackle a considerable climb, some of it in snow, accompanied by one of my most cherished persons on earth, discovering the first wildflowers
and digging into a sumptuous sandwich during a picnic on a sunny if cold meadow.
All this while others are too afraid to eat anything that is not coming out of a vending machine for fear of poisoning, put behind bars, harassed and violated by people out for revenge. I am specifically referring to Ramsey Orta, a friend of Eric Garner, who filmed and later posted a cell phone video of how Garner died in a police chokehold. Orta has been in prison since 2016, and is fearing for his life in retribution of showing police brutality. I cannot independently assess the validity of the claims, but the article has taken hold in my head since I read it last week.
On March 3rd, 2015, Orta’s cell block was served a meal of corn, cabbage, bread, juice, and meatloaf. He didn’t touch it. He’d fallen ill a few times after eating the food at Rikers and was convinced he was being targeted and poisoned.“Eat, inmate,” a CO commanded, banging Orta’s cell with a baton. The guards were all standing too close, watching too intently as the others ate. This kind of attention was unusual. He saw others from his cell block staring down into their meatloaf, forks frozen in midair.
Court documents filed six days later alleged that the prisoners had suffered and continued to suffer from “nausea, vomiting, pain, dizziness, aches, headaches, stomach/intestinal pains, dehydration, diarrhea, nosebleeds, throwing up blood, diarrhea with blood, and/or an overwhelming sense of illness.” The symptoms were consistent with human consumption of rat poison, and when the tainted meatloaf was finally tested, the results found that the blue-green pellets visible in the meatloaf were brodifacoum, the active ingredient in rodenticide.
Not the kind of country Grover Cleveland envisioned. And one that seems just fine for those currently at the helm. As I said, contrasts.
Two days ago I jokingly called on people to visit a NY museum featuring dogs. Today I seriously regret that I did not alert people to a very different show, at SUNY on Long Island, which, alas, closed yesterday.
The topic of the exhibit is important enough, though, that it justifies mention, if only in the context of informing ourselves about current US museum “culture.”
The show announcement of Our Land read as follows:
Our Land, a new exhibition comprising photography and video by artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and their diaspora. Curated by Anthony Hamboussi, photographer and adjunct professor of Visual Arts at SUNY College at Old Westbury, the exhibition explores intersections of land, power, and politics to question dominant historical narratives and current Western perceptions of the MENA region. Interested in modes of self-representation, Our Land presents the work of Arab artists based in or having ancestral ties to the region, to consider landscapes of colonization and postcolonial reconstruction, indigenous land rights, ecological injustice, and war. Interrogating the darker histories of landscape photography and “development” in non-Western countries, the exhibition questions the neutrality of scholarly and scientific landscape image production, and the roles of said images and development in imperialism and domination of the region. The works in Our Land were selected for the ways in which they challenge simplistic representations of cultural identity. In turn, the exhibition compels us to reconsider our relationship to the land and its exploitation under advanced capitalism and environmental crisis.
In 2016 the Brooklyn Museum of Art offered This Place, an exhibition on Israel and Palestine featuring works by 12 photographers including Josef Koudelka, Stephen Shore, and Rosalind Fox Solomon. It was quickly deemed by progressives as a propaganda project, “art washing” the Israeli occupation of Palestine territories, taking money from Zionist organizations and, importantly, neglecting to include any Palestinian or Arab photographers.
“Not so fast,” was the reply by Frédéric Brenner, who ran the show from its inception.” We did offer it to some local artists, midway, but no Palestinian accepted.”
The brilliant art historian, curator and activist Nina Felshin, someone I revere, took the argument apart:
In 2006, a large majority of Palestinian cultural workers called upon international artists and filmmakers to join them in the boycott against Israeli cultural and academic institutions that receive funding from the State of Israel — part of a larger movement known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). The existence of the BDS movement might well explain Palestinian artists’ unwillingness to participate in an exhibition destined for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among other venues.
