S Moody Ave.

I was in a mood. So was the sky.

Walking down South Moody Avenue and neighboring streets on Wednesday I was raging at yet another decision of our city government that is hostile to the poorer part of humanity: investing half a million dollars in benches strategically placed near parks to make it impossible for the houseless to set up sheltering tents. Wanna bet those benches will have dividers so you can’t stretch out on them either? Even Commissioner Jo Ann Hardest, the most progressive of them all, is in favor, although opting for non-divided benches. So adding heads to a site does not count into size, but adding a tent over that head does? Do we know how often first responders have really been blocked?

Here is an alternative:

Looking around me, towers of glass, with beautiful apartments and gorgeous vies, with a median (!) price of $578.000 per unit. I don’t begrudge anyone who can afford $1,795,000 for a two bed room apartment at the John Ross building (if you look at the realtor ads, most offers are strangely above the median price mentioned earlier,) but I do despair when the city spends money on driving the homeless out of sight so we are spared witnessing humanity’s misery. And don’t get me going on using the tax windfall $$ on the hiring of additional police…

Then again, I do acknowledge that large houseless encampments are a huge burden for neighborhoods, when trash and unsafe interactions reach impact levels that are hard to shoulder. Simple comparisons of what it used to be to what is now do, however, neglect to take Covid into account. Here is a news clip on the Portland situation of neighborhood complaints. Note was is NOT stressed: As long as there is no concerted action to build affordable housing rather than spend money elsewhere, we are not going to find solutions.

To be fair, I walked by a huge construction project, with cranes seemingly drawing lines in the sky, in reality chem trails left by low flying airplanes. Maybe this is the promised Metro Housing project for 176 new, affordable homes. City announcements only vaguely speak of RiverPlace Parcel 3.

“The site is located across from the Portland Streetcar, and in close proximity to the MAX and Tilikum Crossing, in the amenity rich South Portland neighborhood. Of the 176 planned affordable homes, 17 will have rents restricted for extremely low income residents and 48 will be family-sized, including 18 three-bedroom units. Twenty of the units will provide Supportive Housing for veterans experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Through a partnership with Impact NW, the project will also provide on-site resident services to all residents, as well as early childhood development, youth programming, and parenting support.”

No, that was not it. Instead, it looks like I was photographing construction activity for the new Willamette Blocks. A 6 story and 23 story mixed use building, respectively, with hundreds of luxury condos.

The poem for today was written in 1926, Cummings in best form raging about the futility of war and the empty promises of patriotism. Funny how the satirical sonnet fits with thoughts about our treatment of the houseless, and political approaches to fighting (or lack thereof) of the pandemic as well.

Told you, I was in a mood.

next to of course god america i

E. E. CUMMINGS (1894 – 1962)

Then again, maybe we should listen to this one (anyone lived in a pretty how town), read by the poet himself with musical voice. Maybe this is OUR town. However, there are also these folks to be found in PDX – considerably improving my mood.

Displacement

Next-door Neighbors is a list-serve that lands in my inbox on a daily basis. Calls for lost cats, yard debris removal, plant identification, smart tips for sales or earthquake preparation, shout-outs to helpful encounters or complaints about car and porch thefts, photos of sunrises or yet another deer in the backyard all outline a microcosm of life going on around us. It is also a coincidental lesson of people’s perceptions, worries about and cursing of the number of houseless people pitching their tents in our area.

The discourse ranges from simple requests for advice what to do, to rants about throwing all these “addicts” into jail since they do not want to work or play by the rules, to well intentioned explanations of the nature of living with paranoid schizophrenia which does not allow you to live in cramped homeless shelters; and, really, everything in-between. Advice to call on help from churches, civic-oriented neighborhood organizations or the police outweigh the comments listing structural, political factors producing houselessness by probably 10:1.

I was thinking about the absurdity that many of those complainants, safely situated in their middle-class homes, are actively pursuing strategies that in turn lead to their neighbors losing their homes, and potentially ending up in a tent on the sidewalk. What am I talking about?

Last week the Portland Mercury and OPB both linked to a city Ombudsman’s Office report on how Portland enforces its lengthy list of property maintenance rules. “The report found the city’s system regularly allows minor eyesores to snowball into financial ruin for homeowners. Those living in gentrifying areas of the city are hit the hardest.” Concretely, poor homeowners in formerly Black neighborhoods in the North of Portland are subjected to the complaints of their new mostly White neighbors.