Another explanation for Palestinian artists’ refusal to participate in the project might be its impresario’s desire to exclude certain approaches to the subject:
“‘I knew one thing would disqualify a photographer — anger,’ he said. ‘It was important to look at Israel without complacency but with compassion. I believe art has a power to address questions that an ideological perspective cannot.’”
Seriously? Anger disqualifies art? And as it turns out, mention of occupied territories, illegal settlements, home demolitions, evictions, or human rights violations was deemed too ideological to be included in a depiction of the region’s history?
Here is Felshin’s 2016 review of the BAM exhibit, scathing and helpful to understand where Our Land, today, is coming from.
Let’s hope Our Land gets a chance to travel to the West Coast!
Music today comes from two sources: traditional Palestinian music
and Boiler Room featuring contemporary Palestinian techno DJ Sama. Boiler Room is a terrific concept: it is an independent music platform which offers international videos of current Club music performances with the goal of bringing people together. From House, techno, jungle, hip-hop to R&B, from Europe to the US to the Middle East and beyond, it covers what’s happening now.
Yesterday a friend who has volunteered with the Dilley Pro Bono Project forwarded an email to me. It reminded me of a question that is so often asked of Germans or by Germans themselves: How could you not know? How could people claim ignorance when so much horror was unfolding all around them in the 1930s and 40s? Without claiming directparallels between horrors, I still think there is reason to question ourselves what we do and do not know right here and now.
The Dilley Pro Bono Project (DPBP), a local partner in the Immigration Justice Campaign, operates a non-traditional pro bono model of legal services that directly represents immigrant mothers and children detained at the 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.
DPBP basically have volunteers come for a week of service, assisting the lawyers who try to help the asylum seekers at the detention site. Volunteers need to be able to speak Spanish, since most clients are fleeing violence in South America. They also need to be able to face 12-15 hours a day of grueling physical and emotional labor. People with A, J or other visitor visas need not apply since ICE will not let them into the facility; people on DACA will only be allowed in if they have not so much as a parking ticket in their legal history.
Here is what came out of Dilley yesterday:
As I mentioned in last week’s dispatch, two weeks ago we saw something we have rarely seen in the STFRC: babies under the age of 1 year old detained. In total we have confirmed 16 cases of babies between the ages of 5 and 11 months, although we believe there were at least a few more. Every mother we spoke to reported that her baby was sick, either with gastrointestinal issues or severe congestion and cough. Some reported their child having difficulty breathing, including one who said her baby tried to cry and couldn’t. The families experienced delays in receiving formula, and were denied bottled water despite their concerns about the quality of the tap water they were mixing into their babies’ bottles. Baby food is unavailable, and one child’s pacifier was confiscated and not replaced. Mothers had difficulty exercising their right to the asylum process, caring for sick babies during legal consultations and having babies returned to them in the middle of credible fear interviews for having cried at the daycare.
In this moment, when we have more than doubled the number of volunteers, AND need to respond with new client service strategies in light of the Attorney General’s horrible asylum decision in Matter of AB, we urgently need more full-time legal staff on the ground at the Dilley Pro Bono Project to support this extra work.
Please consider donating to the Dilley Pro Bono Project today to help us hire additional senior and junior staff attorneys. Share this link with all of your networks – and don’t forget to include your own stories of volunteering. Link to your op-eds and blog posts about your time OTG. Many of you on this listserv have been with us since the beginning of our fight to end family detention. No one can speak for the importance of this work more articulately, or more forcefully, than you.
Now more than ever, we need your help to spread the word. Be our megaphone! Help us hire more staff. Thank you!!
With love,
Shalyn Fluharty Managing Attorney Dilley Pro Bono Project
Attached is a link that has short reports by volunteers:
I obviously never volunteered there, but I do have a blog post and thought it is important information to share. Fittingly, this related article appeared in this morning’s NYT:
Photographs are from a Mission near San Antonio, Texas – you’d think adherence to the gospel would make these kinds of cruelties impossible in a professed Christian state…..