Some of the mind boggling facts: “One Portland homeowner amassed $30,000 in liens after a neighbor reported peeling paint on the exterior of her home to city regulators. A blind veteran racked up $88,000 in debt due to a complaint about unruly grass and unsightly vehicles outside his home. A senior with a severe brain injury almost had his home foreclosed on after a neighbor reported vehicles in his yard and an unfinished remodeling project.”

A system of property maintenance rules and the ability to complain anonymously has led, according to the statistics, to over 15.000 complaints by neighbors who moved into areas where they now want to see rises in property values. Private complaints then call in the city inspectors with the Bureau of Development Services and these dish out fines which accrue after a 4 week grace period for repairs. Fines, if not paid, will double after three months. If you can’t pay, you loose your home.

Some of the history: Oregon was one of only six states that didn’t ratify the 15th amendment, which formalized Black citizenship and suffrage after the civil War. Our Constitution was adopted in 1857, banning the entrance, property ownership, or residency to any Black person. In the 20th century entire neighborhoods were zoned for explicit racial segregation with government directing disproportionally public funds to White neighborhoods. Blacks were segregated into the Albina neighborhood (now part of the deluge of complaints about maintenance.)

In 1919 the Portland Realty Board “adopted a rule declaring it unethical for an agent to sell property to either Negro or Chinese people in a White neighborhood.” The restrictive covenants were legal and widely practiced. Now the North PDX neighborhoods that were homes to Blacks due to earlier segregation are the very areas where young White professionals can still (barely) afford to buy houses and they want to see a return on their investments. Let’s sick the city on inspectors on our neighbors to uphold our own standards!

Of course, Portland is not the only place where issues of blight associated with those you don’t want in front of your eyes received despicable treatment. In our contemporary fight against accurate history lessons that fact should never come into our sight, either.

Case in point: D Magazine, a monthly publication covering Dallas/Fort Worth Tx, was removed from the shelves of a grocery store last week, because the current cover offended enough complainants. The cover? An aerial photograph of a parking lot that had a history. “That parking lot used to be a neighborhood. Driven in large part by racist antipathy directed at the Black folks who lived in about 300 houses there, the city of Dallas in the late ’60s and early ’70s used eminent domain to buy up the properties, displace the people who lived there, and pave over a swath of South Dallas.” If you look at the cover you can read the historic mindset of many of the citizens of Dallas but 50 years ago. Seems some in Portland, half a century later, fit right into that mold.

Photographs today are what’s left of the tuberoses, floating away to unknown destinations, just like displaced neighbors.

Music could not be more à-pro-pos: Sanctuaries: A Tale of Displacement is an opera inspired by gentrification’s damage to Portland’s Black community. It premiered recently by Third Angle – details here. Darrell Grant wrote the music, libretto by Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani (I had recently posted his poem found in windows.)“This piece concerns itself with the spiritual dimensions of displacement, fallout from gentrification, getting to the root causes of the evil that seeded predatory capitalism and the commodification of the Black body.”

Darrell Grant’s playlist that offers takes from the opera can be listened to in full on Spotify. Search for The Sanctuaries Mixtapes. Act I – Darrell Grant.

Whose Bones?

Can’t help but photographing the Halloween decorations on my walks. This year the skeletons are in abundance, with but a sprinkling of spiders, witches, and other ghouls.

Someone must have robbed the Smithsonian where tens of thousands of bones are stored. Scratch that – bad joke. The controversy over these human remains is anything but funny. Here is what I learned from a CodeSwitch program:

It turns out that the Smithsonian’ National Museum of Natural History has a huge ware house behind barbed wire in a suburb in Maryland where the bones from archeological digs are stored. More than 10 000 of them belong to Native American people, some of them full skeletons, all in drawers in a climate controlled, windowless building.

Some 1500 of them have been dug up in Florida, and a native tribe, the Seminoles, has been fighting for over a decade to get them back. Museums, who received them across the last hundreds of years in common archeological practice, want to hold on to them.