Perhaps it’s fitting to end the week with musings on trains, a medium that connects. The thoughts were triggered by the news that about 24 hours after California led 16 states in challenging the president’s farcical ‘national emergency’ the administration plans on cancelling $929m in grants for what Mr Trump has called a “failed” project: high-speed rail in California.
The bullet speed – train project has indeed seen its share of problems, recently described by Governor Newsom in his State-of the State – address. Overrunning costs and delays have plagued the project and led to scaling the project down and focusing on connecting regions in the Central Valley for now. Just the reminder that Trump needed to rage against the “green disaster.”
He would have probably waged war against an earlier train project as well, the historic transcontinental Sunset Route that connected Louisiana to California and helped shift migratory patterns: people trying to escape the remnants of slavery and the segregation of Jim Crow laws moved en masse from New Orleans to Los Angeles, establishing a large Creole population.
Financed by four railroad barons (and built by Chinese labor) the train connections brought huge commercial interests to southern CA, followed by a speculative real estate bubble. The exodus of black people from the South to the West Coast was spearheaded by the families of the Pullman porters who were employed by the railroads. Many others followed and by the 1940s doubled the black population of LA, helping to diversify the city.
Parts of that line are still in use by Amtrak, although havoc reeked by hurricane Katrina in 2005 still hasn’t been fully repaired over a decade later.
Maybe it will eventually make its way into a book that describes railroad lines that were lost: “The lost railways disappeared for all sorts of reasons. They were outcompeted by airlines, better roads, bigger railroads, or speedier subways. Or they were brought down by wars. Or they simply grew old. Sometimes, they were flawed from the beginning.” I would not have minded to accompany the author on a trip visiting all those sites spread across the world…. the photographs are amazing.
What we know for certain, though, is that train traffic takes business away from car, truck and bus traffic, and thus the fossil industry. More importantly, high-speed railways compete with plane travel/transport and thus would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Here are the particulars ( and a description of conservatives screaming about it….) https://www.vox.com/2019/2/8/18215774/green-new-deal-high-speed-train-air-travel
Berlioz’s grand cantata for tenor and six-part chorus was commissioned by the Chemin de Fer du Nord to mark the opening of the Paris to Lille and Brussels railway line in June 1846. Having just undertaken an arduous European tour largely by stagecoach, Berlioz was an enthusiastic advocate of train travel and jumped at the chance, completing the work in a few days.
Still thinking about walls. Or, more precisely, about borders. They rule politics, these days, or the talk about them does. Case in point is the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland that might reemerge if Brexit happens without some miracle solutions. I think I finally understood the problem of the Irish backstop yesterday when I read the article attached at the end.
The worry is that the decades-old conflict between unionists who are allied with the UK and nationalists who want a unified Ireland for the Irish will erupt again. Fears are that this will happen if and when a hard border is re-erected because half of the island will belong to the EU and the other half will leave because of Brexit. Lest we forgot: this conflict claimed close to 4000 lives over 30 years, and sparks of violence are already happening again in form of car bombs or other dangerous attacks.
Peace had been called by the Good Friday agreements in 1998. The border, which was heavily militarized during the conflict, both a symbol of the strife and a very real target for nationalist paramilitary groups, was eradicated, helped by membership and free flow of goods via the EU. If a hard border is re-established between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, many fear it could inflame still-simmering tensions and reignite conflict. So the backstop is the idea that refers to a guarantee that a “hard” Irish border — meaning actual physical checkpoints for goods and people trying to cross it — won’t be put in place when the EU and UK break up.
But of course there is no agreement about the backstop, with the Brexiteers furious about the possibility that it implies no clean break with the links to the EU, the EU furious that May wants to have that back door open to appease the warring Irish parties and so on. Alternatives, like technological gimmicks and/or drones instead of watchtowers, seem to be pragmatically still far from ready to be implemented. For the full argument go here- it does a better job at explaining than I can, still having trouble to connect all the dots.: https://www.vox.com/world/2019/2/18/18204269/brexit-irish-border-backstop-explained
Which brings me to one of my favorite perceptual illusions of dots that are present but that you cannot see in their totality – only those (and perhaps a few others in the vicinity) which you look at directly with your fovea will be perceived. The rest vanishes before you can connect them. The fun part in the demonstration below is interactive, though: if you change a few parameters you can make the illusion disappear or re-appear. Just like the Irish troubles – change some parameters, and it will raise its ugly head again…..Click on the link below.