In 1989 Congress passed a law that called for repatriation of Native American remains (many of which had been literally excavated from dedicated cemeteries by grave robbers and archeologists alike) and included the Smithsonian in a direct appeal. The museum released about a third of their holdings, but is refusing to part with the rest. The reason? They will only allow repatriation if they have connected the remains with a specific federally recognized tribe, and they do so by establishing a “cultural affiliation,” which implies a process that could for all intents and purposes drag on forever. They said they needed evidence like treaties, cultural artifacts, ways of life, geographical location; that evidence is rarely easily available, however, since these remains were dug up in over 80 different locations, by numerous parties, some recording details, others not. It is an institutionalized process filled with loop holes that allows the museums to hold on to the remains without (illegally)claiming they are theirs. It was purposely built to depend on the subjective judgement of the museum administrators, not exactly a neutral party. (Evidence for this can be found in the fact that three different museums came up with three different judgments for tribal connection for bones taken all from the same site. There is simply no objective standard.)

And so the bones rest in a kind of purgatory in those drawers.

The museum’s rationale for holding on to the remains is the possibility that future questions might be answered by investigating them, questions that depend on future technology, for example. That stands in contrast to the Native American insistence for return now, since their beliefs are connected to the need for their ancestors to rest in peace.

Nobody doubts, by the way, that the contemporary Seminoles and the ancient remains are biologically related. But the museum insists on cultural affiliation, and that is in itself so hard to establish without decisive evidence – an excuse to deny repatriation. The question remains why the museum is the arbiter of what belongs to whom, instead of the Seminoles who have oral traditions and belief systems that connect them to the remains.

Ten years into the controversy the tribe started a public campaign #nomorestolenancestors, with public lectures, appeals to congress, resolutions by national tribal representatives and organization urging the museum to give back the remains. The Seminole History Museum publicly ended its relationship with the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian eventually agreed last year to develop a new policy that allows members of the Seminole tribe to look at the remains and identify who they think are ancestors to be returned. They then have to report the result to the museum which in turn will ask all the other Florida tribes to make their claims. If there are no competing demands, the ancestors will be returned. It could take decades.

Here is an interesting book by anthropologist Chip Cowell – Plundered Skulls And Stolen Spirits; Inside The Fight To Reclaim Native America’s Culture – that fills in the details of the debate.

Music today appropriate for Halloween….

Nature’s Bounty – For All

Today’s photographs are views of fall’s bright yellows. The woods and meadows are not just full of color but also teeming with plants that are edible, mushrooms at this time of year first and foremost (I offered their photographs already last week.)

I was taught about edible plants in a podcast on foraging, the search for food in the wild, or your back yard, or the town commons, take your pick. A young Black woman from Ohio, Alexis Nikole Nelson, provided in equal measure food for thought and references to food for our stomachs.

Beyond introducing (real) food stuff, teaching about biology and botany and creating amazing recipes, she reminds the listener of how Black people had a relationship to foraging during slavery, and how their traditions and knowledge were cut off with the hardships and legal or customary exclusion from nature following emancipation. Proprietary rights of White landowners were harshly enforced, once they had no gain from people’s survival, a survival that depended on supplementing the meager scraps of food they received on plantations.

Nelson has by now over 3 million followers on TikTok, and I must say that I got drawn into her videos, getting used to the intensely lively quality that many of them display – after a while it becomes infectious, or less noticeable, can’t say. The content is what convinced me, so much to learn in ways that obviously appeal to a HUGE number of people who are now equipped to bring food to the table even when funds are short. She is a gifted teacher beyond her culinary skills and adventurous spirit.

Here is a link to her site, where you can choose among so many interesting offerings (you don’t have to sign up, just click on any of the videos.) She talks about food as a way to connect to people, a way to show love and and way to express creativity – available for free to all if you know where to look in our eco-system. This is a key point for learning how to forage in a society where 50 million people are food insecure – not knowing where their next meal is coming from.

Black populations were, of course, not just prevented from accessing naturally occurring food sources that grew on private or local lands. There is now a public conservation about how access to nature in general is inherently more difficult for Blacks than for Whites.

If you are tempted to join the chorus that protests: “Public trailheads are open to everyone. Campsites are not segregated. Rivers belong to all!” I urge you to familiarize yourself – as I had to do, since I was clueless about the severity of the issues – with what is happening in real life.