This week I’ll tackle one or another illusion from a variety of contexts. Well, that’s the plan, let’s see how it goes.
The first one, clearly triggered by the events of last week, is the illusion that walls can provide security. I found the argument nowhere better laid out than here:https://fpif.org/the-psychology-of-the-wall/
Here is the summary of Feffer’s arguments (in Foreign Policy in Focus) to contemplate on President’s Day: In 1989, when the Berlin Wall finally came dow, there were 15 border walls around the world. Want to guess what that number is in 2019? Seventyseven. 77 walls that were erected to keep people (and things) out – and that refers only to the actual concrete objects in form of mortar, brick, razor wire, steel slats and so on – not counted are the walls that are more ephemeral in terms of barriers concerning trade, finance, movement of manufacturers or labor.
In Eastern Europe from the Czech Republic to Slovakia to Romania to Hungary you have newly established walls. Some to keep foreigners out, some to separate Roma from non-Roma populations. The Brexit debacle is another kind of wall – just a wet one, called English Channel. Spain has walled off its cities on mainland Morocco, Saudi Arabia is walled off from Iraq.
And let’s not forget Israel – if you can stomach reading the justifications (e.g.The security fence does create some inconvenience to Palestinians, but it also saves lives. The deaths of Israelis caused by terror are permanent and irreversible whereas the hardships faced by the Palestinians are temporary and reversible” – I guess they count generations of traumatized, and orphaned, West Bank children as having a temporary condition….) or are adapt at skipping, here are some intense statistics on walls, fences and security barriers supposed to protect the state. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/background-and-overview-of-israel-s-security-fence
Trump’s wall, and let’s not forget also that of his followers and a GOP that does nothing to stop him, is supposed to keep people out. Here as elsewhere we see a focus on exclusivity – keeping people out of the enclave of the rich, the institutions of the elite, and preserving privilege for a tightly circumscribed minority who is unwilling to share. The promised security then is really about the insecurity of those who see their privileges endangered by others who want to be part of the club. Privileges derived from race, gender and class, let’s face it, and from being an American.
The Right. Feffer argues, “wants that wall to prevent all these privileges — individual, communal, national — from leaking out. It’s the architectural equivalent of a gun. It’s for defense, a way for people to “stand their ground.” But it’s also compensation for powerlessness and lack of control. As with guns, the sense of safety and security is almost entirely illusory.”
Add to the illusion that walls provide security the establishing of the illusion that it is about security and you have last week in a nutshell!
Music is a really funny song by a young Egyptian songwriter which should lift our mood for the week!
Youssra el-Hawari – The Walls يسرا الهواري – السور Essour
In order to prevent protests, SCAF, the military government ruling over Egypt following Mubarak’s ousting, erected large walls in the city of Cairo. These walls have become a site of resistance in the form of graffiti and the like, and in this song, an even simpler expression of discontent.
Here is the translation from the Arabic:
– The Wall
In front of the wall In front of the ones who built it In front of the wall In front of the ones who erected it And in front of the one who guards it as well A poor man stopped to pee On the wall and those who built it, erected it, and guard it On the wall and the ones who built it, the man peed
“It’s an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing ‘art’ to defend their collapsing culture.” George Grosz
Down the street from where I went to law school used to be a rare-book store, some steps down into a daylight basement. They sold prints as well and it was there where I first encountered George Grosz. I had no clue who he was, or how his work was anchored in yet another period of horrid German history. I was 18 and just starting to wake up to political reality. I also had no money to buy a print, which is probably why I remember this whole episode in the first place, since I was overwhelmed by what I saw, coveted it and couldn’t have it. It was different from anything I had been exposed to before.