The range of obstacles is vast.(Ref.) – It starts with the experience that you are singled out as someone unusual on the hiking path (borne out by statistics that show how enormously underrepresented Blacks are in outdoor recreational activities,) and beyond that hypervisibility often made to feel the you don’t belong. It continues with being told directly or indirectly not to trespass on traditionally White activities like fly fishing, or entering a space that was meant as an escape for people from “crowded urban centers,” often a euphemism for poverty, crime and POCs. Most frighteningly the range includes attacks on your property and physical safety, from slashing tires and tents, to actual attempts at lynching. If you don’t believe me, read up in such publications as the Sierra Club Magazine, not known for hyped-up commentary. Or the local Washington State news. Or stories about Black birders in Central Park….

The history of public park systems – culturally segregated even after legal segregation ended – and current day prejudices against non-Whites interact. POCs are three times more likely to live in places where they have no immediate access to nature, and lacking the funds or time to travel far. That is not a coincidence, given the historic structural issues around racism in the National Park movement, claims Myron Floyd, dean of the College of Natural Resources.

“The underlying rationale for creating parks was this idea of U.S. nationalism, to promote the American identity, and the American identity was primarily white, male and young. …..It was really trying to distinguish the American identity from the European identity: being a separate, more mature nation in the mid-19th century.”

John Muir, who is credited with the creation of the National Park System and the conservation movement, was recently called out for his long history of racism by the Sierra Club. For Muir, who co-founded the organization in 1892, Indigenous people “seemed to have no right place in the landscape” despite the fact that they had lived there for thousands of years. He also believed that Indigenous peoples’ villages and their ways of life should be destroyed in order to have “unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.”

Other important figures in the conservation movement, like Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, held racist beliefs and believed that parks were created for Americans of only Northern European descent.

Some months ago the American Trails organization published a list of new organizations that hope to increase participation in outdoor activities by all those traditionally excluded. It did so in the context of a historical perspective on racisms in the outdoors, a short read that I highly recommend.

One of my favorite essays this year describes how another question of access to nature plays out in our own back yard. Strongly recommended reading. It is about the urban rural divide in Yamhill County and how a proposed hiking path was torpedoed by the extreme Right. It was a locally supported trail project that all of a sudden became a hot button in the “culture wars,”now dominating election campaigns for local office, dividing a community, enhancing bigotry and extremism. Spoiler alert – the 12 mile trail project got successfully killed by conservative forces that did not want urban “trash” to blight their landscape. Its remaining proponents are receiving death threats.

Here is an upbeat musical offering to fall – with leaves rustling and colors shimmering, before ending in a pensive mood that goes with today’s discussion of continued inequities.

Transformation

Art, Social Justice
May 20, 2020
1 Comments

There are days when serendipity reigns. They are rare. They are welcome. And, as it so happens, one of them was yesterday. Early that morning I read an essay by a young acquaintance whose writing I have posted here repeatedly for its depth and perceptiveness. Mattathias Schwartz reported on the Trouble with Scale, offering devastating evidence why we need to change our approach to the rapid adoption of products across the world. Unchecked growth is not always good – an urgent example being the effect of internet proliferation on the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar. Among other outlets, including the NYT and the New Yorker, Matt writes for a relatively new nonprofit journalism organization, Rest of World, which so far has delivered nothing but interesting articles – I urge you to check them out if you are at all interested in international topics that won’t appear on our regular radar.

Mid-morning I received an email from a friend who sent me a link to a short film made by friends of her’s, Donata and Wim Wenders. The film is part of a project by public broadcasting in Berlin to create multiple shorts from various artists and intellectuals highlighting aspects of our current world-wide situation.

I am attaching my translation of the spoken/written word in the 2 minute clip so my US readers can appreciate the expressed yearning for change as well. Filmed in his apartment the short follows Wim Wenders editing his typewritten manuscript of reactions to the challenges facing us. You will spot immediately how it is connected to the essay recommended in the beginning of today’s musings.

Here is the film:

https://www.rbb-online.de/derrbbmachts/kurzfilm/videos/der-rbb-macht-kurzfim-veraenderung-wim-wenders.html

Here is the translation:

What would I wish for? Change.

How will our lives change “afterwards?”

Many people think about this right now and it is the most pressing question. What will happen after this brutal emergency brake that was applied to our world?
What would I wish for? Change.

Can we only imagine change when it seems necessary to us?

When and how are we humans willing to accept change?

Only through extreme situations like wars or global crises? The majority of us have never experienced those. Wars are always somewhere else and the second world war was too long ago….
And the climate catastrophe?

It is only existentially experienced by those who will suffer its consequences, the children, the youth, the poorest of the poor, for most of us “there’s still time….”

But don’t we all experience NOW, ALL TOGETHER, for the first time, on the whole planet, something that threatens us all?
And does that not force us to rediscover the COMMON GOOD, the way we are dependent on one another, responsible for each other?

Our new experience of isolation, of being separated, left to fend for oneself, the huge longing for …. connection. How will all that change how we value community or society?

———one sentence I didn’t get————-

Surely it has to be based on a new sense of togetherness, a rediscovery of equality, brotherhood or solidarity… ) (all concepts that have fallen out of favor)

Do we have the strength to redirect out thinking in this direction?

Are we able to learn the lesson?

Will supermarket cashiers, medical personell and delivery truck drivers remain HEROES even “afterwards?”

Not, if all we want is to return to “business as usual.”

“Growth” per se simply cannot remain the holy grail of politics.

Central to the new order has to be socially minded thinking concerning humanity and climate conscious action concerning the planet.

“Afterwards”, nothing will be more important than change. (Renewal? Transformation?)

You know Wenders likely from movies like Paris, Texas, or Wings of Desire, but I highly recommend that you check out a recent documentary, probably one of the best films they made, available on multiple outlets here, about Pope Francis. The visual skill of the film making is stellar, but it was the message that moved me, delivered without pathos, didacticism or condescension: to mend our ways is the only way we can and will survive the forces currently destroying the fabric of our world, quite literally. Religion can – perhaps – play a significant role, if religious representatives remain honorable.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-spiritual-nearness-of-wim-wenderss-pope-francis-a-man-of-his-word

Finally, at the end of the afternoon, I had made my way through multiple days of listening to Igor Levit playing Beethoven, alerted by a friend who pointed to his brilliance.

I found just the piece to end with today: a concert of the Waldstein Sonata he gave this April at Schloss Bellevue in Berlin, introduced by the German President, Walter Steinmeier, who pleaded with us to support the arts in these difficult times (what a difference a president makes…) The pianist reminded us, that it is a piece about togetherness empowering us all. I guess serendipity had lost patience with me, because the video of the performance refused to transfer to the blog. So here are the first and last movement from one of his CDs, I could not find a full version outside of Spotify….

Here is the link to the Bellevue concert, maybe if you copy it directly into youTube, it might work – worth looking at his hands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC8DBTfJI90

Photographs today are in honor of Wim Wender’s devotion to Francis of Assisi, Patron Saint of the birds, and my own devotion to owls. All of these photos – with the exception of the horned owl I found in New Mexico last year – are from the last weeks, when a barred owl made an appearance in my garden while we were sitting on our deck, and in the forest nearby during multiple hikes. Talk about serendipity….

Christmas Legend

Leave it to me, to serve you up with a snarky poem by Master Brecht on Christmas Day. The way I see it, if you are feeling elated, grateful, happy or content, then you have the leeway to think about those less fortunate than you (and the promises kept or broken by religion.) If you, on the other hand, feel lousy, there’s always downward comparison – your woes (hopefully) pale compared to those of people dying from exposure to cold.

The real topic for today, though, is not poetic musings about poverty, but how to approach getting rid of it. We might as well start with a quote from social reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a contemporary of the French Revolution:

“Charity is the drowning of rights in the cesspit of compassion.”

I read this quote in an essay by Thomas Gebauer who is managing director of the socio-medical human rights aid organization “medico international”. He explains that poverty and social exclusion need to be targeted at their roots, which are often of a political nature, rather than having charity, both private and public, simply treat the symptoms.

You can read the long one yourself, but here is the short version: Alleviating the symptoms of poverty and hardship helps people in the short run. Securing the establishment of social and economic human rights will shift things in the long run, no longer relying on individual charitable aid (which can dry up at whim or be unevenly distributed.) A just and guaranteed distribution of social resources will counteract increasing social inequality, unfair trade relations and the absence of social security services. Access to social resources, social security and a decent standard of living should be put on legal footing, guaranteed by public socio-political institutions. For my German readers, here is an interview with him speaking to the same issue in German.

Something to be thought through. I still believe that the direct act of charity from one human to another, the dollar changing hands while the gaze and smile exchanged between eyes, matters enormously for any one individual, giver AND receiver, a reminder that we share this world.