You can see the original Faith Healers at MOMA. The KV stands for KriegsVerwendungsfähig which is usually translated as fit for active service; the literal translation is: usable for war.
Grosz’ experience with the horrors of war as a soldier in WW I made him a committed pacifist. He became intensely involved in subversive art and social critique, became a political activist and documented the upheaval of the 1920s in Germany. Hannah Arendt called his drawings “reportage.” He was dragged into court multiple times over accusations of agitation against the state, or blasphemy, and eventually escaped the rise of Hitler and his minions by moving to the States.
The man who had been a principal member of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, co-founder of DADA, who collaborated with John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann in the invention of photomontage (!), did not fare too well as an emigrant. The revolutionary spirit was subdued – “You come from another country you don’t start right away criticizing – they took you in.”
His art which had so brilliantly subverted the bourgeois style and content, turned into landscape painting and still life, with the occasional apocalyptic sheen. I almost spilled my coffee when I read in the Brittanica that his art became “less misanthropic…” He lived and taught on Long Island, still enamored with the country that took him in, but also clearly suffering the consequences of displacement.
In 1958 he returned to Germany, and died a short time later in an inexplicable fall down a staircase.
Until mid-July you can see some of his works at the Tate Modern in their Magic Realism – Art in Weimar Germany 1919-1933 exhibition. In case you, like I, didn’t know either: the term Magic Realism, for me always linked to South American literature, was actually invented by German photographer, art historian and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe modern realist paintings with fantasy or dream-like subjects. Hah, not a day without learning something new. Lusting for a London trip…..
For music today go to this website and click on the arrow in the black box offering different titles. It is a compilation of music from the Weimar Republic.
Photographs today are street art from Berlin, his hometown.
PS: In the title photograph of today’s blog you can see half a bedbug and a sign below that reads: Vor der Mauer, nach der Mauer , schickt der Staat die Wanzen. – This is a wordplay on an old nursery rhyme: Auf der Mauer, auf der Lauer, liegt ‘ne kleine Wanze, roughly translated: On the wall lies a bedbug in wait to bug you. The wordplay: Before the wall, after the wall, the state sends bugs to bug you.
I literally just started a novel, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Reviews were reportedly stellar, my friends urged me to read it, a kind one gave the book to me and now it is also a community reading project by the Multnomah County Library.
In the first 6 pages I learned that the protagonist currently lives in Princeton, NJ and is on the verge of going back to her homeland of Nigeria. She seems to be a witty person, rather successful at blogging in perceptive and ironic ways about the people she encounters. She has also decided to quit blogging because “… she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use. … The more she wrote the less sure she became. Each post scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt naked and false.”
I have no idea where this will end up; if the ambivalent nature of being a stranger in a strange land contributes to her dilemma; if race and racism plays a part, as is seeming, or fat shaming, or a preoccupation with the past. I am struck by how much she is already a character in my head, making me curious about her moves, annoyed at her willingness to give something up that obviously taught others even if it was hard on herself.
Which leads to two thoughts: for one, Adichie clearly deserves her reputation as an engaging novelist. Secondly, I am thinking about her novel’s blogger in contrast to a real-life writer, long dead, long mourned. Molly Ivins is back in my head because of a documentary about her and her life that just ran to rave reviews at Sundance Film Festival. Here was a writer and political columnist (the old-fashioned way of having a regular piece out) devoured by a devoted readership or loathed by her targets. She defied any expectation for what an upper-class Texan female should become and honed in on an acerbic writing style skewering the right and calling to arms against conceited politicians, a rigged system and unfairness.
She didn’t last long at the NYT which shied away from her progressivism, but her column was eventually syndicated by more than 400 newspapers. I remember listening to her on the radio and laughing tears at her wit, while also feeling comfort that some one that smart could succinctly describe an outrage, laying out all the useful arguments, while making me laugh.
She was able to keep her humor intact even when she was diagnosed with the disease that killed her in no time: “On a personal note: I have contracted an outstanding case of breast cancer, from which I intend to recover. I don’t need get-well cards, but I would like the beloved women readers to do something for me: Go. Get. The. Damn. Mammogram. Done.” And later: “Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that.”
While facing grueling treatment she never gave up on her mission to hold politicians responsible for their action and calling them on their failures, particularly with regard to decisions about war and economic disenfranchisement of the working class. Her columns did not “scrape off yet one more scale of self” as I cited above, but instead were emanations of a lucid mind bend on teaching us all about justice. Raise hell – one of her favorite expressions – she did. I wish we had more of those. In the age of Trump she would have been each morning’s salvation….
Photographs today are some random shots from from Texas, Ivins’ home state..
The German word Entschleunigung is, like so many of our words, hard to translate. It refers to a general slowing down, but it also implies intention about dialing down the speed. It has a mate, Entleerung. That means an emptying, again a willful purge of what’s not deemed essential.
These terms came to mind when I watched Silencio Blanco’s recent performance of Pescador/Fisherman. The group of 7 young puppeteers from Chile is on a return visit to Portland presented by Boom Arts, showing their newest creation at Imago Theatre.https://silencioblanco.cl/en/home-eng/
Like any terrific work of art, their play works on a multitude of levels. The dialogue-free story line (as I interpreted it) is simple: Fisherman Federico arduously launches his small skiff, rows out to the fishing grounds, throws the net. Low booming horns and colonies of seagulls announce the approach of a huge trawler, the kind that is surrounded by these many greedy birds hoping for scraps. The huge waves created by the industrial fishing boat tear Federico’s net to pieces, and fling his little skiff into an abyss of motion. The plucky fisherman survives the ordeal and makes it back to the dock, shaken but determined.
That’s it. For 45 minutes you are immersed in a slowly, languidly developing universe of minimalist action, a visual landscape and soundscape that unfolds before your eyes, drawing you in in mesmerizing ways. The props are but the puppet, a wooden pier, the boat and net and a technically impressive bunch of linked birds flapping their way across the ocean. The sound consists of repeated wave action rising and falling depending on the narrative, the ship horns, gull cries and a few interludes of music enhancing or easing the tension. The occasional grunts or coughing of the fisherman add a human element that soon makes you feel that he is real, weary and cold.
It all happens in darkness, with enough light to be aware of the carefully choreographed movements of the puppeteers who become part of that universe of waves. Their flowing, watery movement, ebbing and cresting, a boat quite literally thrown through the air, is a heavy physical performance on top of making a puppet come to life.
On one level the simplicity opened a space for being, not thinking, becoming part of a created universe. Best evidence for this was brought to me by my seat neighbors of the under-10-year-old set whose early wiggles were completely calmed down during the performance to sitting still in rapt, sustained attention.
On another level, the simplicity provided a veil for the complexity underneath, leaving it up to the viewer to decide to leave it on or take it off to explore what’s hidden. You had a choice to simply experience an individual narrative, in other words, or to probe the context in which this tale unfolds. The latter is, of course, requiring effort. Puppetry, as we experience it today, no longer has the privilege it once enjoyed: audiences who either watched fixed familiar roles (think Judy&Punch or the German equivalent, Kasperle Theater) or watched known tales set in familiar landscapes, story books. The absence of dialogue, so valuable to reach international audiences, as Silence Blanco increasingly – and deservedly! – does, also prohibits the spelling out of contextual details.
Which, in the case of Chilean fisheries, is a tragic tale, wouldn’t you know it. The details can be found in the links attached below, but here’s the punch line: The fish supply has been dwindling due to over-fishing and pirate fishing. The government comes up with half hearted measures to control quotas, but has been upping them recently again, turning a blind eye to the crisis. “The quotas weren’t divided evenly, either. Chile’s 92,000 artisanal fishermen got 40 percent of the country’s total catch. The industrial fleet, which is owned by just seven wealthy families, took the remaining 60 percent.”https://www.ecowatch.com/pirate-fishing-chile-2615164866.html
I leave it up to the reader to discern how much this is a fig leaf, not affecting the purge of artisanal fisheries by industrial interests. There are certainly accounts of aggressive action against individual fishing communities standing in the giants’ way.