Yes, I know, complicated musings on Christmas morning. So just sit back and let Bertold Brecht’s poem sink in. And save me a cookie – a charity guaranteed to be appreciated and not undermining world peace….. Merry Christmas!

Christmas Legend

1
On Christmas Eve today
All of us poor people stay
Huddled in this chilly stack
The wind blows in through every crack.
Dear Jesus, come to us, now see
How sorely we have need of thee.

2
Here today we huddle tight
As the darkest heathens might
The snow falls chilly on our skin
The snow is forcing its way in.
Hush, snow, come in with us to dwell:
We were thrown out by Heaven as well.

3
The wine we’re mulling is strong and old
It’s good for keeping out the cold
The wine is hot, the door is shut
Some fat beast’s snuffling round the hut.
Then come in, beast, out of the snow
Beasts too have nowhere warm to go.

4
We’ll toss our coats on to the fire
Then we’ll all be warm as flames leap higher
Then the roof will almost catch alight
We shan’t freeze to death till we’re through the night.
Come in, dear wind, and be our guest
You too have neither home nor rest.

(1923)

Here is a different, more academic translation. I think Brecht himself would have preferred the one above I chose instead, even though I could not find who translated it. Sorry for not being able to acknowledge them.

Photographs today are of budding Helebores (called Christ’s Roses in German) and other tidbits from the winter garden.

Music is the Christmas gift that keeps on giving. I think last year I posted the Harnoncourt version – today it’s Fasolis: one of the happiest, most energetic rendition of Bach’s Oratorio that you can find. It’ll counterbalance thinking about hard stuff……..

Christmas Eve

I crave determination, cherish stubbornness, and celebrate intent. It can find you room in a stable, convert a manger into a cradle, get you through childbirth among strangers. It drives you across oceans and deserts, where you are about as likely to drown or die from exposure as not when fleeing war and torture in your homeland. It makes you hide what little is left of detergent so the teens in your refugee camp on the Greek islands cannot use it to attempt suicide in their despair.

I have often thought of faith as a form of determination. Take Christianity, for example. If people under the most dire of circumstances sit on Christmas eve and relish a reading of Luke (1-2,) with eyes now shining from the promise in Bethlehem instead of from tears, there is determination to keep up hope. Really a sheer stubbornness to keep the belief alive that somehow, somewhere there will be justice, as implied by the birth of God’s child. Never mind the inconsistencies when that same Luke (18-16) calls for letting the little children come, unhindered, but good Christians in Germany and Europe in general refuse dry-eyed to allow the 4000 (!) minors to escape the limbus of the aegean circles of hell. I’m not even starting to talk about the cruel disgrace closer to home. (And I am not exempting other religions from hypocrisy either (just look at Palestine) – it was just an example.)

Should we stop writing about the darkness that is hovering, stop reading about the despair descending? In the public world or the private one(s) with their own forms of impending doom? No, we should NOT! We should be determined to walk upright and do the right thing and preserve our last bit of self-respect and self-determination – and then share it with others, help them to prevail as well. Faith demands it. As does a different moral compass for the faithless, structured by a different underlying tale. Let us all be stubbornly inclined towards justice, in solidarity!

Verities

By Grace Cavalieri

Maybe she had dementia,
the old lady in the woolen hat,
I don’t know, but she
stopped short in the middle of the aisle,
when her son shouted, PUT THAT BACK.
Clutching a small bag of chips –
like a newborn against her chest,
like a prayer,
like something she owned –
her face collapsed,
Please, but no sound came except,
PUT IT BACK! NOW! PUT IT BACK!
This was Christmas Eve, not that it matters;
Why even embellish a story like that.
I can only tell you I walked behind her
as she walked behind her son,
until I could no longer watch,
yet there was something about
her lopsided hat, her lowered head
that made me sure
no matter what happened next,
she would not put it back.

Grace Cavalieri is an American poet, playwright and radio host of “The Poet and the Poem” from the Library of Congress. In 2019, she was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland. She was awarded the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from WASH INDEP REVIEW. She received the George Garrett Award from AWP for Service to Literature, the Allen Ginsberg, Paterson Award, Bordighera and Columbia Poetry Awards, A Pen Fiction Award, CPB’s Silver Medal.

Photographs from yesterday’s walk near the ICE facility with its detainee holding cells on Bancroft/Macadam Ave. If you look closely below, you can also see homeless encampments dangerously close to the river.

And here is the perfect music for Notte di Natale by Corelli, cormorant giving his blessings.

Resilience

My focus this week is on strength in the face of an onslaught of discrimination. What better opportunity to re-introduce some of the most resilient people I know, the performers of and contributors to PHAME, Portland’s fine and performing arts academy serving adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I have previously written about different aspects of their work here, here, and here.

Choir Rehearsal for Phame’s Rockopera *The Poet’s Shadow*

Today I feel compelled to write because PHAME‘s current project, a Rock Opera titled The Poet’s Shadow, prepared in conjunction with Portland Opera, and directed by Bruce Hostetler, artistic director of Portland Revels, is well underway. I have had the privilege to document the rehearsal process photographically. Portraits of truly talented folks. They wrote the libretto, the music, they designed the costumes and the advertising posters, they dance to the choreography of Wobbly Dance, they sing in the choir, they play the music on iPads, they have five principals with demanding roles.

It is exceptional.

The iPad ensemble directed by Matthew Gailey

“The rock opera brings to fruition an 18-month collaboration between PHAME Academy and Portland Opera. In addition to lending PHAME the use of their Hampton Opera Center for the production’s performances, Portland Opera has taught opera-related classes at PHAME and has provided one-on-one vocal coaching to lead actors. The production also partners with Portland’s acclaimed dance duo Wobbly Dance, who will be choreographing the movement chorus, and with Metropolitan Youth Symphony, whose students will join PHAME’s iPad musicians in making up the production’s orchestra.” (https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/11-features/435217-345460-phame-and-portland-opera-rock-new-show)

Choreographers Yulia Arakelyan and Erik Ferguson from *Wobbly*

The movement group rehearsing the *monster*

Equally timely, though, is the need to spell out some of the darkest aspects that come with our society’s ignorance about, ideology around and treatment of disability.

Tess Raunig, principal role of *Elizabeth*

I am not even thinking about the extremes: White supremacists, say, who try to disenfranchise marginalized groups, disabled people included, by recourse to an ideology enshrined in Eugenics and Race science. (After all the Nazis were inspired and crafted their laws after American Jim Crow and extended them to the disabled population.)

Aaron Hobson, principal role of *Beautiful Love*

Not thinking about people enabling that ideology by implying mental illness is at the root of violent excess, rather than domestic radicalization, something repeatedly experienced in the wake of mass shootings, as the recent one in El Paso, Tx.

Anne-Marie Plass, principal role of *The Rose*

Not thinking about the ideology of some of the highest judges in the land (Kavanaugh’s record on disability issues is hair-raising), or the assault on the rights of people living with disability, including undermining the Affordable Care Act.

Lea Mulligan, principal role of *Mrs. Peacock*

No, I am thinking of the daily volume of violence that is par for the course for this population living in a society bent on ableism – discrimination in favor of able-bodied people – in addition to all of the other obstacles thrown in their way, from problems with physical access and barriers to lack of employment opportunities creating a feedback loop between poverty and assumptions that disability is a sign of cognitive inferiority.

Maxwell Rochette, principal role of *The Fairyguide*

The statistics are staggering. For a succinct overview (with research references) go here. Here are summary quotes from the linked article:

Violent crimes are three times more likely to victimize disabled people than those living without disability (and the data exclude people who are institutionalized, not covered by the research. Numbers of victims there are expected to be significantly higher.)

Then there is law enforcement. “Police violence comprises so much violence against disabled people that we constitute up to half of those killed by law enforcement officers. They are quick to view disability, from deafness to neurodivergence to physical disabilities, as noncompliance—and even quicker to use that perceived noncompliance to justify excessive force.”

Schools: “Of the nearly 50,000 US students who were physically restrained during the 2013–2014 school year, more than 75%were students who received disability accommodations. This is absurdly disproportionate given that these students represented just 14% of the student population.“

Members of the iPad ensemble

The added value of organizations like PHAME lies not just in providing opportunities for talented artists and performers to be seen and heard or to be integrated into a community, lessening social isolation. The quality of the projects, of what they as individuals and as a group accomplish, reveals how wrong we are in our assumptions about a population many of us have little contact with. The imperative of full integration into the lives we all share is and should be, of course, independent of quality of performance or creative achievement. But having the public view accomplishments like these will help undermine our deeply rooted stereotypes. If this leads to changes in views around employability or independent housing or the degree of openness to interact on a level playing field, much will be gained.