Silencio Blanco has a working model that puts research at the local level at the start of their creation. They spend time with the people they portray, in the locations that are their focus. They then build their small tool kit of props, and, for this particular performance, have developed choreography as well. They work hard. I saw them fully rehearse the play a morning after they had performed and 3 hours before they were on for the next round, relentlessly practicing the moves and transitions.
A water bottle stands in for the tossed boat during rehearsal.Dancers’ Feet
For me it was a visual feast, but more importantly a reminder how art can be a political catalyst, making us, when it is at its best, think and, in this case, expose us to international issues that we otherwise ignore in our little PDX oyster.
You have another chance to see for yourself:
February 8th: 7pm/ February 9th: 3pm – Imago Theatre, 17 SE 8th Ave, Portland
Music today (above) is Sergio Ortega’s resistance song that accompanied Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government from 1970 – 1973 – much good did it do the latter. When I visited Santiago in 1975 the city was still visibly riddled with Pinochet’s butchers’ bullet holes. Ortega was able to flee to France; the Nueva Cancîon Movement’s most famous musician,Victor Jara, was murdered – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN_M3u7GWgo
Money has been on my mind. For one, the Jewish Museum in London is going to open a new exhibit mid-March, called Jews, Money, Myth. From the catalogue: ….it examines the origins of some of the longest running and deeply entrenched antisemitic stereotypes: the theological roots of the association of Jews with money; the myths and reality of the medieval Jewish moneylender; and the place of Jews – real and imagined – in commerce, capitalism and finance up to the present day.
The exhibit will feature international art works, including Rembrandt’s Judas returning the 30 Pieces of Silver, manuscripts, board games, cartoons and whatever cultural objects and commissioned videos you can think of that reflect on the theme. Will it enlighten those who hold deep beliefs about Jewish money secretly running the world? Will it harden the attitude of those who feel victimized by the stereotypes? Will it speak to the fears of those who think highlighting the topic will only strengthen anti-Semitic thinking? We should revisit this in the summer….
Just as the stereotype persists that Jews have too much money or use it for nefarious purposes, so does our ignorance about he consequences of the lack of money. This could not have been more clear than when I realized, with shock, what is happening in Florida right now. Here we were all celebrating the restoration of voting rights to convicted felons, miraculously voted in during the midterm elections.
Never mind that certain felons were permanently barred from the return to civic rights – those convicted for murder or sexual offenses. And that 400.000 are on parole or probation, which also excludes them. It still leaves about 1.1 million people who could theoretically register to vote.
As the ACLU chapter of Florida reports, registration requires that your sentence is completed. That, in turn, involves paying off all the fees and fines accrued during the judicial process. They estimate that 560.000 or so of the ex felons have fines that they are not able to pay off, simply because they are too poor. The idea that you can reenter society after having payed for your crime in prison is clearly attenuated by the requirement that you pay for your imprisonment. What a travesty.
At least we now have initiatives that combat the lack of money at the beginning of the criminal proceedings: The Bail Project. It fronts money to people too poor to come up with cash bail. The money is released when the accused show up in court, being available for the next case. Do people show up, you wonder? It looks like 96% of them do. More importantly, 90% of those held on bail plead guilty. When bail is paid, it turns out 50% of the cases are dismissed, and less than 2% receive jail sentences. Compare those two outcome in light of prison overcrowding (never mind in light of what it does to the life of a person.) You can check out the details (and donate….) here, including the organization’s 5-year plan to open offices across the country: https://bailproject.org
Photographs today are from Miami in honor of the restored voting rights, but also sort of related to money: a lot of traditional neighborhoods there as elsewhere in the country are gentrified with the help of “art washing” – the influx, often supported and financed by real estate developers, of artists and galleries who make the neighborhood more attractive, draw in tourists and investment and displace the original poor tenants (until the artists are driven out as well….)