In the meantime I suggest you do yourself a favor and buy tickets to “The Poet’s Shadow.” You will be moved beyond words.

And here is music for left hand only, helping pianists who lost a limb (and no, it’s not Ravel….)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm1wNnn6m-Y

There’s a lot of courage out here

“There’s a lot of courage out here,” were the words of Kaia Sand, executive director of Street Roots, when introducing 11 women and men last night who have lived, fought, and survived homelessness, ready to present their poetry to a full house.

There could not have been a more fitting title for the poetry presentation either: Making the Invisible Visible was what happened during each and every reading, words opened windows into worlds often unknown to those of us protected from living on the streets.

There’s a lot to learn out there. At least for those of us who pacify their conscience by buying Street Roots on a regular basis, supporting the entrepreneurs, members of the local homeless community, who sell the weekly street newspaper published in Portland, OR. Vendors receive 75 cents for every $1 paper they sell. For that they stand day on ends on cold street corners, in all weather, facing who knows how many people who avert their eyes for everyone who glances at them, or engages in quick conversation while buying the paper.

What stays invisible is the talent and perceptiveness of those trying to connect. What stays hidden is our own timidity to face misery that contrasts with our privilege. Off we rush, having paid a token buck.

There’s an incredible amount of creative power out there. Last night’s poems covered a wide range of topics, lengths and forms, and skill levels that demanded, at their heights, publication in its perfection. My belief that poetry should, if possible, be presented orally to unfold its full power, was confirmed again. The merging of words, describing lived experience, and the face, voice and gestural expressiveness of the experiencer made a whole, doubling the impact. Some of the poetry was polished, some written that very day, some describing personal experiences that make you wonder how they can be survived, some lovely paeans to a world we all inhabit, and others a call to political action to fight for economic and social justice.

There was a lot of palpable emotion out there, on all sides, presenters and audience alike. It veered from sadness to anger to joy, from disbelief to curiosity to relief that we share aspects of the world, when the poems covered experiences we are all familiar with. Tears and laughter were openly displayed helping to forge a sense of community in a group of people from backgrounds all over the map. I sat next to a woman who turned out to be one of the leaders of the poetry workshops organized by Street Roots. Her display of encouraging words, gestures, sounds and smiles added one more emotion to the mix: my jealousy of never having had writing teachers of such humanity.

There’s a lot of community engagement out there. The event was organized by one of the artists currently showing at Gallery 114 who hosted the gathering, David Slader, and introduced as well by a Board member of the Pearl District Neighborhood Organization, Stan Penkin. A terrific review of InkBodySkinPaint+Fire, Slader’s work and that of his friend Owen Carey, a renowned Portland photographer who I admire, can be found here:
https://www.orartswatch.org/tattoo-you-art-in-the-flesh/#more-72865

Owen Carey (a soulmate when it comes to being an omnivore of photographic subjects)

You have a few more days to catch the exhibition, it’s worth it, if only for the whimsey of small plastic cows strategically placed across the room…long story.

You also have a few more days to make up your mind how to help an organization like Street Roots, but then get to it! Here are some options to show support: http://streetroots.org/support

Another possibility is to get engaged in their newest advocacy project, a plan to improve the ways we respond to problems unfolding on the street. It is a big endeavor and could use all hands on deck. Attached below is an outlining of the problems and proposed solutions and a TV interview that describes the project in a few minutes.

https://news.streetroots.org/2019/03/15/portland-street-response-street-roots-special-report

https://www.kgw.com/video/entertainment/television/programs/straight-talk/straight-talk-rethinking-how-portland-responds-to-911-calls-about-homeless-people/283-9e656a99-f504-486c-ad8a-16f9cb110659?jwsource=twi

Let me close with a poem of one of last night’s presenters, Brandon Morgrove.

Photographs of the presenters, via iPhone, since there’s a lot of ineptitude out there when your’s truly once again packs a camera with an empty battery…. I also couldn’t figure out for the life of me why the names and the images did not want to center. Oh well. The title photograph was grabbed from the Street Roots social media site, they will forgive me!

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